Please re-read this William F. Buckley review of The Lives of Others, posted on the National Review site on 5.23.07. I've never felt so close to Buckley over my entire life as I did reading this just now. I need to face the fact that on levels I chose not to consider before, Buckley was a kind of beautiful man in addition to being a beautiful writer.

DVD Beaver screen captures from the theatrical version of Criterion's new 4-disc Last Emperor box set, which hit DVD stores yesterday. As usual, an excellent assessment of the visual quality of this and past versions is provided.

McCain: "I am told that Senator Obama would come back to Iraq if al-Qaida established a base [there]. I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq. It's called 'al-Qaida in Iraq."

Obama: "I have some news for John McCain. There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 and that would be al-Qaida in Afghanistan, that is stronger now than at any time since 2001."

There's a new story/photo album piece by USA Today's Suzie Woz (a.k.a., Susan Wloszczyna) about Richard Kelly's The Box, and the plot details she's revealed make it sound like the basic Richard Matheson story (which is more or less "The Monkey's Paw" with variations) has been heavily collateralized.

It takes place in 1976, for one thing. (Why?) James Marsden's character works for NASA and has co-workers who wear plaid pants. Marsden is working on the Viking mission to Mars. (Who gives a shit about NASA space missions? The Box is supposed to be...Read More

The bottom line concerning Gavin O'Connor's all-but-abandoned Pride and Glory -- a New Line film that co-chairman and co-CEO Bob Shaye doesn't like and has decided not to distribute this year, bumping it into '09 -- is that the film might have a chance to come out this year if and when Shaye and co-honcho Michael Lynne get the boot from their owner-bosses at Warner Bros.

DHD's Nikki Finke reported yesterday that Shaye and Lynne "may find out out as soon as this week what will happen to New Line Cinema and their expiring employment contracts at the movie studio...Read More

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has assembled the smartest and most creative suggestions for how to fix the Oscar show that I've read anywhere. I've listed a few, but it can all be boiled down to three words -- fire Gil Cates. He's too old to get with the 21st Century program and needs to be put out to pasture -- simple. Bring in a producer who's younger and fresher and more alive-in-the-moment. Somebody in their 60s, I mean.

(1) "Although I'm sure it will cause a firestorm inside the academy, the technical awards -- sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects, makeup...Read More

"The [Oscar telecast] ratings are going to drop a bit more each year because the Oscar show reflects the cares and passions of industry-ites (filmmakers, distributors, academy members, press, web savants) who at least pretend to care about movies that emotionally engage or arouse or deliver insights about the human experience.

"Unfortunately, this is pretty much what the Gorilla Nation people in the malls -- the ones who just want to watch stuff like Transformers or the Hannah Montana concert movie and who basically prefer films that provide surface thrills or happy-pill highs -- do not want to see as a...Read More

MCN's David Poland voted for a grand total of 7 correct Oscar calls in the final Gurus of Gold chart. Out of 21 categories, that is. (MCN doesn't include doc short, live action short or animated short.) Poland also missed 4 of the top 8 categories including such no-brainers as Best Picture and Original Screenplay. He went with Tony Gilroy and Michael Clayton instead of Diablo Cody and No Country for Old Men.

This doesn't precisely fortify the legend of the Poland Curse (i.e., any Best Picture he gets behind big-time will lose) because Poland...Read More

"There will be plenty of eulogies from people who knew William F. Buckley better than I did -- and certainly from those who agreed with him more than I did," Time's Joe Klein has written. "But he was an honest man, an actual conservative -- who, in the end, was quietly appalled by George W. Bush's radicalism, in Iraq and when it came to the federal budget.

"He was a lovely writer, of course. His book, The Unmaking of a Mayor, an account of his own wry run for mayor of New York in 1965, is not only hilarious but also...Read More

Sarah Silverman's "I'm f---ing Matt Damon" video was inspired stuff, and then came Jimmy Kimmel's "I'm f---ing Ben Affleck," a tit-for-tat that was even more hilarious. But that's enough, I think.

Meaning that "I'm f---ing Seth Rogen", a video in the exact same vein that may have been the creative brainchild of Zack and Miri Make a Porno costar Elizabeth Banks (and not director Kevin Smith) doesn't make it. It's too imitative and not clever enough. If they wanted to get a fast satirical bounce off the Silverman video, fine, but they should...Read More

It's commonly known that Valkyrie director Bryan Singer had wanted to direct the long-in-development Harvey Milk biopic called The Mayor of Castro Street for producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, based on a revised script by Chris McQuarrie. But as Variety's Anne Thompson reported two or three weeks ago, that project has been abandoned. Zadan and/or Meron confirmed this during a producer's panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Thompson has told me.

Now comes an item in the Portland-area publication Willamette Week that Gus Van Sant, director of as currently-rolling Harvey Milk biopic called Milk, has "extended an 'olive branch' to...Read More

In a 2.26 N.Y. Times opinion piece called "Mr. Nader's Unforgivable Wrong," Ron Klain reminds that "the Ralph Nader presidential vote in the 2000 election was larger than the Gore-Bush margin of difference -- not just in Florida, but also in New Hampshire -- is grating and significant.

"So let's just put it this way, as neutrally as possible: while there are several reasons why Al Gore was not sworn in on Jan. 20, 2001, one of them certainly is because Ralph Nader drew votes that would have given Mr. Gore the election -- in not just one state, but two...Read More

He's not a Barack-star in debates -- he's shown that time and again. But he was cool, comprehensive, explicit, sharp and unflappable tonight, and that means he won. But there's one thing Hillary said tonight that I really quite liked. When Tim Russert asked her to name President Vladimir Putin's successor in Russia (whose name is Dmitri A. Medvedev), she said it was "um, Med-medvedova, whatever." My Hillary hate evaporated when she said that. I laughed, liked her smile.

But I also love the new 2.27 Maureen Dowd column that was written just after tonight's debate. Here's a taste:

Hillary Clinton "has...Read More

I missed Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning when I was at Sundance, but I heard almost nothing about it afterward. People were apparently underwhelmed. But now, four weeks after the festival's end, Variety's Winter Miller and Anne Thompson are reporting that it's been picked up by Overture Films for roughly $2 million. Sunshine Cleaning was "deemed a tough sell for its gory subject matter," they comment, and it was also considered a "hard sell at Sundance because the filmmakers were trying to recoup their cost, which insiders say was about $7 million."

Politico's Jeffrey Ressner is reporting that Alex Gibney, director of the Oscar-winning doc Taxi to the Dark Side, is now making a documentary about the Jack Abramoff scandal, which will involve a close look at GOP presidential candidate John McCain's role in investigating the affair. The film, currently titled Casino Jack and the United States of Money, will "come out later this year."

Director George Hickenlooper has informed, meanwhile, that he's developing a dramatic feature about the Abramoff scandal called Bagman. He says he's partnered with producer George Zakk (a Vin Diesel associate who's exec-produced several of Deisel's films, including Find...Read More

Fox 411's Roger Friedman reported this morning that "several sources" have told him that Steven Spielberg's reps "and the folks at the Cannes Film Festival are in negotiations to bring Paramount's highly anticipated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to Cannes for its official worldwide premiere in May.

"The star-studded event easily would be the centerpiece of the festival, akin to the premiere last year of Ocean's Thirteen. I'm told that Spielberg, perhaps producer George Lucas and stars Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LeBeouf, Karen Allen and others would make the walk up the fabled red carpet at...Read More

Thank God the last Clinton-Obama debate is about to happen. 12 minutes from now. A few days and no more listening to that raspy cackly witch-voice. No more looking into those cold steely eyes, or having to discern the real calculation behind those repulsively phony emotional offerings. I realize Barack has to act cool and unruffled like Ronald Reagan in the final debate with Jimmy Carter, but oh, how I would love to see some kind of serious slapdown between them, like that thing they got into in South Carolina.

Now that it's all over....the winners! "Five Envelope pundits tied for nailing seven predix out of those eight Oscar races: Pete Hammond (The Envelope), Dave Karger (Entertainment Weekly), Mark Olsen (The Envelope), Sasha Stone (AwardsDaily.com) and Jeffrey Wells (Hollywood-Elsewhere.com).

"Of the pundits who voted in all 24 categories, Hammond rules with 17 correct predix, followed by a score of 16 achieved by Edward Douglas (Comingsoon.net) and Jack Mathews (New York Daily News). Those who got 15 right included The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone), Mark Olsen (The Envelope), Karger and Stone. I didn't bother to fill out...Read More

Denzel Washington's shaved head and goatee look, evident on last Sunday's Oscar show, is for Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 123, a remake of the 1974 Joseph Sargent film.

Washington apparently has Walter Mattthau's subway administrator role, which he probably wanted as a swing move away from his American Gangster heroin dealer. But I'd rather see him play the Robert Shaw role, which John Travolta has in actuality.

Scott can pull this and that lever and push this and that button, but this new zipped-up version will stand or fall on its...Read More

Charlie Bartlett, which opened weakly last weekend, is a smart teen dramedy about an enterprising kid (Anton Yelchin) who peddles prescription drugs and dispenses psychiatric advice on the side. It's about the spirit of entrepeurialism in the vein of Risky Business, Rushmore and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which is to say it's about a young lad shuffling around with the style and attitude of a likable sociopath.

Anton Yelchin, Robert Downey, Jr. in Charlie Bartlett

It was a wee bit disappointing, to me, when Yelchin developed a conscience and a sense of responsibility at the end....Read More

Among this weekend's openers, The Other Boleyn Girl (being all-media screened tonight) is at 49, 33 and 7...but first-choice is in the teens with women so business could be decent. Penelope is at 52, 25 and 5....fair. Will Ferrell's Semi-Pro is polling at 67,35 and 8...modest

The biggest hit of the March 7th weekend will unquestionably be 10,000 BC....73, 29 and 13...pretty good, very male. Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job is running at 28, 26 and 1. College Road Trip is now .76, 25 and 4. On March 14th comes Doomsday, currently 30, 17 and 0, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who at...Read More

In an imaginary e-mail interview with Semi-Pro star Will Ferrell, Hoboken-based illusionist Dave Lozo, 30, pretends to criticize Ferrell for making the same movie over and over. The irony is that it hits on truths that would never be addressed, much less answered, in a genuine chat with Ferrell. Are made-up interviews preferable? Of course not, but they do seem to get down to things that real interviews sidestep.

"It seems that all your movies are the same and you have very little range as an actor, yet people continue to go to see your movies,"...Read More

"She was a great-looking chick and whatever was in her eyes, it sure wasn't love. Was I smart? No, I was dumb. With a capital D. Wow, was I dead wrong! I had no idea what was ahead of me. You try to figure a dame out."

