Yes, Focus has been keeping quiet about Atonement. But believe me--even though it plays somewhat better for women than for men--think great wartime epics like The English Patient, Reds, Dr. Zhivago--this one is going to stick.

The weekend boxoffice, which usually dips after the Thanksgiving break, should still be dominated by Enchanted and Beowulf. Here's Pam McClintock's take.

Fandango Five – Ticket Sales (as of 11/30/07 10:00 a.m. PT):

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Beowulf “Go” 23%

Enchanted “Go” 16%

No Country for Old Men “Go" 4%

August Rush “Go” 3%

Hitman “Go” 3%

Fandango Weekly Poll (as of 11/30/07 9:00 a.m. PT):

Which holiday movie are you most looking forward to seeing?

National Treasure: Book Of Secrets 31%

I Am Legend 28%

The Golden Compass 16%

Sweeney Todd 12%

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem 5%

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy on the new refurbished Help DVD.

Here's the trailer:

Ray Charles and some fabulous go-go dancers: this makes me miss Lada Edmund Jr. and Hullabaloo.

[Hat Tip: Michael Blowhard]

During jury duty this week, I paid up for T-Mobile at a downtown Starbucks and enjoyed listening to my old fave James Taylor. Here he croons to Oscar the Grouch:

[Hat Tip: The Corner.]

I couldn't make any of the Charlie Wilson's War, Golden Compass or Sweeney Todd screenings this week due to various scheduling conflicts. Safe to say early reactions are more positive for Sweeney, especially for Depp, than Charlie's, although Variety's Todd McCarthy is in the same camp as Time's Richard Corliss: Charlie is fun for adults. Philip Seymour Hoffman seems to be the film's serious Oscar contender, along with writer Aaron Sorkin. Here's McCarthy's nut graph:

"Charlie Wilson's War" is that rare Hollywood commodity these days: a smart, sophisticated entertainment for grownups. Based on the late George Crile's sensational bestseller about how an unlikely trio of influential and colorful characters conspired to generate covert financial and weapons support for the Afghan Mujahideen to defeat the Russians in the 1980s -- and armed America's future enemies in the process -- Mike Nichols' film is snappy, amusing and ruefully ironic. But not even the stellar talent on both sides of the camera may be enough to make these qualities alluring to general audiences or those much under 40, making B.O. prospects a mid-range thing.

Everyone loves a winner. And one win leads to another. A series of wins starts to make actual Oscar nominations look inevitable. Thus the Gothams' breakthrough actor Ellen Page (Juno), having earned a Spirit nom Tuesday morning, continued her march toward a best actress Oscar slot; Spirit nominee and Gotham winner Michael Moore's Sicko is heading toward best doc, and Gotham best feature winner Into the Wild, which had too big a budget to be recognized by the Spirits, got some much-needed love. The Envelope lays out the Spirits vs. The Gothams.

The full list of winners is on the jump:

Sundance has announced its line-up--and Todd McCarthy went over the whole list of pics with fest director Geoff Gilmore. Looks like we're in for some more grim naval-gazing psychological stuff. Oy:

Films that explore individual ways of coping with a distressed world mark the lineup of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, which unspools Jan. 17-27 in Park City, Utah.

Eighty-one world premieres are among the 121 feature films set for the nation's premier indie fest, which received 2,051 narrative features and 1,573 documentaries submitted from around the world this year, an all-time high.

Fest director Geoffrey Gilmore noted that, surprisingly, the films on view this year "are not as political or social issue-oriented as last year. There's more personal expression about the daily aspects of lives, about people's state of mind. The fact is that the world around us is a very troubled place, but the response of the filmmakers isn't always dark, but is about people finding a way though it and about persevering, not succumbing. You sense the need for an escape from the exhausting pressures of reality."

Rawson Thurber's screen adaptation of Michael Chabon's first novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh (above), starring Peter Saarsgard, is one of the pics to look forward to.

This Friday, Entertainment Weekly will publish a new standalone special issue, the first Hollywood “Smart List.” The brain behind this rejuvenated list, which replaces the tired old EW Power 100, is my old colleague Sean Smith, ex-of Newsweek and Premiere, who worked with me on quite a few Premiere power lists. We prided ourselves on reporting the hell out of those lists, and that's what EW has done here, too. A phalanx of EW reporters canvassed the film industry, conducting hundreds of background interviews, seeking info on “the savants and the wunderkinds whose ideas are driving the film industry forward,” according to EW.

Needless to say, anticipation of which actors, directors, producers and agents made the list is already building. Those who can’t wait until the magazine hits newsstands Friday can find just who made the cut-- right here. The question is, having abandoned the old Power 100 model--which readers were far less interested in than the super-driven power-mongers in NY and LA--will folks care about this reinvention of the list? I suspect it makes for better reading, and focuses attention on some worthy folks like FX master John Knoll and composer Gustavo Santaolalla.

EW can't help but go back to some of the same old/same old list of names: Steven Spielberg, Bob Zemeckis, Dick Cook and Brian Grazer are still on there. But otherwise, it's pretty interesting: Number one is Judd Apatow, because "you can't argue with success," says Smith. "He has his finger on the pulse of comedy right now, he's king of it and made three stars out of Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill would never have been movie stars. He's made himself a household brand."

At the start of the process back in August, as LA bureau chief Smith commandeered seven film reporters in LA and three in NY, he found that it was hard to steer clear of old "power list" habits. "We kept slipping back into power discussions," he says. "We had to rethink. I kept telling them we were free to recalibrate, to consider the overall influence on the future of the industry." The list gets more surprising the farther down you go--including an entry for one Roderick Jaynes, the well-known editor of the Coens brothers' movies--a fake name for the Coens themselves.

Here's the top 20 of the top 50, with the rest on the jump:

Entertainment Weekly's 50 Smartest People in Hollywood:
1. Judd Apatow, director/writer/producer
2. Steven Spielberg, director/producer
3. James Cameron, director/producer
4. Ari Emanuel, partner of the Endeavor Agency
5. Will Smith, actor/producer
6. Meryl Streep, actor
7. Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight
8. Tyler Perry, actor/director/writer/producer
9. David Heyman, producer
10. John Knoll, visual-effects supervisor of Industrial Light & Magic
11. Brian Grazer, producer
12. Dick Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios
13. George Clooney, actor/director/producer
14. Jerry Bruckheimer, producer
15. Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment
16. Peter Jackson, director/producer
17. Will Ferrell, actor/producer
18. Robert Zemeckis, director
19. Tom Rothman, co-chair of Fox Filmed Entertainment
20. Ben Stiller, actor/director/producer

John Cusack charmed the Sneak Previews group Monday night. After having made more than 50 movies, he still remembers what Rob Reiner told him early on while they were shooting The Sure Thing. If you're worrying about this and that and the other, said Reiner, you're not doing your job. What's important is what happens in that small circle in front of the camera. Some directors like Reiner, said Cusack, create that quiet space where that focus and concentration can take place for the actor: Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Cameron Crowe.

