Judging by this Wanted trailer, we have Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith mode (without the humor) and James McAvoy, the Scot who will be a star after Atonement, trying on his first action movie. Morgan Freeman plays his usual mentor role. The interesting visual element here is Nightwatch Russian director Timur Bekmambetov. But something tells me he is not in control of the movie's tone. This looks like cheesy fun.

Reactions to some Sweeney Todd previews are spreading over the web like kudzu. From the people I've talked to, the Sweeney Todd story really does play more gruesome as a live action flick than as a stylized piece of musical theatre, which makes sense. After all, people are eating those meat pies! I hear Depp is better all around than Helena Bonham Carter, but I will wait to see for myself. Word is good on both Alan Rickman and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Cinefantastique

Johnny Depp Reads

more Johnny Depp reads

catsplay

Hollywood Elsewhere

IMDB, and

more IMDB.

If you're in NYC, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will screen some Sweeney Todd clips as part of an evening with Tim Burton at 8 PM on Wednesday, November 14 at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. For ticket info, go to Film at Lincoln Center.

A sampling of reactions is pasted on the jump:

I read again for my book group one of the more pivotal books I read growing up, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. It holds up amazingly well, and serves as a window into the roots of the feminist movement that blossomed during my high school years in the 70s. Here's Bill Moyers on Lessing.

Here are ten signs of fall TV depression:

1. I am sad because AMC's Mad Men is over.
2. I am happy that the Red Sox won the World Series, but miserable that there's no more baseball.
3. I have not adopted one new fall show.
4. HBO's Brit import Five Days is almost done.
5. I was going to check out Viva Vegas Laughlin because I loved Viva Blackpool, but was warned off by bad reviews.
6. I am catching up on all the John from Cincinnati episodes I missed.
7. I am watching old Entourage and Sex in the City reruns--which may be a good sign for the upcoming SITC movie--or means I'm really gloomy.
8. I am watching more talk/news shows, from 60 Minutes to Oprah, Charlie Rose, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I am even considering TiVoing Ellen and The View. UPDATE: And The Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts.
9. I am delirous that Project Runway is coming back November 14.
10. But I have to wait until February for the return of Lost.

In the wake of Bart Walker's defection from CAA to John Sloss's Cinetic Media in New York, CAA has recruited Cinetic vet Dan Steinman to come aboard their indie financing unit, led by Rick Hess. Steinman will continue to put packages together and find financing for indie projects and will help the CAA sales arm on such pictures as Sean Penn's Into the Wild, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, and Rian Johnson's Brothers Bloom, which was financed, packaged and recently sold to Summit by CAA for more than $10-million for North American rights. CAA's Micah Green, who first brought Steinman into Cinetic, was instrumental in bringing him over. Steinman was also lured by the opportunity to work in an arena with greater talent resources.

Here's Tatiana Siegel's Variety story.

As revealed by the Gurus 'O Gold voting, the Best Actor race has four likely candidates and a wide-open fifth slot. (No one has seen Charlie Wilson's War.)

This gives some of the indies a shot at doing what ThinkFilm did with Half Nelson and Ryan Gosling last year. But can Lars and the Real Girl's Gosling rise above the ignominy of losing a role in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones? (He has confirmed my hunch that he left because he was not comfortable playing the 30-something father of a 12-year-old.) Finally it was better for him to drop out of a movie that he might not be good in than staying and playing the role. Gosling has many fine roles ahead of him.

Will Philip Seymour Hoffman gain traction for Fox Searchlight's The Savages or ThinkFilm's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead--or cancel himself out on both counts? (Both distribs know what they're doing.) Will Frank Langella ride Frost/Nixon to a nom for Starting Out in the Evening (which I haven't yet seen)? Roadside Attractions also has marketing chops.

It all depends on how successfully the distribs behind these films persuade the Globes voters, the SAG actors, the Academy actors and the critics to watch all these second-tier movies.

The picture is much clearer for the Best Actress category. I don't expect this Gurus 'O Gold consensus top five list to change much going forward.

1. Marion Cotillard La Vie en Rose
2. Julie Christie Away from Her
3. Keira Knightley Atonement
4. Ellen Page Juno
5. Angelina Jolie A Mighty Heart

This Gurus 'O Gold Supporting Actress Consensus has more potential for movement as different pictures gain and lose momentum:
1. Cate Blanchett I'm Not There
2. Tilda Swinton Michael Clayton
3. Amy Ryan Gone, Baby Gone
4. Julia Roberts Charlie' Wilson's War (no one has seen it yet)
5. Saoirse Ronan Atonement

As the writers' strike looms, there's a palpable sense of rising anger as the entertainment industry faces a long-term work stoppage and a crazy frantic shaking out of projects trying to go forward against all odds. It was one thing to be preparing for a strike next summer by the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds. It's another to actually proceed with TV and film production with no writers.