Mind Games, an Oliver Peoples sunglass ad shot as a film noir satire in luscious monochrome, is an agreeable two-minute hoot. It's also the classiest looking plot-driven film that Robert Evans has ever physically acted in. (Voicing his Comedy Central animated series Kid Notorious doesn't count, and neither...Read More

In this Envelope/'Wire Image photo of Sean Penn and model Petra Nemcova at at Elton John's Oscar bash, the caption reads that Nemcova told reporters that Penn "is on the advisory board of my charity." A comment follows that "we can just imagine what kind of charity advice Sean's giving her." That's what's known as a none-too-subtle allusion. If I had written the caption, I would have said "we can just imagine the sounds of animal howling and crashing-over furniture and the sharp cry of under-garments being brutally ripped apart."

The Oscar telecast audience last night was the lowest rated in history. A lousy 32 million viewers tuned in, which is a huge disaster considering that 95.5 million sports fans watched the Super Bowl earlier this month.

This is the way of American culture -- more and more followers of competitive games in which men on performance-enhancing drugs try to either hit or take possession of a ball in order to score with it, and fewer and fewer true movie fans. I guess this means...what, ABC might earn a bit less in the way of ad revenues next year? I need...Read More

I got upset about Roy Scheider being ignored in the Oscar telecast's death montage (i.e., "in Memoriam"), and Us magazine has gotten riled about Brad Renfro being left out as well. But what about Ulrich Muhe, who gave one of the 21st Century's greatest performances in The Lives of Others, which is hands down one of the century's greatest films? He died of stomach cancer last July, and the Academy blew him off also.

An Academy spokesperson told Us that Renfro's omission was "an editing decision because we can't fit everyone in...there was...Read More

Finally...where has this video been hiding? I first ran something about it 10 days ago or whatever.

"My favorite movie of the year was the one about the heartless con man who's obsessed with finding oil. Its called No End In Sight." -- Bill Maher on the Huffington Post.

Barack Obama is in front of Hillary Clinton, 56 to 39, in a USA Today national poll. And is beating her 54 to 38 in a N.Y. Times/CBS poll. And edging her 50 to 46 in Texas, according to a CNN poll. (Change from 2.18 poll -- Obama up two points, Clinton down four.) And columnist Robert Novak is asking today "who will tell her that it's over, that she cannot win the presidential nomination and that the sooner she leaves the race, the more it will improve the party's chances of defeating John McCain in November?"

Due respect, but Tina Fey's pro-Hillary bit 36 hours ago on Saturday Night Live was not cool. Not at this stage of the game. Not with Hillary's latest race-baiting maneuver. She's now on the HE shit list and will stay there until she writes or directs or appears in a really good film. I'm sure she'll be fine with this. That said, her riff about how it's good to be a bitch because they get things done (or a mean nun because they make you learn things) is pretty good stuff.

"Change" is obviously a big theme in the political landscape right now, and there are definite signs over the last couple of years that things have been changing profoundly in terms of Oscar winners also, or more precisely in terms of the makeup of Academy voters. It's the most interesting thought I've heard all day about last night's show, and it came out of a chat I had a few minutes ago with Pete Hammond. Here it is.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has complained that last night's Oscar winners were the darkest and creepiest ever. "Six [Oscars] went to pix about a wacko serial killer (No Country) or a psycho oil baron with murder on his mind (There Will Be Blood). Together they won picture, director, adapted screenplay, actor and supporting actor.

"The other two categories went to, well, somewhat lighter fare: a film about a drug-addicted chanteuse (La Vie en Rose) and a pregnant teen with a bad 'tude (Juno)."

O'Neil was also on the Bill O'Reilly Radio Factor discussion during an Oscars segment that...Read More

An hour ago I heard the best explanation (or at least the best partial explanation) as to why the Julie Christie momentum bandwagon stalled and gave way to Marion Cotillard's winning the Best Actress Oscar. (And I'm not getting into this topic as a complaint -- I've long worshipped Cotillard's La Vie en Rose performance as Edith Piaf.) I'll give the person who told me credit for this when I hear from him and he says it's cool, but until then here it is non-attributed.

Cotillard beat Christie because young actresses almost always beat older actresses in the Best Actress race. One reason...Read More

This is it, the absolute ethical nadir of the Hillary Clinton campaign so far. To my mind sending out that 2006 photo of Barack Obama dressed in Somali garb during a visit to that country is scummy and reprehensible almost beyond measure. It is a a classic race-baiting tactic obviously aimed at latently racist rubes from Texas and Ohio who say they're still on the fence.

Reacting to a headline on the Drudge Report (still up as I write this) claiming that aides to Senator Clinton had e-mailed the photo to reporters and editors, Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe accused the...Read More

A friend from Boston wrote this morning to say that she "didn't see a single one of the nominated movies this year. The only one in the whole bunch that I saw was Once, and it was fun to see them win best song. A lot of people I talked to only saw Juno and none of the others. What percentage of people do you think are like me and didn't see any of those movies?

"Too many seem to have too much violence, too many downer stories. We want to see something uplifting. I love Tilda...Read More

Eleven observations & thoughts from the Oscar telecast (and one from the Spirit Awards), now that I'm catching my breath and have a few moments to tap something out:

(1) Joel and Ethan Coen, good fellows that they are, were a little too modest and self-effacing last night. Their personalities are their personalities, and that's fine. But they're clever writers with things on their minds, and for their acceptance speeches they could have written something that might have cut through to the marrow or acknowledged something other than the state of winning. Anything that might have...Read More

Variety critic Robert Koehler wrote a while back to ask if Marion Cotillard's Best Actress win is a first for a French actress or not. Is it? Koehler believes either way that it's the first time that the same actress has won the French (i.e., Cesar) and American Oscars in this category.

Joel and Ethan Coen have won the Best Director Oscar for No Country for Old Men. Appropriately. Modest, thankful, self-effacing. Loved Frances McDormand's "yeah, yeah!" expression as they walk off stage.

And here's a shaved-head Denzel Washington (for what role?) handing out the Best Picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men. No Clayton or Juno surprises. All according to general expectations. This is producer Scott Rudin's moment, all right. A happy man, "thank you so much." And it's over, dude. Three hours, 17 minutes.

I missed the opening monologue. Watching it now on replay. Best line: "If Vanity Fair wants...Read More

It can't not be Daniel Day Lewis for Best Actor. No disputes or challenges (except from Tom O'Neil). And the Oscar goes to DDL, who kneels before Helen Mirren, the presenter, as he arrives at the podium. "This sprang like a golden sapling out of the mad beautiful head of Paul Thomas Anderson," he says. "Thank you, Paul."

Diablo Cody's win for her Best Original Juno Screenplay was mostly expected. A moving moment because she dropped whatever it is she's been carrying around for the last few months. She mentioned her parents, teared up, delivered. Good for her. Eight to ten years of fat checks -- originals, adaptations, punch-ups -- are all but assured.

The winner of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar is a surprise. All along I was hearing No End in Sight, No End in Sight, No End in Sight. Hooray for Alex Gibney's Taxi to Dark Side, which won, but it's a surprise is all. Nobody I know called this. That I can think of.

The Best Original Score Oscar should go to Atonement...and it does!

The Oscar for Best Cinematography ( a word that Cameron Diaz can barely pronounce) goes to There Will Be Blood's Robert Elswit. This is a surprise. I'm sorry, but the cinematography of Roger Deakins in The Assassination of Jesse James loses? On top of his work in No Country? That doesn't feel right. At all. I loved Elswit's work but...I don't know. Conflicted.

There's no doubt about the Oscar winner for Best Song. Once's Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are the champs...of course! Deserved, fated, ordained. Stewart's line about Glen -- "Wow, that guy is so arrogant!" -- is hilarious.

Penelope Cruz presents the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to...does anyone care? The Academy didn't even nominate the best film in this category, and I haven't discerned any real enthusiasm for the nominees that made the cut. It will probably be The Counterfeiters. And the Oscar goes to...The Counterfeiters. Enthusiasm in the room is muted. I'll rent it down the road.

The third Oscar of the night for The Bourne Ultimatum, this one for editing. Because of the velocity, speed, number of cuts per minute, etc. It's a beautifully edited film. A honor well deserved.

The Best Actress Oscar presented by Forrest Whitaker. Marion Cotillard! Great! Amazing! Julie Christie almost had it. I don't know what happened but this was the right call. The Real Geezer vote didn't materialize as expected. Tom O'Neil or whomever it was who claimed that the Julie Christie thing was the Evolving Big Turn has some explaining to do.

Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen (not Judi Dench or Halle Berry) handing out the Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing Oscars. The Bourne Ultimatum wins the Best Sound Editing Oscar. (HE reader Zay Tonday who predicted No Country to win today at 02:41 PM was wrong! Big mouth!) The Best Sound Mixing Oscar goes to The Bourne Ultimatum again. Mildly surprising. Somewhat.

The Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, presented by James McAvoy and Josh Brolin, is presented to Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men. They're going to win Best Director also (of course), and of course Best Picture. (Right?) Three Oscars for sure. Those dark horse notions about Clayton or Juno...forget 'em. I think.

Alan Arkin handing out the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Cate Blanchett should get it for I'm Not There, but I'll be at peace with Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton taking it. And Swinton wins! As predicted over the last four or five days! She didn't expect it, obviously. Beautiful acceptance speech. Unexpectedly moving. Tony Gilroy's eyes were watering over.

The Best Best Live-Action Oscar should go The Substitute, which I've seen and praised. But the Oscar has gone to Le Mozart de Pickpockets, the most sentimental of the bunch. Sap sentiment! The Best Animated Short Oscar should go to I Met The Walrus, I believe, and the winner is...Peter and the Wolf! I give up.

Javier Bardem, naturally, universally expected, wins the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for No Country for Old Men. Loved his expression when he heard his name called. He was on edge, wasn't sure. I loved his Spanish-spoken words for his mom, which a friend just translated.

Sweeney Todd wins Best Art Direction Oscar, which I had on my sheet. Deserved. Dante Ferreti's soft, delicate Italian accent.

Dwayne Johnson delivering the Best Visual Effects Oscar, which moves me not. The cool effects are the ones you don't notice. The team behind The Golden Compass, the bomb that rocked New Line Cinema, wins. Who cares? Nobody. Not me anyway. I hate blatant CGI.

Late start with live-blog (indecision at the liquor store), but the makeup Oscar going to the La Vie En Rose guys is a favorable indication of Marion Cotillard winning Best Actress....no?

I've never understood the difference between sound editing and sound mixing, even if someone writes in and explains it all in Jack-and-Jill terms, like I'm an idiot. I'll certainly never understand things in a way that will help me decide which No Country For Old Men sound nomination to mark on my ballot -- Skip Lievsay for Sound Editing, or Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland for Sound Mixing. And don't tell me I'm slow or stupid. Nobody understand this stuff.

Among Nikki Finke's list of tips about the content of tonight's Oscar show: "Queen Latifah, one of the scheduled presenters, had a family emergency and had to drop out."

That's an uptick in my book. I respect the fact that downmarket award presenters tend to raise viewership levels, but Queen Latifah fans are probably among that broad sector of the public that wouldn't watch There Will Be Blood at the point of a knife so who needs' em?

