Vote for your iconic swimsuit movie moments. Here are the women--led by Phoebe Cates--while Daniel Craig as James Bond leads the men.

I concur on Craig; but my vote for best wet swimsuit in a movie goes to Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep, video below.

The reviews Kathryn Bigelow has nabbed for The Hurt Locker (91 on Metacritic) are noteworthy. That doesn't mean that the movie will score at the boxoffice for Summit, but it's off to the second-strongest start for an indie this year. The movie has a shot at one of ten slots in the wide open Oscar best picture race. Even the NYT's tough-minded Manohla Dargis, who has long shared with me a sense of dismay at the thin ranks of gifted women directors, was moved to step out of the reviewer's box to praise Bigelow here.

Aside from critics' raves, The Hurt Locker boasts other advantages in the Oscar race. Bigelow is respected in the industry for making movies that are irrelevant to her gender; this movie is as intellectually rigorous and stylishly crafted as any Michael Mann film. (If anything, it's more engaging and viscerally exciting than, say, Public Enemies.) Also, the film industry, well aware of the failure of every Iraq War film to date, has been waiting for the exception that would break through and reach audiences. With America on the verge of withdrawing from Iraq, the timing may be right for this one. Finally, Bigelow gets points not only for figuring out a way to approach the subject that works, but for a high degree of difficulty.

It's shaping up to be an unusually good year for women directors. New Zealand writer-director Jane Campion, the only woman to ever win the Cannes Palme d'Or, is one of three women to be nominated for the best director Oscar, along with Sofia Coppola and Lena Wertmuller. (She won best screenplay for The Piano.) Bright Star, her tragic period romance about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, played well at Cannes but didn't take home a prize. New indie distributor Bob Berney plans to promote Bright Star on the fall fest circuit before a September opening. The impeccably mounted costume drama is quite Academy friendly.

The third Oscar possibility is Mira Nair, whose hits The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala have earned her an Oscar shot with her latest film, Amelia, a biopic about flier Amelia Earhart starring Oscar-winner Hilary Swank in the title role. It doesn't hurt that Fox Searchlight (Slumdog Millionaire, Juno) is shepherding this period adventure, which will also open in October after hitting the fest circuit.

Here's the Amelia trailer:

Here's my Toronto chat with Bigelow:

Meryl Streep + Amy Adams + Nora Ephron + Julia Child + Scott Rudin + French cooking=Julie & Julia. I'm there. Here's latest trailer. Sony releases August 7.

On its surface, a movie about a dowdy middle-aged woman chef--even French cooking icon Julia Child--may not seem commercial. But several elements in this mix could make Julie & Julia, which Sony opens August 7, commercial indeed.

1. Women

One factor that people often ignore when they look at the string of recent hit chick flix such as The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me, Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! is one huge demo in the marketplace--which television is smartly tapping into--Boomer women. Older females adore 50ish movie star Meryl Streep, who's on a roll these days, and they also dig 60ish writer-director Nora Ephron, who boasts rom-com cred from her two biggest hits, 1993's Sleepless in Seattle and 1998's You've Got Mail. (It's been a while, though.)

2. Food

Movies about food are also audience faves, from Taiwan's Eat Drink Man Woman, Japan's Tampopo, Denmark's Babette's Feast and Germany's Mostly Martha to American cook-fests Big Night, Fried Green Tomatoes and Mystic Pizza. Ephron talks about cooking Julia Child recipes on the on the set of Julie & Julia. It's a smart way to get audiences salivating.

What are your favorite food movies?

It's rare for a European actress to carve out a career in Hollywood. But honing her English with rounds of Berlitz and winning both the best actress Oscar and Cesar awards for La Vie en Rose have spun Marion Cotillard into a whirlwind of film roles. First, she went to Chicago to shoot Michael Mann's Public Enemies, playing moll Billie Frechette to Johnny Depp's gangster John Dillinger (July 1).

Three days later she was on the set of Rob Marshall's Fellini-inspired movie musical Nine, using her own singing voice as Luisa Contini opposite best actor Oscar-winner Daniel Day Lewis (November 25). The script for Nine was the last one completed by the late Anthony Minghella.

After just two days in Paris, Cotillard flew to the Morroco desert to shoot the French-language Le Dernier Vol (The Last Flight), co-starring her boyfriend, Guillaume Canet. Let's hope she catches a well-deserved break before starting her next, Inception, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page.

Here's the Public Enemies trailer:

When I interviewed Jane Fonda for More Magazine last year I was stunned that this vital, canny and beautiful actress --even after the commercial hit Monster-in-Law--was not getting movie offers. Her autobiography My Life So Far is a best-seller and the strong-minded political activist still commands massive fees to speak on the lecture circuit. Luckily, even if moviemakers are still focused on the younger demo, Broadway isn't. The theatre has always welcomed mature movie stars, from Lauren Bacall to Glenn Close. So 46 years since she last trod the boards, the 71-year-old Fonda is back on Broadway, earning raves for her role in Moises Kaufman's 33 Variations, where she projects to the balcony through eight shows a week. Take that, Jeremy Piven.

Fonda carries the Amadeus-like 33 Variations, which compares two composers, one famous and one not, and parallels two people in different time periods fighting against the dying of the light. An ailing musicologist (Fonda) feels compelled to travel to a Bonn archive to figure out why at the end of his life, Beethoven (Zach Grenier) composed 33 variations on a waltz by a minor composer. Even though she is declining fast from Lou Gehrig's disease, the obsessive researcher refuses to come home. Eventually her costume designer daughter (Samantha Mathis) and nurse boyfriend (Colin Hanks) insist on coming to Germany to attend to her.

The play shifts back and forth in time to show the ill and increasingly deaf Beethoven’s obsession with finding every possible variation on the waltz. We hear the variations, performed live on piano. The play works, thanks to the radiant Fonda, who starts out strong, confident, and insistent on solving the Beethoven mystery, even as she faces her body’s disintegration. As she gets weaker, she is forced to become more intimate with her daughter. Mathis and Hanks, making his Broadway debut, are also fine.

Susan Sarandon is currently starring on Broadway too, in Exit the King, opposite Geoffrey Rush.