That means: no script-writing, no fixes, no late-night comedy monologues, lots of reality TV. One producer-writer expects to be brought on to a movie or two to make writing changes. Another indie producer is signing up non-WGA and writers and Brits. Many writers are dusting off their unfinished novels and plays. The day the strike is resolved, a flood of spec scripts will land on agents' desks.

While a spate of not-so-good movies is likely to emerge from the 2007/2008 strike-film bubble, a boom in original scripts will only be good for the movie industry. But many people will lose money in the meantime. The cost of the five-month 1988 writers strike was some $500 million.

Many Hollywood folks feel that both sides have been irrational so far and have not even begun to talk reasonably about how to break their impasse. Some see Warner studio chief Barry Meyer as representing the far extreme of tough-talking studio brass, while others see the writers, led by Patric M. Verrone, as impossible to deal with too. "How can you make a deal with people who aren't rational?" asks one studio chairman. Everyone is waiting for this year's mediating figure to emerge, the equivalent of moguls Lew Wasserman or Jeffrey Katzenberg or attorney Ken Ziffren, who all played key roles in past strikes.

Serious negotiations will likely only start tomorrow, on the eve of the Halloween midnight strike deadline. And the latest buzz on the street is that talks could go on for another ten days as writers finish up their scripts, hand them in, and get paid. Here's Variety's strike coverage.

Patrick Goldstein's column covers the long history of bad feeling between the writers and studios (or "producers"). Here's Defamer's take. And Time.

Screenwriter Gregg Rossen and his writing partner Brian Sawyer lassooed some fellow WGA members to star in this funny short, Heroes of the Writers Strike:

Actors who reach a certain prominence are often able to get a movie made. This fall, Anthony Hopkins and Ben Affleck have both directed debut feature films. But the two movies couldn't be more different. Hopkins came to my UCLA class with his second film Slipstream (trailer), which premiered at Sundance in January. The word on the street was that it was arty, experimental, and pretentious. All true.

While my Sneak Previews class, which is comprised of about 500 well-heeled West Side cinephiles (the folks who keep Beverly Hills art houses like the Music Hall and the Fine Arts in business), is pretty sophisticated, they rejected the movie outright. Critics rate Slipstream 26 % rotten on Rotten Tomatoes.

Over the past three years, it has become clear that there's a line the class will not cross. No matter how beautifully made, they couldn't wrap their heads around Children of Men, Fur, Marie Antoinette, The Good German, and House of Flying Daggers. That's because my class demands a satisfying story. They loved Pan's Labyrinth, The Sea Inside, and Babel, which while foreign and challenging, gave them plenty to hang onto: they offered emotional depth and a propulsive narrative drive. And the class adored Hopkins' other low-budget labor-of-love, writer-director Roger Donaldson's The World's Fastest Indian.

At the Slipstream Q & A, Hopkins was charming, admitting that he indulged himself completely with the movie, without thinking about what anyone else would think of it. The stream-of-consciousness screenplay came pouring out of him; he shot it in the California desert with a bunch of actors willing to work for nothing, including himself. The movie makes little narrative sense until you put it together at the end. It's one of those movies, like Marc Forster's Stay or Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, where you get to the climax and say, 'OK, I get it, but so what?' I suspect that this will be Hopkins' one and only last directing gig. Strand is releasing the low-budget pic, which will presumably make some money in homevideo.

Here are parts 1 and 2 of our conversation. Spoiler alert!

On the basis of Affleck's utterly satisfying debut Gone Baby Gone, on the other hand (which is 92 % fresh), I can't wait to see what Affleck does next. After years of painstaking labor as he tried to intelligently condense Dennis Lehane's 448-page novel, Affleck wasn't willing to hand in the script until he thought it was ready. I spoke to Affleck on the phone the other day to ask him if he belonged to that category of stars who give up their acting career to direct. He loves writing and directing; he's gifted at it. He wants to do both, he said, like Clint Eastwood. I wonder if he won't wind up like Ron Howard, eventually, finding himself more satisfied with directing than acting. We'll see.

Another actor-director, Robert Redford, has delivered his first movie in eight years, Lions for Lambs. He jumped at the chance to direct the movie after Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep had expressed interest. Cruise eagerly signed on to work with Redford, and got to act opposite Streep. Clearly a CAA package assembled in some haste at the launch of Paula Wagner and Cruise's ascension at United Artists, the movie played better for my class than I expected. They applauded Redford's bravery at sticking his neck out with this old-fashioned political treatise on the dangers of sending young men into war from behind a desk in Washington. "The film is not anti-war," Wagner told the class. "It's anti-apathy."

Much like former president Jimmy Carter, who has been finding college students more receptive to his anti-apartheid message about the Palestinians and Israelis, Redford has been travelling the country, speaking at packed college auditoriums. As Wagner's husband, CAA partner Rick Nicita, and UA marketing chief Dennis Rice watched from the back of the room, Wagner admitted that no other studio would have made the film, which is a marketing challenge. (It cost about $35 40 million.) "It's not a critic's picture," she said. (So far its reviews are 33% rotten.)