Sooner or later it's going to sink in among Academy officials and Oscar producers that more...Read More

"The Oscars maintain the capacity to surprise," N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr reminded this morning. "This year it is writ that No Country will win best picture, that Javier Bardem is a lock for best supporting actor and that Daniel Day-Lewis's name will be announced when they open the envelope for best actor. But chances are, at least one of those things won't happen.

"Two years ago we were all humming the Brokeback Mountain music at the end of the show when Jack Nicholson surprised everyone, including himself, by saying the word Crash. It...Read More

I checked the entertainment and movies section of today's New York Post for my piece about how the revolutionary Best Picture lineup of 1967 (the story of which is richly told in Mark Harris's just-published Pictures at a Revolution) to no avail.

I assumed they'd killed it because it was too dense or thinky or whatever. (I tried to write it like a borough guy but there's a limit to such contortions.) Then my editor wrote back and said no, it's in the paper -- in the Opinion section.

What was I thinking?...Read More

The Academy Awards represent "the self-assessment of a self-interested, self-involved professional clique," writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. "It can be argued that, over the past decade or so, this roughly 6,000-member [Academy of Motion Pictures] has become more discerning, more willing to confer its blessings on quasi-independent, medium-budget films instead of the lumbering, middlebrow prestige productions it used to favor.

"Nowadays the main divisions of the studios -- Columbia, Paramount, Universal and the rest -- specialize in big-ticket entertainment aimed at a global audience. Their art-house subdivisions -- the Miramaxes, Searchlights and Vantages -- have taken over the business of...Read More

There was grumbling and shoulder-shrugging at the Spirit Awards after-bash about Juno winning the best picture prize. Nobody dislikes it (myself included) but nobody I know thinks it aspires to greatness, much less achieves it. Over and over I heard "why?," "I don't get it," "Whatever," "I don't know...obviously people like it," "they were sucking up to Fox Searchlight," etc.

Juno's Ellen Page

No problems in this corner with Juno star Ellen Page winning the best actress award, or with Diablo Cody winning the best first screenplay prize. They're fine, but it just doesn't seem right on some...Read More

The wi-fi in the backstage press tent at the Spirit Awards is so pathetically weak that it insults the name. If I could find a 28 k dial-up connection, I'd take it. I've taken some good photos and have many impressions to share (80 % of which will evaporate by tonight or tomorrow morning) but it might as well be 1987 for all the connectivity here. (Typed on the damn iPhone.)

NPR's Kim Masters and Pete Hammond talk about the unbridgable gulf between the savorers of Oscar-nominated films and performances (not to mention worshippers of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) and those enjoyed by Gorilla Nation.

I'm leaving now for the Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica. Well, within 15 or 20 minutes. They'll be broadcast on IFC Channel starting at 2 pm Pacific. I'll try to post reactions and photos as they happen.

Politico's Jeffrey Ressner is reporting that "a major documentary" about Sen. Barack Obama is being produced by Edward Norton's Class 5 Productions and directed by Amy Rice, sister of Andrew Rice, an Oklahoma state senator and U.S. Senate candidate.

Rice and Norton have shot "staggering amounts" of "revealing behind-the-scenes footage for the untitled project, which has been ongoing for roughly two years." One advantage these filmmakers enjoy, says Ressner, is "near-exclusive access," having "engaged directly with Obama and won his staff's trust in the year before he even announced his presidential candidacy."

But "it could be years before the Obama...Read More

I love that the last-minute Oscar situation seems fluid and uncertain enough for odd and unlikely predictions to be advanced by serious people. One example of this is The Envelope's Tom O'Neil predicting a George Clooney Best Actor win for his performance in Michael Clayton. It won't happen but I love flirting with the possibility. Any Oscar win that surprises or freaks people out is "good" in my book.

Boiled down, O'Neil is making the Clooney call because, like me, he's impressed with the pro-Clayton, pro-Swinton, pro-Clooney sentiments voice by Real Geezer commentators Marcia Nasatir...Read More

Newsweek's David Ansen has joined those predicting a win for Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton in the Best Supporting Actress category. He's not calling this a certainty as much as confessing he has a hunch along these lines, the rationale being that voting for Swinton is "a way [for Academy members] to honor a movie they like, and an uncompromising actor who's paid her dues in movies both far-out and mainstream."

Ansen informs, incidentally, the Cate Blanchett's name is supposed to be pronounced "BLANCHIT and not BLANSHETTE, as if it were French." He got it straight...

In a 2.23 Washington Post story, an anonymous Clinton campaign adviser tells reporters Anne Kornblut and Shailagh Murray that Barack Obama's 17-point Wisconsin victory last Tuesday "[has] started to sink in as a decisive blow, given that the state had been viewed weeks earlier as a level playing field."

"'The mathematical reality at that point became impossible to ignore,' the adviser said. `There's not a lot of denial left at this point.' He added that despite Clinton's public pronouncements of optimism, `She knows where things are going. It's pretty clear she has a big decision. But...Read More

Vantage Point did about $7,963,000 last night with a projected weekend tally of $24.6 million, and it's a total piece of shit. (Doesn't matter, nobody reads reviews, America the Beautiful.) But three other openers have completely tanked. Be Kind Rewind will do about $4 million, Witless Protection will grab a pathetic $1.9 million, and poor Charlie Bartlett will only do about $1.6 million.

The Spiderwick Chronicles will come second in Sunday night with $12.7 million. Jumper will be third with $12 million even. Step Up will do about $9.2 million. Fool's Gold is expected to take in $6.1 million. Definitely Maybe is...Read More

"With the pressure to recognize big films declining, the Oscars' role in movies has become more like that of Oprah's Book Club in promoting literature: highlighting the obscure, unusual or unexpected.

"'The academy is more concerned with rewarding the best film now than they ever have been. They're less concerned with rewarding popular entertainment," says Sasha Stone, who runs the industry blog AwardsDaily.com.

"That trend expands the eternal disconnect between the tastes of the academy and the tastes of the public. Would even fans of last year's top box office-earner -- Spider-Man 3, which took in...Read More

I spoke earlier today about various Oscar matters with And The Winner Is blogger Scott Feinberg. Here's the file. (It didn't load for me -- it just kept buffering and buffering and buffering.)

As a sentimental gesture to one of the late Roy Scheider's best performances, this afternoon I bought an old DVD of William Freidkin's Sorcerer ('77). It looked much worse than expected. Released by Universal Home Video in November '98, the disc has muddy sound, a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio that seems to trim out a fair amount of what was originally shot, and a crudely mastered appearance that's way too coarse and grainy. I saw Sorcerer at a good theatre when it first came out. The DVD is a desecration.

Some think Sorcerer is a masterpiece....Read More

Mini-shakes at last night's Paramount Vantage party at STK for There Will Be Blood and (sort of) Into The Wild. At the moment this was taken (around 9:25 pm), original slurper Daniel Day Lewis and wife Rebecca Miller were standing about 45 or 50 feet away.

Collider's Steve Weintraub is reporting that Steven Spielberg has bailed out of directing the Trial of the Chicago 7 movie, but Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke is reporting that Spielberg "has backed off setting an April start date...and won't finalize a new start date until the Screen Actors Guild and AMPTP agree on a deal," in part because he feels that Aaron Sorkin's script needs more work.

(l. to r.) Steven Spielberg, Abbie Hoffman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Will Smith

I called Spielberg spokesperson Marvin Levy at the start...Read More

Baird Jones, an event-party guy, a Webster Hall art curator and a former freelance gossip columnist who worked for the N.Y. Daily News' Rush & Molloy in the mid '90s, was found dead last night. I knew and liked him a lot (I especially loved that N.Y. Yankees hat he always wore), and I'm very sorry for his close friends and family right now.

I last talked with Baird in December '07 at a party he invited me to that was somewhere in the west 20s. I don't get how a guy in his early 50s (a N.Y. Daily News...Read More

Kidding or half-serious, Paul Thomas Anderson let N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr have it right between the eyes last night during a brief chat at a Paramount Vantage party (which I also attended) at a sprawling joint called STK or SKG or DMT....something along those lines.

Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger") said something or other about the Best Picture candidates he likes, admitting that There Will Be Blood isn't quite at the top of his list, and Anderson said, "You know, you don't know a fucking thing about movies!"

Anderson then said There Will Be Blood "[is] the best...Read More

Australian artist-hustler Vincent Fantauzzo has gotten PageSix.com to help raise the value of a just-completed Heath Ledger painting. Fatauzzo persuaded Ledger to pose not long before the 28 year-old actor accidentally died last month. (People sit for paintings these days? What for?) Ledger's hair is black because that was part of his appearance in Terry Gilliam's Dr. Parnassus, but why does he seem to be wearing dark body makeup, like he's playing a Sicilian gigolo in an early '60s film?

"Right now, at this point in history, it is more important to have our first black president than our first woman president," director Rod Lurie (Nothing But The Truth, Resurrecting The Champ) has written in a 2.22 Huffington Post opinion piece.

Kate Beckinsale, Rod Lurie during filming of Nothing But The Truth

"There have been many nations that have had female leaders. But there are very few, if any, that have elected a member of their ethnic minority to lead them," Lurie states. "Were we to put Hillary in office, the world would shrug their shoulders and...Read More

"The problem was he hired a bunch of art house executives, and now he's tired of making money-losing films," a source told Nikki Finke yesterday about Sidney Kimmel, whose production and distribution company has reigned supreme at the art of losing tens of millions at the box office. A lot of people lose money or have bad luck, but the guys at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment have shown a special gift.

The biggest Sidney Kimmel wipeouts have been Talk To Me (which I knew would be dead meat the moment I heard the synopsis and that Don Cheadle would star), Death At A...Read More

"The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists" -- a seemingly well-reported, fair-minded article about John McCain by the Washington Post's Michael Shear and Jeff Birnbaum. It essentially backs up the underlying point of yesterday's highly controversial N.Y. Times piece without mentioning Vicky Iseman.

Very early in the presidential race (sometime in winter months of '07), I finally decided I wasn't going to be cheering on Hillary Clinton's campaign because of a gut instinct call. I remember reading a piece about the all-time favorite films of the candidates, and Hillary was quoted as saying (or so I recall) that hers was Gone With The Wind. Another article said her choice was Casablanca.

That tore it for me. I love both Casablanca and Gone With the Wind for the usual reasons. I relate to Rick Blaine's feelings of bitterness and...Read More

I've read this 2.22 Jessica Barbanel/Fox News story twice and I'm still not understanding how the Best Picture ascension of No Country for Old Men was primarily due to marketing. I mean, I don't buy this line for a second.

NCFOM was well promoted, yes, by producer Scott Rudin, 42 West Oscar strategist Cynthia Swartz and Miramax publicity, but nothing would have happened if it didn't have the soul and the pedigree of a major art film that also worked as a first-rate thriller/suspenser/chaser. (Until the last 20 or 25 minutes, that is, which is when the thrills stopped and thematic payoff...Read More

Plagiarism! Busted! (How does it feel, girl?)

