My Valkyrie reaction is that it's...uhm, not too bad. A passable sit, relatively okay, decent enough, I wasn't in pain. Except it feels as if this World War II-era thriller, about an effort by a group of patriotic German officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1944, is taking place inside an underground bunker. There's something muffled and suppressed about it. As Tom Cruise and his co-conspirators go about to trying to bring down the Nazi regime, it just doesn't feel all that suspenseful.

Or interesting, even. Okay, it's "interesting" as far as...Read More

Yesterday Fox 411's Roger Friedman said he'd been "banned" from seeing Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, and then Patrick "Big Picture" Goldstein had a discussion with Mike Vollman about the Friedman situation,during which Vollman said that the New York-based columnist "just wasn't invited...screenings are a privilege, not a right, and [if Freidman had] indicated a desire to be open-minded and not telegraphed his intentions ahead of time, we would've acted differently."

The interesting part comes when Goldstein writes that he doesn't "like the idea of studios banning writers from screenings, since judging from the state of my frosty relations with a couple...Read More

In a 12.15 petition, Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin and more than 125 other SAG members urged guild leaders to deep-six a scheduled strike authorization vote. "We support our union and we support the issues we're fighting for, but we do not believe in all good conscience that now is the time to be putting people out of work," the petition said.

If an Academy member or press person allows a watermarked screener in his/her possession to be pirated and is thereafter busted for this, we the people (a) want to know the name and profession of this person, partly so we can speculate on his/her idiocy levels or circumstance, and (b) want to see the perp severely punished. But no such satisfaction has come out of the Quantum of Solace screener situation, that was recently reported by Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil, and which involves a female Academy member.

We didn't need to hear any details back in '04 when former Academy...Read More

The San Francisco, San Diego and St. Louis film critics announced their best-of lists yesterday, and I have to confess to a sense of growing tedium. Okay, there are two or three variations (thank God), but mainly they're all marching in lockstep with the status-quo faves. Half award-giving, half photo-copying.

At least the St. Louis gang gave their Best Supporting Actress award to Doubt's Viola Davis -- good call. And their Best Actress award to Revolutionary Road's Kate Winslet -- check. Their Best Picture award went to The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button...okay. But their remaining awards were the same...Read More

I suck at this Bush Shoe-Throwing Game. My highest score has been 13 or something. You think it's easy? The trick is to throw the instant Bush pops up; hesitate and he drops right down again. He's very agile, good reflexes, no easy target. Plus the soundtrack is distracting, messes with your concentration. And the blood-hit effect is unnecessarily vicious.

I'm not saying I'm so persuaded or even in the mood to go poking around, but since we're all pretty clear on the likely Oscar nominees, I'm wondering if there's any yearning out there to see this or that contender taken down. I'm really not feeling any of the old fire myself (it's been a bit of a tepid year) but does anyone out there feel anything? In terms of wanting a film or filmmaker out of contention, I mean?

Always pruning, always re-thinking, always open to suggestions.

BEST PICTURE

Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight); Che(IFC Films); Milk (Focus Features); The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount/Warner Bros.); Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage/DreamWorks); Frost/Nixon (Universal); Doubt (Miramax); The Visitor (Overture Films), The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight), Gran Torino (Warner Bros.), Nothing But the Truth (Yari Film Group), WALL-E (Disney).

BEST DIRECTOR

David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Steven Soderbergh (Che); Gus Van Sant (Milk); Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road); John Patrick Shanley (Doubt); Stephen Daldry (The Reader); Tom McCarthy (The Visitor); Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler).

BEST ACTOR

Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road); Richard Jenkins (The Visitor); Josh Brolin (W.); Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler); Sean Penn (Milk); Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon); Benicio Del Toro (Che).

BEST ACTRESS

Kristin Scott Thomas (I've Loved You So Long); Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road, Meryl Streep (Doubt); Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married); Melissa Leo (Frozen River); Kate Beckinsale (Nothing But the Truth); The Reader); Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky); Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight); Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder), James Franco (Milk), Alan Alda (Nothing But the Truth), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt); Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road); Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Viola Davis (Doubt); Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona); Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married); Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler); Elsa Zylberstein (I've Loved You So Long); Hiam Abbass (The Visitor); Vera Farmiga (Nothing But the Truth).

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie (Australia); Susannah Grant (The Soloist), Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), J. Michael Straczynski (Changeling), Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler); Nick Schenk (Gran Torino), Rod Lurie (Nothing But the Truth), Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky); Peter Buchman, Steven Soderbergh (Che), Philippe Claudel (I've Loved You So Long).