Orson Welles directed the 1958 film noir classic Touch of Evil starring himself, Marlene Dietrich, Charlton Heston, and Janet Leigh. (Dennis Weaver and Mercedes McCambridge have memorable supporting roles.) Here's a clip of the masterful three-minute 20 second long-take opening shot which always takes my breath away. In the 1998 recut of the movie, based on Welles' infamous 58-page memo to Universal Studios, Henry Mancini's music and the credits were removed.

For more info, here's Roger Ebert and Filmsite. When you list your fave raves on Flixter (which is on Facebook), it supplies available clips and trailers.

This clip from the Howard Hawks 1938 classic comedy Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, is delicious, giddy fun. If there's anybody in today's acting pantheon who can do this kind of madcap slapstick comedy anymore, let me know. Maybe the Coens came closest with their acting ensemble in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The LAT bewails the lack of strong comedy roles for women. Brit Emily Mortimer does a good job in Lars and the Real Girl, which, happily, is picking up steam. Here's her New York Q & A.

William J. Mann's new book, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, features new material from the recently opened Hepburn private archives; he details her affair with macho director John Ford, and speculates on how close Hepburn got to crossing over to the lesbian side. (There are more than 20 books by or about Hepburn, whose account of shooting The African Queen with Bogey, Bacall and Huston is a must-read. There's also the gold standard, A. Scott Berg's authorized Kate Remembered.)

As for Howard Hawks, you won't do better than Todd McCarthy's engrossing biography, Howard Hawks; The Grey Fox of Hollywood. And here's Senses of Cinema on Hawks.

It's an Oscar staple, the beautiful actress who makes herself ugly for a role and wins an Oscar. Reelzchannel has a preliminary list:

1. Charlize Theron in Monster
2. Nicole Kidman The Hours
3. Hilary Swank Boys Don't Cry
4. Susan Sarandon Dead Man Walking
5. Elizabeth Taylor Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Sasha Stone at Awards Daily adds:

1. Renee Zellweger, Cold Mountain
2. Jessica Lange, Frances
3. Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice
4. Renee Zellweger, Bridget Jones (by Hollywood's standards)
5. Elisabeth Shue, Leaving Las Vegas
6. Jodie Foster, The Accused

Sasha's list includes some nominees who didn't win: Zellweger won for Cold Mountain and not Bridget Jones Diary, Shue was nominated, and Lange won for Blue Sky and Tootsie, not Frances. Also, I don't think Streep, while a beautiful woman, was ever identified as a glamour girl; she's always been a character actress who looks different in every role. Swank and Foster are also actresses who have never been seen as ingenues. And on my list below, it's fair to say that Holly Hunter has never been perceived as a glamour girl either.

I'll see Sasha and raise her:

1. Halle Berry in Monster's Ball
2. Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby
3. Holly Hunter in The Piano
4. Helen Hunt in As Good as it Gets
5. Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted
6. Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve

Which brings up another theory: The Oscar often goes to an actress playing poor white trash--as exemplified by Foster in The Accused, Swank in Boys Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby, and Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, who while deglammed, was by no means ugly.

By this logic, gorgeous French star Marion Cotillard is in good shape for channeling songstress from the gutter Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.

Any more?

Here's an evergreen Oscar quiz from the Guardian. Oscar-savvy that I am, I scored 34.

Here's another List of Oscar Rules from Film.com. And Bruce Kirkland lists actresses who have gone from fluff to tough.

Obviously, Academy actors and Oscar voters look at degree of difficulty and bravura moments. But for Hollywood's glamour girls, from Elizabeth Taylor to Halle Berry, it's a question of picking a great role to chew on--and getting folks to take them seriously.

One Christmas gift for the Stanley Kubrick-phile who doesn't already own any of the preceding Kubrick collections is the just-released 10-disc Warner Director Series: Stanley Kubrick. The boxed set boasts remastered versions of five of his last six films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, plus the add-on doc Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. According to the NYT's Dave Kehr:

The 10-disc boxed set includes many extras but has been attracting some controversy for using the wide-screen theatrical versions rather than the full-frame versions Kubrick originally released to the home video market.

Here's CNN's take. Screenhead. And DVD Spindoctor.

Here's the "Dawn of Man" sequence from 2001:

Saw IV butchered the weekend boxoffice, natch. Here's Variety's Sunday b.o report and review. I have never seen a Saw movie, and probably never will. Saw's strength suggests that despite the recent decline in the fortunes of torture porn, established franchises with brand cred like Saw and Resident Evil can still do well.