Grace is Gone is a small movie shot for $3 million in 24 days that Cusack produced, working with 29-year-old rookie director Jim Strouse (who also wrote Lonesome Jim). Cusack based his muscle-bound performance on friends and family in Illinois. His inarticulate soldier wants to be in control of an ordered life but loses his wife in the Iraq War and has to tell his two young daughters---and puts it off as long as possible. He's clenched and tight, Cusack said. His unforgettable walk was a key to finding the character. He had to go to the chiropractor a lot while shooting. Cusack beamed with pride at the two first-time actresses they hired in the Chicago area to play the two girls. The crowd applauded them.

The Weinstein Co. scooped up the movie at Sundance. It was Harvey's idea to go to Eastwood for the score. Cusack, an admirer of Eastwood's music, was happy to ask him, having worked with him before on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. He was surprised when Eastwood said yes.

My class liked the film, although its even-handed politics confused some who wanted a clearer statement of the film's POV. Clearly, Cusack wanted to show the impact of the Iraq War on a human scale, and hopes that the film will reach a wide swath of audiences, not just the Liberal choir. Resistance to the subject may prove hard to overcome. Cusack is moving and believable as a midwestern dad and soldier and could get some attention from SAG and Oscar members--but only if folks watch the movie, which was overlooked by the Indie Spirits.

I'm having big debates about No Country for Old Men, especially the ending. If you've read the Cormac McCarthy book, you know that the Coens have done a very faithful adaptation, which McCarthy admires. [SPOILER ALERT] The duo was attracted to the very things that make the movie unconventional: a major character dies, and the forces of good don't triumph over the forces of evil at the end.

At my book group Tuesday night (where we had a spirited discussion about Flaubert's Sentimental Education) we agreed that the Coens' No Country for Old Men will persevere and endure and may even land an Oscar best picture nom because it is about where we are now. The point of the movie is that the good sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones with sad weariness has never seen so much implacable evil and does not know if it is possible to conquer it. Is Javier Bardem's Chigurh real, or a ghost? I think he is very real. And he represents all the evil in the world that will not stop, will not rest.

Alec Baldwin blogs about the movie and Javier Bardem at The Huffington Post. Nora Ephron hilariously debates the movie with her partner in The New Yorker.

Glenn Kenny lays out the movie's issues with the ending at Premiere.com. Now I'm really confused.

The NYT has rebooted its annual Oscar blog for the second time. It makes no sense to me to build up all that loyal traffic and then toss it away between seasons, but in any case, media columnist David Carr is back in his Carpetbagger guise, sticking his mic at celebs on red carpets and blogging with abandon. (One hopes that some of the stream of verbiage that hit his blog today was stored in advance.) In preparation for his relaunch, Carr has presumably been lining up events and happenings and folks to interview for Oscar tidbits. He admits that he can no longer plausibly play the wet-eared outsider, but will Oscar-watch like a seasoned pro.

The Indie Spirit Awards announcement this morning raises some interesting questions:

Did I'm Not There, the front-runner with four noms and the Robert Altman award, really cost less than $20-million, the supposed cap for Indie Spirit consideration? The film's official budget is $20 million. No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood weren't eligible because they were well over the cap.

There's an abortion theme this year, with the Romanian 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and Tony Kaye's doc Lake of Fire both getting nominations in the foreign and doc categories, respectively. Even Juno features a teen girl who refuses to have an abortion. Juno also got an Oscar boost with four noms--actress Ellen Page and screenwriter Diablo Cody will keep moving forward during the awards season.

Philip Seymour Hoffman got nommed for The Savages--which also landed four noms, including two for Tamara Jenkins for directing and writing--over Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which landed a first screenplay nom for Kelly Masterson as well as a supporting nom for Marisa Tomei. I'm not feeling real Oscar heat for the hardboiled Sidney Lumet picture, which didn't land director or feature slots here. Unfortunately for its Oscar hopes, The Weinstein Co's Grace is Gone, which features a lauded performance by John Cusack as a military man who loses his wife to the Iraq War, was overlooked by the Spirits.

The French-language The Diving Bell and the Butterfly presumably was eligible for the best feature category because its two producers, Kathleen Kennedy and Jon Kilik, are American. Four Spirit noms will definitely help the pic, which is playing well at guild screenings as it pursues Oscar attention (although director Julian Schnabel's recent swing through L.A. may have set the movie back a few notches). Janusz Kaminski and Ronald Harwood, especially, are strong Oscar contenders for cinematography and adapted screenplay.

On the other hand, Ireland's English-language Once is nominated in the foreign language category! While Ang Lee's Chinese-language Lust, Caution didn't make the cut for foreign film or best feature, it did score best actor and actress for Tony Leung and Tang Wei. And Israel's The Band's Visit, which has too much English in it to be Oscar-eligible, nabbed a foreign nom here.

A Mighty Heart's Angelina Jolie will duke it out for best actress with Juno's Ellen Page, I suspect.

The Cinevegas Film Fest invites American residents who travel between now and February 15 to submit original travel shorts (under 5 minutes) to their new Trip Takes online film contest. (Condé Nast Traveler is co-sponsoring the contest.) Trip Takes will post the shorts on the Trip Takes website, where they will be judged by both an online audience and a jury of experts, including Dennis Hopper, who is chair of the CineVegas Creative Advisory Board. The jury's top five finalists will be flown to Vegas so they can accompany their films to the 10th CineVegas Film Fest, which runs June 12 – 21. The winner gets a $5,000; the audience award winner, selected by both online and live festgoers, lands $2,500.

Over the weekend, David Poland at Movie City News reported that Harvey Weinstein was planning to push Cate Blanchett as best actress for I'm Not There, rather than supporting. Which didn't necessarily mean that the Golden Globes, SAG and the Academy would go along with it. UPDATE: And it doesn't mean Weinstein will take this route, either, it turns out. "Nothing is changing," said one Weinstein Co. spokeswoman. These games are often played. In this case, some of the
I'm Not There folks are pushing for TWC to make this change. Blanchett is off Down Under doing a play, but apparently has no intention of backing off her support for Elizabeth, which Universal has been backing handsomely via "for your consideration" ads. If Blanchett were to withdraw her support for an Elizabeth push, she might land best actress, but she's weaker in that category. She was a surefire winner in supporting.

