Amy's Robot

Last night a "very drunk" 21 year-old guy was arrested for stabbing the driver of his cab after asking him if he was Muslim.

From the Times article:

The assailant, Michael Enright, was an SVA film student who had recently been in Afghanistan shooting his documentary, Home of the Brave, about US soldiers.

The trailer is on YouTube:

It features young soldiers talking about what inspired them to enlist (9/11) and what it's like to be part of a tight-knight group of soldiers (they've got your back) and, actually, makes being a soldier in Afghanistan look pretty fun. There's basic training and motivational speeches in an auditorium, and also Christmas and birthday parties and playing with a friendly dog. Doesn't look like the film includes combat, probably because as a film student he wasn't allowed to see any action.

But clearly Hollywood has defined what we think war is supposed to look like, because there's a trailer for another movie called Home of the Brave that looks far grittier and more violent. This one is about Iraq, not Afghanistan, and it stars Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel, and 50 Cent, but when you watch the trailer, the on-the-ground scenes look a lot more war-like than the documentary. It was directed by the guy who produced all the Rocky movies.

More bombs, fewer birthday cakes.

Anyway, it seems like Michael Enright was deeply attached to the US soldiers he met and other friends who were deployed, and somewhere along the way he went nuts. Interestingly, he was also a volunteer for Intersections International, a nonprofit that works to overcome racial and religious boundaries, in their veteran's dialogue program.

The cab driver is going to be OK.

I had exerted monumental effort to keep my expectations in check for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The cast, the music, the style, Michael Cera, Edgar Wright--I was getting really excited about this movie, and it would have been easy to walk in expecting (Shaun of the Dead x "Arrested Development"), only to be confronted with (Run Fatboy Run - Year One).

But there was nothing to worry about--this movie is completely wonderful and is the best time I've had in the theater this year (even if the fight scenes get a little samey.) Edgar Wright understands his genres so completely, and is unapologetically of, by, and for his own generation and its pop culture. Even though this movie is about people in their early 20's, the references, music (both the soundtrack and original songs by Beck), clothes, and video game style are a lot more early 90's than 2010. If you're approximately Edgar Wright's age (36) you will totally get this movie, even if you've never read a comic book and haven't played a video game since Zelda.

I have no idea if actual 22 year-olds will like or get it or not. I would guess they would be a little puzzled by love interest Ramona Flowers and her personal style, which is sort of late-80's goth with a touch of early-90's riot grrrl and really has no point of reference to how cool young women in movies dress now. But she made me want to dig out my old boots and A-line miniskirts from college.

All the stuff about relationships, evil exes, and trying against all odds to get that one person who is far cooler than you are to go out with you is universal. As is the realization that, no matter how wronged and heartbroken you may feel, there are also times that you're the heartbreaker asshole.

Which brings me to something else that's great about this movie: Michael Cera gets to play a dick. For the last 6 years or so, Michael Cera has pretty much played variations of George-Michael Bluth: an earnest, sweet kid, socially awkward, a romantic, sort of a loser with sincere intentions. He's so good at it that he's had to play this same role over and over again. Sometime around Juno, this started to get a little tedious.

But in Scott Pilgrim, he's not necessarily the nicest guy in the world. He knows how to play the sweet, sincere puppy-dog type, but sometimes it's an act. Some of the time, Pilgrim is manipulative, selfish, and petulant. He's got a long, unflattering history with the ladies, and he's a little bit of a jerk.

It turns out Michael Cera is great at playing a little bit of a jerk! It was such a relief. It reminds me of that period in the 90's when Hugh Grant played one stammering, awkward, floppy-haired, increasingly annoying romantic after another (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, etc.) Then he did Bridget Jones and About a Boy and played unrepentant pricks in each movie. He was phenomenal. Such a relief to see him break out of his type, and such a surprise to see how good he was at playing selfish assholes, even if they come around by the end.

So hopefully Michael Cera will get more opportunities to embrace his inner jerk.

Note: despite my own love for this movie and the monumental marketing behind it (I think I've seen an interview with Edgar Wright or Michal Cera in every single publication and website I read [good one in The AV Club]) it didn't do that well this weekend at the box office. Everybody's been watching Eat Pray Love and The Expendables. Too bad: I'm willing to bet Scott Pilgrim is a lot more fun and will make you feel much cooler than either of those.

The Toronto Film Festival is starting to announce its movie lineup, and one of the premieres is going to be a revenge thriller called Trust. The trailer just came out, and it reveals a few interesting things:

• It stars Clive Owen and Catherine Keener as a married couple, so it's automatically cool
• It's about this cool married couple trying to deal with a terrible thing that happens to one of their kids (the trailer gives away lots of details about this, so don't watch it if you don't want to know. What is it with these trailers? Better question: why do I keep watching them when they bug the hell out of me?)
• The movie seems to focus in particular on Clive Owen's descent into obsessive and possibly homicidal thirst for revenge, featuring lots of wild-eyed rage that doesn't even begin to diminish his rumpled, doughy-faced handsomeness
• Supporting cast includes Viola Davis and Noah Emmerich, who I just now figured out is one of my favorite character actors
• It's directed by David Schwimmer! Huh? Run, Fatboy, Run, the US version of "Little Britain", and now this. Who does he think he is, Edgar Wright? Now that he's anchored himself firmly behind the camera, that guy has done pretty well for himself.

Here's the trailer (it keeps getting taken down from YouTube: hopefully new versions will keep getting posted):

One other thing: there are a LOT of movies out there called Trust. IMDb has three of them coming out in 2010 alone. So far my favorite is Hal Hartley's, which also premiered at Toronto back in 1990. But really, it's time to retire this title.

There's at least one other person out there besides me who wishes that Jon Hamm and Rebecca Hall had formed the gorgeous on-screen couple of the year in The Town, instead of her and not-gorgeous Ben Affleck. Because W Magazine has a big sexy photo spread of the two of them lounging around draped over each other looking really stylish and hot!

Clearly this set of photos is far more satisfying than a few pained movie scenes of awkward, hesitant desire thwarted by the unsentimental realities of modern life, FBI regulations, and anti-erotic Boston accents.

But in a less gritty, New Englandy movie, they would make one handsome couple. Check out that profile:

Wow. More here.

Ben Affleck might not be the world's greatest actor, but I will give him this: he knows how to hire a great cast. He's now directed his second movie, The Town, which comes out in September. Here's the new trailer. [Warning: it seems to me like the trailer gives away a lot of plot twists, so if you're not into that kind of thing, maybe don't watch it.]

Even if you have no idea what this movie is about, I bet you can predict all its main features: 1) crime, 2) Boston, 3) uneducated white people who live on the fringes of society and swear like feckin' crazy.

But that's not the interesting part. The cast looks phenomenal for this movie. He's got Jon Hamm as a tenacious FBI agent determined to bring down some bank robbers (who, in a Boston heist movie cliché so obvious it almost transcends itself, dress in nun costumes) and Rebecca Hall as some kind of bank employee/love interest. Unfortunately for me, she's not Jon Hamm's love interest, because then they would have been the most beautiful screen couple of the year.

Instead, she's Ben Affleck's love interest, who decided to just give in and cast himself in this movie, a temptation he resisted for his first movie Gone Baby Gone. Judging from the trailer, it looks like he's one of the movie's weaker links, but he did make the creative choice of including a scene of himself doing pull-ups that's dramatically lit to highlight the chiseled topography of every ab and pec of his body. Nice one, Ben.

Anyway, there's also Jeremy Renner, who post-The Hurt Locker should finally be a real superstar. He's about a hundred times tougher and more scary than Ben Affleck in the trailer, and he's only on screen for about 4 seconds. There's Pete Postlethwaite, one of my favorite actors ever (even if half of the movies he does are of the Clash of the Titans variety,) and Blake Lively as a stripper who let's just assume is a real sweet girl deep down. And is that Chris Cooper as Ben Affleck's dad? Awesome.

Here's the trailer.

I happened to see two movies yesterday that had so many things in common they were like companion pieces for each other. I Am Love is a gorgeously stylized melodrama about a wealthy northern Italian family. It's by Luca Guadagnino and stars Tilda Swinton, who solidifies her status as one of greatest actresses of all time by showing once again that she can do absolutely anything, including speak Italian with a Russian accent. The Kids Are All Right is the third movie written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, and it's my favorite. The movie's about a family headed by two moms whose lives are turned upside-down by the introduction of their kids to their sperm donor, the gaspingly sexy Mark Ruffalo.

They were both great. I won't give anything big away here, but let me list some of the things both of these movies prominently feature:

• Infidelity
• Lots of naked not-exactly-young flesh
• The irresistible seductiveness of hot organic farmer-chefs
• Lesbians
• Mia Wasikowska and Alba Rohrwacher, who each play the protagonists' daughters and look uncannily alike:



• And one scene in each movie that is seriously identical. I won't reveal it, but the lesson of the scene in both movies is that certain people should really be more careful about where they leave snippets of their hair.

One movie will probably provoke a strong desire to be rich and Italian, the other to be rich and Californian, and both could inspire you to have crazy illicit sex in a beautiful, lush botanical setting.

And both have awesome soundtracks. The Kids Are All Right is all old Bowie and contemporary cool stuff like Fever Ray and Deerhoof, and I Am Love has swooningly romantic and gorgeous music by composer John Adams (apparently this is the first time he's allowed his music to be used in a movie.)

The two movies finally diverge in their endings and overall attitudes about family life and domesticity vs. passion. But both are some of the best things I've seen yet this year.

The weirdest part of today's news about the third Harold & Kumar movie should have been the easiest to guess. Because it's the third installment. Starting with 1982's Friday the 13th Part III, it's been the corporate duty, the moral obligation, of big movie franchises to release the third one in 3D. Jaws, Spy Kids, Ice Age, Step Up, and Toy Story all did it, and Men in Black and Transformers are both coming. (Shrek missed the boat.)

But Harold & Kumar in 3D -- that's going to be funnier and way more contrived and ridiculous than all of those. In this one, Harold and Kumar will enter the third dimension in their quest for the perfect last-minute Christmas tree. That story doesn't have quite the same urgency as getting to White Castle or escaping Guantanamo, but that's what we've got.

Joining NPH and other usual cast members will be some great-sounding surprises: Patton Oswalt, Danny Trejo, and Fred Melamed. First timer Todd Strauss-Schulson is directing--he's the creator of many goofball College Humor-type videos like "Drunks vs. Highs" and "The I Have To Go In A Minute Show", so obviously we're in capable stoner-movie hands.

One of the most talked-about TV shows of all time that nobody watched while it was on the air is "Freaks and Geeks". It's one of my favorite shows ever, and today's big news is that IFC is going to air the entire series, starting this Friday!

The show gets so much attention now because it represents the earliest stage of what has become the Judd Apatow Juggernaut: that group of writers, directors, and actors who have dominated the R-rated comedy scene since 2005's The 40 Year Old Virgin. The show was the brainchild of Apatow, Paul Feig (who went on to do "Arrested Development" and "The Office") and Mike White (Orange County, School of Rock).

The stars have almost all gone on to bigger things: James Franco, Seth Rogen (at a tender 17!), Jason Segel, Linda Cardelleni, and Busy Philipps all got their start on the show. My very favorite actor on the show is Martin Starr, who's now an awesome character actor and has become handsome and sort of beefy--surprising, considering how good he was as super-nerd Bill Haverchuck on the show.

(In other news, Martin Starr's latest show "Party Down" just got canceled by Starz.)

Anyway, "Freaks and Geeks" was an hour-long comedy-drama about being in high school in Michigan in the mid-80's. It's hilarious and nostalgic in a non-manipulative way and heartbreaking and great. If you missed it when it ran for all of 18 episodes in 1999-2000, now's your chance.

It airs on IFC on Friday, Monday, and Sunday nights. In a few months, IFC is also going to run the entire series of "Undeclared", which was the next show produced by most of the same people. That one's about freshman year of college. It was pretty uneven and never reached the greatness of "Freaks and Geeks", but it does feature a great performance by Jason Segel as the obsessive hometown boyfriend of the main girl who during one episode comes to visit her on campus--he's completely unnerving and manic, and it's the best thing he's ever done.

When IFC was airing "Arrested Development" a few months ago, if I ever happened to come across it while flipping around the channels I would always sit and watch the episode, even though I've got the DVDs sitting right there under the TV. I'm sure it will be exactly the same with "Freaks and Geeks"--it's just more exciting to be lucky enough to catch a favorite episode on TV, plus no commercials.

IFC has gotten really good at picking my favorite shows. What's next? "Spaced"?

Tough break, General McChrystal. Yammering to Rolling Stone about your ineffectual boss was a terrible idea, but it really seems like he lost sight of how his words would sound outside of the Paris bars where he hung out out with journalist Michael Hastings.

The issue of Rolling Stone won't hit the stands until Friday, and it's already the most significant/disastrous article of the year. It's worth reading. We already know about all the disses on Obama and no-nonsense military tough-talk, but there's some funny and surprising stuff in there, too. McChrystal sounds like a guy who's serious about his job, totally dedicated to his soldiers, misguidedly wedded to his counterinsurgency fantasy, and almost superhumanly disciplined. With the notable exception of his tendency to mouth off to reporters.

A couple of interesting bits:

• McChrystal allegedly eats only once a day, and in the month (!) that Michael Hastings spent around him, he witnessed him eating exactly one time
• His staff refers to themselves as "Team America", referencing the movie by the South Park guys in a way that causes me a lot of confusion about their degree of self-awareness
• He's tighter with Karzai than the US ambassador or any other civilian government reps
• He was personally involved in the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death by a fellow soldier in Afghanistan, one of the darker moments of this war
• He wrote 7 short stories for the West Point literary journal while he was there

Michael Hastings did a short interview with Newsweek (his former employer) over the turmoil his piece has created, and discusses why McChrystal was so open with him. Specifically: he has no idea.

He's still in Afghanistan now, and says that he doesn't know why McChrystal agreed to talk to him in the first place. But it does seem like a lot of the more candid (aka ill-advised) stuff might have come out because a) they were in Paris and Berlin for some of the time, rather than in Afghanistan, and b) what was supposed to be two days of interviews turned into a month because of the the Icelandic ash cloud.

So I guess things got a little looser as time went on, and McChrystal and his staff probably stopped thinking of Hastings as a journalist. It happened in Almost Famous, when Stillwater got a little too cozy with their 15 year-old Rolling Stone reporter, and I guess it happened in real life, too.

One other interesting thing about Michael Hastings: he's also the guy whose girlfriend visited him while he was working for Newsweek in Baghdad as part of her job with a political nonprofit, and while she was there got killed in a Sunni ambush. He wrote a book about it.

The other day I mentioned a new series of short books about individual movies that Soft Skull Press was going to launch later this year. Cool, right? Sort of like the 33 1/3 series of books about individual albums that I like a lot. Everyone's got a movie they've watched enough times they could probably write a book about it, it seems, so this sounded like a wonderful and novel idea.

Except that the British already did it. A film buff friend who knows a thousand times more than I ever will about German expressionism and film noir pointed out that if I'm so psyched about this new series, maybe I should check out BFI's existing series of short books about movies. Ahem.

Since the 90's, the BFI (British Film Institute) has been putting out these great little books as part of its Film Classics series, and they've got some really good ones. Like, well over 100 of them. They've got tons of standard selections like like Star Wars (above), Vertigo, and Lawrence of Arabia, and smart, less popular favorites like Night of the Living Dead, Cat People, and Sweet Smell of Success, which comes out later this summer.

But check these out. They did a book about Groundhog Day. Spirited Away. In August they're putting out Back to the Future. Manohla Dargis did the book about L.A. Confidential ! They got freaking Salman Rushdie to write the book about The Wizard of Oz !

They're all available in the US through Macmillan, and they're all up on Amazon, too. Just about all of them are 10 or 11 bucks, and mostly under 100 pages! Though, mysteriously, no books about Alien or Tootsie.

Wow. Hard to know where to start. Maybe I'll go for Mark Kermode's book on The Exorcist--he's pretty great, and apparently believes it's the greatest movie ever made.

One of the coolest things to happen to music criticism in recent years is Continuum's 33 1/3 series of short books, each one about a different album and by a different author. Each book is around 100 pages long, and includes background, interviews, heady analysis, and often some wacky, highly personal musings, reflections, and rants on the importance of the album in question. They're a lot of fun--the experience of reading one is sort of like meeting an interesting person at a party and suddenly finding yourself in a long, meandering conversation about the album that's playing, which you both happen to really love.

The albums in the series range from the obvious but necessary ("Led Zeppelin IV", "Doolittle", "OK Computer") to the well-informed if less canonical ("Meat is Murder", "Born in the U.S.A.") to the truly inspired picks that you might not immediately think of for a series like this ("Rid of Me", "Trout Mask Replica", and one brave monograph about Celine Dion.) There are new ones coming out all the time--I can't wait to see the book for Wu Tang's "36 Chambers", especially the crazy recording studio anecdotes. Here's the whole Wikipedia list and Amazon list.

Many of the writers of these books don't have any other author credits on Amazon, so there's a tantalizing sense that you yourself could one day write a 33 1/3 book on "Dubnobasswithmyheadman" or "Faith" or "Elastica" or "Very Necessary", and that music fans everywhere would read about your own personal musical obsessions.

(As a side note, I've always thought it was an unfortunate indicator of my own musical ignorance that the one book in the series written by somebody I actually know is about an album I have zero personal connection with: The Minutemen's "Double Nickels on the Dime".)

This news has been out for a bit, but I just found out (via Rex) there's going to be a similar series of short books -- about movies! It's called Deep Focus, and it's being put out by Soft Skull Press. The first two books in the series will be about John Carpenter's alien takeover movie They Live, by Jonathan Lethem (!), and Charles Bronson's Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino. Both are out in November.

So the next obvious question: if you could write a book for this series, what movie would you choose? It seems like they're going mainstream so far, but let's assume that the movie selection will be wide open. I might pick a favorite comedy like Tootsie. There's so much to say about that movie. Or, oh man, can you imagine getting to write a whole book that encompasses every tangent and diversion about Blue Velvet? Or The Apartment? Or Dead Alive? Or Hannah and Her Sisters? I can't wait to see where they go with the series.

If you were going to get paid to go off at length on your own totally subjective analysis and personal adoration of a movie, what would you pick?

As an antidote to the opening of Sex and the City 2 on Thursday night, I went to see Nicole Holofcener's latest movie Please Give. The two movies have a lot in common: both are about women in New York City trying to make a living, find love, and get a pair of jeans that makes their butt look good (at least, you know, in concept.) But while all the lightness and sass of the first few seasons of "Sex and the City" have been sucked out of the movies, leaving what A.O. Scott describes as "the ugly smell of unexamined privilege", Please Give is a totally different story.

Catherine Keener is the star of every Nicole Holofcener movie, and she's always phenomenally great. Here she plays a woman uneasily living with the ugly smell of examined privilege. She and her husband Oliver Platt are waiting for the elderly woman next door to die so they can expand into her apartment, and they run a vintage furniture shop that relies on the willingness of children of dead people to part with their parents' beautiful old stuff so they can resell it with a huge markup.

Neither of these things are necessarily morally wrong, but she's so consumed with guilt that she tries to compensate in increasingly awkward ways: she gives twenties to people on the street, tries to gives leftovers to an older black man she incorrectly assumes is homeless, and offers to volunteer at a center for disabled kids, but is asked to leave when she starts crying while watching them play basketball. She's a really deeply flawed character and the source of most of her own misery. But the way Keener plays her, I felt like I could relate to her--after all, what thinking person doesn't feel some guilt about the poverty you see everyday in this city and want to do the right thing in response? The characters in this movie do the wrong thing a lot of the time, but they're so well written and acted that I still feel for them.

Oh, also, it's funny. The rest of the cast includes my girlfriend Rebecca Hall as a sweet, lonely mammogram technician who puts up with her nasty grandmother with a lot more patience than her sister, Amanda Peet. She plays a selfish bitchy pretty girl like she has in many movies, but this character is a lot more credible and sympathetic than her characters in Igby Goes Down or Saving Silverman. Representing the older and younger generations, there's the delightfully abrasive Ann Guilbert who plays the insufferable grandmother with genius comic timing, and Sarah Steele as Catherine Keener's teenage daughter who spends the whole movie mortified by her looks, until the last scene when she walks out of a dressing room wearing the coveted pair of flattering jeans absolutely glowing, and you realize she's a really good actress.

This movie could have easily been a repellently vapid story about neurotic upper middle class people and how hard it is to live a privileged life, but instead it's subtle, funny, and sometimes uncomfortably relatable. And it's so good to see a movie about women who are fully imagined people rather than plot devices. Roger Ebert's review is great: "Nicole Holofcener pays close attention to women. She doesn't define them by their relationships with men. In a Holofcener movie, women actually have their own reasons for doing things — and these are even allowed to be bad reasons, and funny ones. The movie is about imperfect characters in a difficult world, who mostly do the best they can under the circumstances, but not always. Do you realize what a revolutionary approach that is for a movie these days?"

The trailer that became a movie has become a trailer again: a new trailer for the full-length Machete is out!

It's been a rough time for Robert Rodriguez since he teamed up with Quentin Tarantino to do Grindhouse. He left his wife and 5 children to take up with his leading lady Rose McGowan, which, incredibly, did not work out. Also, Grindhouse was a flop, for reasons I still can't figure out.

At least something good is coming out of it. Machete was originally a fake trailer shown between the two short movies that made up Grindhouse (here's the video). Now it's a wonderfully pulpy looking full-length movie coming out in September, featuring the incredibly prolific extra turned character actor turned movie star Danny Trejo. Here's The A.V. Club's great recent interview with him.

There's also Robert DeNiro as an anti-immigrant Senator advocating a law that's pretty much exactly like the real one in Arizona ("every time an illegal dances across our border, it is an overt act of terrorism!") which is a total gift to this movie's marketing plan. And Jessica Alba and a one-eyed Michelle Rodriguez as tough freedom fighters, and Cheech Marin as a double-barreled priest.

Oh, and Lindsay Lohan in her first real movie in 3 years.

And Don Johnson.

This movie is like holy absolution for every actor who's noticed the phone doesn't ring as much as it used to.

Back in the early days of shows like "Friday Night Videos", music videos were a fun, goofy diversion. They usually looked like they cost about $25 to make and served as a novel way to experience the songs you heard on the radio, and as a new resource for looking at girls and guys in sexy outfits. Examples: Olivia Newton-John's "Physical", Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra".

Then videos became both big business and sometimes actual art. You've got every video from "Thriller", a-ha's "Take On Me", and Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More". People often cared more about the video than the song, and videos became the perfect marketing device: ads that people wanted to watch. Pretty soon David Fincher is directing Paula Abdul's best videos and Madonna's "Express Yourself", Michael Jackson makes "Scream" for $7 million, and Aerosmith does an Alicia Silverstone video trilogy ("Cryin'", "Crazy", and the one I always forget, "Amazing".)

I'd love to see a graph comparing the declining number of videos aired per day on MTV and shrinking record sales. Maybe downloading had already taken hold, so MTV decided to stop running video-ads for singles and albums that no one was buying anymore. Or maybe MTV's lack of interest in videos and growing devotion to reality shows actually contributed in some small way to the crash of the music industry. Either way, record companies don't have the marketing budgets that they used to, and the last five years or so have been terrible for the music video.

In New York magazine, there's a great article called "Internet Killed the MTV Star", which says that even if they're not on TV anymore, videos are back. There's nothing in this piece that comes as much of a surprise, but it nicely articulates a few things that you've probably been noticing over the past few years:

• Videos are popular again because of YouTube
• YouTube has slowly shifted focus from accidentally popular amateur videos to intentionally popular music videos
• Lady Gaga is the biggest thing to happen to music videos since MTV, Madonna, and Tawny Kitaen.

Gaga's videos have over 1 billion views, and she's one of few current artists to have truly massive album sales ("The Fame" hit 10 million in February), so it seems that people do still actually want to buy a record when they like the videos.

Gaga's videos are also money makers in themselves, through a little bit of revenue from internet ads, and from far more lucrative product placement, which glaringly saturates the "Telephone" video. The CEO of video service Vevo (which is owned by Sony and Universal) says, "There was a time when music videos were purely promotional, and that was fine when people were buying music. Now they're no longer promotional. We sell advertising in and around them at a premium. Instead of being a marketing expense, videos can be a profit center."

One of the best things about the resurgence of music videos as something record companies will actually invest in again is that the most exciting directors that really know how to make great videos can get back into it. The director of Gaga's current trilogy, Jonas Akerlund, did a lot of Roxette videos and that notorious Prodigy one for "Smack My Bitch Up". Spike Jonze has just done a new one for LCD Soundsystem's "Drunk Girls". Michel Gondry, who did tons of great videos for Bjork and the White Stripes, but hasn't been doing much lately, says, "now I feel like it's coming back to early MTV, before the big-budget cranes, when it was creative and fun."

Videos might be creative and fun again because we're going to see a whole lot of Virgin Mobile ads in them, but on the whole, it's probably a better experience than watching MTV circa 1999 when you pretty much just saw the same Smash Mouth and Limp Bizkit videos every day.

[Thanks, That Fuzzy Bastarrd!]

A recent study found that kids who are allowed to watch R-rated movies are a lot more likely to start drinking at younger ages. The researchers surveyed middle school kids, asking them whether their parents let them watch R-rated movies or not, then surveyed the same kids again two years later and asked if they'd started drinking yet. Only 3% of kids who were never allowed to watch R-rated movies drank, compared to a Goldschlager-chugging 25% of kids who were allowed to watch R-rated movies "all the time".

One of the researchers said the data suggests that it's the R-rated movies themselves that lead kids to drink: "seeing the adult content actually changes their personality."

What it says to me is that, for better or worse, kids with more permissive parents end up drinking sooner than kids with more restrictive parents. But I wonder about those kids who aren't actually allowed to watch R-rated movies, but sneakily figure out how to watch them anyway. Which is probably most kids in the 10-14 age range, especially the ones with HBO. Do they get into even worse stuff than the kids whose parents let them watch some R-rated movies and maybe let them have a little wine at special events? What are those sneaky kids doing by the time they get to 9th grade? Snorting mescaline and watching snuff films?

Using myself as a test case, I thought back to the first R-rated movie I ever saw. Because we're talking about the '80's here, my first experiences were all horror. I watched about half of Children of the Corn at age 11 at a neighborhood party in the TV room where the kids were hanging out. Probably none of the parents there knew their kids were watching it. It could have been a pretty subversive viewing experience, considering I was in a roomful of preteens at a grown-up party watching a movie about kids killing all the adults in town, but unfortunately, it's a pretty terrible movie. Not actually good enough to be subversive. I left the room when things started to get heavy, human-sacrifice-wise.

The first one I watched all the way through was The Howling, a much better movie, at around age 13. This is a great first R-rated horror movie for a kid to see: it's equal parts cool, scary, and ridiculous, and plays out like an investigative conspiracy movie with Dee Wallace as a reporter accidentally mixed up with a colony of werewolves. I loved it. No kind of parental permission was involved in watching this one, either.

Then shortly after that, some friends and I sneaked into a movie theater showing Action Jackson, an awful movie that made a lot of money and didn't quite destroy Carl Weathers' career. I loved sneaking into the theater, but hated the movie. Things got a lot better with repeated, obsessive viewings of The Lost Boys on video.

Even though my parents didn't actually give me permission to watch any of these movies, they definitely let me drink a little bit at summer parties and the odd holiday dinner. I wonder what happens to kids who watch higher quality R-rated movies than I happened to see? If a 12 year-old watches Fargo and Chinatown, will they actually start drinking at a later age because they're more likely to turn into film geeks and spend their Saturday nights staying in and watching TCM?

What was your first R-rated movie? Did it corrupt you?

The latest insanely popular relationship self-help book to be made into a movie will be early 90's juggernaut "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus", a book I was almost as happy to see fade from public consciousness as the marginally more odious "The Rules". I'm sure you remember this book. There was a time that every single person on the planet was reading it, or one of its thousands of spin-offs ("M&V On a Date", "M&V In the Bedroom", "M&V Starting Over", "M&V Grit Their Teeth Through Endless Years of Tedium and Despair"). And by "every single person" I mean women who can't stand their insufferable husbands/boyfriends.

Time for Mars & Venus: The Movie! Which sounds exactly like last year's He's Just Not That Into You: The Movie, except with even more rigid and stereotypical gender roles.

The book was a giant step backwards in terms of breaking down useless and stifling assumptions about what men are like (i.e. rational) and what women are like (i.e. emotional), and reinforced the notion that you can make generalizations about men and women so outrageously broad that you can claim things like this:

As to what kind of pseudo-chick-flick nightmare this movie is going to be, you can pretty much imagine. On the upside, I can't wait to read Manohla Dargis's eviscerating review, which will probably spit as much venom as her HJNTIY review.

As far as casting goes, the movie could go a few different ways. The standard Hollywood movie star route would probably go with Jennifer Aniston and Bradley Cooper (who were both in HJNTIY). The really horrifically unfortunate cast would be Katherine Heigl and Ben Affleck. The luckier cast that might create an OK movie could be someone like Emily Mortimer or Rosemarie DeWitt, and Adam Goldberg or Paul Rudd. But would actors like them want anything to do with a movie like this?

In an ideal, admittedly psychotic, world, I would love to see the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus movie starring David Cross and Jane Adams as the hostile, bickering couple from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind who appear throughout the movie, staying together while loathing each other. Here's a short video clip of one of my favorite scenes ("I am making a birdhouse!")

Someone finally made a good documentary about street art, except it's only partially about Banksy and other actual street artists, and mostly about a crazy, obsessive French fan who followed them around with a camera, Thierry Guetta.

The best thing about the movie is Banksy himself and his totally self-effacing sense of humor. It's not so surprising that he's a funny guy: most of his art is funny in a sly, dark way. But the man is also a master of comic timing, telling the strange story of how he befriended Thierry Guetta, only much later realizing how mental he was, like he's been crafting a whole other career as a performer. We never see his face or hear his voice without distortion, but you can still tell he's not only a great artist but a hilarious storyteller, too.

The movie was directed by Banksy, but almost all the footage was filmed by Thierry Guetta though his obsessive recording of pretty much every moment of his waking life. Guetta started hanging out with LA street artists sort of by accident, and claimed he was making a documentary even though he had no intention of cutting all his miles of tape into anything like a movie. As Banksy eventually realized, he wasn't really a filmmaker, but "just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera." It's not a very flattering story for Banksy, but he's honest in showing that his relationship with Guetta was based on Guetta's total adoration of him and willingness to do whatever he asked. Even cool street artists are susceptible to ego-stroking.

After Guetta's monumentally successful debut as an artist himself (as Mr. Brainwash), the street artists he had followed around didn't want anything to do with him. Guetta copied their styles and techniques, and threw together hundreds of meaningless pieces that blatantly rip off every major pop artist of the last 50 years. It's easy to dismiss all the people who got suckered into buying his bad art as trend-seeking morons, but I admire that Banksy also included footage of his own media circus of an LA art exhibit, with celebrity buyers and a stunt involving a baby elephant overshadowing the actual art. As the title suggests, street art has become something you buy in a museum gift shop. Banksy's art is in a different category than Mr. Brainwash's, but the hype that surrounds both of them is equally silly.

One of the best parts of the movie is a beautiful and inspiring opening montage of street and graffiti artists at work on brick walls, trains, tunnels, and sidewalks all over the world, set to Richard Hawley's "Tonight the Streets Are Ours". You can see most of it in this extended trailer. In spite of all the money and attention that a pretend artist like Mr. Brainwash might get, it's so awesome to watch the real ones out there doing it and risking getting hurt or busted by the cops because they love it.

Director Andrew Niccol seems like he has it all figured out. He wants to make sci-fi movies, like his first movie Gattaca, but he wants to be able to plausibly fill his movies with conspicuously gorgeous people. So he makes his story about genetically engineered characters who are literally scientifically perfect. Enter Uma Thurman and Jude Law, hot sci-fi stars.

Niccol's next movie, titled I'm.mortal, is about a world in which the aging gene can be turned off. The wealthy elite never age and can live forever, while the poor struggle to buy the most agelessness they can afford (it sounds a little like Logan's Run.) Voila! You can fill your cast with 23 year-olds! No need for any aging hags, and no regard for realistic age differentiation whatsoever. Dakota Fanning can play Chace Crawford's mom and Megan Fox's great-grandmother. Why not?

Unfortunately for Andrew Niccol, his scripts that require his cast to be abnormally attractive haven't been so successful in the past: all three movies he's directed (Gattaca, S1m0ne, Lord of War) have been bombs, and the only real success he's had is his script for The Truman Show. Which actually sort of follows the same model of engineering a story to get the cast you want: it pretty much required that Truman be played by a universally beloved huge star, and Jim Carrey is probably a big reason why the movie did so well.

How this guy gets to keep making movies after so many failures is beyond me.

Anyway, maybe after I'm.mortal (that is one overly complicated smug little bastard of a title), he'll write a script about a world in the not-too-distant future, where genetically perfect teens have evolved to a state where they no longer need to wear clothes for protection from the elements. Birthday Suits? Na.kids?

This is a photo of the cute and sassy Monica Beresford-Redman. I'm assuming it was taken in the mid-90's, judging from the cigar. She's the owner of an LA nightspot that every news story refers to as "the Zabumba bikini bar", and the wife of Bruce Beresford-Redman who created MTV's "Pimp My Ride" and produced some "Survivor" episodes. Bruce was detained by Mexican police yesterday when Monica was found dead in the sewer system of a hotel near Cancun where they had been staying.

He was released today, but has been asked not to leave the country. It's not looking so good for Bruce: guests and staff at the hotel heard them fighting (probably because she had just learned he was cheating) and saw him try to hit her on Monday night, when she was murdered. It looks like she was scratched and choked, and Bruce has scratches on his face and neck, which if you're even a casual viewer of "Law & Order", you know is highly suspicious.

(Note: I realize that you can't really use crime-solving strategies from TV and movies to investigate real crimes. But, OK. In addition to the usual, face-scratches = guilt calculus of many "Law & Order" episodes, there are instances in pop culture when scratches on a suspect's face do not ultimately point to guilt.

One example is Sam Raimi's fantastic and probably underrated movie The Gift, in which an abusive and monstrous Keanu Reeves is initially suspected of killing Katie Holmes, in part because they were having a secret and probably really hot affair, and also because he got scratches on his neck the night she was killed. It turns out that his explanation for the scratches--"Stray cat. She didn't like it when I killed her."--though absurdly over the top in trying to make his character seem menacing and evil, was actually legitimate.)

But in the case of Bruce and Monica Beresford-Redman, I'd say those scratches were likely not from a stray cat. The night of their fight and Monica's death, their hotel door was also opened and closed "at least 11 times". Remember how in Rear Window, Raymond Burr's series of comings and goings late at night from the apartment complex was part of what led Jimmy Stewart to conclude that he had killed his wife.

Bruce B-R probably didn't set out to kill his wife that night (assuming he actually did it) but started hurting her in a moment of anger and poor judgment and, oh, whoops, she's dead. But if he'd spent more time watching crime dramas, he might have know how to cover his tracks better.

It's getting increasingly difficult to remember which gay celebrities have officially come out and which ones are just biding their time until they have a new album/movie/show to promote.

Today's news that Ricky Martin is a fortunate homosexual man wasn't surprising in itself, though for a minute I thought, didn't this just happen the other day? When we found out someone was gay who we already knew was gay?

Oh, no, that was Sean Hayes (just in time for his new Broadway show!)

It's no one's duty to be a positive role model for their alleged community, but every time we get another Ricky Martin to admit it already, hopefully it gets a little easier for the rest of the closeted people we see on TV and in movies to come out, too.

So, how about it, Anderson?

Tom?

Hell, Peter O'Toole?

Wait a minute. Ladies first!

Latifah?

Jodie?

How much of the entertainment industry is gay? A lot more than we know about. Ultimately it's no one's business, and you can't get very far by guessing, but I know attitudes and assumptions would change mighty fast if every single gay celebrity (and elected Republican, apparently) came out tomorrow.

This is my favorite picture of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, from back in the old days. It might even be from their first show together, "Sneak Previews", which aired on PBS stations in the 70's before "At the Movies" started.

Shortly after the announcement that the current A.O. Scott/Michael Phillips-hosted "At the Movies" show was getting canceled, Roger Ebert shed some light on the new TV show and "full-tilt new media" enterprise he's got in the works, which will be called "Roger Ebert presents At the Movies".

The most exciting thing about this new show is that it sounds like the show Ebert has always wanted to do. The experience of watching movies has completely changed in the last 10 years. Everyone now has access to the kinds of little, foreign, or independent movies that only people in big cities used to see, through Netflix, Amazon's streaming rentals, on-demand, Red Box kiosks and things like that. Every so often, Siskel and Ebert would devote a significant chunk of their weekly show to a small movie that most of us would never be able to see in the theater, and would be lucky if our local video store got a copy of it.

Back in the early 90's they championed movies like Hoop Dreams and Crumb and Kieslowski's Three Colors series on nationally syndicated TV, which is pretty incredible. They probably did more to raise the profile of independent and foreign film in the US than anybody else.

So now that we all have far greater access all kinds of weird, small movies, Ebert's new show can be as far-reaching as he wants, because his audience will be so much more knowledgeable about what's out there. Here's how he describes it: "Not just the One Weekend Wonders, although you gotta have 'em, but indie films, foreign films, documentaries, restored classics, the new Herzog, the new Bahrani, the new Almodovar. What's new on Instant Streaming. What great movies should everyone see? Hey, Paramount just announced $1 million for ten $100,000 movies. Those kinds of films ... Our show will try to reach people who think before they watch a movie, and value their time, and their minds."

So, obviously, it's gonna be on cable. Maybe IFC? Ebert and his wife, Chaz, are producing it, and he says they've chosen their host. I don't think it will be any of the previous "At the Movies" hosts (though there's a decent chance Ben Mankiewicz could be in the running--he did a pretty good job.)

My top choice: Alec Baldwin. Why not? He's already hosting the New York Philharmonic's weekly radio show, hosting "The Essentials" on Saturday nights on TCM, writing for the Huffington Post, guest hosting Studio 360, and hosted the Oscars, and that's on top of "30 Rock". He can handle it. I'm only half kidding.

Ebert himself will be on the show every so often for a Great Movies segment or to report from the film festivals. It should be a fun and thoughtful show, because that's how he seems to approach everything these days. Ebert's reviews have gotten pretty generous lately, but he's still an assiduous reviewer.

Check out his review for Hot Tub Time Machine: three stars, which surprises even him, but he explains why it's better than you would think. And here's what he says about Rob Corddry (probably the biggest reason to see it): "Corddry here achieves a level of comic confidence that seems almost uncanny; Cusack, as co-producer, and Steve Pink, the director (who wrote Cusack's High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank), must have intuited this gift and been willing to give him free rein."

I'm glad Ebert's got the money and the clout to do the kind of show he wants. It should be great.

