[Posted by Peter Debruge]
According to the Academy, there are 306 films competing for Oscars this year, which makes me feel pretty good about my own movie diet. At last count, I'd seen 205 new releases — and that doesn't include repeats (like Superbad, which is just as funny the second time around) or re-releases (like Blade Runner: The Final Cut). Of course, there's always the chance that some of those films could be disqualified if they don't open for a one-week 2007 run by next Monday.

Last year, the Weinstein Company snuck a few movies in just under the wire, releasing Factory Girl, Arthur and the Invisibles and Fast Track (later retitled The Ex) at the last possible minute, a ploy that resulted in nary a nomination among them. This year, TWC decided not even to bother with a qualifying run for the new Woody Allen film, Cassandra's Dream, bumping it to January 18 instead (and though the word on the film is toxic, the January schedule is shaping up to be a bit more sophisticated than its dumping ground reputation would suggest, what with 4 Months, U2 3D and Be Kind Rewind popping up amid the usual turkeys).

That means the year's last two takers are most likely Picturehouse's The Orphanage (a Spanish haunted house story from producer Guillermo del Toro repeating Pan's Labyrinth's 11th-hour release strategy) and Emerging Pictures' Honeydripper, both opening today.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
The movie certainly had its champions, myself included. But after splashy coverage around its Los Angeles release last week (including a City Beat cover story and a decent LA Times piece), John Turturro's wild and crazy Romance & Cigarettes has scaled back to a single Los Angeles screen — at the Sunset 5, no less.

I tried to do my part, most recently posting a rave on Collider.com, but at a certain point, you just have to accept the fact that the world's not ready for a working-class musical. I don't really mean that, since many of those who did see the film — especially those who witnessed it with a crowd, where like-minded cohorts can chuckle along and reaffirm its oddball charm — came out loving it. But it's a tough season, and Turturro pretty much staged this release on his own, opening in one of Hollywood's most crowded Christmas seasons. Kudos to him for fighting the good fight. Don't miss it.

Given the remoteness of the possibility that the Writers Guild strike will be resolved before the Golden Globes award show on January 13, word from within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is that one possible scenario is for the Globes to proceed without the live NBC telecast. That way the show could go on, with celebrities attending and moving on to the all-important after-parties at the Beverly Hilton (which I gather the studios are booking). This scenario does raise certain contractual questions; so far NBC is going forward with plans to telecast the show live. UPDATE: More in the NYT.

In retrospect, it would have been smarter for the HFPA to approach the WGA themselves much earlier and request a waiver (as Film Independent did for the Indie Spirits Awards), rather than going through Dick Clark Productions and NBC. Thus the angry WGA struck back at a major network by withholding the waiver.

If the show is not televised, NBC will lose the revenue it would have generated via advertising (the Globes show earns strong ratings), and the Globes will lose the money they would have been paid. But at this point it is much more important to the HFPA (which has enough cash in its coffers to miss one year's telecast) for the Globes show to go on with celebrities walking down that red carpet (even with no writers to pen the presentation speeches) to present and accept awards than for them to face the possibility that most stars will not cross an active picket line.

Last weekend, I ran into youthful Dark Knight director Chris Nolan at a Christmas party in the Hollywood Hills. He was enthused about shooting entire sections of the movie in IMAX--entirely his idea. It's now possible to show the movie on some 150 IMAX screens that aren't just at science museums or in Las Vegas. He shot using IMAX cameras, which are four to five times heavier than 35 mm cameras--the first Hollywood film to do so. The opening first six minutes are being shown in front of I Am Legend in special IMAX locations. (Here's one ecstatic fan review.)

While the trailer makes the movie look pixel-big, the pic is character-driven PG, Nolan said. That way The Joker has to be really scary without resorting to real violence. The trailer is focused on creepy Heath Ledger as The Joker (played in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman by Jack Nicholson in a broadly comedic interpretation), not on district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who is also a key player in the movie. There are plenty of intimate scenes of people talking, as well as a few big-scale set pieces.

