• Penelope Cruz will be honored at this year’s Gotham Awards. Details at the FILMMAKER Blog, where Scott Macaulay also points to an appreciation of Manny Farber written by his former student, filmmaker Barbara Schock.
• Meanwhile, everyone thinks she’s got the Best Supporting Actress Oscar race locked up for her work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Even Lawrence Levi, who writes the film itself off as “as blinkered and lazy as the ‘90s films I got sick of,” admits that Cruz and Javier Bardem are “staggeringly funny and sexy” in it.
• Speaking of “too soon!” Oscar predictions: Can Robert Downey Jr win a nomination by acting in a movie about actors who are whores for Oscar nominations?

• Fox has brought a lawsuit against Warner Brothers, claiming that the latter studio does not have the right to release Zach Snyder’s Watchmen movie, because the former studio never full gave up their rights to the property. The movie’s supposed to come out on March 6, and though a court could decide that Fox should be cut in on its eventual profits, apparently that studio would prefer if the film was shelved altogether. Why did they wait until the film was finished in order to take action? Your thoughts, please.
• Josh Brolin, Ben Affleck, Charlize Theron and Morgan Spurlock are among the celebrities expected to “either cross paths with or interface with such politicians as Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and assorted other city, state and national elected officials” at the Starz! Green Room at the Democratic National Convention next week.
• The Coen Brothers have hired “Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony-nominated actor with little experience in front of the cameras, and Richard Kind, a character actor best known for his role on ABC’s Spin City,” to star as brothers in their upcoming period comedy, A Serious Man.

Everyone’s talking today about how, while no one was looking, Step Brothers has somehow made almost $100 million. All this, in spite of middling reviews and an almost complete lack of buzz. And granted, this might have been a real surprise in a different year, but if you take a look at 2008’s overall box office numbers, you see a lot of films that were written off after disappointing first weekends and/or otherwise for some reason have not been touted as “hits”, but which have nonetheless very quietly grossed either just under or just over a million dollars.

The most notable example of this is probably What Happens in Vegas, which has made $80 million in just over three months. Its release never went wider than 3,000 screens, and it never hit number 1, but if you factor in international box office, it’s grossed $200 million––or, about six times its reported production budget. Why is no one is talking about this film, or what it means for the careers of Cameron Diaz or Ashton Kutcher,  while 27 Dresses’ $76 million domestic gross, on a very similar budget, is pretty widely considered confirmation that Katherine Heigl has risen to the  very selective stratosphere of actresses who can open a movie?

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• Tropic Thunder was not only the number one film of the weekend, but it dethroned The Dark Knight, which is now the second highest grossing film of all time. So why is Ben Stiller brooding? No, he’s not recycling his Bono impression––according to Variety, its $26 million 3-day weekend (it made $37 million from Wednesday through Sunday) is no cause for celebration. The film made about $4 million less than Pineapple Express in its opening run, but cost four times more than that film to produce.
• They spent $13 million on last year’s broadcast alone, but due to “plunging sales, recession fears and spiking gasoline prices”, GM can no longer afford to sponsor the Oscars.
  
• The Voltron movie, which has been in development since before the first Transformers movie was completed, has been put into turnaround.

Last night, like everyone else, I stayed up late to watch the All-Around Finals in Olympic Women’s Gymnastics. The thrill of cheering for our good, wholesome, corn syrup-fed girls to take their massive muscled thighs and (metaphorically, of course) break the necks of foreign competitors who are apparently ten years under the minimum age can’t be denied. But where even my beloved Bela Karolyi said from the start that Shawn Johnson was probably the American girl to beat, I had my money on Nastia Liukin.

There’s just something about Nastia. She’s like part ballerina, and part assassin. From the moment I saw her, I had visions of her dressed up like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Then, as last night’s competition went on, I kind of revised the fantasy: I imagined all of the competing gymnasts in a reform school exploitation flick, with Shawn as the good girl who doesn’t really belong there, and Nastia as the leader of the pack who teaches her it’s better to be bad.

(It should maybe be here noted that last night, for purely non-recreational reasons, I was under the influence of vicodin).

Anyway, after Nastia won the gold and my sympathy for the bad ass proved prescient, I checked it out, and it turns out Nastia does have an IMDb profile and a bit of acting experience! Well, sort of: she played herself in that cheesy tween-targeted gymnastics flick, Stick It! Apparently, I’m not the only one obsessed with seeing Nastia on screen: last night, this clip from the movie had less than 4,000 views on YouTube; about eight hours later, that count has tripled. Somebody get this girl an agent! But a really, really terrible agent, who will only cast her in schlock, please.

I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.

Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

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To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them.

To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that.

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• Paula Wagner, Tom Cruise’s long-time producing partner, is leaving her post at the top of United Artists. Though Wagner will hold on to a share of UA––which has barely made use of their $500 million credit line, due to some friction with parent studio MGM over which movies to greenlight––apparently “it’s possible that the studio will once again go into hibernation and that the UA coin will go to MGM.”
• Totally coincidentally, the release date on UA’s next big production, the bad buzz-plagued Tom Cruise-in-an-eye patch vehicle Valkyrie, has been moved to Dec. 26 from Feb. 13, allegedly to capitalize on holiday audiences.
• In news that has to do with Cruise but is totally unrelated to Paula Wagner, he might star in The Tourist, a remake of a 2005 French film called Anthony Zimmer, with an adaptation by Julian Fellowes.
• Magnolia is funneling a few of genre-arm Magnet’s recent acquisitions into a theatrical release label called the Six Shooter Film Series. The Series will start with the Tribeca-lauded Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In, and will also showcase Sundance picks Special and Timecrimes.

So: Miramax is suing Daily Mail columnist and chick-lit novelist Allison Pearson, alleging that in 2002 they gave her an advance and a two-year contract to produce a new book, on which they’d own the movie rights. To give some perspective: the deal was brokered during the Harvey Weinstein era, and Miramax now alleges that they haven’t even been able to get Pearson to return their calls since 2006––a year after the Weinsten’s gave over their stake in the mini-major to Disney and left to start their own company.

But: Since Pearson is married to New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, and according to Gawker, there is “speculation that critic-pandering Harvey Weinstein—when he was at Miramax—might have been inspired to buy her book because of Pearson’s husband.” Which make me wonder: totally hypothetically, if Anthony Lane was paid off to wink-wink positively review Miramax output from 2002 until the Weinsteins left the company in 2005, did he at least do a good job of it? My findings after the jump.

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