The first movie of the year that I'm really excited about, The Runaways, comes out today. Let's look at some reviews:

• A.O. Scott seems to love it in spite of its typical music biopic flaws. Also check out his glowing comment about Dakota Fanning: "Ms. Fanning, who has shown herself a remarkably disciplined and self-aware actress almost since toddlerhood, displays heartbreaking vulnerability as well as frightening poise."
• Three stars from Roger Ebert, who especially loves Michael Shannon as the Svengali-like producer/manager Kim Fowley. He also ends the review with this cute note: "Many years ago, while I was standing at a luggage carousel at Heathrow Airport, I was approached by a friendly young woman. "I'm Joan Jett," she told me. "I liked Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Just sayin'."
• Owen Gleiberman thinks it's OK as long as the girls are rocking on stage, but the dramatic scenes are "glumly episodic." He also wishes Kristen Stewart played Joan Jett with bigger dykey swagger.
• Michael Phillips says that even if we've seen the stories and these characters before in other rock movies, The Runaways "has an exceptional hangout factor."

I don't know which was the bigger surprise on last night's "Lost": finding out who Ben is talking to on his doorstep, or seeing the "Directed by Mario Van Peebles" credit that flashed up on the screen at the same time (full episode here).

The last I'd heard of Mario, he was directing and starring in a homage to his father Melvin's seminal 1971 blaxploitation movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, called, naturally Baadasssss! It was, and I mean this with all sincerity, badass.

Since then, he's directed a few episodes of "Law & Order" and now has a small role on "Damages". I don't think he's really made a movie since Baadasssss! (that's 5 s's) in 2003, but he has somehow gotten to direct three feature-length movies that are in production right now, including:

• a movie about spiritual redemption with Michael Clarke Duncan and the always skeezy Tom Skerritt called Black, White and Blues,
• an insane-looking Russian produced movie about secret missions in Iraq with Bill Pullman and a guy from Twilight called Kerosene Cowboys,
• and one about a young football player called Things Fall Apart, written by and starring 50 Cent, though seemingly not related to the Roots album, the novel by Chinua Achebe, or the poem by Yeats.

Plus a BET documentary about black male role models called "Bring Your A Game" with Spike Lee and Ice Cube. And an episode of "Lost".

Mario Van Peebles, I don't know how you do it. Either he's got the world's best agent, he works really cheap, or the entertainment industry thinks back on New Jack City with overpowering fondness.

What I can't figure out about the Oscars is how a show that moves along from award to award so briskly and cuts off speeches at 45 seconds still feels like an interminable bore, punctuated by some funny Baldwin/Martin banter. There were a mere 3 montages, no performances of Best Song nominees, and there wasn't even an Irving G. Thalberg award this year!

Still, when we got to the last two awards and the show was already a half-hour overtime, suddenly it went from slow-motion to high gear and it was all over in about 3 minutes. Hurt Locker's in, Avatar's out, and Kathryn Bigelow gave two sincere but sort of bland speeches, thanking the military twice (and also Hazmat teams! Weird.) I'd like to think that she won Best Director on the basis of her movie and not because of some feel-good self-congratulatory tokenism on the part of the Academy, but either way, she accepted it like a cool, collected pro (and thankfully avoided all "this award is so much bigger than me" claims, and crying.) Here's the clip.

Anyway, the other interesting moment was the teen star reunion in honor of John Hughes. Look at the round-spectacled guy who looks sort of like one third of John Goodman with a goatee. Even after the announcer read all their names as they came out on stage, I had no idea who this guy was.

You can make your guess and click on the photo to see if you're right. Or you can just read Wonkette's first headline this morning.

Though I certainly didn't know it, Judd Nelson has kept working steadily since the 80's, mostly small roles in movies I've never heard of. And New Jack City. Later this year, he'll star in a movie called Mayor Cupcake, in which he plays the husband of a small-town baker played by fellow Hughes teen star Lea Thompson.

The weirdest part of the night was the dance montage of the Best Score nominees, with guys in cardigans breakdancing to The Hurt Locker.

My favorite moments: The Hurt Locker actors picking each other up and screaming when they won Best Picture, T Bone Burnett's sunglasses and suit, the horror montage, and the AmEx Members Project ad with Geoffrey Canada talking about Harlem Children's Zone, which was more inspiring than just about any of the award-winning movie clips.

You can watch all the acceptance speeches at the Oscars site.

It's another Oscars year where everybody already knows who's going to win a lot of the major awards. Some of these are great picks, and some we'll think about years from now and wonder how the Academy could have made such weird choices that now make no sense (Sandra Bullock really needs an Oscar?)

We've gone through the nominees and make our predictions about who's going to get the award, like always. These are our guesses about who will win, not necessarily who should win. My grand unified theory about how these things get decided is that Academy members vote for their friends, and they love to feel good about themselves.

Put your own picks in the comments and display your nuanced understanding of how Hollywood insiders operate! If you're going to keep score at home and not just swear futilely at Sean Penn and Miley Cyrus as they announce winners, here's a printable ballot with all the nominees.

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges in "Crazy Heart" (Amy) Jeff Bridges is by far the best part of this movie--he's pretty much irresistible and everybody loves him. This is the Academy's feel-good award this year. Clooney already has an Oscar, and Colin Firth will hopefully be back another year. (Cushie) I think Jeremy Renner is the dark horse here, but Bridges will win.
George Clooney in "Up in the Air"
Colin Firth in "A Single Man"
Morgan Freeman in "Invictus"
Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker"

Best Supporting Actor
Matt Damon in "Invictus"
Woody Harrelson in "The Messenger"
Christopher Plummer in "The Last Station"
Stanley Tucci in "The Lovely Bones"
Christoph Waltz in "Inglourious Basterds" (Amy) He's the obvious choice, and deserves to win, but there are other great nominees in this category. Too bad Christopher Plummer got his first nomination ever (!) this year, since he has no chance of winning. I guess that's what Lifetime Achievement awards are for. (Cushie) Matt Damon is probably the other one with a chance here, because he did a good job with a hard accent, but I think this might be the Basterds' only award.

Best Actress
Sandra Bullock in "The Blind Side" (Amy) I want to believe Meryl Streep's going to get it. Do you realize Streep has not won an Oscar since 1983? It's time for another one, but she's not going to get it. Sandra Bullock is the weakest nominee of an otherwise great category. (Cushie) I think this is Sandra Bullock's year, unfortunately. I would prefer any of the other four.
Helen Mirren in "The Last Station"
Carey Mulligan in "An Education"
Gabourey Sidibe in "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"
Meryl Streep in "Julie & Julia"

Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz in "Nine"
Vera Farmiga in "Up in the Air"
Maggie Gyllenhaal in "Crazy Heart"
Anna Kendrick in "Up in the Air"
Mo'Nique in "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" (Amy) There is no question. It's kind of a cardboard caricature of a role, but she did a great job with it. (Cushie) Vera Farmiga should get the "if I wasn't against Mo'Nique I would win" award.

Best Animated Feature Film
"Coraline"
"Fantastic Mr. Fox"
"The Princess and the Frog"
"The Secret of Kells"
"Up" (Amy) I love this movie. (Cushie)

Art Direction
"Avatar" (Amy) This is the kind of category Avatar really deserves to win. Note it did not get a screenwriting nomination. (Cushie) I am actually OK with Avatar winning this.
"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus"
"Nine"
"Sherlock Holmes"
"The Young Victoria"

Cinematography
"Avatar"
"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"
"The Hurt Locker" (Amy) The steady, unflinching camera was one of the best parts of the movie (Cushie)
"Inglourious Basterds"
"The White Ribbon"

Costume Design
"Bright Star"
"Coco before Chanel"
"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus"
"Nine" (Amy) Can this award specifically be for Penelope Cruz's cardiac-arrest-inducing underwear costume from her big dance number? It's more likely a more obvious period piece will win, I just can't tell which one.
"The Young Victoria" (Cushie). The Academy loves period costumes, and it has a few choices here.

Directing
"Avatar"
"The Hurt Locker" (Amy) This is it! The Academy won't be able to resist Making Movie History. I'm psyched. And will retreat into scowling hatred for the whole world if James Cameron wins. (Cushie) Time for a Lady Director!
"Inglourious Basterds"
"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"
"Up in the Air"

Best Documentary
"Burma VJ"
"The Cove" (Amy) I want Food, Inc. to win, but people seem to be into this one. Didn't concern for dolphins go out of vogue sometime in the early 90's, though?
"Food, Inc." (Cushie) Every single Academy member only shops at Whole Foods and feeds their beautiful child only the best in organic baby food.
"The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers"
"Which Way Home"

Best Documentary Short
"China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province"
"The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner"
"The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant" (Amy) Hollywood wants to appear concerned about the struggles of regular Americans, right before going to Elton John's afterparty at the Sunset Tower. (Cushie) Although I would not be surprised if they chose the China movie.
"Music by Prudence"
"Rabbit à la Berlin"

Editing
"Avatar"
"District 9"
"The Hurt Locker" (Amy)(Cushie)
"Inglourious Basterds"
"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"

Best Foreign Language Film
"Ajami"
"El Secreto de Sus Ojos"
"The Milk of Sorrow"
"Un Prophète"
"The White Ribbon"(Amy) Maybe too dark? Well, none of these are exactly feel-good, so I'm going with the one that's gotten the most attention.(Cushie)

Makeup
"Il Divo"
"Star Trek" (Amy)
"The Young Victoria" (Cushie)

Original Score
"Avatar" (Cushie). Yuck.
"Fantastic Mr. Fox"
"The Hurt Locker"
"Sherlock Holmes"
"Up" (Amy)

Original Song
"Almost There" from "The Princess and the Frog"
"Down in New Orleans" from "The Princess and the Frog"
"Loin de Paname" from "Paris 36"
"Take It All" from "Nine"
"The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)" from "Crazy Heart" (Amy) The songs from this movie still pop into my head all the time. (Cushie) This is actually a great song.

Best Picture
"Avatar" (Amy) I guess? It will win because of its total industry domination, but not much else.
"The Blind Side"
"District 9"
"An Education"
"The Hurt Locker" (Cushie) Please please please!
"Inglourious Basterds"
"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"
"A Serious Man"
"Up"
"Up in the Air"

Best Animated Short
"French Roast"
"Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty"
"The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)"
"Logorama"
"A Matter of Loaf and Death" by Nick Park (Amy) Only because it's Nick Park. (Cushie)

Best Short Film
"The Door"
"Instead of Abracadabra"
"Kavi"
"Miracle Fish" (Cushie) No idea. I like the name of this.
"The New Tenants" (Amy)

Sound Editing
"Avatar" (Cushie)
"The Hurt Locker"
"Inglourious Basterds"
"Star Trek" (Amy)
"Up"

Sound Mixing
"Avatar" (Cushie)
"The Hurt Locker" (Amy) Hedging my bets, here.
"Inglourious Basterds"
"Star Trek"
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

Visual Effects
"Avatar" (Amy) It really deserves this one. Watching this movie was a transporting experience. (Cushie)
"District 9"
"Star Trek"

Adapted Screenplay
"District 9"
"An Education"
"In the Loop"
"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"
"Up in the Air" (Amy) People like this screenplay, I guess. I thought it was sloppy and non-credible, and I hope Nick Hornby gets it for An Education, but I don't think he will. (Cushie) I agree although I would love to see Hornby or Armando Iannucci.

Original Screenplay
"The Hurt Locker" (Cushie) Although I also think A Serious Man is a good contender.
"Inglourious Basterds" (Amy) Maybe he'll win this one again! Another really strong category. I'd be happy if any of these win, except maybe The Messenger.
"The Messenger"
"A Serious Man"
"Up"

Sometimes, Martin Scorsese makes cinematic masterpieces that will be watched and remembered forever. And sometimes he makes overly long meandering movies that have their good points and look great, but run out of steam by the end. In the first category you've got Goodfellas and Raging Bull and, probably, The Departed. In the second category you've got movies like Casino, where the best thing about the movie might be Robert DeNiro's suits.

I forget sometimes that not every Scorsese movie is a winner, but watching Shutter Island last night served as a great reminder. "Oh, right," I thought. "I'd almost forgotten about the 15 years I spent watching Gangs of New York."

If you think about Shutter Island as a pulpy, melodramatic B-movie, it actually comes out OK. The first third of the movie is tense and atmospheric, and the dark mysteries about the mental institution "foh the criminally in-SANE," as we've all heard Leo stress over and over in the trailer, are creepy and interesting. The movie loses steam in the last 45 minutes, and the payoff at the end is really unsatisfying, but there sure are some beautiful shots and gorgeous, color-drenched sets, and all kinds of lurid images of horror-movie carnage. When the blood flows it's a rich cherry red, and Ben Kingsley's sitting room is all velvet upholstery you could do the breaststroke in and sparkling crystal whisky decanters. And I'm gonna be honest: there are worse ways you could spend your time than watching Mark Ruffalo in a 50's suit and fedora, raising those eyebrows and looking gorgeously Ruffalicious.

Actually, considering his competition, you could argue that Shutter Island is the best of the movies adapted from Dennis Lehane novels. The other ones are Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, which was drab and flat except when it was shrill and hysterical, and Gone Baby Gone by Ben Affleck (I know!), which was pretty good but dragged in the third act. Actually, all of his adapted movies seem to start strong and then sputter to a ending that I stopped caring about half an hour ago.

At least Scorsese knows how to do style when the substance is lacking. For an excellent example of this that's a lot more fun than Shutter Island, there's the long-form commercial he did for Freixenet a couple of years ago. It's set up like a documentary about Scorsese filming some newly discovered pages from a Hitchcock script, and he's really hilarious in it.

Yeah, he sure does lots of ads, but at least they're funny. The AmEx ads (especially the one hour photo one) and the AT&T ad that runs in movie theaters about shutting off your cellphone ("You don't even call him daddy. To you, he's Frank. That's how detached you are") are my favorites. Scorsese sells out better than anyone.

Doug Fieger, singer and guitarist of The Knack, died over the weekend of lung cancer (here's his obituary.) But his teenage girlfriend from the 70s, Sharon Alperin, still looms large in pop music history as the subject of their biggest hit "My Sharona", that classic tale of unrestrained sexual coercion.

Fieger presumably built his entire career around that one song, which was #1 in the charts for 6 weeks in 1979 and has been the inspiration for many parodies and tributes and the scene from Reality Bites that ushered people my age into generational nostalgia, even though we were still in college when the movie came out.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that Sharona, that braless teenage siren in a tank top, has used her tangential celebrity to her own advantage: her real estate website URL is mysharona.com, one third of the site's page on her experience is about the song, and she was interviewed for Entertainment Weekly about Fieger's death (she "spent the entire weekend" with his body. Ew.)

If the entire universe is going to hear how a 26 year-old guy in a band pressured you into having sex with him when you were 17, you might as well spend the next 30 years cashing in. Go, Sharona.

Note: The Knack's second biggest single, "Good Girls Don't", is also catchy as hell and has even more salacious lyrics--see the Wikipedia notes on the "clean" version.

Terrence Malick is not one to rush. During his unhurried 37 year career, he's written and directed exactly 5 movies.

Sure, they've been doozies (Badlands, The New World, and The Thin Red Line, which I haven't seen but I'm sure is good) but the man knows how to take his time. He took 20 years to come out with his follow-up to 1978's Days of Heaven.

And technically, his fifth movie hasn't even come out yet. The Tree of Life stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Fiona Shaw, and Jessica Chastain, and it's about a 1950s Texas family (though there's allegedly a lot more to it than that: something "hugely ambitious" involving prehistoric Earth and possibly dinosaurs. Who knows.) It's coming out later this year, a short 5 years after The New World.

Now today there are reports that later this year, he'll start shooting another movie. That will presumably be released in the same decade as his last movie. Well! Look out, world! Hurricane Terrence is rolling down the pike, and he ain't paying no tolls!

This new movie will star Christian Bale (who was also in The New World), Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams, and Olga Kurylenko (the most recent Bond girl) in some kind of dramatic love story. Judging from his other dramatic love stories, it will probably end badly.

The Oscar nominations are out. I had big hopes that this year's change from 5 to 10 best picture nominations would allow some smaller movies that don't normally stand a chance to be acknowledged, and in some cases this has happened. None of the movies I named back in June when the change was announced actually ended up with nominations (Moon, Adventureland, Goodbye Solo) but A Serious Man, District 9, and Up probably wouldn't have made the list otherwise.

I usually try to see all the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars, but my primary movie-watching partner wrote to me this morning saying, "Jesus Christ, are we gonna have to watch The Blind Side now??" I think I'm OK with letting this one go.

I guess that's what you get with a longer nominations list. I'd like to think The Blind Side would never have made a list of 5, and I still sort of can't believe it beat out The Hangover. The weekend it came out, I happened to be at our nation's largest retirement community, The Villages, and, gee whiz, did old white people sure get excited about that movie. Maybe this nomination is the Academy trying to reach out to middle America and show them they love feel-good star vehicles, too (especially the ones whose moral seems to be, in the words of A.O. Scott, that "the best hope for a poor black child in America is to have rich white parents.") And the people who produce the Oscars are psyched that so many huge hits are in the mix this year.

It's looking like Avatar is going to get Best Picture, in spite of everything. I'm still chasing the dream that Kathryn Bigelow will get Best Director for The Hurt Locker, since every so often the movie that win Best Picture doesn't also win directing or acting awards. All the recent movies I can think of that fall into this category have been big, bombastic movies that are, arguably, sort of terrible and don't hold up to much scrutiny: Gladiator, Chicago, and Crash won Best Picture but not Best Director, and of those three I think only Gladiator won a major acting award. Avatar could join that list: it got nominations for best picture and director, but, notably, no acting or writing nominations, probably because the acting and writing are mostly awful. So there's some justice.

Right now I'm going to say Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock (I know, I don't understand it either) will get the acting awards, Avatar gets Best Picture, and Kathryn Bigelow gets Director.

I'm a few days late, here, but wanted to mention the Banksy movie that sort of appeared out of nowhere and premiered at Sundance the other day. It's called Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Here's the trailer:

There's some really thorough press coverage of the movie (Guardian review: "very funny") and about Banksy and his style of guerrilla public art as sly, darkly funny social commentary. The LA Times has a lot to say about it, so I'll briefly summarize: the movie originated with a Banksy fan, a French guy living in LA named Thierry Guetta who started filming everything in his life after his mother died. He met up with Banksy in LA, and they became friends and sort of accomplices as Thierry decided to make a documentary about Banksy, until Banksy started to think maybe this guy Thierry was just a crazy person with a camera. A crazy person who later became an art-world version of a superstar.

Anyway, Banksy ended up making this movie using the miles of footage they accumulated, so it's sort of a documentary about both of them. Judging from the trailer and its many shots of pratfalls, face plants, spilled paint, torn stencils, and other street-art disasters, it seems to promote the idea that art can be both a serious contribution to the world and a joke.

Of course, you can't see Bansky's face or hear his unmodified voice in the movie at all.

Banksy had this to say about his movie: "Trying to make a movie which truly conveys the raw thrill and expressive power of art is very difficult. So I haven’t bothered. Instead this is a simple everyday tale of life, longing and mindless vandalism."

It's supposed to come out this Spring. Here's the Flickr group pool of his art.

The Screen Actors Guild gave out its awards over the weekend, and the only real surprise was Inglourious Basterds, which won the night's big award for best cast. Some of the movie's cast members were really great and deserve an award like this, like Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender, and Diane Kruger. But it's nuts to see Eli Roth, with his blunderingly terrible overacted performance, standing there on stage holding up his statuette for outstanding acting. Congratulations, Eli! How about you quit while you're ahead.

Here's a shot from the red carpet, with Tina Fey captivated/overwhelmed by Christina Hendricks' red cantilevered feat of engineering:

The nine movies that are being considered for an Oscar for best foreign film were announced today, and among them is Michael Haneke's dark and dread-filled The White Ribbon. The movie is set in a small German farming town that's filled with some particularly malicious people in the lead-up to World War I.

I don't have that strong an opinion about whether this movie should win the Oscar or not, but if there were an award for most totally unnerving child actor, this kid with the tears of unspeakable rage would be a slam-dunk:

Holy crap. That is one preteen I would not want to encounter in a deserted cabbage field.

The movie features many more completely creepy and unsettling shots such as this one:

Yikes.

Just the other day I was wondering what Julianne Moore had been up to these days, since it seemed like she hadn't starred in a big movie in a while. And now, here she is!

She's in a new sexy psychological evil prostitute thriller called Chloe. The trailer just came out, and it takes full advantage of its red band (a little bit NSFW):

The trailer probably gives too much away, which is something that bugs me about a lot of trailers, but at least while this one is revealing major plot points, it manages to reveal some naked people, too.

The movie would look pretty pulpy and bad if it weren't for the cast: Julianne, her husband Liam Neeson, and the wonderful Amanda Seyfried as the hot young thing she hires to figure out if her husband is a cheater or not. As is so often the case in these jealous-wife-hires-a-hooker storylines, things go terribly wrong, though in different and more salacious ways than you might think.

Also, the director is Atom Egoyan, who generally does a good job when his movies involve commercial sex, family strife, and homicidal insanity: see Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Felicia's Journey, some of his best.

It comes out in March. Actually, Chloe is a remake of a French movie called Nathalie in which the hot young hooker is played by Emmanuelle Béart, who was 40 years old when it came out. To put it another way, Emmanuelle Béart is the same age as Jeanne Tripplehorn, who plays Amanda Seyfried's mother on "Big Love".

Ah, the French! So loose in their requirements for playing a movie temptress. Here in America, we know that if you're over 25, you're a matronly hag.

Now that you've read not only one million Best Movies of 2009 lists, but also another million Best Movies of the Decade lists, and are completely over the whole year/decade and Sandra Bullock and $16 3D movies and loving Avatar and hating Avatar and you just want to leave the past behind and go see some cool Australian vampires in Daybreakers, here's what I have to offer you: my dumb top movies list.

I'm bad with making a firm commitment to something as important as a movie list, so this list is not really strictly speaking ranked, though it does flow more or less from my very favorites on down.

A Serious Man
Larry Gopnik fails to understand life's mysteries in the same way other Cohen characters fail to obtain a lot of money or hatch their ambitious schemes: spectacularly. This movie is the funniest meditation on the inescapable and inexplicable miseries of living I've ever seen. Why do bad things happen? Does having a spiritual belief system help us endure life's hardships or does it just set us up for being disappointed by a cryptic and uncaring deity? Is God punishing us for something or are we alone in the universe? Either way, there's nothing we can do about it, so you might as well enjoy the rare good, happy moments, then go around the next corner and get kicked in the face. The Sy Ableman scenes were some of the funniest scenes I saw all year. Bring on the Meshbesher drinking game!

Inglourious Basterds
As Roger Ebert said, it's one World War II movie where we don't know the ending. The Shoshanna storyline was my favorite part, and as many times as we've seen scenes like the one of her getting ready for her final cinematic victory, it just totally knocked me out anyway. I love all the big cinematic, old Hollywood stuff, the hyper-movieness of those last scenes in the theater. I also loved the slow, careful way the Christoph Waltz scenes rolled out, as he edged closer and closer to destroying his victims with perfect, deliciously evil elegance and confidence. The Basterds themselves were sort of a waste, though.

Up
It's pretty amazing that Pixar can keep making these fantastically successful movies that appeal to so many people yet somehow completely avoid feeling obvious or trite. Up was original and surprising and way more touching than I expected. The visuals, characters, story and structure were all right on. I didn't see it in 3D and don't feel like I missed anything.

Summer Hours
A small movie by Olivier Assayas about a family dealing with a country house full of objects that could be regarded as beautiful artifacts to be appreciated and preserved or as junk to be unloaded for the highest price. It asks lots of questions about how values change over time, like, how much do history and family matter? Is stuff that connects you to the past valuable or is it ultimately just stuff? It's sad to watch three siblings realize they don't care about spending time together in their mother's country house enough to keep it. I really like the scenes of their young kids running around outside and having parties at the house -- a good reminder that old things still matter if you stop worrying about if they're valuable or not and just enjoy them.

The Hurt Locker
Probably the first good movie about Iraq because it's not about politics or culture or strategy, it's just about soldiers who are really good at what they do. Tense and tight; even if I felt like some of the sequences were too similar every now and then, it was still really nicely structured. Not a lot happens in the way of characters changing through the course of the movie, but we gain an understanding of why these people do their incredibly difficult jobs.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Nicolas Cage is a bad cop who goes crazy, and Werner Herzog eats it up with a spoon. You don't see a performance this wildly unhinged every day, but Herzog knows how keep it from derailing the movie and to make it part of a structure that holds together. No one can play a maniac like Nicolas Cage, and lately it seems like those are the only performances of his worth seeing.

Humpday
A super-small movie that was largely improvised, so I've heard, that is just fantastically subtle and funny. It's worth seeing, especially if you don't know too much about it in advance, so I'll just say that it's about two old friends trying to prove to each other how open-minded and comfortable with themselves they are, while also being far more conventional and predictable than they would like to think. Both of the two main actors and the woman who plays the wife give some really natural and believable performances.

Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi lets his inner 80's horror fan out to play, and it's so freaking fun to watch. He could make this kind of movie in his sleep, but he doesn't skimp on bizarre details and fresh, disgusting ideas to gross the audience out. The confrontation in Alison Lohman's car with the old woman was one of my favorite scenes of the year, particularly all the face-gumming.

Goodbye Solo and Sugar
These last two are both little independent movies about immigrants in America, both very different stories than we might be used to seeing. Goodbye Solo is about the ebullient Senegalese cab driver Solo and the grizzled old bastard he calls "Big Dog" who becomes his client. This little movie just rolls along quietly until you get to the end and the emotional impact hits you and you realize your mind has been blown. Sugar is about Dominican ball players in the States, and follows a really different path than I thought it was going to. It's just about all amateur actors in this one, and was so natural it hardly feels like you're watching people act.

Here are a few other movies I liked a lot: Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which is as filled with misanthropic dread as anything he's done but I didn't quite connect with as much as his other recent ones; Adventureland, with an outstanding supporting cast and soundtrack; Moon, Sam Rockwell in an unsettling one-man identity confusion show in space; Funny People which is so damn hilarious for the first half, then falls off a cliff; An Education, a good story of middle-class self-deception, that Carey Mulligan is great; Big Fan, Patton Oswalt turns out to have some real chops; In the Loop, stunningly funny swearing and an unusually dark view of how politics happens; Precious, Jennifer's Body, and Soderbergh's double bill of arm's-length protagonists, The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant!

Watching Avatar was a completely amazing and immersive experience because of the 3D effects and CGI that finally look as gorgeous as we all hoped it could look. But I sometimes got pulled out of the experience by a story and premise that made no sense and Cameron's brand of pretend feminism and respect for indigenous cultures that's so simplistic it's borderline offensive. And a few lines that sounded like they were taken from Can't Buy Me Love, the one that goes like, "I was only pretending to like you at first, but then once I got to know you, I really fell in love with you!" Anyway, it was a lot of fun to watch.

I wasn't so into Up in the Air, it was often either too cheesy or too relentlessly dark to be believable. Like, I can't see even the most cold-hearted business executive actually finding Clooney's backpack metaphor of jettisoning all people from your life useful. But the acting was fantastic and a few scenes were awesome.

A couple movies I missed, regrettably: The Beaches of Agnes and Lorna's Silence.

Here's the list from 2008.

What movies did you like this year?

Crazy Heart is a small, simple movie about people you've seen before in lots of other movies--an alcoholic country singer past his prime, a woman who's been through hell but is willing to take a chance on him, and a straight-shooting Texan played by Robert Duvall. It's a formula you've seen a lot of times before, but you've heard lots of versions of "Your Cheatin' Heart", too.

It's easy to compare the story and its style to other movies, especially The Wrestler and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The main character's very listenable songs were written by T-Bone Burnett, who also did the music for O Brother Where Art Thou?, and one of the musicians in the movie who co-wrote the theme song is named Ryan Bingham, the same name as George Clooney's character in Up in the Air.

I bet Clooney and Jeff Bridges are going to be the top contenders for an Oscar this year, but Bridges is probably going to get it. Last year, the race was basically between Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, and because both performances were great, and because Mickey Rourke pissed off a lot of people in Hollywood for the past 20 years, it went to Sean Penn. This year, Jeff Bridges gives a similarly fantastic performance of a really similar character, but everyone loves Jeff Bridges, and he's been nominated four times already and never won. So I think he's got it.

Politics aside, he deserves an Oscar for this. This is a role and a movie that could spill over into sappy, self-pitying melodrama, like bad country music does, but it stays honest and wistful and a little bit reserved, like good country music. He does all his own singing (as does Colin Farrell) and guitar playing. He also spends the majority of the movie with his pants partially unbuttoned, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about his character.

The Times did a good article about how Crazy Heart almost didn't get released this year. The story has a lot of similarities to Slumdog Millionaire, last year's surprise hit and big Oscar winner. It was only toward the end of 2009 that Fox Searchlight bought Crazy Heart from Viacom, which produced it through Country Music Television but was going to release it straight to cable or video. Fox originally planned to wait until 2010 to release it in theaters, and only decided to do it in 2009 a couple of months ago.

So far, Jeff Bridges has been nominated for a Golden Globe, and the theme song got a nomination as well. Both will probably get Oscar nominations, too, and the movie should get a much wider release. It's an accessible, not-too-cheesy movie about a rough but lovable country singer, so I could see it doing well. One of the movie's producers says he hopes it "has legs in a part of the country that is typically underserved by Hollywood," i.e. country fans in middle America who might not go nuts for a movie whose hero is an antisocial jerk who flies around the country blithely firing people from their jobs.

I already mentioned the red-band trailer for Kick-Ass that features Hit-Girl, the purple-wigged crime-fighting little girl hellion. She also appears in the regular Kick Ass trailer that's playing before Avatar in the theater, but this newer trailer is the one where you get to see her shoot about a thousand guys in the head and swear good-naturedly at her dad Nicolas Cage. I love it.

Anyway, the actress who plays Hit-Girl is 12 year-old Chloe Moretz, who has been in a bunch of movies and TV shows, including simultaneous roles in Disney Channel's "My Friends Tigger & Pooh" and ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money". This year she's playing an unstoppable killing machine in Kick-Ass, and I just learned that she's playing the lonely (and hungry) little vampire girl in the American remake of last year's Scandinavian tween vampire movie Let the Right One In, which has the brisker, non-Morrissey-referencing title Let Me In. (Richard Jenkins is in it, too -- hopefully he's playing her slavishly devoted keeper.)

Quite a career for young Chloe! I'm guessing her life is rich with parental release forms. She's just a couple of years behind her fellow Georgia native Dakota Fanning, who's playing Cherie Currie in The Runaways at 15. Unlike Dakota Fanning, Chloe luckily avoided getting movie-raped in her transition from Disney roles to assassin/hellraiser.

I saw Sherlock Holmes over Christmas (a fun movie, really funny, Robert Downey, Jr. is fantastic) and thought I'd mention a couple of the trailers that ran along with it.

Remember the photos from a few months ago of Tracy Morgan riding a bike in a cell phone costume? Those were taken on the set of Kevin Smith's new movie A Couple of Dicks. So now here's the trailer with Tracy and Bruce Willis as cops chasing after smart-ass Seann William Scott. Then the title flashes up, and it seems the movie has a new, less funny title: Cop Out.

Kevin Smith says that after the experience of trying to market Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the studio was worried about running TV ads for A Couple of Dicks. They checked with the networks, who said that as long as the word "dicks" was in the title (the plural, specifically; "dick" apparently would have been OK) they wouldn't air ads until after 9:00 PM. So they had to come up with a new name.

Cop Out makes it sound like an 80's cop buddy movie, which Smith says is the feel he was going for anyway, plus it's a little meta-commentary on the forced title change. Smith still sounds disappointed: "We were making up sequel titles in our heads, dude. Like, you know, Two Bigger Dicks. Or Dicks 2: It Just Got Harder."

The trailer is OK, but not gaspingly hilarious. I liked Kevin Smith's last couple of movies, but this is the first movie he directed that he didn't also write, so it's hard to know what to expect. It might not have any funnier moments than Tracy shoving nachos into his face (see above).

Then came the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, the most confidently self-explanatory movie title since Snakes on a Plane. The cast is pretty strange: there's Craig Robinson, who is building a solid career out of supporting roles in every funny movie and TV show produced this decade, Rob Corddry, who hasn't quite exploded into the superstardom I thought he would achieve after he left The Daily Show a few years ago, and one of the kids from Sex Drive, which no one saw.

And John Cusack.

I'm not sure where John Cusack is heading with his career these days. Think about the movies he's been in lately. He's had a hit or two this decade (2012, Serendipity) but he has had a LOT of bombs, like War, Inc., Martian Child, The Ice Harvest, and a whole bunch more. Even his serious little indie movies like Grace is Gone looked sort of awful.

The last good, successful movie that starred John Cusack that I can think of is High Fidelity from 2000 (actually, that's the last movie he was in that I saw in the theater, so that's probably why I think that.) I used to think of him as one of my favorite actors, not that he had the most incredible range, but that there was a better than average chance that a movie he was in would be worth seeing. Somewhere around Must Love Dogs, everything changed.

Anyway, Hot Tub Time Machine could be an OK example of a doofusy time-travel 80's spoof. It's directed by Cusack's old pal Steve Pink, and it has Crispin Glover in it, so there is hope.

There's also a not very funny red-band trailer available on a Greek movie site. The best part is that the Greek site calls it "Hot Tube Machine".

On a recent episode of the Filmspotting podcast, the hosts listed their favorite overlooked movies of the year--movies that didn't attract big audiences but were worth a look. I liked a lot of the ones they picked, including Moon, Food, Inc., and Humpday (they also listed Anvil! The Story of Anvil, which I still haven't freaking seen yet.) So I decided to check out one I hadn't seen, which they thought was one of the strangest comedies they'd seen in a while: World's Greatest Dad.

You may not have heard of this movie, which was released late this summer, and you almost definitely didn't see it: it only made about $200,000 in box office. Here are three interesting things about this movie:

These things are probably the reasons why so few people saw it: how do you market a really, really dark Robin Williams comedy? No Mrs. Doubtfire fan should see this movie (you can see some of their horrified comments on IMDb) and few fans of disturbing, sick comedy would be all that intrigued by a Robin Williams vehicle.

I'm not going to give away anything about the plot, which is weird enough that it should be experienced with no advance knowledge. The movie centers on some really detestable, self-centered characters, some overtly so and some who think they're good and decent people but are actually as bad as everyone else, sort of like Arrested Development's Michael Bluth. The main themes include suicide, masturbation, literary fraud, and poop porn. And it has a sort of sweet ending.

It's not for everyone, and it's probably not altogether bad that the movie didn't reach many people in theaters, because it just would have made the people who should have been watching Old Dogs feel kind of dirty. But for fans of Heathers who wish the main characters had been floundering, desperate adults instead of sneering teens, it's worth a look. Robin Williams is great, and his outrageously obnoxious son is played by Juni from Spy Kids (Daryl Sabara) which is a sort of shocking new direction for him. There were some funnier movies that came out this year, but none that were anything like this.

(There are a few good reviews of the movie that are worth reading after you've seen it, but they give away everything about the plot that's best left as a surprise. Here's the Times review and the Cinematical review; both are huge spoilers. Roger Ebert liked it too, but the movie wasn't quite dark enough for him.)

I didn't realize how excited I was for The Runaways biopic until I watched this excellent short trailer that came out today and my mind exploded.

Yeah! They're gonna tear this world apart!

In addition to the cast that plays the band (Kristen Stewart, finally playing the big butch role I've always wanted her to do, little Dakota Fanning in full glam-punk regalia, and Alia Shawkut as a bassist that never actually existed, but was definitely worth inventing so that Alia Shawkut could be in this movie) there's Michael Shannon as the band's manager Kim Fowley.

Fowley was a legendary producer in his own right, producing "Alley Oop", Dr. Demento standby "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Ha", and some early Jonathan Richman albums, and co-writing songs for KISS and Slade among others. As is sometimes the case with legendary producers, particularly those who discover and promote successful girl groups, he was also a real jerk, and after The Runaways split up, he used the name to start a new group called The Runaways, then was sued by the original band for the name and money he owed them.

Anyway, Michael Shannon is the actor to play Kim Fowley. Dark, charismatic, sort of sinister, and not afraid to play deeply slimy guys.

I can't wait to see the transformation of the band from the group of girls who posed in a wood-paneled basement in their t-shirts above (look at that cool teenage Lita Ford on the right!) to the stylized, heavily-jumpsuited rock act they became:

Comes out in March!

Over the weekend I watched last week's episode of 30 Rock, and there was guest star Julianne Moore, playing the cutest girl in East Sandchester High School's Class of '76, Nancy Donovan. She was so funny and gorgeous, and even if her Boston accent was a little uneven (her "I wanna sit on it and play a boh-uhd game!" was totally weird and great) I was delighted to see her again.

Because, really, when was the last time you saw Julianne Moore in anything? Here's her IMDb page. For me, it was when she played the Joan Baez-esque person in I'm Not There, and that was two years ago. Before that, she had a couple of scenes in Children of Men in 2006.

The heyday of Julianne Moore seems to be over. Between Boogie Nights in 1997 and The Hours in 2002, she was in tons of stuff: Magnolia, The End of the Affair, Hannibal, Far From Heaven--some great movies, some not so great, but all were important in their own way and did pretty well.

Since then, things haven't looked so hot for Julianne. She's gotten into some pretty terrible desperate mom movies with The Forgotten (spoiler!: aliens took her kid) and Freedomland (spoiler!: she accidentally killed her kid) and other questionable stuff like The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio and Nicolas Cage's schlocky psychic Next. Then there was Blindness, which I don't think anyone saw, and now she's in Tom Ford's adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, which looks OK, I guess.

It's high time for Julianne Moore to have a starring role in a big, great movie. Paul Thomas Anderson could use her again, but he doesn't seem to be working on anything. She's got something coming up with Lisa Cholodenko (who did Laurel Canyon) called The Kids Are All Right that could be OK, and some Barry Levinson adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel about a gutsy pioneer woman called Boone's Lick, which despite the title is probably not a porny comedy.

At least one of these had better be at least as good as her re-enactment of "Hey, Beantown!" with Alec Baldwin.

Now that it's awards season, The Hurt Locker is going to be all over the press again for the next couple of months. It's already won the Boston and LA Critics awards (best film and best director) and will probably be all over the Golden Globes nominations that come out tomorrow.

Reuters has a great piece on the origins and production of the movie--starting with screenwriter Mark Boal, who was an embedded journalist with an Iraq bomb squad in 2004, through getting funding, deciding to film in Jordan (it was a lot cheaper than Morocco) and finding a crew willing to work there, and writing scenes on the fly during the shoot, based on what was going on in their locations.

But the best details are about the incredibly difficult conditions they worked in. The star, Jeremy Renner, was wearing that crazy armored spacesuit in July in Jordan, and they couldn't use the suit's built-in air conditioner because it made too much noise.

Hey, at least it was a 44-day film shoot, and not an 15-month tour.