(This week while cruising the channels we happened upon Joel Schumacher's ridiculously over-wrought penultimate 1995 Batman Forever, starring Val Kilmer, Chris O'Donnell sporting an earring as Robin, Nicole Kidman as a sexy therapist, a hyped-up Jim Carrey as The Riddler, and Tommy Lee Jones in piles of makeup as Two-Face. Give us Christian Bale and Nolan, please!)

Speaking of DC Comics pics, it is highly unlikely that Bryan Singer will return to shoot the next Superman movie. (The director is finishing up Tom Cruise's Nazi film Valkyrie, and prepping The Mayor of Castro Street). The next Superman we will see on the big screen will not be Brandon Routh, but a younger Superman among a cast of youthful superheroes in The Justice League. That movie will likely not be shot, however, until after the WGA strike is resolved. Warners is so happy with Dark Knight that their fondest hope is that Nolan will return to do another Batman.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
The rock-star murals in the parking structure were the first casualty. Now it's official: The Virgin Megastore at 8000 Sunset is closing in January after something like 15 years in that location. (Don't worry: This isn't a rehash of the Tower Records situation. The company's doing fine, and the Hollywood & Highland location will remain.)

Oh, how that Sunset & Laurel shopping center has changed over the years. I remember watching my share of seminal indie films as a teenager at the Laemmle theater upstairs, once the chain's flagship arthouse. Now, the theater seldom programs anything more exciting than its Rocky Horror-style monthly midnight screening of The Room, sending key movies to its other locations.

The dejected Virgin employee I spoke with yesterday said the company tried everything to keep their lease, including offering to scale back to a single floor, but the complex raised the rent and didn't want to negotiate. I can't imagine what the building management has in mind. A Trader Joe's was said to be going in where the Sam Ash guitar store used to be, but I gather the deal's off, which leaves only that cruisy Crunch gym and its C-list celebs. What gives?

Update: I haven't had a chance to confirm it, but a friend tells me they're planning to use the shopping mall for office space. It already serves as HQ for TMZ.

As I Am Legend rocks the boxoffice (David and Nora were disappointed) and J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield looms, several media outlets are checking out Hollywood's love affair with destroying New York.

Here's the NYT.com.

New York's Culture Vulture.

Here's the Cloverfield trailer:

And the 1998 Godzilla:

And The Day After Tomorrow:

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
You know how you can tell that even your own mother hasn't been reading your movie reviews? When she calls you from the video store to gauge your opinion about a film you panned in print. That's why I resolved to get her an online DVD rental subscription for Christmas this year, so I could log in and load the queue with classy choices I know she'd love (like The Lives of Others or Breaking & Entering).

The question? Should I go with Netflix (the service I use myself) or Blockbuster Total Access, which would allow her to trade in my picks for any movie she pleases for free in their stores? I was leaning towards Blockbuster when I stumbled across this price-hike news from Variety's sister publication, Video Business:

Blockbuster, in a bid to increase the profitability of Total Access, is changing the prices of DVD rental subscription programs, with rates for its Total Access Premium offering unlimited mail order and in-store exchanges going up a hefty $5 to $10. ... The changes take effect on the next billing cycle for existing customers and on Dec. 27 for new customers.

Seems the in-store advantage is costing the company too much money, and they're adjusting the prices accordingly (it should be noted that they're decreasing some of the plans that don't include in-store trade-ins to compete with Netflix). Of course, if I wanted to get really classy, I'd would have gone the mom-and-pop route and hooked her up with a GreenCine membership, which caters to true film snobs by delivering hard-to-find titles.

Bob Dylan meets Handel's Messiah.

Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander offers one of the great Christmas movie sequences ever:

[Hat Tip: Awards Daily]

Irv Letofsky was entertainment editor of the LA Times Calendar when I first met him in the early 80s. And during my recent stint at The Hollywood Reporter, he used to come into the newsroom every week to file his TV reviews. Letofsky was a warm, wise, Lou Grant-style editor, gruff but generously supportive to younger writers like me. He will be missed.

When I was growing up, our family Christmas-watching rituals included A Christmas Carol, starring Alistair Sim as Mr. Scrooge, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and Holiday Inn, featuring Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas.