Here's Pamela McClintock's astute analysis of the depressed fall boxoffice, which is down from last year by 6 %. There were too many R-rated dark-themed movies and too many indie pics crowding theaters and scrabbling to keep screens when they need time to build word-of-mouth. Thursday, the LAT took a stab at the indie boxoffice, without making clear distinctions between limited and wide releases and long-playing and short-term pics. MCN's David Poland adds his take: in the long term, many of these pics will catch up with last years equivalents. McClintock points out that the pattern is: summer tentpoles, softer entries in September and October, holiday tentpoles.

Salon lists The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Torture.

And this 2001 article posits a 20-year cycle theory on horror films. Hmmm.

DVD Spindoctor is making daily Halloween week scary movie picks.

UPDATE: The second annual After Dark Horrorfest runs from November 9 – 18th on over 300 AMC, Regal and Cinemark screens across the U.S. Horrorfest 2007 will premiere 8 Films to Die For, scary flicks that run the gamut of horror: from thrillers to gore to the supernatural. Here's the lineup:

[Seven Days of Halloween graphic courtesy of DVD Spindoctor]

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) is a moodily atmospheric black-and-white sci-fi masterpiece starring tough-guy Eddie Constantine and Godard muse Anna Karina. In this clip they talk about love in a way that only Godard can:

As Shari Roman pointed out on my Funwall, this true story deserves a Darwin Award:

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
For nearly two years, it looked like one of the most offbeat and original American movies of the decade would never reach American audiences. I'm talking about John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes, a blue-collar musical set in suburban Queens, where bridge builder James Gandolfini indulges himself in the two great vices of the film's title: smoking cancer sticks and sticking smoking-hot Kate Winslet (I'm not the type to drop the "O word" in my reviews, but come on Academy, you owe it to yourselves to see Winslet top even her Eternal Sunshine performance as the ultimate Scarlet Woman).

So here's the deal: Turturro started writing the script on the set of "Barton Fink" and eventaully made the movie for United Artists just as parent company MGM was changing hands, and while other movies caught in the fray (such as Capote) went on to box-office and Oscar glory, Romance & Cigarettes fell by the wayside. According to a recent New York Times story, after inheriting UA's undistributed titles, Sony couldn't find anyone to swallow Romance & Cigarette's $3 million asking price. So it sat on the shelf, doomed to an eventual straight-to-DVD fate. Until Turturro's pal (and co-star) Adam Sandler stepped in, convincing the studio to let Turturro open the film himself at New York's Film Forum in October.

“There’s at least $3 million of weirdos out there who’d go to see it. I probably know half of them,” Gandolfini told the Times, and I couldn't agree more. No matter how jaded, audiences simply don't witness movies as alive and crazy as this every day. It's a left-field ringer, an unmatched mix of carefully observed working-class detail and off-the-wall eccentricity (after Hairspray, who wouldn't want to see Christopher Walken erupt into a spontaneous cover of Tom Jones' "Delilah"?), simultaneously poignant and outrageous. It's bawdy, raunchy and rude, yet sentimental and sincere. Not everyone's cuppa tea, but it's got that Coen brothers feel (they exec produced for their old friend) and a terrific cast and — get this — it's coming to Los Angeles!

The film's Dec. 21 L.A. opening means, among other things, an Oscar-qualifying run. And Winslet's not the only standout in a cast that includes a side of Susan Sarandon you won't soon forget (the kind of steel-willed female character actresses can so rarely sink their teeth into). It's been an uphill battle for Turturro, getting this movie in front of audiences, and running the show single-handedly means you won't see any For Your Consideration ads on the cover of Variety. Take my advice: Consider it anyway.

Today one of my fave Oscar bloggers, InContention's Kris Tapley, launched his Variety Oscar blog, Red Carpet District, at Award Central. Check him out; he's tirelessly assembling all the Oscar stuff that's worth knowing out there. Yes, Oscar season is ramping up. And so are the Oscar blogs.

Fox Searchlight is injecting some life into Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited. One, the studio has finally added the Hotel Chevalier short to the movie, which was probably their plan all along. Until now it had been available as a free iTunes download. And while recovering star Owen Wilson, who had checked into a hospital following a suicide attempt, showed up at an Academy screening of the movie, he is now going to promote the pic. But not via the usual route, the press. No, Wilson will be interviewed by Anderson as part of MySpace's Artist on Artist series, reports USA Today.

The interview will be posted online at midnight Friday as part of MySpace.com’s Artist on Artist series, according to Fox Searchlight, the studio that released the pair's most recent film, The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson and Wilson have worked together on all of Anderson’s movies -- Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It’s unclear how far the interview, recorded today, will delve into Wilson’s recent personal struggles –- if at all.

In other words, Searchlight is using the Internet to go direct to fans.

UPDATE: Here's the video. Pretty dull stuff. (ABC reports.) Although it's cool that Anderson was in NYC and Wilson was in Culver City.