Bloggers are often successful because they know how to get attention, to market themselves. One example of a PR natural is Diablo Cody (Juno), who came to fame via her Pussy Ranch blog. These days the Oscar-winning scribe seems to be neglecting her MySpace/United States of Tara blog in favor of tweeting; she already has more than 28,000 people following her on Twitter. She also gets regular exposure via her regular column in EW, and recently landed a fashion layout with her screenwriter gal pals in the NYT.

[Photo of Diablo Cody and screenwriter chums courtesy of The New York Times]

Sally Potter's new film Rage stars Jude Law as a transvestite. It screens at the Berlin fest on Sunday. Law is often best when playing down his good looks (I love him in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Road to Perdition) but in this case, Potter writes in her online press notes, the director (Orlando, Yes) took advantage of the actor's beauty:

"Part of the subject matter of Rage is the ugly use of beauty in the pursuit of profit," Potter writes. "Drugged by marketing, sapped by fear of aging, conned by the cult of celebrity -- image becomes all."

"Law, whose beauty has sometimes been held against him as an actor, made the courageous decision to accept the role of Minx -- a 'celebrity super-model' -- and took on a kind of hyper-beauty for this persona...a 'female' beauty which gradually unravels as the story unfolds. Strangely, the more he became a 'she', coiffed and made-up, the more naked was his performance. There was great strength in his willingness to make himself vulnerable. It was an extraordinarily intense part of the shoot."

Fun reads: At Film.com, Tim Appelo begs Brad and Angelina to save the Oscars, while Mark Harris explains at The Observer that the Academy is not, contrary to popular belief, a monolith. Film Experience examines the fates of the 2004 Vanity Fair Hollywood cover girls.

When my family and I saw the trailer for Paul Blart Mall Cop over the holidays, we all knew it would be a hit. But this big? New York Mag defines a new genre: the Blart. And Stephen Schaefer commends both new comedy star Kevin James and employable Oscar contender Mickey Rourke for recent smart career moves.

Some friends of mine are so afraid of Google they refuse to use it. Slate defines yet another Google triumph: Google Gear.

Steal this: Online retail giant Amazon is selling DVDs of 900 new indie and foreign films, priced from $5.99.

Emma Thompson has won Oscars for both acting (Howard's End) and writing (Sense and Sensibility). And she is coming to accept how satisfying both can be. "I always thought acting was my compulsion," she says," but that writing was a different form of creativity because it is so back to the knuckle. Acting is a natural thing because you are using your body, it's like singing. I was wrong about that. Both can answer the same need. I feel better after writing for two hours."

Thompson is back in her fave Bel Air Hotel bungalow promoting Last Chance Harvey, an unassuming romantic comedy that Joel Hopkins wrote for her some eight years ago. She revived it by bringing in as her leading man her co-star on Stranger than Fiction, Dustin Hoffman. "There are no special effects, no sub-plots, no heroes, no villains," she says. "It's just people talking and acting and falling in love and the obstacles that arise within the soul."

Meanwhile she's still pursuing her other muse, adapting the classic Lerner and Loew musical My Fair Lady for the screen for Columbia Pictures. She writes long-hand for the first draft, then moves to the computer, she says. "There is a connection between the brain and the arm and the pen."

Keira Knightley is signed on to star as Eliza Doolittle. While Thompson's old Cambridge cohort Hugh Laurie is her first choice for Henry Higgins, she has to finish the script first. And that choice will be made by the film's eventual director. (She won't be ready to direct, although she has some projects in mind, until her 8-year-old daughter is grown.)

Thompson revelled in checking into the source, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. "I love it," she says. "You can't contemporize this. I love that period anyway. I loved investigating Shaw himself and his relationship with women and actresses."

My My Fair Lady Higgins poll was a pitched battle between fans of Colin Firth and Jeremy Northam, who finally won. Who do you want to play him?

In the meantime the sequel to the family fantasy comedy Nanny McPhee is getting under way in January, written by and starring the snaggle-toothed Thompson. It's about "two sets of children and war between two families who don't understand each other," she says. And it stars a baby elephant.

With an Oscar nomination for Doubt at stake, Meryl Streep gamely turned up to do her stint on Letterman even though she was clearly under the influence of a serious head cold:

We're in the thick of the award season now.

Today's Indie Spirits noms were largely predictable. (The biggest surprise was the inclusion of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which debuted at Toronto, but won't be released until 2009.) Some movies got a much-needed boost in the awards derby, while others didn't get helped at all. Waltz with Bashir was a surprising omission from foreign film. Elegy and Adam Resurrected came up empty-handed.

Slumdog Millionaire was deemed ineligible for best feature as a foreign film, but it is three-quarters in English, so didn't make it into the foreign category either. But the Fox Searchlight/Warner Bros. film doesn't need help from the Spirits anyway, and neither does Focus Features' Milk, which scored for four noms, including best actor Sean Penn and supporting actor James Franco, but not best feature or director. It's also odd that Fox Searchlight's The Wrestler landed best feature and actor (Mickey Rourke) but not director or writer.

Sony Pictures Classics led the fray with 18 noms and looked to make good on its goal to land best actress noms this year for Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married) and Melissa Leo (Frozen River), and best supporting actress for Married's Debra Winger and Rosemary DeWitt. Laurent Cantet's The Class was among the foreign nominees.

IFC landed 11 noms for its plethora of year-end movies, including foreign entries Hunger and Gomorra. Overture's The Visitor scored a welcome nod for Richard Jenkins for best actor, as well as best director for Tom McCarthy.

Newcomer Oscilloscope scored noms for best feature (Wendy and Lucy) and best actress (Michelle Williams). This is what needs to happen for Williams to gain traction in the best actress race. And Lance Hammer's critic's fave Ballast scored amazing six noms even though he distributed the movie himself. Some films that have already been released theatrically will benefit from awards attention via DVD sales and Netflix rentals.

Charlie Kaufman (also winner of the Robert Altman award and nominated for best first feature) and Woody Allen got boosts for their original screenplays for Synecdoche, New York and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, respectively. Vicky Cristina's Penelope Cruz also added a notch to her belt for supporting actress.

Two popular docs on the Oscar short list grabbed additional attention with Spirit noms, Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World and Man on Wire, the story of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers.

The full list of Indie Spirit nominees is on the jump.