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), John Michael Shanley (Doubt), Justin Haythe (Revolutionary Road), David Hare (The Reader).

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Everlasting Moments (Sweden, d: Jan Troell); Waltz with Bashir (Israel) The Class (France), Captain Abu Raed (Jordan); Gomorra (d: Matteo Garrone); The Baader Meinhof Gang (Germany, d: Uli Edel); Necessities of Life (Canada, d: Benoit Pilon); Tear This Heart Out (Mexico; d: Roberto Sneider); Departures (Japan, d: Yojiro Takita); Tulpan (Kazakhstan; d: Sergey Dvortsevoy).

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Man on Wire (d: James Marsh), Trouble the Water (d: Carl Deal,Tia Lessin); I.O.U.S.A. (d: I forget); Standard Operating Procedure (d: Errol Morris); Encounters At The End of The World (d: Werner Herzog). SHAMEFULLY OFF THE SHORT LIST: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (d: Marina Gordon); Stranded: I've Come From a plane that crashed on the mountains (d: Gonzalo Arijon); Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (d: Alex Gibney)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight), Colin Watkinson (The Fall)

SPECIAL EFFECTS

Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull The Fall, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Dark Knight, Indy 4: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

WALL-E (Pixar/Walt Disney Pictures); Waltz with Bashir (Sony Pictures Classics); Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks SKG), Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who (20th Century Fox), The Tale of Despereaux (Universal Pictures), Igor (The Weinstein Company), Bolt (Walt Disney Pictures), Space Chimps (20th Century Fox), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (DreamWorks SKG), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Warner Bros. Pictures).

Alliance of Women Film Journalists Special Mention Awards: (1) AWFJ Hall Of Shame Award to 27 Dresses; (2) Actress Most in Need Of A New Agent: Kate Hudson ; (3) Movie You Wanted To Love But Just Couldn't (Tie) -- Mamma Mia! and The Women; (4) Best Of The Fests -- Hunger; (5) Unforgettable Moment Award (tie between The Dark Knight (Joker's first scene) and Slumdog Millionaire (young Jamal jumps into the poop....what?); (6) Best Depiction Of Nudity or Sexuality (tie between Elegy and The Reader); (7) Best Seduction -- Vicky Cristina Barcelona; (8) Sequel That Shouldn't Have Been Made Award -- tie...Read More

"Over the years, Detroit bosses kept repeating, 'We have to make the cars people want.' That's why they're in trouble. Their job is to make the cars people don't know they want but will buy like crazy when they see them. I would have been happy with my Sony Walkman had Apple not invented the iPod. Now I can't live without my iPod. I didn't know I wanted it, but Apple did. Same with my Toyota hybrid." -- Thomas L. Friedman in his 12.14 N.Y. Times column.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Egyptian journalist who threw two shoes at President Bush yesterday during a Baghdad press conference yesterday, is suddenly a new Middle-Eastern folk hero, and no wonder. Thousands of Iraqis "took to the streets today to demand al-Zeidi's release, to hail him as a hero and to praise his insult as a proper send-off to the unpopular U.S. president," says this AP story by Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Omar Sinan.

I agree with the angry masses. Like Peter Finch's Howard Beale did in Network, Muntadhar al-Zeidi has articulated a popular rage. Throwing those shoes
...Read More

HE reader Andrew Corks writes that he "saw Let The Right One In this year at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it took one of the top prizes, and was blown away by the overall quality of the film. It has an uncanny ability to successfully cross all genres -- horror, love story, comedy, coming-of-age -- combined with genuine acting and spectacular cinematography.

"Now that Let The Right One In has now picked up its second major critic's society award, why is it still absent from the Oscar Balloon and general Oscar talks?"

Wells to Corks: I'm not looking to put...Read More

Here's a video of an encounter last Friday night between some anti-Che Guevara right-wing Latins and Che director Steven Soderbergh. It happened during a q & a at the Zeigfeld Theatre after a screening of both Che pics, in tandem. The video appears in mini-form on Indiewire. (Thanks to Eugene Hernandez for the tip-off.)

It's appalling that American Film Institute's 10 Best Films of '08 included Iron Man -- a first-rate comic book action CG flick that is nonetheless a generic wish-fulfillment power-dreams movie aimed at adolescent males of all ages. A movie, in other words, with absolutely no river running through it whatsoever other than....okay, a certain aura of coolness exuded by star Robert Downey, Jr., a vibe of wowness because the film was very profitable, and the respectable career-bump panache enjoyed by director Jon Favreau.

