Since the Aviator cat’s out of the bag with last Wednesday’s rave review by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, it’s okay to respond to his praising of the film’s CG-bolstered aerial photography sequences. They’re not “eminently satisfying,” as he described them, because over and over they reach out from the screen, grab you by both lapels and shout, “Hard drive!” McCarthy says “it’s not that you can’t tell when a flight is being digitally rendered, but it’s all done amazingly well — the degree of artifice surrounding the entire picture allows the computer work to fit in gracefully rather than to stick out.” This is emphatically not so. The aerial shots of Hughes flying those World War I biplanes, the H-1 Racer, the XF-11 and the Spruce Goose constantly demand that the viewer foresake any semblance of belief in what is supposed to be organic reality. More than once these...

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Thanks to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein for the front-page plug in today’s (Tuesday. 11.30) “Big Picture” column, in which he quotes my Million Dollar Baby blurb from last week (“Trust me, it’s a multi-Oscar nominee — Best Picture, Best Director,” etc.). It would’ve been a mite cooler if he’d mentioned Hollywood Elsewhere as my residence and not just referred to me as being linked on Oscarrace.com. After all, he spells out Movie City News in his discussion of David Poland’s Oscar predictions. I’ll have some reactions to Patrick’s Oscar contender assessments in Wednesday’s (12.1) main column.

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The mystery of James L. Brooks’ Spanglish (Columbia, 12.17) will begin to unravel early next week. Is it Oscar material or just a (presumably) good relationship comedy? Will Tea Leoni’s performance hit the right notes or…? I keep thinking back to a report I heard several weeks ago, which is that Cloris Leachman, playing Leoni’s wine-drinking, acid-tongued mom, has all the zingers…

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Alexander star Colin Farrell has been reading the reviews of Oliver Stone’s historical epic since its Wednesday debut and admits, “It’s been f***ing hammered!” He’s told Toronto journalist Bruce Kirkland that “I don’t usually read [reviews], but I read them this time because I love the film so much and I have so much invested in it emotionally — and I’m worried more for Oliver than for me because he’s highly sensitive, as tough as he is.” Alexander, he emphasized, “is an important thing in my life…a lot of my life has gone into it. My son was born during it, and a lot of my son is there in my performance, whatever my performance is. So it certainly affects me. I can’t abstract myself from it at all. I can’t be subjective. Having said that, I do think a lot of [the negativity toward the film] is personal, with respect to Oliver.”

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I am sooo outta here, sooo not working over the next four days. Happy Thanksgiving to anyone paying a visit. I don’t see myself doing any more than six, seven work sessions (adding items, editing stories) between now and Sunday. Chill-out time, man.

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Uhmmm…I got it wrong about Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake in a WIRED item I wrote two or three days ago. It played at last September’s Venice Film Festival and not, apparently, at the Toronto Film Festival.

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Clint Eastwood has just thrown a heavyweight punch in the Oscar race, and the after-effects will be felt all the way until Feb. 27. His boxing movie Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.17, limited) had its first-anywhere showing at a very-limited-attendance screening last Friday night on the Warner Bros. lot, and then at a press-infiltrated Academy screening last night (Monday, 11.22) at the Director’s Guild. I’ve spoken to people who attended both, and they’re all seriously impressed or floored. (I was at the DGA screening also, and I fully concur.) Baby is a major art film… easily in the same realm as Clint’s Unforgiven, and, in the view of at least one major critic who attended the DGA screening, his best ever. Trust me, it’s a multi-Oscar nominee — Best Picture, Best Director (Eastwood), Best Actor (Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank). This means, of course, that Swank is once again duelling with Annette Bening — they last faced each other in the ’99 race when Swank’s Boys Don’t Cry performance beat Bening’s in American Beauty.

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I missed the Variety item last Thursday (11.18), but Bob Berney’s Newmarket Films has picked up Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, that German-produced, end-of-the-Third-Reich, down-in-the-bunker movie that I saw a few weeks ago and quite liked. Obviously angling for a Best Foreign Film Oscar nom, Downfall is “an exceptional historical piece [that's] all about detail, detail and more detail,” I wrote on 11.3. “Not so much a Hitler character study as a Guernica-sized, pointillist portrait of the last remnants of Nazi culture collapsing into itself.” Pic was written and produced by Constantin Film’s Berndt Eichinger, and costars Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler, Alexandra Maria Lara as Hitler’s private secretary, Ulrich Matthes as Joseph Goebbels and Juliane Kohler as Eva Braun.