For once, women are dominating movie theaters. That's because there's more than enough for them to see. (OK, they're not going to see Transporter 3.) Usually, though, they're starved and I hope Hollywood takes the lessons of 2008 to heart, from Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! to Twilight and Australia, all movies designed to appeal to women. Lots of women.

The studios always act surprised when movies for women score big. Truth is, they like to make movies for men because they're more predictable and reliable and less finicky and demanding than women. Also, the femme audience can be relied on to go see movies about men, who are less likely to cross the line for a chick flick. Girls like to scream at horror picks. Men would rather die than go to a romantic comedy--unless it stars Seth Rogen, Vince Vaughn or Adam Sandler. Judd Apatow figured out that making rom-coms for both sexes was the way to go.

At the Thanksgiving weekend boxoffice, Four Christmases will do fine, I suspect (despite dismal reviews, although the NYT's A.O. Scott liked it) because it's the kind of rom-com that plays to both sexes. (Here's Pamela McClintock's weekend boxoffice preview.)

Australia will feed the hunger for romance and melodrama and sheer entertainment--while mixed reviews indicate that Oscars are not in its future. Twilight will pull repeat business and curiosity seekers checking out the phenom.

And for the art-house gang, Danny Boyle's must-see Slumdog Millionaire (92% on Rotten Tomatoes) is expanding (and gaining ground in the Oscar derby), and Gus Van Sant's Milk is a critics' fave, also earning 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. Sean Penn is already the one to beat in the best actor Oscar race.

Disney's animated Bolt nabbed good reviews (85% Tomatometer), while the vampire romance Twilight did not (48% Tomatometer ). It won't matter. There are plenty of excited teenage girls and their moms to keep the theaters noisy the opening weekend. (If you don't want to be distracted by screaming hordes, wait a week.) The movie works for what it is, and Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson are strong leads. Ken Turan's review gets it. So does Kim Voynar.

UPDATE: Twilight is outperforming even the most exuberant projections at the boxoffice, proving yet again that yes, women can open a movie. And Summit is greenlighting a film version of the second novel in Stephenie Meyer's vampire series, New Moon, they confirmed Saturday.

It kills me that Jane Fonda at 70 is at the height of her powers and because she no longer wants to do the heavy-lifting of producing her own movies--which is how she stayed at the top of the Hollywood actress pyramid for so long--she isn't working much. But she's a draw on the lecture circuit talking about women, teens and politics--she supported Hillary Clinton, then Barack Obama. And she's writing books; her autobiography My Life So Far is better written and more honest than most, and she's now researching and writing The Third Act: Entering Primetime, about women and aging.

I got a kick out of interviewing Fonda some months back when she was in town for the Warren Beatty AFI Tribute. She was open-faced, candid and fun to talk to. Here's my story in the current issue of More Magazine.

When it comes to this year's Oscar race, don't believe everything you read. So many movies haven't been seen yet, from Revolutionary Road and The Reader to Doubt and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I hear Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett are all strong Best Actress contenders, but until we see the films...everyone's talking through their hat.

And the actress race is not as strong a field as people would have you think. I'm not clear on whether the Academy likes Rachel Getting Married and Anne Hathaway, for example. She gives a great, surprising performance, but Academy voters are not necessarily the target for this movie, which is playing younger. I wonder if Mad Men vet Rosemary DeWitt isn't a stronger candidate in the weak supporting category. (Debra Winger just doesn't have a juicy money scene.)

I'll check out how Clint Eastwood's Changeling plays at the Academy premiere Thursday night. Cannes is one thing, the reality of a fall release is another. I think that Changeling is a stronger shot than A Mighty Heart for Angelina Jolie, but nothing is certain with period dramas.

Speaking of which, I also need to see all of Australia before I make up my mind on Nicole Kidman. She's an accomplished and versatile member of the Oscar-winner club--but the Baz Luhrmann movie may not be a slam dunk Academy picture. The footage is looking broad and entertaining and romantic-- like King Solomon's Mines, say-- rather than epic and grand and Out of Africa. Which may be good news for its boxoffice potential. It all depends.

The one thing I'm sure of is that I've Loved You So Long's Kristin Scott Thomas will get nominated. Yes, she gives a great performance in a good movie that should play with Academy members. (UPDATE: it's opening day reviews are at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.) But here's why she'll gain a slot:

1) She wears no makeup, looks awful and moves from shut-down depression to life.

2) She's a Brit who speaks French. (She's lived in France for 25 years.) This is huge.

3) She's done good work for a long time and is overdue (she was nominated once, for The English Patient).

4) Scott Thomas is also earning raves on Broadway for The Seagull. This does not hurt one little bit.

Tom Tapp and Stephen Schaefer agree. (Unlike Schaefer, I do not think that this is Keira Knightley's year for The Duchess, rated 61 % on Rotten Tomatoes, nor do I believe that Queen Latifah will get anywhere this awards season. The Secret Life of Bees is a hit, but did not score strong reviews--58% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

UPDATE: Yes, I left off indie upstarts Sally Hawkins, who creates from scratch the astonishing character of Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, which is holding its own at the b.o., and Frozen River's equally deserving Melissa Leo, a movie that many will never see. Both have earned rave reviews and have a shot IF the critics groups, Golden Globes, and SAG nominating committees reward them. The Academy actors need to watch their films.

Leo has the advantage of being a well-known veteran character actress, while Brit Hawkins has no following here. That didn't hurt another Leigh performer, Vera Drake's Imelda Staunton, who grabbed an Oscar nom. But there are some who find Hawkins' Poppy irritating. I also left off Michelle Williams in Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, despite the fact that the crafty Cynthia Swartz is working on her campaign. Look for Williams to score with the Indie Spirit awards. Mini-distrib Oscilloscope simply doesn't have the scratch to mount a competitive campaign. I wish annual merit awards didn't depend on money. But they do.

Meanwhile, word from the foreign film voters is that it is another strong year. The full list of 67 foreign entries is up at indieWIRE.com , where Anthony Kaufman looks at the foreign Oscar race. And check out the exhaustive database at The Film Experience.

Of the four out of 67 that I've seen, France's The Class is innovative improvisational filmmaking, but not super-emotional; Sweden's Everlasting Moments from The Emigrants' Oscar-winning Jan Troell is a career-capping, moving masterpiece; Israel's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir could have a devastating impact on the Academy; and The Netherlands' Norway's O'Horten is a small jewel. I look forward to seeing more.

