• A few record openings happened over the weekend, though unfortunately some came too late. As the Coen brothers experienced their greatest ever debut with Burn After Reading (or, as I call it, “Forget After Watching”), which also gave Focus Features its biggest opening ever, the same was true for Picturehouse, which saw its best bow with its final release, The Women. Meanwhile, newbie distributor Overture Films had its best debut with its fifth release, Righteous Kill, and Warner Independent opened its own final feature, Towelhead, to the weekend’s best per-screen average ($13,250).
• Despite his latest box office failure, Vin Diesel is getting another another chance. The actor will reunite with director Rob Cohen for a third xXx movie after having skipped the first sequel. It would seem to be Diesel’s acknowledgment of career misdirection had he not already recently signed on for the fourth Fast and the Furious installment, too.
• Speaking of things that came too late: where was Framelight Productions when Alan Moore began his naive relationship with the movie biz? According to The Hollywood Reporter, this new company’s goal is to work very closely with creators every step of the way in its adaptations of their comics, video games and toys.
• And finally, for the too soon department: Jeffrey Katzenberg is still pimping 3-D, this time via a live 3-D broadcast and talking of a time when all movies are 3-D, all viewing formats are 3-D (including computers and handheld devices) and everyone fashionably wears their 3-D glasses at all times.

Everybody remembers the bigger name Coen Bros. regulars, such as John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Frances McDormand, Billy Bob Thornton and now George Clooney. And of course, there are the one-shot stars, like Nicolas Cage, Gabriel Byrne, Jeff Bridges, William H. Macy, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Julianne Moore, Paul Newman, Albert Finney, Woody Harrelson, Tim Robbins and now Brad Pitt and John Malkovich. But who ever talks about Michael Lerner? He received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in Barton Fink, yet he never seems to get the same kind of respect that Javier Bardem gets, and it’s not just because Bardem won the award for No Country for Old Men.

With their new film, Burn After Reading, the Coens have again recast some lesser known character actors that I hope get the recognition they deserve. Both Richard Jenkins and J.K. Simmons have previously appeared in the Coens’ films, but each has seriously risen in notability since their last collaboration with the filmmakers. Hopefully, they’ll continue to be cast by the brothers.

Obviously, all my favorite Coen Bros. actors can’t be in every Coen Bros. movie (especially since some of them are dead). And interestingly enough, the brothers’ next film, A Serious Man, is being cast with (so far) only actors they’ve never employed. So, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the less-recognized actors and actresses who have done tremendous work for Joel and Ethan, not so much in the hopes that they’ll be re-employed (some can’t be) but in the general interest of giving them some much-needed praise.

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From its crash and burn debut at the Venice Film Festival to its slightly more positive but still definitively mixed reception here at the Toronto Film Festival, people who like to spend a lot of time bitching have spent a lot of time bitching that the Coen Brothers‘ Burn After Reading is at the very least a “disappointment” as a follow-up to No Country For Old Men, and is maybe even Exhibit A to the charge that this is a disastrous year for American pseudo-indie film. The former might be true, if one was of the mind that No Country as a masterpiece … which I was not. The latter might be true, if one was of the mind that a star-studded festival entry with little to no chance of impressing the stodgy middlebrow fetishists of the obvious of the Academy is synonymous with failure…which I am not. Burn After Reading may not have the sparse majesty of No Country––it may not go out of its way to tell you that We Are Getting Deep Up In Here––but in its own way its even more brutal assignation of moral confusion.

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• While I was out, AJ Schnack wrote a couple of amazing, insightful posts about the minor tragedy that is the Academy’s Best Documentary shortlist. Those posts have produced a flood of generally well-thought out responses: see, for starters, Danielle DiGiacomo, Dan Eisenberg, and shortlisted director Tricia Regan on Agnes Varnum’s blog.
• Twitch reports the very good news that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, which was banned in its home country of Thailand, is coming to DVD in the US on January 15.
• The Reeler joins us in berating Variety for that stupid headline about “art films”: “It’s obviousness-stating time for Pamela McClintock and her headline-writing colleagues…And if you’ll kindly turn to page 10, editor-in-chief Peter Bart has the latest on Watergate.”
• At NewCritics, I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, a new tome dedicated to the fan cult surrounding the Coen Brothers’ epic stoner comedy, has Dennis Cozzalio feeling a little like Garbo: “I closed the back cover wanting…to have been left alone with my own perceptions, about the movie and the cult. In this way, the Coens reticence to offer DVD audio commentary or any kind of ascension to the various theories floating around about their work, this film included, can be seen as the ultimate respect for fans of their movies—they are willing to let us do all the heavy lifting when it comes to assessing what those movies mean to us.”
• Death of a President, that terrible faux-doc about what hypothetically might happen if a hypothetical George W. Bush was hypothetically assassinated, just won an International Emmy. Sometime Spout Guest Blogger Chris Campbell accidentally ambled past the ceremony.