Are audiences ready for another round of "Hi Ho Silver"? According to EW, the Lone Ranger may saddle up again. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer is developing a script with Pirates of the Caribbean scribes Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot. He may want to look at the boxoffice for the 1981 incarnation, the widely excoriated The Legend of the Lone Ranger (pictured). It grossed $13 million.

This Wong Kar Wai short is stunning. Very mod. Very beautiful. Does anyone know how this came to be made?

[Thanks B. Ruby Rich.]

Michelle Satter is the founding director of the feature film program of the Sundance Institute, as writer-director Tamara Jenkins (The Savages) points out in this delightful intro speech she gave earlier this month at a Women in Film event where she presented Satter with the WIF Leadership Award. Fair to say, the folks sitting in the sunny back yard of the Intercontinental Hotel were laughing their heads off. Jenkins is a funny and insightful writer, one reason why The Savages, her upcoming dark comedy starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as warring siblings, is so good.

I thought it was auspicious that on my way to this WOMEN IN FILM event, the female flight attendant on my United Flight was reading THE SECOND SEX by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. When she handed me my tiny Mylar bag of pretzels, I commented on her book and she rolled her eyes said, “I got to get out of this job.” As a former waitress, I could relate. This afternoon we’re here to honor someone without whom there is a very good chance that today—instead of being a woman in film—I’d still be a waitress in film.

As it says in the program, Michelle Satter is the FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF THE FEATURE FILM PROGRAM OF THE SUNDANCE INSTITUTE. What does the Founding Director of a Feature Film Program do exactly? My job is to give you a little insight into Michelle’s world and to help you understand why it is that she very much deserves the award that she will be given today and perhaps a few more.

First of all, Michelle has to deal with people like me all the time. Writer-Director-Artist-types. Perhaps you know some of these kinds of people or you have one in your family. Or perhaps, worst of all, you are one yourself.

In which case you know that we are a difficult breed. Characteristics can include a peculiar mix of profound insecurity on the one hand and demented grandiosity on the other. This combination of personality traits can also be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under another title. But we should leave that for the American Psychiatric Association to discuss.

Michelle isn’t a trained psychiatrist, but she has developed many of their skills. Michelle shows up at a critical time in a fledgling filmmaker’s life—a stage in their careers when they are often described as “emerging” or more simply put—unemployed.

12 years ago, I was living in a 5th floor walk-up on Avenue B and I was going through a particularly bleak period. I had just suffered the indignities of a very unpleasant break-up. I was broke. I had no health insurance. I had a few short films under my belt and a half-written screenplay sitting in my computer that I was unable to finish. I was officially “emerging.” Then I got the call. It came in over the answering machine. A gentle voice wafting through my otherwise stagnant apartment:

“Hi Tamara, this is Michelle Satter from the Sundance Institute. I’m calling because I was wondering if you were working on a screenplay that you might want to submit for consideration to our feature film program. Give me a call. I’d love to know what you’re working on.”

While There Will be Blood did not take the fest route this fall, Paul Thomas Anderson scheduled one "underground" screening at Harry Knowles' Fantastic fest, which yielded some positive advance buzz. Now the director's trying it again. This time he's staging a screening at San Francisco's famed Castro Theatre on November 5.

Into the Wild's much-lauded Hal Holbrook, who is 82, has been sidelined as he fought back a bout of pneumonia at a Houston hospital. Now Holbrook is recovering at his temporary quarters in the Houston area, where his wife Dixie is working on a movie. According to Paramount Vantage, Holbrook plans to return to L.A. in mid-November to make the award season rounds. While Holbrook has a fistful of Emmys, his moving role in Into the Wild as a lonely man who takes wanderer Chris McCandless under his wing could earn him his first Oscar nomination as supporting actor.

Also showing up late after an illness was Peter O'Toole last year, who nonetheless gave Forrest Whitaker some competition in the best actor race.

Here's Variety's Into the Wild review.

Speaking of Into the Wild, writer-director Sean Penn, who has already lost one house to a Malibu fire, this time around lost some Airstream trailers on his property to fire while he was travelling in Europe.

There's a hint of Psycho screeching violins in the score of the second Sweeney Todd trailer. The music is Stephen Sondheim, but there's no singing in this one. It's the R-rated horror Halloween version.

Of Variety's carefully selected Ten Actors to Watch, the ones I am most convinced have long careers ahead of them are:

Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma, right)
Andrew Garfield (a Brit who is much better in Toronto hit Boy A than he is in Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs)
Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone could garner her a supporting actress nomination)
Paul Schneider (a standout in both Lars and the Real Girl and The Assassination of Jesse James)

Novelist Larry McMurtry, who knows a lot about many things, has long been a friend of Diane Keaton and reviews her various photography books in The New York Review of Books. It's always fun to read McMurtry, whether he's writing western novels like Lonesome Dove or screenplays like Brokeback Mountain (with Diane Ossana). I own Keaton's Still Life, which collects great PR shots from Hollywood history. She has a eye for the strange and beautiful and kitsch.