Speaking of escapist musicals, 1000 folks crammed into the Academy Theater on Friday night to escape the financial crisis and fall happily into the giddy world of the 1958 Arthur Freed/Vincente Minnelli musical Gigi, which swept all nine of its Oscar nominations. It's the film's Golden anniversary, and star Leslie Caron flew in from France to be quizzed by critic Stephen Farber. Warners supplied a gorgeous digital restoration. Both Minnelli's Gigi and 1951's An American in Paris are coming out in special two-disc editions.

At the reception beforehand, the tiny, birdlike Caron was surrounded by elderly male admirers from her MGM days, including West Side Story star George Chakiris. Dancer Gene Kelly discovered ballerina Caron on the stage in Paris; she was 18 when she arrived at Metro to test for An American in Paris, and landed the role. Her first naive act was to shear her own hair short with nail scissors, horrifying everyone and delaying the start of production by several weeks. Kelly choreographed and placed the cameras during the dance sequences, she said.

After An American in Paris hit big, Freed asked the dancer what material she liked and she mentioned Colette's Gigi. Freed developed it for years, first as a drama, but eventually realized that the only way to get around the strictures of the Hayes Code--Gigi is in training to be a French courtesan--was to make it a musical. "I'm playing a hooker who made good," said Caron.

[Photo courtesy L.A. Times]

Thanks to Glamour Reel Moments, Kirsten Smith is making the move from screenwriter to fledgling director.

Yes, Reel Moments is about promoting the Glamour brand (and sponsor Suave). But the fact remains that Glamour Magazine's annual series has given 14 women (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Rita Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, and Kate Hudson) the chance to make their film directing debuts. This year's installment, premiering Tuesday, October 14 at the DGA, unveils the rookie shorts of actresses Courteney Cox and Demi Moore--and House Bunny scribe Smith.

Smith dove into directing with The Spleenectomy, based on a Glamour reader's own story. The short stars House Bunny comedienne Anna Faris "as an aspiring community theater actress," says Smith, "lacking in natural ability, who goes on the audition of her life."

Smith, 38, loved the freedom of directing, with help from Reel Moments producer Freestyle Productions and Faris. "She's crazy talented and easy relaxed," says Smith. "It's great to encourage people to give their best, to get all these ideas and take credit for them. The auteur theory is so cocakamamie and untrue."

Authors of some 25 scripts over 12 years, Smith and writing partner Karen Lutz first sold 10 Things I Hate About You in 1997. Then came the post-feminist rom-com Legally Blonde, starring Reese Witherspoon, which broke out in the summer of 2001--with support from both teen girls and gay men-- to gross more than $96 million at the domestic boxoffice. Some of the duo's scripts were originals, like She's the Man, some were page-one rewrites, like Ella Enchanted. And the team has also delivered various polish-jobs-for-hire.

This summer Smith and Lutz scored again with 2008 hit House Bunny, custom-made for Faris, who plays a buxom ditzy femme thrown out her Playboy Mansion paradise and into house-mothering a college sorority of Plain Janes. "We're particularly drawn to underdog and fish-out-of-water stories," says Smith. She and Lutz first approached Faris after admiring her work in Just Friends. "This girl is rad," they decided.

Paula Garces (Harold & Kumar 2) is inviting audiences to participate in the creation of her new feature film, Red Princess Blues, via her interactive website myProducer.tv, which launches next week.

The ad-based site boasts social networking, video streaming, and micro-financing fundraising. Garces wants filmmakers to start a free profile and ask other site members for feedback on fundraising, casting, script, editing, promotion and release. She posits that if a filmmaker engages other experts on the site, he or she will not only raise money but will gain the insight to produce a better and potentially more popular film. (Really?)

Filmmakers can also create a "private collaboration area" on the site which permits access only to crew members.

It sounds like a good idea, but more established indie filmmaker sites like Withoutabox, iKlipz and Spout have already built a community of filmmakers. It's hard to imagine that this will compete.

Sony PIctures Classics is claiming first screener of the season this year. Academy voters should be getting today their copies of Frozen River, starring Best Actress candidate Melissa Leo (here on the cover of Filmmaker). Gold Derby weighs her Oscar chances.

Remember, when SPC started lobbying for Amy Adams for supporting actress in Junebug, nobody thought she had much of a shot. And Ryan Gosling was a long shot too, for Half Nelson. The actress race is weak this year, which helps Leo's cause.

But SPC is also pushing Anne Hathaway for Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, as well as Kristin Scott Thomas for I've Loved You So Long. That's three women chasing actress slots. Of the three I'd give Thomas the best shot. She's due. She's British. Wears no makeup. And acts in French.

As I previously reported, Ari Folman's animated doc Waltz with Bashir won't be tracking a documentary nod, SPC confirms, although it's eligible in the foreign film and animated categories. Documentarian/writer/ blogger A.J. Schnack has more.

From Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep to Megan Fox in How to Lose Friends And Alienate People, a babe in a wet shirt is a tried-and-true way to promote a movie. Especially in the Internet Age.

Let's just say that Fox doesn't quite compete with the glorious Miss Bisset in her prime:

As the awards season gets under way, the Gurus 'o Gold have made their first stabs at weighing the upcoming Oscar race. It's early days yet. Many of these films have not been seen. For example, the gurus know more about Frost/Nixon, based on Peter Morgan's play, than anything else, which may account for its front-runner status--which is not necessarily a good place to be at this stage.

Frost/Nixon also features two head-to-head male leads who can't be relegated to supporting status: Frank Langella and Michael Sheen. That's also true of Jamie Foxx (who won Best Actor for Ray) vs. Robert Downey, Jr. in The Soloist. Actors will bend over backwards to give Downey something this year, even if it's a supporting nod for the comedy Tropic Thunder, because Iron Man is not an Academy movie (except perhaps for technical categories like FX).

It's back to the norm this year with the actors--the best actor field looks much stronger and more competitive than the best actress list.

Meanwhile fan site IGN has launched some counter-programming, their first annual IGN Summer Movie Awards, honoring the high-octane films that their readers care about most. Winners include Best Summer Movie: The Dark Knight, Best Director: Iron Man's Jon Favreau, Best Animated Movie: Wall-E, directed by Andrew Stanton, and less predictably, Babe of the Summer: Natalie Martinez, star of Death Race.