The article also points out that the cinematographer was Barry Ackroyd, who also shot United 93. Neither movie is a documentary, but both had a really appealing and appropriate documentary-like feel that was largely created through how they were filmed. Ackroyd gets a little too jerky with the handheld camera now and then, but overall I like his style a lot. He's also the cinematographer for Green Zone, a fictional Iraq movie with Matt Damon coming out next year. (It's directed by Paul Greengrass, who also did United 93 and the last two Bourne movies, which used way too much of the jerky handheld, in my opinion.)

Green Zone was shot in Spain and Morocco, so hopefully Ackroyd didn't keep passing out with heat stroke like he did during Hurt Locker.

So after all that, the movie only brought in about $12 million domestically. And I thought it was one of the indie hits of the year. By comparison, Precious has made $36 million so far. Hurt Locker will probably get re-released early next year if it gets a Best Picture nomination, so it should eventually make a lot more.

Another little note: I somehow missed that Kathryn Bigelow used to be married to James Cameron. Their marriage was from 1989-1991, right after he split up with Linda Hamilton, but, interestingly, before they collaborated on Strange Days. I think she's got about a thousand times better chance at winning a Best Director Oscar this year for Hurt Locker than James Cameron does for Avatar--and she'd be the first woman ever to win.

Here's the Hurt Locker trailer, and the Green Zone trailer.

So doing a Top 10 list covering the last 10 years... I give up.

By which I mean, I'll do it, but I'm probably forgetting about all the best movies, and it's hard to judge comedies, dramas, and documentaries on the same scale. But assuming the movies that haven't come out yet this year--like Brothers (sorry I got busy with your hotter brother while you were dead, honey!) and Nine (Daniel Day-Lewis nails everyone in the whole world, while singing)--aren't going to blow my mind, I'll take a stab at a list.

But first, a bunch of other lists. A lot more of these will come out in the next few weeks, but so far, there's not much consensus on what the best movies of the decade are. A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips from "At the Movies" are doing a countdown of their Top 10 lists week by week, and they've gotten up to #6 so far. Already there's a lot of room for controversy: I've got some picks in common with each critic, but Million Dollar Baby?, 25th Hour? That movie was not that good--I liked it at first, but it doesn't hold up to repeated viewings. Last week, A.O. Scott picked The Best of Youth, which I've never heard of.

A writer from Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt, posted his Top 10 list, which is impressively unconventional. Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon hasn't come out yet, so no comment on that one, but he's got another Haneke movie on there, too, half of his picks are foreign, and he includes Far From Heaven (?) and Letters from Iwo Jima (?!!), a movie I more or less forgot all about 5 minutes after walking out of the theater.

A few other lists: a short one from Cinematical (with a surprise Anchorman in the top comedy spot), Top 50 from Paste Magazine, a list I like a lot except for the top 2 selections (Amelie and City of God--yawn), and a gutsy Top 100 list from the Times of London: in addition to all the usual stuff, they've got Bad Santa, Capturing the Friedmans, Casino Royale, and Grizzly Man.

So here are the movies that would be on my own top movies of the decade list:

Kill Bill, Vol 1 and 2: gorgeous, eye-popping, emotional, wildly stylish, tense, funny, and unstoppable. The coolest movie I've seen in at least 10 years.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: even if you literally get your memory erased, you still can't get over that one who dumped you. A wistfully beautiful and optimistic movie about brains and broken hearts.

No Country For Old Men/A Serious Man: I suspect A Serious Man might be a tiny bit better, but I have to see it again.

Mulholland Drive: like having a really stylish, self-perpetuating anxiety dream after watching too many movies. Naomi Watts is the greatest.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days: a slow, intense buildup to the most harrowing day ever. Quietly eloquent movie about the abuse of power and all the crap vulnerable people have to deal with.

The Piano Teacher/Caché: Two jaw-dropping movies by Michael Haneke, I can't decide which one is best.

The Descent: a smallish horror movie not a lot of people saw, but it's so amazingly great as both an action/adventure movie and as a standard attack-of-the-cave-monsters movie. Really holds up.

The Bourne Identity: the first one was the best. Has some of the greatest city-based action scenes ever.

Ghost Dog: this movie's tones and styles are all over the place, but it gets them all right. It's smooth, light, cool, dark, touching, cartoonish, funny, and sweet. Makes me feel cool just watching it.

My Winnipeg: I only recently got into Guy Maddin, and this one is the best I've seen so far. Originality isn't everything, but there aren't any other movies out there like this. Surreally nostalgic and really funny.

A few other stand-outs: The Departed, Pan's Labyrinth, Brokeback Mountain, Shaun of the Dead, The Royal Tenenbaums, Almost Famous, and United 93. I was going to say Being John Malkovich, but it came out in 1999.

You know what would be a good idea? Doing a Top Comedies of the Decade list. I'd put Wedding Crashers, Shaun of the Dead, Dude, Where's My Car? (really), Superbad and Dodgeball on there.

A few movies that are gonna keep popping up on other people's lists are Zodiac, Lost in Translation, and The Dark Knight. Eh.

OK, what did I forget and what are your favorites?

The first item in weird movie news is the announcement of American Gladiators: The Movie. Of course! Ever since last year's revival of the original 80s show on NBC, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to come up with a one-word plot concept like "superheroes" and make a movie adaptation.

I'm going to guess that the superhero Gladiators will fight an evil foreign government that's making death robots, and the Gladiators will have to use their 100% all-natural brawn to defeat the robots in a trapeze jousting battle while scrambling over an exploding foam rubber pyramid.

(By the way, Wikipedia has an unbelievably extensive entry on all the events that were ever on the show, with sub-entries on each individual event, like Gauntlet. It's overwhelmingly thorough.)

The screenwriter for the Gladiators movie is Peter Iliff, which inspires a little bit of hope because he also wrote Point Break. Point Break is one of the most re-watchable movies ever made, so, naturally, a sequel is in the works, also to be written by Peter Iliff.

But now that I think about it, my love for Point Break might have more to do with Patrick Swayze and the director, Kathryn Bigelow, and neither of them are involved in the sequel (of course: RIP Swayze.) The sequel is called Point Break Indo, which presumably means it will be marketed to stoner pretend-surfers. It comes out next year, probably right around the time Kathryn Bigelow is getting nominated for The Hurt Locker.

Peter Iliff's other new screenplay with a drug-themed title, Chasing the Dragon, will star Wesley Snipes as an FBI agent going after an Asian drug lord to avenge his fellow agents' deaths.

To recap: Point Break Indo is probably going to be straight to video, Chasing the Dragon will come and go while Wesley Snipes keeps appealing his three-year jail sentence, and American Gladiators will make $300 million.

In other weird sequel news, did you know a Donnie Darko sequel came out this year? Richard Kelly has nothing to do with it. It's about Donnie's little sister, Samantha, and it's called S. Darko. The cast includes: the little dead girl in the well from the American remake of The Ring as Samantha Darko (she played her in the original Donnie Darko, too,) Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl, and Elizabeth Berkley. I think it went straight to video.

Considering how terrible S. Darko looks, I'm even more impressed that Donnie Darko was as good as it was. The IMDb plot summary for DD--"A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes, after narrowly escaping a bizarre accident"--sounds like a disaster, but even though I've only seen it once 7 years ago, I remember lots of great stuff about it.

Other sequels/remakes/not remakes coming out today: part 2 of the Twilight "saga" ("saga"?!), (Manohla calls it "bloodless") and Herzog's Bad Lieutenant (A.O. Scott says Nicolas Cage's performance "requires adjectives as yet uncoined, typed with both the caps-lock key and the italics button engaged". Haha.)

Roger Corman, one of the most prolific movie makers ever, got his honorary Oscar yesterday. He's an award winner that seems unconventional for the Academy, but Corman's connections to mainstream Hollywood go deeper than I realized.

You might already know Roger Corman, King of the B's, as the guy who produced or directed hundreds of the finest American movies involving man-eating snake girls (Night of the Cobra Woman), bloodthirsty motel proprietresses (Mountaintop Motel Massacre), Peruvian cave monsters being sold as a snack food (Munchies), brain eaters (The Brain Eaters), and the Ramones (Rock 'n' Roll High School).

But did you know he also helped launch the careers of tons of respected actors and directors? Here are some of the people who owe it all to Roger Corman:

• Francis Ford Coppola, director of Dementia 13
• Ron Howard, director of Grand Theft Auto (really!)
• Martin Scorsese, director of Boxcar Bertha, starring Barbara Hershey
• Jack Nicholson, star of The Cry Baby Killer and Little Shop of Horrors (the 1960 one)
• Robert De Niro, star of Bloody Mama
• Curtis Hanson, director of L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile, and 1973's Sweet Kill
• Jonathan Demme, director of Caged Heat. Tagline: Women's prison U.S.A. Rape Riot and Revenge! White Hot Desires melting cold prison steel!

Actually, Jonathan Demme and Roger Corman have stayed pals since Corman gave him his first writing job in 1971 with Angels Hard as They Come (starring a young Scott Glenn) and his first directing job in 1974 with Caged Heat. Roger Corman appeared in small roles in Demme's Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, and Rachel Getting Married.

He also played Congressmen in both Godfather II and Apollo 13.

At the Oscars ceremony, Peter Bogdanovich, another Corman protégé, said: "Roger Corman is responsible for the New Hollywood. He has made a tremendous impact as a director himself and made very stylish horror films and made them fast and cheap and made them look good."

Fast and cheap, no joke. Supposedly he shot Little Shop of Horrors in 2 days, and for a while there was putting out 6-7 movies every year. Corman certainly had an eye for real talent in the people he chose for his movies, though I guess when you're churning out that kind of volume, at least a few of your protégés are going to end up being the greatest actors in the world.

There was some news yesterday about a potential prequel to Inglourious Basterds, a rumor spread by my least favorite part of the whole movie, Eli Roth. He says Tarantino has most of a prequel written (probably because it was originally going to be included in the movie) and that there's enthusiasm among the actors to do it:

Though one of the Boston scenes allegedly involves Cloris Leachman, who is fantastic, I'm guessing/hoping this prequel idea is never going to happen. I don't know about you, but I thought the Basterds were the weakest part of the movie. Every time they came on screen, I was pulled out of the action, they were hammy thug caricatures, and if you'd taken them out of the movie entirely, it still would have held together fine. Though I guess you'd have to do something about the title.

The engine driving the movie was Shoshanna's story, I thought, and it seems like Tarantino steered the plot in such a way that she had the biggest, awesomest victory and definitely the most incredibly cool visual moments. The memorable parts of the movie are all hers. It almost seemed like Tarantino came up with the Basterds idea first, then the other characters all eclipsed them and became much more interesting, but he still felt like he had to stick with his original vision of these Nazi-killing soldiers.

So more Basterds would not be a good focal point for another movie, and more Eli Roth would be a flat-out disaster. Watching him on screen was painful; he had this "Look! I'm acting now!" weirdly intense self-consciousness that was completely distracting and out of place, no matter how handily he wielded that baseball bat. I know the Basterds were all meant to be broad cartoons, but he was on his own level of overacting that was too much even for Tarantino.

Just put the prequel scenes on the DVD and be done with it.

The Men Who Stare at Goats opens today, and while it has some great cast members (Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, and Jeff Bridges, who all buoy up the Kevin Spacey deadweight) and some funny visual jokes about the woo-woo era of the US military in the 70s, it might not be the greatest movie. Manohla Dargis liked it OK, but says it "doesn't add up to anything. It's wacky, amusing."

Even if it's light and inconsequential, it sounds like there are a few transcendent moments, and the story is based on the delightful and real Stargate Project, which Manohla describes as "born in the fields of Vietnam and baptized in the hot tubs of the New Age movement, it brings together Buddhism, pantheism, militarism and old-fashioned hooey-ism, the idea being that war can be waged with love, eagle feathers and assorted paranormal techniques -- with a few martial arts moves thrown in."

Since the real Stargate Project is probably the most interesting thing here, Wired analyzed the military operations and experiments that appear in the movie and reports on how much of the wacky stuff was real. A few highlights:

• The Army really did try using witches and self-billed psychics in the 90s
• they gave drugs to soldiers without their knowledge in mind control experiments
• the Lt Col that Jeff Bridges' character is based on really did develop a plan for a new Army called First Earth Battalion that uses New Age theory to fight wars through positive vibrations and carrying symbolic animals of peace onto the battlefield
• they're looking into transcendental meditation and Reiki, which is probably a pretty good idea for PTSD

Actually, it might be more fun to just read Lt Col Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion field guide, which tells you how to create a movement of peace, positive visualization, and harmony with the universe, but within the US military.

Was there ever a decade as self-confidently goofball as the 70s?

Risk, the favorite board game of global domination nerds who think nothing of playing same game for days at a time, is going to be adapted into a movie. I'm hoping it'll be pretty good, with lots of cool, unstoppable characters from all corners of the world strategizing for epic takeover, which since this game involves human soldiers and not just robot machines, could actually happen.

The interesting thing here is that the game was created in 1957 by a French filmmaker, Albert Lamorisse, who called it La Conquete du Monde. Considering France's experiences in the first half of the 20th century, it must have been a great fantasy for French people wanting to experience taking over the world instead of getting invaded and occupied.

But Lamorisse actually had a much gentler career as a short filmmaker: he made The Red Balloon, the 1956 short movie about a turtlenecked boy, Pascal, who befriends a friendly, sentient balloon. His own kids played the boy and girl in the movie. I feel like this movie was on PBS all the time in the 80s, and it's sweet and kind of mesmerizing, almost like a silent film, with a lovely score and almost no dialogue.

And it's online, so you can watch the whole thing!

It would be great if the new Risk movie was produced in the same style as The Red Balloon, with some pensive soldiers in turtleneck sweaters running through picturesque city streets, followed by bands of inquisitive colorful pinwheels as they amass their empires through whimsical, French military domination.

The biggest reason that I went to see (Untitled) is Adam Goldberg. It's promoted as a satiric look at the avant-garde art world, it got mixed reviews, and it's only playing at the Angelika, one of my least favorite movie theaters, but that Adam Goldberg is so funny and compelling in everything I've seen him in, even when he's playing a hapless grump who hates the world. Hell, especially when he's playing a hapless grump who hates the world.

Experimental art galleries and atonal concert music are tricky subjects for a comedy, but this movie really knows its stuff. Some of the performance scenes of Adam Goldberg's trio are straight out of one of the better Christopher Guest parodies, but what sets them apart is that these characters are completely unaware they're in a comedy. There's hardly any caricatures or winking at the camera, just people who genuinely believe in their music with non-melodic piano, clarinet, yowling, bubble wrap, and bucket. Though it reflects some of the experimental art out there that's meaningless hogwash, the movie also includes some really cool, beautiful music, which redeems it from getting too mean. All the music was composed by David Lang, who obviously has a sense of humor about his genre.

In the movie, a beautiful gallery owner falls for Adam Goldberg, so we see a lot of crazy conceptual art and the people who like to talk about it. There are some jabs at real artists, including a wildman English superstar specializing in taxidermy who's clearly based on Damien Hirst, played by Guy Ritchie standby Vinnie Jones. And there are references to Jake and Dinos Chapman's disturbing child mannequins with genitals attached to their heads and Robert Gober's legs coming out of a wall, and probably a lot of other stuff I didn't recognize. It's an easy field to make fun of, but the jokes are smart and subtle, and even if the people who collect these kinds of pieces can be gullible phonies, they're sort of sweet, too. It's good to see a satire with real, believable characters.

The rest of the cast is good too: there's Marley Shelton who played the doctor in Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, and Zak Orth, a hilarious comic actor from all the David Wain/Michael Showalter movies who plays an art collector more into the investment than the aesthetics ("Art does not look as good when it goes down in value.")

Here are a few reviews, from the Times, Kurt Loder, and Arts Journal, and here's the trailer. Time Out hated it, but their movie reviews have been weird and unpredictable lately.

Now I've got to consummate my love for Adam Goldberg by finally seeing The Hebrew Hammer.

You might have seen the ad for the new psychological thriller The Box, which is a retelling of the classic short story and Twilight Zone episode "Button, Button" [video] about a mysterious man who offers a desperate family a lot of money if they push a button that will kill someone they don't know*. The movie clearly goes way beyond the scope of the original story.

But did you know it's directed by Richard Kelly? Who did Donnie Darko and the craziest movie of 2007, Southland Tales?

It is! He's apparently decided to go somewhat mainstream again, which sounds like a good decision considering Southland Tales brought in a total of $275,000, which as far as his distributor is concerned might as well be $2.75. He sounds really energetic and a little loopy in the Times article, though actually not as nuts as you might think. Jake Gyllenhaal says he's like "the missing character in The Breakfast Club" and his producing partner friend tactfully comments that "Richard's greatest strength is his imagination, and sometimes it's his biggest hurdle," which sounds like code for "yeah, he's mental, but his movies are sick!"

The movie's website is surreal and anxiety-producing. Or you can skip through the Flash to the less interesting, non-crazy part. Here's the trailer.

Here's Richard Kelly Twitter page.

* I refrained from giving away the zinger at the end of "Button, Button", because yesterday I summarized the whole story, with the ending, to a friend who as it turned out did not happen to read that story in school. Whoops.

Also in the Times is a profile of Frederick Wiseman, the best documentarian a lot of people have never heard of (and MacArthur fellow!) His movies are all about institutions like schools, hospitals, welfare offices, mental institutions, police stations, the Army, and racetracks. Straight up edited unstaged video footage, with no voiceovers or talking heads or anything. He's the real deal.

I saw his 1968 movie High School my freshman year in college and remember having to reevaluate my own high school, which was Girl Scout camp by comparison. I sure felt lucky not to have had the stifling coke-bottle glasses guidance counselor and the lady gym teacher telling me how to have good posture. A lot of his movies were only aired on PBS and are still hard to find: there's nothing at Netflix yet, and you have to order DVDs direct from Zipporah Films, his distributor.

So if you get the chance, it's worth checking his stuff out. I've never seen his 1976 doc Meat, but you can pretty much imagine how that one goes.

He's about to turn 80, and is coming out with his second documentary about a ballet company, La Danse. MoMA is going to screen all his major movies next year, which is great.

The Times had lots of good stuff in the Movies section this weekend.

A profile of Willem Dafoe. You could argue he makes more inexplicable choices in the movies he does makes than just about anyone. He contacted Lars von Trier to ask if he could work with him, which resulted in the genital-obliterating high-concept emotional/physical/audience-torture movie Antichrist. He also says Spider-Man, in which he played the Green Goblin, was "a very personal film," and does a lot of theater including a new play at the Public called Idiot Savant by the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

In a non-explanation of his process for choosing work, he says, "Nobody has to know what I think about what I do. In fact it’s very important, I think, for an actor to keep their mouth shut on some level."

Since the launch of the Transformers juggernaut, with hugely successful movies, merchandise, toys, Optimus Prime lounge chairs, and a 7-Eleven marketing campaign (though the Transformer's Bumblebee Blast Slurpee wasn't anywhere near as cool as the Apocalyptic Ice Terminator tie-in Slurpee) more 80's anime-warrior TV show adaptations are inevitable.

We're going to be getting a lot of Voltron before long, including an animated series for TV, video game, toys, and a movie. The show ran in the US from 1984-85, and the main story structure of five people who pilot robot lions that join together to form one giant robot warrior, is probably easier to adapt into a narrative screenplay about humans than something like Transformers.

I only really watched Voltron when my friends' little brothers were watching it after school, but I agree that it could be a good live-action movie. How about this: it could be the first all-girl machine-warrior movie, with a group of five tough girls fighting the forces of evil in their lion flying robots. Sort of like Charlie's Angels meets Angelina Jolie's posse of spy-assassins from Mr. and Mrs. Smith in a future world of tech-fighter robots.

Then get some combination of the best cast members of The Runaways and Sucker Punch, and a soundtrack including The Plastiscines, The Gossip and The Donnas.

I would see this movie!

Another Japanese anime adaption is in the works: Tobey Maguire is producing a Robotech movie, but it's been in the works for two years already with lots of writers departing the project, so we'll see what happens.

I went to see The Informant! over the weekend (pretty good, though it got really repetitive by the end, but I liked the hyper-unreliable narrator and his inner monologue voiceovers about polar bears and the German word for "pen") and one of the trailers was for Daybreakers, an Australian vampire movie that's coming out in January.

Yeah, another vampire movie. It looks cool, and like it owes a lot to the Blade movies. First: the title. If you've seen Blade, you probably remember that Blade is a "daywalker" because he's half vampire/half human, and can walk around in the sunlight without igniting or exploding. This new movie also seems to use a similar retro-tech weapons style, where the vampire hunters use crossbows and swords. Also, remember in Blade II how there were evil vampires that introduced a new strain of super-bloodlusty vampirism that was going to wipe out the good vampires and humans alike?

Daybreakers is also about good vampires and bad vampires. They've run into the problem that we all knew would eventually come when the vampires start taking over the world: they're running out of humans. You go around turning everybody into vampires, pretty soon there's no one left to provide for your daily blood-sucking needs. It's sort of like a climate change/pollution of natural resources/foreign oil allegory for the undead. When vampires are deprived of blood, you can bet what happens is really scary and gross.

Anyway, there's Ethan Hawke playing a researcher (a vampire researcher, of course, because everybody's a vampire) trying to find a synthetic alternative to human blood (like in True Blood) to save humans from extinction. Since humans are already being used as blood-producing animals, we get a Matrix-like shots of hundreds of humans in suspended animation hooked up to a network of blood-harvesting machines. Ethan Hawke seems to advocate for humans in a way that reminds me of his character in Gattaca--a guy in a highly regulated and sort of creepily exploitative corporation of the future who quietly subverts it from the inside. He's also a thoughtful, ethical vampire who only drinks pig's blood, like the guy in Twilight.

There's Willem Dafoe as a mysterious renegade ex-vampire named, for some reason, Elvis, who has cured himself of his need for blood, but he's still gleefully vampy, like a warrior reincarnation of his Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire. And because it's an Australian movie, we've got to have Sam Neill (love him!) as the head of the blood-harvesting corporation that wants to squeeze as much money as possible out of their scarce product while they can.

Could be some good stuff in this one: an all-vampire society, dwindling resources, the rich getting the best of everything while the poor scramble to subsist on cheap substitutes, greedy vampires, and the breakdown of social order. One review from a screening at Toronto says it's "fast, loud, atmospheric, funny, and at times very scary. The gore is plentiful, as are the explosions."

Here's the trailer, which uses the Placebo cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill".

The funniest and most aggravating interview subjects working in movies today have got to be the Coen Brothers. Getting them to talk in a revealing, insightful way about their movies seems to be just about impossible. The experience of interviewing the Coens about what their movies mean is probably not far off from asking a marginally observant Jew to explain exactly what's so important about circumcision.

They're doing press for A Serious Man, which comes out tomorrow, but the interviews shed more light on how much fun it would be to hang out with these guys in regular life, and not so much on the writing/directing movies part.

In an interview in Time Out, they reveal that they wrote this screenplay at the same time they were doing Burn After Reading and No Country For Old Men, which is pretty funny if you think back to how many critics slammed Burn for being inconsequential and fluffy compared to the weighty metaphysics of No Country. Both were funny, dark movies about ordinary people trying to get something more than what life has offered them, and failing completely. The main characters either end up right back where they started, or burned from their failure, or dead. You could say that about most of their movies. Yeah, I liked No Country better, but both movies were perfect examples of what the Coens are good at.

But after that big reveal, and the statement that "There’s a big difference between 'prairie' Jews and coastal Jews," (a big difference they don't define), they go on to jab the Big Lebowski fans who participate in Lebowskifests in bowling alleys across the country:

Other useful information: Joel calls his wife Frances McDormand "Frannie" (??!!).

A reporter for the Canadian press asked them if they considered themselves serious men, and Ethan replied, "I don't think either of us would. I don't know. It's just, you know, the weakness for fart jokes and the like."

A Serious Man has zero big stars in it, which after the superstar megacast of Burn After Reading should make for a less distracting, undiluted Coen experience. Sort of like Blood Simple.

The Times has done two features about A Serious Man lately, neither of them reviews. One from a week or so ago is structured like an interview with the filmmakers, though since they offer so little in the way of insightful comments, ends up being a musing about the Jewishness of this movie and other Coen Brothers movies. The brothers do report that their professor father ate bacon in his Welsh rarebit at the campus restaurant, and that they used to sneak ham at their neighbor's house. They seem to acknowledge that this movie is in part about what it means to be Jewish (it includes a disclaimer: "No Jews were hurt in the making of this motion picture") but they brush off speculation that other movies like Miller's Crossing make any kind of Jewish statement, or as is sometimes speculated, anti-Jewish statement.

The Coens obviously aren't anti-Jewish, but they clearly take pleasure in the suffering and misery of their lead characters. "For us," Ethan said, "the fun was inventing new ways to torment Larry."

Then today A.O. Scott came out with a feature on Jewishness in recent movies, which is really great. He looks at Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen in Funny People and everybody in A Serious Man, and notices the two movies could have traded titles. And he has to bring up Inglourious Basterds: "now even the Holocaust has become a safe subject for pure entertainment."

Both Times features begin with Jewish jokes, but A.O. Scott's is better, and it sounds like it could be the opening quote of the movie: "'Why does a Jew answer a question with a question?' my grandfather — an atheist, a socialist and a righteous man in the best Biblical sense — used to ask. 'Why not?'"

UPDATE: A.O. Scott wrote one of the best reviews he's ever written for A Serious Man, and also has really smart things to say about the Coens' movies in general. Good stuff.

Polanski extradition = total mess.

It's like everyone involved in the entire history of this case has massively screwed up. There were lapses in the prosecution process by the judge. Polanski got nervous after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, then skipped the country before sentencing. The US inexplicably decided last week that Justice Must Be Served on a warrant that's been outstanding since 1978 and arrested him on his way to accepting a lifetime achievement award. It's a sloppy disaster.

If Polanski had just seen the plea bargain process through back in 1978, he would have spent his 20 days in jail or something like that and gotten through probation, and now he'd be able to make movies wherever he wants and serve as a guest judge on American Idol.

Instead, he's in jail in Switzerland at age 76, where he could be for 60 days while the US gets its formal extradition request together, then when/if he ends up back in court in LA, he'll have to deal with the fallout of running out on his sentence for a 31 year-old crime.

Meanwhile, members of the European film industry are making some half-intelligent, half-boneheaded statements that more or less claim that, because Polanski is a famous movie maker, the criminal justice system should just let this one go. It's nice that the victim has long since moved on and forgiven him, but he still pleaded guilty to sex with a 13 year-old, and in the words of Walter Sobchak, this is not 'Nam, there are rules.

I'm only partially kidding, here. Yeah, his movies are good (except Bitter Moon, man, that's a stinker) but suck it up and just serve your sentence, already. In response to the arrest, the French Cultural Minister said, "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face." Well said, but America is a lot like Polanski himself: there's the filmmaker who did Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown that I like, there is also a scary child rapist that's been hiding behind his celebrity for 30 years.

How about this for a solution: issue the warrant, fly him to LA, sentence him to time served (which was already done once), and everyone's done with it. Polanski can buy a place in Malibu and direct Charlie Kaufman's next screenplay and everyone can get on with their lives.

Maybe Polanski is lucky that he's went through his plea deal back in the 70's instead of today: AP has a piece on homeless sex offenders in Georgia who have been instructed to live in a makeshift camp out in the woods because there are no shelters or halfway houses that meet Georgia's strict living restrictions. These rules are supposedly made for public safety, and we end up with a bunch of sex offenders living together in the woods. Great.

Earlier this summer when it was announced that David Mamet was going to write and direct a film version of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, the smirky jokes flew fast. Some of the many fake script excerpts out there are OK, though a lot of them don't move very far beyond all the characters swearing a lot and being inexplicably aggressive. (NY Mag, The Independent, The Voice.)

One pretty good one incorporates this line for Anne: "You know what it takes to live in an attic for two years? It takes BRASS BALLS." The Onion's highlights from their imagined script uses the same the brass balls joke (taken from Alec Baldwin's big scene in Glengarry Glen Ross [video]). And (this is great) The Onion also predicts, "Rebecca Pidgeon is shoehorned into the plot, ruining movie at last minute."

Anyway, one of the best joke Mamet/Anne Frank scripts was performed and broadcast on last week's edition of Filmspotting, a good movie discussion podcast. The script was submitted by a listener and the podcast performance got posted on YouTube:

Maybe this is some kind of delayed backlash to the Diablo Cody backlash, but I'm going to say it: Jennifer's Body is a better movie than Juno. It's also an unapologetic teen horror movie, so I probably like it in part because I love teen horror movies, and I'm ambivalent about twee little indie movies about meaningful teen issues with a hideously grating soundtrack.

There's a robust tradition of horror movies with gutsy heroines kicking ass (The Final Girl, etc) but this is the first one I've seen that is of, by, for, and about girls. With every boy she devours, Jennifer is really trying to provoke her best friend Needy's attention, jealousy, love, and loyalty--she's the twisted friend who shows her devotion to you by randomly making out with you, then hitting on your boyfriend.

You could read the movie as: a metaphor for combustible female teenage sexuality and sexual power; a revenge fantasy about killing men who exploit teenage girls and turn them into literal and figurative monsters; a story about how best friends navigate their friendships when they start getting into boys; a thoughtful analysis of our cultural obsession with Megan Fox; and a big middle finger to our cultural obsession with Megan Fox.

And while all these layers are going on, it's still a really fun horror movie about an occult ritual gone wrong, and the resulting demon-babe with an insatiable appetite for boy guts. With a decent soundtrack!

While I was watching the movie and thinking about how it's all about the Megan Fox media saturation we live in, I was reminded of Steven Soderbergh casting Sasha Grey to play an expensive prostitute in The Girlfriend Experience, which was about buying and selling the fantasies that we create about people. By casting Sasha Grey, he made an interesting statement about audiences wanting to believe in the characters we watch in movies, even though we know they're really actors playing roles. It was a great idea, but the downside was that Sasha Grey played her character with such flat affectlessness than it was impossible to care very much about her or anything she did. You could argue that Soderbergh isn't interested in audiences caring about his characters and just wants to make experimental movies about the roles people play in society or something like that, but a lead actor that failed to bring any life at all to her character made for an empty-feeling movie. That I still liked. I can't help myself, Soderbergh!

Megan Fox can act rings around Sasha Grey. Megan Fox knows how to play a man-eating sexpot, because she does it in every one of her movies, magazine interviews, TV appearances, and in the thousands of red carpet and publicity shots we've all seen of her. Casting Megan Fox as a sexy demon in a Diablo Cody horror movie is stunt-casting in the same way that casting Sasha Grey to play an expensive hooker is stunt-casting, but this time it worked. Our friend Emily once said that Megan Fox is the most unmediated celebrity in the world--she's famous for appearing sexy, dangerous, and unhinged in interviews. She's unpredictable, and maybe a little nuts. Her recent Rolling Stone interview about cutting herself and her own insecurity sounds like it was created specifically for Jennifer's Body marketing.

In the press, there's Megan Fox, the a gorgeous sexual dynamo who exists to fuel boys' fantasies about her so people will go see her movies. In the movie, there's Megan Fox, the gorgeous sexual devil who exists to fuel boys' fantasies about her so she can feed on their flesh. It's beautiful.

Vulture claims that critics are anti-Jennifer's Body, but I disagree. A.O. Scott wrote a glowing review, and especially likes the movie's treacherous world of female friendship, and Dana Stevens from Slate says whatever you expect of this movie based on what you think about Diablo Cody, you're wrong.

Also, she won't get enough attention for this movie, but I loved Amanda Seyfried as Needy, the best friend heroine. Jennifer's the hot one that all the boys want, but Needy has the world's sweetest boyfriend, a supportive mom (Amy Sedaris!), and a healthy dose of self-respect. I loved the image of Needy tearing across a field in her gigantic poofy hot pink princess prom dress and fluffy blonde hairdo to save her boyfriend and kill the demon. I was glad that director Karyn Kusama (who also did Girlfight) could make a formidable heroine who doesn't need boxing gloves to be tough.

So I was wrong to make "don't call it a remake" jokes about Werner Herzog's non-remake of Bad Lieutenant, because the critics who are seeing it at the Toronto Film Festival say it really isn't any kind of remake at all. Karina from Spout says "Werner Herzog’s emphatic declarations that he’s never seen Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant finally seem credible", and the story has nothing in common with the very earnest original, except that it's about a lieutenant becoming unhinged, taking drugs, and doing a terrible job at being a cop.

Other than that, it's a totally new movie, and it sounds fantastic. Herzog doing crime-action! It's set in seamy post-Katrina New Orleans, and sounds like a deliriously chaotic freakout of crime/drugs/hookers and urban rot. It looks like one of those increasingly rare movies where Nicolas Cage is incredibly great, which seems to happen only ever 5-8 years, in less than 10% of the movies he stars in. Like Valley Girl, Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas, Wild at Heart (sort of), and Adaptation (sort of.)

Manohla Dargis loved it. She goes so far as to say that Nicolas Cage is as well-suited to Herzog as his old muse Klaus Kinski: "Mr. Herzog has again found a performer as committed to representing unspeakable human will." Spout says he's the perfect Herzog star because he's "an actor for whom hysteria is autopilot," which makes me think of those great scenes from Bringing Out the Dead, a not so special movie with some good moments of Cage screeching like a wild dog driving an ambulance around Hell's Kitchen.

The movie also features Xzibit (above with the double-barrel) who I like and a very puffy Val Kilmer who's seems to be headed for his bloated Jim Morrison look from the end of The Doors.

• Comedian, performer, and eye makeup stylist extraordinaire Eddie Izzard just finished running 1,100 miles across the UK, the equivalent of 43 marathons, in 51 days. I guess if you just keep running, you can pretty much run forever. From the BBC article: "Izzard himself admits people no longer believe how many races he has run. 'I might as well say I've just eaten a car.' "
• The director of last year's great Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson, is going to direct Nicole Kidman in The Danish Girl, the movie where she plays artist Einar Wegener who in 1931 was the first person to become a woman through a sex-change. This one's been kicking around for a while.
• Tarantino talks about the success of Inglourious Basterds, suggesting that his movies are pretty much the only thing keeping the Weinstein Co. afloat, which is probably true.

  With Inglourious Basterds and District 9 both doing well, maybe 2009 is the year of the popular subtitle.

Some bits of news from the last few days:

• St. Etienne is going to rerelease a new version of the Foxbase Alpha album remixed by Richard X, who's produced your favorite M.I.A., Sugababes, Kelis, and Annie tracks. It's titled, of course, Foxbase Beta, and comes out later this month.
• Disney says is has no plans to resurrect the 1986 Michael Jackson Francis Ford Coppola-directed Captain EO at the theme parks. Apparently it's not clear who even owns it, and can you imagine how much FFC would love to make everyone forget it ever happened? It's on YouTube.
• Guess who the Coens are considering for the star of their True Grit remake? The Dude.
• Trailer for a new font: Heroine.
• King of the B's Roger Corman is getting a lifetime achievement Oscar. Awesome.
• Coverage of Dominick Dunne's funeral, which had the kind of amazing guest list you'd expect.
• Times on a new Dogfish Head beer: chicha, the corn beer that's all over South America. " In order to follow an authentic Peruvian method as closely as possible, the corn would be milled and moistened in the chicha maker's mouth. In other words, they spit in the beer." Yuuuck!

2009: the year everyone got into 3D, and the year everyone got sick of 3D. Back in January, someone put together a list of all the 3D releases scheduled for the year. It had 13 movies on it, like Coraline, Up, G-Force, and Monsters vs Aliens, and since then we've had a few more surprise 3D releases, including a few extra kids' movies and--this is when you know the 3D trend has peaked--a Jonas Brothers 3D concert movie. We're now up to 17 3D movies this year.

I've seen My Bloody Valentine, Coraline, and The Final Destination 3D, and let me tell you, I'm over it. 3D is worthwhile when it's used for horror movies, especially when a big spike, crossbeam, or pickaxe is thrust through a victim's head toward the screen, and its pointy end pops an eyeball out at you, or something gross (and obvious) like that. Frankly, I don't know why ALL the Final Destination movies weren't in 3D, because the only thing better than a spinning ceiling fan blade that breaks off and hurtles toward an unsuspecting doomed teen is one that flies out of the screen like it's going to decapitate you. Gross-out horror movies are probably always better in three dimensions, especially when characters get impaled by flying objects while watching a 3D movie (see above).

Coraline was pretty good, but by the end it felt like the 3D effects were primarily for the trippy scenes of evil gardens coming to life or the scene with the old acrobatic ladies doing their crazy routine, and those felt sort of like filler. I went out of my way to see Up in 2D, and the flat version was just fine.

Those 3D glasses are distracting even during the most engrossing movies, and I keep getting pulled out of the flow of the action by noticing all that insistent 3D imagery coming at me. "Wow, look at that cool 3D" is a good conscious thought to have over and over again only when the movie is basically nothing but cool effects and flashy shockers to begin with.

Plus it bugs me that you have to pay $5 extra for 3D movies even if you bring your own glasses from the last one you saw, then the theater asks you to recycle them after the show, presumably so the ushers can wipe them off on their pant leg, encase them in plastic, and resell them.

Toy Story 3 looks pretty good, but A Christmas Carol and, sorry, Avatar, both look like they use 3D as a crutch instead of as an enhancement of a movie that would be just as good in 2D. Those pores on Jim Carrey's Scrooge nose--do we want to see those in three dimensions? Ew.

• MTV has bought the rights to remake British teen TV show "Skins". The original series was pretty great--you can watch it on BBC America and on YouTube.

  Fans are worried the MTV version will be watered down, meaning there won't be as much drugs, drinking, smoking, swearing, nudity, sex, binging, purging, and suicide attempts, all of which were well-represented on the original. They'll probably pull off casting unknown actors, since they're used to doing that already. It sounds like the original producer and one of the co-creators are coming over for the new series -- the producer says his goal is to make sure the new show is "the absolute opposite of 'Gossip Girl'."

• I would never in a million years have guessed who has the #1 album this week. It's Third Eye Blind. Huh?
• Spout is putting out a book based on their blog, probably my favorite of the movie blogs out there.
• A long piece on Wired about Craigslist is titled "Why Craigslist is Such a Mess", but is really more about the mystery of why Craigslist is so incredibly successful when it doesn't follow any usual business or organizational rules at all:
  
  Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30. Craigslist may have little to teach us about how to make decisions, but that's not the aspect of democracy that concerns [Craig] Newmark most. He cares about the details, about executing all the little obvious things we'd like government to do. "I'm not interested in politics, I'm interested in governance," he says. "Customer service is public service."

Martin Scorsese's new movie Shutter Island, the movie with the trailer I've seen more times than any other trailer in my entire life, isn't going to be released this October after all, but is getting moved all the way to some time in February 2010.

Which means, I guess, that the studio doesn't think it's a serious Oscars contender, so they're not going to waste their marketing budget on a big For Your Consideration push for this movie.

I feel like I've already seen the thing several times, because the trailer's been there at at least 6 different movies I've seen in the theater lately. Let me recreate for you the scene with the guard at the mental institution and Leonardo DiCaprio, both using this strange, stilted, Boston-accented speech where no one uses any contractions:

[trailer]

I'm looking forward to a time when Scorsese is finished with the Boston accents. Don't any other regions of the country have gritty but haunted blue-collar white people in them?

