The hard-working professionals in charge of manning the defenses at Lunar Pages are fending off a hostile DDoS attack…screaming savages outside the gates of the fort…woo-woo-woo!…flaming arrows!…Ward Bond taking one in the chest…and that’s why I haven’t put very much up this morning.

The Writers Guild of America has given one of its five best Original Screenplay Award nominations to Judd Apatow and Steve Carell‘s The 40 year-Old Virgin….what? In the process they’ve blown off Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow, Woody Allen’s Match Point and Guillermo Ariagga’s superb The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Does Judd Apatow host a WGA poker game or something? Is there some kind of “aww, Judd has worked so hard and he’s a nice guy and needs a pat on the back” sentiment out there? The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, at best, an above-average relationship comedy during its second half, but during the oafish first half it’s not even close to award-worthy. This is bar none one of the most moronic, jaw-dropping calls the WGA has ever made. Congrats, meanwhile, to the other four nominees for Best Original Screenplay — Cinderella Man‘s Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman, Crash‘s Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco, Good Night, And Good Luck‘s George Clooney and Grant Heslov and The Squid and the Whale‘s Noah Baumbach.

I sort of expected this, but Radar magazine has folded. Kurt Andersen’s withering review of the fledgling publication in a 6.6.05 issue of New York magazine sounded the death knell. It read, in part, that “Radar seeks to be one of those ‘rare titles’ that ‘define a cultural moment by getting there first.’ But if that’s the goal, shouldn’t it be more original?”

The Seattle Weekly‘s Sheila Benson and Chuck Wilson have agreed with me (and quite a few others, I suspect) about Roberta Maxwell having given a brief but stirring performance as Jake Gyllenhaal’s mom in Brokeback Mountain . They’ve got her at at the top of their list of the year’s finest blink-and-they’re-gone performances (“The Two-Minute Oscars”). And right on for including Walk the Line‘s Dallas Roberts for his acting as record producer Sam Phillips, the guy who says “sorry” when he hears a few bars of Johnny Cash’s rendition of a gospel tune but then goads him into playing ‘Folsom Prison Blues”…and a star is born.

If anyone’s stuck for Sundance lodgings, I think I’ve got some- thing that sounds good. Semi-spacious, not too expensive. Write me and we’ll talk it over. Available for the entire span of the fes- tival…near Prospector Square. Respond hastily.

As I understand it (i.e., as the newspaper ads proclaim), the initial 149-minute version of Terrence Malick’s The New World is going to “close” late tonight — Tuesday, January 3rd — and a new shorter version is going to re-open on Friday, 1.20.06. So today is the last chance for anyone to see the longer, more meditative version of this half-awesome, half-not-so-awesome film. For all we know the 149-minute version will never again see the light of day. You never know…will the eccentric Malick forbid New World Home Video from releasing it? It’s looking to me like more and more of a big do-or-die day…and just hours to go! The shorter New World will run about 132 minutes (a New Line spokesperson says it’s been cut by “about 16 or 17 minutes”). It will be press-screened a week or so before the 1.20 re-opening.

So why was Ridley Scott’s “extended cut” of Kingdom of Heaven not sent out on DVD to Academy members or selected press? It’s only showing at the Laemmle Fairfax…which isn’t a very good theatre, by the way. It should have been booked into a better house in Westwood somewhere. If you’re going to promote a big-budgeted film for year-end Academy Awards consideration (which is what showing the “extended cut” is apparently about), why do it in such a half-assed way?

Here’s an L.A. Times public-opinion piece piece by John Horn and Scott Collins (“Moviegoers Speak Up”) about what average folks feel about the moviegoing experience. It feel lazy, this thing. It adds nothing to what everyone’s been hearing and repeating for a long time. Oh, and I have no respect for anyone who says they’re “not bothered” by theatrical TV commercials. I’m speaking of one Frank Delgado, 41, who spoke for his wife Patty, 42, and children Emily, 7, and Ryan, 11. Delgado was interviewed at the Edwards Westpark 8 in Irvine…baaahh.

I always thought once you get a bit older and know who and what you are, watching a sensitively-made movie about a non-hetero romance is no big deal. So what’s with Larry David‘s New York Times piece about how he can’t quite roll with the idea of seeing Brokeback Mountain? I think it’s supposed to be a satire about homophobia (right…?) but it also strikes me as a somewhat honest confessional. Larry David never inhabits another persona — he’s always himself. “I just know if I saw [Brokeback Mountain], the voice inside my head that delights in torturing me would have a field day,” he write. “‘You like those cowboys, don’t you? They’re kind of cute. Go ahead, admit it, they’re cute. You can’t fool me, gay man. Go ahead, stop fighting it. You’re gay! You’re gay!”

The Carpetbagger, the New York Times Oscar blogger, says “negotiations are still under way with Whoopi Goldberg and Steve Martin to host the Oscars”….beehhrrrnnnng!! Whoopi’s done well but nobody really wants her to host again, and Steve Martin has passed, apparently over a sense of general career lethargy and “Pantherphobia” in particular. And no one’s talking about hiring Jon Stewart either, although he’d be pretty damn good. I say again that getting Wedding Crashers stars Owen Wilson and Vaughn to co-host would be brilliant. I was the first one to say it so I want a commission if Gil Cates makes it happen! The rumble right now is that a tag-team “tandem-host” format is being widely floated as a way to go.

We are suddenly in the January Dog Days…the doldrums…the dead times. Not in terms of the various guild awards this week and planning for the Sundance Film Festival, etc. I mean because the new films screening are mostly bilge. Those scintillating days of year-end excitement are over. Hostel! Grandma’s Boy!

An arrangement was made in late November or thereabouts by an Oakland school teacher to have me come up for a discussion lecture thing in one of her classes during the first or second week in January. She left a message a week or two ago but I lost the number and I’ve forgotten her name…so now what?