Given the hundreds of movies unspooling in Toronto, key press in LA and NY are getting a head start on some of the screenings that will get piled up there. It's impossible to see everything.

Of the films I've seen, three masterful performances by women could take off in Toronto.

Rachel Weisz steals the show from romantic interest Adrien Brody and his fellow con-man, Mark Ruffalo, in Brothers Bloom, Rian Johnson's follow-up to his Sundance debut film, Brick. The caper comedy continues Johnson's high-style reinvention of past genres; I suspect it will play to a hip young audience. It's intricately plotted light fun, in the vein of Two for the Road, The List of Adrian Messenger, The Sting, House of Games (Ricky Jay narrates) or Topkapi (Maximillian Schell has a role in Bloom).

Johnson finished the script nine months after Brick's debut at the 2005 Sundance fest. Producer Ram Bergman raised money from Jim Stern's Endgame for the movie, which finally came in under $20 million. The filmmakers used four locations-- Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, and New Jersey-- to cover for ten key locales. And while the movie twists and turns, it doesn't go where you expect. Summit picked it up last December and will mount a commercial October release; it's not heading for awards contention.

Post her Constant Gardener Oscar win, Weisz was the first one in on Brothers Bloom, recognizing a juicy role in the reclusive, brainy heiress starving for love and experience who is drawn into the brothers Bloom's elaborate con game. "It was a tricky character," Johnson says. "She did a lot of work on the energy level to make it feel genuine. It could have been the sum of her quirks. She put life behind it. She was fearless."

Brit auteur Mike Leigh turns lighter with Happy-Go-Lucky, which stars Sally Hawkins as a wackily ebullient school teacher. She cares about people, and no matter how dark the world around her gets, it doesn't take her long to recover her footing and keep on looking at the bright side of life. She's hilarious, joyful, and probably, to some, a tad annoying. Leigh throws her into some trying situations, and asks why such a winning charmer doesn't find a mate. By film's end, there is some hope on that front. Hawkins won the best actress prize at Berlin, and could build some awards momentum if Miramax manages the film with a sure hand.

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy debuted at Cannes, where it scored rave reviews from Variety and Cinematical. I can see why. While I found Reichardt's Old Joy tedious and pedantic, this small-scale intimate drama is sure-footed and precise, and entirely focused on Michelle Williams as a young woman, Wendy, stuck in an Oregon town en route to Alaska. She is vulnerable and alone and devastated when her car breaks down and she loses her dog, Lucy.

Again, given the right handling--tiny distrib Oscilloscope is releasing the pic December 7--Williams could get some attention for this moving role. (She's also part of Charlie Kaufman's sprawling ensemble in Synecdoche, New York, which will show in Toronto.) Williams just suffered a tough year, with the death of her child's father, Heath Ledger, who co-starred with her in Brokeback Mountain, for which they both earned Oscar noms. Williams' Wendy and Lucy performance is a sad, four-handkerchief tour-de-force. It's a long shot, but if enough actors see this movie, Williams and Ledger could both be nominated in the same year, again.

When Bryan Singer first approached United Artists with the idea of making Valkyrie, he wanted to do it for about $25 million. Then Tom Cruise got interested and the budget exploded. The same thing happened to Lions for Lambs -- to Cruise and Robert Redford, it seemed like a modest little movie; at $35 million plus marketing, it was still too expensive for what it was.

The idea of UA being an indie was impossible with the players involved. Now Valkyrie, which several people I know have seen and liked, has bad buzz and will be judged as a costly star vehicle, which is quite different from a $25 million movie with no marquee star. Finally, MGM has decided to give the pic a shot in late December, after it screened well. It had been pushed back to February. This makes sense; if the movie is a smart arty picture with great performances, year-end award season support is probably just what it needs.

Cruise's long-time producing partner, Paula Wagner, is a fine studio producer and was a great agent, but the nurturing of Cruise and his movies is quite another matter from running a company. With Mary Parent now in charge at MGM, Wagner is transitioning to a producing deal.

Here's her statement:

“I’ve truly relished working with my longtime partner Tom Cruise to revitalize United Artists, and I am proud of all that we’ve accomplished in the past two years, reinvigorating the brand and developing such a strong slate of films,” Ms. Wagner said. “But I always tell my sons, ‘Follow your passion’ – and I’ve got to follow that advice myself. As much as I’ve enjoyed my time as an executive, I have longed to return to my true love, which is making movies, so that’s what I’ve decided to do. I still believe in our vision for UA, and I am confident that Harry Sloan and our colleagues at MGM will see that vision through to reality.”

UPDATE: The official press release is on the jump:

The Film Experience has collected the top ten Queens of Screams. They miss the chance to include a mother-daughter act: the omitted Janet Leigh (Psycho) as well as the included Halloween's Jamie Lee Curtis.

[Photo montage courtesy of Film Experience]

Mamma Mia! may not be a great movie, but like Sex and the City, it's going to score with older women all over the world. (And younger ones too. It's cutting a wide swath with female audiences.) God forbid, but given enough undeniable evidence that the femme demo is starving for decent product aimed at them, maybe the studios will step up. Still to come, The Women and The Duchess and Revolutionary Road and at least three movies in the next year starring the admirable Helen Mirren, who is still a sexpot after all these years. For evidence, check her out in a bikini, no less.

Warner Bros. is not releasing The Women in the fall. Picturehouse is.

Outgoing Picturehouse exec Bob Berney persuaded the studio to give him a bigger budget to take The Women wide on September 12 in 1500-2000 situations. "The trailer gets great response," says Berney, who wants to create a Sex and the City-style "bring your girlfriends" opening weekend femme event.

Here's the trailer:

Diane English's long-awaited remake of The Women looks quite close to the 1939 original, with Eva Mendes in the Joan Crawford role. And there are absolutely no men in it. And Candice Bergen is in it too, natch.

Kung Fu Panda will hit solidly with families. (It's pretty damned good.) Panda scored great reviews Friday, with an 85% fresh Rotten Tomatoes score, while Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan nabbed a piddly 37 % rotten. It should reach a few of the poor neglected males out there.