As Halloween approaches, EW extracts John Carpenter's scariest moments. I knew Carpenter well at the start of his career, when he was still an indie maverick making Halloween, The Fog and Escape from New York. Crews and actors loved him. But he never delivered on his promise inside the studio system.

Stephen King gets in the Halloween mood.

And here's a list of the most controversial horror flicks ever, like Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (right). That woman is about to get her eye sliced with a razor.

As a Variety staffer, I enjoy throwing around slanguage like prexy, helmer, boffo and pics with legs. They're ingrained in my brain. What's not to like? This acerbic Brit blogger takes issue with Varietyese, especially as it applies to our film criticism. There is an argument to be made that slanguage works better in the print edition of an entertainment business trade than it does online, where it's read by millions of industry-philes all over the world. So we tend to tone down the headlines a bit on Variety.com.

Here's the Variety slanguage dictionary. And Variety editor Tim Gray, the master of the witty headline and author of The Hollywood Dictionary, is interviewed here by NPR.

Does Varietyese annoy you? Or are you fond of it? Update: Kristin Thompson mounts a defense with the headline: Crix Nix Variety’s Tics.

There's a reason why Newsweek's David Ansen became a film critic. And we're glad he did.

Again, there are some pics that haven't been seen. So some of my colleagues have high hopes for Charlie Wilson's War, which is building good buzz for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Advance word on Sweeney Todd and There Will be Blood is very good for Johnny Depp, who is overdue, and Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano. But I haven't seen the pics yet.

This week the Gurus 'o Gold have voted Atonement, No Country for Old Men, Charlie Wilson's War, American Gangster, There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton as their top best picture picks. The list will change as we move forward.

Best Actor:
Daniel Day Lewis
Denzel Washington
James McAvoy
Johnny Depp
George Clooney

Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem No Country for Old Men
Tom Wilkinson Michael Clayton
Hal Holbrook Into the Wild
Paul Dano There will Be Blood
Philip Seymour Hoffman Charlie Wilson's War

Film critics David Edelstein of New York and Richard Corliss of Time are having a pissing match over Rush Limbaugh and masturbation. At least I think that's what they are debating.

The reason this works is that they use the VOICE familiar from so many movie trailers.

[Hat Tip: Hollywood Elsewhere]

WSJ critic Joe Morgenstern riffs on the theme of too-long movies. And thanks, Joe, for the kind mention.

Page views, site traffic and how to measure them is spurring huge debate in the New Media Internet Age, when eyeballs equal ad dollars.

Predictably, Clooney's busy sked and the pushing back of the opening of Leatherheads to 2008 has taken him out of White Jazz. Joe Carnahan is scrambling to find someone else.

Great World of Sound, Day Night Day Night, Into the Wild, and Margot at the Wedding lead the list of the IFP's 17th Gotham Awards nominees. As with all such awards lists, some movies get a needed boost while the ones that are left off don't. As far as the Oscars are concerned, this could help Into the Wild, The Namesake, Margot at the Wedding and I'm Not There gain some traction. On the other hand, Lars and the Real Girl and Eastern Promises are the sorts of films that could have used some help from this group.

The fact that No Country for Old Men is only getting a special award must have something to do with its budget, which was split by Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films. The Gothams seem to be sticking below the $20 million range--although IFP chief Michelle Byrd keeps saying that budget doesn't matter. Despite its omission here, No Country for Old Men should still be a serious year-end critics' fave and awards contender.

While Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and The Savages are in effect also-rans with ensemble acting nods, their performances are their best shots at getting awards attention. I suspect that Juno's breakthrough actor Ellen Page has a better chance at landing an acting Oscar nom than Into the Wild's Emile Hirsch. But both Fox Searchlight and Vantage will push their candidates hard.

Among the docs, as Michael Moore's Sicko continues toward its inevitable Oscar nom, Alex Gibney's torture expose Taxi to the Dark Side is also building valuable momentum.

Here's the press release:

The awards will be presented at Steiner Studios in New York on Tuesday, November 27, 2007.

Garnering three separate nominations -- the most this year -- is Great World of Sound, Craig Zobel's directorial debut which was nominated for Best Feature, Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor.

Three films received two nominations each: Day Night Day Night directed by Julia Loktev (Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor), Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn (Best Feature and Breakthrough Actor), and Margot at the Wedding, directed by Noah Baumbach (Best Feature and Best Ensemble Cast).

A total of 28 films received nominations in six categories: Best Feature, Best Documentary, Breakthrough Director, Breakthrough Actor, Best Ensemble Cast, and Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You.

Presented by IFP, the Gotham Awards provide a critical spotlight and important boost to breakthrough independent films, such as last year's Best Feature winner Half Nelson, which went on to garner numerous critics' awards and an Oscar® nomination for its star, Ryan Gosling.