Poland didn't check with TWC to verify the assertion of his good source, he admits. And his weekly memo to his Gurus of Gold voters told them to place Blanchett in the best actress category.

So why take the chance? Economics. Even a nomination in the lead categories means more in global boxoffice and DVD sales than supporting does. Think Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda. That movie did far better than it would have done otherwise. And I'm Not There is strictly an art-house play without some Oscar attention.

Here's a Blanchett clip that's been on YouTube for a while:

And the real-life limo video of John Lennon and Bob Dylan that may have inspired it:

The five-day Thanksgiving weekend boxoffice was flat when compared to last year, but that was good news after a dismal fall. As expected, the Disney musical Enchanted landed rave reviews and magical grosses, an estimated $50-million for the weekend. Mythical actioner Beowulf held just OK, while the Coen brothers’ ultra-violent No Country for Old Men went wide with a terrific $11-million in 860 runs.And new opener Starting Out in the Evening, which scored excellent reviews from the likes of the NYT and LAT, opened well on Friday on seven screens in NY and LA at an estimated $85, 596, and grabbed a fighting chance at pushing star Frank Langella into the best actor Oscar race.

Juno is the sophomore effort of Jason Reitman, sprig of Ivan Reitman. (Here's his LAT profile.) Reitman gets it--he hit the ground running with Thank You for Smoking, and had the sense to ditch what he was writing as soon as he read Diablo Cody's Juno screenplay. (Here's her EW profile and my column.) She says they're on the same wavelength (he's producing her next, the feminist horror flick Jennifer's Body, at Fox Atomic). Reitman has that rare blend of humanity and comedy that his father has. He's going to be around for a while.

Among other notable children of directors, I also want to see what Sofia Coppola does with her skill set, and hope her brother Roman, whose sci-fi fantasy CQ showed promise, comes out from behind helping his family and friends like Wes Anderson on their sets and makes another movie, no matter how daunting that prospect.

Jake Kasdan, son of Lawrence Kasdan, already has three smart and funny films under his belt. While none has taken off at the boxoffice so far, hooking up with Apatow on Freaks & Geeks was probably a strong move. Kasdan's fourth, due in December, is producer Judd Apatow's biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

As for Alison Eastwood, it's hard to tell with Rails & Ties, which scored 33% on Rotten Tomatoes and was DOA at the boxoffice. With support from father Clint Eastwood, the ex-actress hired a phalanx of experienced craftspeople and was gifted with a solid script and a studio budget. (Here's the LAT story.) Her cast is led by Mystic River stalwarts Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden. I would have liked to see the grittier, non-Warner Bros. version. Then she would have truly proved herself.

Chris Nolan has shot several sequences of The Dark Knight--due next summer--in IMAX. Here's the promo featurette:

The ongoing Murakami exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary is a must-see. I knew it would be fun, but I didn't know that this guy is not only a vibrant artist pushing the edge of what is kitsch, art, commercial and a complete sell-out, but he is also a filmmaker who wants to position himself in the global mainstream as the next Spielberg--someone he hugely admires.

Here's Peter Debruge on Murakami's animation work; at a recent MOCA panel organized by Variety, DreamWorks animation czar Jeffrey Katzenberg met Murakami for the first time and later brought him to DreamWorks for a tour, which caused some buzz.

Murakami churns out hugely expensive big-scale high art, sculptures covered in gold foil, as well as tiny collectible action figures, wallpaper, greeting cards, t-shirts and Louis Vuitton luggage:

MOCA shows Murakami's animated Kanye West Good Morning video, which is terrific. This YouTube shakycam version is all over the Web but is not official:

And here's the Kaikai & Kiki movie trailer--the animated footage at MOCA was cool:

The film in progress that they screened, a kitchen sink live-action view of youth in Japan, left me cold.

The MOCA description of the Murakami exhibit is on the jump:

DreamWorks/Paramount are parceling out the info on Sweeney Todd, trying hard to keep this very strange musical aimed squarely at the mainstream. The rest of us will go along for the ride, they figure. Here's some behind-the-scenes footage of Johnny Depp prepping the music for the movie:

The results are fascinating for Awards Daily's "director you're most thankful for in 2007" poll: the Coen brothers are the winners by a mile. No contest. P.T. Anderson is the only one who comes even close. It's not surprising that they are beloved, not only for No Country for Old Men, but for their entire body of work.

While No Country for Old Men is among the best-reviewed pics of the year and will wind up on many critics' ten-best lists, I keep running into Academy members who were left cold. Anthony Lane's New Yorker review happens to mirror some of their comments. Yes, it's a critics' picture. But I still think the Academy writers, directors, and actors will push No Country for Old Men into best-picture contention. DP Roger Deakins should also land a nom for his 9th film with the Coens--probably over his stellar work in The Assassination of Jesse James, which has been been seen by fewer people.

UPDATE: Here's David Edelstein on the Coens in New York, Newsday's feature on Josh Brolin, Peter Travers' Rolling Stone rave and Saturday's terrific column by Michael Sragow, which compares No Country to the work of the late great Sam Peckinpah.

[Photos for New York Magazine by Andrew Eccles]

Dennis Lehane wonders how he got so lucky, with three Hollywood movies being made from his books, from Clint Eastwood's Mystic River to Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone to the latest Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration, Shutter Island, based on Lehane's last novel, published in 2004. The Boston writer was gun-shy of Hollywood until he heard the voice of Clint Eastwood on the other end of the phone. Well, that turned out OK. Lehane's a marvelous wordsmith, and so far his books have drawn really talented Hollywood folks.

The question is, when are we going to see another novel? While some mystery writers like Michael Connelly churn out a book a year, Lehane's last book was the collection Coronado: Stories. He did put in some time on The Wire, and teaches writing, so we can only hope we get to see his eighth, The Given Day, real soon.

This story about China's warning to the folks who might get some ideas from Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is hilarious.

While I admire Kris Tapley's attempt to make some sense out of the blizzard of Oscar predictions out there, I remain convinced that until the prognosticators see Charlie Wilson's War and Sweeney Todd, the two films that many of us got invited to see Monday, none of these lists make much sense. Richard Corliss in Time suggests that "audiences will have a great time watching" Charlie Wilson's War, which seemed to play for Oprah Winfrey's Chicago audience. Oprah raved about Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance, as guests Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts (who tried to get out of shooting a bikini scene while four weeks pregnant) nodded politely. My hunch is that Hoffman won't get nommed for best actor for The Savages or Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, but will get a supporting nom for Charlie Wilson's War.