But when you start a family, Christmas habits change. David added Bob Clark's A Christmas Story to our holiday ritual. And while Nora loves It's a Wonderful Life, she never responded to the black-and-white A Christmas Carol. And somehow, Richard Curtis's Love Actually has snuck into our regular Christmas viewing. Here's DVD Spindoctor's Christmas list.

And of course, no Christmas would be right without watching Judy Garland sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to the sobbing Margaret O'Brien in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis:

This is a strange 1963 TV reprise:

There Will be Blood opens December 26. Its Tomatometer rating off 32 reviews so far is 91%.

Paul Thomas Anderson talks candidly to Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Here's a feature on the movie in The London Times; Judith Lewis's LA Weekly cover story on Daniel Day Lewis; he also does the LAT and the AP. And in case you missed it, Lynn Hirschberg's cover profile in the NYT Magazine.

Here's a clip:

Here's one of a series of strike-related videos; this one's an interview with Bring it On writer Jessica Bendinger:

Sweeney Todd opened to excellent reviews (87% fresh on Rottentomatoes.com) and strong initial numbers on Friday, but the movie dropped an estimated 28 % (actually 25%) between Friday and Saturday. (Here's Sunday's Variety weekend boxoffice report.) This indicates that many viewers were lured by Paramount's mainstream horror-driven ad campaign, which did not sell the film as a Stephen Sondheim musical, and walked away disappointed. (The company also seeded the internet with clips showing the musical numbers.) Selling a unique movie like this, where there is no tried-and-true pattern to follow, is admittedly tricky. So Paramount made the call to go wide with 1200 runs--and not build the movie from fewer runs in sophisticated urban markets. It now looks like Dreamworks' initial strategy might have been the right way to go. That way early adopters would spread good word and build an audience slowly over time, rather than folks being lured into seeing a movie that they wind up not liking--and spreading bad word.

Sweeney Todd is a great movie. But it is the kind of unusual and arty film that requires delicate, special handling. OK, so what if it isn't a movie with mass-market appeal? Will the Academy come through for a great film that is tainted in the marketplace? And what happened with the Screen Actors Guild bypassing Sweeney? It's quite possible that many of the SAG committee members did not see the late-breaking Sweeney; the DVD finally went out Saturday.

UPDATE: According to DreamWorks, the plan was to start at 800 screens; based on tracking and reaction to the movie they expanded to l200. The two studios agreed to the plan. There were several different spots for the movie, some with music, some not.

Variety's Peter Bart speaks the truth in his year-end column musing on the striking writers facing today's corporate Goliaths, the faceless conglomerates.

Aside from Irving Berlin's White Christmas, The Christmas Song, written by Mel Torme and Robert Walls, is one of the most enduring Christmas pop songs ever, and in 1946 made Nat King Cole a star:

Here are the lyrics, which Walls scrawled in a rush one blistering L.A. summer day:

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack Frost nipping at your nose,
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like eskimos.
Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe
Help to make the season bright.
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight.
They know that Santa's on his way -
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh
And ev'rymother's child is gonna spy
To see if reindeer really know how to fly.
and so I'm offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it's been said many times,
Many ways: "Merry Christmas to you".
(Repeat) (from 9th line)

The folks at Rotten Tomatoes sent me their Best Reviewed Movies (ranked alphabetically) of 2007 (as of December 10, 2007):

· Gone Baby Gone 93 %

· Hairspray 92 %

· Hot Fuzz 89%

· Knocked Up 90%

· Michael Clayton 90 %

· No Country for Old Men 95%

· Ratatouille 97 %

· Sicko 93 %

· The Bourne Ultimatum 93 %

· Zodiac 89%

Oddly, the most current Best of 2007 list on the site is more inclusive and quite different.

Happily, I managed to skip each and every one of their Worst Reviewed Movies (ranked alphabetically) of 2007 (as of December 10, 2007):

· Because I Said So

· Daddy Day Camp

· Good Luck Chuck

· Happily N'Ever After

· License To Wed

· Norbit

· Perfect Stranger

· Premonition

· The Number 23

· The Reaping

106 North American film critics participated in the second indieWIRE Critics' Poll, which voted Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood the number one film of 2007.