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Time‘s Richard Corliss has declared that Closer (Columbia, 12.3) “runs counter to the numbing predictability of most current films: the inevitable plot points of revenge and uplift, the reduction of human beings to heroes and villains, the avoidance of complexity in sexual matters.” And director Mike Nicohols observes in the same piece, “I thought we were way past being able to shock anybody …but people are shocked [by this film]. It’s not necessarily because of the language but because things that usually go unexplored are explored in public. Some people are armed against it. They say, ‘I just don’t know those people.’ Well, they’re you, man!”

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Imelda Staunton’s highly-touted performance in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (New Line) is falling off the screen as a Best Actress hopeful. One observer opined last night that Staunton and Drake peaked at the Venice Film Festival and just after, and have been fading ever since. One problem is that after Staunton’s Drake character gets popped for performing abortions, she goes into what amounts to a one- note emotional state of shock…eyes glazed over, look of horror on her face…and nothing more. Another problem is that no one has seen it. New Line is “having a hard time keeping it in theatres,” says one Academy pulse-taker. “In Los Angeles it’s currently hanging on at the Westside Pavilion and it’s already playing at the Pasadena Academy, a slightly discounted art house. Next they’ll probably send it to the Beverly Center, where movies go to die….”

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Herald Tribune film critic Joan Dupont has written of Audrey Tatou, the radiant lead in Jean Piere Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement: “From her films, it looks as if she is the only French actress to play the waif. She has stretched from cute Am√ÉÀÜlie to resolute Mathilde, a girl who wears the slightly morbid Japrisot stripe with panache.” Dupont refers to Sebastian Japrisot, the author of the original ’91 Engagement novel, as well the famed The Sleeping Car Murders.

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Another Hollywood entity has been lacerated by the dreaded “remains to be seen” in a New York Times Arts and Leisure article. In Dennis McDougal’s 11.21 piece about Kevin Spacey’s battle to make his Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea (Lions Gate, 12.17), he notes that Spacey “essentially becomes Darin in the film,” but adds, “Whether that will help revive his career, which has flagged in recent years as he spent his talent on routine fare like Pay It Forward, K-PAX and The Life of David Gale, remains to be seen.” That settles it…Spacey (and his movie, in all likelihood) are all but finito. Nobody survives “remains to be seen.” Less than a month ago Nancy Hass’s piece about Scott Rudin seriously wounded two upcoming prestige pics with the following sentence: “Whether Closer, with its searing look at relationships and adultery, or the zany Aquatic, directed by Wes Anderson and starring Bill Murray, will combine emotional depth with box-office magic remains to be seen.” Aaaahhhh!

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I was in West L.A.’s Laser Blazer last night (Friday, 11.19) and I heard one of the clerks mention Natalie Portman. What about her? I asked. “My friend’s in love with her,” the guy answered. “Tell him to see Closer then,” I said. “So they didn’t cut her nude scene?” he asked. “No, they did cut it but it doesn’t matter,” I replied, “because what they left in is fine, trust me. She’s got a beautiful ass.” The guy and three behind-the-counter colleagues who were listening crowed in unison, “Whoaaa-hoohhh!” The guy said to me, “I think you just sold four tickets!”

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Alexander (Warner Bros., 11.24) is tracking well and should open decently, but if it tanks the following week the studio marketing guys can always lay the blame on the pseudo-gay content, just like ’04 campaign handicappers (accurately) blamed John Kerry’s loss on gay-marriage initiatives. Right?

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If you’re looking for insight into adolescent male sexuality and the influence of movies upon same, the Christian film-critic view is never less than four-square. Consider the suspicions of Bob Waliszewski, a film critic with Focus on the Family and www.pluggedinonline.com, as quoted by the New York Times‘ Sharon Waxman in her 11.20 story about Oliver Stone’s portrayal of a bisexual world conqueror in Alexander, to wit: “There will be people who see Alexander the Great’s bisexuality as applauding that lifestyle, and unfortunately it will lead some young boys, young men down a path that I think they’ll regret someday.”

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Apologies for screwing up sound clips # 3 and #4 in today’s Prick Up Your Ears. I fixed it and it’s now working….