Anyway, now that there are four more months for this movie to be promoted, you'll have many more chances to watch the trailer and see that scary old bald lady doing the "shh!" gesture, Michelle Williams looking sad and accusatory holding a bottle of whiskey, and Jackie Earle Haley, who I suspect will be the best part of the movie, telling Leo he's a rat in a maze.

Also, you can watch this trailer one hundred times and still only barely catch that Mark Ruffalo is in it. Which he is! There's also Elias Koteas, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, and Max freaking von Sydow. Awesome.

Now that Shutter Island has moved off of its original October 2 date, we're going to get a bunch of other good movies released then instead: A Serious Man, Zombieland, and Whip It.

Having seen Viva Las Vegas many times, and watched in awe/horror as Ann-Margret yowled and flailed around in her orange sweater during that one sort of kooky dance number, I could relate to Peggy on last night's "Mad Men" watching Ann-Margret in awe/horror as she camped it up on screen like a crazy 8 year-old in a clip from Bye Bye Birdie [here's the clip]. Ann-Margret's mid-60's performance style seemed to be: mental sexy.

I liked the scenes of Peggy dismissing Ann-Margret's phony little-girl-but-sexy act as being irrelevant to women, and kind of insulting. Even better was the scene of Don reassuring her that, yes, the Bye Bye Birdie clip is ridiculous, but people are morons, powerless to resist Ann-Margret's tits and you have to market to them that way. I'm paraphrasing here; what he actually said was much more subtle, but that was the idea.

[Aside: In a perfect little indicator of the disturbing undercurrent of Bye Bye Birdie, the Daily News had an article today about a revival production that's coming to Broadway. The producers have decided to change a dance sequence in which the heroine cavorts friskily with a bunch of Shriners at their banquet because as Gina Gershon (who will play the character) said, "it seemed a little too gang rape-y."]

Even better was the scene of Peggy practicing her sex kitten routine in front of the mirror, then going out for some hot casual non-intercourse action with a guy she bags not by being a pretend-helpless little kitten, but by being a gutsy smart girl who's not afraid to take a big bite out of a fella's hamburger. It was pretty great.

Other highlights from last night: Don telling his wife's elderly dad to "drop your socks and grab... something", though I wish he'd just finished with "your cocks", as an ex-Army man making a joke with the phrase. This is cable, can't they say that?

Also: Roger Sterling's daughter is going to have one bummer of a wedding the day after JFK's assassination. I wonder if the reference to her wedding date (November 23, 1963) means that this season is going to include the assassination, or if we're just meant to recognize that poor Margaret Sterling's wedding is going to suck big time.

• Some cops in Midland, TX got in trouble for taking this week's best picture, above. Someone called the cops after seeing this young waitress holding a big rifle and hanging out in the parking lot outside a restaurant. When they arrived, it turned out the guys she was hanging out with were other cops, who had been in the restaurant when they invited the waitress out for a little photo shoot. Her name tag, The Smoking Gun points out, reads "Bambi". I love that she still has on her apron with straws and pens in it.
• New study: "the typical adult video game player is overweight, introverted and may be a little bit depressed."
• Tuesday night's wild storm knocked down 500 trees in Manhattan.
• A lot of the big movie star vehicles this year haven't done so well, and studios are trying to compensate, in part by paying stars less. Land of the Lost, Pelham 1 2 3, Duplicity, Funny People all had big stars and did worse than expected. The movies that did well are Harry Potter, Transformers, and Up, none of which were really popular because of their stars.

  And don't forget about that relatively small budget South African movie with zero stars where half the dialogue is subtitled. District 9 was mostly pretty good (except for some terrible dialogue toward the end,) but what I especially like about it is that studios will notice, again, that when a movie is well made (and well marketed) it doesn't need a huge budget, a famous director, big actors, or a dumb plot that's spoon-fed to the audience to make money. I love when people turn out for good, atypical movies and make them hits.

• WNYC made a ridiculously twee little movie with an extended gag about having a bake sale to raise money. Goofy, but it's cool to see Brian Lehrer, Jad Abumrad (whose dessert I would actually eat,) Leonard Lopate, Brooke Gladstone, Terrance McKnight, and our faves Richard Hake and Soterios Johnson (above) all pretending to be terrible bakers. Best YouTube comment: "Soterios Johnson is white?"
• Interesting op-ed about how struggling newspapers should switch to a nonprofit model like Harper's and Mother Jones.
• The good news: the first real video inside a print magazine. The bad news: it's a "Two and a Half Men" clip and a Pepsi ad in Entertainment Weekly. I like pop culture just a little bit less now.
• Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, my favorite movie of 2011, now has Jon Hamm in it, playing a character named High Roller. OK, I guess I like pop culture again.
• Maybe you've seen ads for this new movie Bandslam. Did you assume it was another cruddy pre-teen High School Musical spinoff? Me too!

  Did you know it might actually be a cool movie that's a victim of bad marketing, and features a scene in the abandoned CBGB's where, according to the Washington Post review, the main character "spots an old Patti Smith poster and gasps in awe, 'Do you know how many times she must have spit on this floor?'" And has a David Bowie cameo? Me neither!

• This is from a week or so ago: Wired has a short video interview with Mike Relm, one of my favorite mashup guys, talking about his live sets where he scratches music and video simultaneously. With stuff like Battle Royale, Pee Wee, Led Zeppelin concert footage, and amateur YouTube videos. It's cool.
• I like Nicole Holofcener's movies, which center on women and their relationships but are better than most other movies about women and their relationships, and always star Catherine Keener. But here's her next movie: I'm With Cancer, starring James McAvoy and produced by Seth Rogen (who co-stars) and Evan Goldberg. It's about a young guy with cancer.

  I can't decide if I'm annoyed that one of the few successful women writer/directors who makes good movies about women has been absorbed by the Seth Rogen juggernaut, or if I'm hopeful that the next Rogen/Goldberg movie might be a lot better than Pineapple Express.

• A New York judge ruled that Google has to reveal the identity of a blogger whose blogger.com site, Skanks in NYC (it's been taken down), exists only to diss model Liskula Cohen, who wants to sue the blogger for defamation. (She's also the one who a crazy guy hit in the face with a bottle at a club.) The blogger's lawyer said this case could lead to indiscriminate lawsuits against internet trash talkers, which means the floodgates might have just been opened.
• The Times says that there are almost twice as many Dunkin Donuts as Duane Reades in the city, which I can't see how that is possible.

• Last night's season premiere of "Mad Men" featured a storyline about a campaign for London Fog. Above are two real London Fog ads--the first appeared in an copy of Playboy from the early 60s, and features a tearful woman using her man's raincoat as a Kleenex. You can read the text of the ad in a blog post about using deep zoom with Playboy's online archives (for the articles, of course) which touts the coat's imperviousness to "emotional outbursts or sudden cloudbursts". The second ad is a not-so-pregnant-looking Gisele from a few weeks ago.

  Don Draper's new campaign, which he briefly described last night, involves a woman wearing a London Fog raincoat flashing a man on the subway--which sounds a lot more like the 2009 ad than the actual ad from back then.

  And of course, the whole storyline was a big product placement (so was the Stoli reference.) London Fog probably got to request that their ad on the show feature a naked lady to keep their branding consistent.

  (Also, pretty good episode, but Sal and Joan were both great. I bet this season will be good because of the supporting cast, and not so much the stars.)

• "Reno 911!" got canceled. It ran for SIX SEASONS. If "30 Rock" gets canceled this year, I'm gonna riot.
• Brad Pitt is allegedly going to be in the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey, Jr/Jude Law Sherlock Holmes movie as Professor Moriarty. He wouldn't be my first choice for Holmes's menacing nemesis, but maybe Eddie Izzard isn't available (wouldn't he be good?)
• Mike Nichols is going to direct an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Deep Water. The book is about an unhappy couple who agree that the wife can see other people. She does. Then her other people start dying off. Mike Nichols is better at quiet personal dramas than thrillers, but it still sounds cool.
• And here's a great Times article about Al Bell, former owner of the late, great Stax Records in Memphis. He's trying to bring Memphis back as a musical capital, through the Memphis Music Foundation and one of the greatest museums I've ever been to, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

• Paul Reubens is bringing back his live show that began in 1980, The Pee-Wee Herman Show, to an LA theater this fall. Most of the original cast and crew will be back, which I hope specifically means Laurence Fishburne.
• A completed documentary about some guys trying to find the reclusive John Hughes is going to be released. It seems that late last week, they were suddenly able to find a distributor. It's called Don't You Forget About Me, but could also be titled You Forgot All About Me Until My Untimely Death Hit the News.
• A Brazilian crime show host is being investigated for generating stories for his TV show by ordering killings. I wonder if that's how "Cheaters" works too.
• A man was found guilty of groping Minnie Mouse at Disney World. The costumed victim said she "had to do everything possible to keep his hands off her breasts."
• It's real: Bob Dylan Christmas album
• Upcoming Hank Williams biopic. He died when he was only 29. Who could play Hank? I like Channing Tatum, who's from Alabama like Hank, if he can lose some of the beefiness. Or James Franco (too crinkly?) or Paul Dano (too baby-faced?).
• A map of drug use across the US, by state. Vermont and Rhode Island like their drugs, North Dakota prefers binge drinking.
• A report about the Waterfront Commission of New York, which was created to fight waterfront corruption, finds that (surprise!) it's corrupt.

Disney-ABC has finally decided to make their classic movie review show "At the Movies" into something respectable and good again by booting off the Two Bens (Mankiewicz, who is OK, and Lyons, an embarrassment who has provoked rage and contempt since the day he started) less than one year after they came on as hosts.

They just hired the Times' A.O. Scott and the Tribune's Michael Phillips to take their places.

Well! Hooray!

For those of us who grew up watching Siskel and Ebert (here's an archive of the old shows), this is really exciting news. After Gene Siskel got sick and left the show, there were a few great episodes where Roger Ebert brought on guest critics, but after Richard Roeper was hired in 2000 as a permanent co-host, it got pretty tough to watch. After giving one or two shots to the Two Bens over the last year, I gave up completely.

Scott is one of my personal favorite critics (he's not leaving the Times,) and though I don't read Phillips' reviews in the Tribune, I love when he joins Adam and Matty over at the Filmspotting podcast--he's smart and funny and likes good stuff. Both critics seem like pleasant, affable people, but hopefully they'll stick to their guns and not shy away from on-screen verbal brawls over things like whether Brian DePalma is capable of making good movies anymore.

The new pair will start on September 7. Can't wait.

A few links for today:

• A new study shows that people have a lot less self-control than they think they do, and people who think they're good at resisting temptation are actually terrible at it. One of the tests involved college student smokers watching Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes (which features Iggy and Tom, above) while holding an unlit cigarette in their hand or, for the hardcore delusional people, in their mouths. Three times more students who thought they had unbreakable self-control smoked during the movie than the other students.

  The lesson: you are helpless to resist that donut/cigarette/drink/cute flirt, so who do you think you're kidding? As Wilde said, the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

• Latest cast addition to Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch: Carla Gugino. If this movie isn't fantastic I'm going to cry.
• Review copies of G.I. Joe aren't going to be released, which is usually a bad sign. But really, what have they got to lose? Transformers 2 showed that fans don't care what critics say anyway, so why put what's probably a pretty disappointing movie out there to get bad reviews? One reviewer who has seen it called it "a big, silly, pulpy, cartoony action film." Yeah, no kidding.
• Some statisticians who think language used in song lyrics and on blogs indicate our national mood found that teen blogs use "an abundance of 'sick,' 'hate' and 'stupid.' "
• Michiko Kakutani weighs in not so positively on Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, which sounds like an intentionally breezy read: "it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself."

The trailer is out for the Coen Brothers' next movie, A Serious Man. It looks dryly funny, claustrophobic, and a little anxiety-provoking, like their best movies are. The trailer itself doesn't follow the usual narrative-snapshot structure of most trailers -- as Empire describes it, it "loops sound and dialogue to give the impression that DJ Shadow cut it together."

I think this might be their first movie that is, in part, specifically about being Jewish and how the Jewish community as an entity interacts with the main characters. At least that's how it looks from the trailer. They've had Jewish characters in other movies: you've got Barton Fink (which some people think is an allegory for the Holocaust) and Verna and Bernie Bernbaum from Miller's Crossing, but I bet A Serious Man is the movie you could market as the Coens at their Jewiest.

The stars of the movie are largely stage actors, many connected to Minneapolis, which is where the Coens are from and where the movie was shot (as well as in a few other Minnesota towns.) There's Woody Allen regular Fred Melamed (seen in the trailer pounding the lead guy's head against a blackboard over and over again) who's been at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and on Broadway, and stage actors Michael Stuhlbarg and Sari Lennick as the husband and wife whose failing marriage is at the center of the movie.

It comes out in October and looks like it could be a return to the Coen glory days of the 90's. And, tantalizingly, it's "loosely autobiographical". Here's that trailer.

• Spout's review of Funny People is up. Did you realize that movie is TWO AND A HALF HOURS long?! Karina liked it, mostly, though she says it's less funny than Apatow's other movies and gets "crazy indulgent with the montages."
• Darren Aronofsky's next movie is about two rival ballet dancers, one of whom (Mila Kunis) might be a figment of the other's (Natalie Portman) imagination. One thing Aronofsky does not seem to like: blondes.
• Ben Affleck is directing another movie. This one is a bank robber/FBI drama called The Town, with Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, and, maybe unfortunately, him.
• Network attempts to get people to watch more TV: a new half-hour TV show that just plays viral internet videos called "Smash Cuts".


• Record companies attempt to get people to buy more albums: iTunes will start selling albums packaged with artwork, videos, and ringtones in a new product code-named "Cocktail". At higher prices, right? Great.

  Later in this article, AP lists some other things labels have tried to get people to buy more music, like iTunes' tiered pricing structure and exclusive videos and stuff like that, then says, "So far the impact of such efforts on sales volumes has been minimal." Exactly.

Today's Who'dat?™ pic was taken at the premiere of Julie & Julia, the Meryl Streep/Amy Adams movie adapted from a blog about obsessive cookbook completism. This celebrity is looking glamorous and fresh-faced, though not especially recognizable.

To play, look at the photo and try to guess who it is. Then click on it to see if you're right.

In the Loop is a little funnier than the other summer comedies, and dark dark dark-- it's meaner than The Hangover and more linguistically vulgar than Bruno. There's enough spectacular profanity in In the Loop that I guess the producers didn't bother to fight with the MPAA and potentially set a precedent for earning an NC-17 rating solely for swearing. It's unrated.

You can read the reviews (A.O. Scott in the Times, and the Washington Post review which unfortunately isn't by the paper's In the Loop columnist) and hear all about the witty barbs and conniving, selfish characters in the US and UK governments all trying to keep their heads above water as their leaders shove them toward war.

The movie is about Iraq and Bush and Blair and Rumsfeld, but it doesn't use any of those names. Instead it's about all the smaller government players scrambling to understand the larger machinations at work, and pointlessly trying to influence outcomes that have already been decided by people who don't care about democratic process or making the world a better place. It reminded me of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", a great play (and less great movie) about the two minor players in Hamlet, bewildered as they try to understand what's going on and what they're supposed to be doing while all the big Shakespearean guys are making things happen. Mostly they stand around and play acrobatic word games.

The word games in In the Loop are funnier. The best is lead British communications guy/Rottweiler, Malcolm Tucker, who in one scene accommodates an American official's sensitive ears by pronouncing his favorite swear word "F-star-star-cunt".

Anyway, I saw some parallels between this movie and the Coen Brother's Burn After Reading, another DC political comedy about people who think they're "in the loop", but are really small players in over their heads inside a political machine that chews them up and spits them out. Burn After Reading has an ambitious but bumbling duo, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, who try to blackmail an ex-CIA agent with a document that they think is a lot more important than it actually is. In the Loop has ambitious but clueless British aides and Secretaries excitedly caught up in the debates leading to the Iraq war, while actually being used by the US government to fabricate evidence to legitimize a baseless war that's going to happen anyway.

The American staffers aren't really in the loop, either. Assistant Secretary Karen Clark, who has Frances McDormand's exact sandy bob haircut from Burn After Reading (above), gets shut out by another State Department big, Linton Barwick, who's an amalgam of every senior member of the Bush administration. He's played by David Rasche, who also played J.K. Simmons's CIA assistant in the funniest scenes in Burn After Reading.

It's a great little movie, but has no redeeming characters and the story spins away to nothing by the end. In the Loop is getting better reviews than Burn After Reading did, partially because it's less slapstick and more talky and the swears are a lot more creative, and because we're impressed by British comedy over here and expect the Coens to be more serious than they actually are.

You can watch episodes of the UK TV show "The Thick of It", which is the predecessor to In the Loop and has some of the same characters--they're all up on YouTube. Here's the first one. And here's an interview with the writer/director Armando Iannucci about making the Iraq war funny and the lax security they encountered at the State Department.

A few movie links:

• I don't know why Manohla Dargis keeps putting herself through screening every single awful rom-com that comes out when they all offend her sensibilities and give her more opportunity to incinerate Hollywood studios for presenting single women as spineless imbeciles in push-up bras who live in desolate agony until they land a man. Actually, I guess that's the reason right there.

  This week's version of her perennial pissed-off review is for The Ugly Truth. Apparently she'll never lose her appetite for these movies, as long as she can call each one "a cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy that is interesting on several levels, none having to do with cinema," as she does in this version.



• Adoption advocates are worried that Orphan will make people believe that kids in foster care are evil Russian demons who will kill you and your family
.

• And here's the Times review of Orphan. The little girl who plays the title character, the adorable 11 year-old Isabelle Fuhrman, sounds like the best part: Manohla calls her "very self-possessed" playing her role "with an exotic accent and predatory habits that suggest she worked for SPECTRE back in the motherland before landing in America as an undercover devil doll." AP says she more than rises to the challenge of some "gnarly stuff" she does onscreen.

And in other news: AP looked into the 911 systems improvement tax that you pay through your cellphone bill, and found out that money has been used for lots of unrelated stuff. In New York state, only 15% of the $1.20 monthly tax was used for 911 improvements--the rest was used for things like police uniforms and general state budget shortfalls.

You know those video rental kiosk box things you see every so often inside a Circle K or a ShopRite? And you probably think: Huh? Now that Kim's Video is gone, your local video store has started offering two-for-one Monday through Thursday out of sheer desperation, and even your parents do Netflix, someone had the bright idea of opening a line of DVD vending machines?

But Redbox, the company that runs those machines, is doing pretty well and is actually growing--15,000 locations, and 7.5 million rentals every week. Not too bad compared to Netflix's 10 million per week.

The Times did a feature on Redbox that suggests some advantages the company has going for it, which also tell you a thing or two about the kind of customer they likely have. Rentals go for only $1 a day, you don't have to use a computer or create an account to rent, and when you're already at a McDonald's and see Taken or Meatballs through the kiosk window (they've got 'em) that's an impulse rental that a lot of people are very ready to make.

The main reason that I still use my local video store (other than the fact that its collection is exceptionally good) is that when I want to watch The Bourne Identity or Rock 'n' Roll High School, I usually want to watch them right now. Sure, if I decide I need to catch up on all the French new wave stuff I didn't see in college or make my way through everything Barbara Stanwyck ever did, I'm happy to wait for a Netflix delivery. But on those rare occasions when you need to watch Almost Famous and it's not airing on VH1 or streaming on Netflix, you need a fail-safe option for immediate viewing.

The Redbox selection is, of course, not remotely comparable to the Netflix selection, with each kiosk only stocking about 200 titles, but even this could be pitched as a selling point. The president of the company, who worked at Netflix for 6 years before defecting, says the typical Redbox customer "doesn't want to wade through titles they won't be interested in." Their top rental title ever is Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Netflix's top title is Crash.

In other words, for the Redbox customer, you can keep your precious non-linear social commentary on race and class that you add to your schmancy online queue. I'll pick up Step Brothers and Starship Troopers along with some Crunch 'n Munch at Walgreens.

There are more and more ways to get access to movies, and increasingly they don't involve leaving your home. So it's interesting that people are still willing to go out into the world to pick up a physical disc, as long as it's easy, really cheap, and they can do it while they're somewhere they have to go anyway.

So good for you, Redbox and your $1 rentals. I looked up my closest kiosk location on the website (on the "Find a Redbox" page that uses, of course!, Mapquest) so I'm heading there tomorrow to get a hyper-affordable mainstream DVD and wage some movie rental class warfare.

UPDATE: So I went to my local Redbox machine in a Walgreen's, scrolled around the movies they had, and ended up abandoning my mainstream vision by renting I've Loved You So Long, that French movie from last year with Kristen Scott Thomas. This movie might not be in the highest demand for Redbox customers, but it was great. And $1.08, including tax!

I may not go out of my way to rent from Redbox, but the interface is super easy and intuitive and the whole rental process took less than 3 minutes (in part because they don't have all that many movies to scroll through.) For times when you want to see a particular movie and want to be watching the opening credits in less than 15 minutes, it's a good option.

Whip It! is a new movie coming out in October. On the upside: it's about women's roller derby (some photos were just released), it stars Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, Zoe Bell, Marcia Gay Harden, Eve, and my girlfriend Alia Shawkut, aka Maeby from "Arrested Development".

On the downside: it's directed by Drew Barrymore, and it also stars her. And Juliette Lewis, who I sort of like, but sometimes plays slack-jawed and unstable a little too consistently.

But Juliette Lewis in a helmet and kneepads playing a character called Dinah Might I think I can handle. Plus, Kristen Wiig as Malice in Wonderland has the potential to make up for a million Drew Barrymores, and also decreases the likelihood that Whip It! will be a weak sub-Charlie's Angels ripoff.

Ellen Page stars as a Texas indie-rock loving misfit beauty queen who, according to publicity, "throws in her small-town beauty pageant crown for the rowdy world of roller derby" in nearby Austin. Sounds suspiciously similar to Ellen Page's small-town indie-rock-loving misfit girl named Juno who throws in her carefree wisecracking virginity for the emotionally murky and complicated world of pregnancy and adoption.

But there is no room for hyper-stylized sarcasm in roller derby! Young adult novelist Shauna Cross wrote the screenplay based on her own novel Derby Girl, so hopefully the dialogue in Whip It! will be a little easier to take.

Plus, just look at Kristen Wiig's eye makeup in that shot. Awesome.

Here are some more photos.

The movie I've been most looking forward to all summer is Michael Mann's Public Enemies. I love some of Mann's movies (especially The Insider, Manhunter and most of Collateral), I love Johnny Depp, and I'm a sucker for period gangster movies that involve slick suits, big guns, and smoky nightclubs.

Maybe my expectations were too high. I was completely prepared to love Public Enemies, but I didn't.

The good things about it:

• If the movie had any overarching theme, it's how our society constructs crime. John Dillinger knew how to turn on the charm and use the media to make the public love him, even though he was a thief and a murderer. J. Edgar Hoover also uses pop culture to launch his War on Crime, showing "America's Most Wanted"-style reels at movie theaters about "public enemy number one" like a sort of 1930's reality show. Hoover's methods may have backfired, since spotlighting Dillinger made him even more of a celebrity and a folk hero, but it's interesting to see the moment when law enforcement turned real-life crime into entertainment.


• The contrast between Dillinger the man and Dillinger the pop icon. I love the scene of John Dillinger in a movie theater, watching the reel about himself. He watches, sort of detached and bemused, with only a moment of anxiety as the audience is instructed to "look to your right; look to your left", but of course, nobody notices him. John Dillinger is just an unsophisticated farm boy who's good with a machine gun; Dillinger the public enemy is practically a movie star.


• The overlap between Johnny Depp and John Dillinger. In one of the only moments of exposition in the whole movie, Dillinger declares that he likes "baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you", speaking to a pretty girl he just met. He's a man of action who isn't interested in image, even though his image is what makes him who he is. You could say the same things about Johnny Depp, judging from the recent Vanity Fair feature where he carouses around with his buds, drinking and enjoying being Johnny Depp, yet has no interest in watching his own movies.


• The scene where a mob middle-manager (played by John Ortiz, who was in "The Job") tells Dillinger that they will no longer associate with him, launder his money, give him guns, or let him use their safe houses, because he's "bad for business." The mob was pulling down a lot more cash through their gambling ring than Dillinger was stealing from banks, but the feds were only interested in Dillinger, because he made a better celebrity-criminal. This one scene says more about perceptions about what kind of crime matters in this country than anything else in the movie, and I wish they did more with it.


• Marion Cotillard telling an abusive cop, "When my Johnny finds out how you slapped around his girl, you know what's going to happen to you, fat boy?"

But overall, the movie felt surfacy and meaningless. It's fine to drop in on the action with no exposition: we can figure out who these characters are as we go along. But it's like there was nothing to figure out. I never felt like I understood what John Dillinger was all about, except that he was good at robbing banks, and I have no clue what the members of his gang were like. Wouldn't it have been interesting to see some stuff about the relationships between Dillinger and his gang, the people at the safe houses, and the madam he was friends with? It would have been, but we hardly got any of it.

The gritty look of the HD video was fine and made sense, but using hammy dialogue straight out of a 40's gangster movie totally didn't fit with the look. The acting was cold and flat, which is fine for a movie that doesn't glamorize its characters, but then it's almost impossible to care when those characters get arrested or killed. There are no cheesy biopic cliches, but there also isn't any character development, emotion, or suspense. As Roger Ebert says in his (positive) review: "His name was John Dillinger, and he robbed banks. But there had to be more to it than that, right? No, apparently not."

I'm surprised that I these characters were so uninteresting, because Michael Mann knows how to get you to care about his characters. Think about The Insider: Russell Crowe is brave, but he's thorny and unfriendly, not especially likable. But we really care about what happens to him and want to see where the movie goes. We already know what happens to Dillinger, so we need something else besides the plot to feel invested in him, and I don't think we got it.

My favorite review is David Edelstein's in NY Magazine. He suggests that the best rejoinder for Public Enemies is the Michael Jackson video for "Smooth Criminal":

Here's the long version and the short version of the MJ video. Not really a fair comparison, but the video is a lot more fun than the movie.

Some interesting news today: the Academy decided to double the number of nominees for Best Picture this year from 5 to 10. So all those movies that you love but you know are never ever in a million years going to be considered for an Oscar? They could actually get in.

This move was probably prompted by last year's race, in which no Best Picture nominee was particularly successful at the box office. Slumdog did well for an independent, but other than that, there was stuff like Frost/Nixon and The Reader. The movie industry is probably worried about alienating those few remaining Americans that still purchase actual movie tickets, because those people tend to be interested in movies like The Dark Knight, and are less enthusiastic about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

In the spirit of the announcement, here are 5 movies that have come out in the first half of this year that I'd love to see get a nomination, which in any other year probably wouldn't stand a chance once Shutter Island and A Serious Man and Ninja Assassin hit:

Adventureland. Funny, sweet, subtle, and smart. Anyone who has ever had an unrequited crush can get into this movie. Killer soundtrack and outstanding cast, especially Martin Starr and, surprise, Ryan Reynolds.

Goodbye Solo. So minimal you hardly realize anything is happening until you get to the end and your mind is blown.

The Girlfriend Experience. Hell, maybe. It's one of Soderbergh's better small movies, quietly moving and sadder than you think it's going to be. I can't get behind the stunt casting at the center of the movie, but it still holds up.

Drag Me to Hell. If there were awards for Best Genre Picture, this would be it. Hands down the funniest, grossest, most rollicking good time of a horror movie I've seen in forever. It's like Sam Raimi finally got to do all the awesomely sick stuff he's been saving up over 6 years of Spider-Man. Freaking fantastic. Like coming home again for horror fans.

Moon. This movie uses some ideas from 2001, Alien, Sunshine, and sort of Nabokov's Despair, but somehow still goes somewhere new and original. Sam Rockwell deserves a Best Actor nomination for creating more than one completely believable and engaging performance while acting in a vacuum on a big empty set. An unsettling exploration of what it would be like to encounter yourself, then discover that you're actually sort of a jerk.

There will be a lot more good movies this year, but this decision opens up the awards to lot of interesting stuff that would otherwise get overlooked. As the President of the Academy said, "Who knows, there might even be a comedy."

Today we get to see some images from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which suggest that for this movie, he took the psychedelic Victorian Willy Wonka get-up he created for Johnny Depp a few years ago, soaked it in radioactive Kool-Aid, then gave it to a CGI Elijah Wood robot to put on.

Looks like Burton is relying more and more on facial distortion effects and wacky costumes, which makes me look back wistfully on his movies like Ed Wood that concentrated more on good actors and memorable characters, and the unadulterated gorgeousness of Johnny Depp. Even Sweeney Todd (which I liked) had a more understated look, and that's a Sondheim musical for crying out loud.

You can look at more images from Alice in Wonderland, including a hallucinatory videogame-like garden, a scary/funny Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, and a surprisingly un-processed Anne Hathaway.

Francis Ford Coppola is, arguably, back. His new movie, Tetro, has gotten good reviews, and in recent interviews he's talked about what a relief it is to make a movie where he created the story, wrote the screenplay, and directed, something he hasn't done since 1974's The Conversation.

But he's had some rough times too (remember Dracula?) and says he's been in a creative slump for 25 years (that would be since around Rumble Fish.) He seems to have some specific, residual bad feelings about his career: I remember seeing a list of his favorites of his own movies a couple of years ago when Youth Without Youth was coming out, and he purposefully left off all the Godfather movies.

Today, he's still hating on The Godfather, a movie he made when he was younger than I am now. In a letter to viewers that was sent to the Landmark Film Club members this week, he says "Tetro is the kind of film I might have been making 35 years ago, had my career not taken an abrupt and sudden turn as it did with The Godfather." Then he goes on to say that his success with The Godfather made the studios want him to do more gangster movies, or "if not a gangster film, then take your choice between a thriller, a caper film, a romantic comedy (nothing wrong with that) or sci-fi epic (nor that)."

In another interview in The Examiner, he says he didn't even want to make The Godfather II, and that his success with those movies didn't mean a thing when it came time to make Apocalypse Now, which no one would fund.

You know, there aren't a lot of people out there who, after accomplishing something like The Godfather II, would dismiss it as something they didn't even want to do it in the first place.

I guess when you've had a wildly erratic career like his, you're going to end up talking about your older movies at least as much as you talk about your current one. How many more millions of people have watched and loved The Godfather than will ever see Tetro? A lot. It sounds like Coppola will always be dissatisfied with how his career turned out and which movies he'll always be remembered for. He still hasn't gotten over his early success.

Here's an interesting thing: when he did an interview about Youth Without Youth in 2007, he said that Tetro was going to star Matt Dillon and Javier Bardem, neither of whom are actually in it. Instead he got the aggressively insane Vince Gallo and an unknown Alden Ehrenreich, which he now says is better because non-stars are "100 percent in control of their careers," like he says Marlon Brando also was for The Godfather.

Of course, the reason these actors are so in control of their careers is that most other directors wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole, but clearly this strategy has worked well for Coppola before. I haven't seen Tetro yet, but I hope it's good enough for this poor guy to start feeling better about being Francis Ford Coppola.

So The Hangover looks pretty hilarious. The Times did a sweetly admiring profile of director Todd Phillips last week (in which he quotes Mike Tyson during the shoot as saying, bizarrely, "Oh, man, this is great. I’m getting taught to punch by the captain of the Jewish debating team.") And the cast is great.

So I was surprised to see A.O. Scott's review in the Times, which is so dripping with contempt for the movie's adoration of its man-child characters and barely concealed sexism that, as my friend T-Rock said, you have to check to make sure it wasn't written by Manohla Dargis. He acknowledges that the movie is funny, but says that you'll probably end up feeling bad about yourself if you laugh, because of all the immature jokes and racism and sexism. It's funny, but it's wrong.

But Roger Ebert's review? Three and a half stars!

Here's what I love about Roger Ebert: he would never criticize a horror movie just for being too violent. He would never criticize a romantic movie just for being too sentimental. And he would never criticize a movie about a bunch of doofusy guys having a wild bachelor party in Las Vegas just for being too ridiculous and immature. From his review:

I'm not sure what to make of this. Either Roger Ebert is secretly a sexist fratty jerk or for once he's a little bit savvier about how genre movies work than A.O. Scott.

UPDATE: I saw the movie. It was very immature and ridiculous, and I laughed a lot (though maybe not quite as much as Roger Ebert did) and didn't feel wrong or like a bad person about it. Also, the director totally used the same inappropriate song at a formal event joke as he did in Starsky & Hutch, where the band at a girl's bat mitzvah played "Feel Like Makin' Love".

Yeah, the characters are man-children, and they follow completely predictable development arcs where the wimpy one grows a pair, the jackassy one gets a little bit nicer, and the weird one with no pants sort of gets his act together (but still doesn't have any pants.) The women are one-dimensional fantasy plot devices, but not any more so than most male characters are in ridiculous movies for women like Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or The Holiday.

For what it is, The Hangover is good. And it looks like the public is on Ebert's side: even sort of late on a Sunday night, the theater was full, and those people ate every infantile joke up.

(Tx Stef!)

Pitchfork has a regular feature called Director's Cut, where they interview the directors of interesting music videos. Today's installment is about a new video for Bob Dylan's "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'", which is more like a short movie that uses the Dylan song as its soundtrack than a traditional music video.

In addition to hearing the song, you can hear a lot of ambient sounds of the main action of the video/movie, which consists of a man and a woman beating the crap out of each other in a motel room. The storyline is minimal and inexplicable, but it's an engrossing, violent video.

The video is by an Australian director Nash Edgerton, who has mostly done stunt work in a million action movies, and directed a few of his own movies. Looks like he's a big fan of the Uma Thurman/Daryl Hannah scene in Michael Madsen's trailer in Kill Bill 2.

And there's your tie-in tribute to today's sad news about David Carradine.

I finally watched Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (only $6.99 to rent on Amazon, now that it's also out in theaters!) More than enough has already been said about this movie, mostly about casting real-life porn star Sasha Gray to play an expensive prostitute, and how the buying and selling of people and relationships runs through many aspects of modern life.

I mostly liked the movie, especially the structure that jumps back and forth through time, returning to a couple of key scenes that grow more resonant as the audience learns more about what happened before and after. Soderbergh is really good at slow, deliberate revelations about his characters, and creating a bunch of little snapshots that add up to something bigger than the sum of the parts.

This movie works in the same way that other smaller movies of his do, like Full Frontal or The Limey: really nicely shot, no wasted scenes, repetition of important moments, building up to a few really amazing scenes. You hardly knew you were as into it as you were.

But: it would have worked so much better if he had cast a real actress instead of Sasha Grey. The movie got more attention that it probably would have, but this is pure stunt casting. It helped make some kind of interesting meta-points about buying and selling people and the sex industry, but didn't help the movie at all.

Sasha Gray is great at playing cold and distant, and her character spends most of the movie with clients wearing an emotional suit of armor. Her clients are ostensibly paying for the "girlfriend experience", but what they actually want is a pretty woman who will sit quietly and listen to them talk, speak only when spoken to, and when she does speak, agree with everything they say. The sex part is almost incidental. Sasha Grey is great in these scenes at conveying the blank receptivity that the clients want.

What she's less good at is conveying that there's more going on beneath the surface. It makes sense for the clients to see her as a pretty, reflective screen onto which they can project whatever they're paying for. But in order for the audience to care about her, we need to see that she's a real person underneath the shiny exterior. She needs to show layers, where the characters in the movie see one thing, and the audience sees something more.

This is why we have professional actors. But even the other inexperienced actors in the movie are better at this than Sasha Gray is. There are a few scenes of her personal trainer boyfriend Chris, played by Chris Santos, where we watch him talking to his clients, and we can see him projecting one thing to them, while allowing the audience to see more happening under the surface. One client, attempting to have an honest conversation with his hired trainer, asks "what are you doing this weekend?" Chris' reaction is more layered than just about anything Sasha Gray does in the whole movie.

Not to say that she can't play anything other than detached blankness. Late in the movie, when her character experiences closeness, then sadness and disappointment in some unguarded moments with another character, she's great at that. But those scenes don't mean that much because we haven't seen any real human emotion in her until then.

If Soderbergh hadn't gone for the stunt casting choice, what pretty young actress could he have cast? I think someone like Evan Rachel Wood would have been good--think of those early scenes in Thirteen when she's clearly conflicted about the questionable stuff her new bad-girl friend is getting into. Or in The Wrestler, when we can see the difference between how she's acting toward Mickey Rourke and how she actually feels on the inside.

Or maybe someone from Vanity Fair's Young Hollywood issue, like Summer Bishil. Or Emma Roberts, Eric Roberts' daughter. She's probably good, right?

Casting someone like Sasha Grey makes the movie feel more like an elaborate conceptual experiment than a movie we're supposed to watch and respond to for what it is in itself. Like he wanted it to be critic-proof. As Owen Gleiberman pointed out, there are a number of unsubtle jabs at critics in the movie, though Soderbergh denies they're there.

You can say that he cast Sasha Gray to get more publicity, and to draw a connection between service work in which people use each other as substitutes for something else, and movie audiences who want to believe that actors' performances are real. OK, well, it was still a bad choice.

Here's the trailer for Werner Herzog's "don't call it a remake" remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 movie Bad Lieutenant.

Lots of snorting, lots of shooting.

The movie's second title is "Port of Call New Orleans", which prompted the star of the movie Nicolas Cage to suggest it could turn into a Herzogian franchise: "You could have Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call London next. It could happen!"

I request "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call Amazon Jungle", please.

Nicolas Cage has been either forgettably bland or teeth-gnashingly earnest in most of the movies he's done for the last 10 or 15 years, with only a few exceptions (Adaptation? I guess?) But judging from the trailer, it looks like he approaches this role with the same flailing desperation as he did with Leaving Las Vegas or Bringing Out the Dead. Every once in a while, he comes out with something pretty great.

It also stars Val Kilmer and Eva Mendes, and Xzibit and Jennifer Coolidge, which sounds sort of nuts, but I bet Werner Herzog somehow pulls the whole crazy thing together.

From an earlier interview with Herzog: "I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is."

Quick update on the Cannes film festival, which ended over the weekend. AP summed up the festival like this: "The festival began buoyantly May 13 with Pixar's 3-D animated adventure Up before plumbing depths of tragedy, pain and horror." Mm-hm.

Charlotte Gainsbourg won Best Actress in Lars von Trier's "terrifying" Antichrist, which I am scared of. Like von Trier's other leading ladies, Gainsbourg sounds like it was a hard role. She called making the movie "the strongest, most painful and most exciting experience of my whole life." (She stopped short of calling it "soul-robbery", like Bjork did about making Dancer in the Dark.)

Another article about the movie (SICK SPOILER ALERT) reveals that it contains a talking fox, and genital mutilation. Whatever Charlotte Gainsbourg got paid, it wasn't enough.

The big winner was Michael Haneke for his new movie The White Ribbon, which sounds almost as soul-robbing as Antichrist. It was shot in black and white, and AP says it "examines themes of communal guilt, distrust and punishment among residents of a small German town besieged by tragedies and strange occurrences as World War I approaches." I liked Haneke's Caché and The Piano Teacher a lot, so this one should be good.