I guarantee that one of the AFI jurors voting for Iron Man was documentarian and filmmaker-interview smoothie...Read More

Lukas Moodysson's Mammoth is a Manhattan-based yuppie-values drama that also involves time spent in Thailand by the husband character, played by Gael Garcia Bernal. (With a little tsunami action?) The wife/mother is played by Michelle Williams. Pic will screen in the main competition at the Berlin International Film Festival 2009. This European TV clip contains a longish trailer for the film.

In a Rachel Abramowitz/L.A. Times interview that ran yesterday, Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes asserted that April Wheeler, played by Kate Winslet in the film, "is one of the great feminist heroines. She's the only person in the movie [who's] big enough to face the truth.

"You know well this is not a movie about a woman who wants to go to Paris," Mendes says. "It's a movie about a woman who wants her life back and can still remember the dreams she once had and is finally...Read More

Here's a scan of the letter of transit that caused all the rumpus in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca. It's one of the extras in the relatively new Casablanca Blu-ray box-set. Notice, however, the date that Paul Henreid's Victor Laszlo is travelling on -- 22 Juillet 1941. And then notice the date on the gambling voucher signed by Humphrey Bogart's Rick at the beginning of the film -- 2 Decembre 1941.

Read More

To properly absorb this rote holiday item, you need to click and listen -- that's all. Everyone's allowed to dip their toe into the swamp of sappy sentimentality around the time of year. As long as you keep yourself in check.

Consider the Dickopedia profile of MSNBC's David Gregory, the very thought of whom makes me growl like Clint Eastwood's Walt Kowalski.

Watch this and tell me there isn't at least a small part of you that doesn't enjoy watching George Bush duck as an Iraqi journalist throws not just one but two shoes at him, in tandem. "All I can report," Bush joked of the incident, "is a size 10."

I for one am willing to temporarily buy Chris Weitz's statement of devotion and sincerity regarding his direction of New Moon, the sequel to Twilight. I happen to feel Weitz (The Golden Compass, About A Boy) is a weak choice, feeling as I do that he's a sensitive, well-intentioned but fatally middlebrow journeyman. I've also said before that given the chaste female sensibility of the Twilight novels that a woman director would have been a more natural fit. (Like The Hurt Locker 's Kathryn Bigelow.)

I also think that Weitz's statement-to-the-fans is politically correct b.s., but one may as well...Read More

Today the Boston Society of Film Critics tied on their choice of 2008's Best Picture, splitting their top honor between Slumdog Millionaire and WALL*E. Except they also gave WALL*E their Best Animated Film award. Due respect, but this seems to me like muddled thinking.

If you're giving WALL*E your Best Picture award (along with Milk), you're saying, "This Chaplinesque robot movie is so good it deserves honor and glory outside the animation ghetto." Which is fine and good. But you can't then turn around and say, "Oh, and it's also the Best Animated Film." That's like a Catholic male convincing...Read More

Every three or four months the Zapata obsession pops through, especially on weekends. When, why, what, what's the problem, etc.?

"A question has been nagging me for a while and recently intensified upon seeing Frost/Nixon," writes a reader named Mat (one "t" -- not a typo). "Why are Hollywood biographies so vapid? Every one i see is 'just line 'em up and knock 'em down,' straight facts, predictable arc. it leaves each film at the mercy of how interesting the given subject is, but rarely captures the essence of said subject.

"I'm thinking specifically of Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan doc of a few years ago (i.e., No Direction Home), which brought such a vivid feel to the man's life and experiences instead...Read More

For those HE readers who thought it perverse or presumptuous that I addressed Phillip Seymour Hoffman as "Philly" at a Doubt party a week and a half ago, listen to Jon Stewart as he welcomes Hoffman on-stage in this clip from the show.

I'm sick of running Daily Show embed codes because they go on forever (lines and lines and lines of coding) and sometimes they're not properly written (i.e.. no closing div tags) and because I don't care for the smallish size of these Daily Show clips. Why can't the tech guys create a coding that adjusts to...Read More

Click here before reading the following: Mira Nair's Amelia (Fox Searchlight, 10.23.09) was research-screened last Wednesday in Pasadena, according to what Nair told L.A. Times/Envelope columnist Scott Feinberg the day before. If anyone saw it (or knows someone who did) and has heard anything at least vaguely encouraging, I'd be curious to hear some particulars. If the word isn't so hot then forget it, for obvious reasons.

