Is romance dead? David Carr seems to think so, at least in American cinema (both Hollywood and “Indiewood,” as he inclusively clarifies). While celebrating the subway station meet-cute from the beginning of Milk, a scene he claims to be of an increasingly rare sort, Carr states that American filmmakers “can do romantic pathology and entropy, but the kind of love for the ages, a big-movie kind of love? Not so much.”

If you agree with him, blame the back-to-back Best Picture winners Titanic and Shakespeare in Love for feeding us the kind of romance that’s so cheesy it clogs our arteries and gives us a coronary. Left with a burst heart and a lack of quality Nora Ephron movies, most of us have been cynics when it comes to love stories these past ten years. Yet cynics can still be swept off their feet, and American filmmakers have adequately supplied them with new kinds of love for the ages.

Just take a look at these ten films from the past decade. They may be full of cynicism, but they’re also filled with big-movie love, in their own way. If you can’t see the romance, then the problem is with you, not the movies.

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Eric Fensler created one of the first viral video sensations when he overdubbed the GI Joe PSAs. He’s a rare artist who, like Andy Kaufman, is hard to describe in a sentence or two. One thing is certain, he’d rather not be called, “The GI Joe PSA guy.”

Listeners respond with what their families watched on Thanksgiving, while Karina Longworth was transfixed by Australia and Indecent Proposal over the holiday weekend.

(See two of Eric Fensler videos after the jump.)

0:00 - Intro, listener feedback

5:32 - Eric Fensler

29:41 - Karina on Indecent Proposal, Australia

42:21 - Listener voice mail: why movies are better than video games

filmcouch-99

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I might as well get this out of the way first: I loved Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia. I was on the fence about seeing this, especially once I heard about the 165 minute running time, but I gave in and boy was I glad. It’s a sprawling epic with nods to classic films of the 30s and 40s, and besides featuring the eye candy combo of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, it also introduces Brandon Walters, who is possibly the cutest child actor alive. If there was some sort of scientific cuteness scale, he’d break it.

Despite the beautiful vistas and the sweeping storyline, not everyone is loving it. After the press screening I attended, a bunch of us gathered on the street outside the theater to debate reactions. It was oddly dividing: people either hated it or loathed it. I’d spent part of the week with a friend from Australia, and he’d denounced it as cheesy, because they have two Aussies in the lead roles: Jackman doing a faux “crikey!” Australian accent, while Kidman actually has a faux British accent. He said most of his friends in Sydney felt the same way.

Here in the States, Australia’s detractors are saying a lot of the same things. So, I’m taking the top five critiques of Australia and refuting them. I might not be able to change the critics’ minds, but I’m hoping you’ll at least give the movie a chance in theaters. Spoilers ahead!

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Today’s Extremely Improbable Rumor Sourced From The British Tabloids: NOW Magazine is reporting that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are “looking at remaking Last Tango In Paris.” It’s apparently part of a gambit to shore up the public perception of both halves of Hollywood’s most routinely questioned couple by having them appear together in “a movie that has a mainstream plot, but also some intense sex stuff.”

At the Guardian, Xan Brooks not only buys the rumor, but is all about it. Well, maybe not the Last Tango part, but the Cruise-on-Holmes on screen action in general. “The thrill is gone and they need it back. They need to have sex on screen, to prove their love,” he writes.

Because the couple who makes a movie sold on the idea that its stars Really Do It stays together, right? Just look at Eyes Wide Shut! (OMG, they should remake that. And then Far and Away. And then Days of Thunder.)

In a crowded year for Best Actress contention, Anne Hathaway could be the only first-timer to receive an Oscar nomination in the lead category, possibly going up against mainstays such as her Devil Wears Prada costar Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet, as well as the less-nominated vets Nicole Kidman and Kristen Scott Thomas. Her main competition for the outsider, dark horse position is Frozen River’s Melissa Leo (who may benefit from her film’s initiatory screener campaign even though River’s theatrical release was early and hardly noticed), and Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins, whose film just debuted to favorable reviews citing her brilliant (as in talented and bright) performance. But Hathaway is sure to be the victor –– even though her performance in Rachel Getting Married is hardly deserving of such an honor.