The Evil Nazi guy from Inglourious Basterds won Best Actor, stealing the spotlight from obscure character actor Brad Pitt. Here's a complete list of winners.

The Times has a great feature today on Charlaine Harris, the middle-aged southern lady who writes the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels that has become the basis for HBO's True Blood series, the show about dirty, sexy, campy vampires that stars Anna Paquin. This lady has got it going on.

I'm coming in really late in the game, here. I've never read any of her books, and I haven't seen True Blood. I also haven't read any of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, or seen the movie that came out a few months ago. My opinion is based solely on this one article and the press about the books and tv/movie adaptations. But next time I'm taking a really long flight or recovering from dental surgery and need a vampire soap opera potboiler, I'm picking up Sookie Stackhouse.

Both Sookie and the Twilight series have been wildly popular. The latest Sookie novel, Dead and Gone, came out last week and debuted at number one. Twilight has sold one hundred billion copies (actually 42 million) and preteens everywhere went completely mental for the movie.

But from what I can tell, Sookie has it all over Bella Swan and the Twilight crew. She's a waitress in a rural Louisiana bar, she's kind of trashy, she can read minds, and she likes to have freaky swamp sex with vampires. The TV show itself sounds like it unfortunately abandoned its pulpy roots to devolve into a misguided metaphor for identity politics. I love this quote from Slate's review: "its ideas (about race, gender, sexual orientation, what have you) simmer on the artsy-fartsy backburner while blood and lust boil away in the low-culture pot up front." The opening credits are good and nasty.

Meanwhile, Twilight's main character, Bella Swan, looks wan and ineffectual, and her relationship with her vampire boyfriend involves a lot of pained chastity. I like Kristen Stewart in Panic Room and Adventureland, so I hope she doesn't get trapped playing bad gothy damsel in distress roles in this series for too long. A few months ago Stephen King said in an interview that Stephenie Meyer "can't write worth a damn."

Here are a few good bits from the Times article on Charlaine Harris. In addition to the latest one, she's also written 25 other books, including an earlier series about a librarian-turned-sleuth, and another "more violent and sexually explicit storyline" about a cleaning lady who investigates murders.

I already love her.

If you've seen some of Lars von Trier's movies, you'll probably understand why Stephanie Zacharek over at Salon once described his movies as "meat grinders he feeds his characters through."

I've only actually gotten through Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, and I barely made it out of those alive. Judging from those movies, and from what I've read about Dogville and Manderlay, he tends to start with troubled characters (usually women) who are struggling against some difficult situation, then makes some bad things happen to them, then makes other really bad things happen, then you hide under your seat until it's over.

Which is why it's not really a shock to learn that von Trier has been suffering from "severe and inexplicable depression" for the last two years, according to an interview in Variety. "Severe" I understand. But I think I can come up with one really good theory that might explain why he's been down lately. Some kind of karmic backlash against directors who make psychically agonizing movies just bit back, big time.

Anyway, he's started to cheer up, and is showing his new movie at Cannes this year. It's called Antichrist, and it's a horror movie. [official site] He was probably pretty desperate to get back to creating lots of new and horrible things to do to his characters, so it may have been therapeutic.

Here's the story: Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are a troubled couple who retreat to their country house to try to get their lives back on track. Then some bad things happen. Then some really bad things happen and nature starts taking over and there are some sort of snarling marmots in their house and all hell breaks loose.

Here's the trailer.

It looks like there are also some beautiful shots of the two stars looking pensive and beleaguered in creepy natural settings:

Charlotte Gainsbourg notes there are lots of graphic sex scenes in the movie, whch I am going to guess means that there are also lots of violent and terrifying sex scenes, and that overall the movie is as disturbing and sick as anything he's ever done.

Von Trier says, "For me it is a very personal film. It is childish, even though it definitely is not for children to see."

Last night I watched the weirdest movie I've seen so far this year at one of the last screenings of the Tribeca Film Festival. It's titled Midgets vs. Mascots, and plays like an especially surreal competitive reality show--more offensive than "Little People, Big World", but mostly less shocking than the really nasty scenes from the first few episodes of "Rock of Love Bus".

The premise of the movie is this: a successful little person, who during his career transitioned from mascot to porn star, dies, and leaves his estate to whichever team wins of a series of 30 challenges. One team is midgets. One team is mascots. Both teams end up getting really porny.

As you would guess, the humor centers on fart jokes, sex jokes, porn jokes, puke jokes, and poop jokes, and slurs based on race, gender, body size, penis size, and horniness. It's quantity, not quality. Too many jokes depended on shock value and nothing else, so sometimes it was pretty jaw-dropping and funny, but often it was unimaginative and not that funny. But it won third place in the film festival's Audience Awards! People love schlock.

But the reality show style was absolutely perfect, complete with trash-talking scenes on each of the teams' tour buses, the competing coaches secretly getting busy, and escalating gross-out depravity. Some of the challenges were inspired, including Drinking a Gallon of Milk, Making a Movie Trailer in 30 Minutes, Tetherball, and Getting Someone to Punch You in the Face After the Fewest Insults.

Plus the cast. In addition to the primary cast members Bunny, Gator, Spartan Man, and Taco, we've got Gary Coleman as the lead little person, the little actor from In Bruges, Jason "Jay" Mewes, and Scottie Pippin.

The movie website has some NSFW clips, some interviews that discuss Gary Coleman's sort of sweet rants about the movie and a claim that he threatened to kill the cast, and audience comments such as "Love the racial offensiveness" and "I liked the booger dialogue."

I went to see a good movie that opened on Friday--Sleep Dealer by first time director Alex Rivera [official site]. It's only playing in New York and LA so far, but it got a pretty good review in the Times from A.O. Scott and hopefully will get to other cities.

The movie is about the near future when the US-Mexico border has been closed. American employers still hire Mexican workers for construction and factory jobs and to work as bus boys and in child care, but the workers are all lined up in warehouses in Mexico, manipulating robots in the US via wires connecting their bodies to a big, centralized node network. Glowing blue wires plug directly into workers' central nervous system through nodes that they get riveted onto their arms and backs (see the movie poster), usually on the black market by a "coyotek" (ha). We follow a young guy from Oaxaca named Memo as he comes to Tijuana to get some nodes and find work.

People also use their nodes for entertainment: they can connect directly to their computers to upload memories and make them available for sale, and can connect to other people during sex and achieve some kind of sexy psychic mind-meld.

There are lots of ideas here that we've seen before. People's life energy being used by sentient machines through sockets in their bodies is right out of The Matrix. William Gibson's Neuromancer has people connecting their bodies and brains directly to their computers. There's also some of David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (though the nodes in that movie were fleshier and more orifice-like, since Cronenberg loves weird orifices) and Strange Days, where people illegally sell their memories.

But Sleep Dealer goes beyond straight sci-fi with some interesting connections to real immigration policy and other ways that the US exploits Mexico. In the movie, American companies use workers' labor while offering no benefits of citizenship, decent working conditions, or basic safety. Sound familiar? The movie also shows the US owning most of the water in Mexico, charging local residents high prices and killing any suspected "aqua-terrorists" who try to get access to their own natural resource. In real life, the US uses almost all the water of the Colorado River, and the little bit that reaches Mexico is salty and gross.

The movie has some smart references to the US-Mexico bracero program that operated from World War II until the 1960s that allowed Mexican guest workers to take temporary jobs in the US with guaranteed minimum wages and benefits. The program was good for a lot of workers, but also encouraged some employers to hire Mexican workers outside the bracero program if they would agree to work for lower wages and no benefits, setting up the kind of exploitation that's still going on now. The factory where Mexicans go to plug in and work remotely in the US is called Cybracero (see Memo's uniform in the photo above.)

There's also a storyline involving a smart and beautiful writer that Memo meets, Luz, who starts secretly selling her memories of their encounters on TruNode, a market for other people's memories. When Memo finds out what she's doing, it reminded me of every blogger that's gotten fired or dumped for oversharing on their public website or Facebook.

The movie premiered at the 2008 Sundance and is only making it to theaters now. It's small and low-budget, but pretty smart and original in its take on ideas we've seen before. The Ain't It Cool News review from Sundance says "If this film is director Rivera's THX, I can't wait to see his Star Wars."

The 90's movie magazine Movieline is back, online only. The print magazine ran from 1989 to 2003, and it was a fun read. Looking back at it now, it serves as an interesting document about how people thought about movies and celebrities in our no-so-distant ancient past (for example, the 2003 "sex symbol" Kevin Spacey cover above, that frankly makes my skin crawl.) To help take you back, here's a 1996 cover with a quote from Heather Locklear about whether she or Teri Hatcher had the most downloaded images.

The original magazine was a good general-interest movie mag, but also compiled some smart and interesting lists, like their 1995 100 Best Movies Ever Made list, a few years before AFI started doing their own. They also did a 100 Best Foreign Films list in 1996. The Best Movies list has some good choices (Being There, In a Lonely Place) and included only 3 movies from the 90's. But one of those was True Lies. So I guess the magazine attempted to balance thinky film criticism with whatever was popular at the moment.

The new site seems to have a similar philosophy. They've got interviews with Emily Blunt and the guy who directed the new Grey Gardens, and also gossip about Leo DiCaprio and Zac Efron talking about heroin and a bit about Seinfeld porn. And stuff about TV like Parks and Recreation.

It looks like they're going for accessibility, balanced with some stuff for people who are really into watching movies and some stuff for people who are really into celebrity gossip. A bunch of the editors were hired from Defamer, which Gawker shut down as an independent site a couple of months ago. Hard to say if the world needs another site like this, but it's good to see the Defamer group is largely intact in a new home. Hopefully they'll resist the original Movieline magazine trajectory--in 2003 it changed its name to Hollywood Life, which was like a less interesting US Weekly that nobody read.

The new Movieline is owned by Mail.com, which is weird. Mail.com says that in addition to the email service they have "a growing number of essential online content destinations."

The Vault, an archive of all the print magazines, is coming soon. You can see a lot of old covers up there now, featuring a young Johnny Depp, a young Christina Ricci, and a really young Robert Downey, Jr.

Adventureland is writer-director Greg Mottola's follow up to Superbad, so I was expecting something in the same cinematic ballpark--maybe an 80's teen movie about horny kids trying to get laid at summer camp. Maybe a sweeter, slightly less kitschy Wet Hot American Summer with tons of hilarious vulgarity.

Totally wrong! It turns out writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were completely responsible for the dirty jokes and horndog hijinks in Superbad, and Greg Mottola was responsible for the sweet, wistful tone that runs through the movie, and for Bill Hader.

Adventureland is in fact about horny kids trying to get laid while working crappy summer jobs in the 80s, but it has more in common with Mystic Pizza than Meatballs. The main guy, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is an earnest virgin who reads poetry for pleasure and wants to find love and become a journalist. He combines some of Michael Cera's awkward, funny sweetness from Superbad with Jason Biggs' nerdy desperation from American Pie that results in a sort of pot-smoking teenage Woody Allen. He was OK. There are references to local ethnic tension just like in Mystic Pizza, but here it's between Jews and Catholics instead of Portuguese and whatever those rich assholes were. WASPs?

Also: great soundtrack. Here's an interview with Greg Mottola about how he decided which songs to use. We've got The Replacements, Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and Husker Du, which is all fine, but seriously, how many teenagers in suburban Pittsburgh were actually listening to Big Star in 1987? Big Star certainly gained a larger following through the 90's and now everyone who likes REM or Primal Scream knows them, but back then, the defining characteristic of the band seemed to be their abject commercial failure. Yet we've got the cool amusement park girl listening to "#1 Record" on her parents' hi-fi. It reminded me of a scene in The Wedding Singer, set in 1985, when Adam Sandler's character, a Van Halen fan, says he's been listening to The Cure a lot lately. There's just no way.

Adventureland also features some Falco, Poison, and Foreigner, mostly played over the amusement park's PA system and by cover bands at local bars, so there was some representation of 80s trash pop reality.

My favorite part of the movie was Martin Starr as a wise-cracking Gogol fan (above). He also played one of the geeks on "Freaks and Geeks", the excellent Judd Apatow/Paul Feig-created TV show that aired in 1999-2000. Actually, Adventureland is like an continuation of that show if the nerdy characters had come back to Michigan after college and found each other again--it's the same combination of smart kids stuck somewhere they don't fit in, meatheady bullies, horniness, and lots of weed. Greg Mottola directed a few episodes of the show, which was also set in the mid 80s, so there you go.

Next, Mottola is directing a new movie by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost called Paul, about two British comic book fans traveling around the US which is pretty much guaranteed to be great.

This is a photo from WWE's Wrestlemania 25, taken last night in Houston. It's Mickey Rourke, a fake wrestler, punching out Chris Jericho, an actual wrestler. Or at least Jericho is an actual pro wrestler, which makes him a real fake wrestler, while Mickey Rourke is just a fake fake wrestler.

Since The Wrestler came out late last year, Mickey Rourke has been talking all kinds of smack about wanting to get in the ring and do some actual wrestling. As already has been very thoroughly reported everywhere, he got into professional boxing before he started acting, and again during his slow acting period in the 90's, and actually did OK.

Playing Randy "The Ram" Robinson in The Wrestler encompasses many overlapping levels of reality and make-believe for someone like Mickey Rourke, and the experience seems to have steered his second career away from boxing and toward scripted, choreographed bouts that you can watch on pay-per-view. On Sunday night, upstart whippersnapper Jericho challenged Hall of Famers "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat to a 3-on-1. He beat them all handily, then started taunting Mickey Rourke, who was in the audience.

Rourke then surprised everyone* by stepping into the ring and delivering some bare-knuckle boxing moves. From WWE's coverage: "The star of The Wrestler entered the squared circle, but soon decided he’d heard enough of Jericho’s relentless taunts. Rourke, a former boxer, swung a slew of heavy fists at his tormentor, finishing with a punch that dimmed the lights of the conceited Superstar and dropped both him, and his pride, to the mat." Then he walked off the stage in victory with Ric Flair, one of my childhood favorites.

Here's video, and some more photos.

It's probably psychologically dangerous to indulge the fantasies/delusions of a loose cannon like Mickey Rourke and let him out-perform guys who have been doing this since the 70's, but it makes for good pretend entertainment. Meanwhile, the Iron Man 2 insurers are wondering what they've gotten themselves into. Hopefully he won't get as submerged in his role in Stallone's South American mercenary movie The Expendables.

*not really

A lot of us saw Anil Kapoor for the first time when he played the devious game show host in Slumdog Millionaire. He was one of my favorite characters in the movie while he was being subtle and mysteriously sneaky, but when he suddenly made that ham-handed outburst toward the end, like "I call the shots around here! That slumdog will never become a millionaire on MY SHOW!" or whatever, the whole movie sort of lost me.

Anyway: Kapoor is already a mega-star in India, and has been in about 100 movies over the last 25 years. He's alerady on the next step to fame in America by signing up to be a regular character on the next season of 24.

Luckily for him, he doesn't have to play a terrorist. Sort of unluckily for him, he does have to pretend to be from the Middle East, coming to the US as part of an anti-terrorism mission.

24 is good at recruiting Indian actors to play Middle Eastern terrorists. We've already had Kal Penn, who played a terrorist Ahmed Amar last season in one of the few storylines of that season that was good, and Anil Kumar, who played a villain named Kalil Hasan, the operative who stopped at the gas station that Kiefer then absurdly pretended to hold up in Season 4.

24 also casts Latino-Americans and Italians who all convincingly played Middle Eastern terrorists, so they don't get too hung up on ethnic specificity: if you have brown skin, you're in.

Anil Kapoor is a lot of fun to watch onscreen, so I think he'll be a good, scenery-chewing addition to the show.

Tomorrow, Fred "Nookie" Durst's directorial debut (!!) comes out. It's called The Education of Charlie Banks.

Wait, wait. Isn't that the movie the came out last year, with Robert Downey, Jr. and the kid who starts offering counseling and anti-depressants out of the high school boys' bathroom? Oh right, that was Charlie Bartlett. [video]

Or what about that other one with Tom Hanks and the Soviets in Afghanistan and Julia Roberts as the fancy vampy lady with too much lipstick? Oh yeah, that's Charlie Wilson's War. [trailer]

Can we all stop naming our movies after the title character whose name is Charlie with an English last name? I can't keep all this straight and don't want to inadvertantly watch a movie by Fred Durst.

Education of Charlie Banks is about a kid growing up in New York in the 80's, then going off to college where he is surrounded by a bunch of rich jerky guys and learns important life lessons (which I learned from the trailer.)

It stars Jesse Eisenberg, the kid from The Squid and the Whale, who is also in about a million other interesting movies coming up:

• Adventureland, the Greg Mottola movie coming out next week


• Holy Rollers, about Hasidic Jews running an Ecstasy ring


• Zombieland, which takes place in a world overrun with zombies


• Something called Kill Your Darlings, about Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs coming together in New York in the 40's. Eisenberg plays Ginsberg, Chris Evans plays Kerouac, which sounds pretty good. Really--Chris Evans was good in Sunshine!

This is Bobb'e J. Thompson, and he is the next huge American preteen superstar. He was in last summer's very funny Role Models , then he was the star of the most memorable scene of last week's episode of "30 Rock" [video--his scene is in Chapter 3]. On "30 Rock" he played Tracy Morgan's son Tracy, Jr., and delivered my favorite line, illustrating what home life is like with an unemployed Tracy: "You want to see what he packed me for lunch today? A jar of mayonnaise and a pack of cigarettes."

Bobb'e is really good at outrageous over-acting. Everything he does is huge. He gets all kinds of filthy jokes about sex and child molestation and his comic book "The Adventures of The Booby Watcher" in his movies and shows, and he's only 13. He doesn't play by the rules. Cartoon Network just announced that they're giving him his own show later this year, and it's not even going to be a cartoon.

Before he played Tracy Morgan's son on "30 Rock", Bobb'e played Tracy Morgan's son on "The Tracy Morgan Show" back in 2003. It got canceled, but Bobb'e at age 8 was already doing stuff that was probably inappropriate for kids. An article from back then about the show called attention to Bobb'e because he "gets some of the sharpest, funniest lines", which the writer thought might be "too sophisticated" for a young kid, which I am guessing is code for "dirty".

Tracy countered that accusation with "Real kids nowadays say even crazier stuff," so he was nuts back then too. Actually, yeah, nowadays the kids are saying crazy stuff, but those kids are still Bobb'e Thompson.

It seems like the last year of Anne Hathaway's life has been perfectly constructed to prepare her to play Judy Garland, which today we found out is actually happening. The Weinsteins optioned the 2001 Judy Garland biography, Get Happy, which includes a lot of Garland's own writings.

Not only does Anne Hathaway look a lot like Garland, but think about what we've learned about her lately:

Does she sing and dance? Check! She briefly joined Hugh Jackman onstage during the opening number of this year's Oscars [video]. She's no Judy, but she hit some pretty big notes, and looked like she could handle herself in a biopic recreation of, say, "The Trolley Song".

Can she play a drug addict? Check! Rachel Getting Married was all about being a self-destructive addict who just wants to deaden the pain of her miserable life. Garland was on pills since she was a teenager, and died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

Is she unlucky in love? Check! Anne had Raffaello Follieri. Judy had five husbands.

Anne Hathaway might have to transform that big, thousand-watt smile into Judy's dreamy, little-girl-lost expression, but I think she'll be great.

Manohla Dargis' review of the new movie about Central Americans trying to cross the border into the US, Sin Nombre, isn't super-positive. The teenage characters at the center of the story are maybe a little too adorable and all the horrible things that happen to them might get "assuaged by some final-act uplift," but it's got nice cinematography, and she says the writer/director has a sincerity that a lot of other movies about desperate people lack.

But then I read more about the writer/director, Cary Fukunaga, in an email to the members of the Landmark Theatres Film Club (it's a very exclusive club) about his travels with people that come up from Central America to cross the border, and now it sounds pretty incredible.

From the email:

Sounds a whole lot more exciting than El Norte from 10th grade Spanish class! And that's because more violent = more exciting. Getting across the border is a lot more dangerous now, especially with the rise of international gangs like Mara Salvatrucha, which started in LA and moved to other US cities, then back to El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. They're the guys who are really into getting tattoos on their faces and killing people, and they're all over Sin Nombre.

Actually, it might be a good idea to sneak into I Love You, Man after watching this one. Let the doughy-faced, Rush fan, man love help you recover.

Have you seen the trailer for the new Seth Rogen mall cop sub-genre movie, Observe and Report? It doesn't look so great, and the timing of the release will automatically make people notice its unfortunate similarites to Paul Blart. Plus, wow, Seth Rogen sure is in a lot of movies these days.

But a few things suggest that it might be OK after all. Wired reports from South by Southwest that the screening was "transgressive and violently funny," and also points out that the director of the movie, Jody Hill, also created the new show on HBO, "Eastbound & Down", which stars Danny McBride as a washed-up ex-baseball player and by all accounts is pretty funny, especially if you like Talladega Nights.

Plus, the red-band trailer for Observe and Report that's up on the official site has lots of swearing, drug use, and brief nudity, which is a good sign. Another review on Cinematical says it's "a farce that deals in weirdness, darkness, and downright SHOCK." So I guess that means there's full frontal male nudity.

I still have faith in co-star Anna Faris even though The House Bunny was a big disappointment. In Smiley Face, she's a natural.

Here are some video clips of "Eastbound & Down". Pretty good, and special guest star Craig Robinson! Who I think is in even movies a year than Seth Rogen, but I never get sick of him.

I saw Watchmen this weekend, along with everybody else. I haven't read the book, and went in with expectations that hovered somewhere between the second Matrix movie and the third Spider-Man movie.

But it was better than both of those. The visuals were really cool and I liked the story's grim, Machiavellian attitude about fighting crime in a hopelessly self-destructive world, even if it didn't always make sense. And I loved the characters--they reminded me of the X-Men, if Xavier's and Magneto's respective posses had been fused into one morally ambiguous group of misunderstood outsiders.

But the best part was Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. This is the moment for Haley to get really, really famous. Before this movie, he was probably best known as the cool kid with the motorcycle in Bad News Bears (when he was 15) and for playing the released sex offender in 2006's Little Children. I also really love him as Moocher in one of my all-time favorites, Breaking Away.

This guy is a master of playing really intense, heartbreaking, compelling characters who are totally fucked in the head. I guarantee that, if you saw Little Children, his brief scene with Jane Adams freaked you out, and you might even remember it more clearly than the rest of the movie.

His whole performance in Watchmen was kind of like that. As the central narrator of the movie, and the only member of the original group who still seems to be living as a shadowy crime-fighter when all the rest have moved on to something else, he has to get the audience on board for the movie to work. Also, he's a paranoid sociopath with an especially perverse and gruesome sense of justice. But somehow he pulled it off-- I was right there with him through the whole movie, though more than once my jaw dropped open at the sick stuff he was doing. If his character had been any less interesting, the movie wouldn't have been anywhere near as good.

There were other good parts, too. The actors were mostly solid, except for the woman who played Silk Spectre II--flat as a flounder. Especially compared to the delightful Carla Gugino, who was awesome as Silk Spectre the First. What a tease! Couldn't she have just played both?

I haven't read the book, but I've heard from people who have that one of the few visual changes Zack Snyder made for the movie was to significantly expand Dr. Manhattan's weinus (of course he did!) which I strongly support.

Even at nearly three hours long, Watchmen pulled in $55 million opening weekend--pretty good, though still behind Zack Snyder's last movie, 300, which was the top March movie opening ever. If anything, I wish there had been more backstory and character development about Nite Owl and Ozymandias, though that would have pushed it to an insane original Kill Bill length, so maybe it's just as well.

During the 90's when his acting career was dead, Jackie Earle Haley was apparently a successful director of commercials. Here's a great, touching article about his big comeback in Little Children and All the King's Men. Next he's going to be an asylum inmate in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. Can't wait.

Oscars wooo!

It was a better show than usual this year, largely because of Hugh Jackman's natural showmanship and unstoppable appeal and charm and talent and handsomeness. Plus Ben Kingsley! And Beyoncé and her red glittery hips! [video] Woo!

If you watched the red carpet interviews and saw the event on TV, you pretty much saw everything there was to see. So here are just a few notes about being there and the whole crazy experience:

• My buddy Shemrock and I arrived at the Kodak Theater later than planned, on account of the unwavering persecution of pedestrians in LA (see below.) So we had limited mingling time at the pre-show cocktail party. But we did walk the red carpet along with Kate Winslet, Penélope Cruz, Alicia Keys, and Taraji Nelson. I said hi to a very sweetly giddy Dev Patel and told him I dug him in "Skins", like a BBC America nerd.
• Even when your hotel is only a couple of blocks away, you cannot walk to the Oscars. It might be simpler for everyone involved if you could walk up to the security check point and show your ticket and ID, but instead you have to wait in a really long line of cars, show a special car pass to a series of cops, get your car checked for explosives, and have a valet take it and park it in a huge garage and then get it for you again afterwards. Shemrock figured out that LA must be at the mercy of an all-powerful valet union that calls all the shots in the city.
• It's true that the academy is largely made up of very elderly people. They were everywhere. The ones sitting next to me momentarily got excited about Eva Marie Saint, and spent the rest of the evening complaining about how long the show was.
• During commercial breaks, Hugh Jackman kept the crowd entertained. Part way through, he read a note that his wife had passed up to him from out in the audience, which said, "Show's going great, dear. I'm hungry." So he got a plate of cookies, ran out into the audience and gave cookies to his wife, Sam Mendes, and some guy who looked like DJ Qualls.
• We also got to see a little montage video of various celebrities talking about the Best Picture nominees. You can watch it here. There's Robert Evans, Michael Stipe, Flea, Mike Bloomberg, Mike Nichols, Hugh Hefner, Sarah Silverman, Mickey Rooney, Graydon Carter, Joe Torre, Spike Jonze, and the French guy from Man on Wire.
• Oddest moment: The guys in front of me at the valet pick-up had their car pulled around. It was a hearse.
• Funniest moment: Shemrock and I were approaching the theater, driving down Hollywood Blvd through screaming crowds of people behind barricades on the sidewalks who were there to see all the famous people driving by. Shem rolls down the windows and shouts, "I was in The Dark Knight!"

Luckily, I was too busy getting ready to go to the Oscars this year to get into a betting pool, because I would have gotten destroyed. Departures? Did anyone get that one right? Here are all the winners.

Update: As far as I'm concerned Sean Penn and Dustin Lance Black are as American as apple pie and Mickey Rourke, but they are somewhat more marginalized than say, Meryl Streep.

OK everyone, it's time to imagine that you're a member of the Academy. Maybe you were the props master for Big Trouble in Little China, the sound mixer for Tootsie, or Karl Malden. How do you think the Academy will vote? Ballots are due Tuesday.

Here are all the nominees for the Oscars. Our picks of who we think will (not should) win are below.

Here's the NY Times poll, where you can vote for what you want to win even though you know deep down those bastards are going to give the Oscar to Benjamin f'ing Button. They'll score your ballot during the awards on Feb. 22.

Through a miraculous set of circumstances, I am going to attend the Oscars this year. So far, the to-do list includes sitting next to Jack Nicholson (so I'll get on TV all one thousand times the camera cuts to him cackling in the front row), doing keg stands with Wesley Snipes at Prince's afterparty, and making out with any combination of the following: Clive Owen, Amy Adams, Mickey Rourke, and Werner Herzog.

Please add your own picks in the comments.

Nominees are:

Actor in a leading role
Richard Jenkins in "The Visitor"
Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon"
Sean Penn in "Milk"
Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler" [Amy] He's had some practice delivering acceptance speeches now, so this one might be less rambling and weird, but I still can't wait to hear it.
[Cushie] I think Mickey should win and probably will, even though he was arguably playing himself and maybe Sean Penn's Milk was a harder role.

Actor in a supporting role
Josh Brolin in "Milk"
Robert Downey Jr. in "Tropic Thunder"
Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Doubt"
Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight" [Amy] This would be a really interesting race if Heath Ledger hadn't died. [Cushie] He can't lose.
Michael Shannon in "Revolutionary Road"

Actress in a leading role
Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married" [Cushie] She deserves it, I think, but might only get it because of strange vote splitting. Awards voters do love Streep and Winslet.
Angelina Jolie in "Changeling"
Melissa Leo in "Frozen River"
Meryl Streep in "Doubt"
Kate Winslet in "The Reader" [Amy] If enough voters bumped her up to Best Actress from Supporting, I think she's got it.

Actress in a supporting role
Amy Adams in "Doubt"
Penélope Cruz in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" [Amy] This is a really strong category this year. The Academy loves mentally unstable supporting actresses, so I think she'll get it.
Viola Davis in "Doubt"
Taraji P. Henson in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Marisa Tomei in "The Wrestler" [Cushie] Tough call but who can resist the stripper with a heart of gold. In an Aronofsky movie. Played by the delightful Marisa Tomei.

Animated feature film
"Bolt"
"Kung Fu Panda"
"WALL-E" [Amy] [Cushie] Beauty and the Beast got nominated for Best Picture, and this one didn't?!

Art direction
"Changeling"
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" [Amy] Anyone who could remind us all of what Brad Pitt looked like when he was 23 deserves an Oscar as far as I'm concerned.
"The Dark Knight" [Cushie] Doesn't everyone love this crazy dystopian Gotham?
"The Duchess"
"Revolutionary Road"

Cinematography
"Changeling"
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"The Dark Knight" [Amy]
"The Reader"
"Slumdog Millionaire" [Cushie]

Costume design
"Australia"
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" [Amy]
"The Duchess"
"Milk" [Cushie] [Cushie loves tight jeans. -Amy]
"Revolutionary Road"

Directing
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" David Fincher
"Frost/Nixon" Ron Howard
"Milk" Gus Van Sant [Amy] Anything that isn't Slumdog is a long shot, but I think the Academy might throw a bone to Gus Van Sant since he won't win Best Picture, and as a sort of Proposition 8 protest
"The Reader" Stephen Daldry
"Slumdog Millionaire" Danny Boyle [Cushie]. This is Danny Boyle's big moment.

Documentary feature
"The Betrayal"
"Encounters at the End of the World"
"The Garden"
"Man on Wire" [Cushie] So the producers don't have to embarrassingly cut to Samuel L. Jackson and Debbie Allen in the audience when the Black Documentary wins.
"Trouble the Water" [Amy] Oh yeah, they're going to cut to Sam Jackson and Lou Gossett, Jr, alright. This one is the popular favorite, though Man On Wire is the best nominee.

Documentary short subject
"The Conscience of Nhem En"
"The Final Inch"
"Smile Pinki"
"The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306" [Amy] I have no idea, but I went to the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis last year, and who's gonna argue with a MLK doc? [Cushie]

Film editing
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"The Dark Knight"
"Frost/Nixon"
"Milk"
"Slumdog Millionaire" [Amy] There sure were a lot of cuts in this movie! Remember: for the Academy, "Best Editing" is usually the same as "Most Editing".[Cushie] Since Slumdog gets no acting awards it has to pad its numbers.

Foreign language film
"The Baader Meinhof Complex" Germany
"The Class" France [Cushie] I really don't know.
"Departures" Japan
"Revanche" Austria
"Waltz with Bashir" Israel [Amy] What a great movie.

Makeup
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" [Amy]
"The Dark Knight" [Cushie]
"Hellboy II: The Golden Army"

Music (score)
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"Defiance"
"Milk"
"Slumdog Millionaire" [Amy][Cushie]
"WALL-E"

Music (song)
"Down to Earth" from "WALL-E" Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman
"Jai Ho" from "Slumdog Millionaire" A.R. Rahman and Gulzar
"O Saya" from "Slumdog Millionaire" A.R. Rahman and Maya Arulpragasam [Amy] M.I.A. on stage will be this year's Three 6 Mafia. Especially if she just gave birth a couple of hours earlier! [Cushie] It will be funniest if she is still pregnant.

Best picture
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"Frost/Nixon"
"Milk"
"The Reader"
"Slumdog Millionaire" [Amy] I wish it was Milk. Oh well. [Cushie]

Animated short film
"La Maison en Petits Cubes"
"Lavatory - Lovestory" [Cushie] No idea but I had to be different from Amy.
"Oktapodi"
"Presto" [Amy]
"This Way Up"

Live action short film
"Auf der Strecke (On the Line)" [Amy] Got a chance to watch these, and this was the best one. Really great little movie.
"Manon on the Asphalt"
"New Boy"
"The Pig" [Cushie]
"Spielzeugland (Toyland)"

Sound editing
"The Dark Knight" [Amy]
"Iron Man"
"Slumdog Millionaire" [Cushie]
"WALL-E"
"Wanted"

Sound mixing
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"The Dark Knight"
"Slumdog Millionaire" [Amy][Cushie]
"WALL-E"
"Wanted"

Visual effects
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"The Dark Knight" [Amy][Cushie]
"Iron Man"

Adapted screenplay
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"Doubt" [Amy]
"Frost/Nixon"
"The Reader"
"Slumdog Millionaire" [Cushie]

Original screenplay
"Frozen River"
"Happy-Go-Lucky" [Amy] Maybe my favorite category this year--I'd be happy for any of these to win. Though the consolation prize that Gus Van Sant wins could be this one instead of Best Director.
"In Bruges"
"Milk" [Cushie]
"WALL-E"

Let me tell you something that Wired is really good at. When they put the first sentence or two from their blog posts up on the front page, they often end the excerpt at exactly the most tantalizing point in the post.

Case in point:

Decides to WHAT? Let's see: dead husband, sci-fi, "Womb". Maybe she steals her husband's body and impregnates herself with his decaying genetic material, resulting in a screwed-up mutated zombie baby? Or coerces his aging parents into having another child using herself as a surrogate or something creepy like that?

When you click through to read the entire post, you learn that, of course, she has the dead husband cloned. Which sounds cool too, and will hopefully bring up all the disturbing, Frankenstein-like implications of cloning, since she will almost definitely treat the cloned guy like she owns him and force him to marry her and basically be her creature. Isn't that the point?

I have to admit that I'm a little in love with Eva Green and the sassy but inscrutable and sort of messed-up sensibility she brought to her characters in The Dreamers and Casino Royale. Hopefully Womb's director will also make good use of her outstanding rack.

The guy who's going to be the new Doctor Who next year, Matt Smith, plays the dead/undead husband.

This new movie He's Just Not That Into You, based on a book, based on a line of dialogue from a sitcom, looks just awful. I've been trying to figure out what is so loathsome about this movie, and Manohla Dargis's review spells it out: what kind of woman would be at all interested in watching a movie like this? It's ostensibly about the realities of women's dating lives, but the movie sounds like a unreconstructed male dating fantasy: dickheady guys are surrounded with gorgeous, available, and interested women who are also highly insecure and probably crazy. When they want to see these women, they do, and when they don't, the ladies have to go off by themselves and read self-help books to try to cope with the agony of rejection.

The problem here is that the movie is marketed all wrong. The target audience should be single men, not single women. If the writers had thrown in better jokes, some decent male actors, a lot more sex, and replaced all scenes in which women shop or get manicures together with scenes of guys playing video games and doing shots, you'd have a movie that would actually make sense.

Actually, I think the movie I'm envisioning is the last 6 movies produced by Judd Apatow.

Anyway, Manohla's review is great. She envisions what the movie would look like if it were successfully targeted to a female audience, by asking, "What Would Thelma and Louise Do?" after a character goes on a bad date with a drippy guy named Conor:

A good anti-HJNTIY is last year's Happy-Go-Lucky, in which a female character actually gets what she wants sometimes without being desperate, pathetic, or insane.

Today's edition of Who'dat?™ is just about impossible, but you can go ahead and click on the photo below if you think you know who it is before I give it away.

But here's a hint: "Horses Are Pretty".

Yes! It's little Hallie Kate Eisenberg, who played temperamental indie director Christie in IFC's funny ads from the late 90's [watch examples, "You be quiet! No you be quiet!" and "Lili doesn't know her lines today"].

So the real news is here is that Hallie Kate Eisenberg is going to star in a new movie currently being filmed in NYC called Holy Rollers, and it sounds awesome.

The movie is based on a true story about a ring of drug traffickers who brought an insane amount of Ecstasy into the US in the late 90's. The twist: they were all Hasidic Jews. Sean Erez, an Israeli-Canadian in his early 30s, worked with a 17 year-old kid from Brooklyn, Shimon Levita, who recruited his teenage friends to make trips back and forth to Amsterdam carrying tens of thousands of pills at a time. The LA Times has a good pretty story on the case from around the time everyone was sentenced in 2001. Also the NY Times quotes Levita speaking to a New York judge during his sentencing: "I was raised in a real orthodox religious house," he said, hands clasped behind his back. "We didn't have no television and no radio. I didn't know what drugs were. But in nine months in jail, I learned what they can do."

Yesterday's Daily News had a good piece on the movie--they interview director Kevin Asch and actor/producer Danny Abeckaser, who got the idea for the movie while watching a documentary on the real smugglers on Discovery. The article covers a nightclub scene that was shot recently at Marquee, with a great photo of guys in yarmulkes and black suits walking through a crowd of dancing club kids.

The young smugglers are played by Jesse Eisenberg, the older brother in The Squid and the Whale, and Justin Bartha from National Treasure. Cast also features 16 year-old Hallie Kate Eisenberg, and, best of all, Q-Tip as an Ethiopian Jew named Ephraim.

Last year, the real Sean Erez was convicted, again, for trafficking cocaine in Toronto.

Sundance ended on Saturday, with many celebrities attending screenings and walking around Utah smoking Marlboros.

To play today's Who'dat?™, look at the photo below and try to guess who it is. Then click on the photo to see if you're right.

A few of the notable movies at Sundance this year:

The Daily News has a story today about Joseph Brooks, a man who wrote the 1977 love ballad "You Light Up My Life", made popular by Debbie Boone and used as the title song in his show biz/romance movie of the same name, which Brooks wrote and directed.

These days, the 70 year-old Brooks is using his apparently durable fame to lure aspiring actresses to his apartment via Craig's List ads, promising to show them the Oscar he won for the song and give them parts in his next movie, then drugging and raping them. He's allegedly committed 5 such assaults over the past two years. Gross.

Maybe he was inspired by Jared Harris' use of the song in Todd Solondz's Happiness, in which his Russian cab driver character's acoustic rendition effortlessly sweeps a love-struck Jane Adams into bed.

Here's the video (involves sex, NSFW):

Here's a video of Debbie Boone singing the song at the Grammys.

It was a big night for Mickey Rourke. He got up on stage to collect his Best Actor Golden Globe, dressed in a satiny suit, sequined sash, and a chain wallet, and while he was up there, he talked about his long road back, got Darren Aronofsky to give him the finger on live tv, and thanked his agent, his co-stars, and his dogs (it was not, as Spout blog notes, an acceptance speech scripted by any publicist.)

He also restated his enduring love for Axl Rose, in what I'm guessing was Axl's first Golden Globes acknowledgment, for giving the movie the rights to use "Sweet Child o' Mine" at an affordable price. That single rights clearance sounds like it was one of the most important elements about the whole experience of making The Wrestler, as far as Mickey Rourke is concerned. In an interview about that song, Darren Aronofsky also talked about it like it was a defining event of the entire movie:

[video of his speech]

Note: In addition to all the former members of Guns n' Roses, Mickey Rourke is also friends with Bruce Springsteen and his main awards season competitor Sean Penn.