Here's the full list.

LAT.com is running a photo gallery with deep captions on the provocative subject of Oscar movies tainted by scandal. While it's a sure way to grab online traffic, the stories are attention-grabbing without offering any substance. Is discussion of Keira Knightley's skinniness really going to change her chances of getting an Oscar nom?

As for Kite Runner, distrib Paramount Vantage is still fighting the good fight on the basis of strong exit polls indicating that like the book, The Kite Runner movie plays better to regular folks than to the intelligentsia. Here's some info:

Exit polls last Sunday were 94% top two boxes and 85% definite recommend at a wide sampling from six markets. An avalanche of blowback comments hit the NYT website responding to Manohla Dargis's review. The movie is trying to recover from tough reviews; its rankings on Rottentomatoes are climbing to 69% in the "cream of the crop" group.

The filmmakers are crossing their fingers that the movie expands well into middle markets this weekend.

The NYT's A.O. Scott calls Sweeney Todd "close to a masterpiece." Wow. This is one hell of a great review, in every sense.

Tim Burton makes fantasy movies. Stephen Sondheim writes musicals. It is hard to think of two more optimistic genres of popular art, or of two popular artists who have so systematically subverted that optimism. Mr. Sondheim has always gravitated toward the dissonance lurking in hummable tunes, and has threaded his song-and-dance spectaculars with subtexts of anxiety and alienation. Mr. Burton, for his part, dwells most naturally (if somewhat uneasily) in the realms of the gothic and the grotesque, turning comic books and children's tales into scary, nightmarish shadow plays.

And so it should not be surprising that "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," Mr. Burton's film adaptation of Mr. Sondheim's musical, is as dark and terrifying as any motion picture in recent memory, not excluding the bloody installments in the Saw franchise. Indeed, "Sweeney" is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature. It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme-- I am tempted to say evil-- genius.

This will help push people to see and accept the movie--and to understand what they're seeing. Because Sweeney is so different.

Jodie Foster has a nose for what's commercial--most of the time. (The Brave One worked fine for me.) This trailer for the family comedy Nim's Island reminds me of one of those Hayley Mills movies from the 60s. Or maybe Romancing the Stone. There's nothing in the Koran that says that Jodie Foster can't be funny. Or that Gerard Butler can't be swashbuckling. On the other hand, this could be really awful.

Guillermo Del Toro has put up a trailer for his next, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

There's never a dull moment over at Paramount. Indie prod-turned-Brad Grey favorite at Paramount, production exec Pamela Abdy, finds herself embroiled in a plot worthy of The Sopranos. A NYP story reveals that Abdy was caught on a wiretap discussing her intimate relationship with new Jersey mobster Joseph Perna:

Award-winning Paramount Pictures veep and producer Pamela Abdy has been identified as the girlfriend of a married New Jersey mobster nabbed this week on charges he helped run a multibillion-dollar illegal gambling ring with ties to the Bloods gang, court documents show.

Abdy - whose credits include "Garden State," "Babel," "World Trade Center" and "Freedom Writers" - was captured on wiretaps talking with her beau, reputed Luchese made man Joseph Perna, just minutes before she headed to a June movie screening, according to New Jersey authorities.

During their conversation, Abdy, who investigators said had a "personal dating relationship" with Perna, discusses their jobs, likening some film business execs to "made guys."

Abdy has been working on a project called "Gangsta Bitches." In recent weeks the exec v-p had been rumored to be ascending to replace John Lesher at Paramount Vantage. It is unlikely that under these circumstances Abdy will be able to keep her current job. Here's Variety's story.

The Screen Actors Guild nominees took some surprising directions. (Here's Variety's story.) They reflect a few things about SAG, and may not predict Academy voting behavior. The two groups often share noms but also go their separate ways.

Actors LOVE Sean Penn, whose Into the Wild grabbed four noms. Hal Holbrook is still the most likely Oscar nom for this film, but Emile Hirsch and Catherine Keener get a leg up. Remember, actors adore Penn, but the rest of the Academy voters may not.