HE final, final Oscar predictions: BEST PICTURE: No Country for Old Men, although I'd like credit for saying it's vaguely possible that Michael Clayton or Juno could sneak a win. (Although it probably won't happen.) BEST DIRECTOR: No Country's Joel and Ethan Coen -- no question, no discussion.

BEST ACTOR: Blood's Daniel Day-Lewis...a lock. BEST ACTRESS: Probably Away From Her's Julie Christie, although I personally prefer La Vie en Rose's Marion Cotillard. (I'll personally be shattered if Juno's Ellen Page wins for the mere feat of giving good spunk.) BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: No Country's Javier Bardem. BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton,...Read More

Vantage Point is a hound dog, but it's going to be the weekend's #1 film. The tracking is 71, 40 and 19, which means a weekend gross in the high teens, possibly crestng $20 million. Unless, of course, it tanks so badly with audiences that the word spreads like nerve gas.

"Can an implausible set piece offer up fresh thrills and insights if replayed ad infinitum from different perspectives?," Justin Chang's 2.21 Variety review begins. "Not according to Vantage Point, a 23-minute movie dragged out, via some narrative gimmickry, to a punishing hour and a half.

Dennis Quaid as a poor man's Clint Eastwood/In The Line of Fire character in Vantage Point.

"Circling endlessly around a political assassination attempt and its violently contrived aftermath, the film proves every bit as crude, nerve-grinding and finally unsalvageable as the car accidents it keeps inflicting on its characters. Originally...Read More

MSNBC's Alonso Duralde asks what the Oscar nominees for Best Picture say about who and what we are today. A decently written piece that brings in Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution for perspective.

Latest ABC News/Washington Post Texas and Ohio poll data.

Seeking to "reduce exposure to advertising markets and cyclicality," Reed Elsevier intends to sell Variety and other Reed Business trade pubs like Broadcasting and Cable, Multichannel News and Publishers Weekly. Either the RE bean counters don't see enough growth potential in the advertising revenues from these trades over the next few years, or they've simply lost their stomach for the business. Can you imagine an owner of a automotive garage saying they're selling in order to reduce exposure to gaskets, oil filters, picky customers, Phillips head screwdrivers and fan belts?

Video from the Belgrade rioting has shown a clip of a Serbian mob on a street below with a view of a large off-white wall with a half-obscured McDonald's logo, plain as day. If I were there (and a part of me wishes I were) I would get this shot, guaranteed. Nothing says "Orwellian" or "Big Brother" like the Golden Arches.

"A desperately unfunny mix of tepid showbiz satire and formulaic romantic comedy, writer-director Amy Heckerling's long-delayed, trouble-plagued I Could Never Be Your Womanfinally has been released -- or, more precisely, unleashed -- as a direct-to-video title. But it's unlikely that even the marquee allure of Michelle Pfeiffer, Paul Rudd and up-and-comer Saoirse Ronan will be enough to offset unfavorable buzz after enough renters sample this ill-fated fiasco." -- from Joe Leydon's 2.21 Variety review.

Gabriel Sherman's 2.21 New Republic piece about the run-up -- reporting, internal debating, stalling, the resignation of a reporter -- to the publishing of yesterday's N.Y. Times story about allegations that Sen.John McCain and a female lobbyist had an improper relationship eight years ago, is an absolute must-read. The article is called "The Long Run-Up: Behind the Bombshell in The New York Times."

There is a place in the world for big-concept Roland Emmerich movies with lots of special effects that critics will most likely hate. You have to be a grown-up and accept this. Be a man, take the pain. There was the alien mother ship the size of Newport, Rhode Island, hovering over the White House in Independence Day. That scene in The Patriot with the cannonball blowing a guy's head off. Those scenes of cataclysmic global disaster in The Day After Tomorrow. The scary saber-tooth tigers in 10,000 B.C. (out March 7, 2008). The latest sign off is an end-of-days movie called...Read More

Michael Clayton "is the best it can be in that genre. But there's a ceiling on that genre. If it has a shot at [winning] anything, it's best supporting actress with Tilda Swinton." -- George Clooney speaking to Time profiler Joel Stein in the 2.20 issue.

Also: "I thought Daniel Day Lewis had the best performance of the year. Then I saw La Vie En Rose. Marion Cotillard does an old person trying to be young, instead of what everyone does -- a young person trying to be old. It's a stunning performance. But there...Read More

Certain filmmakers didn't get back to me for my N.Y. Post Oscar Sunday piece, delaying progress and keeping me up until 1 ayem as I tried to slap it together based on quotes I had in time for this morning's deadline. Didn't make it, had to crash, woke up early, etc. I have to finish the damn thing this morning so no more posts until I do.

The passed-along allegation is that the central idea in Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (New Line, 2.22) rips off an eight year-old episode of The Amanda Show on Nicholodeon. I have no dog in this hunt.

MTV's Josh Horowitz and his creative tech team have thrown together a reasonably ambitious short in which Horowitz has inserted himself into the five Best Picture contenders as a kind of Oscar host. They've also thrown in a cameo by MTV's Kurt Loder. Going for broke here. Not your father's typical MTV report.

Coming Soon's Edward Douglas has posted his final Oscar prediction column. Absolutely no surprises (he doesn't even mention the apparent surge of Juno and Michael Clayton support in the Best Picture category) except for predicting Cate Blanchett to take the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, which I'm 90% convinced will go to Clayton's Tilda Swinton. "Hastiliy written," he says, "but heavily researched. Granted, some of my picks are those who I think should win, but I did think this stuff out, even going against the favorite Juno for original screenplay."

On 12.16.07 I wondered why Juno director Jason Reitman cast Ellen Page based on her sass and spirit "but with no regard for the fact that in the real world a young woman who looks like Page -- midget-sized, scrawny, looking like a feisty 11 year-old with absolutely nothing about her that says 'alluring breeding-age female' -- most likely wouldn't exactly be fighting off the attentions of hormonally-crazed teenage boys, including nice-guy dweebs like Michael Cera's character."

I was, of course, mocked and spitballed for saying this in the most respectful terms I could manage....Read More

The Envelope's Pete Hammond isn't quite buying into the scenario of an upset Best Picture win (i.e., either the much- loved Michael Clayton or Juno slipping in due to the gnarly nihilist vote being split between No Country and There Will Be Blood), but he's toying with the scenario regardless.

Uno, the Westminster Dog Show champ on 2.11.08.

Hammond is basically acknowledging that the talk is out there (as I have, as others have) but is saying in the final analysis that he's not persuaded there's enough talk to change his prediction about a...Read More

Film Jerk's Edward Havens has his annual Oscar handicap articles up. Stats, stats, and more stats. The Best Picture article is of particular interest. Havens predicts No Country but personally favors Michael Clayton among the five nominees and picks The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as the best of all the '07 films.

David Fincher is attached to direct a film based on Black Hole, the Charles Burns graphic novel about a sexually transmitted virus among teens that causes strange growths and tears in the skin. AIDS yuckfest! Plan B and producer Kevin Messick are developing for Fincher, Paramount Pictures and MTV Films. Beowulf screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman wrote a Black Hole screenplay in 2006. Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension) was previously attached to direct.

I just ran out onto Melrose to see the lunar eclipse. It's something like 50% or 55% dark now, but the moon is so low in the L.A. sky right now you need to be out in the open and looking east without any buildings or trees obscuring.

I'm saying nothing about this Rec Show article, which is a full journalistic equivalent of an intimate act performed upon Steven Spielberg. Key statement: "Spielberg is to movies what the Beatles are to music. You can follow in his footsteps, but you cannot top him." It's mostly YouTube video clips, so I don't know what there is to mull over.

The just-up N.Y. Times report about a possibly romantic relationship eight years ago between John McCain and a lobbyist named Vicki Iseman (40 now, 32 then) is a bombshell, yes, but something feels insufficient. The events in the story happened so many years ago with the intimacy angle being denied by both parties -- there's no photo, no salacious evidence -- that one wonders what the real-dirt story is.

Upside: doesn't McCain seem slightly younger now?

The story seems to be primarily saying now that McCain is as flawed as...Read More

If MSNBC's Chris Matthews had asked me to name some of Barack Obama's legislative accomplishments (as he did last night with Texas State Senator Kirk Watson, causing him to look like a total doofus when he couldn't name a single one), I would have said that legislative accomplishment and the give-and-take of relationships within a legislative body is considered to be a different game, requiring differing skills and strengths, than dispensing inspirational leadership and applying organizational focus.

I then would have offered to give Matthews the whole Obama legislative as soon as he names the legislative accomplishments of JFK during his...Read More

Carter Burwell's "score" and Skip Lievsay's sound effects in No Country for Old Men are comprised of "the occasional barely audible hum and whine of undefinable instruments at moments of tension," writes Slate's Jan Swafford. "As in many film scores there's a recurring motif: the keening and howling desert wind.

"Its meaning is revealed at the end, when Sheriff Moss delivers a mournful soliloquy accompanied by the wind. The last thing we hear before the credits is the wind and the ticking of a clock. It's not just about death. It's the desert that is eternal and doesn't care about all...Read More

I've been trying to whip together a New York Post article about the parallels between Oscar contenders of 2007 vs. 1967. Norman Jewison, director of In The Heat of the Night (which won the Best Picture Oscar), was kind enough to promptly call back today and offer some thoughts. At the end of our chat we digressed a bit and got into Best Picture Oscar talk.

I asked Jewison if he's heard any talk about Juno as Best Picture. "That escapes me," he said. "It's a very smart script... what I call smart-ass dialogue. I think it has a brilliant performance. But I...Read More

A director friend, currently prepping a film in London, wrote me a four-word e-mail last night: "I'm hearing Juno everywhere." Meaning that British-based Academy members are telling each other over lunches and at parties that they like Juno as a Best Picture nominee more than No Country or There Will Be Blood or Michael Clayton, even. Everywhere I turn, everyone I talk to, the talk is rife that a left-field Best Picture upset may be in the offing.

I don't believe it. I can't believe it. How could No Country win all those guild awards and not be the clear front-runner?

One...Read More

Extremely well placed sources have told CHUD's Devin Faraci that Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are is the subject of a "behind-the-scenes debate" at Warner Bros and Legendary as the suits are very unhappy with the film and with the lead child actor (i.e., Max Records) and want to reshoot essentially the whole picture.

I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, but George Prager's impression of the trailer was that it looked like plushie porn. He was being perverse, of course, but if Jonze's original Wild Things (actors in animal costumes that are obviously "costumes") is tossed, I...Read More

Cinematical is running its usual spate of oddball Oscar predictions, talking to wackjob savants like Jose the Cabbie and Filipino bartenders on a cruise ship. James Rocchi has posted the Ernest Borgnine Oscar predictor (up now at 8:10 pm Pacific). Cinematical has also posted some "serious" predictions.

