Verbatim dialogue spoken prior to last night’s showing of God Grew Tired Of Us at the Pacific Design Center: (Full disclosure — I’m guy #2.) Guy #1: “Bush is giving a speech Wednesday night about Iraq.” Guy #2: “Yeah? (turning to guy #3) “Are you interested in hearing Bush talk about Iraq?” Guy #3: “Uhm…no.” Guy #2: “What’s he gonna say?” Guy #3: “He’s not going to be preempting The Nights of Prosperity, is he?” Guy #2: “That’s…what is that?” Oh, the rip-off-Mick Jagger thing?” Guy #3: “Yeah.” Guy #2: “Donal Logue.” Guy #3: “He’d better not preempt it.” Guy #2: “When’s it go on?” Guy #3: “9, I think.”

David Poland saw the “new cut” of Factory Girl last night “and lo and behold, it is quite a different movie than the one I saw on December 6,” he’s said. Good enough to serve as a platform for the actors, he means, “like the really not very good Transamerica last year.”
“It’s still not a very good movie, but it could actually have made a legitimate Oscar push for Sienna Miller as Sedgwick and for Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol. Had this cut been available in November, they would have had a real shot…it’s now simple and clean enough to have been a base from which to make an acting awards push. But six days before nominations close, it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s probably too late.
Then he closes with a tribute to Harvey Weinstein‘s amazing producing-auteur persistence. “If I had a movie that worked and he wanted to mess with it, I would be very upset,” Poland writes. “But if I had a mess, there is no one on the planet who I would trust more to get it close to presentable.”

In his interview with Borat star-producer Sacha Baron Cohen, L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein says that “a number of people who appeared in the film have complained or filed suit, claiming they’d been hoodwinked [but] Cohen isn’t exactly sympathetic. ‘This wasn’t Candid Camera,’ he says.

‘There were two large cameras in the room [every time we spoke to these people]. I don’t buy the argument that, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have acted so racist or anti-Semitic if I’d known this film was being shown in America.’ That’s no excuse. If you saw all of our footage with the gun-shop owner, for example, we had a whole conversation about the right gun to use to shoot a Jew’s horns off his head.”

The Directors Guild of America ’06 nominees will be announced at 10 ayem (two hours, 35 minutes from now), so you have that much time to consider the results of Oscarwatch.com’s journo prediction poll, which was posted early yesterday evening. Scorsese, Eastwood, Inarritu, Frears, Cuaron, del Toro, Greengrass, et. al.

The Online Film Critics Society yesterday named United 93 as Best Picture, Martin Scorsese as Best Director, Forrest Whitaker as Best Actor, Helen…I can’t do this. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, I keep typing the names of the same winners.

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Dermot Mulroney, Catherine Keener and Ed Norton attended this evening’s premiere of Christopher Dillon Quinn‘s (and Tommy Walker‘s) God Grew Tired Of Us (Newmarket, 1.12 limited), the emotional hit of last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It happened at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center — pre-screening schmooze time, the film at 8 pm, and then a crowded after-party. Pitt executive produced; Kidman narrated, Mulroney and Keener co-produced.

Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt prior to tonight’s premiere showing of God Grew Tired of Us — Monday, 1.8.07, 7:12 pm; Angie’s bodyguard is the beefy guy with the damp, close-cropped hair; Angie (far left), Kidman; Pitt’s hair is dyed blonde for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Pitt inquiring; John Bul Dou, one of the three subjects of God Grew Tired of Us and head of the American Care for Sudan Foundation, and Jolie; John Bul Dou, L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss; John, Nicole

God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of three young Sudanese guys — John, Daniel, and Panther — all of them refugees from their country’s ongoing, utterly devastating civil war, and members of a massive army known as the “lost boys of Sudan”. The film is about their escape to America to start new lives only to encounter profound longings for home and family, and no small measure of guilt.

The 44th annual Publicists Awards luncheon will happen February 7th at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Among the nominees will be five publicists up for the Les Mason Award (Tony Angellotti, the Angellotti Co.; Hilary Clark, 20th Century Fox Intl.; Jeff Hare, Warner Bros.; Mary Hunter, Warner Bros. Intl.; Pat Kingsley, PMK/HBH; and Alan Nierob, Rogers & Cowan). Plus five Press award nominees: (Dan Fierman, Entertainment Weekly; Elizabeth Snead (L.A. Times, the Envelope); Anne Thompson (Hollywood Reporter); Bonnie Tiegel (Entertainment Tonight/the Insider); and Susan Wloszcyna (USA Today).