Sex and the City should hold well based on good word-of-mouth and may even pull in a few men. (Is it a one-shot anomaly? Or can Hollywood continue to harness the femmes?) Others have weighed in: The Women's Media Center, The Philly Inquirer, Newsweek, EW Popwatch and Cinematical. [Hat Tip: Women and Hollywood.]

Here are Variety's Zohan and Panda reviews, and our weekend boxoffice report.

Fandango's ticket sales (as of 6/6/08 10:00 a.m. PT) are:

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Sex and the City “Must Go” 52%

Kung Fu Panda “Go” 23%

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull “Go” 8%

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan “Go” 8%

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian “Go” 2%

In the wake of the Sex and the City boxoffice juggernaut, a lot of people are going to be speculating about which upcoming chick flicks are going to ride a new wave of interest in women's pics.

Truth is, most romantic comedies are not Big Event pics like Sex and the City--which is an escapist sexy entertaining movie that celebrates what it is to be a woman. How often does that come our way?

In fact, the movie version of the HBO series (which still draws decent numbers in reruns, years later) serves as an unwelcome reminder of how little the formula pablum served up by the studios satisfies the demanding femme demo. In other words, Sex and the City got made because it was a hit HBO show, not because it fit into any of the usual Hollywood notions of what women want. And thus it is an anomaly.

Which is not to say that I'm bitching about the trailer below, for He's Just Not That Into You, which at least boasts a strong ensemble cast led by Jennifer Anniston, Ben Affleck, Drew Barrymore and Scarlett Johansson. So you tell me: will this one be boffo at the b.o.?

HBO series-turned-movie Sex and the City demonstrated the power of a femme-driven brand this weekend, scoring an amazing $26.9 million on Friday and an estimated $55.7 million for the weekend, despite middling reviews. Here's Variety's weekend b.o. report, and review. And Carina Chocano's spot-on review in the LAT.

This is how the big boys behave at the boxoffice, not romantic comedies. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for example, scored $25 million on its opening day, Thursday May 22-- but went on to score $151 million over the five-day Memorial Day Weekend. Indiana Jones was expected to beat out Sex and the City this weekend, but while it performed respectably in its second frame, Carrie Bradshaw and company ruled the boxoffice roost.

Nora and I went to see Sex and the city Saturday noon at Century City's AMC. The theater was packed with women who laughed heartily throughout. When there was a question of whether or not Mr. Big would get himself to the church on time, you could hear a pin drop.

The movie is far from perfect, but for fans of the HBO show, it's right on target, expanding the quartet's wardrobe --and Carrie Bradshaw's closet--to out-sized movie proportions. Could it have been shorter, smarter, deeper, better? Yes. It took an awfully long time to reach its utterly predictable--and satisfying-- conclusion. But it was good, mindless, entertaining fun. The audience ate up the Charlotte poop and Samantha horny-dog jokes. And I really wanted Samantha to get it on with the ripped guy next door. Isn't that the point?

It should be noted that this success did not happen by chance. The marketing team at New Line knocked themselves out getting this movie out the door, as Warners took it over.

Will Mamma Mia! and The Women do as well? Unlikely. Sex and the City is an established popular brand. There was an appetite for this movie. But Hollywood regularly underestimates the power of the female audience, and thus tends to starve them. Maybe the studios will wake up and take notice.

Won't it be amusing if after Warners cuts back New Line Cinema, the label scores a raft of hits? Sex and the City, which appeals largely to women, is expected to score off the charts this weekend for a movie with virtually no allure for men. UPDATE: It may gross $20 million on its opening day, reports Pamela McClintock.

Nora and I will be going to an early Saturday screening, as most prime-time evening slots are pre-sold-out, according to online ticket sites MovieTickets.com (which reports that Sex and the City is now ranked number 19 10 on its list of top pre-sale films of all time) and Fandango, which states that as of Thursday morning, "the movie represents 92% of Fandango’s daily ticket sales, the highest daily percentage for any film so far this summer."

In anticipation of a big-titted hit, DreamWorks has clinched a first-look deal for Sex and the City's writer-director-producer, Michael Patrick King, writes Variety.

Metacritic ranks the film at a mid-range 54%. The NYT's Manohla Dargis does not like the film at all:

A little Botox goes a long way in “Sex and the City,” but a little decent writing would have gone even further. A dumpy big-screen makeover of that much-adored small-screen delight, the movie was written and directed by Michael Patrick King, one of the guiding lights and bright wits of the original series, based on Candace Bushnell’s newspaper columns and subsequent book. Once again, Sarah Jessica Parker has stepped into the dizzyingly high heels of Carrie Bradshaw, that postmodern Lorelei Lee — a hardly working New York writer with a passion for men and Manolos — but this time she’s taken a terrible tumble.

While in New York Magazine, David Edelstein gives Sex and the City thumbs up:

Has there ever been a TV series more polarizing than Sex and the City? It polarized me: First it drove me crazy (like itching powder), now I’m madly in love with it. It’s hard to feel halfway about these women and their unabashed materialism, overprivilege, and self-indulgence, their overdependence on and objectification of men. But what a hoot it is to see babes, for once, doing the objectifying—and talking dirty and sleeping around and measuring their fantasies against the sobering truth of male emotional insufficiency. If the core friendship of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte is the biggest fantasy of all—they complement one another perfectly; they’re never too competitive—it’s a moving design for living: existential haute couture.

And at The Huffington Post, Us Magazine critic Thelma Adams blogs that the movie is no longer in tune with the times: "Sex and the City jumps the shark."

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists conducted a poll about movie trailers. Here's a sampling:

QUESTION: Do you enjoy trailers, think they’re an important part of the movie theater experience and would you miss them if they were gone?

The majority of AWFJ members ‘love’ trailers (and love is the term they use to describe their feelings) and think they‘re integral to the movie theater experience.
Susan Wloszczyna puts it this way: “Anyone who claims to love films must possess some interest in movie trailers–when done well and honestly, they’re like great foreplay, an irresistible tease to what hopefully will be an affair to remember.”
Sara Voorhees notes, “Just as appetizers are necessary before a meal, trailers prime the pump, letting body and soul know a new experience is coming, so you’re ready and alert, emotionally prepared for it.“

Happy Birthday, George! Clooney turns 47 today, and Marc Malkin reports on the birthday party attended by girlfriend Sarah Larson, David Beckham and others --complete with two birthday cakes--Monday night.