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Remember that scene in Jerry Maguire after Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr) fires Jerry (Tom Cruise) at lunch, and then they both run back to the office to beef up their client list — Sugar calling to dissuade his clients from signing with Maguire, and Maguire trying to persuade his clients to come with him, etc.? This is pretty much what’s been happening since PMK/HBH’s Pat Kingsley fired 23 year veteran Leslee Dart on Wednesday. The reason Kingsley acted so decisively and at such an inopportune time (i.e., right in the middle of Oscar season), I’m told, was because Dart had been talking to several clients about coming with her to a new p.r. company she intends to start up, possibly in partneship with former Miramax publicist Marci Granata but not, despite the rumors, with currently-employed Miramax publicist Amanda Lundberg, who says she’s flattered by the rumor but is pregnant (due next April) and under contract with Miramax until August ’05.

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Those who haven’t seen Kevin McDonald’s Touching the Void, hands-down one of the year’s finest films, should know it’s showing on PBS stations on Sunday evening, 11.21, at 9 pm. (L.A.’s KCET is showing it at this time, anyway — go to http://www.pbs.org/previews/touchingthevoid to see what your local airing time is.) Watch it closely, consider the dramatic devices it uses, and tell me if you think it meets the criteria for a documentary. I think it should be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and not Best Feature Documentary.

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There’s quite a contrast between Claudia Eller’s reporting in today’s L.A. Times about the firing of PMK/HBH honcho Leslee Dart by Pat Kingsley, and Stuart Elliot’s version of the story in the New York Times. The apparent fact is that Eller got the story and Elliot didn’t. Eller simply states that the 50 year-old Dart “lost an internal power struggle to take control of the agency from the 72 year-old Kingsley.” Elliot pussyfoots around and interprets what happened mainly through quotes from Kingsley and Dart. Kingsley tells Elliot there was “a difference of opinion about the direction of the company and what we wanted to accomplish” and Dart tlles him she and Kingsley “had different ideas about the future of the company.”

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Letter from a smart movie-marketing guy in New York City: “You really should add The Incredibles to the Oscar Balloon for Best Picture, Best Director (Brad Bird) and Best Original Screenplay (ditto). It’s a lock for Best Animated Feature, of course, but I think something else is starting to happen. It reminds me of last year when Keisha Castle-Hughes got nominated for Best Actress against all predictions…because everyone who saw Whale Ridervoted for her, even if they thought nobody else would. This year, when I ask Academy members what they like most, only Sideways comes up as often as The Incredibles. Sure, a lot of people still need to see a lot of movies, but I think this one has hit a deep chord…and rightly so.”

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Michael Moore’s coming to Los Angeles at the end of the month (i.e., just after Thanksgiving) to make the rounds, beat the bushes and work the town. With one presumed big-studio Oscar contender after another getting shot up or going down in flames, those who are paying attention are facing the likelihood that the five Best Picture finalists are going to be (Phantom of the Opera aside) four un-grandiose movies from the middle-ranks, which means Fahrenheit 9/11 has a shot, especially if Academy members are just into the idea of giving G.W. Bush a symbolic f— you by nominating it, but paying tribute to its place in history for being the first doc to earn north of $100 million.

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Speaking of places in history, what about the Academy giving a Best Picture nomination to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ for the $300 million it earned? I don’t see it happening. People are too angry about Bush’s re-election to nominate a film that became a mega-hit largely by appealing to red-state moviegoers. Plus a good percentage of the New York-L.A. crowd thinks it’s a fairly deranged film anyway with all the blood and beatings and whippings..

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In America director Jim Sheridan doing Locked and Loaded, a street-crime biopic about 50 Cent? The more I think about it, the cooler it sounds. I see Jim bringing his trademark soulfulness and a veneer of class to the story, being co-written by Sheridan and Sopranos script writer Terrence Winter, about a Queens drug dealer leaving the crime world to pursue his a career as a rapper. And it always seems to work out nicely when English/Irish directors do a take on some uniquely American story-subject, like John Boorman doing Point Blank or Michael Apted doing Coal Miner’s Daughter. The Paramount-MTV venture will roll film early next year. Sheridan’s Ikiru remake with Tom Hanks will happen when it happens, I guess. (I’m told the script isn’t there yet.) Oh, and if anyone wants to slip me a copy of the 50 Cent thing? Mum’s the word.

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Longtime journalist and book author to yours truly last night (on my cell phone as I wandered down the aisles of Pavillions on Santa Monica Blvd.): “Jeff, all the big presumptive Best Picture nominees are flaming out!” And I answered, “People are resisting it, they want that ride over the waterfall, but with one exception the most deserving contenders are all in the intimate, thoughtful, mid-sized range.”

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I was apparently wrong in presuming that Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator has been shot in 1.85 (standard Academy ratio) rather than 2.35 (widescreen) simply because the new Aviator trailer is in 1.85….although I won’t absolutely know until I see it a little bit later this week.

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