Clearly, the non-pro fans on Movie City News and Awards Daily are voting with their youthful hearts and not thinking much about the Academy's tastes. Into the Wild is a popular movie that has a chance at some noms, especially for Hal Holbrook, but because of the way the movie was written, shot and performed, the different branches of the Academy may not take it seriously enough. It's shot doc-style on location, it looks like it was performed on the fly. I suspect the editor has a better shot than Penn as director or writer, Emile Hirsch as actor, or the cinematography. The Academy admires fakery, sets, costumes and literature. As an organic whole, Into the Wild is an entertaining, thought-provoking emotionally rewarding movie. But it's a long-shot as an Academy contender.

David Fincher's Zodiac is another movie that isn't gaining Oscar momentum. It was well-reviewed last summer March, and many critics will include it on their ten-bests. But its time has come and gone. It was an expensive big-budget studio failure. It's indulgently long, and Fincher's insistence on verisimilitude meant not giving viewers a satisfying narrative arc. The movie has its merits--hell, it will be on my ten best list---but an Oscar contender needs to have enthusiastic supporters, few detractors and a passionate push behind it. It needs confidence. Zodiac has too many deficits. Paramount is already gearing up to make a major Oscar push for Fincher's next, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as star-crossed lovers twisted by time, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I got into a heated debate with someone in the office yesterday about Enchanted, the animated/live action comedy that brilliantly spoofs Disney's classic animated musicals. This movie is just what the doctor ordered: entertaining, witty, engaging, delirious fun. It's a three-quadrant accessible family musical that will grow and grow and grow through the holidays. Whatever it opens at Wednesday, it will keep building: the movie could wind up one of the year's biggest grossers. Men will initially resist the chick flick's charms, but they should eventually get pulled into Enchanted's vortex. Amy Adams gives a full-blown star breakout performance (on Oprah, a clip of her from Charlie Wilson's War caused both Hanks and Roberts to chime, "Amy Adams," naming her the It Girl of the moment). Adams could land, Julie Andrews-style, a nomination for best actress. (Why Disney isn't thumping the movie harder, I don't know. Most of us media folks didn't see it until last week. UPDATE: And yet again, the Academy screening committee in its wisdom has scheduled Alvin and the Chipmunks during its prime December viewing season, and not Enchanted.)

But Enchanted is not your standard-issue Oscar movie. Director Kevin Lima (Tarzan, 102 Dalmations) has made a successful crossover from animation. Bill Kelly's script is witty and smart and should land a nomination. But will it? Let's be honest about the Academy. They are SNOBS! They are high-minded, nose-in-the-air, classists. The more literary, historic, and pretentious the better. (EW's Mark Harris explains the Oscar predicting game.) The last animated film to make it to Best Picture was Beauty and the Beast (for which Lima did character animation), before there was an animation category. Sure, I'd also like to see the best-reviewed movie of the year, Pixar's fabulous Ratatouille, score screenplay, director and picture. It deserves it. But it won't necessarily happen.

The trick with Oscar predicting is feeling where the momentum is going and looking into the future, down the line. The best prognosticators have seen the movies, one. And two, they're not rooting for their favorites. They're staying ruthlessly objective. Do I have some pics I'm rooting for? Sure. But I have to take that into account and remain clear-eyed. The year I let emotions get the better of me and predicted that Beauty and the Beast would win, I was so wrong.

As for the Academy docs short list of 15, they are the the best-known and best-reviewed: the full list is on the jump.

The reaction to Saturday's NYT story about DreamWorks negotiating to move to Universal is fascinating. If you look beyond the question of who's spinning who, obviously someone with an agenda tipped Sharon Waxman (who has been on book leave and is scheduled to return to the NYT's metro desk in January). But her story (co-bylined with Brooks Barnes) did little to advance the DreamWorks cause. Here's Variety's take.

Mssrs. Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg don't want to be perceived as beggars going around from studio to studio with hats in hand. They see themselves as mighty and powerful players. But the day they sold DreamWorks, library and all, they stopped being owners and became another top-of-the-line production entity not unlike Universal's own Imagine Entertainment. (The word studio gets thrown around a lot these days. It used to mean a lot with soundstages and if you were a "major," you owned theaters.) My sense is that DreamWorks would rather be back at Universal, where Spielberg still keeps his offices, than anywhere else, although Geffen has been talking to both Fox and Universal. But DreamWorks is asking for a studio to give them hundreds of millions of dollars with which to make movies. (And is there room for two 500-pound gorillas on the Universal lot? Here's the latest puff piece on Brian Grazer, riding high off American Gangster, in the NYT.)

So why not raise their own production funding? That would give DreamWorks more of the autonomy they so seriously crave. These men are beyond wealthy, and are accustomed to living large at the top of the Hollywood pyramid (without spending their own money). The question is, who's going to be willing to pay them to do that?

Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's feminist horror comedy Teeth is a must-see for women who can handle some ultra-violence and men who can handle the subject matter. Here's the trailer. Virginal high school student Dawn (Jess Weixler, who won an acting prize at Sundance) tamps down her budding sexuality by volunteering at a local chastity group. Provoked by her nasty stepbrother Brad (John Hensley), Dawn unwittingly discovers that she has a toothed vagina (vagina dentata) more than willing to fight back against unwelcome intruders. Dawn struggles to understand, control and accept her unusual anatomy. Roadside Attractions will open the horror pic in February, more than a year after its debut at Sundance.

When you don't have room to spell out on the entire Love in the Time of Cholera title on a theatre marquee, the shortened version tends to be "Cholera," which is not exactly a boxoffice lure. Directed by Mike Newell from Ronald Harwood's adaptation of the romantic Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, Cholera didn't pull in too many moviegoers this weekend, grossing an estimated $1.9 million from 852 theaters.

As the strike goes on, there's no telling how much terrific material is going to wind up on the Web:

Seeing The Savages for the second time, I marveled at how Tamara Jenkins took painful material about ailing parents, competitive siblings and nursing homes and made it funny. I look forward to what this gifted writer-director does next. On second viewing, as good as Philip Seymour Hoffman is, I realized that it's Laura Linney's movie. (Hoffman will go after a best actor nod for Before the Devil Knows Your Dead.) If Angelina Jolie or Cate Blanchett falls out, Linney could be a dark horse replacement for best actress. She's always good, and she's due (she was nominated twice, for supporting for Kinsey and lead for You Can Count On Me). Philip Bosco also nails the silent and reactive role of the unsympathetic, demented dad. Here's the LAT piece on Bosco.