Having survived the release of Leatherheads--an old-fashioned period screwball comedy that would never have been made if Clooney hadn't thrown himself behind it--he now looks forward to premiering the Coens' CIA satire Burn After Reading, also starring Brad Pitt, at Venice at summer's end. And he's voicing the title role in Wes Anderson's animated pic The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

It annoys me when people use Clooney as an example of the kind of star who doesn't open movies anymore. Look at his filmography: he often purposely picks movies that are obviously not commercial, like Steven Soderbergh's The Good German or Solaris. He cares more about having a worthwhile film legacy than about how much his movies open or how much he gets paid. (He did not pay himself $20-million to make Leatherheads.) More and more, actors are figuring out that diversity is the best policy.

Take Maria Bello. I interviewed her onstage at the Castro at the San Francisco International Film Fest last weekend. Bello doesn't dwell on image or boxoffice. She took over the Rachel Weisz role in Mummy 3 because she's wanted to do an action flick ever since she first saw Raiders of the Los Ark. Bello is one of the rare actresses to navigate the Hollywood system by making intelligent choices while keeping her dignity intact, taking on a range of juicy roles, large and small, studio and indie, all different. This is no blushing ingenue.

She's never afraid to take her clothes off and deal with sex and intimacy in a movie like The Cooler; she's seeking danger in such roles as Downloading Nancy, which creeped people out at Sundance this year. She looked stunned when I asked if she had any rules for what she would or wouldn't do. (The answer was no.) She likes to take a chance on a rising director like Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking). She played the real Donna McLoughlin for Oliver Stone in World Trade Center, a hooker opposite Mel Gibson in Payback, was married to the very kinky Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) in Paul Schrader's Autofocus, cracked up on the set with Viggo Mortenson and David Cronenberg while shooting the intense A History of Violence, was romanced by a younger man in Robin Swicord's Jane Austen Book Club, debuted Alan Ball's Nothing is Private in Toronto and Yellow Handkerchief (with Bill Hurt, below) in Sundance. She is currently filming Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.

The NYT's Manohla Dargis seems to think that there aren't many women's pictures coming out this summer. True, much of the summer movie advance buzz and online hype is about what the fanboys are interested in. The women's pictures, which appeal to one or two audience quadrants and don't necessarily target men, won't be blockbusters. That's one issue. (Another is the current phobia about putting sex in movies, like Speed Racer and Iron Man, because it will scare off men and younger folks. Please.)

But several movies in theaters now and still to come are aimed at women, from Made of Honor and What Happens in Vegas to the Meryl Streep Abba musical Mamma Mia! and Sex and the City. Even Get Smart, starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway, is going to pull women. And don't mess with Wanted's Angelina Jolie: she can kick ass on-screen as well as any male action star.

Finally, some marketing is starting to hit on Sex and the City, from Parker hyping her role as a mother on the cover of Parade, to early raves from Oprah and Fox News' Roger Friedman. Cinematical and Women and Hollywood debate Sex and the City's b.o. mettle. Carrie Bradshaw's getting married to Mr. Big? It will be huge.

Do I agree with Dargis that we could use more and better movies targeted at women? Fuck yeah!

Amazingly, the dumb-male stoner comedy sequel Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Tina Fey's smart female comedy Baby Mama are earning equivalently middling reviews. Harold and Kumar is 53% Rotten on the Tomatometer, and so is Baby Mama. Here are Variety's reviews of Baby Mama and Harold and Kumar. At a Variety conference table meeting last week, one guy asked, "who wants to see Baby Mama?", clearly expecting universal agreement that it was a must-to-avoid. Several women, including me, instantly chimed up, "we do!"

The potboiler Deception, on the other hand, is in the Rotten Tomato doghouse, with a 9 % rotten critics rating.

Here's Variety's weekend forecast. UPDATE: Baby Mama is soundly beating Harold and Kumar.

Fandango Five – Ticket Sales (as of 4/25/08 7:00 a.m. PT)

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay “Go” 18%

Iron Man “Go” 12%

Forgetting Sarah Marshall “Go” 11%

Baby Mama “Go” 8%

The Forbidden Kingdom “Go” 6%

Sasha Stone looks into the paucity of good roles for women these days. Thank God for Meryl Streep--who not only carried The Devil Wears Prada--which even Hollywood can't completely ignore--but has the musical Mamma Mia, the drama Doubt and the Julia Child biopic coming up.

Here's how it works. A magazine like Mean wants to promote its new issue, which features Kate Beckinsale on the cover channeling 60s French cinema icon Anna Karina. So the marketing people create a catchy YouTube video of the cover shoot and seed the press with it so we'll post it on our blogs. Beckinsale is a perfectly lovely and capable young actress, but this video annoyed me. Simply: I prefer the original.

Page Six has the scoop on Vanity Fair's April cover story on today's crop of comediennes. Annie Leibovitz shoots Queens of Comedy Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman and Amy Poehler for the cover, while inside, they and Sandra Bernhard, Jenna Fischer, Chelsea Handler and Wanda Sykes impersonate the likes of Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and Lil Kim.

Did you see this amazing photo of Amy Winehouse in The New Yorker? Talk about skanky. (Here's the piece that goes with it.)

Rising ingenues Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Anne Hathaway, Ellen Page and America Ferrara are among this year's crop of Vanity Fair Hollywood issue cover girls. The cover is stilted, awkward and oddly sexless, considering the star wattage. Am I the only one who thinks that Juno star Page looks like she's in drag when she puts on a fancy designer dress? UPDATE: She looked like her cheerful Oscar-caliber self in black and white stripes at the Academy Luncheon on Monday. Here's a slideshow of past VF Hollywood covers; they get better as they go back. The first one was a stunner.

On Super Bowl weekend, Hollywood leaves the boxoffice to the girls. Thus it's a 3D Hannah Montana concert movies vs. Jessica Alba in The Eye this weekend.

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

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

Accepting a leadership award from Sherry Lansing at last week's Women in Entertainment event, Jodie Foster thanked "Cydney," her long-term partner, for sticking with her through thick and thin. Foster has long kept any reference to her private life out of the public eye, so this marked a significant change for the actress.