Lots of great movies this year. As usual, I tried over the last frantic week to watch all the stuff that came out right at the end of the year, but it turned out that most of the really good ones weren't the 12/26-release-in-NY-and-LA-only Oscars fodder.

So here's my list:

Happy-Go-Lucky. The sunshiny, effervescent Poppy, played by Sally Hawkins, gets dropped in the middle of your typical Mike Leigh movie, shocking everyone who was used to the usual misanthropes, miserable teens, and misguided abortionists from his other movies. Her series of driving lessons with the World's Worst Driving Instructor, Eddie Marsan, shows Poppy is not a mindless dingbat wandering through life with rose-tinted blinders, but an insightful person who understands what people are really like and chooses to bring kindness and positivity to everyone she meets. This movie kind of changed the way I think about everything and was my favorite of the year. Also I could have watched an entire movie about Poppy and her friends sitting around bullshitting after their girls' night out.

Rachel Getting Married. Like Happy-Go-Lucky, Rachel Getting Married felt so natural that watching the group and party scenes felt like being at a real family's house. An insane family that might be exhausting to be around sometimes, but a believable one. Anne Hathaway was great in a totally unflattering role, playing a girl I could empathize with even though I didn't like her, and the supporting cast is the best ensemble of the year. Stephen Holden has a good dissection of the awkward rehearsal dinner speech that Kym makes while everyone cringes. I can't wait for Rosemarie DeWitt to become a big star.

The Wrestler. A moving and emotional movie about Mickey Rourke/Randy "The Ram" finding his way in a world that's moved on without him, and getting his pecs shot with a staple gun. I really cared about this guy, probably more than any other character this year. The writing was a little rocky sometimes, but Mickey Rourke made it better than it actually was. Can't wait to see him in 13!

The Edge of Heaven. Turks in Germany and Germans in Turkey--the latest movie from Fatih Akin, who also made the excellent Head-On. This movie is about the complicated and seemingly fated intersections of three families. Love, crime, death, politics--all heavy stuff, but it unrolls so easily that it never feels contrived or tragic.

Let the Right One In. The life of a lonely Swedish tween and his vampire almost-girlfriend. I especially liked the sweet, tentative, sort of creepy early scenes between the boy and girl as they figure out how to relate to each other ("Will you be my girlfriend?" "Oskar, I'm not a girl.") and the scenes that matter-of-factly reveal the gruesome realities of maintaining a supply of fresh blood. Both of the kids were first-time actors in this movie--incredible.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days. AKA The Romanian abortion movie. Watching this movie from the safe distance of my American living room in 2008, I was still filled with a sense of powerless dread. It was so tense and deliberately paced that it felt like it was playing out in real time. Anamaria Marinca is especially good as the main character Otilia, a helpful friend who, as Roger Ebert says, does everything but have the abortion herself. (She's going to star in Julie Delpy's next movie, so that's good news.) I especially like the nightmare of a family party scene that breaks up the main action, and gives Otilia the opportunity to lay into her clueless boyfriend for all the injustices that women face when they risk unwanted pregnancy. I loved this movie and never want to watch it again.

Paranoid Park. Gus Van Sant's dreamy story about a skater boy in Portland trying to cope with the confusion of teenage life and the fallout of a bad accident. This one is more about style than the story--all hazy, indistinct camera work and a disjointed structure that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

Synecdoche, NY. I think it's best to just let this movie wash over you and not try to figure out what's happening every single minute. Here's what I got: a man spends his whole life trying to capture or recreate his life in a play, then it turns out that the play actually is his life. But it seems like the only time he finds any happiness is when he's living his life, not turning it into the play. Anyway, you know how amazing the supporting cast is? Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh. My favorite scenes were the ones with the notes between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener as his ex-wife Adele (didn't she also play an Adele in Out of Sight?) who thinks he's her maid. It didn't quite resonate with me like Eternal Sunshine did, but it's still a good one.

Waltz With Bashir. Israeli men think back to their experiences as soldiers in the Lebanon War in 1982, as one of them tries to recall the memories he's blocked out. I just saw this last night and at first I didn't like it much. Sure, the animation of real-life interviews is cool, the music is really good, and I liked the repetition of key scenes as the characters try to make sense of their role in the war. But the ending about the reality of the massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees made the earlier musings of some ex-soldiers seem insignificant in comparison. Then I realized that, as they say in Synecdoche, NY, we're all the leads in our own stories. And I listened to the Studio 360 interview with filmmaker and main character Ari Folman, where he says it's an anti-war movie and his decision about the ending was an ideological decision, not an artistic one. So when I thought about it that way, I liked it. Plus, playing "Enola Gay" by OMD as the soldiers are sailing into Beirut was pure morbid genius [movie clip].

Wall-E and Man on Wire. If this is going to be a Top 10 list, then these are tied. Both movies transcend their genres (Pixar family movie and historical documentary) and made their seemingly mundane subject material way more engaging and meaningful than I expected. I definitely didn't think these would be the movies that made me get a little teary, but they were.

There are a few other movies this year that I haven't seen yet or just missed at the theater that I really wish I had seen. A Christmas Tale looks great, but that 2-1/2 hour running time put me off. Frozen River looks so good I was tempted to just put it on my list even though I'm not going to see it until later this week when MoMA is showing it again; same deal with My Winnipeg, by Guy Maddin, a director I just found out about recently but like a lot. MoMA screening schedule is here.

Other movies I liked: The Reader. Kate Winslet is really great in this, and I love its examination of the worst generation gap in the history of the world: German kids born post-WWII who grew up realizing their parents were Nazis. But those fake German accents that everyone uses bugged me.

Role Models, maybe the funniest movie of the year. Also Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, all good.

Milk was just about perfect as a by-the-book biopic about a charismatic and inspiring figure, but it was completely conventional, and I wanted more. Doubt was great (go Viola Davis!), but sort of blows it at the end, and Hamlet 2 was like an out of control genius that doesn't quite hit it every time, but when it does, look out.

Worst movies: Religulous, which was a good effort ruined by Bill Maher's irritating demeanor and glaring favoritism of Jews and Catholics; and The Spirit, which I accidentally ended up watching the third time I attempted to see Slumdog Millionaire.

Here's the 2007 list.

Just like everyone else, I loved The Wrestler. If you take it at face value as a character study, it's great--the central character is so likable and tough he seems like he can handle anything, but also so fragile and damaged that you know he definitely can't. The sad life of a washed-up pro wrestler would be pathetic in other circumstances, but this character is noble in his struggle to do the right thing in a bleak and lonely world.

But on top of the standard character exploration of a struggling artist, there's a lot in there about identity, performance, simulation of sex/violence, and self-determination. I'm sure cultural studies graduate students will be writing theses about it for decades to come.

Then on top of that, there's Mickey Rourke in the lead role, which brings any analysis of this movie into the fourth dimension of complexity. He's made a mythological persona for himself, a tough-guy/psychopath mystique, whose personal history is full of questionable facts and non-questionable arrests, and he's playing a character with his own manufactured mythology and identity.

Both Mickey Rourke and Randy "The Ram" Robinson, aka Robin Ramsinsky, have created careers based on stylized performances. The main difference between them seems to be that Randy is at heart a sweet person trying (and failing) to find his place in a world that has left him behind, whereas I don't know what Mickey Rourke really is. He's a big question mark. There's more on Rourke in the Times' recent magazine section feature, which highlights his emotional retelling of his life story, which may or may not be fake. There's been tons of press about the return of Mickey Rourke, about half of which is praise for an amazing performance, and the other half is about the man himself, which usually involves comments like this one from director Darren Aronofsky: "I think the reality is this, that he's basically a ripped open nerve and he's just sizzling with emotion."

Then there's the screenwriter: this is the first movie by Robert D. Siegel, former editor-in-chief of The Onion. He apparently wrote the character with Mickey Rourke in mind, so hopefully was prepared for the emotion-sizzling he got himself into. In a brief LA Times interview about a favorite scene in the movie (the one with Ratt's "Round and Round") he says, "The actual lines from the script -- Mickey does a lot of improvising -- I’m glad they made it in: 'Like there’s anything wrong with having fun'; 'The 90s sucked.'"

If you decide to be a screenwriter, and the first thing you get produced is The Wrestler, you're doing pretty great for yourself. Actually, Siegel wrote another movie first, called Big Fan, which got the attention of Darren Aronofsky, who then asked him to write The Wrestler. Siegel seems to have a really dark sense of humor and is drawn to characters that live on the fringes. He seems especially good at bringing dignity to characters whose lives might be laughable if you didn't have so much respect for them. In a recent Times interview, he says, "The idea that a person with a comedy background would do something dark should not come as a shock to people with any exposure to comedy or darkness."

Which brings us to this other movie, Big Fan, which Siegel is directing himself. He started production on it as soon as The Wrestler was finished, and it's debuting next month at Sundance.

Here's the story: Patton Oswalt plays a 35 year-old parking garage attendant in Staten Island, who loves the NY Giants. During a chance meeting with a Giant, things go horribly wrong, and he gets publicly beaten up by his idol.

Judging from this still shot from the movie, Siegel has once again captured the dinginess of working-class life:

I'm guessing that's Patton Oswalt's mother standing there at the counter, who he may or may not live with. I'm really looking forward to this one.

Here's a great poster for The Wrestler's screening at film festivals, done up like an 80's wrestling flyer.

We all love to watch Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock every week, but how's his film career going? What has he done since Little Man, First Sunday from earlier this year, and Deep in the Valley, an almost definitely pornographic Kim Kardashian vehicle in which Tracy plays Busta Nut?

Variety announced today that Tracy Morgan will star in Freshman Roommates, in which a hapless dude drunkenly responds to a Nigerian scam email. Then Tracy Morgan, an actual deposed Nigerian prince, shows up at his door looking for his inheritance. Crazy! So we're probably looking at a weirder Coming to America with more costume changes, more strippers, and more inappropriate jokes that make you wonder if Tracy Morgan is actually mentally ill or just really good at his shtick.

The drunken emailer is played by the guy with the video camera from Cloverfield, and the screenplay is by John Mulaney, who wrote for SNL's Weekend Update Thursday series, and Nick Kroll, one of the Cavemen.

Beyoncé's latest movie, Cadillac Records, tells the story of Chicago's Chess Records, an early blues, soul, and rock label that introduced black artists to white audiences and global stardom. Beyoncé plays Etta James, and though her acting is a little uneven and the movie isn't doing especially well at the box office (it opened last week in 9th place, this week it's at 11th), she's got an Executive Producer credit and sings the hell out of a lot of soul classics on the soundtrack.

Her last major role was in Dreamgirls, the quasi-historical story of Motown Records, Detroit's early pop and R&B label. She played the Diana Ross character, and even though she was flat as a flounder, she looked great in those early 60's outfits and more or less held her own in a mediocre movie.

So what's next? I'd like to see the early rock label triumvirate completed with a movie about Stax Records, Memphis's early soul and funk label. Like Chess, most of the greats on Stax were men (Isaac Hayes, Booker T and the MG's, Otis Redding) but there were a few outsize female icons that would be great for Beyoncé to play. She could do a pretty good Mavis Staples [photo], beating out her older Staple Sisters to become the lasting solo star. I'm not Beyoncé's greatest fan, and she's better at pop than soul, but she's trying to stretch herself into a respected actress, which is good. Plus she's probably a major draw for audiences that might otherwise not care about movies about old record labels.

Cadillac Records was OK. It has a few great scenes, and Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters and Mos Def as Chuck Berry are especially good. I wish there had been more scenes about the uneasy partnership between Leonard Chess, the label owner, and Muddy Waters, his first star, since their scenes together were the most memorable. And fewer contrived lines like "Just you wait! My wife's gonna drive a Cadillac!"

The Post explains today why Bo Diddley, also a major star on Chess, isn't mentioned in the movie at all. His management company says:

That "creative accounting" is represented in the movie, with Leonard Chess diverting a bit of Chuck Berry's prodigious income stream to his less popular labelmates. The scene in Cadillac Records was almost exactly like the scene in 24 Hour Party People, the quasi-historical movie about Factory Records, when Tony Wilson uses New Order's royalties to pay for other less successful ventures, like the Hacienda and every other band on the label.

Now that investors have been scared off from stocks, real estate, and the financial institutions that used to be the foundation of our economy, we need new and innovative investment products to help us incinerate our money.

Here's Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment firm whose primary credential seems to be that they haven't gone bankrupt yet, with a financial service I can actually sort of relate to: movie futures. Here's how this new scheme works. Six months before a new movie comes out, you place bets on how well you think it's going to do. If you think a movie will do better than the odds say (determined by the market) you buy a one-millionth share. Then if it does well, you get some cash! And if it doesn't do so well, you owe your bookie, Cantor Fitzgerald, more money.

This is great news for producers of really terrible movies that people have unreasonably high expectations for, because it will get lots of casual investors and movie fans to give them advance money for their box office bomb. A year ago, I would have definitely bet that Run Fatboy Run would have done really well, like it did in the UK. But it only did $6 million in the US, so I would have lost big. One the other side you've got Mamma Mia!, which might not have had the greatest expectations, but has made $560 million globally so far.

Apparently Cantor Fitzgerald first talked about creating a movie market 7 years ago, right before the company got almost completely wiped out on September 11. Better luck this time. They also own a virtual movie market, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which for people like me is probably as good as the real thing.

Of course the first thing this scheme brings to mind is good old Bialystock and Bloom and their realization that you could make more money with a flop than a hit. "If he were certain the show would fail, a man could make a fortune!" Some unscrupulous movie producer out there could announce a movie that attracts tons of futures investors, then make sure it bombs. And someone will create some sort of alternative fund so contrary investors can bet against the market. If I could get into one of those, I'd go all in against the next movie Nicole Kidman makes.

Hopefully People and Variety will start running live odds.

A little thing on Page Six today alerted me to a Hollywood remake of a Georgian movie from two years ago that freaked the hell out of me: Tzameti (13).

This movie was pretty rough: super low-budget, black and white, with no soundtrack to speak of, but it was one of the more intense movie-going experiences I've ever had. It got some attention when it came out, even though it only played in a few theaters, because the story is so thrilling and dark: a Georgian immigrant in France unwittingly signs up for a high-risk/high-reward secret game, and lots of horrible things happen. The less you know about the movie going in, the better.

The remake will feature Mickey Rouke, described by the Post as "covered in scars, facial hair, tattoos and cowboy gear" while shooting scenes for the movie in a Long Island prison. The rest of the cast is like every tough guy you can think of: Jason Statham, Ray Winstone, Ray Liotta, one of the guys from Oz, and good old Fitty. And to balance things out, there's also the guy who played Ian Curtis in Control, who presumably plays a skinny English guy.

Here's the website for the original movie. The original writer/director is doing the remake too. It might be tricky for him to maintain the suspense and tension of the original with the new cast of famous actors, many of whom are no strangers to hamming it up (and in cowboy gear too!), but the guy seems to know what he's doing.

Milk did really well in its opening weekend. It's only playing on 34 screens, but it broke a box office record for that size release--$1.9 million since Wednesday, and it sold out at the theater where I saw it. When was the last time a Gus Van Sant movie sold out any theaters? Forget selling out, when's the last time one of his movies even cleared $1 million gross? A quick IMDb scan suggests that 2003's Elephant made just over $1.2 million total, which is a lot better than anything else he's done since 2000.

I didn't see Elephant, or Last Days, or Gerry. Paranoid Park was released earlier this year, and it was great, but also really dark and non-linear, and had a dreamy, nostalgic atmosphere that placed it squarely in the art film category of Van Sant's movies.

Here's the thing about Gus Van Sant: he can do mainstream, and he can do arty, but he seems to lurch from one style to the other whenever he gets stuck. His career is an uneven mess of solid mainstream movies (Good Will Hunting, To Die For, and I'm going to include Milk here) and solid indie/art movies (My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy, Paranoid Park) with all these embarrassing clunkers mixed in (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Finding Forrester, Psycho) that make you wonder what he was thinking.

His latest run of small movies focusing on shaggy adolescents and their encounters with death (Last Days, Elephant, Paranoid Park) didn't make any money or have any big stars. So now he's got Milk, and it looks like he's not taking any chances--he's got a cast of famous actors and a pretty well-known assassinated civil rights leader as the subject.

The movie is about as a good as a conventional biopic can get. And that's in spite of some really cliched biopic devices, including an older Harvey Milk narrating his life story into a tape recorder for posterity or something, fast-forwards through mundane years to get to the important historic events, and an epilogue sequence telling us what became of the real characters we've been watching. Hardly any of the experimental, impressionist style that's in all his small movies.

For a movie about the gay rights movement, Milk plays it totally straight. It's like Van Sant looked back over his career, realized that he can draw big audiences when he makes movies like Good Will Hunting that have compelling characters, a few big actors, and an inspirational story about underdogs overcoming obstacles to fulfill their dreams. So he more or less just did that, and it looks like it's working again.

But this time, probably because the story of Harvey Milk is closer to his heart than some freak genius wiseass from South Boston, Gus Van Sant seems to have made an effort to advance gay actors in his casting choices. Sure, all the leads are straight, but as Van Sant pointed out at a press conference that Spout attended, there aren't any gay actors that have the "box office stature" he needed to get this movie made.

So we end up with Sean Penn, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, and Josh Brolin as the leads. And they're all really great. But Van Sant did get a whole bunch of gay actors for supporting roles. We've got Victor Garber (above, the guy from Alias and Legally Blonde) as Mayor George Moscone, Stephen Spinella (who plays lots of gay characters, with the notable exception of sexual harasser Miles Papazian from the last season of 24) as a high-powered lawyer, real-life Hollywood producer Howard Rosenman as rich businessman and gay media figure David Goodstein, and best of all, Denis O'Hare as California Senator John Briggs, the sponsor of the 1978 initiative to ban gay teachers from schools.

As Van Sant says, there may not be a lot of gay stars out there--at least not many young ones. (Once they get to be Ian McKellen's age, I guess they just stop worrying and come out already.) I'm glad Van Sant is using his big return to popular mainstream movies to help advance some careers other than just Sean Penn's.

This is what Jerry Garcia looked like in 1967 at age 25. He had just recently started the Grateful Dead (a name the whole band hated) and he was a big fan of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and bluegrass.

It's this period of Garcia's life that a new biopic will focus on. Spout is suggesting some actors to play him, but their ideas all sound like the later-era Jerry Garcia, the heroin addict and egg cream fiend. They're talking about Philip Seymour Hoffman, Vincent D'Onofrio, or Paul Giamatti. I love all those actors, but we need someone young, hairy, and maybe a little doughy-faced to play Jerry when he looked like this:

So here are a few ideas: Jeremy Sisto. He's got the hair, he'd have no trouble growing a big beard, and look at that smile:

Here's another one: Danny Masterson, from That 70s Show. Put a few pounds on him and he's just about perfect. Plus, everyone already associates him with being a stoner.

Then there's the obvious choice: Seth Rogen. The man is the real hirsute frizzed-out deal, and is clearly no stranger to Cheetos. But his range is pretty limited: I'm guessing the first half-hour or so of the movie might involve some scenes where Jerry Garcia is not high, and it's hard to imagine Seth Rogen pulling that off.

Please add other ideas in the comments.

Forbidden Planet from 1956 is one of the most entertaining sci-fi classics out there, even for a not very committed sci-fi fan like me. In the story based on The Tempest, a young Leslie Nielsen leads a mission to a distant planet inhabited only by the sweet-faced Anne Francis and her father, and lovable sidekick Robby the Robot. The movie also had the first all-electronic movie soundtrack, and this was years before the first Moog synthesizer came out.

So now there's going to be a remake, which hopefully will hang onto some of the endearing qualities of the original, or at least include a Leslie Nielsen cameo. The remake is being written by J. Michael Straczynski, a man who I think formed my childhood concept of what sci-fi/fiction is: he wrote for He-Man, She-Ra, and the 80's version of the Twilight Zone. (He also created Babylon 5, which I wasn't into.) And he did the screenplay for the Wachowski Brothers-produced Ninja Assassin, which comes out next year and looks OK.

But: more important. J. Michael Straczynski also wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Max Brooks' World War Z! The book is a really fun read, a surprisingly well thought-out and thorough collection of oral accounts of the great zombie war that engulfs the globe in the near future.

Here's a review of the leaked World War Z screenplay, with some excerpts. Looks like the movie will stick with the current fast-zombie trend, and attach all sorts of criticism of government corruption and consumer culture to the zombie metaphor--the reviewer calls it "a George Romero wet dream."

Ugly people--ew!

The Times has an article in today's Style section that makes a half-hearted attempt to document a trend in average-looking or ugly people getting more attention in movies and TV. Here's the thesis statement:

So maybe social scientists momentarily care that ugly people don't get the attention, admiration, or money that beautiful people get, but, as it turns out, no one else does. Cosmetic surgery is a $13 billion industry, beauty and makeover shows are all over the TV, and the gajillions of magazines, ads, and movies out there confirm that we're only interested in looking at beautiful people.

The article even notes that America Ferrera, who plays Ugly Betty, is actually really gorgeous.

Which brings us to an aspect of this ugliness non-phenomenon that's more interesting: the article only addresses beauty vs. ugliness in women. The only reference to a male creature in the whole article is Shrek who, as an ogre, is by definition ugly.

The highest paid actors are good-looking guys like Johnny Depp, Will Smith, and Leonardo DiCaprio, but we've also got Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, and James Gandolfini to play the regular shlubby dudes whose characters are supposed to be average-looking.

On the other hand, when a female character is supposed to be regular-looking or kind of ugly, we tend to get beautiful women disfigured by ugly makeup and clothes: Nicole Kidman in a fake nose, Renee Zellweger plus 30 pounds, or Charlize up there in ugly-person makeup and fake crooked teeth. Or America Ferrera in her Ugly Betty red glasses and braces.

So here's the legitimate trend: prosthetic makeup is likely to be a solid career field forever.

Some interesting trailers out today:

• Notorious, the biopic about Biggie Smalls, starring Angela Bassett as his long-suffering mother, and unknowns as Biggie and Lil Kim. [IMDb]
• My Bloody Valentine 3D. A sequel to the 1981 horror movie about a vengeful coal miner. In 3D! The trailer shows actual pickaxes and balls of flame bursting out of the screen right at a movie audience wearing 3D glasses, in case you need to be reminded of how cool 3D is. They don't seem to be making any effort to tie the movie in with the band MBV's tour last month. And how about the soundtrack? "Glider" is perfect for a gruesome slasher scene! [IMDb]
• Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I watched this whole trailer thinking, "Wow, Kate Beckinsale is almost completely unrecognizable in this!" before realizing she isn't in it. Poor man's Kate Beckinsale Rhona Mitra is the star of this one. A few months ago she starred in something called Doomsday, which I recently saw on my list of movies I've watched this year, and had to go look it up to remember what it was. [IMDb]

While everyone's waiting for those sexy teenage vampires in Twilight, there's a much weirder looking movie coming out this Friday: preteen Swedish vampires (that hopefully will not be especially sexy) in Let The Right One In.

The story is about a 12 year-old boy living in suburban Stockholm in the early '80's who gets bullied at school. The he's faced with a moral dilemma: should a boy kill a known vampire if that vampire is gruesomely killing all the little bastards who beat him up every day? The vampire in question is a sad-faced 12 year-old girl, and they kinda like each other. She's like an externalized form of Sissy Spacek's apocalyptic telekinetic skills in Carrie.

Here's a fantastic short clip from the movie that plays on that "you have to invite vampires in before they can come into your house" rule that we all learned from The Lost Boys.

The NY Times has a very sweet, sad clip, too.

If you only saw these clips, you'd probably think Let The Right One In is a little wistful movie about how lonely it is to be a vampire tween. But check out the trailer: knives, gore, blazing infernos, and a little girl killing people with her bare hands! It's pretty great.

There's a glowing quote from Guillermo del Toro in there. There are talks of an American remake already--he would be ideal to do it. But in reality, it looks like we're going to get J.J. Abrams' production company doing the remake, with the guy who did Cloverfield directing. Will they be able to resist casting 20 year olds and turning it into an especially gory episode of "Felicity"?

The author of the original book seems to be a Morrissey fan: the title was taken from the similarly-titled Morrissey song, and there's another Morrissey quote (from "Last Of The Famous International Playboys") as an epigraph. So there should be some dark, funny stuff in there, too.

It opens on Friday at the Angelika.

In a Time Out NY story on his new movie Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme said, sort of incredibly, that the script by Jenny Lumet and the chance to work with Anne Hathaway were the only things that got him to take a break from making documentaries to do a fictional movie. I was surprised when I read that last week, but after watching the movie this weekend, I see what he meant.

This is Jenny Lumet's first screenplay, and it deals with subject matter that is almost impossible to make palatable. Privileged people complaining about their oh-so-difficult lives and alternating between emotionally manipulating each other and screaming at each other-- it's hard to make that stuff anything other than grating.

Jonathan Demme has enough experience to wind through a minefield of drug addiction, co-dependency, and self-pity, set against a backdrop of a rich family having a big multi-culti party that involves white people wearing saris and dancing to samba, and still end up with characters that the audience can relate to. Somehow it all works. It also helps that the characters have been through a lot that we don't learn about right away.

Another potentially tricky aspect of the movie is how it deals with race. There are layers of harmonious, maybe idealistic, racial blending in the movie that don't feel forced at all, which may be helped by Jenny Lumet's own multiracial background (her father is famous director Sidney Lumet, and her mother is Gail Lumet Buckley, a black writer and daugher of Lena Horne.) Sidney Lumet hasn't done anything as good as his stuff from the 70's and 80's, but Jonathan Demme can still make a great movie, which is good, since things were looking pretty bleak around The Truth About Charlie.

The best parts were the long, rambling, Robert Altman-like ensemble scenes, like the scene at the rehearsal dinner where it seems like every single character has a toast to make, but it was so authentic I could have watched it roll on all night. All of the actors are great, especially Anna Deveare Smith, who also does a lot of stuff on Broadway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Debra Winger, and Anne Hathaway. The girl's got chops.

The music is great, too. All the music in the movie is diegetic, a ten dollar word I learned just for this movie which means that we only hear music that the characters can also hear. Luckily, because the movie takes place around a wedding, there's loads of music that the characters and the audience all get to hear, including a surprise performance by my old teenage favorite Robyn Hitchcock, (also the subject of Demme's Storefront Hitchcock concert movie) doing his song "America" with the wedding band [photo]. Tunde Adebimpe, the singer from TV On The Radio, plays the groom, and has a really nice musical interlude.

Rachel Getting Married is only playing at 9 theaters now, but it made over $30,000 per screen, which is about what the first Spider-Man made when it debuted. At the Regal theater at Union Square, the line to get into the theater looked like Iron Man's opening weekend. It'll probably do well, which is good for Jonathan Demme. Did you know he's directed 7 different actors in performances that were nominated for Oscars, and 4 who won? He's probably going to get a couple more in this one.

After a fun, goofy summer of some good blockbusters (Tropic Thunder, Wall-E) and a few wonderful weird little movies (Hamlet 2, The Edge of Heaven), the fall season seems to be off to a slow start. Some of the movies I've been most interested in all year are out now, but nothing has created much of a sensation.

Choke sounds bloodless and dull. Miracle at St. Anna unfortunately seems a little corny and stodgy, two words that I don't think could be used to describe any other Spike Lee movie.

This week we've got three movies coming out that at one point sounded potentially great, but are getting so-so reviews.

Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist: Charming but trivial according to A.O. Scott. Wired says it's a movie for teens and aging hipsters, and advises "If you've got more ZZ Top and Doobie Brothers on your playlist than Fleet Foxes, Death Cab or Vampire Weekend, you might want to consider a different picture." The usually generous Roger Ebert says it "doesn't bring much to the party."

Rachel Getting Married: This one could be really good. It's directed by Jonathan Demme, shot on hand-held DV, and stars Rosemarie DeWitt, who was great on "Mad Men" last season. Hopefully Anne Hathaway's performance as an attention-hogging drug addict teeters on the edge of being irritating and self-indulgent without falling over. Slate likes it; A.O. Scott thinks it barely avoids melodrama and sentimentality--which means that it might actually be a big sloshy melodramatic mess, especially since he also describes Anne Hathaway's bangs as looking very Louise Brooks-ish, though she doesn't have bangs at all in the trailer. Gawker says it's "absolutely terrible".

Then there's How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, which I had been really looking forward to. Manohla Dargis says it's "crushingly unfunny and slopped together". Ouch. AV Club calls it "cheap and ugly". Roger Ebert is pretty much alone in thinking it's a hoot, and says Simon Pegg was born to play Toby Young, the British writer whose spectacular failure at Vanity Fair is the basis of the book and movie.

The AV Club has their annual Oscar-O-Meter up. There's some movies up there that look good, like Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, W., Synecdoche, New York, and hopefully Milk (it's pretty much impossible to predict if Gus Van Sant's movies will be great or terrible these days.) So things should be picking up soon.

One of the books I read in high school English was The Grapes of Wrath, which we read for its social commentary on the Great Depression-era exploitation of desperate people and their struggle to maintain some dignity as they fight to survive. Mostly what I remember about that book is being grossed-out by the last scene in which Rosasharn breastfeeds a dying old man. That one scene probably prolonged millions of teenagers' feelings of confusion and revulsion over their adolescent bodily development for many months or years.

But one other scene I remember is where Pa Joad, the patriarch of the Joad family that we follow on their journey to find work out west, is confronted by a man who explains the harsh economic truth behind the myth of plentiful jobs in California that all the people in the migrant camp have been clinging to.

From the screenplay based on the book:

Today, AP describes our current economic situation as "the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression". In another article, they describe modern-day Joad families setting up tent cities in western towns where people have come expecting to find jobs. Except that instead of looking for fruit picking jobs in California, they're looking for casino jobs in Reno:

The article also refers to growing tent cities in Santa Barbara, Fresno, Portland, Seattle, Chattanooga, San Diego, and Columbus.

When I think of the most memorable actors and characters of the Coen Brothers' movies, I usually think of the men. There are guys they use again and again, like John Goodman, Steve Buscemi and John Turturro, and those genius one-offs like Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey Lebowski, Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn't There, or Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. Spout made a really great list of 10 supporting Coen Brothers actors that often get overlooked, since it's often the supporting characters that give their movies their distinctive bizarre and unsettling style.

But what about the ladies? Just about all of their movies feature a bunch of male leads with only one main female character. In 4 movies now they've gone with their best gal Frances McDormand (Joel Coen's wife) and twice they've used Holly Hunter (in O Brother Where Art Thou? and Raising Arizona.)

Coen Brothers women mostly conform to a type: they're tough as nails (if they aren't at the beginning of the movie, they definitely are by the end), often inscrutable and distant, and their no-nonsense exterior either masks a soft and tender interior (like Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy, Holly Hunter and Frances McDormand as sweet but gutsy cops in Raising Arizona and Fargo) or amplifies a genuinely manipulative and selfish nature (Tilda Swinton in Burn After Reading or Frances McDormand in The Man Who Wasn't There.)

Others, like Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski, Marcia Gay Harden in Miller's Crossing, and Judy Davis in Barton Fink are also mysteriously sexy and remote, sometimes with a whiff of treachery. I can only think of one real casting misstep: Catherine Zeta-Jones in Intolerable Cruelty, which just didn't work.

One partial exception is Kelly Macdonald as the wife in No Country For Old Men--one of the few movies the Coen Brothers adapted from someone else's story. She has a small role, and lacks the grit of most Coen Brothers women, but in her final big showdown with soft-spoken psychopath Javier Bardem she shows an unshakable resolve and inner strength, and ends up kind of serving as the moral anchor of the whole movie [video].

Anyway, in their current movie Burn After Reading, there are actually two female leads, both of which are pretty ridiculous and insensitive people. Frances McDormand is a selfish but harmless woman who can't see anything beyond her own needs, though her chronic loneliness and moments of real joy in finding connections with other people makes her a bit sympathetic. Tilda Swinton, on the other hand, is an icy, cruel bitch on wheels, which makes the reveal of what her profession is towards the end of the movie the single funniest moment in the whole thing.

Burn After Reading has gotten a lot of lukewarm or negative reviews, largely from critics who compare it to the more serious variety of Coen Brothers movies like No Country. I loved No Country as much as anyone, but you've got to remember that at least half of their movies are goofy screwball comedies in which bumbling but lovable characters wildly chase after the things they desperately want, which they almost always fail to achieve. Three times in Burn After Reading different characters say "This isn't fun and games," by which I think the Coen Brothers are reassuring us that this IS all fun and games. In his review, one of the most positive ones I've seen, Roger Ebert notes that the plot doesn't matter at all--the strengths of the movie are the dialogue and the characters, both of which are as good as ever. It's inconsequential, but that doesn't mean it's not worth seeing.

Anyway, their next movie is called A Serious Man (that oughta make the No Country For Old Men-loving sourpusses happy.) It doesn't use any of their regular actors, and some of the cast have only worked in Minnesota theater--including leading lady Sari Lennick. I'm going out on a limb here and predicting that she plays a ballsy lady who doesn't take any crap. The movie also stars character actor Richard Kind and Broadway star Michael Stuhlbarg.

Roger Ebert evaluates the candidates for president and vice president through the lens that matters most to him: What are their favorite movies?

Examining their Facebook pages, he comes up with the following responses:

John McCain: Viva Zapata!, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Some Like It Hot.

Barack Obama: Casablanca, Godfather I and II, Lawrence of Arabia, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Joe Biden: no response.

Sarah Palin: no response.

Well! Ebert is very disappointed by the VP candidates' failure to appreciate the importance of sharing their taste in movies with voters. He also believes that no campaign aides selected these movies for the candidates, but that they reflect the true views of the candidates themselves: "Something as important as choosing your favorite movie, you don't delegate that to underlings." He might be giving them too much credit on that, but let's hope he's right.

Obama's choices strike me as very safe and impersonal (come on, The Godfather?) but One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is pretty interesting. He clearly likes movies about one man standing up to an oppressive regime or bureaucracy.

McCain has some easy choices too, though I was glad to see he had the guts to include a comedy. But he blows it out of the water in a recent EW interview, which Ebert references, in which he more fully explains his Viva Zapata! choice. McCain's a bit of a film buff:

But Ebert says that Bill Clinton has them both beat, based on an interview he did with him in 1999. It's a pretty incredible conversation: Clinton can really talk movies.

Today's Ebert column offers another look at Sarah Palin, who he calls The American Idol candidate. People like her because they think she's just like them, he says, which is exactly why Ebert doesn't like her: "I don't want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq."

Humboldt County is coming out in a couple of weeks, and looks like it should be good. People who saw it at SXSW have said pretty much what you could say based on watching the trailer: it looks like a less Zach Braffy Garden State but with a weirder/better cast, and seems to has a good soundtrack. Here's the official site.

About the cast: the main non-Zach Braff guy with an overbearing father who is successful on the surface but dead on the inside is played by a relative unknown--Jeremy Strong. He was in The Happening earlier this year, but hopefully no one saw him in it.

The mysterious, free-spirited girl is played by Fairuza Balk, who you probably remember from movies that came out many years ago, like The Craft and American History X. Her character's name is Bogart-- oh, haha, like "don't Fairuza Balk me".

Lately she hasn't been working much, but check this out--she appears to be turning into character actor Christine Baranski (who has been in a million movies including Cruel Intentions and Mamma Mia.) You can really see it in the Humboldt County trailer.

Fairuza is also going to be in the Werner Herzog's inscrutable "don't call it a remake" version of Bad Lieutenant.

Humboldt County also features good old Peter Bogdanovich, who still shows up in stuff every so often. He's now directing a movie that looks interesting: The Broken Code, about scientist Rosalind Franklin whose x-rays were instrumental in Watson and Crick discovering the double helix structure of DNA.

Yesterday we lost the unbelievably popular voiceover artist Don LaFontaine, who died of complications related to a collapsed lung, ending a 40 year career that produced many thousands of trailers and ads.

Unfortunately, this means that your window of opportunity to get him to record your outgoing voicemail message has now closed. He says he got lots of requests from people to do their voicemail; in the short, funny interview below, he says if he had time, he would often do it.

"In a world where Adam Slutsky is not available..."

He sounded like a hardworking guy who was very proud of his gigantic body of work:

A few other things about LaFontaine, from his bio: he got his start as an audio engineer in NY, then started producing movie ads years before he recorded any voiceovers himself. He was also a big "Arrested Development" fan.

Two movies come out today that I've been waiting to see: Hamlet 2 and The House Bunny. Both of them got pretty lukewarm reviews, but hey, so did Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder, and those were still worth seeing. These two new ones have at least a few things going for them.

Critics are saying that Hamlet 2 is badly structured, uneven, and a lot of the jokes fall flat. But OK, look: it's got Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, David Arquette, and Amy Poehler as an ACLU lawyer named Cricket Feldstein. And my old favorite Elisabeth Shue. It can't be all bad, right?

A.O. Scott would have been the best Times reviewer, but instead we got Stephen Holden, who as usual spends most of his review recounting the plot. David Edelstein doesn't love it, but says Steve Coogan is riveting, and the movie "gets points for weirdness." Kenneth Turan over at the LA Times says "the hits are so dead-on that the misses don't seem to matter." Good enough for me.

It looks like there's only one reason to see The House Bunny: Anna Faris. The intensity of critical love she gets for this movie is almost at post-Lost in Translation Bill Murray levels. Sure, the movie is a rehashed Legally Blonde (same writers and everything) but she's got the knack for playing the goofy smart-dumb hot girl who will do anything for a laugh. "All hail, Anna Faris, fake bimbo par excellence", from the Times. And the folks at IFC wrote a gushing piece about how great she is. Thank God this role went to someone really funny and not Kirsten Dunst.

Dana Stevens at Slate stresses that the movie is about as empowering to women as "My Super Sweet 16", but is glad to see enough funny material for Faris to "hint at a well of anarchic, defiantly ungirly humor that her career thus far has barely begun to tap." And, for what it's worth, Kurt Loder loves it, and swears it's hilarious even though it's formulaic. There have already been a few letdowns in this year's big summer comedies, so we need it.

Anna Faris co-stars with Seth Rogen in a comedy called Observe and Report next year, so it looks like the big time is about to be hit.

Isaac Hayes was unexpectedly killed by a treadmill yesterday, after having some recent health problems. The NY Times obituary says his music "defined the glories and excesses of soul" through his early years as a songwriter and musician at Stax Records in Memphis.

Cushie and I happened to visit the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis a few months ago, and it was one of the best music history experiences of my life. Before he did "Theme from Shaft" and became a celebrity in his own right, Isaac Hayes wrote around 200 songs from the Stax catalog with his partner David Porter, including Sam and Dave's "Hold on, I'm Comin'" and "Soul Man", and played keyboards with Otis Redding , Booker T and the MG's, and pretty much everybody else on Stax as a session musician.