After last week's Variety screening (which was not packed), Linney raved about Jenkins' writing. Scripts and characters this rich were rare, she said. With a low-budget 30-day shoot like this, Linney said, rehearsals are a luxury: you have to be focused and hit all your marks. She had never worked with Hoffman before; they were well-matched.

Here's my column and blog post on Jenkins.

Michael Eisner so perfectly reflects the OLD STUDIO state of mind. Call him a dinosaur. On some level, Eisner helps to make new Disney chief Bob Iger, who does get new technology, look, well, almost cool.

Sure enough, as expected, Beowulf more than scored this weekend; 40 % of its $28 million came from 3-D screens, both IMAX and regular. Bee Season's gross passed the $93-million mark, while American Gangster passed $100 million, the first fall film to do so. The literary art film Love in the Time of Cholera, which needed good reviews, didn't get them and grossed a weak $1.9 million in 852 theaters, or tenth place. On the other hand, Margot at the Wedding opened well on two New York screens and No Country for Old Men expanded successfully. Read the full Variety story.

The Circuit's Mike Jones swears that no animals were hurt while making this AFM video:

The online voting is closed for the Online Video Awards: the winners will be announced November 26. Here are the funniest web video finalists:

As the writers strike grinds on and TV continues to shut down, I can't help but wonder if the studios, which are so wealthy and enormous, don't realize how vulnerable they actually are. Sure, they're worried about changes in distribution models, the digital future, piracy, and so forth. But they're still making so much money.

I have long thought that the studios are foolish to treat consumers as little gnats that should be grateful for all the pap they they sell them. The studios are coming from a place that is large and all-powerful. But what if their customers slowly, quietly, in little increments here and there, stopped watching TV and buying DVDs in favor of other sources of entertainment and delight? Why are DVD sales going down? Games, FaceBook, Flixter, Quarterlife, My Damn Channel, JibJab, FunnyorDie...the list goes on. The TV networks and studios should be very worried about people abandoning live television and purchased DVDs in favor of Netflix, downloads, internet viewing, saved TiVo shows, cable OnDemand...the list goes on. (Ironically, the movies are less likely to suffer--although the marketing challenge of cutting through the noise is an issue.)

Netscape founder (and Loudcloud billionaire) Marc Andreessen posits that the WGA strike is the ideal setting for an end-run around the antiquated studio distribution system. Here are a few choice pieces of his argument (the entire story is posted on the jump):

In Silicon Valley, creation, marketing, and distribution of a compelling new product is not very expensive. And with the Internet, marketing and distribution costs drop nearly to zero. Most successful Internet companies, large and small, use free viral marketing techniques and never run ads. And the whole concept of distribution costs goes away when everything is digital -- the next set of bits costs nothing to manufacture. Therefore, there are no bottlenecks. Many companies, large and small, can afford to be in business -- can afford to develop new products and bring them to market, market them and distribute them. And nobody can really block you. In Silicon Valley, the creators of the product -- the talent -- are owners: owners of their product, and owners of their company. In fact, the entities that finance the companies -- venture capitalists, private equity funds, the public stock market -- want the creators to be owners: in a world where there can be many companies, the best creative talent will be drawn to the situations in which they will be owners, and will be compensated as owners. Because of that, in technology, creators get paid like owners. Therefore, there are no unions. There is no reason for the creators to unionize -- they would be negotiating with themselves. The concept of residuals does not exist -- they'd be paying themselves. And alignment of interests between creators and financiers is near-perfect. I believe the entertainment industry is in the early stages of being rebuilt in the image of Silicon Valley.

What would a new entertainment media company, producing original content, look like in the age of the Internet?

Starting from the end of the process: you know distribution is now nearly free. Put it up on the Internet and let people stream or download it.
Marketing is also free, due to virality. Let people email your content to their friends; let people embed your content in their blogs and on their social networking pages; let your content be searchable via Google; let your content be easily surfaced using social crawlers like Digg. All free.
Production is very cheap. Handheld high-definition video cameras cost nearly nothing. You can do almost every aspect of production and post-production on any Mac. Hell, you can even score an entire movie for free -- there are hundreds of thousands of bands on the Internet who would love to have their music embedded in a new entertainment property as promotion for the bands' concerts and merchandise.
The creators of the content are the owners of the company. The writers, actors, directors -- they are the owners. They have a direct, equity-based economic stake in the company's success. They get paid like owners, and they act like owners.
Financing is straightforward: venture capital, just like a high-tech startup. We live in a world in which financing a high-quality startup is simply not difficult -- not for a high-quality technology startup, and increasingly not for a high-quality media startup. Modern financiers love being co-owners of a new company with the talent that will make the company successful -- and that's how it will happen here.
This is not a difficult thing to envision. And in fact, it's already happening. Will Ferrell's Funny Or Die, in which I am a minority investor, is one early existence proof of this model. And there are a ton of other such new companies either already underway, or currently being incubated, or currently being negotiated.

And in fact, there are a lot of historical precedents even in the media industry for the model of talent as owners, going all the way back to the original United Artists in 1919. Some of those precedents worked great -- George Lucas, for example. Some flamed out. Of course, they were all up against the bottlenecks.

But here we are, living in a world in which the bottlenecks have suddenly become irrelevant.

I don't think there's any question that this is the logical model to pursue in the age of the Internet -- the age of free distribution and marketing.

And here are some ideas on Screenwriters DIY:

Written by Wagner James Au Posted Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 12:00 AM PT Screenwriters, DIY!

In the mid 90s, during a strike against The San Francisco Examiner, a bunch of staff writers and editors abandoned the newspaper to start up their own “web magazine.” Though it seemed like a weird idea at the time, the web mag eventually became Salon.com, now a site with more readers than most newspapers — including The Examiner itself.

As the WGA strike moves into its second week, it’s hard not to see a similar opportunity: What’s to stop WGA writers (especially those associated with well-known TV shows and movies) from doing a similar thing with YouTube? Create new, low-budget shorts à la Lonely Girl, then leverage them as spinoffs for new TV series/movies when the strike ends? Or perhaps even better, come up with a Net-driven revenue model and leave the dinosaur conglomerates of Hollywood behind?

