A guy wrote me and said he was “baffled by [my] fascination with the silly Film Snobs book. Leone really is a greater director than Fellini, so what’s the problem?” And I answered back, “Leone… endless closeups, closeups, closeups….middle-aged guys with lined, leathery faces staring hard at other guys with lined, leathery faces at the train depot, and somebody finally shoots. He’s a stylist, not an artist..not even in the same realm as early ’50s to early ’60s Fellini.”

It felt for a while like I was the only one carrying the ball for Fox Home Video’s DVD of Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero — now Glenn Erickson (a.k.a., DVD Savant) has stepped up to the plate. “This unpretentious and uncluttered mini-epic about moonshining and stock car racing in the rural south accomplishes an impressive feat,” he says. “It’s intelligent enough to make viewers forget the idiocy of good-ole-boy action comedies like Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard.” The way I put it was, “There was only one high-velocity ’70s redneck film that was any good, and it wasn’t even a redneck film.”

Visiting Jett in San Francisco today, tomorrow and Tuesday. The Wi-Fi at the Tropicana hotel (south of Market, near the Castro) supposedly works. Here’s hoping.

I happened to come upon this color shot of Lee Harvey Oswald (snapped on 11.23.63) on The Smoking Gun earlier today, and it hit me that every photo I’ve seen of the guy my entire life has been in black and white…until today. And I now think Oliver Stone should have gotten somebody besides Gary Oldman to play him in JFK.

Former Salon critic Charles Taylor (a major film critic who warrants absolute respect, despite the fact that he likes Mission to Mars) and Jeremiah Kipp talk frankly about movies and the political currents that led to Taylor’s dismissal from Salon in early ’05. The piece appears on Matt Zoller Seitz‘s The House Next Door blog.

There’s an attractive “Great Performers” gallery in Sunday’s N.Y. Times magazine with photos by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin and a quickie intro by Lynn Hirschberg. Neat impressionistic face- and body-painting shots of Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, Vera Farmiga (great in Down to the Bone), etc. But I don’t get the cat eyes on George Clooney. It’s just not in the same vein as the other shots…not decorative…oddball …creepy no matter how you slice it.

Just can’t do those Gurus of Gold inputs no more. Many thanks to David Poland for honoring me with an invitation to keep voting, but I’m Guru’d out, man. I’ve been Heath Ledger-ed, George Clooney-ed, Felicity Huffman-ed, Academy-soaked, Karen Fried-icized, Tony Angelotti-sized, Reese Witherspoon-ed, Philip Seymour Hoffman-ed and Paul Haggis-ed to death. Two weeks and two days and it’s over. I love the hoopla and those Oscar contention ads and the parties and all, but I can’t be the only one feeling this way.

Terrence Rafferty on Robert Altman‘s finally getting an honorary career achievement award from the Academy on March 5th, and how he “pretty emphatically qualifies as overdue…he has been overdue for 30 years.” Of course, Rafferty’s New York Times piece zeroes in on Altman’s great five-year period when he made M*A*S*H (’70), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (’71), The Long Goodbye (which was barely paid attention to when it opened in ’73), Thieves Like Us (’74), California Split (’74) and Nashville (’75), and says they “still look like the core of his achieve- ment…[films] we talk about when we talk about Robert Altman.” Rafferty trashes some others (Quintet, Health, Pret-a-Porter, The Company), and salutes Altman’s two later-in-life winners: The Player (’92) and Gosford Park (’02). The early ’70s worked well for the soon-to-be 81 year-old filmmaker because “the conditions were right for Altman’s loose-jointed, intuitive, risk-courting approach to making movies, and the planets over Hollywood haven’t aligned themselves in that way since. The wondrous opportunity those years afforded adventurous filmmakers like him was that studio executives, for once in their ignoble history, actually knew that they had no idea what they were doing.”

My favorite all-time Robert Altman film is California Split, closely followed by McCabe, The Long Goodbye and The Player. I haven’t seen Nashville in eons, and I’ve seen M*A*S*H* too often. My all-time favorite improvised line in an Altman film (which may have been written by Leigh Brackett for all I know): Elliot Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe is asking a small-town Mexican official about the alleged death of his amoral, sleazy friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton), and the Mexican gentleman refers to Lennox as “the deceased” but it sounds like another English term. And Gould goes, “The diseased…yeah, right.” Side note: In the mid ’80s I rented an apartment on Hightower Drive (off Camrose, not far from the Hollywood Bowl) partly because Gould’s Marlowe lived in an amazing, high-up, elevator-access deco complex on Hightower in The Long Goodbye, and I thought it would be cool to live right down the street from this.

I attended a cinematographer’s seminar at the Newport Beach Film Festival a year or two ago, and asked a question of Vilmos Zsigmond, whose camerawork on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was entirely composed of slowly arc-ing tracking shots, always gently floating from right to left (or vice versa) and never sitting still. I told Zsigmond I loved this because it seemed like an apt metaphor for the fluid, always-moving impermanence of life in Los Angeles. And he said, “What you’ve just said is an intelligent interpretation, but when Altman and I talked about it there was no rationale of that kind. All he said was, ‘Let’s keep the camera slowly moving the whole time.’ I asked why and he said, ‘I don’t know but let’s just do that.’ I didn’t like it at all, but I do now.”

Hold up on those “Halle Berry was a good sport when she got her Hasty Pudding Award in Cambridge” stories. Here’s why.

Jasmila Zbanic‘s Grbavica, a drama about a Bosnian mother and daughter struggling to make their way through the aftermath of the Balkan war, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday. And The Road to Guantanamo co-helmers Michael Winterbottom and and Mat Whitecross shared the Best Director award. Moritz Bleibtreu won a Silver Bear Best Actor award for his role as “a sexually disturbed teacher” in The Elementary Particles. Sandra Hueller was named Best Actress for her acting in Requiem, a fact-based story about a woman “who undergoes an exorcism after suffering a breakdown.” Great.