The Oscar buzz for Hathaway has been high for weeks now, enough that the actress apparently joked about it in her Saturday Night Live monologue earlier this month (I thought of it as less a current-year expectation than a general career goal, but it’s made Risky Biz Blog’s Steven Zeitchik compare Hathaway to Catherine O’Hara’s buzz-afflicted character in For Your Consideration). The fact that she’s a well-known movie star should make Hathaway’s buzz continually more reportable by the press and more noticeable by both the public and the voters, which gives her some advantage over Leo and Hawkins in terms of cultural consciousness.

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• Disney still loves its cash calf, Miley Cyrus, and is doing all it can to see her mature in its own pastures. The studio has hired Nicholas Sparks for a tailor-made project along the lines of his A Walk to Remember. He’ll simultaneously pen the novel and script, the plot and title of which are unknown. The only thing certain about the film is that it won’t feature any singing parts for Cyrus.
• Though I wish it was for another Romancing the Stone sequel (yeah, really), it’s great that Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito will be reunited once again for the Steven Soderbergh-produced Solitary Man, in which Douglas is to play a sex-addicted car dealer.
• More South Korea firsts: following the recent news that Universal is financing a South Korean film, Sony Pictures has announced a production that will be the first mainstream Hollywood movie to shoot in the country. Unfortunately, the movie is Beverly Hills Ninja 2, starring David Hasselhoff.
• Umm, Nicole Kidman will now be to Indiana Jones what Jason Bourne is to James Bond?

I have been making the case for Doug Liman for years now. I’d even recently given up the claim that I completely despise Swingers (it’s mostly the neo-swing soundtrack I hate). I constantly argued that his The Bourne Identity was better than Greengrass’ The Bourne Supremacy — in the end Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum turned out ultimately the best — and still continue promoting the genius of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (I watched it with a newbie just the other night, and that person was convinced). But now, I am on the fence about Jumper, which I haven’t yet seen and which arrived in theaters today. I can’t decide whether to bother seeing it.

The movie certainly looks stupid. I’ll admit it. Yet this is where my Liman defending came about in the past year, especially recently, as its release got closer. Every time the trailer or TV ad came on the screen, someone would turn to me and say it looks really stupid. Or I would overhear a similar statement coming from the mouths of strangers. Oh, it has to be better than it looks, I would say. It’s Doug Liman, a great action director who tackles seemingly stupid movies. But now the reviews are out. It has an 18% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t find one trustworthy critic who offers good enough reason to see it.

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• Specialty divisions are expecting this Sunday’s stripped-down Golden Globes to deliver a serious hit in the usual visibility for their Oscar-hopeful product. But one exec quoted in this piece says some of his colleagues are “secretly thrilled” that they don’t have to take their minds off the strike and the election in order to attend one more black-tie schmoozefest. Here’s the kicker: “I had heard that stars weren’t even planning to dress up should the telecast have happened,” he said.
• Although film studios have thus far managed to remain fairly active over the course of the strike, Warner Brothers laid off more than 1,000 employees yesterday, citing an impending “decline in production activity.” At other studios, crew members from struck TV shows have been repurposed  to work on films, but the stock pile of shootable scripts can only last so long.
• Nicole Kidman is pregnant, so Kate Winslet will take the part she was scheduled to play in Stephen Dalry’s The Reader. Winslet was Daldry’s first choice for the role but had been initially unavailable.

Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:

• Redacted: Bill O’Reilly can finally get a look at the film he’s sight-unseen been threatening to boycott, while Magnolia finally gets to put that whole all-press-is-good-press maxim to the test. Here’s my review from Telluride; for a recap on the possibly-contrived battle between director Brian DePalma and producer/distributor Mark Cuban, see here, here and here.
• Beowulf: Is director Robert Zemeckis not doing press for this film because he knows it’s a bad idea to compete with the post-Comic-Con gushage over Angelina Jolie’s nakedness?
• Smiley Face: Kevin and Paul are big fans of Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy, which came off a successful festival run to be all but abandoned by its distributor. The film opens on one screen in L.A. today before going straight to DVD. Listen to Paul’s interview with Araki here.
• Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is disappointing, despite Nicole Kidman’s strong performance as a wicked sister. Read the review here.
• Southland Tales: What can I say? I thought it was funny.

I first saw Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, in September at Telluride. I generally disliked it, but I vowed to see it again at the New York Film Festival and, if my opinion had changed, update my original review. If anything, the second viewing solidified many of my initial, negative feelings about the movie, but I did gain deeper respect for the performances, particularly that of Nicole Kidman, who creates a magnificent villain with a vivid backstory, despite the fact that Baumbach gives her very little to work towards. I’ve updated my review to include some thoughts based on a second viewing; you’ll find the old version here, and the new version after the jump.