Okay, I’ll admit it: this teaser trailer for The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Movie City News owns the link in eternal cyber perpetuity because Poland linked to it before I did) has one little trick of visual innovation. It’s fairly cool. If the director of the film, Martin Weisz, also directed this teaser (and you never know in this racket), he’s definitely got some talent.

The “Bagger” (a.k.a., N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr) and the Baguette paid a visit to the N.Y. Film Critics Circle awards dinner last night, and this deftly phrased piece resulted.
“Early in the evening, the Baguette asked winners about their relationship with critics. Peter Morgan, who won best screenplay for The Queen, said, “They write and think deeply about cinema professionally. It’s clearly a highly intelligent, highly sophisticated group of people befitting the town they represent.”
On the other hand, he doesn’t read their reviews. “I live in London,” he said.

Time magazine hit the streets last Friday in order to be more competitive (or at least seem that way on some level) and the mag’s website has been agreeably redesigned, but a whole lot of Time, Inc. employees are going to get whacked later this month as part of a major cost-cutting measure.
N.Y. Times guy David Carr has reported that Time Inc. management “is trying to cut costs to reflect brutal realities in the mass magazine business,” and that “at the end of the month there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division, and it will not end with Time‘s 280 editorial employees. Other magazines within the division of Time Warner will also re-engineer and cut as well.”
Suggestion: before cutting people, Time bigwigs should eliminate the expense of maintaining the Time, Inc. corporate jet, which is primarily used by CEO Richard Parsons and Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn and Warner-allied celebrity fat-cats like George Clooney .
Or whack Parsons, for that matter. Parsons’s bonus was trimmed last year, but in 2005 his compensation was $16 million. Parsons’ four-year compensation plan, according to a 4.20.06 Forbes article, was $32.4 million. Parsons could at least slash his own salary by five million in order to keep a few more Time, Inc. employ- ees off the streets.

Oscarwatch‘s Sasha Stone has asked me to send her my choices for the five most likely DGA Best Director nominees, which are being announced tomorrow. I started to write them out but quickly devolved into hemming and hawing because…
I can’t figure which of the well-celebrated Three Amigos (Inarritu, Cuaron, del Toro) are the most steady and venerated in the membership’s eyes, for one thing, and which is the most vulnerable? They obviously all deserve to be nominated — if nothing else, ’06 has truly been the Year of the Three Amigos — and I really don’t know which way to turn because of the Children of Men surge of the last week or so. (Did it take off too late?)
The Queen‘s Stephen Frears is a likely nominee, I suppose, but I haven’t been feeling great inevitable power surges coming out of the Queen camp. I’ve been presuming all along that Bill Condon will be nominated for Dreamgirls, and good for Bill and Larry Mark and the gang if this happens, but I don’t know. The gotta- salute-the-big-musical herd mentality will probably put him over, but I wonder.
And I’m figuring United 93‘s Paul Greengrass has to be nominated…no? The most highly regarded film of the year according to the critics?
Here are my five choices plus reasons for each: (1) Martin Scorsese (The Departed) — slam dunk, no question, in the bag. (2) Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) — the Producers Guild and SAG ratifications make this more likely than it was two or three weeks ago; (3) Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) — because everyone loves their film, and they’re little guys from the indie/MTV world; (4) Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) — herd mentality; and (5) Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) — because he’s the master.
It depends on how many DGA voters have seen Children of Men and how many of these have picked up on the growing support for this film, but something tells me that helmer Alfonso Cuaron might just make it into the top five. And if he doesn’t make it — or even if he does — Greengrass might step in also. Dunno, can’t figure it….stumped.

20th Century Fox has officially announced that James Cameron will really, no-shit-really start lensing Avatar for them in April 2011 with an expected release date in the summer of 2013. Yeah, I’m kidding again…like I did when I wrote this other pissy-snarky item about Cameron and Avatar about two weeks ago. The film will be shot in digital 3D (“a blend of live-action photography and new virtual photorealistic production techniques invented by Cameron’s team”)…big deal. Technical paint-brushings are strictly secondary considerations. Will the story be any good? That’s what counts, hombre. Will anyone give a shit about the characters? Will Cameron really have it completed and on-screens by 2009, or roughly five or six months into Barack Obama‘s first term?