Marc Andreessen and other Internet mavens have recently made that case, but I was curious to know what working screenwriters thought of the idea. So I put the question to my friend Howard A. Rodman, who’s in a unique position to answer: As a writer, he’s worked for filmmakers as varied as Steven Soderbergh, Errol Morris, and Tom Cruise; he’s the writer of the upcoming Savage Grace with Julianne Moore; and, most pertinently, is a board member with the WGA. What did he think of the “Go Internet” scenario? His characteristically urbane answer came with a clarion call:

“[O]ur Lonely Girl, our Dziga Vertov, our salon des refusees, has yet to emerge,” he acknowledged via email. “Give it time. More conjecturally, the Googles of this world, the Mark Cubans of this world, the Jeff Skolls of this world, might see an opportunity to work with world-class writers, without having to take 30 percent off the top as the studios’ distribution fee.”

“Increasingly,” he continued, “as the studios want you to come to them with a script, with stars, with attachments, with financing, the question becomes, what’s the value added? That question will be asked, more and more frequently, and more and more loudly. Big Media’s refusal to bargain and end this strike only assures that this question will continue to be asked — until some brave and imaginative soul answers it. Loudly.”

His advice to daring writers and Internet financiers who would rise to the challenge? “DIY!” he wrote. He pointed to a witty pro-WGA YouTube video that turns the corporate owners’ words against them. “Take a look at this: created with no more resources than you or I already have on our desktops.” (For myself, I’d point to someone like Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Felicia Day, who did that very thing months before the strike, creating a series that’s so popular online, the show’s fans willingly finance it with donations.)

For more resources, Howard pointed to Variety’s compilation of screenwriter blogs, and another at Huffington Post, where Howard is a contributor. For that matter, read more from Howard in a group interview I’m currently hosting on The Well, the legendary online community now owned (to tie this post up nicely) by Salon.com.

In 2001, Wagner James Au optioned his sci-fi action screenplay Future Tense to Canal Plus, a deal which pretty much summarizes the entirety of his screenwriting career. More recently, he’s GigaOM’s games editor and writes about Second Life for his blog New World Notes.

It was a mistake.

While DreamWorks partner David Geffen has always demonstrated pitch-perfect timing in his big business decisions, the fateful move to take DreamWorks away from Universal to Paramount was a huge blunder. With a big financial deadline looming and General Electric dragging its heels, the DreamWorks partners sold DreamWorks live action to Paramount. And have regretted it ever since.

It's telling that Steven Spielberg did not leave the Universal lot. And likely never will. While the filmmaker is still at the top of the Hollywood food chain, DreamWorks' best hope for landing the rich deal they're after is the troica of Universal's Ron Meyer, NBC's Jeff Zucker and General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt (who admitted after the fact that it was a mistake to let the DreamWorks team go). It's less likely that anyone else will come through for them--although last week word was that Rupert Murdoch was in the mix. Here's today's NYT story.

And yet, leaving Paramount and starting over at Universal is a risky move for DreamWorks, no matter how much they despise working under the capricious leadership of Sumner Redstone. They would leave behind much of their development--unless they can buy some material back and make co-production arrangements on others. They will have to build their inventory up again. (Will Stacey Snider want to take on that backbreaking task? Will she want to return to the studio that she once ran?) What DreamWorks could lose is that often ephemeral thing that you don't want to ever lose in Hollywood. Momentum.

Under intense pressure to return to the bargaining table, the WGA and AMPTP have agreed to meet again on November 26.

Here's Variety.

And here's Patric Verrone's email to the WGA board:

To My Fellow Board Members, The AMPTP agreed to return to the table on Monday, November 26. I will be sending out an e-mail to the membership later tonight and we can discuss the development in more detail at Monday's board meeting but I can't tell you much more before then. Best, Patric

Here's Moovy Boovy on the move toward original programming on the web, including a clip from Quarterlife, which has just been picked up by good old-fashioned network television.

One of the the most important boosts a movie can get toward Oscar nominations is an official Academy screening. An Academy committee of about a dozen folks, give or take a few, decides which movies it will book four weekends each month, usually a matinee and evening screening on both Saturday and Sunday. These screenings are booked months in advance, with the folks who make the determination not always knowing much about the films, especially the smaller indie pics like Lars and the Real Girl, which despite playing well at the Toronto fest, failed to get a slot. Perhaps a Sidney Kimmel indie pic about a man in love with a rubber doll didn't pass muster. But the system should not be rigged against low-profile movies, when some of the best films that need the most exposure are indie pics.

The committee is anonymous, so there's no lobbying the members. Roadside Attractions heaved a sigh of relief when, via various friends of friends in Academy places, they somehow landed a November December spot for their Sundance entry Starting Out in the Evening, starring Frank Langella. But why, I'd like to know, did two of these valuable pieces of screening real estate this month go to a weekend double feature of Martian Child and Fred Claus? Are these the best that the Academy has to offer?

Beowulf is heading toward a strong opening weekend. Here's Variety's take.

Fandango Five – Ticket Sales (as of 11/14/07 5:00 p.m. PT):

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Beowulf “Go” 30%

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium “Go” 7%

American Gangster “Go” 7%

Bee Movie “Go” 5%

No Country for Old Men “Go” 5%

Paramount Vantage is on the There will Be Blood promo trail, screening the pic and building support. I watched the two hour and forty minute film, happily, for the second time at the WGA screening Monday night; the crowd gave Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis a standing ovation afterward.

Here's what I learned:
As far as the Oscars go--Daniel Day Lewis is a cinch for a nom. And the directors could come through for Anderson's extraordinary mise-en-scene. The writers may see some weakness in the script. The production values are stunning--production design, costumes, etc. There Will Be Blood won't play for the mainstream Academy. But it's a movie, like Citizen Kane or Greed or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that will endure. It has that kind of power.

Paramount Vantage should encourage folks to see this movie twice, because it really is better after it has been pre-digested. That said, gorgeous as it is, the movie is hard for people to take. It's not easy to watch. It's rough and violent and provides few good characters to hang onto. And Lewis's towering performance is more humorously operatic than I realized the first time.

Newsweek critic David Ansen, who was the only journalist on the set of the movie, moderated the Q & A and revealed that Paul Dano was originally cast as Paul Sunday, the guy who tips off Daniel Day Lewis's oilcatter to a possible oil strike in California. At the last minute, just as Dano was supposed to start filming, Anderson told him that he wanted him to play a second role, as Paul's twin brother Eli. Dano was surprised, but jumped right in. The problem is, the film is confusing. I was not sure that they were two separate people the first time. This time, I watched carefully; Anderson doesn't spell it out enough; it flies over people's heads. Several people at the screening were also confused.