One look at this N.Y. Times story, which I just noticed on the newspaper stand at a Starbucks just south of Beverly Blvd. on La Cienega, and I immediately thought of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13.08), a spooker about a rash of inexplicable suicides caused by a natural disaster. Is Hillary losing in Wisconsin? Please, God...don't. Update: Whew....no, it's fine.

First Feinberg, now Edelstein! Another flying- fuck-at-a-rolling-donut scenario, I mean, in which the likable-but-equally- dreaded Juno may win the Best Picture Oscar.

"This is a year in which so much has gone to shit," Edelstein writes in New York magazine. "There is a sense among the enlightened that our way of life is about to change radically, that our economic system will collapse, our suburbs will fall, our environment will exact its revenge. With all the downbeat Iraq movies DOA at the box office (what a lesson was there!), No Country for Old Men might be the best way for...Read More

Never much for European tradition (let alone San Francisco's), Los Angeles is known for its commercial establishments disappearing or at least getting radically face-lifted every 15 or 20 years. Except for the old-codger music joints like the Roxy, the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go-Go. They alone seem to be the great buckers of the tide.

Snapped with an iPhone, sitting on the bike and waiting for a green light -- Tuesday, 2.19.08, 12:35 pm.

Imagine the steady pressure over the years to drop the "a Go-Go" part of the name. They could've just called it "the Whisky"...Read More

The most concisely phrased and on-target words Alec Baldwin has ever written for the Huffington Post appeared a little more than three hours ago: "What Mrs. Clinton has that Mr. Obama does not have, Mr. Obama can get. What Mr. Obama has that Mrs. Clinton does not have, she can never get."

A Survey USA poll of Ohio voters (conducted 2.17 and 2.18) is reporting that Barack Obama has nearly cut Hillary Clinton's lead by 50% over the past seven days. Clinton led by 17 a week ago; today, she leads by 9 points (52-43). Obama led by 1 point among men 7 days ago; today, he leads by 16."

And we already know about the dead heat in Texas and the majority of Wisconsin polls saying that Obama has a slight or better-than-slight edge. I just wish there was more reason to trust pollsters. However rigorous or exacting their methodologies may...Read More

And The Winner Is prognosticator Scott Feinberg is predicting a Juno win for Best Picture. Nobody likes or gets the No Country ending, he says, so they've lunged over to Juno because it's accessible. If this happens, it will certainly be as big of an upset as Shakespeare in Love edging out Saving Private Ryan or Crash stealing the Best Picture Oscar from Brokeback Mountain. It's a dream, of course. A Feinberg dream emanating from the forests of Connecticut...a doodle. But I like the headline: "A Pregnant Teen Can Stop What's Coming...Friendo!"

Less than two months hence (on April 8th), Paramount Home Video will release There Will Be Blood on DVD (in single and double-disc versions). Paul Thomas Anderson's film will also go out on the throughly dead HD-DVD format. PHV will almost certainly put it out on Blu-ray as well, although that's speculative. The DVD will include (a) additional Scenes, (b) "The Story of Petroleum" featurette, (c) "Dailies Gone Wild" featurette, and (d) trailers. (Thanks to Rope of Silicon for the tipoff.)

"No chick flick worth its collagen treatments is complete without (a) a yoga-class scene (possible alternative: the jogging-in- the-park meet-cute); (b) the triumphant sing-along where a row of white chicks lip-synch to a Motown song ; (c) the pre-wedding-jitters weepy meltdown, sometimes accompanied by a throw-up; (d) a scene set at a catering service or floral shop; (e) a snowball fight; (f) a cathartic having-it-out-with-Mom grievance-shoveling showdown ("It was always about you, it was never about me!"); (g) a Thanksgiving turkey that ends up on the floor, squirting around like a loose football; and, (h) most emblematically, the slapstick pratfall that sends the...Read More

Before I respond to Stu Van Airsdale's Vanity Fair "In Memoriam" questionaire (who will be emphasized, omitted, specially honored with audio or video clips?), let's take a moment to remember once more the revolting failure three years ago of Oscar show producers Gil Cates and Lou Horvitz to offer a special tribute to the great Marlon Brando, going instead with a special trumpet blast for the departed Johnny Carson. This was the single most shameful oversight in Oscar telecast history.

Will They Make It? (Choose One): Norman Mailer (+5)...of course Mailer wiil make it!...Read More

"With No Country, the moral underpinning of the story spoke to me in a big way, yet you could also see it as an exciting chase movie. The underpinning was always there, but I hate movies that speak about their morals. It works better when you have a piece of material where the moral questions are buried -- otherwise the film feels too medicinal. I look for a voice.

The Coen brothers "have an enormous moral force in their movies, but they also have the kind of bravura razzle-dazzle that worked for this story. A lot of...Read More

"As you drill backward into Oscar history you keep finding things -- Hollywood classics, in some cases -- that could only be made now as independent films. I'm pretty confident that nobody in Hollywood would see much sex or sizzle potential in Hope and Glory(a 1987 Best Picture nominee) or Gandhi (1982) or Deliverance(1972). And they'd be right -- none of those movies made much money.

"For that matter, try to imagine pitching such vintage Oscar fodder as Annie Hall or The Graduate or To Kill a Mockingbird to a contemporary Hollywood executive. Well, okay, maybe...Read More

Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (Penguin, on sale now) is about how a fresher, nervier, less formal kind of filmmaking found its stride in 1967 when The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde -- stories about misfits saying no to the man in their own peculiar madcap way, and unmistakable metaphors about the social rumblings of the time -- were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.

Charlie Bubbles, If...

The other three nominees were the more traditional-minded Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In The Heat...Read More

How is everyone having sampled "fired up and ready to go" (Obama first, then Clinton and McCain) different than Obama sampling Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's "just words" riff? There's nothing to get into here. It's small. The desperation of the Clinton team is sad. Obama and Clinton are now in a statistical dead heat in Texas and they're scared.

What I'm about to say I say as an effete white guy who's owned exactly two hip-hop albums in his life (Dr. Dre's The Chronic and Wu Tang Clan Forever), but there's a reason that sampling -- the act of taking...Read More

Is there anyone who doesn't suspect that Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, 4.25) will somehow play fast and loose, water down or otherwise make light of that deplorable situation? I don't know the plot or the shot, but if you saw the first film you know the director-writers (Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg) and their basic attitudes and instincts. That said, it's probably better to have made some kind of comedy with a Gitmo backdrop than not. Better to have it out there than pushed aside, I mean.

Kal Penn, John Cho

Legendary photographer Bert Stern has re-shot his 1962 Marilyn Monroe nude photo session with Lindsay Lohan substituting. The shots appear in the current (2.18) issue of New York. Intriguing shots -- okay, alluring -- but why did the session happen? Obviously because Lohan is trying to get back into it somehow. She's trying to launch a new impression of herself that might sink in and shift attitudes.

Her career was considered all but finished after the last drunk-driving incident. The box-office disappointment of Georgia Rules and the total wipeout of I Know Who Killed Me seemed...Read More

Israeli blogger Yair Raveh has uploaded his annual "Guess the Oscars" online ballot. The URL for his English-language site is here. Raveh will be posting his final Oscar predictions on Thursday. He's confiding that he sees The Diving Bell and the Butterfly upsetting No Country for Old Men in at least one category (either director, script or cinematography).

The idea of Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law co-performing or additionally playing Heath Ledger's character in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a noble gesture on the part of the actors. Admirable, compassionate. It's going to result in a slightly confusing narrative, but Gilliam's films unfold that way regardless so no harm done.

Ledger's footage was shot in London (i.e., mainly exteriors) -- the other three will perform green-screen scenes. The common character, "Tony," is "transported into three separate dimensions [that] Ledger accesses via a paranormal mirror, and which will "now be...Read More

The squishy, endlessly dithering John Edwards needs to go into full wuss mode and endorse Hillary Clinton to demonstrate to the world how meaningless his endorsement is and what a shapeless and gelatinous life form he truly is deep down.

"Fourteen weeks of covering bitter trench warfare between the Writers Guild of America and the studios, and the ink-stained wretches are feeling wretched. It's not just that covering a complex, polarizing news story for more than three months left them fried. The worst part has been the blowback. And we don't mean from the studios and networks, either. No, friends, it's the ugliest kind of warfare: writer on writer." -- L.A. Times "Channel Island" guy Scott Collins, posted today.

For all the lazy kneejerk Obama-dissers who've been saying that he's all hat and no cattle, a riff by Truthout's Washington, D.C. bureau chief Scott Galindez.

The trailer for Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (New Line, 7.11) tells you it's more of a kiddie movie -- a logic-free comedy for anyone over the age of 8, or anyone who happens to be a cretin -- than any kind of half-gripping adventure-thriller.

It seems to want to be a poor man's Indiana Jones film (including a Temple of Doom thrill ride on a train track inside a mine) but the trailer is basically selling a goofy-ass special-effects ride about a visit to the Bullshit Adventure Theme Park where...Read More

In the 2.25 New Yorker, critic David Denby has written a lengthy love letter to Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning with an awed description of the first 20 minutes of No Country for Old Men.

(Illustration by Robert Risko)

Then he rolls the clock back to 1985 and Blood Simple and reviews the highlights of their career, tracing their gradual evolution from sardonic snickering jokers who often seemed outside their material to masters of austerity and dry irony and chilling silences, first in Fargo and then, 11 years later (and after at least a couple of...Read More

Here we go with another guys-crying-at-movies article, this one (undated) from e-harmony advice, a relationships and dating advice site. Included on its list of top 20 male tearjerkers (better sit down) is Richard Curtis's Love Actually. I don't want to know any guy who says he's felt even a tiny bit moved by this repulsive '03 release. I understand girly-man attitudes but there are limits.

I ran a piece about this topic last March after MSNBC's Ian Hodder went off on it. I wrote about it four or five years ago on Reel.com, and before that for the...

Speaking of Mandingo and ostensibly "shocking" inter-racial sex, it would have been mildly interesting if the Film Forum had decided to include Sidney Lumet's Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots ('70) in its currently runnng Lumet retrospective, which goes until 2.28.

I've only seen a portion of Hotshots, but it has a reputation of being extremely talky and dull. (The screenplay is by Gore Vidal, adapting a Tennessee Williams play called Seven Descents of Myrtle.) It has a suggested oral sex scene near the end in which Lynn Redgrave kneels before Robert Hooks, an African-American actor...Read More

For the most part, the extra 18 or 19 minutes of footage in the American Gangster Extended Cut DVD (out Tuesday) feeds right into the whole with a sense of absolute harmony. We all know what it feels like when a film has had lumps added to its stocking with "flavor" or directorial "darlings." This is not one of those cases. This is more like the extended Bugsy or Aliens. I would have been that much happier with American Gangster if these extras had been in from the get-go.

Josh Brolin (center), Ridley Scott (r.) during preparation...