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My first impression of Margot at the Wedding (which, admittedly, may change after I see it a second time at the New York Film Festival) is that Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is an intermittently fascinating exercise that barely holds together as a film. It plays as if Baumbach cut together a footage reel of master-class actors (plus Jack Black, who, perhaps emboldened by the company, somehow gives the finest performance of his career) rehearsing without a script. The characters are half-formed and/or disposed of unceremoniously, the themes are haphazardly integrated, the emotional arc is virtually non-existent.

And yet, some of the performances show flashes of magic, so much so that for all its faults, it’s not entirely dismissable.

It did look good on paper, didn’t it? Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a successful short story writer/prolific drinker who has developed a kind of perfect celebrity-literary scam: she projects her own self-loathing outward, and then drains the frustrations of her friends and family directly onto the pages of the New Yorker. It’s not entirely clear why Margot’s husband (John Turturro), son (Zane Pais) and sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to the director) keep letting her get away with this, but in the film’s best scene, her sometime-lover very publicly dresses her down for the same.

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Good news for fans of Eyes Wide Shut: a new DVD edition of Stanley Kubrick’s final film is on the way, complete with rated and unrated versions of the film, plus two documentaries, commentary from Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, and more. It will be available for purchase on its own, or as part of a nine-disc Kubrick collection, coming out in late October.

And if you read the above and immediately thought to yourself, “WHAT fans of Eyes Wide Shut?”, you should go read this appreciation of the film by Jeffrey M. Anderson. For several years I’ve thought (mostly in a lazy, cocktail chatter sort of way) of writing a book about Eyes Wide Shut — not so much the movie itself as the press surrounding its production, Kubrick’s death, the controversy surrounding preparing the film for MPAA approval, and its reception amongst both critics and audiences. Every time I gear myself up to actually do the writing, I inevitably lose confidence–something happens and I think, “Oh, nobody cares about that movie.”

Jeffrey’s post–and, especially, the comments it has engendered–has possibly convinced me otherwise. It’s one thing for a couple of critics to remain fascinated by a widely-reviled film ten years after its release, but those comments suggest a common relief among Eyes Wide Shut lovers: they’re all basically saying, “Finally, it’s okay for me to come out of the closet about this.”

• Nicole Kidman’s streak of high-profile disappointments looks like it’ll continue with The Invasion. Dennis Harvey’s review confirms the bad buzz: “Perhaps the sole distinguishing element in this Invasion is that it provides a new transmission oh-so-characteristic of our filmic era: projectile barfing.”
• Jennifer Aniston will join Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly and Kevin Connelly in He’s Just Not Into You, making the New Line project surely the most star-studded movie based on a self-help book ever made.
• Rosario Dawson is teaming with the creative team behind the hit animated sci-fi web video series Afterworld to star in and produce The Gemini Division, a 100-episode “live-action/motion-capture animation online sci-fi series.”
• Emerging Pictures is calling on students at historically black universities around the country to help promote Honeydripper, John Sayles’ upcoming musical starring Danny Glover. EP, in partnership with Clark Atlanta University, is creating a college course through which “students from participating schools will help develop and implement a grassroots marketing campaign with their professors and the film’s distribution team.” The film will make its debut at the Toronto Film Festival.

Rare is the year that a studio moves up a release date, in order to ensure that their film is “the first Western in the marketplace.” But such is the case this fall, as Lionsgate has decided to open James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma a month ahead of schedule, in order to get a jump on the competition (ie: The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt). But while Lionsgate might have dodged their genre competition, September’s an increibly crowded month for “prestige” releases; still, 3:10’s biggest competition on that particular weekend will be hardly-fearsome The Nanny Diaries.

Spike Lee held another press conference in Italy yesterday, in which he wowed the local journalists with his usual “don’t call me mainstream, I’m just here to scout locations for my $45 million film” bon mots. Amongst other revelations, Lee intimated that recent success has hardly made his life in Hollywood any easier. “My last feature film, Inside Man, was my most successful so far, and I was naive enough to think that that meant I could go from there and make any film I wanted to make. But I was very, very wrong about that.”

Apparently attempting to replicate the, um, success of Bewitched, Nicole Kidman will produce and star in a wacky romantic comedy called Monte Carlo.