Also in the Stax Museum is Isaac Hayes' car, a blue 1972 Cadillac Eldorado, which was lined with fur, had a bar that popped out of the dashboard, and because he was a man undaunted by the technological limitations of his time, he had a small black and white TV sort of wedged awkwardly into the area below the radio between the two front seats. The car was taken by the IRS in 1977 when Hayes had some financial problems.

In a good VH1 interview from a few years ago he talked about his fearless and distinctive sense of style, which sounds more like a celebrity from this decade with an army of personal stylists on staff than a southern black man starting out in the early 60's:

Here's a video clip of Isaac Hayes making his dramatic entrance at the Wattstax concert in LA in 1972. Pink tights, black and white fur boots, and gold chains. He is so awesome:

Hayes seemed to move effortlessly from one important moment in pop culture to another for his entire life. After helping to create soul music in the 60's and defining himself as a symbol of black pride during the 70's, he moved onto TV and movies in the 80's. He was in Escape From New York, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, and showed up on "The A-Team" and "Miami Vice". In the 90's came "South Park" and, of course, Scientology. It would have been only a matter of time before he did a song with Kanye.

Incredibly, Hayes had just finished making a movie called Soul Men with Samuel L. Jackson and good old Bernie Mac, who also died this weekend. Hang in there, Samuel L.

LA Times also has a very lengthy and in-depth obituary. Reports of the number of kids he has varies from "several" in the LA Times to 6 on IMDb to 12 in the NY Times. There's a good, if not very well organized bio on his website.

Pineapple Express comes out today. Just like Superbad came out a few months after Knocked Up last summer, this one looks like it's going to be the weirder follow-up to the mainstream hit (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) that came out in the spring. Dirtier jokes, fewer female characters, and a lot more weed.

Most reviews say the same thing: it's great when it's just James Franco and Seth Rogen sitting around talking smack, then goes off track when it turns into a big heavy action movie in the last half hour. Here's Manohla's NY Times review, the Slate review, Edelstein at NY Mag (he calls it "empty and formulaic" but likes it anyway.) The Daily News reviewer recommends you just go back and watch old episodes of "Freaks and Geeks". Roger Ebert stands apart--he pretty much loves the whole thing. But he gave 3 stars to The Mummy 3, so.

Seth Rogen was the big revelation from The 40 Year Old Virgin two years ago--I think the major discovery of Pineapple Express is going to be Danny McBride, the third guy in the movie posters. The director, David Gordon Green, brought him along from an earlier smaller movie he did, All the Real Girls, and the critics like him a lot. Dana Stevens says "he should be commanding his own goofy franchise in a matter of months," and Manohla says he "steals the show".

McBride is also in Tropic Thunder, which comes out in a week and is going to be huuuge. This guy will be hosting SNL by this time next year. Here are two interviews with him about each movie and an upcoming HBO show that he wrote and stars in. He's beside himself with excitement over his growing fame--he says the two new movies are "both so fucking awesome". Heh. I think I'm convinced.

Loads of notable movies come out today. Unfortunately, the reviews for the big ones that I've been looking forward to (X-Files, Step Brothers, Baghead, American Teen, Brideshead Revisited) aren't all that good. The Times hardly likes anything this week, but a few other reviewers come through with positive words.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Manohla at the Times is unimpressed: "Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark." Roger Ebert likes the way it explores morality and the complex choices Mulder and Scully have to make, and notes positively that there are no explosions or CGI. His review gives away a LOT of the plot though, so don't read it if you want to be surprised.

I've been excited about American Teen since it was playing at Sundance, and it still sounds pretty good despite lukewarm reviews from A.O. Scott, who thinks it feels weirdly contrived, and NY Mag's David Edelstein, who says it just reinforces everything you assume to be true about the stereotypical teen types when going in. Yeah, well, I'm seeing it anyway.

Baghead looks like a sort of goofy indie parody of people-getting-stabbed-in-the-woods horror movies that's also a little bit scary. The Times' Stephen Holden seems to like the strained relationships between the 4 characters OK, but as he often does, he mostly just describes the plot and style without quite saying if it's good or bad. David Edelstein decides that "fumblecore" is a better name for the genre than "mumblecore", and confirms that the gentle satire of horror movies is actually scary in itself. This one I will definitely see.

Step Brothers. Everybody already knows exactly what this Farrell-Reilly-Apatow movie is like, and for the most part they already hate it. Like Manohla Dargis, whose review is scorchingly disdainful: "Dudes, I understand: You have penises. You’re nice and sort of blobby and you don’t look like Tom Cruise, but you’re real men. Hot-blooded, anatomically correct men, and no one should ever forget it, least of all the ladies that you can’t stop talking dirty about and hope one day to marry because, well, that’s the kind of good, hot-blooded, anatomically correct guys you are."

Ebert really lets rip, linking the movie's gross-out humor and general vulgarity to the moral degradation of our society. His disgust is pretty intense: "Sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare. All about me, standards are collapsing, manners are evaporating, people show no respect for themselves. I am not a moralistic nut. I'm proud of the X-rated movie I once wrote. I like vulgarity if it's funny or serves a purpose. But what is going on here?"

Over at the Washington Post, Stephen Hunter finds depths of nuance and an "undertow of melancholy" in the characters and thinks the crude jokes are a riot. So who knows.

Brideshead Revisited. Everyone agrees: it's stuffy and insincere and not as good as the BBC version from the 80's. (A.O. Scott: "tedious, confused and banal.")

The movies that sound really good are the little ones. The Order of Myths is a documentary about the all-white and all-black Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, AL, by the same woman who did the Townes Van Zandt doc a few years ago. Manohla and Davy E. both love it.

But I can't seem to get excited about Man on Wire, a documentary about the French guy who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers in the 70's that everybody says is good.

MTV has joined with Fox Television to do a remake of every high school Drama Club geek's favorite midnight movie, Rocky Horror Picture Show. I guess it will be for TV?

OK, it's not very cool to admit that I have been to a few of these screenings, complete with a shadow cast in front of the screen, props, and a theater full of assistant stage managers singing along to "Time Warp". A long time ago. But I agree with some of the very indignant Wired commenters that this will be a tough remake to pull off without enraging a lot of devoted fans.

So let's think about recasting. The cast for a Rocky Horror remake needs to be energetic and funny and able to camp it up and dance in heels and fishnets. And ideally also sing.

Here's what I've got:

Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Tim Curry was in the original. I want to see Alan Cumming, who could generate the appropriate level of drag flamboyance (as he demonstrated in the Lincoln Center production of The Bacchae recently.) Or maybe, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, Robert Downey, Jr. He's gotten himself together now, but I think he's still just unhinged enough to make it work.

Brad, the Eagle Scout do-gooder waiting to be corrupted. Barry Bostwick in the original, who later went onto "Spin City" and the forthcoming Hannah Montana movie. I think this would be perfect for Chris Klein, who needs a good comeback. Or how about this one: Justin Timberlake! He was great in Southland Tales and Black Snake Moan and has no problem with campy choreography. I'd love to see him in drag.

Janet. A very young Susan Sarandon in the original, which is still hard to believe. I'd like to see Amy Adams in the remake. She's really funny, so she'll be good at the blushing, nice-girl part at the start of the movie, and I bet she can vamp it up for the slutty transformation.

Riff Raff. Richard O'Brien in the original. We need someone who can play a sort of weirdly sexy creepy ghoul from outer space. I'm going for Rhys Ifans, or, even better, Seth Green.

Magenta. Patricia Quinn in the original, who I definitely haven't seen in anything else she's done since RHPS. We need a scary/sexy alien for this one. How about either Asia Argento, who is terrifying and hot, or maybe Pink, who is mostly just terrifying.

Eddie. It was good old Meat Loaf in the original. Kid Rock could do a good job as a crazy undead rockabilly lobotomy victim, but I think an aging, puffy, crinkly Sebastian Bach might be good too.

Columbia. Nell Campbell in the original, whose career has not taken off since. Best choice is Scarlett Johansson. I've really lost faith in her movie choices lately, but I bet she's still good in comedies, and would look great in a gold-sequined tap dancing outfit.

Then Brian Cox can play old Dr. Scott in the wheelchair.

What about Rocky? The blonde sexbot hunk of chiseled beef? Either some nameless gay porn star could do it (the original Rocky didn't have much of a legitimate career, either) or a prettyboy heartthrob, like Chace Crawford from Gossip Girl. Is he hunky enough?

If you think of Matthew McConaughey as a celebrity product, he's one of the most consistently branded and immediately recognizable products on the planet. In most photos, he is a) on a beach, b) in shorts, c) holding a surfboard, d) wearing a do-rag, e) drunk, or most often f) a combination of at least 3 of these.

Matthew McConaughey is his own logo, and it looks like this:

or maybe like this:

Since Matthew McConaughey's branding is so consistent, it becomes easy to predict the details of new business ventures he's getting into. For example, if you hear that Matthew McConaughey has started a record label, what genre would you guess his first artist is in?

That's right: Reggae! The first single is "Here Comes Da Train" by Mishka.

Here's another one: What do you think his upcoming movie that he stars in and produced might be about?

Yes: surfing! Surfer Dude comes out later this year. It's also features Woody Harrelson and Willie Nelson and is about a surfer on a mystical journey. So actually, if your guess had been "smoking weed" you also would have been right.

From the IMDb message board for Surfer Dude:

See what I mean? The man is a rigorously disciplined marketing genius.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the director of Surfer Dude is S.R. Bindler, whose only other movie is maybe the greatest documentary ever made, Hands on a Hard Body. So yes, it will be awesome. It looks like Bindler and Matthew McConaughey were in high school together in Texas.

The Times has a lot of especially good stuff today:

• A response from Rep. Charles Rangel about his 4 rent-stabilized apartments in a luxury building, which the Times exposed this morning. He fails to explain why he gets to have all 4 when one is the legal limit, and pretty much just comes right out and says that Harlem should be glad he still lives there.
• A piece on the Bronx Zoo visitors trapped in a broken-down tram, and their newfound sympathy for the animals they were there to see: "I can understand what animals feel,” one woman said. "You have no say in what happens to you. You lose all control."
• Amazingly in-depth piece on wooden roller coasters in Pennsylvania, which have a "different psychology of fear" than steel ones. (I agree--they're scarier.)
• Positive comments from New Yorkers about the city's plan to use two lanes of Broadway between Times Square and 34 St as a pedestrian park. Opening in August!
• New debate over who wrote the Serenity Prayer--a Protestant theologian? Aristotle? St. Francis?
• Obama gets in trouble for saying Americans should learn other languages; McCain gets in trouble for saying Social Security is "a disgrace."
• A court interpreter for Spanish-speakers wrote an essay saying that many immigrant defendants don't understand the charges brought against them or their legal rights.
• A.O. Scott tries to avoid thrill-ride comparisons in his review of Journey to the Center of the Earth. He fails. But he does note that one of the coolest uses of 3-D in the movie is when Brendan Fraser spits into the sink while brushing his teeth.

A new service called PopTok allows users to insert video one-liners of movies into instant messages and email. Creator Illi Edry describes the inspiration for his service:

Of course, it's this mentality that led to the whole world repeating "You're so money!" and "Yeah baby!" over and over again in 1997, but I see his point. (Damn, my references are old. I just can't think of any annoying catchphrases from Iron Man.)

The service is being tested now, but they say they already have 2,000 snippets licensed from studios that you can drag into your IM conversations. Neat!

The site offers a few examples of their available clips, which are mostly famous 2-3 second bits from movies like Austin Powers, American Psycho, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Borat, Scarface, some Bugs Bunny, and a Kanye video.

I thought I'd suggest a few clips I'd like to see:

• "It places the lotion in the basket" from Silence of the Lambs
• "I think men are wonderful", Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story
• "We thought you was a toad" from O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• "Shut shut shut shut up", scary Philip Seymour Hoffman in Punch-Drunk Love
• "Is that an alcoholic beverage? Is it for me?" from the highly-quotable The Philadelphia Story
• "Don't Speak", Dianne Wiest from Bullets Over Broadway
• "You're too much trouble. Get some therapy." from Tootsie
• Anything that either Teri Garr or Bill Murray says in Tootsie. It's a one-liner goldmine.

Suggestions?

Today the Times examines the recreation of 70's era Times Square on W. 38th St, for a movie called All Good Things. The movie is about (or at least "inspired by") the story of Robert Durst (crazy oldest son of the prominent real estate family) and his first wife Kathleen who, along with just about everybody else in Mr. Durst's life, is presumed to have died under very mysterious circumstances.

The movie is directed by Andrew Jarecki, who did the excellent documentary Capturing the Friedmans, another story about a cryptically messed-up family. Kirsten Dunst plays the long-lost and similarly-named Kathleen Durst, who vanished in 1982 after 10 years of marriage to Robert. Ryan Gosling also stars, and I'm guessing/hoping that he plays Durst. If you thought his delusional, tic-y loner in Lars and the Real Girl was a little unnerving, wait till you see him shaving his eyebrows and doing primal scream therapy.

You can read lots more about Robert Durst's epically strange and dangerous life in a very thorough bio. Highlights include Asperger's syndrome, witnessing his mother's suicide, almost certainly killing 3 people and dismembering 1, living as a not-very-convincing woman, and stealing a chicken salad sandwich.

The Times post goes into detail about how much Times Square has changed, and the regret that many New Yorkers feel for the transformation of the gross but thrilling area into a mall.

Earlier: Robert Durst is a free man, getting back into real estate

This afternoon, Turkey plays Germany in a semi-final game of the Euro Cup. I really love the added political drama of international sports when one country plays its own former colony, like when Senegal trounced France in the very first game of the 2002 World Cup. Games like that don't happen much in the Euro Cup, but the long and mostly exploitative relationship between Turkey and Germany means this game is going to be a good one to watch, even if Turkey doesn't have the greatest chance of winning.

I happened to go see Fatih Akin's great new movie The Edge of Heaven last night at Film Forum, and it's all about messy interactions between Turks and Germans. His earlier movie, Head-On from 2005, was incredibly good; this one deals with some of the same difficulties of the Turkish population living in Germany, but gets into even better stuff about parents and children, the things people will do to try to take care of each other, and the unlikely connections that can form between people from different worlds. It was fantastic, but way too complicated for a brief summary.

The Edge of Heaven's original title in German translates to On the Other Side, which is better. Here are a few glowing reviews, from A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and the Guardian.

(One note about the cast--the most famous actor in the movie is Hannah Schygulla, who was in a bunch of Fassbinder movies in the '70's, and played the title role in The Marriage of Maria Braun. She's still awesome.)

Germany's Ulrich Schnauss also played a free concert at the World Financial Center last night--I caught most of it. Now I just gotta get some stuffed eggplant and shish kebab and get ready to watch Turkey face Germany starting at 2:45.

In case you're interested, here's some background on the Turkish population in Germany. The short version: Germany invited Turks to come into the country after WWII because they needed cheap labor. Loads of Turks came over, and today make up the largest minority population in Germany, but weren't given citizenship. Most children of immigrants aren't citizens either. So today, there are millions of Turks in Germany, many of whom are 3rd generation residents and may have never been to Turkey, but aren't citizens. It sucks.

Starting in 2000, Germany allowed children of foreigners born in Germany the possibility of citizenship, so maybe things are changing.

UPDATE: Germany won, barely. They pulled out a winning goal in the last minute of the game, plus the whole world missed Turkey's surprise last goal because of satellite broadcasting problems. Bleegh.

VH1 started its newest installment of the "I Love The..." series last night with "I Love the New Millennium", a show that looks back fondly on the decade that we're still in.

Message boards on VH1 and IMDb are full of "Are you kidding me?" and "What's next? 'I Love 45 minutes Ago'?" comments, but personally, I have no problem with a nostalgia show about just a few years ago. I don't feel especially nostalgic for when I was 9 or when I was 16. I feel nostalgic for when I was 27.

The 2000 and 2001 shows were on last night; 2002 and 2003 play back to back tonight. There were a few obvious segments in last night's episodes that didn't exactly capture the zeitgeist of years past because nothing has changed since then (remember the iPod? and when people downloaded music off the internet?) But there were a few bits that really did feel like a return to a not-so-distant long-lost era:

• Failed football experiments: XFL, Dennis Miller hosting Monday Night Football
• Dude, Where's My Car?
• Kelly Ripa's debut
• Sisqo

Many of the hosts of the old shows are back, with the deadpan Michael Ian Black delivering a solid half of the commentary. Dee Snyder is back, squeezing this new show in between episodes of "Rock the Cradle" and "100 Most Metal Moments", as is the most inexplicable of the regular VH1 commentators, Luis Guzman. The guy does 4-6 movies a year and still has time for this crap? He does a good job though. Also back are two members of The Donnas.

New commentators include Toofer and Josh from "30 Rock". Maybe they did this show during the writers' strike?

A few things from our current decade that I already feel nostalgic about:

• Canceled TV: "The Job" and "The Lone Gunmen"
• Low Culture (a highlight or two)
• Fametracker
• Common and Kanye on "Chappelle's Show" doing "The Food" live [video] (to be honest, the first time I saw this clip from the show was just a few days ago, but the pre-Jamie Foxx Kanye wearing a Kanye West t-shirt and blazer, with Dave Chappelle raising his fist in the studio/kitchen was instant wistfulness.)

Reprise opened in limited release about a month ago. It's by a first-time Norwegian director and stars young actors unknown in the US, so it isn't going to draw any viewers from Kung Fu Panda, but it's one of the better movies I've seen so far this year.

It can be tricky to make a movie about young, idealistic artists prone to immaturity and mental illness, because these characters tend to be pretentious, self-indulgent, and irritating (see The Doors, The Basketball Diaries, Glitter.) Reprise follows two longtime friends in their early 20's whose young writing careers diverge when one becomes an instant success. I think it (mostly) succeeds because equal time is spent watching these guys and their group of friends talk about the Ramones and make fun of each other's porn collections as we hear them talk about Heidegger and the metaphors they use in their novels.

It's still can get tedious watching these moronic boys blather on about how smart/tortured they think they are, but that makes it more satisfying when they finally grow up. And makes you a little bit glad you're not 23 anymore.

Since I always think about movies I like in terms of other movies I like, here are a few comparisons:

There are a fantastic couple of scenes that use the same kind of fragmented approach as the central hotel bar/hotel room seduction scene in Out of Sight, skipping around between a few times and places to show how a long encounter unfolds.

The super-condensed fast-forwarding of the characters' lives, like in Run Lola Run. We see a few different possibilities of what could happen to the guys in Reprise, but I especially like the uncertainty in this movie about what really happens to them and what they imagine might happen.

The rapid back-and-forth between cerebral musings about the nature of life, love, poetry, etc., and raucous punk concerts and crazy party scenes, like in 24 Hour Party People. Also, Reprise should win some special award for Most Ecstatic Use of Le Tigre in a Feature Film Soundtrack.

Here's the review by Manohla Dargis, who loves it, and by Roger Ebert, who thought it was OK but flawed.

Slate offers a few political theories today, largely about the intersection of politics and pop culture:

• First one: part of the reason Sex and the City did so well this weekend is because its main fan base, white ladies, could no longer deny that their favorite political candidate has lost the nomination. According to this theory, both Hillary Clinton's campaign and the movie (which had the highest grossing opening weekend ever for a romantic-comedy) represent a "weirdly conflicted feminism": the SATC ladies are successful and independent, but their lives revolve around status, money, and the men in their lives, while Hillary arguably got as far as she did because she's married to her own Mr. Big. So much for the feminist revolution.
• Next is another theory about Hillary: since she keeps winning primaries, especially in big states, why doesn't she have more superdelegates supporting her? Theory: the superdelegates have learned from history that a party that fights with itself through the convention will lose in November. If she were running in the free-wheeling '70's or '80's when the news was only on for a half an hour a day, she might still have a chance. As it is, the political big shots who serve as superdelegates are trying (and failing) to minimize negative press and keep their party from looking like a chaotic bunch of squabblers.
• And finally, an insinuated conspiracy theory: 90 year-old West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd was mysteriously hospitalized hours after criticizing Dick Cheney's "contempt and astounding ignorance toward his own countrymen" when Cheney made a cheap incest joke about West Virginia.

Jury duty is an aspect of public life that many people think about only in terms of what strategy will get them out of it. You can try claiming you don't believe in the justice system, saying you're racist, saying your brother-in-law is a cop--everybody has theories about what to say during voir dire so that you don't get picked for a case.

This is totally the wrong approach. The chances are low that you'll get to put away Uma Thurman's stalker, but there are still lots of good things about serving on a jury. Once you get past the boring part of sitting around waiting to get selected, it's sort of cool:

• For today's TV-loving juror, court rooms have been turned into entertainment venues. Everything that happens in there really is just like what you see on "Law & Order" and "Judge Judy". You'll almost definitely get to hear "all rise" every time you enter or leave the room, lots of objections (often vehement), deal with crotchety old world-weary judges, and maybe even get a few tears from emotional witnesses.
• If you're dealing with a civil case, you get the opportunity to feel like you're leveling the playing field of our unfair world just a little bit by making corporate America/greedy doctors/unscrupulous landlords/corrupt nail salon owners/your oppressor of choice pay up, big time. This is incredibly gratifying.
• During deliberation, you get to re-enact your favorite scenes from 12 Angry Men and either coolly persuade dissenters to come over to your rational way of thinking, or play the insane crabby jackass who holds out and almost ruins the whole trial. Not that you would actually change the outcome of the verdict through manufactured drama, but for anyone who enjoys playing devil's advocate, it's kind of fun.
• Getting a whole jury to agree on a dollar amount for a civil case award is tricky, but everyone loves throwing around other people's money. Why stop at 50 grand? Let's give 100! No, 200! It's like you're on Oprah's show where you compete to give away a million dollars, but you don't ever get eliminated and, as far as I can tell, you can pick whatever huge number you want.
• And let's be honest here, you get a legitimate reason not to go to work for a few days. Some days the judge will probably release you hours earlier than you would ever be able to leave work, and you should feel no obligation to go into work or use this time productively at all. As long as you're not self-employed, it's not a bad deal.

So go ahead, send in that juror questionnaire! It's not as bad as you think.

Alanis Morissette's new album is called "Flavors of Entanglement", by which I think she means "Jagged Little Pill, Pt. 2: I Can't F'ing Believe I'm Going Through This Breakup Bullshit All Over Again".

She tells People that the album is about the "unraveling" of a significant relationship, and "chronicles the rock bottom finally being hit."

There has been much speculation about who she was singing about in "You Oughta Know", her first single about how much it sucks to get dumped, with most theories pointing to Dave Coulier from "Full House" and, more recently, "Skating With Celebrities". It's a lot clearer this time around--she and Ryan Reynolds dated since 2002 and broke up last year. He was with Scarlett Johansson a few months later.

"Flavors of Entanglement" comes out June 10; Scarlett's vanity-album of Tom Waits covers comes out next week (and generally isn't getting great reviews.)

Maybe not that surprisingly, it looks like Alanis is appearing in better movies than Scarlett this year. Alanis has got Radio Free Albemuth, an adaption of a Philip K. Dick novel about an extra-terrestrial resistance movement against a despotic president, and The Other Side, a supernatural mystery with Giovanni Ribisi and Jason Lee.

Scarlett has He's Just Not That Into You, which looks sort of like Sex and the City but with worse clothes. Ryan Reynolds is starring in Adventureland, which is by the director of Superbad and feateres Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, so will probably be at least OK.

When it's 11:00 on a Sunday night and there's a crazy long line outside the men's room at the AMC, you know that summer movie season has started, even though it's barely May.

We bought $100 million of tickets to Iron Man last weekend, which is second only to Spider-Man for the non-sequel opening weekend record.

At the screening I went to, not a lot of viewers stuck around through the credits to watch the very very end of the movie. So in case you missed it, here it is, as recorded on a handheld/cellphone camera:

[UPDATE: these videos keep getting blocked by YouTube. I'll keep trying to find new clips to link to, but it's a losing game.]

New franchise! Marvel Studios just announced the sequel will come out in two years. Keep our pal RDJ off the smack, Jon Favreau.

Rumors about the future of Fox's canceled "Arrested Development" swirl around from time to time. Today's Times reports that since the launch of NBC and Fox's online TV service Hulu, the show has consistently been one of the top three most-watched shows up there. I guess all the people who couldn't be bothered to watch while it was on the air are just getting around to it now.

Creator Mitchell Hurwitz, who effectively ended renewal negotiations in 2006 when he decided he wasn't interested in going on, is surprised. "Isn’t that crazy?" he said in an interview last week. "This was a largely unwatched show when it was on network television," and said its too-little too-late popularity was "enormously rewarding in every way except for financially."

Money was probably one reason why he didn't want to keep the low-rated show on the air, and a few people streaming the show online for free probably isn't generating a lot of income for old Mitch. But the Times is obviously eager to fuel the recently resurrected ongoing low-level rumors about a movie in the works. From the article: "He also suggested that the show’s streaming success could enhance prospects for a film based on the series."

What that probably means is the interviewer said, "Is it true that "Arrested Development"'s success online would in theory make it easier to get a film made?", to which Mitch Hurwitz did not say no. Let's get "Untitled Bluth Project" up on IMDb!

Oo, how tantalizing: it already is. Someone 's trying to will a vague speculation into reality, but I want to believe.

This photo is from last night's premiere of Baby Mama--Tina Fey and her husband Jeff Richmond.

They met while they were both working at Second City and have been married since 2001. I would bet cash money that he is a wonderful and funny guy. Incredibly, Fey says that before she met him she "could not get a date."

But I have to hand it to Tina Fey for staying with this guy instead of doing what other celebrities who suddenly find their public value rocketing to super-fame levels would do, such as divorcing him to trade up for someone more famous like Naveen Andrews or John Stamos (or even her agent.) She's a real movie star now; in terms of media measurement of her fame, she's progressed from being on the cover of Bust to being on the covers of magazines at the checkout at Rite Aid.

How many TV/movie stars under 40 at a Tina Fey-level of fame can you think of who are married to a someone who a) you've never heard of, and b) also isn't conventionally attractive (i.e. not a former model)? Anyone?

Little Rudy Huxtable = all grown up.

That cute elementary-schooler in pigtails that was America's kid sister in the '80's, Keshia Knight Pulliam, recently turned 29 years old. For people my age, Keshia is like a one-woman version of the Olsen twins that we watched grow up on tv. The difference is that Keshia's a lot better looking, and successfully graduated from college.

Her post-"Cosby Show" career hasn't really taken off (though she was in Beauty Shop with Queen Latifah), but now she's about to enter an important rite of passage for anyone transitioning from child star to adult actress: starring in Tyler Perry's latest family movie as a hooker named Candy.

Who's America's pigtailed cutiepie now? That'll show 'em!

I just learned she also appeared in a 2003 Chingy video with a brief shot of her in a bra [video]. OK girl, we get it, you can put your shirt back on.

Here's something Hollywood has a long history of doing: latching on to an informal variety of art or performance that was originated by poor people living in big cities, then sucking all the life out of it through a series of big, commercial movies that feature a sanitized version of the original performance/art form.

In 1980: Can't Stop the Music (disco) and Xanadu (disco roller skating).

In 1984: Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (breakdancing). These two movies came out only 7 months apart, which says a lot about their production values, and shows how well the producers predicted that the first movie would swiftly obliterate whatever coolness breakdancing still had.

Now it seems like young star Channing Tatum is making a career out of these kinds of movies. The guy is the star of Step Up and appears in Step Up 2 The Streets.

(I am guessing that at one time there were young city kids who actually engaged in some form of street dancing, which is different from step dancing, right? Kids in my hometown were metal fans, so I'm out of my element.)

Channing Tatum is also the star of Dito Montiel's upcoming Fighting, about underground street fighting. And now he's going to star in Parkour, about an undercover cop who enters the shadowy world of underground street gymnastics. [tx T-Rock for developing this theory.]

By the time Parkour gets released in 2009, it will be 5 years after the French District 13 came out. Parkour probably stopped being cool around 2006, sometime after that one scene in Casino Royale and the Madonna video. Even the Times did their characteristically late trend-watch piece last June. If those weren't enough to make parkour uncool, this should do it.

Channing Tatum is the perfect prefab famous actor name. If I start acting, I think I'm going to use Hepburn Dakota.

The first movie I'm really excited about in 2008 is Doomsday [official site], the new movie by Neil Marshall. This is the same guy who did The Descent from 2006, one of the coolest movies I've seen in years.

Marshall likes to create tough female characters who fight through really dangerous situations with guts and brawn. They're also smokin' hot. He uses only two of the Descent posse in Doomsday, but also brings in Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell, and Rhona Mitra (from "The Practice") as the primary ass-kicker.

I don't know much about the story except what's in the trailer, but more or less: a deadly virus has been quarantined in the northern-most part of the UK--there's a wall cutting off the island at around Newcastle, and all the infected people are kept to the north of it. Then years later something happens, the virus starts infecting people again, and Rhona Mitra has to go up to Scotland to try to find a cure among the abandoned people up there who have devolved into heavily-tattooed lawless metal fans, swarming all over Glasgow and setting things on fire.

Overall, it looks like a combination of Escape From New York, Mad Max, and that opening rave scene from Blade.

If it weren't written and directed by Neil Marshall, this movie could be in danger of hokeyness, but I think he does great stuff. It comes out March 14.

All the big awards were won by Europeans at this years Oscars. The UK was represented by Daniel Day-Lewis and the magnificent and extra-terrestrial Tilda Swinton, France by Marion Cotillard, Spain by Javier Bardem, and the Grand Duchy of Minneapolis by the Coen Brothers and Diablo Cody. Those last two won writing awards, demonstrating that the fine European sensibility is best for interpreting the multi-faceted nuances of American culture.

Even the best song and best score awards went to Europeans. Ireland's Glen Hansard and Czech Republic's Marketa Irglova won for their acoustic-y "Falling Slowly" from Once. Hansard's gleeful acceptance speech ate up 100% of their alloted time on the stage, and Irglova didn't get to say a single word before the orchestra started playing and stopped her.

So then Jon Stewart came back on and said, "That guy is so arrogant"--my favorite line of the night. After the commercial, Stewart went off-script to bring Irglova back on to deliver her very sincere acceptance speech.

Here's a video of Hansard's acceptance speech, Jon Stewart's one-liner, and Irglova's return to the stage [link fixed].

A complete list of winners.

As we get closer to the Oscars on Sunday, the media seems to be converging on a few nominees as almost certain winners (Ebert, AP, Washington Post). Daniel Day-Lewis and the Coens look like sure things, but as the LA Times pointed out yesterday, we're living in a moment where Uno the Beagle, Herbie Hancock, the NY Giants, John McCain, and Barack Obama are all winners or presumed winners, so upsets should be expected.

You can document your bold, fearless predictions now, so you can gloat later.

OK, strike's over, the Oscars are here, get cracking on writing those puns for mismatched pairs of presenters, WGA members!

A lot of the nominess for the big awards at this year's Oscars are surprising, and some categories are really all over the place. Next Sunday should be an interesting night.

Before we get to the picks, I want to point out this year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Robert Boyle, an art director I've never heard of. The montage of his movies before his speech is going to be awesome: he worked on In Cold Blood, North By Northwest, The Birds, Marnie, the original Cape Fear, and Abbott and Costello Go To Mars. Guess who forgot to give this guy an Oscar? Oopsie!

So here are our picks of who we think will win in each category. Please add your picks for any categories you want to predict in the comments.

You can also participate in IMDb's poll, where you vote for who you want to win, not necessarily who you think will.

Actor in a leading role
George Clooney in "Michael Clayton"
Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood" [Amy][Cushie]
Johnny Depp in "Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"
Tommy Lee Jones in "In the Valley of Elah"
Viggo Mortensen in "Eastern Promises"

Actor in a supporting role
Casey Affleck in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men" [Amy]
Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Charlie Wilson's War"
Hal Holbrook in "Into the Wild"
Tom Wilkinson in "Michael Clayton" [Cushie]
(This is my favorite category--these guys are all so good. Hal Holbrook is my favorite, but I don't think he'll win.)

Actress in a leading role
Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"
Julie Christie in "Away from Her" [Amy]
Marion Cotillard in "La Vie en Rose"
Laura Linney in "The Savages"
Ellen Page in "Juno" [Cushie]
(A pretty weird group. Aside from Juno, these movies hardly have any other nominations. But Academy folks are nuts for Julie Christie, so I think she'll win it for sentimental reasons.)

Actress in a supporting role
Cate Blanchett in "I'm Not There" [Cushie]
Ruby Dee in "American Gangster"
Saoirse Ronan in "Atonement"
Amy Ryan in "Gone Baby Gone" [Amy]
Tilda Swinton in "Michael Clayton"
(Holy God, Amy Ryan was so good. She really deserves it. Cate Blanchett could get it, but she already has one of these for The Aviator.)

Animated feature film
"Persepolis"
"Ratatouille" [Amy][Cushie]
"Surf's Up"

Art direction
"American Gangster"
"Atonement" [Amy]
"The Golden Compass"
"Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" [Cushie]
"There Will Be Blood"
(If Atonement wins anything, it will probably be for this sort of stuff. It was awfully pretty.)

Cinematography
"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
"Atonement"
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
"No Country for Old Men"
"There Will Be Blood" [Amy][Cushie]

Costume design
"Across the Universe" [Cushie]
"Atonement"
"Elizabeth: The Golden Age"
"La Vie en Rose"
"Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" [Amy]

Directing
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
"Juno"
"Michael Clayton"
"No Country for Old Men" [Amy][Cushie]
"There Will Be Blood"
(The Academy is so relieved that the Coens are making good movies again that they won't be able to resist.)

Documentary feature
"No End in Sight" [Amy]
"Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience"
"Sicko" [Cushie]
"Taxi to the Dark Side"
"War/Dance"

Documentary short subject
"Freeheld"
"La Corona (The Crown)"
"Salim Baba"
"Sari's Mother" [Amy][Cushie]

Film editing
"The Bourne Ultimatum"
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
"Into the Wild"
"No Country for Old Men" [Amy]
"There Will Be Blood" [Cushie]

Foreign language film
"Beaufort" Israel
"The Counterfeiters" Austria
"Katyn" Poland [Amy][Cushie]
"Mongol" Kazakhstan
"12" Russia

Makeup
"La Vie en Rose" [Amy][Cushie]
"Norbit"
"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"
(Heh. Norbit.)

Music (score)
"Atonement"
"The Kite Runner" [Cushie]
"Michael Clayton"
"Ratatouille" [Amy]
"3:10 to Yuma"

Music (song)
"Falling Slowly" from "Once" [Cushie, wishful thinking...]
"Happy Working Song" from "Enchanted"
"Raise It Up" from "August Rush"
"So Close" from "Enchanted"
"That's How You Know" from "Enchanted" (Amy)
(Enchanted's got a lock. Alan Menken wrote all of them, and he's Mr. Disney Oscar.)

Best picture
"Atonement"
"Juno"
"Michael Clayton"
"No Country for Old Men" [Amy]
"There Will Be Blood" [Cushie]
(Tough one, best guess. There Will Be Blood is too weird, and people don't like the other ones enough.)

Animated short film
"I Met the Walrus"
"Madame Tutli-Putli"
"Même les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)" [Amy][Cushie]
"My Love (Moya Lyubov)"
"Peter & the Wolf"

Live action short film
"At Night" [Amy][Cushie, I have no idea]
"Il Supplente (The Substitute)"
"Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)"
"Tanghi Argentini"
"The Tonto Woman"

Sound editing
"The Bourne Ultimatum"
"No Country for Old Men" [Amy]
"Ratatouille"
"There Will Be Blood" [Cushie]
"Transformers"

Sound mixing
"The Bourne Ultimatum" [Cushie]
"No Country for Old Men"
"Ratatouille"
"3:10 to Yuma" [Amy]
"Transformers"

Visual effects
"The Golden Compass"
"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"
"Transformers" [Amy][Cushie]

Adapted screenplay
"Atonement"
"Away from Her"
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
"No Country for Old Men" [Amy]
"There Will Be Blood" [Cushie]
(This is a really hard one, but the Coens managed to make the Cormac McCarthy book funny and sort of snappy, so it will probably win.)

Original screenplay
"Juno" [Cushie]
"Lars and the Real Girl"
"Michael Clayton" [Amy]
"Ratatouille"
"The Savages"
(I just realized that I am predicting a Juno shut-out. I think it will either win zero awards or maybe will bizarrely only win Best Picture, if votes get split between No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood.)

In today's edition of Who'dat?™, we bring you a celebrity featured in the current issue of Vanity Fair, the annual Hollywood issue. The issue includes a really cool section with current movie stars in recreations of famous scenes from Alfred Hitchcock movies. There's Jodie Foster as Tippi Hedron in The Birds, Keira Knightley and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Rebecca (who are exactly who I think would be cast in that movie if it were remade), and--this is genius--Seth Rogen as Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

But there's one celebrity in the series that might be trickier to identify. To play Who'dat™, look at the person in the Vertigo recreation below, and try to guess who it is. Then click on the picture to see if you're right.

This isn't even the first time this celebrity has been a Who'dat™ subject. The chances I'd be able to recognize her on the street are probably zero.

Here's the whole Vanity Fair series.

WARNING: Some spoilers.

Imagine you're watching TV and a rerun of "Felicity" comes on. It's an episode you haven't seen before, but it seems to be about the usual pretty but sort of bland characters going on about their realistic but sort of bland problems and interpersonal relationship dramas, and they're all hanging out and talking a lot in the nicest dorm room/loft in New York.

Then a monster attacks the city and shit starts blowing up and all the characters start running around screaming and getting eaten and otherwise horribly killed.

You'd watch that, right? You'd say, "Fuckin' yeah! This is the best damn "Felicity" episode I've ever seen!" Of course you would.

The first big movie controversy of 2008 seems to be over the J.J. Abrams-produced, cleverly marketed, and overly scrutinized Cloverfield. Specifically, is it a cool action movie in which Manhattan gets spectacularly destroyed, or is it worthless garbage with nothing intelligent to say about our contemporary consumerist culture and the effects of a 24-hour news media on how we experience real life?

This is a dumb controversy.

Manohla Dargis wrote a surprisingly out-of-touch review in which she mostly complains that Cloverfield lacks "Freudian complexity or political critique" (a phrase the Times readers are having a lot of fun tearing to shreds over at the readers' reviews.) She makes reference to September 11 (twice!) in order to demonstrate that the horrors of Cloverfield pale in comparison to the actual terrorist attacks that happened in real life. No kidding!

She usually knows how to review a movie on its own terms, and since she went into raptures of praise for the remarkably similar The Host last year, I was really surprised at her negative review. The characters in The Host were similarly broad, often caricatures, and the dialogue was no more inventive or witty. Maybe the not-so-subtle anti-pollution, anti-military message of The Host bumped it up in her estimation? Personally, I was relieved not to have any valuable city-obliteration time wasted on meaningless pseudo-science about where the monster came from, why it wants to kill us, what form of ionic gas cloud might neutralize it, blah dee blah.

In Cloverfield, all we know is there's a gigantic really scary monster out there that will totally kill you in a number of terrible and surprising ways. And sure, there were some contrived plot devices and relationship melodramas, but they're all in service of the action. Whatever it takes to get characters into interesting and scary situations in which they will almost definitely get killed, I'm all for it.