Former basketball star, NBA commentator and Barack Obama supporter Charles Barkley ripped into "fake [Republican] Christians" on CNN this morning for their judgmental views about gays and other groups and beliefs deemed to be in defiance of Christian values. No argument here -- intolerant religious purists are cut from the same cloth the world over, be they American or Middle Eastern -- but Barkley is probably going to get a "chill out and shut up" phone call from an Obama campaign official, saying "don't rattle the Obamacans!"

More Clinton-Wolfson ick -- desperate, agitated, flailing -- refuted by Sen. Ted Kennedy and Wisonsin Gov. Doyle.

I don't know how to respond to this alleged clip from Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are, which won't be out until 2009 (according to the IMDB).

Could it be legit? If so, I'm 90% committed to running the other way when this film comes out. A live action piece with bipeds in big animal costumes voiced by name actors (Forest Whitaker, Catherine Keener, Paul Dano, James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Lauren Ambrose)?

The clip shows a guy in a big Cheshire Cat costume talking to a kid in a white animal outfit, and then asking to be hit...Read More

A Rec Show rant from Ray about a recent piece by AICN's Harry Knowles that indicates (in Ray's view) that Harry was an HD-DVD supporter because he received free Toshiba/HD-DVD booty (including four HD-DVD players) and had only one Blu-ray player. Fairness requires a statement that Ray's case doesn't seem conclusive. (To me.) But I'm amused by the colorful prose in the opening graph that mentions Harry's grandmother.

I saw Richard Fleischer's Mandingo with a couple of friends at one of the New York repertory cinemas (probably the Carnegie Hall or the Bleecker) in the late '70s. Unavailable on DVD in this country, it's a piece of rank steamy pulp about a slave (Ken Norton), slave-owners (James Mason, Perry King) and inter-racial shtupping (Susan George being a significant participant).

Mandingo had originally opened in '75, but by the time I saw it the cool-cat revisionist attitude had settled in. It wasn't a hoot as much as a howl -- one of the most...Read More

In a piece about Chloe Sevigny's personally designed clothing line on view at Manhattan's Opening Ceremony, the Guardian's Ryan Gilbey writes that while "the 33-year-old Sevigny is tall and slender in tight, dark jeans, black boots and baggy leather jacket, she walks with a slight galumphing awkwardness, planting her feet purposefully as she goes.

"Her face is long and elegantly pointed, offset by a formidable jaw on which you could crack open a bottle of beer. Her droopy-lidded eyes can lend her a docile vagueness, which came in handy during an early run of...Read More

"Will there be a good movie this year?," Time's Richard Corliss asked yesterday. "Do we have to wait till November for Hollywood to unveil the niche prestige items that it saves for Oscar consideration? Is every movie till then doomed to be aimed at the all-important 8-year-old-girl-to-14-year- old-boy demographic?

The Best Films of 2008...hands down, take 'em home, in this order: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, In Bruges, The Band's Visit, Cassandra's Dream (second-tier Woody Allen, but not at all bad with a superb Colin Farrell weak-loser performance) and -- I know this sounds like a stretch -- Sylvester Stallone's...Read More

In a 2.17 N.Y. Times piece about some especially memorable Oscar moments, Anita Gates' list of big surprises somehow omits Roman Polanski's winning the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist in '03. That was stunning. I'll never forget it as long as I live.

Gates recalls (1) Pollock's Marcia Gay Harden winning over the favored Kate Hudson for her performance in Almost Famous, (2) L.A. Confidential's Kim Basinger beating Titanic's Gloria Stuart for Best Supporting Actress, (3) Linda Hunt's winning the same prize for her acting in The Year of Living Dangerously, (4) The Goodbye Girl's Richard Dreyfuss taking the Best Actor...Read More

The four-day total for Jumper is projected to be roughly $28,557,000. Step Up will make about $22,846,000, The Spiderwick Chronicles will earn $20,400,000, and Fool's Gold will take down $16,410,000, give or take.

The old melting, tried and true, whatever works.

I'm a fool for photos of Times Square marquees from the '20s onward. Color, black-and-white...anything that looks sharp and clean and well-framed. I've heard about a coffee-table book devoted to such photos, but if anyone knows of any websites with a good assortment or even a site with a single decent shot of any of big marquees announcing any classic film (the Astor showing On The Waterfront, King Kong at the Radio City Music Hall or the Roxy...anything like that), please inform. All I've been able to find so far are inky dupes like the one below.

Jose Padilha's Elite Squad, described in a Beyond Hollywood review last fall as "a kind of the anti-City of God following the Rio de Jainero police rather than the criminals," has won the Golden Bear at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. The Weinstein Co. will distribute in the U.S., although they haven't set a release date.

Errol Morris's Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure won the Silver Bear. Paul Thomas Anderson won the Silver Bear for best director for There Will Be Blood, Jonny Greenwood's Blood score was honored for artist contribution, and Wang...Read More

Missed this two-day-old Variety story about John Landis directing a movie about EC Comics Mad magazine publisher William Gaines called Ghoulishly Yours. Mad was great in the '50s and early '60s but you can't go home again. No one will care outside of the boomers and baby- busters who read the legendary rag when they were young. Sorry, but a bad idea for a theatrical feature. An HBO film at best.

With the Vanity Fair and Elton John Oscar after-parties cancelled (along with the late-night Oscar party hosted by Rick Yorn, Brent Bolthouse, Patrick Whitesell and Mike De Luca), the Governors Ball has become "the undisputed, hot-ticket, must-go-to after-party," says Variety's Bill Higgins.

Also eighty-sixed are Ed Limato's annual Friday before the awards party, Dani Janssen's Academy Awards party for the over-70 crowd, the Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg Oscar-eve luncheon for Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

All that leaves, according to Higgins, is the annual Night Before party on Saturday, 2.22, the Night Before the Night Before on...Read More

This 2.16 N.Y. Times story by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jo Becker goes into pretzel-like contortions in order to not say what's really going on, but it comes into focus if you settle into the quotes and the careful parsings and hints and whatnot. Bottom line: unless she pulls off a total nuclear blowout in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Clinton is toast.

Van Natta and Becker's report about a decision by Al Gore and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others to "remain neutral for now in the presidential race in part to keep open the option to broker a...Read More

Agreed -- this Verizon FiOS commercial is the cleverest, most likable piece of filmmaking from the hand of Michal Bay since The Rock. Because it has a theme. Because it's half-sell and half-personal confession. By embracing his rep as the shallowest big-name director around, Bay has almost transcended it. He'll make his first truly rich and mature (and possibly even moving) film ten years from now. Maybe sooner.

Let's just take a moment to acknowledge the strange success of The Bucket List. Four out of five of the top critics hated it, and the damn thing keeps selling tickets. It will make $5,191,000 this weekend for a cume of $82 million. Other than the old saw about average audiences having no taste, a view supported by decades of abundant evidence...why? They like the CG travel footage? There's one good bit in the entire film, which is when Jack Nicholson says that "I believe more people die of visitors than diseases."

Features of Hasbro's Cloverfield monster: (a) 70 points of articulation and incredible life-like detail; (B) Authentic sound; (c) 14 inches tall; (d) 10 parasites; (e) Two interchangeable heads; (f) Statue of Liberty head accessory. The Cloverfield monster is available exclusively through HasbroToyShop.com. Limited quantities are available. Includes 3 AAA batteries. Price: $99.99.

What finally happened with Cloverfield? It was at $71,915,658 domestic as of 2.3 and has sold well overseas, but why did the U.S. box-office plummet so radically after the first weekend? Was it the crazy-cam photography, which reportedly made some people sick? Or...Read More

The unrated extended (i.e., 18 minutes longer) version is out Tuesday, two- and three-disc packages and on worthless HD-DVD. The 176-minute version will screen at the Westside Pavillion on Tuesday night, followed by a Ridley Scott q & a.

A freshly conceived London presentation of my all-time favorite Stephen Sondheim musical has been in previews since last January, opening later this month. Directed by Sam Buntrock, said by a friend who caught it last week to be brilliant and dazzling. Playing at least until May 18th. Any first-hand reports?

To me, the most interesting thing about Caryn James' 2.15 N.Y. Times article about how the Oscar nominees for Best Feature Documentary are "where the action is" -- politically charged, focused on conflict, urgent messages -- is the flames-of-hell photo from Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight.

The richest quote comes at the end when James asks Ferguson if the nomination [is] having any effect on his film. He says he has no evidence of this but adds: "If the film wins, there will be one effect. I will have about 60 seconds to say...

The HD-DVD death-gong was heard 'round the world a month ago with that hilarious Hitler video, but this 2.15 CNN Money report about Wal-Mart giving the hard-luck Toshiba machines the heave-ho is worth noting as a kind of magic-marker underline.

All well and good that Paramount Vantage is apparently intending to distribute Philip Noyce's Mary, Queen of Scots, which will begin filming this spring, but...naaah, forget it. Each movie is its own novel, journey, river, song, etc. And plenty of time will have elapsed between this late '09 release and The Other Boleyn Girl, which is out on 2.29.

Fortune's Philip Elmer-DeWitt offers a quality comparison between downloaded high-definition movies from Apple TV vs. Blu-ray DVD. Short verdict: Blu-ray is slightly better, but Apple isn't far behind.

Apple TV image (l); Bluray image (r.)

Enough people are writing that Jamie Bell steals (or almost steals) Doug Liman's Jumper that I'm actually thinking about paying to see it this weekend from beginning to end instead of the previously mentioned catch-a-few-minutes'-worth plan. 20th Century Fox never invited me to see it at a screening. I might have gone if they had, but something more important (like taking a nap on the couch) might have come up.

Rule #5 in David Poland's Ten Rules of the Oscar Season (posted yesterday) states that "critics only matter when unanimous," that they "can't really kill or make an Oscar movie unless they are united in a clear, loud voice (even if that clear, loud voice is not a vast majority, just the right loudmouths)."

In other words, a sufficient number of loudmouths with a unified theory (this is right out of the handbook of Nikolai Lenin) can sway the industry masses? I don't think he means that. All loudmouths can do is start a conversation, which the industry sometimes listens to...Read More

Two weeks ago Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr delivered an NPR essay about how the "reality TV show with the craziest plot twists, the nuttiest characters and the biggest payoff is what he's dubbed Primary Reality. It's on at all hours, on almost every channel. And everyone else is watching, too. It also happens to be the race for the presidency of the United States."

It dawned on me after listening to this yesterday that I've become absorbed in the presidential contest like nothing else since The Sopranos. There are no plot or character parallels...Read More

I've finally seen all the Oscar-nominated live shorts (which are opening, by the way, on some 70 screens nationwide starting today), and my absolute favorite, hands down, is Andrea Judlin's The Substitute, a 15-minute Italian high-school comedy with a slight touch of Bunuelian surrealism.