"2007 was an incredibly strong year for independent film," said Michelle Byrd, executive director of IFP. "Ranging from the small gems produced on micro-budgets to extraordinary films from specialty divisions, the nominees all share the type of creative vision and risk-taking that are a hallmark of independent film."

In addition to the competitive awards, the 17th Annual Gotham Awards will also present Gotham Tributes to six individuals in recognition of their influential work in the film industry: Actor Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men, Love in the Time of Cholera), film critic Roger Ebert, production designer Mark Friedberg (Across the Universe, The Darjeeling Limited), New York's Honorable Mayor Michael Bloomberg, director Mira Nair (The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala) and Jonathan Sehring, President of IFC Entertainment and creator of IFC Center.

To celebrate New York City's role as the world capital of independent film, the 17th Annual Gotham Awards will be held for the first time at Brooklyn's Steiner Studios, a symbol of New York's growing film production prowess.

Selecting this year's nominees were 19 critics, journalists, and film programmers (see list below). Final award recipients will be determined by separate juries of writers, directors, actors, producers and others directly involved in making films. The recipient of The Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award will be determined by the editors of Filmmaker magazine, a publication of IFP.

The 17th Annual Gotham Award nominees are:

While he finds much to admire, Variety's Todd McCarthy has some issues with Ridley Scott's sprawling Harlem gangster epic American Gangster. While I grant that in some ways Russell Crowe is miscast as an honest Jewish cop from New Jersey, he runs with the role anyway. You need a star of some heft to stand up to the powerful Denzel Washington as a real-life Harlem drug lord.

The movie is hugely entertaining, and should score handily at the boxoffice, no matter its length, as well as with Oscar voters. It could be this year's The Departed. And Washington is a shoo-in for a best actor nod. I am assuming that most critics are not going to be as tough on American Gangster as McCarthy. If they are, that could hurt American Gangster's Oscar longevity. UPDATE: Here's Screen International.

The reason Ryan Gosling was gaining 20 pounds and growing a thick beard was to age himself for the role of the grieving father of a young girl in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. I had wondered how such a young guy--Gosling's 26--could play the father of a 12-year-old. Well, Variety reports that Gosling is out--"creative differences"--and Mark Wahlberg is in. UPDATE: Kim Masters has more details.

Gosling has been earning raves for his role in Lars and the Real Girl, although the film's reception has been mixed.

[Photo for LAT]

Here's how Time dealt with wanting to support a film, No Country for Old Men, whose novelist and filmmakers aren't too high on talking to the press. Author Cormac McCarthy and writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen talked to each other.

One of the movie's stars, Tommy Lee Jones, another press-phobe, chatted Friday with one of the most influential Oscar influencers: Charlie Rose.

[Photo for Time]

This Variety Rome Film Fest review of Francis Ford Coppola's return to personal filmmaking, Youth Without Youth, reminds me that I still need to check this movie out for myself. Here are two Rome fest Coppola AP stories. And interestingly, George Hickenlooper's famous doc Hearts of Darkness about the making of Apocalypse Now is finally coming out on DVD, reports Filmmaker Magazine's blog.

Horror flick 30 Days of Night handily won the weekend. (Here's Variety's weekend wrap. Of all the "serious" Hollywood contenders clogging theaters this weekend, Michael Clayton held the best (only dropping 33%) while We Own the Night dropped a steep 49%.

Of the newbies, Ben Affleck's well-reviewed Gone Baby Gone (92% on rottentomatoes!) came in sixth, performing better than the disappointing Rendition, Things We Lost the Fire and Reservation Road--all grim adult-minded dramas.

What a bloodbath. Of the family pics, The Game Plan only dropped 26%, while Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? dropped 43%. Game Plan has already grossed almost $70 million. What that tells us more than anything is that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is a bonafide movie star. Doesn't matter if he can act. Folks love the guy.

Love the London Daily Mail, which shares these photos of Uma Thurman, hosting the recent Swarovsky Fashion Rocks in this clinging see-through Valentino. Fashion victim?

And Nicole Kidman, 40, appears to be following Renee Zellweger's lead and gaining weight for her role in The Reader, in which director Stephen Daldry wants her to thicken into middle age.

At first glance, this trailer for Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce's long-delayed follow-up after eight years to Boys Don't Cry) shows us yet another Iraq War movie we may not want to see. But what if this one does something the other pics have not yet done: tap into the rising tide of anger against continuing the war? That could be a different zeitgeist phenom. The folks behind this film are heaving huge sighs of relief that they did not go out this fall, where they would have gotten lumped in with all the other "serious" "Iraq" movies. This way they can breathe in April, be edgy, get some space.

[Hat Tip: Karina Longworth]

This montage by critic Jim Emerson, inspired by the recent close-up blogathon, is very cool.