Comparing the film to Upton Sinclair's novel, Ansen said, "This is original, the resemblance to the book is miniscule, based on the first 150 pages." Anderson agreed that the book was "mammoth" and thus impossible to shoot at its length. He transcribed a lot of the book, but just kept cutting and cutting. Something that was ten pages "became five, became four, became one," he said. Inspired by a plot of land on Signal Hill where oil was discovered, Sinclair "was a great journalist," said Anderson. "He wrote in amazing detail." The movie was contained in good part from being a "typical epic" by its limited scope and budget, Anderson said.

One of my favorite shots in the film, when Day Lewis on horseback rides around the outside of the Bandy house and peers in through the window, was Lewis's suggestion; Anderson just shot it. Lewis, in pork pie hat, said he did a lot of research, like digging into the ground. "It was irresistible," he said. And while he took a long time "to splash around" on finding his voice, listening to turn-of-the-century recordings, John Huston did come to mind at a certain point. Lewis sent Anderson tapes of what he was trying. "The great advantage of a period like that is noone knows, so you can do whatever you like," he said.

Anderson also watched Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre repeatedly, and gave it to Lewis and composer Jonny Greenwood. "For a few nights in a row I fell asleep to it to get into the saltwater of it all," he said.

The score by Jonny Greenwood, which seems strange and intrusive the first time, grows on you the second. One big chunk of the soundtrack is Brahms.

Anderson loved working with all the non-pros around Marfa, Texas, including first-time actor Dylan Freasier, who plays his son H.W.. "He's terrific in the film," said Anderson, "and he's ten times as terrific as a young man." First, though, Freasier's state trooper mom had to give permission for him to star in the film opposite Lewis. Unfortunately, she was horrified by Gangs of New York before someone quickly sent her The Age of Innocence. Then she relented.

I was struck by the notation "a carbon neutral production" on the closing credits. This for a movie that involves a lot of gushing and dramatically burning oil. Anderson admitted afterwards that he had nothing to do with this and found it amusing, as the burning oil is real in the film and would be pretty hard to neutralize. "Did they plant a lot trees?" he asked. The ILM digital effects in the movie are mostly enhancements, along the lines of a wonderful shot of an oil lake with the sky reflecting in it. Anderson had seen a picture of a lake like that and wanted it in the film.

Ansen has a trove of info on this film. I hope he goes ahead and writes up what he knows online, even if Newsweek's print edition isn't interested. (Newsweek's new editor isn't entertainment friendly; no wonder Sean Smith left to go to become EW's LA Bureau chief.)

It's always interesting to see how my fellow journalists fare when they try to go over to the PR side. Some can do it, some can't and I have to say I am delighted that ex-WSJist John Lippman, after a flirtation with Sitrick & Co. , is returning to journalism via the LAT, where Lippman will replace business side editor James Bates--who is going to Sitrick! Welcome back.

Walkouts are ineffective but unavoidable, writes The New Yorker's James Surowiecki of the current WGA strike. "History is against them."

UPDATE: Here's the WSJ on the WGA's efforts to police screenwriting. And the LAT.

So far, while many have tried, no programmer has been able to improve Netflix's recommendation software by 10 percent, or win the Netflix contest prize of $1 million.

Anyone who likes old movies and freebies might want to check out Amazon Unbox's Free Classic Movie Week (ends Nov. 18). They're all digital downloads, most for rent, a few to own, all for free. Laurel and Hardy: Lost Films Volume 4 has skyrocketed up the Amazon Unbox chart to Number 8 bestselling download because of this sale.

Back in Cannes in May, when the critics returned from the screening of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, they were raving. (Here's the review). And at fest's end, the low-budget Romanian abortion movie won the Palme d'Or. I can see why it's been a fest circuit hit. I finally caught Romania's foreign Oscar entry, which IFC Films will open in January, at the AFI Fest last week. It has already screened well for the Academy foreign branch and should land a foreign Oscar slot.

It packs a punch. First, like the similarly extraordinary Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which was also shot by DP Oleg Mutu, the 35 mm movie is comprised of a series of long hand-held shots. It is strictly told from the POV of the friend of the young college student who is trying to get an illegal abortion during the 80s, during the oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. [SPOILER ALERT]

At the Q & A, director Cristian Mungiu explained how this true story haunted him for 15 years. "For a long while I never thought I'd make a film about it," he said. But as he was trying to write a short film about his generation in their 20s, he saw the emotional potential in this story for his second film. (His first debuted in Cannes in 2002.)

He had to fly his lead, Anamaria Marinca, in from London, where she's in demand after winning a BAFTA for the Brit TV series Sex Traffic. (She's also in Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth.) Marinca gives an astonishing, authentic, heart-breaking performance during a complex set of unfolding scenarios full of danger and menace.

At the start of the story she's in love, in a relationship with someone who could become her life partner. By movie's end, she's no longer in that place. And helping her roommate to get an abortion---because she would expect the friend to do the same for her---ruins her life. Turns her into a criminal. Changes how she sees men. A lot of things.

Anyone who has been through an abortion will find this a tough slog. The film is provocative and timely and a must-see for any cinephile. I disagree with some who interpret this as an anti-abortion film. While it doesn't say that going through an abortion is a good or easy thing--and late-term abortions are certainly not advisable--this film says that we should not turn women who choose to have abortions into criminals.

"I rely on these actors who are very natural," said Mungiu, who shot the film in 31 days. "These ten minute shoots are difficult to shoot. They have to remember so many lines at once in a precise script. And be very focused. I liked that they never faked the emotions they were having."

Mungiu makes careful decisions about what he shows and does not show. Some are controversial. He shot things several different ways, and made the final decision in the editing room to reveal an aborted fetus. "My attempt was to be very honest," he said. "As soon as I edited the film it was obvious that this moment had to be in the film."

Here's the trailer:

Bimonthly Creative Screenwriting Magazine is covering the writers' strike at their website and have assembled some FAQs aimed at clearing up the confusion for the many writers who've been inundating them with queries.

For those of you who missed this escapist bit of Grease-inspired madness, here's Summer Nights in all its Lego glory:

Pity the poor filmmaker with an Award season movie to flog. If it's good enough to have a shot at some awards attention, then the distrib is going to make you do the rounds: the guild screenings and Q & As, the dinners, the AFI Fest, the Hollywood Fest, the Variety screening series, my UCLA Sneak Previews class, the Behind the Camera Awards--and that's just the beginning. As we go on there's the gauntlet of awards ceremonies, the LA and NY critics, the Board of Review, the Indie Spirits, The Gothams, the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards. The real horror is keeping the thing going all the way to the Oscars. If I were Julian Schnabel, I'd pack my PJs and head back to NYC right now.