I hope the attention SAG voters gave Lars and the Real Girl's Ryan Gosling, Eastern Promises' Viggo Mortensen and A Mighty Heart's Angelina Jolie will inspire Academy voters to watch those three films.

Actors love Cate Blanchett. Like the Golden Globes, she grabbed two noms, for best actress for Elizabeth: The Golden Age and supporting actress for I'm Not There. I doubt the Oscar actors will go for Elizabeth.

SAG voters are somewhat more mainstream than the Academy actors. They steered away from such late-breaking high-brow Academy contenders as Sweeney Todd and Atonement. No Johnny Depp, James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saorise Ronan. They went for There Will be Blood's Daniel Day Lewis, but not Paul Dano. Michael Clayton's George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson continue to gain traction for Academy Oscar slots. SAG voters skipped such foreign-language fare as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Kite Runner, but came through for Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, which was a hit here. It makes sense that they embraced the great ensemble acting in the hugely entertaining 3:10 to Yuma, American Gangster, Hairspray and No Country for Old Men (both Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem got supporting actor noms).

American Gangster won a best ensemble nod and Ruby Dee is a supporting actress nominee, but Denzel Washington got nothing, not for American Gangster nor The Great Debaters, which some SAG voters may not have had a chance to see. While American Gangster seems to be losing momentum (it has fallen out of the LAT's Buzzmeter poll's top five for best picture) my sense is that many Academy voters like it a lot. Charlie Wilson's War, on the other hand, which opens this weekend, hasn't got a pulse.

The full SAG nominations list is on the jump:

Yet another Will Smith hit in the making is Hancock:

I've had Sweeney Todd in my head for weeks now. I have a great deal of respect for what the filmmakers and actors did to make this movie musical work on screen. It was a tough nut to crack, but with Stephen Sondheim's help, they did it. Here's the LAT story explaining how.

The MPAA has deemed the one-sheet for Alex Gibney's doc Taxi to the Dark Side, which ThinkFilm will release January 11, as inappropriate. The doc tracks the practice of torture from Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo. The poster (right) shows a docu photograph of soldiers with a hooded prisoner.

"Not permitting us to use an image of a hooded man that comes from a documentary photograph is censorship, pure and simple," said producer, writer and director Gibney. "Intentional or not, the MPAA's disapproval of the poster is a political act, undermining legitimate criticism of the Bush administration. I agree that the image is offensive; it's also real."

Here's A.J. Schack's story.

Here's a short, sneak peak of Current TV's SuperNews Episode It's a Horrible Life, starring George Bush as George Bailey and George Clooney as the current president of the United States, which starts airing on Current TV and Current.com simultaneously on December 18 at 10 p.m. PT/ET. The piece was created by Josh Faure-Brac of ILL-ustrated, who is also behind the animated series Bill and Ted.

Here's Variety's review of Denzel Washington's late Oscar-race entry The Great Debaters.

Popular Mechanics takes on the dubious science in I Am Legend, which is based on Richard Matheson's book--which tried to explain the science behind vampires! I think you're supposed to call it "suspension of disbelief."

[Hat Tip: MCN]

Never say never in Hollywood. The weekend that New Line Cinema's would-be follow-up fantasy franchise to The Lord of the Rings, The Golden Compass, tanked at the boxoffice, I said, "Watch Robert Shaye bury the hatchet with Peter Jackson and set up The Hobbit."

Sure enough, Shaye, whose deal at Warner Bros. is coming up for renewal, wasted no time in doing just that. At this point Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh will serve as exec producers. UPDATE: David Poland adds his two cents at The Hot Blog.