Feinberg writes that "it has long amazed me that...Read More

Where can this guy possibly go in life, given the perverse tomb that he lives in, like a living mummy inside an ancient Egyptian pyramid, and his apparent inability to leave it, step out and renew, re-engage, reinvent himself. He's Miss Havisham from Great Expectations -- bloated, diseased and malignant beyond the darkest imaginings of Edgar Allen Poe, much less Charles Dickens.

Steven Soderbergh's Che is off to a strong start at Manhattan's Ziegfeld and L.A.'s Westside Pavillion, I'm told. In LA the entire weekend was sold out before the first show started, and the big Ziegfeld show (i.e., both films plus intermission) sold out an an hour in advance. People cheered during the Ziegfeld intermission. When Soderbergh dropped by for a q & a, he got a standing ovation. He spoke for about 40 minutes, and almost everyone stayed.

What Doesn't Kill You director-writer Brian Goodman invited me to a post-screening soiree last night at Almond, a noisy, reasonably priced restaurant on West 22nd near Broadway. By the time everyone arrived around 9:45 or so the news had broken about Bob Yari , the producer-distributor of Goodman's film, having gone into Chapter 11.

This is bad news for WDKY, which is only just starting to be seen and talked about, and for Rod Lurie's Nothing But The Truth , a Yari movie that's also been caught with its pants down. It would be one thing if they both blew...Read More

The American public will hand over roughly $31,524,000 to the makers of The Day The Earth Stood Still this weekend. The second place Four Christmases will make $12,234,000 for a cume of $86,900,000.
The third-place Twilight will take in $7,334,000 -- $149,129,000 as of Sunday night.
And the fourth-place Bolt will take in $6,946,000

Nothing Like the Holidays, the Hispanic holiday comedy, bombed with a projected total of $4,035,000 and $2400 a theatre. Baz Luhrman's Australia will earn $3,865,000 -- now to about $37 million domestic. Madagascar will follow with $2,879,000.

The only limited opener that looks like it has...Read More

Asked what he thinks the Obama administration "will do about Cuba," Che director Steven Soderbergh tells Politico's Jeffrey Ressner the following:

"What they ought to do is really obvious. Whether they'll do it is one of these questions in which you have a lot of people with certain beliefs controlling the dialogue, and therefore the problem is not getting solved.

"How many years are you supposed to give a bad idea? Would you stay married for 45 years to someone you hated? It's obvious what we're doing isn't working. The answer is [to] lift the embargo and flood that place with...Read More

The absence of a comma between the words "bad" and "can" drove me up the wall the minute I had a look at the Good poster last night. I'm convinced that movie advertising people enjoy running copy that ignores basic punctuation because they know it irritates people like me. I think it gives them a little perverse kick. Seriously.

What Doesn't Kill You director-writer-actor Brian Goodman on Prince and Lafayette -- Friday, 12.12, 4:35 pm. After shooting pics we went upstairs to a friend's office and did a half-hour interview. An excellent fellow all around -- candid, a humanist, unaffected, no bull. Relatively few guys with hard-knocks experience within the criminal world have gone on to a life of writing and entertainment, but Goodman's a member in good standing.

The career of Van Johnson, whose death was reported earlier today, peaked in the '40s and '50s. I never much liked his country-hick accent (he came from Rhode Island) and particularly the way he repeatedly groaned "ohhh, no!" in William Wellman 's Battleground ('49). But I've been watching that film all my life so Johnson obviously wasn't that alienating. I'll always remember his grim- faced Lieutenant Stephen Maryk in The Caine Mutiny ('54), and the pilot he played in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo ('44). He lived for 92 years, which is a pretty good long run. He was allegedly closeted.

...

Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal says "no Che screeners or screenings (that I know of) were set for the Phoenix Film Critics Society. Same for Nothing but the Truth. Voting deadline is today."

"Why not go the Full Monty and have Hugh Jackman host the Oscar telecast as Wolverine, with other super-heroes as presenters? That would be worth the price of admission." -- posted at 11:409 Pacific by Rich S.

Of all the Nazi-slash-Holocaust movies that have screened or opened over the last few weeks, I was surprised to discover that Vicente Amorim's Good (Thinkfilm, 12.31), an adaptation of C.P. Taylor's play with Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs in the lead roles, is the best of the lot. More satisfying than The Reader, slightly more engaging than Valkyrie, more period-believable than The Boy in Striped Pajamas, more emotionally affecting than Adam Resurrected.