The Daily News' Greg Hernandez picked up on the speech; so did Defamer.

Planet Gossip feels the love for Atonement star and Elle cover girl Keira Knightley.

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

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

Sasha Stone at Awards Daily adds:

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

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

I'll see Sasha and raise her:

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

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

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

Any more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's silly to suggest that a major studio would turn its back on movies starring women. Here's Warner prexy Jeff Robinov's response:

Poor execution and bad timing at the end of the most recent horror cycle were part of the poor reception for the horrific "The Reaping" and "The Invasion," which both Kidman and co-star Daniel Craig refused to promote. As for Neil Jordan's brainy twist on the vigilante genre, "The Brave One," Robinov said he is "proud of the movie," which Foster continues to support around the world. "It's tricky," he said. "It may have been too rough for women, and we didn't get the reviews we had expected."

Action features starring women remain a hard sell for many moviegoers. But Robinov said he is still willing to put a femme star into an action role. "But, like any other movie, it has to be the right movie with the right actor and the right filmmaker at the right time," he said.

Jeffrey Wells makes an important distinction in his story about the unsubstantiated rumors that Robinov had put a halt to movies with women stars:

Would Robinov be saying "no more movies with women in the lead" if WB had recently made a film as good and successful as The Silence of the Lambs, Aliens, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Kill Bill? Not likely. If a sweeping statement is required, Robinov should actually be saying that Warner Bros. "is no longer doing female-starring thrillers and actioners produced by Joel Silver." Silver, after all, produced The Brave One, The Invasion, Gothika and The Reaping.

Agreed. Warners greenlit three violent action pics starring female stars with femme appeal--Jodie Foster, Hilary Swank and Nicole Kidman, respectively--and then marketed the movies like Joel Silver movies. There are myriad reasons why each of these pics failed to thrive. A brainy twist on the vigilante genre, The Brave One may have been too disturbing for moviegoers, who remain uncomfortable with realistic stories about women with guns or angry women who take revenge on violent men. (Angelina Jolie with guns in a fantasy action pic is another matter.) The Brave One required careful handling and may have needed a slower release plan. Selling Foster as some kind of action hero may not have been the best approach. Audiences did buy her in Panic Room and Flight Plan, probably because in both she was a frightened mother defending her child. That's one of the only ways that audiences will forgive a woman with a gun.

The Reaping and The Invasion were both expensive B-pictures that were poor vehicles for any star, and were badly timed at the tail end of the recent horror cycle. Their fate had nothing to do with Swank or Kidman's performances. One thing that Warners and Silver should keep in mind with any movie aimed at women--they tend to be more discerning, read reviews, don't show up en masse opening weekend, and look for movies to be well-executed. Ouch.

UPDATE: Many many responses to this story, which has struck a nerve. Sasha Stone weighs in. And here's Carrie Rickey. Salon. Huffington Post. Spout. And New York.

Until I get my thoughts organized on The Assasination of Jesse James, here are some strongly worded thoughts from a Variety colleague who travels the blogosphere under the nom de plume MiraJeff.

He also has an early scoop on Sex and the City, which reveals that the movie boasts a flashback with younger versions of our four heroines.

New York doc vet Jennifer Fox debuted her six-hour Danish-funded documentary Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman at Sundance in January. (Here's John Anderson's Variety review and NYT feature.) She's been taking the six one-hour segments to 15 cities around the country in advance of their showing on the Sundance Channel next spring. She just finished a swing through L.A., where the docu about women, sex, relationships and family showed at the American Cinematheque.

I watched the six episodes two at a time, three nights running. (I had admired Fox's 80s doc Beirut: The Last Home Movie.) I was fascinated. Fox took five years of her own life and turned it into the narrative through-line for a survey of women and their life choices in different cultures. As she pursues her career as a documentarian, flying around the globe, she interviews women about their lives, from South Africa and Cambodia to India and Pakistan. As she faces her mid-40s, she juggles two long-distance relationships and struggles with issues of fertility and monogamy. "I wasn't filming to film," she said. "I was filming to discover something. A lot of the reasons I went on the journey were answered. Then it was time to stop."

Fox takes the docu form to a new place as she carries a lightweight Sony PDX 10 DV cam around with her, passing it to other people in conversation and filming herself. The filmmaker got into the habit of shooting herself every day, and diarizing, even though she wound up using mostly the spaces between the words--the moments that silently captured emotion. She worked hard to strip herself down, lose self-consciousness, and tried to foster that naturalism in her interviewees, from her parents and lovers to her friends and complete strangers. "I had to be naive, to be in it without being too judgmental," she said. "I cultivated equanimity, a stance of acceptance. I was a character in crisis, and I didn't know what I was going to do. It was daunting being a one-person crew."

When she first pitched the idea of the doc, distribs were skeptical that the passing of the camera would work, so Fox sent them some footage. That was no longer an issue. Denmark wound up producing the film, partly because her work falls easily into their docu tradition. She set her own list of Dogme-like rules: shoot every day, no makeup, shoot as you enter scenes, no tripods, no radio mikes, the camera has to be passed. "The purpose was to watch the way women speak when there isn't a camera around," she said. "I found a way to use the camera that doesn't hurt conversation. The person brings presence to the conversation."

During the film, this vulnerable attractive western woman is gawked at by groups of men in cultures that find independent single women strange. Yet Fox found a wide range of articulate women of different classes and cultures, many of whom opened up about their hopes and limitations. Some of the women, while not ready to discuss such foreign issues as masturbation, are delaying arranged marriages and working outside the home. And it was clear that across cultures, women are dealing with the same issues. Even if western women are free of the strictures that oppress women in other societies, we know that many families are nonetheless dominated by men, and many women are abused.

Fox shot 1600 hours of footage, which was logged, digitized and edited by a Danish editor. After Fox showed the movie to her mother and father, they were upset and asked her to soften some things. Her mother said, "How could you be so stupid? All married women are going to hate you." But, said Fox, her mother "backed the film." In fact her parents insisted on going to Sundance, where they did a Q & A.

At the three Cinematheque Q & As I attended, Fox passed the camera, which has a lavalier mike lashed onto it with a hairband, through the audience, soliciting people to send their own material to her flyingconfessions.com website to participate in a possible 7th episode.