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists (of which I am a voting member) has announced its 2nd Annual Achievement Awards:

Best Film: No Country For Old Men

Best Director:
The Coen Brothers

Best Original Screenplay:
Juno - Diablo Cody

Best Screenplay Adapted:
Away From Her - Sarah Polley

Best Documentary:
No End In Sight - Charles Ferguson

Best Actress:
Julie Christie - Away From Her

Best Actress In Supporting Role:
Amy Ryan - Gone Baby Gone

Best Actor:
Daniel Day Lewis - There Will Be Blood

Best Actor In Supporting Role:
Tom Wilkinson - Michael Clayton

Best Ensemble Cast:
Juno

Best Editing:
The Diving Bell and The Butterfly - Juliette Welfling

Best Foreign Film:
Diving Bell and The Butterfly - Julian Schnabel

EDA Female Focus Awards
Best Woman Director:
Sarah Polley

Best Woman Screenwriter:
Tamara Jenkins - The Savages

Best Breakthrough Performance:
Ellen Page - Juno

Best Newcomer:
Saoirse Ronan - Atonement

Women’s Image Award:
Sarah Polley

For those of you with classical music fans on your Christmas list, consider this. Composer Igor Keller has created a Baroque oratorio in the style of Handel’s Messiah for a 28-piece chamber orchestra, 26-voice chorus and three soloists. The libretto is the sexual harassment complaint lodged against Fox News host Bill O’Reilly by staff producer Andrea Mackris in October 2004. Here's a video excerpt of its world premiere in January 2007.

The WGA is playing hard ball with the Hollywood Foreign Press's Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, denying them waivers for their respective televised awards shows, reports Variety. This means celebrities may not want to cross picket lines, and it means a relatively simple litany of ad-libbed acceptance speeches for those who do. Here's Film Experience on what to expect.

The next big awards announcement that will have significant influence on the Oscar nominations are the SAG Awards nominations. The announcement in five film categories will be made at 6 a.m. PT / 9 a.m. ET on Thursday Dec. 20, 2007 and will be telecast live on Turner Network Television (TNT) and webcast live on TNT.TV and TBS.COM.

This trailer for the upcoming Focus Features comedy Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day hit my sweet spot. 1) It's a makeover fantasy that turns a middle-aged spinster nanny (the incomparable Frances McDormand) into a kissable babe (see Moonstruck). 2) It stars the it-girl of the moment, Amy Adams, as an ambitious young starlet. 3) It boasts some young and handsome Brit love-interests, plus, for those interested in an older man of the world, Caesar himself, Ciaran Hinds. (My idea of a good time is watching Persuasion for the nth time, so shoot me.) Miss Pettigrew is written by David Magee, who wrote Finding Neverland, and Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty; it's directed by a TV refugee, Bharat Nalluri.

This Wednesday's The Envelope in the LAT features a Q & A with Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis on the making of their critic's fave There Will Be Blood. Here's a taste:

Q: I wonder why a project with you two attached would have trouble getting financed, as this did, apart from the lack of car crashes and women being tortured.

A: Day-Lewis: Probably someone somewhere said, “If ever we let those two…get together, there’s going to be trouble.”

Anderson: Yeah, that’s probably what they said.

Day-Lewis: It’s a bit like crunching numbers to work out whether an actor or a director is going to be a payoff. They do the same thing with all the ingredients, apparently, of any given project. And this is a period film, which apparently nobody wants to go see; there are no girls in it…

Q: How did you two get together to make this movie?

A: Anderson: I knew through the grapevine that Daniel had liked “Punch-Drunk Love” a lot, so I felt confident enough to ask him to read the script I was writing. It worked out really nicely just because our lives were at a good spot. He was ready to work and I was in New York at the same time he was in New York. So, long afternoon walks and really good breakfasts.

Day-Lewis: We really tucked away some ham and eggs.

Anderson: You get to learn a lot about somebody you might want to work with from what they order for breakfast.

Day-Lewis: Yeah, yeah. What’s that appetite like? And do they resist the appetite? Are they really very hungry but they order the fruit plate?

At the Monterey Jazz festival, jazz afficionados and filmmakers John Sayles (Honeydripper) and Clint Eastwood, who most recently composed the score for Grace is Gone, talk about the blues.

My favorite quote of the year comes from Variety's own Todd McCarthy, reviewing Rob Reiner's latest studio comedy, Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two dying men out to live the rest of their lives to the fullest:

"The Bucket List" is a feel-good film about death, a sitcom about mortality, "Ikiru" for meatheads.