Somehow a throughly unhinged businessman just waltzes into a high school classroom and pretends to be a substitute teacher. He's a kind of Jerry Lewis- styled madman, a taunter, a mind-fucker and, oddly, a kind of divine interventionist.

He puts the students int their place, goofing on their atttitudes, making...Read More

"Doc Soup" columnist Tom Roston, writing for the PBS/POV site, has a list of the Top 10 Sexiest Documentaries. Surely there are docs out there, seen or unseen, released or unreleased, that are sexier than these.

The finest Hillary-trashing pot high of the day has already been provided, again, by the glorious Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. It's not just a hunger for a daily Hillary hate-on that articles like Noonan's greatly satisfy, but an almost Biblical-level feeling of clarity, cleansing, righteousness. There's no way to not feel good about this.

All last night I thought about the Clinton campaign's communications director Howard Wolfson stating yesterday that, if necessary, Hillary is ready to burn the house down all spring and summer long in order to fulfill her clawing ambition. That first, the fair or...Read More

The trailer that went up yesterday for M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13), which looks and feels like a return to the eerie-scary-inexplicable jolt vibe of Signs. Perhaps this time we'll be spared the religious hokum. (Thanks to HE reader Suki Jonze for the shout-out.)

At 4:31 this morning, AICN's Drew McWeeny reported some digital tweakings in the U.S. version of the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull teaser that are not evident on the international version. He was alerted to this stunning realization by a message board rant that appeared last night on CHUD.

A frame-filling American flag CU appears in the domestic version but is absent overseas. Fewer Russian guns are aimed at Harrison Ford and Ray Winstone in the U.S. version. And something about Winstone's khaki pants is said to be strikingly...Read More

The red-band trailer for David Gordon Green and Judd Apatow's Pineapple Express (Columbia/Sony, 8.8.08). Seth Rogen, James Franco, Bill Hader, James Remar, Gary Cole, Amber Heard and Rosie Perez costar.

My 9:01 am comment that "my sensings are telling me that Hillary and her campaign team are going to scrap and claw and take everyone down to hell"? Boston Globe's "Political Intelligence" columnist Foon Rhee wrote earlier today that Clinton "will not concede the race to Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and will count on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top, if necessary, said Clinton's communications director Howard Wolfson."

Diego Pillco, the admitted murderer of director-actress Adrienne Shelley, has passed along some particulars. Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau says the 11.1.06 tragedy resulted from Shelley catching Pillco "stealing her wallet," which led to her reaching for the phone to call police "but [Pillco] grabbed it and a fight ensued. He covered the victim's mouth and nose with his hand until she passed out. He then took a sheet, choked her to death, and made it look like a suicide."

What a ghastly sequence of events. Awful, horrific...but I have to say something. If there was any question about the basic...Read More

Just another tit-for-tat ad, but the speed of it is pretty incredible. It's a response to very recent Clinton ad aired for the Wisconsin market, challenging Obama to debate her prior to the 2.19 primary there. 24 or 48 hours later, wham...the Obama team is right back at her.

"It's an odd thing, but in recent years, just about every movie that attempts a sophisticated take on romance, has turned out to be strained and witless. All the successful recent comedies (The 40 Year Old Virgin, The Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up, to name three) have tended toward the raunchy end of the spectrum. It's as if Hollywood's wise guys have recognized that middle-class American life is just too complicated, perhaps even too inherently miserable, to get an intelligent handle on.

"You can't quite treat [modern relationships] as a tragedy but you can turn...Read More

Late to the table but in complete agreement with Sasha Stone and Kris Tapley that this Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ad on behalf of Best Supporting Actor nominee Casey Afleck is perhaps the best of its kind seen all season. In no small part because it's in keeping with the aura and tone of the film itself.

It would take four to six hours of calling the Sovet Republic of Warner Bros. to begin to get some kind of answer about who the creative hands were so let's...

"Seventy percent of the country is against the Iraq War now," Young Turks co-host Cenk Uygyur has wrote today. "A great majority of American believe it was a mistake to go into Iraq in the first place. With a country that is this united against the war, are we really going to have two presidential candidates that voted for the Iraq War?

"If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic primary, both of the major party candidates will have been wrong on the war. Why? Why on God's green earth would we do that?"

So far, the scheduled Oscar show presenters are Alan Arkin, Jennifer Hudson, Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Amy Adams, Jessica Alba, Cate Blanchett, Josh Brolin, Steve Carell, George Clooney, Penelope Cruz, Miley Cyrus, Patrick Dempsey, Cameron Diaz, Colin Farrell, Harrison Ford, Jennifer Garner, Tom Hanks, Anne Hathaway, Katherine Heigl, Jonah Hill, Dwayne Johnson, Nicole Kidman, James McAvoy, Queen Latifah, Seth Rogen, Martin Scorsese, Hilary Swank, John Travolta, Denzel Washington and Renee Zellweger.

Definitely Maybe has been tracking decently among women. The general numbers are 64, 32 and 11, but the first choice number is in the teens among women. (Keep in mind there's an extra President's Day holiday day on Monday.)

Doug Liman's allegedly painful Jumper -- almost certainly a one-weekend phenomenon -- is still the #1 attraction. The Spiderwick Chronicles is running at 75, 24 and 5. Step Up 2 The Streets is a 16 first choice. All four films are going to do at least decently....no wipeouts.

Vantage Point will do decent business when it opens on 2.22. The most popular March...Read More

I received a reply this morning from director Gavin O'Connor regarding an item I wrote eight days ago (on 11.5) about Pride and Glory, an Ed Norton-Colin Farrell cop drama that's been done since last November but has been bumped by New Line into an '09 release.

I wrote that "you can tell from the trailer that Pride and Glory is a little boiler-platey, perhaps a little too emphatic and histrionic." I also said that "my general motto is that any New Line film that costars Noah Emmerich (brother of production chief Tobey Emmerich)...Read More

The New Hampshire and California primary numbers were so ridiculously off that pollsters are generally thought to be operating out of bounds these days with a gravely flawed methodology, to put it faintly. This notion seems to be reenforced by two strongly divergent polls that came out today.

A Quinnipiac poll that has Hillary Clinton at 55 to Barack Obama's 34 in Ohio, and Clinton ahead of Obama in Pennsylvania by 52 to 36. How the hell does that square with those good Virginians giving Obama such an overwhelming majority two days ago with Obama dramatically cutting into Hillary's core support...Read More

Speaking of the plot and high-octane action scenes in 20th Century Fox and Gavin Hood's Wolverine flick, which will open 14 and 1/2 months from now (on 5.1.09), star-producer Hugh Jackman has told USA Today's Scott Bowles that "with all the success of the X-Men [films], you feel the pressure to keep pushing it further."

And that, ladies and gents, is a scary omen. It's the action movie that has the confidence and balls to hold back and make every shot count that wins. ("Shot" referring to any high-impact thrill moment.) An action movie with...Read More

Will Michelle Obama please shut up about "there will be no second run for the presidency" if things run against Barack, blah blah? Due respect and all, but it's a deeply unattractive thing to say.

Nobody respects a one-shot-and-we're-gone attitude. You have to hunker down and be a stayer. Harvey Milk lost election bids for a San Francisco city supervisor post three times before he finally won after running a fourth time. Inspiration, vision and natural charm are well and good, but nothing happens without brass and tenacity. (The exception is pitching woo. If you haven't gotten the green-light signal within the...Read More

Chuckw286 wrote this morning to say he's "no fan of Hillary by any stretch, but how would you feel about a deal where she steps down now and becomes Obama's Secy of State?" To which I said "yeah, that would work." Doubtful but yeah...maybe. Of course, Clinton probably doesn't have the character or the elegance to give it up graciously after March 4th (given the way the voting is likely to go), which makes any such notion way premature.

My sensings are telling me that Hillary and her campaign team are going to scrap and claw and take everyone down to...Read More

The Diablo Cody pile-ons are coming fast and furious. There are two, actually. A 23/6 parody piece in which Cody weighs in on the current violence in Kenya, and a "leaked" Diablo Cody screenplay on Something Awful, written and doodled by the brilliant Bob "BobServo" Mackey.

I'm such a travel whore that the mere fact of this magic-hour still from Jumper (with Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson) having been shot on the Tiber in Rome makes me almost want to see it. Next May on DVD, I mean. Okay, maybe I'll sneak into it at the Grove and catch five minutes' worth this weekend.

I'm not interested in sitting through the whole thing because it's been described as if it's another Doug Liman jizz-spray sell-out film, the first being Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Liman was a hip prince when he made Swingers, Go...Read More

Okay, okay...no more mentions of Uncle Festus. The first-anywhere teaser for Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull is a kind of comic-flamboyant Festus refutation. Too old and tired to play Indy again? Too much of a graybeard Hillary Clinton supporter to direct an Indy film as well as they were directed 21 to 27 years ago? Eat our dust, Festus naysayers!

After the reviewing-the-last-three-Indy films intro (which consists of 40% of the teaser's length) and an homage to the iconic...Read More

Reminder: The heavily-hyped debut trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will play tomorrow morning -- Thursday, 2.14 -- at 6:00 am on http://movies.yahoo.com/. Wait...Eastern or Pacific?

How the Hillary forces failed, how the numbers don't add up for her even if she wins Texas/Ohio/Pennsylvania; how she's in denial, how the haters and the patriarchals are massing against her, how she's slipping with whites and women. I could read this stuff all day.

Joshua Green's "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up," a well-reported account of how Hillary Clinton's campaign (and the departed Patti Solis Doyle in particular) mis-managed its money, went up two or three days ago on Atlantic.com. It gives you an idea what kind of ship Hillary's been running, and explains her cherishing loyalty over everything else (including managerial efficiency).

The last two minutes of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat are about a young German sailor, his ship torpedoed and sunk, pulling a gun on the boat's inhabitants (Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Hume Cronyn, etc.), and then, having been disarmed, asking "aren't you going to kill me?" I've always loved the final line, spoken by Bankhead.

The current Vanity Fair reconstruction

Paramount is bumping JJ Abrams' Star Trek from 12.25.08 to 5.8.09. DreamWorks has shifted its Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder from 7.11.08 to 8.15.08. (There are dozens of proven exceptions to the legend of August being a dumper month, but it persists all the same.) And Paramount has announced that Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island will open on 10.2.08.

How the Hillary forces failed, how the numbers don't add up for her, how she's in denial, how the haters and the patriarchals are massing against her, how she's slipping with whites and women. I could read this stuff all day.

"Some critics have called Stanley Kramer's films out of touch, but a look now at many of them proves they were anything but," writes Envelope columnist Pete Hammond in a just-published piece. This is "perhaps a reason why the Academy nominated six of them for the Best Picture Oscar, including Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which featured Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier in a movie about the consequences of a racially-mixed romance.

"It won Oscars for Hepburn and original screenplay, and in light of the current Barack Obama frenzy, the movie could...Read More

The Page's Mark Halperin has apologized for passing along an alleged comment by John Edwards (a.k.a. that "gutless dithering douchebag pussy") that Barack Obama is "kind of a pussy" and how Edwards has "real questions about Obama's toughness, his readiness for the office."