There were a few kinder reviews that judge Cloverfield on its own terms. Roger Ebert (3 stars!) notes that it sticks to its structural premise perfectly through the whole movie, and "never breaks the illusion that it is all happening as we see it."

The Boston Globe review says the movie lives up to the hype (which I don't totally agree with--the only problem I have with the movie is how out of control the endless, boring blog speculation got, but that's not really the movie's fault.) The reviewer also points out how suspenseful and agonizingly drawn out a lot of scariest parts were--there's some top-notch audience manipulation in there. David Edelstein in New York Magazine says it's shallow, sure, but still admits he was "blown sideways by it."

Meanwhile, Manohla Dargis goes on about the characters' and the movies' "incomprehensible stupidity", a claim which even for a movie like this doesn't hold much water. Just look at that shot above. It's funny and smart and somebody who knows what they're doing put it together. If you go see this movie, what you're going to get is a relatively unsentimental action movie about a big monster pounding the crap out of New York. It's a tidy 80 minutes, and for what it is, it's good.

Speaking of all the endless internet speculation about different aspects of the movie that mostly just made people sick of it before it even opened, IMDb lists all the fake working titles the movie went through: 1-18-08 (of course), Cheese, Clover, the Spanish Monstruoso, and my favorite, Slusho.

We had a few big stand-outs this year, and a whole bunch of memorable movies that I loved despite their flaws. This list could be about 20 movies long, but I've gotten it down to a rough approximation of a Top 10 list.

There are a couple of movies that came out in the last few days of 2007 that I haven't seen yet and aren't included, but that's what happens when you're not a real movie critic and don't get advance screenings to help you get your list out in December. I learned recently that real movie critics in other cities solve the problem of movies that open in NY and LA in December, but don't get to their city until January by just including those movies in their list for the following year (example: Memphis' alternative weekly paper--they liked Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth this year.) I just do what I can with what I got.

These aren't strictly ranked. A few of the best movies of the year were:

No Country For Old Men
Just about a perfect movie, completely engrossing and tense. The Coen Brothers and the cast somehow made Cormac McCarthy and his squinting, tough-guy characters funny at times. Javier Bardem and his pneumatic piston gun thing was the coolest movie weapon since Uma's Hanzo sword in Kill Bill. Some of Tommy Lee Jones' voiceover musings about the nature of evil toward the end could have been cut, but that's my only complaint. Also: the main character dies offscreen and the movie doesn't pause even for a second. You sure don't see that everyday.

There Will Be Blood
Emily predicted that this movie would be Boogie Nights, but with oil instead of porn, and she was pretty much right. If you take the Boogie Nights scene where Mark Wahlberg is out of his mind on cocaine and storms out to the pool angrily demanding to start shooting a scene right now, and the scene where Mark Wahlberg and his posse try to buy/steal drugs from the Rick Springfield-loving Alfred Molina while that weird guy walks around the living room lighting firecrackers and throwing them in the air, then make those scenes way more violent, blood-thirsty, and totally fucking nuts, that's what There Will Be Blood is like. Completely disturbing and really great. I am just going to assume that Daniel Day-Lewis knows how funny he is while he lurches around the screen as a megalomaniacal sociopath, getting crazier by the second. Because the audience was howling.

I'm Not There
By far the most creative of the musical biopics of the past few years. My favorite segments were the wonderboy blues guitarist riding the rails and pretending to be someone he's not, big-time rockstar Cate Blanchett having a meltdown, and especially Christian Bale's frizzy-headed pentecostal performance of "Pressing On". I'm not any kind of Bob Dylan fan, but this movie goes beyond fandom, and way beyond the hammy celebrity impersonation that has been so popular with the Academy in recent years. But OK: what the hell was up with the Richard Gere section? If anyone can explain to me why his old west town was populated by circus performers, I will give you one US dollar.

Grindhouse
It's too bad that so few people took advantage of what Grindhouse had to offer: a big, noisy, messy double-feature of fun, goofball action movies, with what is clearly the most iconic image of 2007 (see photo above.) Now that the two movies were ripped apart for DVD, just like Kill Bill was for the theater (goddammit), you have to rent them separately to watch what was intended to be seen in one straight shot. I was a little disappointed in Quentin Tarantino's betrayal of the cheap-o sleazy aesthetic of real grindhouse movies--using all that clever dialogue and thoughtful character development made the critics like his movie better than Rodriguez's, who stuck to the original formula better. Even if QT did cheat a little, I could have sat there and watched Rosario and her friends chat in the diner all day long. Plus: the trailer reels, the car chase at the end, and Kurt Russell's beguiling evil sneer. Awesome.

Black Snake Moan
The weirdest movie about compassion, kindness, and redemption I've ever seen. It will be remembered forever as the movie where Samuel L. Jackson chained Christina Ricci to his radiator, but the truth is, sometimes what a character needs most in the world is for someone to chain them to a radiator. The three main characters (chainer, chainee, and Justin Timberlake) are seriously flawed and have all kinds of messed-up diagnosable psychoses, but by the end have started to figure out how to live their lives and be happy anyway. The acting is unreal. I can hardly believe that this movie is so good at addressing such wholesome, feel-good themes, but man, it really is.

And some others:

Superbad
There were other very funny movies that came out this year, but Superbad is one of the funniest movies that has ever come out, ever. I find that it holds up to multiple viewings, especially if you take the number of times you have already seen it, and have that number of drinks (or, if you're me, twice that number of drinks) before you watch it again. The most impressive thing about this movie might be that the whole world already knew the "McLovin" joke from seeing the trailer a bunch of times, and they somehow still managed to make it funny for the entire duration of the movie.

The Lives of Others
This movie is really good when it focuses on the unintentional complications of secret surveillance. Watching the Stasi agent grow interested in his subjects, and become aware of the corruption at the heart of the state he works for, were the best parts. Some of the plot points were clumsy and contrived, but the agent's quiet, unrewarded insertion into his subjects' lives was smart and believable.

Into the Wild
The great friendships that the self-styled grizzly boy makes along the way to getting annihilated by nature make it hard to believe that he really thought he could find The Truth out in the woods by himself. Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook are both so fantastic and appealing in this movie, I wish we didn't have to spend so much time with the misguided teenage main character, who keeps missing what's really important until it's too late.

And a bunch of other ones I liked:

Eastern Promises
I love how, even when he makes a fairly straightforward crime-thriller about the Russian mob, when you get to the scene where a guy gets his throat cut and the camera lingers for a solid 6 or 7 seconds on a close, steady shot of blood gushing out of the wound while the victim gurgles and sputters helplessly, you remember you're watching a David Cronenberg movie.

Waitress
An unapologetic chick-flick, but a sincere, unpretentious, and sweet chick-flick that made me want to eat pie. RIP Adrienne Shelly.

Michael Clayton
Probably as good a legal thriller as you're gonna get. George Clooney is driven and intense like he's always good at playing, but Tilda Swinton sitting in the bathroom stall with huge armpit stains, hyperventilating, is the image that stays with me.

Southland Tales
Freakiest movie yet about where the world is headed post-Iraq. Buffy singing "Teen Horniness Is Not A Crime" and Justin Timberlake pouring beer over his head while dancing with a line of Busby Berkeley skee-ball lovelies were some of my favorite moments all year.

The Bourne Ultimatum
Nothing clever to say about it. The latest Bourne was awesome.

Some movies that I haven't gotten around to seeing yet but if I had, might be on this list:

Away From Her, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Persepolis, and No End In Sight. They all sound really good.

Not on the list:

I didn't include Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, because with that cast, there is just no excuse for this movie not to be incredibly great. Somehow it all added up to less than the sum of its parts. I loved the scenes in the cleanest shooting gallery in New York, and the scene of Philip Seymour Hoffman trashing his apartment in slow-motion. Other than that, eh.

Juno had some wonderful moments, but was a little too precious for me, I hated the soundtrack, and the dialogue drove me up the wall for the first 15 minutes. The movie got better, but I think Juno is ultimately this year's Little Miss Sunshine/Sideways.

Atonement, aka this year's The English Patient, aka this year's Titanic. Just read the book.

For next year, I'm looking forward to Steven Soderbergh getting back in shape. After his latest unnecessary Ocean sequel and 2006, the year of Bubble and The Good German, we really need him to pull it together and start making some great movies again. In 2008 we'll see his Che Guevara movie, which is either going to be called Guerrilla or The Argentine. It stars Benicio Del Toro, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Franka Potente, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Ramon Salazar from the third season of "24". I have high hopes.

Here's the 2006 list.

Southland Tales came out a month ago. Even though it's not that relevant anymore, I think it's safe to assume that hardly anybody has seen it: so far it's made something like $250,000, so I'm guessing that roughly the population of a small county in Maine has seen this movie.

Which is too bad, because it is by far the weirdest movie I have seen all year. It's already gotten a fair amount of press about how crazy it is, how it got trashed at Cannes, how the distribution company and studio totally disowned it by being hyperclear that the movie is nobody's fault but writer/director Richard Kelly's (the same guy who made Donnie Darko in 2001), and the best thing most critics had to say is that the movie has "a certain delirious lyricism", in the case of David Edelstein. Manohla Dargis liked it, or at least strongly admired it, and actually compares it favorably to No Country For Old Men for how many risks it takes.

It's well documented that this movie is really crazy and that Richard Kelly is a lunatic, so all I have left to talk about is the cast.

In Southland Tales, Richard Kelly leaves his former stunt casting abilities in the dust. Casting Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko was pretty good, but Southland Tales actually achieves 100% stunt casting.

You know how with some actors, like Meryl Streep, even if you've seen them in dozens of roles, they are still able to disappear inside their characters so that you aren't left thinking "There's Meryl Streep" when you see her on the screen? This movie was like the opposite of that. Different actors come on the screen, and all you think is "There's Buffy!" or "There's Justin Timberlake!" or "There's the guy from "Night Court" and the whole past and present cast of SNL!" This has to be on purpose. The overall effect is the sense that you are watching some compressed apocalyptic version of our entire pop culture all together at the end of the world in Southern California.

I think the best way to describe the overall story and feel of the movie is this: one scene features the guy from The Princess Bride, the scary little-girl-voiced medium from Poltergeist, and Booger as a group of scientists who hold a press conference for their new energy-generating machine called Fluid Karma that creates a rift in the space-time continuum, and that this group also launches a giant glowing Mega-Zeppelin, accidentally generates a clone of The Rock, and makes a secret drug that Justin Timberlake smuggles back from Iraq to create some sort of telepathic communication. Bai Ling also vamps around with the scientists as an even more outrageous self-parody than usual, and enthusiastically makes out with Wallace Shawn. Awesome.

I was really impressed by how imaginative and wacky the movie is, but it's pretty clear that Richard Kelly also ripped off some other filmmakers. Rebekah Del Rio singing an impassioned Spanglish version of "The Star Spangled Banner"? Hm, just like David Lynch did in Mulholland Drive, when Rebekah Del Rio sang an impassioned Spanish version of "Crying". And the hallucinatory Busby Berkeley-style song-and-dance number with Justin Timberlake in the arcade to a Killers song sure was a lot like the Busby Berkeley number with Jeff Bridges in the hallucinatory bowling alley in The Big Lebowski.

Pretty obvious steals, but they're good scenes to lift. Trying to understand the plot of Southland Tales and make sense of the goofball dialogue won't get you anywhere, but it's a really funny freakshow of a movie. There are so many other subplots that are really good: Sarah Michelle Gellar and her "The View"-inspired talk show with her porn star pals are especially hilarious, as is Amy Poehler's brief scene as a new bride having a screaming match with her husband about all the men she's cheated on him with.

It's still playing at the Village East cinema on 2nd Ave.

I miss my make-up artist, Stacey Panepinto. I miss my hairstylist, Richard Esposito. I miss all of the 30 ROCK cast and crew, who I don't see anymore because of this motherfucking, motherfucking, motherfucking strike.

Eli Roth hasn't offered any definite information on his Thanksgiving trailer being made into a full-length movie yet. The gross-out trailer [video] ran between the two movies of Grindhouse in the original double-feature theater release, before it got split in two for DVD, which destroyed the cool two-for-one concept that was the basis of the whole project.

Anyway, the fake trailers were a great part of the original movie. My personal favorite is Robert Rodriguez's own Machete [video]; rumors swirl on the IMDb message board about whether or not this one is going to be made into a full-length.

And while Roth isn't promising anything about a second helping of Thanksgiving, he is selling timely merchandise for it! You can buy a t-shirt and a poster at Hot Topic, while you're shopping for your pink rubber spiky fingerless gloves.

While this sure sounds like a cheap ploy to make money for a project you're not actually doing, in this case, I think merchandise for a movie that doesn't exist is just fine. Trailers are often a lot better than the movies they promote (did you see Running With Scissors? Ugh. And the trailer was so funny, too) and maybe some concepts should only last for three minutes.

More exciting news is that Roth says he's working on a collection of trailers called Trailer Trash. As he writes on his MySpace blog, "Why make a whole movie when you can just go film the best parts?"

The first picket lines for the Writers Guild of America strike went up this morning at Rockefeller Center, where about 30 writers peacefully gathered near the skating rink with signs and the giant inflatable rat. Many of the writers out there probably work for some popular shows, but of course, I have no idea who they are or what they look like.

With the exception of Tina Fey.

The strike is the result of unsuccessful negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. So how does that work when one person is a writer but also an executive producer? Wouldn't that make someone like Tina Fey both union and management? Maybe. But she's a producer who's out there on the lines with the proletariat, because she's awesome.

The Times has a good piece on the vast disparities in income among the 12,000 WGA members. Almost half of the West coast members are unemployed, while writers for shows like "Grey's Anatomy" take home $5 million a year. The WGA site has a schedule of all the picket locations in the LA area.

WARNING: SPOILERS

This Friday, what will hopefully be Sidney Lumet's first great movie since Running On Empty (or maybe since The Verdict?) comes out: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

I got excited about this movie when some filming notices were taped to the trees along 45th Street last summer. Here's what this movie has going for it: Philip Seymour Hoffman (in his scary-intense Punch-Drunk Love mode,) Ethan Hawke, Rosemary Harris, Albert Finney, and Marisa Tomei. And now we'll all be excited for Amy Ryan, too, since she's turned out to be one of the most exciting parts of Gone Baby Gone.

Plus it's a heist-gone-wrong movie, plus it's a movie about strife between brothers (which Philip Seymour Hoffman can basically do in his sleep since he did True West on Broadway with John C. Reilly back in 2000,) plus, as the AP review tells us today, the movie begins with a graphic, "unflinching" sex scene between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei. I'm not sure that necessarily counts as a reason to see the movie, but one thing it is certainly going to be is memorable.

Here's the trailer. Last Sunday's Times had a great overview of Lumet's career, and his pragmatic, unsentimental approach to movies.

Please please please let Manohla Dargis review this movie.

If you want to email any files to me, Francis, I'm happy to hold on to them for you. In the meantime, the director is offering a reward for help tracking down the computer- no word yet on whether the reward is a cameo in Tetro.

Yesterday afternoon I happened to see a film shoot going on in Ramon Aponte Park on 47th St in Hell's Kitchen. The trailers parked on 9th Avenue had the names "Luis" and "Dito" on the doors. I figure there's probably only one Dito in the movie world, and that's Dito Montiel, whose first movie, A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, came out last year.

Sure enough, yesterday's movie shoot was for his next movie, Fighting, which stars Terrence Howard, Luis Guzman, and a guy named Channing Tatum, who also appeared in Guide, that Amanda Bynes movie where she pretends to be a boy, and Anne Hathaway's good-girl-image-incinerating, straight-to-video Havoc. Fighting seems to be about underground fight clubs.

Anyway, I saw Terrence Howard walking around inside the park waiting for the scene to start, but he was mostly obscured by the crew and all the equipment. I ran and picked up a pack of baby wipes to try to get onto the set by declaring "Mr. Howard needs me to get these to him right away!," but no dice. So I had to settle for the shot above.

You can see the tracks laid for some kind of dolly shot here.

Remember Everyone Says I Love you and Slums of Beverly Hills . Natasha Lyonne could have been the next Parker Posey, or something.

Thanks, Heatworld .

Man, look at Colin Farrell. The pretty boy from a few years ago has had some late nights. Here he was at the premiere for Alexander just 3 years ago:

Now here he is in Toronto with Ewan McGregor, for the premiere of the Woody Allen movie they're both in, Cassandra's Dream:

Ewan McGregor is 5 years older than Colin Farrell. And Colin Farrell has a neck that is just a little bit jowlier than Woody Allen's.

Wow.

I know that A.O. Scott's review of Shoot 'Em Up is meant to make me decide that I don't want to go see it. He calls it "witless, soulless, heartless" and "a worthless piece of garbage". Fine. I pretty much knew this was going to be a completely absurd and misguided movie just by the poster featuring Paul Giamatti (?!) menacingly holding a machine gun that's almost as big as he is.

But the photo attached to the article? Hm! Why is Clive Owen pulling that trigger with a carrot?

Then A.O. Scott goes and writes things like this:

And this:

Yeah, I know, what are Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and Monica Bellucci doing in schlock like this, etc. Still, this negative review makes it sound so weird and fun that if the opportunity to sneak in to this movie presented itself, I wouldn't say no.

UPDATE: Sourpuss A.O. Scott missed the boat on this one. I saw Shoot 'Em Up, and it's one of the weirdest, most ridiculous movies I've ever seen. It's a riot. (It's also probably a good idea to have a drink or two before you watch it.) The audience at the AMC went nuts for it. If the movie didn't have such great actors in it, it probably would have felt smarmy and irritating, but these actors know how to take radically over-the-top material and make you feel like you're all in on the same joke.

Roger Ebert got the joke too: his review is really good. He recognizes how nuts this movie is, but he happily goes along for the ride: "Shoot 'Em Up is the most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, Sin City, which in comparison was a chamber drama. That I liked Shoot 'em Up is a consequence of a critical quirk I sometimes notice: I may disapprove of a movie for going too far, and yet have a sneaky regard for a movie that goes much, much farther than merely too far."

I don't know how I missed earlier reports of this casting news, but Mischa Barton, canned actress from canceled teen drama The O.C., is starring in a new movie called Finding tATu. The movie just finished filming in Moscow, and tells the story of two young women who find love at a tATu concert.

Russian pop group tATu was a perfectly engineered specimen of pop marketing. Their cliche of a Svengali-like producer and former child psychologist, Ivan Shapovalov, said of his soft-porn entertainment product, "I saw that most people look up pornography on the Internet and of those, most are looking for underage sex. I saw their needs weren't fulfilled. Later, it turned out, I was right. This is the same as my own desires."

As an erstwhile tATu fan friend once said, what's better than two underage girls? How about two underage girls soaking wet? In school uniforms? Making out with each other? Here you go: the "All the Things She Said" video, which is like the KFC Famous Bowl of mainstream commercial fetishism.

By 2004 their popularity started to wane, Yulia got pregnant by her hockey player boyfriend, and the illusion crumbled. A year later during primetime sweeps, Mischa Barton locked lips with Olivia Wilde in a brief teenage lesbian relationship on The O.C. [screenshot], which generated a little ratings boost (the show was already starting its downward spiral) but didn't really raise any eyebrows. Now, in a complex layering of simulations, Barton plays a young lesbian inspired by performers that everybody knows are just pretending to be lesbians.

Since this is such a tireless niche market, somebody figured it was a good idea to write a screenplay based on a Russian novel called tATu Come Back (looks like the novel was never released here.) Actually, writing this story in anything other than screenplay form sounds like a big waste of time. The director is the same guy who did the recent schlocky Captivity. Today's Daily News calls the movie a "sexy romp" (2nd item)--demonstrating the robust appeal of manufactured pretend-gay pop culture. But who cares, everybody knows it's manufactured; two girls getting it on = built-in audience.

Growing up, I got just about all my information about new movies from watching Siskel & Ebert At The Movies on Sunday mornings. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are still the best TV movie critics of all time, as far as I'm concerned, probably because at heart they were both journalists. They were incredibly knowledgeable and really cared about movies, and the focus of the show was always the movies, not the reviewers. I wonder if those two guys with their bad hair and anti-telegenic looks would ever make it on TV today.

Siskel & Ebert were famous for their fearless and passionate debates/fights, but that was part of what made the show so much fun to watch--rarely do we see any TV personalities (with the exception of Anderson Cooper) get so worked up over their subject matter today, unless they're talking about politics. After Siskel died, it was never the same: Ebert needs a thorny, more analytical partner to keep him from getting too soft, and I think we can all agree that Richard Roeper is no Gene Siskel.

Starting tomorrow, over 5,000 clips from the show are going to be available at AtTheMoviesTV.com! (Currently it directs you to the Ebert & Roeper site.) The site will feature over 20 years of reviews, the largest collection of online video-based movie reviews anywhere.

This is awesome news. It's been hard to find any clips of the old show online--YouTube has this one of Siskel and Ebert reviewing Blue Velvet (also available on the movie DVD) which Roger Ebert notoriously didn't like because he thought it was disrespectful to Isabella Rossellini, an argument that doesn't really make sense (since she agreed to do it.) He has since said he wishes he had done a more balanced review of the movie as a whole.

But tomorrow, you'll be able to search for thousands of clips by movie title, director, or actor, and watch the two reviewers almost come to blows over movies like Full Metal Jacket [video]. It seems that hardly any of the shows pre-1985 were saved, so only shows from 1986 onwards, after they moved over to Buena Vista Entertainment, will be in the archive.

On his own site, Ebert wrote about the archive: "Gene and I knew those old shows would be worth saving, but for a long time nobody agreed with us. In the years before home video, it seemed like a waste of expensive video tape to preserve hundreds of episodes of our earlier incarnations on “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You,” “Sneak Previews” or “At the Movies.” After all, the movies we were reviewing weren’t going to be opening again, and who’d want to watch a show of old movie reviews? Right?"

Ha. Clearly those television people were living before we entered the days of Always Archive Everything.

Lots of great stuff on Page Six today. Some highlights:

• David Frost recounts the grossest conversation-starter of all time: As they were sitting down to their famous TV interview, Richard Nixon turned to him and asked, "Well, did you do any fornicating this weekend?" YUCK YUCK YUCK. What's even more disturbing than being asked a question like that by Richard Nixon is that Richard Nixon obviously thought of himself some kind of slick, winking, ladies' man. Puke.
• Tom Cruise in his fetishiest/campiest movie outfit yet (above), on the set of Valkyrie in Germany.
• During her first show in 2 weeks not to be canceled due to exhaustion, a troubled Amy Winehouse spit on the crowd. Crying onstage and hitting herself in the head with her microphone also reported.
• A bizarre story from Moby about getting a funny letter from Karl Rove, after Moby joked that maybe they were half-brothers. The letter suggested that maybe James Carville was a more likely secret relative. Moby might actually not be joking about this.
• And A.M. Homes, a writer we still love even though her latest books are maybe not as good, is reportedly doing an HBO series about the Hamptons, which hopefully will be as perverse and sick as her very best stories.

You've probably seen him a couple of times on Conan and maybe a stand-up set on Comedy Central at one in the morning. Hopefully you were lucky enough not to see him in bit parts in unfunny comedies that nobody saw like Taxi and Failure to Launch. But all of a sudden, it seems like Patton Oswalt is everywhere.

His breakthrough from late-night comedy to the big time is his starring role as the voice of Remy the rat in Ratatouille, one of the best animated children's movies that grown-ups also think is funny that I've ever seen. He's hilarious and great.

(I realize he was also on The King of Queens for 9 seasons, but I cannot figure out who watched that show. Families, I guess, judging from his blog post about the end of the show this spring.)

He also had a live CD/DVD come out yesterday called Werewolves and Lollipops. And he's going to be at Brooklyn's Sound Fix Records venue tomorrow night doing a free performance to promote it. If you can't make it to Brooklyn, he's going to be back on Conan tomorrow night, too.

Go Patton Oswalt!

A few notable TV appearances from the last year or so:

• On Conan talking about old people having babies [video] (very funny, not really safe for work)
• On Conan talking about the "Physics for Poets" class he took at William & Mary [video]
• On Jimmy Kimmel talking about getting engaged and comics [video]
• and there are about a thousand recent promotional appearances for Ratatouille on YouTube.

Next, he's going to be appear in goofy sports-comedy Balls of Fury (looks like Dodgeball) later this summer, and then takes a surprising detour into pre-teen drama in something called All Roads Lead Home which according to IMDb is about a young girl who befriends a puppy after her mom dies in a car accident. Hmm.

It looks like Patton Oswalt might be developing a split career, sort of like Bob Saget did, where he does a lot of mainstream family-friendly stuff that wins the hearts of America's 10 year-olds, and simultaneously keeps going with adult-themed stand-up comedy where he got his start. The thing is, he's really good at both, and Ratatouille is a great movie. As long as the comedy for grown-ups keeps coming and he can pay the bills with the kids' stuff, he should be unstoppable.

Last night Joan Jett & the Blackhearts played River Rocks at Pier 54. Joan was as wiry and fiesty as ever, wearing a black vinyl top that probably would have fit her in 1980 when her first solo album came out.

And of course, they rocked. In addition to a handful of songs from her new album, Sinner, the band played literally every single Joan Jett & the Blackhearts song I have ever heard. Hearing all their hits together like that, I realized how many of their biggest songs were actually covers: "I Love Rock 'n Roll" (The Arrows), "Do You Wanna Touch Me" (Gary Glitter), "Light of Day" (Bruce Springsteen), "Crimson and Clover" (Tommy James).

But one of her best songs, "Bad Reputation", is one that she wrote. Though it was actually never released as a single, I suspect that "Bad Reputation" has had somewhat of a resurgence in popular culture recently because it's the track used in the opening credits of "Freaks and Geeks", the beloved but short-lived TV show from the '90's that I also bet has enjoyed newfound popularity because of the wild success of The 40 Year Old Virgin and more recently Knocked Up, which were created by the almost all the same people that did the TV show. I couldn't help thinking that the biggest reason that Joan Jett played "Bad Reputation" as the very first song of her set last night was, weirdly enough, Judd Apatow.

"Bad Reputation" was also used in a promo for TLC's "American Chopper" earlier this year.

This full-page ad in Time Out turns out to not be a joke. Johnny Utah's is the new restaurant opening in July at the Rockefeller Center Hotel on West 51st St.

Although Johnny Utah is the undercover FBI agent portrayed by Keanu Reeves in the landmark 1991 California-Buddhist-surfer-bank-robber heist-buddy movie Point Break, for the purposes of midtown fine dining, the name is meant to evoke the old American southwest. From the hotel website about their "urban cowboy experience": "It was a time in which food and drink dictated the mood and voracious appetite of outlaws, gunslingers, cattle barons, and muleskinners."

I'm not sure how those voracious muleskinners would have felt about the Lone Ranger tofu salad or the Coyote Ugly burger at Johnny Utah's. Actually, the "food of the vaqueros" selections on the menu suggest that by "old west", the managers of Johnny Utah's seem to mean "any part of American culture that isn't the northeast." They've got southern pulled pork, Mexican tequila, a "Wyoming grilled" steak sandwich, and a breakfast item called the "Buffalo Bill Granola Bowl", which even makes this city slicker wince.

Just a little background, in case you missed Point Break the last 35 times it was on TBS: Johnny Utah, non-cowboy, was a quarterback at Ohio State; an injury forced him out of football; he's an FBI agent who's a lot more bored with the straight and narrow life than he's willing to admit, and gets seduced by the free-spirited surfer lifestyle represented by the mystical and insane bank robber Patrick Swayze, aka Bodhi, with whom he develops a complex guru/father-figure-but-cooler relationship, and the two share many scenes of intense non-homosexual man-love and questionable acting.

The movie also features the greatest skydiving action sequence of all time, in which Johnny Utah jumps out of the plane without a parachute, catches Bodhi mid-air, then has to decide between letting go of his gun and pulling the ripcord of the parachute strapped to Bodhi, or holding onto his gun and falling to a sure death, because he can't do both and Bodhi WILL NOT PULL THAT RIPCORD.

But anyway, surfers aren't cowboys.

Related: IMDb's extensive collection of memorable quotes from Point Break. Wikipedia's Point Break page includes references to the movie, such as this one from Hot Fuzz: "Have you ever pointed your gun up in the air, shooting wildly shouting 'Aaaarrrggghhh' because you were friends with who you had to shoot?"

While watching Knocked Up the other day, I knew I sort of recognized the actress who played Alison's mom--she was hazily familiar, but I couldn't identify her. It turned out to be Joanna Kerns, the mom from "Growing Pains", a show I never watched regularly, but the show was so popular for so long that of course everybody knew who she was.

Joanna Kerns' second career as a TV director has been a lot like that: she's directed an episode or two of popular shows that I've rarely or never actually watched, but could still probably name a lot of the actors on them and all the main plot developments. She directed her first TV episode on her own show during the last season of "Growing Pains", then went on to lots of soapy drama of the '90s: "ER", "Ally McBeal", "Boston Public", and more recently "The Ghost Whisperer". Teen dramas like "Dawson's Creek", "Felicity", "Joan of Arcadia" and "One Tree Hill". Two episodes of "Scrubs". An episode of "Medium" from last month. She's never been a regular series director, but she's clearly made a name for herself and is getting regular work--pretty cool for a sitcom mom.

The Times points out that Joanna Kerns' scene with Katherine Heigl in which she tries unsuccessfully to convince her daughter to "take care of" her pregnancy (the closest anyone gets to saying the word "abortion" is Seth Rogan's pals saying "shmashmortion" a few times) is part of a larger Hollywood trend in which abortions are essentially a non-option. It was a little freaky to watch Maggie Seaver play the pragmatic devil on the main character's shoulder, but I probably should have known she had some range as an actress: in 1983 she was on "V" (sci-fi allegory for the Third Reich), "Laverne & Shirley" (screwball comedy), and "The A-Team" (screwball action).

Another interesting thing I just learned about Knocked Up: the two little girls that play Leslie Mann's and Paul Rudd's kids in the movie are Leslie Mann's and Judd Apatow's daughters in real life. The older girl delivers probably the most adorable reading of the word "penis" in the history of film.

Tonight is the TBS premiere of Tyler Perry's first TV show "House of Payne", which like his other productions is about a southern black family and their various troubles and successes. There aren't many other people working in entertainment today like Tyler Perry, who has become enormously popular and rich working outside mainstream media channels.

"House of Payne" aired for 10 episodes last spring in New York, Philly, Chicago, Houston, DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Baltimore and Raleigh, and was popular enough to incite a bidding war among networks. TBS bought an unprecedented 100 episodes of the show, which start airing tonight, and Fox also got in on the deal to air episodes starting next fall.

Not bad for a show totally created by one man (Tyler Perry is director, producer, executive producer and writer) who paid for the production of the first 10 episodes himself at his own studio, then sold those into syndication, then got a network to buy 100 episodes at once. As the New York Times points out in an article about the phenomenal success of every single thing Tyler Perry does, this is backwards from the usual process of getting a network show made, and has allowed him to continue making the kinds of productions that studios may not be quick to recognize as promising: "I went to LA and pitched to a room full of studio execs," Mr. Perry said. "They told me I couldn’t say 'Jesus' on television and nobody would watch it."

Just like his 2005 movie Diary of a Mad Black Woman generated a lot of terrible reviews from critics, some angry statements from black cultural theorists and writers, and gigantic ticket sales (and even led to an exchange between us and Roger Ebert,) how you react to "House of Payne" seems to depend a lot on who you are and what you expect from a sitcom. If you're Jill Nelson, African-American cultural critic who wrote about Perry in Essence, you think it's insulting to women and not funny. If you're the kind of person who writes on the IMDb discussion boards, you either think it's a shameless exploitation of offensive black stereotypes, or you think it depicts important truths about black American families. Or you're just mad that it replaced "Girlfriends" in its time slot.

Either way, enough people who watch TV and buy movie and theater tickets love Tyler Perry, and helped him move off the "chitlin' circuit" to reach a national audience. A lot of people (maybe especially a lot of white people) may not like or understand his style, but he's already shooting a second comedy series called "Meet the Browns", shooting a talk show, two new movies, and is making plans for his own TV network.

Personally, I think the mainstream critical responses to Tyler Perry's productions really demonstrate how far removed those critics are from his core audience. The Times article refers to Niyi Coker Jr., a professor of theater and media studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis:

It's also interesting to see the creative ways a TV network like TBS markets to an audience that they know is out there and that they want a piece of: they're running a contest on the "House of Payne" website where you can win $25,000 for your church and a trip on a Sheridan Gospel Network cruise. Mm-hmm. How often do you see mainstream secular TV networks offering a donation to a church as an incentive to viewers?

There are two things that you might remember about Jennifer Lynch. She's David Lynch's daughter, and she made 1993's Boxing Helena. What you might remember about Boxing Helena is that it could be the worst movie ever made.

Now she's back, making her first movie since then: Surveillance. As much as I admire anyone who can come back after such an abject failure of a first movie (especially with such an acclaimed father,) judging from the things she says in a feature the NY Times did about her, it seems that Jennifer Lynch might be getting sick of waiting around for people to start writing mean things about her again.

Boxing Helena, and sometimes Lynch herself, got savaged by critics (especially good was Janet Maslin's review, which doesn't fall back on accusations of misogyny or perversion that some other critics threw out, but rather says the movie "threatens to give the concept of metaphor a bad name.") There's really no temptation to be contrary and claim that Boxing Helena is some kind of misunderstood masterpiece. Lynch seems like a nice enough person, but her movie really is as bad as everyone says (video evidence). Not surprising: she wrote the script when she was 19.

But now that's over, and she's offering herself up to be pistol-whipped by this cruel, cruel world all over again. Here's a quote from the NYT feature that comes after she's already openly discussed her addictions, her changing emotional states, journalists who think she doesn't deserve to be loved, and the titanium rod that was implanted in her spine a few years ago:

There are so few female directors working in Hollywood, and I really wish I didn't find this one so irritating. Surveillance ("both grotesque and insane!" --Bill Pullman) is about homicidal maniacs driving through Nebraska. I hope it's good, or soon we're going to be reading about her breakthroughs in group therapy and abnormal Pap smears.

The best movie playing at the Cannes Film Festival is Abel Ferrara's new movie Go Go Tales.

I'm basing this judgment on three things (none of which are the movie, which I haven't seen):

1) Manohla Dargis's review:

2) The cast: Willem Dafoe, Bob Hoskins, and notably Asia Argento, who plays one of the strippers. From the review: "Ms. Argento, who enters wearing her pretty scowl and tethered to a Rottweiler ... has the kind of intense screen presence that could bring out the fire department. Actors are paid to emote and recite lines, but Ms. Argento bares body and soul."

3) These photos of Asia Argento, Stefania Rocca, Bianca Balti, and Abel Ferrara whooping it up at the screening at Cannes.

We couldn't be happier for the success that has come to the Television Without Pity crew--the site got bought by Bravo/NBC in March, and no doubt it's nothing but avalanches of corporate money, booze and sex on tap, and unlimited Tivo hard drive space over there these days.

One downside to the buy, though: Fametracker, the Farmer's Almanac of Celebrity Worth that shares some writers with TWoP, has been "on hiatus" ever since. Site creators Wing Chun and Man From FUNKLE clearly have big things going on, and New York magazine's Intelligencer probably needs a lot of attention. But Fametracker was my very favorite pop culture website for the past several years, and if it really is gone, it deserves some recognition. Or at least a clip show of its own.

So here are a few of our Fametracker favorites from the vault:

The Fame Audit. Assessments of celebrities' current status, and where they're headed.

• Owen Wilson
• William Shatner ("Shatner has conquered. He was cool, then he was nerd-cool, then he was kitsch, then he was kitsch-cool, then he was knowing-wink cool, then just plain cool again, and now he's something better than cool. He made himself a punchline with such debonair cunning that -- guess what? -- the man is not a punchline anymore.")
• Scarlett Johansson, who they recognized was in the process of flushing her career down the toilet two years ago ("The only problem is that, while you might place your lips to the money teat while thinking, "I can always do indies on the side," you can't, in fact, always do indies on the side. Scarlett, don't you think Ben Affleck, while being hoisted in a harness into a model of a fighter plane against a green screen on the set of Pearl Harbor, was thinking to himself, "I can always do indies on the side"?")

2 Stars 1 Slot. Pitting two actors who occupy the same cultural space against each other. Terrence Howard vs. Jeffrey Wright in "Battle of the Next Great Black Actors"; and William Shatner (yes, again) vs. Alec Baldwin in "Battle of the Brilliant, Bloated Meta-Masters".

And some of the best stuff they ever put out in Blue Moons:

• Least Essential Movie lists, in which American Pie 2 was dubbed Pie Fucker 2: The Fuckening
• Rejected Firewall Taglines ("Kick-Ass.exe")
• The totally brilliant Inside the Hollywood Star Chamber, in which five decrepit clones of Karl Malden convene in a secret bunker to select the Academy Awards every year
• The annual Rasco P. Soultrain Awards, featuring the most Undeservedly Famous Person of the Year (last year it was also Time's Person of the Year: You) and the Newgoer of the Year (bye bye, Ryan Phillippe!)

Sure, we'll be able to keep on trudging through life without Fametracker, but without some funny rejected taglines for Ocean's 13, our skies will be just a little grayer.

Blah blah backlash, I still like Chuck Klosterman. Not everybody appreciates his obsessive approach to the minutiae of popular culture and tendency to make just about every story he writes a self-referential exercise or public disclosure of his family history/love life/drug habits.

But when he was writing for Spin, before the big shake-up that seems to have resulted in everything in there you'd want to read getting axed, I enjoyed his columns. In these columns, he often made wild and unsubstantiated claims about music and sometimes relied a little too heavily on the same '80's metal bands for earnest comic value, but they were almost always genuinely funny, even if his one-liners hold up better than his thesis statements. Sometimes the essays captured some idea about music that was new, at least to me (such as the "Ten Most Accurately Rated Artists in Music History" piece.)

So then New York magazine comes along with a self-consciously quirky little Apropos of Nothing column called "32 Reasons Why the Eagles Are the Best Band in the Universe", which is an attempt at ripping off Klosterman that is just not subtle at all. It's also not very successful. Here are some of their reasons:

The underlying "greatest rock band" hyperbole of this list is a rip-off in itself, and these kinds of statements about the Eagles are, I guess, trying to be cute and "random" ("rubber cement and chewable Quaaludes"??) but come off as insincere and unfunny. So the style of this piece really bugs me, as does, of course, the notion that the Eagles are the world's greatest rock band.

The fact that they actually include as a reason the Eagles reference that's in The Big Lebowski ("15. The scene in The Big Lebowski where the Dude (Jeff Bridges) gets thrown out of a taxicab for dissing the Eagles") demonstrates that these people have no idea what they're talking about. The Dude getting thrown out of cab after he says "I hate the fuckin' Eagles, man" isn't supposed to act as a rebuke to the Eagles-hating public, it's meant to suggest that the Eagles in general, and the song playing in the cab ("Peaceful Easy Feeling") in particular, are not synonymous with "the best band in the universe". As Robert Christgau famously wrote, "Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them."

Watch the Eagles-dissing clip from The Big Lebowski.