No, it's not Elle Enchanted. And it's not Cinderella or Beauty or Snow White who pops into real life Times Square and starts to behave like she's in a Disney animated musical. (Six songs are by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz.) In Enchanted, from animation director Kevin Lima, it's Princess Giselle (Amy Adams) who is pursued into live-action Manhattan by a Prince Charming (James Marsden) and a Wicked Queen (Susan Sarandon). Meanwhile she starts to fall for handsome lawyer Patrick Dempsey. Very high concept, and judging from this trailer and what I hear from advanced screenings, it works. Disney opens the family fantasy pic November 21.

Let the rumpus start! New York's Vulture Blog and Big Screen Little Screen report on Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' long-in-the-works adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are.

This is the sort of mutual backscratching PR opportunity that makes me cringe. Why give an organization a meaningless, impersonal star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, when peerless screenwriter Robert Towne routinely gets turned down because no studio is invested in buying one for him? This makes me crazy. It's such a waste of energy.

WHAT: Screen Actors Guild will receive The Award of Excellence Star on Hollywood Boulevard from the Hollywood Historic Trust in recognition of the Guild's significant contributions to actors and the entire entertainment community for nearly 75 years. SAG is the first labor union to receive this honor.

The installation of the star on Hollywood Boulevard will be preceded by a celebratory champagne breakfast with red carpet arrivals at the Annex at Hollywood & Highland, hosted by the Screen Actors Guild Foundation and the Ford Motor Company.

WHO: The award will be accepted by Screen Actors Guild President Alan Rosenberg, Secretary-Treasurer Connie Stevens and past presidents Edward Asner, Melissa Gilbert, Barry Gordon, Kathleen Nolan and William Schallert.

A.J. Schnack has the list of top-grossing documentaries. And Metacritic has the Top 15 List of best-reviewed movies in release, and most of them are docs! No End in Sight is just behind the best-reviewed movie so far this year, Ratatouille:

1 Ratatouille 96

2 No End in Sight 89

3 Once 88

4 This Is England 86

5 Bourne Ultimatum, The 85

6 Pete Seeger: The Power of Song 85

7 Knocked Up 85

8 In the Shadow of the Moon 84

9 King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, The 83

10 Lake of Fire 83

11 Michael Clayton 82

12 Eastern Promises 82

13 Hairspray 81

14 Paprika 81

15 Simpsons Movie, The 80

As for the feature doc Oscar race, there will be a long list of excellent pictures vying for a slot. The IDA released their short list last week; here's Variety.

The IDA's list of contenders includes:
Dan Klores' Crazy Love, a huge hit at Sundance that died in theaters
Richard E. Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
Michael Moore's health care hit Sicko
Alex Gibney's Abu Graib torture expose Taxi To the Dark Side (Gibney made the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)
Mark Olive Smith's A Walk To Beautiful

Deborah Kerr, star of The King and I, An Affair to Remember and From Here to Eternity (right) has died. I loved this actress, always. One of my favorite of her movies is John Huston's underappreciated Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. She was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a nun stranded on a Pacific Island with marine Robert Mitchum. He falls in love with her, of course.

UPDATE: Here's Glenn Kenny's take.And the NYT. And Variety.

Reading this thread on Hollywood Elsewhere responding to Kim Masters' Slate story on George Clooney and the boxoffice fate of Michael Clayton depressed me.

George Clooney is the model of a modern movie star. His accountant told him one day he never had to work another day in his life and he decided to use that "fuck you" money to make good movies. (Solaris and The Good German were both noble Steven Soderbergh failures.) I understand that Clooney signed off on Warner Bros.' stupid distribution decision to go wide with Michael Clayton on the second weekend.

What makes me crazy is that the studio had a well-reviewed, smart-house, classy movie that played well for the Academy and cost only $22 million. That's peanuts to a studio like Warners and there was no earthly reason to go wide! They could have let those per-screen averages play out slowly over time, kept the movie simmering in a successful mode, and widened gradually, keeping the Oscar race in mind. This is the kind of movie that builds and finds an audience. As long as it's successful, all well and good. But taint it with a 4th-place weekend and you've got the perception of damaged goods.

As to whether George Clooney is a star: if he gets paid $20 million, does he open the movie? Well, the guy doesn't get paid that much. He'd rather get his money in back-end gross. If he chooses to topline big commercial ensembles like the Oceans series or star opposite a giant wave, that's fine. If he makes overtly uncommercial movies that still do business, because they're Oscar-worthy, like Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck, that few other actors would have risked, that's fine too.

Look at someone like Harrison Ford, who's too scared to star in Traffic or Syriana. Is that who we want Clooney to be? There is value in a movie star like Jodie Foster (The Brave One aside, a violent action movie nobody wanted to see her in) or Clooney who represents quality. When the adult audience believes that their movies will be good, they will come--but not necessarily all at once on one weekend.

With all due respect to my colleague Brian Lowry, who correctly called Michael Clayton a tricky sell because the movie lacked car chases and the usual formulaic thrills and chills--that's exactly why the movie is so good, and why it's ranked at 82 on Metacritic.