It’s over two weeks old (heavens!), but this Mick LaSalle piece in the San Francisco Chronicle is one of the most perceptive and well-grounded explanations why theatrical revenues dropped in ’05…and why they’ll continue to drop (putting aside the claims of those who insist that the slump is a statistical myth or wieves’ tale) until something drastic happens. Which of course won’t happen until mainstream films start costing less to make (which won’t happen until things get so bad that superstars and their agents stop holding up the studios for exorbitant upfront pay-or-play fees) or theatres drop their prices or…you tell me. “Was [the slump] just an anomaly [or] a blip?,” LaSalle writes. “Probably not. Was this simply not a very good movie year? To an extent, yes. But something else seemed to be at play in 2005 — the inevitable drift of movie consumers from theaters to home video. The drift has been ongoing, but this year the box office started feeling the pinch.”

Time‘s Richard Corliss on the great Terrence Howard: “He exudes a charismatic musk as DJay, the pimp-turned-rapper in the indie film Hustle & Flow. Those soft eyes, the feline athleticism, a voice that can caress subtlety into any dialogue — viewers get a taste of that, and in a minute they say, ‘This guy’s a natural star.'”

We all know that screw-ups happen now and then, and this one’s not a rumor: the Technicolor tech guys who sent out screeners of Steven Spielberg’s Munich on behalf of NBC Universal have messed things up as far as members of the British Film Academy (BAFTA) are concerned. The purchase order on Universal’s part was correct, but somehow it wasn’t carried out right and BAFTA’s 3000-plus members “were sent encrypted ‘screener’ DVDs that were mastered for North America, and can only be played on special [multi-region] DVD players supplied by Cinea (www.cinea.com — a Dolby subsidiary),” according to a Boing-Boing correspondent. “First the DVDs were held up by UK customs, thereby missing the first-round voting deadline. But when they arrived, they would not play on any machine because they had been mastered for Region 1 (North America).” I made the call and an NBC Uni spokesman has confirmed the veracity of the report.

Okay, we’ve figured out the best actors to play director Nicholas Ray in Phil Kaufman’s I Was Interrupted, which will cover Ray’s final decade. Candidate #1: Nick Nolte. Candidate #2: Liam Neeson. Candidate #3: Sam Shepard, but Ray’s voice was deep and bellowing so Shepard would have to do something about that aw-shucksy twangy thing. Candidate #4: Geoffrey Rush, but I don’t think so. And Candidate #5: Ian McKellen…maybe.

An amusing, appealing teaser for Kevin Smith‘s Clerks 2 (Weinstein Co.), which may turn up at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival…or so I’ve been told.

Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger, currently in Australia and interviewed at the Melbourne premiere of Ang Lee’s film, had a couple of things to say about Larry Miller‘s refusing to show it in Salt Lake City last weekend. But Ledger’s claim that West Virginia had lynchings “only 25 years ago” appears suspect. According to this June 2005 Washington Post article about Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (who was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan), the last lynching in West Virginia was in 1931.

The salivating ambition of the Broadcast Film Critics Awards aside, the awards they handed out early Monday evening were right down the middle of the bowling alley — Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, Ang Lee for Best Director, Philip Seymour Hoffman for best Acotr in Capote, Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress in Walk the Line, et. al. The only hiccups were (a) naming the bizarrely over-rated The 40 Year-old Virgin as Best Comedy, and (b) giving John Williams the Best Musical Score award for Memoirs of a Geisha instead of Gustavo Santaolalla’s for Brokeback Mountain.

No one has ever been able to explain any kind of easy-to-sort- through criteria by which a regular guy can decide that the sound editing on this film is better than the sound editing on that film. It’s always been a total mystery to me…to everyone. And why is is that only the expensive big-noise films with elaborate costumes and weaponry seem to get nominated for the sound editing Oscar? This year’s nominees, in alphabetical order, are The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, King Kong, Memoirs of a Geisha, Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Walk the Line and War of the Worlds. Do it differently this year: scratch all the behemoths and give the Oscar to Walk the Line, the only medium-sized guy.

The Broadcast Film Critics — the new whores on the block, the KY Jelly conquistadors said to be determined to out-glitz and out-fellate the Golden Globes — are handing out their coveted awards tonight. Be sure and watch and see which of their ten Best Picture nominees — Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Cinderella Man, The Constant Gardener, Crash, Good Night, and Good Luck, King Kong, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich and Walk the Line — walks off with the prize. That’s right — they’ve listed Memoirs of a Geisha as a nominee for Best Picture of 2005. It starts at 5 pm at the Santa Monica Civic and the WB (channel 5 in Los Angeles) will air on a delayed basis at 8pm.

Steven Spielberg is one very hip and cool guy, or at least he was a year ago. A piece in the February issue of W says that comic Kathy Griffin is still agog that Spielberg’s attorneys threatened her for joking during the 2005 Golden Globes awards ceremony that Dakota Fanning “had entered rehab.” (And imagine…this anecdote just collected dust for eleven months!!) A Page Six sum-up says that “lawyers for Spielberg, who directed Fanning in War of the Worlds, contacted Griffin after the awards and demanded that she apologize for the crack. When she refused, Spielberg’s legal lackeys warned that she would end up on the powerful director’s ‘shit list.'” Griffin told W that “Spielberg has a lot of fucking nerve. I don’t care how big you are, you will not trample on my, or anyone else’s, First Amendment rights. That makes me furious.” Spielberg spokesperson Marvin Levy told Page Six that “it was a very upsetting thing for a young child and her family. Obviously, to Kathy Griffin it was a joke, but why make a joke out of [Fanning]? She’s a terrific young lady who was there with her family, and it was very upsetting.” Maybe (if you want to be a milquetoast about it), but what adjective best describes Spielberg’s response?

This sounds interesting…kind of. Variety is reporting that Philip Kaufman (Quills, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) has signed to direct a biopic of legendary cult director Nicholas Ray called I Was Interrupted, based on a script by Oren Moverman (Jesus’ Son). It’s about the last decade of Ray’s life (he died of cancer in ’79), during which time he played an art forger in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (’77) and co-directed (with Wim Wenders) Lightning Over Water, a documentary about his last days. The film will reportedly focus on Ray’s relationship with Susan Schwartz, whom he met when she was a teenager and eventually married. (Schwartz placed an ad in the Soho Weekly News in 1980 or ’81 looking for the right someone to share the Spring Street loft she’d lived in with Ray, and I was one of those who came by to look it over.) I wonder what middle-aged actor Kaufman will hire to put on that signature black eyepatch and play Ray? He’ll have to be tall and lanky with craggy features…I’m drawing a blank.

I was right, of course, in presuming that Last Holiday (Disney, 1.13), the Wayne Wang-Queen Latifah remake of the 1950 Alec Guiness comedy, would discard the finale of the original British version, which was written by J.B. Priestley. (Soon after Guiness is told his fatal illness diagnosis was a mistake, he gets into a car crash and is killed.) I won’t be seeing the new film until tomorrow night’s all-media screening (which I’m thinking of blowing off), but in his Variety review Joe Leydon said “it’s not at all surprising that the remake eschews Priestley’s audacious ending.”