On Friday night, after a long Miramax dinner, he and producers Kathleen Kennedy and Jon Kilik, screenwriter Ronald Harwood, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and stars Mathieu Amalric, Max Von Sydow, Marie-Josee Croze, and Emmanuelle Seigner all trooped onto the stage at the Fine Arts Theatre to talk up The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which Schnabel won the directing prize in Cannes. The hirsute Schnabel ran the show from center stage, wearing a skirt and fuming a cigarette.

Schnabel promoted the movie's soundtrack, and pimped Seigner's new record, too. It was important, he said, to shoot at the real maritime hospital in Berck where Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby had stayed after his stroke, to pick up the atmosphere, the accidents, the inspiration from the place. One day, Schnabel saw the tide going out past a big rock and arranged to shoot Amalric on it, in his wheelchair, a stunning image.

The movie is beautiful, poetic, moving. Schnabel pointed out that the precise, purposefully distorted mise-en-scene and messy POV shots by Kaminski involved virtually no VFX (except for a digital image of a butterfly coming out of a cocoon). Kaminski did all the superimposition inside the camera, by running the film twice. Amalric paid tribute to his fellow actors, who are amazingly direct and communicative when acting to panes of glass, as they perform straight into the camera. Amalric got huge applause from the Fine Arts crowd for his role as the paralyzed editor who emotes --and dictates an entire memoir--with mere blinks and twitches.

Von Sydow admitted that he submitted to a real close razor shave from Amalric--and got cut. And it was the first time, he said, that he had to deliver his first day's work on a film over the telephone. The scenes between Amalric and Von Sydow are among the most powerful; Schnabel had just lost his father when he took on the project, which was originally to star Johnny Depp. Kennedy and Kilik moved the movie over to Pathe in France when Universal passed. It's hard now to imagine it not being done in authentic French.

I ran into a smaller subset of the Diving Bell gang at The Highlands supper club on Sunday night, when Schnabel was the last presenter at Hamilton Watch's Behind the Camera Awards. Schnabel lectured host Anne Volokh, publisher of Hollywood Life Magazine, about the lousy acoustics in the room--"build a wall," he ordered her--then offered up his hearfelt tribute to his long-time producing partner, Kilik. "It's a great honor for him to be a friend of mine," he said, forgetting to give him the trophy. I think he truly meant it.

The Behind the Camera Awards were short and sweet. Jodie Foster expressed the pleasure she had "bathing in the light" of cinematographer Philippe Rousselot on Sommersby and The Brave One--which she found both "lonely and gratifying."

Seth Rogen figured everyone in the room probably had a crush on the ruggedly handsome Hamilton Watch guy, who was funny and hot enough for him to blow--but he hadn't gotten a watch yet. Rogen gave the screenwriter award to Knocked Up's Judd Apatow, who expounded (there being a writers strike, after all) on his sister's recent birth experience. She pushed her baby out in five minutes, he said, because "her vagina is huge."

Charlie Kaufman raved about production designer Mark Friedberg, who not only designed Julie Taymor's visually dazzling Across the Universe, but Kaufman's recently wrapped directorial debut, Synecdoche.

Jason Reitman, just returned from showing Juno at the Denver Film Fest, recalled running into his presenter, Rainn Wilson, at a Starbucks in Vancouver and asking him to work with him on an upcoming ninja movie. Wilson agreed to collaborate on the upcoming Bonzai Shadowhands.

Sean Penn described how long-time editor Jay Cassidy lived in a bungalow behind his house in San Francisco as they edited Into the Wild and was available to him at any time, 24/7. When Cassidy accepted the award, he admitted that it was true, and asked Penn to consider directing a comedy next time. "That's really hard," he said.

While American Gangster is still kicking ass at the the boxoffice, family-friendly Bee Movie finally took the weekend, reports Variety.

In case you missed Jerry Seinfeld ripping apart Larry King, enjoy this clip. My sympathies are with King.

As expected Lions for Lambs was dead on arrival:

"Lions" struggled to find an aud, grossing an estimated $6.7 million from 2,215 runs. Directed by Redford, "Lions" came in 4th. It's the latest in a string of movies dealing with U.S. policy abroad and the war on terror that haven't been able to rally substantial box office grosses.

Beowulf is good cheesy fun. Bob Zemeckis and Sony Imageworks and the hundreds of folks who labored to make this movie have delivered a must-see event, especially in IMAX 3-D. But it's not nearly as good as it could have been, nor did it need to be so labor intensive. I would happily watch the blue-screen/live-action/300 version of this movie, which would have cost half as much. Or I would eagerly see the entirely animated version. Why not shoot live-action and animate the non-human creatures? This performance capture/imagemotion process remains clunky and stiff.

Here's the deal: the best stuff in Beowulf is the most stylized, the most liberated from the motion-capture process--Angelina Jolie's spike-heeled demon, the monster Grendel, the golden dragon and Beowulf himself. Beowulf is an idealized Adonis-version of Ray Winstone, and the most magnificently rendered human character ever put on-screen. But the other humans, from Robin Wright Penn to Anthony Hopkins, with their plastic eyes and murky teeth, are still strange and weird. They are stiff, robotic, less human than if they had been animated. The human eye is rigged to pick out anything wrong. The closer to reality you get, the easier it is to miss it.

As for the whole Academy debate about animation vs. visual effects, Zemeckis remains hung up on being taken seriously as a live-action director who works with actors and props etc. Well, as long as this movie is 100% rendered, the Academy considers it animation, even if the process used to make the movie is the same one that created Gollum or King Kong. Those characters are considered VFX. But the VFX committee will never budge on this.

The Beowulf myth is a deep and powerful one; it goes back to the old tales that J.R.R. Tolkein was inspired by when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. I highly recommend the Seamus Heaney translation, which doesn't take long to read. But Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have gussied up the story, complicating it with sex and honor and guilt and all sorts of modern emotions that the original myth had nothing to do with. Finally, I prefer the old-fashioned action-adventure Beowulf & Grendel, starring 300's Gerard Butler.

Here's the Variety review.

The NYT Mag goes Western:

A.O. Scott.

Lynn Hirschberg on Daniel Day Lewis and The Coens.

U of Texas's Thomas Schatz on western history.

Walter Salles on the road movie as western.