This review isn't making me rush out and see this movie any sooner. It's on my growing DVD pile. My resistance isn't to the two stars, but I confess, to director Rob Reiner, who hasn't made a good movie inside the comedy zone in a while. When he's good he's very very good, but when he's bad...

The British Academy Awards, or BAFTAs, have some influence on Oscar voters. And Atonement is expected to get yet another boost when the nominations are announced January 16. But director Joe Wright could face some backlash from his acceptance speech last year, when he chided voters for not awarding Pride & Prejudice star Keira Knightly with a prize, reports Variety's Adam Dawtrey.

As The Golden Compass, which cost New Line Cinema something north of $180 million, heads down the tubes domestically (luckily it's doing okay foreign), when I read Variety's story on studio resistance to hiring maverick fantasy master Terry Gilliam, it struck me that a cheaper Golden Compass directed by Gilliam might have yielded a better movie--and a happier ending.

Gilliam is one of the fantasy cinema greats, and I am delighted that $30 million has been raised for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which Gilliam will direct from his own script. Even when his movies go south commercially, as did Brothers Grimm and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (above, with Johnny Depp as Hunter Thompson), I always have a good time escaping into Gilliam's visuallly sumptuous alternate universe.

If Stephen King can do it, so can Juno scribe Diablo Cody, who launches her EW column here. When on strike, journalism is a viable option. The girl, who has gone native here in Hollywood--she prefers describing herself as "in showbiz" to "Hollywood screenwriter"--has the chops. It's an entertaining column. But most of this stuff was on her Pussy Ranch blog to begin with (including the photo from the Toronto Film Fest), albeit in rawer form. I hope she doesn't give that up.

She posted this on her blog, too:

Universal's Ron Meyer, Marc Shmuger, David Linde and producer Brian Grazer threw an Oscar-season party at Ago Saturday night to honor American Gangster director Ridley Scott. It's a measure of the Brit's clout that he was surrounded by actors. Paying tribute were Gangster star Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio (talking to Jeremy Piven), Armand Assante and Edward James Olmos, who starred in the recently reissued Blade Runner.

Scott shot commercials in Manhattan back in the 70s, when American Gangster was set, and took pictures in Harlem, which he consulted when prepping the movie. Screenwriter Steve Zaillian, who collaborated with Scott on Black Hawk Down and Hannibal, sent his draft of American Gangster to the director, who managed to talk Washington into coming back on board after a later script fell dormant. Zaillian is trying to adjust to not writing, he said. Strike talk filled the party, with most folks assuming that the forthcoming DGA talks were most likely to yield some results.

The trailer for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is finally online. Hi-res is much better than herky-jerky cameracams on YouTube. Heath Ledger as The Joker looks sinister and creepy here. But the trailer hints at the inflated-pixel grandiosity that these movies often head into. I hope not.

UPDATE: MTV does a shot-by- shot analysis.

Slashfilm posts a nifty collection of 30 years of Lucasfilm Christmas cards.

I Am Legend grossed an estimated $76.5 million this weekend, breaking b.o. records for the best December opening of all time, reports Variety. Newsweek named Will Smith the world's number one star earlier this year; they seem to be right. And Smith carries the pic alone on-screen, opposite a supporting dog and a lot of nasty CG night-zombies. Golden Globes nominees Atonement, Juno and No Country for Old Men also scored this weekend.

The American Film Institute jury picked its top ten American films Saturday, which included a vote for the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up as well as the French language film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is produced and directed by Americans.

In alphabetical order the AFI Ten Best are:

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
Juno
Knocked Up
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
The Savages
There Will Be Blood

The Carpetbagger (NYT media columnist David Carr) takes a cab over to New York's Four Seasons to check out a Lars and the Real Girl lunch hosted by NY PR doyenne Peggy Siegal. Here's his video report, which features the charming Ryan Gosling (who is excellent in this movie, which people seem to be resisting going to see), as well as Sidney Kimmel Entertainment exec Bingham Ray, sporting new facial hair. And here's Variety's takeout on the legendary NY flack.

Kris Tapley has the new Dark Knight posters. Splendid.