Public talk is often more distinguished but sometimes less truthful; private talk is always about the lowdown.

An older friend told me yesterday he wonders the same thing. He believes that Michelle Obama wears the pants in their family, that Barack is "pussy-whipped," and that he may therefore lack the cojones to be a strong president. I...Read More

Same line, same idea, different contexts. The meaning depends upon who's saying it and how it's pitched. Example #1 is from a very well-known 1962 film. The line implies a kind of enigmatic intrigue. Example #2 is from a very well known 1976 film. This time the implication is that the speaker is sick, deranged.

The embedded code for the 2.13 MSNBC "Morning Joe" segment I tried to post is clearly different than last night's ("An Embarassment of Niches") but it doesn't post. Instead you see last night's segment all over again. The MSNBC techies need to get their act together. Irritating. Drop it.

"I've recently watched two largely dismissed large-format Hollywood films in exemplary HD transfers-- The Big Country and the 1966 Lawrence of Arabia wannabe Khartoum. In both cases certain dramatic deficiencies of the films that would have been apparent [as] talking-heads dramas on your 21" Sylvania in the 60s or 70s, receded in importance when the films again benefited from having their sheer size and detail restored.

"Seeming subtleties of presentation make a big difference. A film that is captivating in a sparkling clear print can be a chore in an only slightly muddier one. A film that seems trite on TV can delight...Read More

What a gutless dithering douchebag pussy John Edwards has turned out to be, sitting on the sidelines, thinking things over, unable to pull the trigger for days on end. My respect for the man has gone out the window.

It's not that he's reportedly thinking about endorsing Hillary Clinton, which would be fine. (She's all but finished anyway and the Edwards voters have already re-aligned so what does it matter?) It's the fact that he's been acting like the softer, squishier, less decisive brother of Gregory Peck's character in The Big Country. By the standards of that 1958 William Wyler film,...Read More

Chicago investors are reportedly looking to build McMansions on just-acquired land right next to the Hollywood sign. Opportunity knocks! The city of Los Angeles needs to make a definitive statement to itself and the world that there is no such thing as hallowed ground in this town when it comes to potential real-estate booty. No major U.S. city has shown less regard for its past (even when it came to preserving '50s kitsch establishments like Tiny Naylors back in the '80s). Build the homes, get your ugly on, and hire some crack riflemen to go out and kill those coyotes

A discussion is warranted about Pete Hammond's belief/theory (which is shared by yours truly) that given the strong support/affection for Michael Clayton, particularly among the over-60 crowd, the odds favor at least one Clayton nominee -- Tilda Swinton -- getting rewarded with an Oscar.

The thinking is that Academy voters, wanting to give Tony Gilroy's film something but knowing that a Best Picture or Best Director or Best Original Screenplay or Best Supporting Actor win won't happen (because No Country, the Coen brothers, Diablo Cody and Javier Bardem have these prizes all but sewn up), will throw all their Clayton love...Read More

In a Berlin Film Festival review of Filth and Wisdom, the first feature directed by Madonna, Times Online critic James Christopher has waxed mixed-positive. Wait...is that an accurate way to characterize? It's almost a pan but with a Valentine flourish. Like Christopher was staggered by the fact that it was a lot better than expected, which led to his writing from a generous (i.e., relieved) state of mind.

"Despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband,...Read More

It was already pretty "official" by most standards, but Hollywood's writers made it even more so last night when they voted to end the WGA strike by a 92.5% majority. That means, apparently, that 7.5% of the 3,775 members (roughly 345 writers) said no, not good enough, back to the barricades.

As a way of challenging HE talk-backers who screamed in defiance in response to my two There Will Be Blood/"I drink your milkshake" postings last Friday (enough! it's jumped the shark! we can't stand it any more!), here's a column posted today (2.12) by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson on the same topic. And they admit that they only began to get wind of the milkshake thing a week ago! So give us a break! For Mr. and Mrs. America, this milkshake branding is a relatively new thing. There's no room for snide elitist judgments on this site. (Kidding!)

Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris' first film since his Oscar-winning The Fog Of War, has been zip-gunned by Variety critic Todd McCarthy in a 2.12 Berlin Film Festival review.

"If the medicine's going to taste as bad as it does in Standard Operating Procedure, it had better be really good for you," McCarthy begins. "But despite the coup of landing candid interviews with several of the Americans most intimately involved in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Morris' doc adds relatively little insight to the public understanding of wayward military behavior more incisively analyzed in Taxi...Read More

This columnist is hereby saluting Steven Spielberg for announcing he won't participate in Beijing's Summer Olympic Games as an artistic adviser, citing the lack of progress in ending the genocide in Darfur. A respectful salute is extended also to Mia Farrow, whose guilt-tripping of Spielberg last March led to the dawning of his political conscience in this matter.

"After careful consideration, I have decided to formally announce the end of my involvement as one of the overseas artistic advisers to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games," Spielberg said in a...Read More

Never say die, won't back down, sisters unite, down to the sea in ships, remember the Alamo.

20th Century Fox filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros on Friday, 2.8.08 over The Watchmen, claiming they have the rights to develop, produce, and distribute a film based on the D.C. Comics property. Here's a PDF file of the paperwork. The Zack Snyder adaptation is due for release in March 2009. Why did Fox wait until the film was up and rolling?

Live-blogging during a screening of Fool's Gold by 23/6 guys Ricky Camilleri and Alex Leo. Mildly funny. An amusing way to go with the right kind of film. Don't review -- experience it!

Definitely Maybe, opening tomorrow, is tracking at 53, 25 and 3. The big opener this weekend will be Jumper, which is running at 70, 42 and 20. Demographics are strongly male. The Spiderwick Chronicles will get a shot on Friday from the Indy 4 trailer, but otherwise the tracking is 69, 23 and 6. Step Up 2 the Streets is at 67, 32 and 7.

2.22 openers: Be Kind Rewind at 40, 32 and 2. Charlie Bartlett at 25, 20 and 1. Vantage Point at 59, 38 and 7. Witless Protection at 38, 15 and 0 2.29 openers: The Other Boleyn Girl at...Read More

A Chandler-esque noir in the vein of Miller's Crossing, The Yiddish Policeman's Union will be the next Coen brothers film to be shot. (The comedic Burn After Reading is in the can and coming out later this year.) Based on the Michael Chabon novel and set in an imaginary Alaska that's "been turned into a homeland for Jewish refugees displaced after the second world war, following the collapse of Israel, etc. A Guardian story about the project claims that the book's plot suggests that the "murder victim may well have been the Messiah."

Yesterday's news but these conflicting-message videos need to be posted for future reference. Exhibit #1: MSNBC's Keith Olbermann saying in an editorial rant last September that "in pimping General David Petraeus," blah blah. Exhibit #2: Olbermann apologizing profusely for David Shuster's having used the same term in a question about the Clinton campaign's use of Chelsea Clinton as a political emissary.

Vantage Point (Sony, 2.22), a possibly well-crafted Rashomon-type thriller, opens in ten days with a shot at some decent business. Monday's tracking has it at 59, 38 and 7, but that should bump up. But I'm not hearing about any screenings from anyone (not even an all-media screening) so...you tell me. I called Sony publicity this morning to ask what's up. I'll tell you what's up. "Silencio" is what's up.

The trailer has an intense, mad-camera jolt quality but there seems to be something...I don't know, facile and tricky-feeling about it. Something about...Read More

Hillary Clinton's firing of campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, a Latina, is going to help Barack Obama with Hispanic voters in the March 4th Texas primary. The N.Y. Post's Maggie Haberman reported last night that Steven Ybarra, a California superdelegate who heads the voting-rights committee of the DNC Hispanic Caucus, has stated in an angry e-mail to fellow Hispanics that "loyalty is not a two-way street," that the firing gives "Latino superdelegates...cause to pause," and that whacking Solis Doyle, a child of Mexican immigrants, "just weeks before the Texas primary, [in a state] where 36 %of the population is Hispanic,...Read More

Either your agent hammered out a contract/agreement that gave you profit participation and everybody signed off on this, or you agreed to just take a writing fee and you weren't crafty or pushy enough to demand more. Nobody wants to hear about anything else.

An interesting observation on the Coen Brothers Wikipedia page, to wit: "Several of the Coen brothers' films feature a character that embodies the archetype of 'unstoppable evil.' In many cases, it is hinted that these characters are inhuman, or feature demonic overtones."

Example #1: Sheriff Cooley (Daniel von Bargen) in O Brother, Where Art Thou? matches the description of the Devil given by one of the characters. He further indicates his otherwordliness when, advised that it would be illegal to hang pardoned fugitives, he sneeringly opines that 'the law is a human institution.'

Example #2: Eddie Dane (J.E....Read More

Variety's Leslie Felperin reviewed Elegy out of the Berlin Film Festival two nights ago, but I somehow missed it until this morning. It isn't a rave -- I can feel a certain hesitancy -- but it's definitely a thumbs-up response. Key passage: "Scenes unfold in a series of near-musical dialogue duets, with Ben Kingsley offering finely-phrased arias of self-deprecation and despair. Despite the age difference, he and Penelope Cruz (who's never been better in English) look somehow chemically balanced and credible as a couple in a way Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins never did in The Human Stain."

got it wrong...Read More

I've always thought that the word "chimerical" alludes to shamanry and hocus-pocus. Websters says it means "unreal, imaginary, visionary, wildly fanciful," etc. Either way I can't say I've used it with any regularity in daily conversation. Nonetheless, Slate's Kim Masters has used it to describe the Writers Guild's alleged victory (i.e., "big win") over the producers.

The just-about-concluded WGA strike was punishing but, in the words of Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy, "clearly necessary." He tells N.Y. Times reporter David Carr (a.k.a. "the Bagger") that writers and directors "have our nose in the tent for real for the first...Read More

Defamer's Mark Lisanti has resigned his post and will be gone as of Friday. He doesn't say why, of course. The burnout factor is pretty high with this kind of work. I would love to grow HE's audience by contributing to Defamer in some modest but daily way (there have been discussions along these lines) but...but...but....a voice is telling me such a move would shave two or three years off my life. But maybe not.

Penn Jillette, the bigger, longer-haired and more garrulous half of Penn and Teller, tells a hilarious story about how a Hillary Clinton joke went down within the last couple of days. Great way to start the day off. I laughed, I convulsed.

I've been my usual sloppy and lazy self in attempting to catch the the Oscar-nominated live action and animated shorts. So far I've seen exactly one animated entry -- Josh Raskin's I Met the Walrus. It reminds me a bit of portions of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, which may be deliberate because it's based on an actual tape-recorded chat with John Lennon during his 1969 bed-in for peace in a Toronto hotel. It played at Sundance and the Santa Barbara Film Festivals, and, for what it's worth, has HE's seal of approval to point to.