What movies are going to be snubbed by Oscar because they don't speak Hollywood's language? Does Into the Wild play better for Baby Boomers than younger audiences? Can Once get a second chance? And do movie journalists have a responsibility to reflect the Oscar race, or to try and influence it? Joining James on The Rocchi Review this week to talk about those questions and much more is Jeffrey Wells of notorious film news blog Hollywood Elsewhere. You can download the entire podcast right here -- and we hope you enjoy; those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Directed by Ridley Scott, American Gangster is a big, blue-toned bruiser of a crime epic, telling the true story of 1970's Harlem crime lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the Jersey cop who brought him down. Scott's working with rich, real material here, as screenwriter Stephen Zaillian adapts Mark Jacobson's 2000 New York Magazine piece "The Return of Superfly." The interesting thing is how Scott's epic-sized story doesn't stumble on the facts but, rather, on fragments of fiction -- the echo of other movies in American Gangster grows and grows until it drowns out what Scott's trying to say. That doesn't mean that Scott's film isn't well made or compelling, but the constant stream of references and nods to other movies makes the film look a little shabby, clad in stolen grandeur like a giant's robes upon a dwarfish thief.

American Gangster opens strong, as Denzel Washington's Frank Lucas pours gas on another man, sets it alight and then pumps a couple of shots into the flaming victim as rough mercy. The message to anyone expecting the noble, beloved Denzel Washington of the past is clear: No more Mr. Nice Guy. Frank is the driver for Bumpy Jones (Clarence Williams III), the benevolent gangster-lord of Harlem. But Bumpy, incensed by a discount department store, mutters a final judgment before dying: "This is what's wrong with America -- it's gotten so big you can't find your way ... What right do they have cutting out the suppliers, pushing all the middlemen out, buying direct from the manufacturer?" Bumpy's not long in the ground before Frank seizes on his dying mentor's words and spins them to his own benefit -- he's going to cut out the middleman, go around the Mob-controlled drug interests that regulate the flow of heroin into New York, purchase direct from the Southeast Asian dope kings, flood the streets with pure, cheap drugs.

As a brief coda to an interview about the upcoming No Country for Old Men, Cinematical had the chance to ask Josh Brolin if he had been approached about the rumored Goonies project that's been mused about and hinted at over the past few months. (Sean Astin calls it an "absolute certainty"; noting Astin's post-Rings resume, you might suggest that's wishful thinking on his part.) Brolin, obviously bemused at the line of questioning, stated that he hasn't been contacted -- and offered his thoughts on the possibility. Look for Cinematical's full interview with Brolin about his non-One-Eyed-Willie-related work next week; the full transcript of Brolin's remarks is below.

Cinematical: There's one final thing that my editor basically put a gun to my head and told me to ask you ...

Josh Brolin: ... But it's ultimately your choice ...

Cinematical: ... I know, but I am a little bit curious as well; there have been rumors and rumblings that Warners is going around to the cast of The Goonies and talking to them about getting back together. ...

JB: Haven't heard a word.

Cinematical: If they asked you, are there limits to nostalgia? Or would you go back to it, as a lark?

JB: I don't know; it depends on the story ... I mean, it has nothing to do with (nostalgia); you know, they gave me my break, so that's a huge thing for me. And it's not like Spielberg or Dick Donner are slouches; they're great filmmakers ... I don't know; I haven't heard anything about it. I don't know what those actors are doing; Martha Plimpton, I run into once in a while; I think she's an amazing actress. But would it be smart to do that? Would it take away from the original film, and how great that was? Is it a business decision? Do we feel like we can make some money off it, because it is such a childhood classic? I don't know. Maybe I'll be some great alcoholic homeless character in the boondocks of Astoria, Oregon ... That would be fun.

Maybe a filmmaker wants to tip their hat to the slashers and psychos who thrilled and chilled them in their youth; perhaps they want to make a post-modern comment on the nature of watching violent entertainment; maybe they just want to scare us good and proper with a moment of sheer blood-curdling terror. Whatever the reason, there are some pretty good horror movies about watching horror movies; here are seven (admittedly skewed towards the modern and the domestic) for your perusal.

1) Scream (1996)

Kevin Williamson's sly, self-referential script exploded every slasher-flick cliché ... and picked some darkly glimmering moments out of the rubble. Starring Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a girl beset by a masked killer, Scream paved the way for a host of imitators, but the original is a surprisingly fresh and remarkably well-structured mystery -- plus, Williamson and director Wes Craven's commentary on the DVD is like a master-class on the history and methodology of slasher film. When the blood-stained climax sees our heroine suggesting our killers have "seen too many movies," the reply comes back fast: "Now Sid, don't you blame the movies. Movies don't create psychos; movies make psychos more creative!" It's a great line -- and you also wonder if it's true. Scream's killer famously asked "Do you like scary movies?" Scream itself asked why you like scary movies, and left you to puzzle over your answer. (Bonus question: How many times did Scream show up on a Cinematical Seven throughout the month of October?)

2) My Little Eye (2002)

Five contestants sign up for a reality-TV-style contest; they spend six months locked together in an isolated home. If you stick it out for the duration, everyone wins a cool million dollars; if one person leaves, though, everyone loses. Much of My Little Eye is shot with distorted web-cams and a you-are-there queasiness -- we're the audience for the "show," and we get to witness as things start to go very, very wrong. Eventually, the truth comes out -- and we feel ourselves becoming a very different kind of viewer, watching something very different than the 'contest' in the film's set-up, seeing the film's events through very different eyes. My Little Eye may not be perfect, but it has one grim, chilling moment that's among the scariest, creepiest scenes I've ever seen in a horror movie.

Any fan of modern crime fiction has got to be a little jazzed about this news: The long-in-development adaptation of Don Winslow's crime novel The Winter of Frankie Machine now has a star and a director -- and it's the same team who gave us the modern crime classic Heat. Variety reports that Paramount's production, which has been on their development slate since the studio bought the rights to Winslow's novel pre-publication back in 2005, is moving forward with Michael Mann on-board to direct the long-attached Robert De Niro in the lead role. Winslow may be the best crime writer you've never heard of; his California Fire and Life is certainly my pick for one of the best page-turning thrillers of the past 20 years, and his decades-spanning, border-crossing drug epic The Power of the Dog is a knockout as well. The Winter of Frankie Machine will be shooting from a script adaptation by Brian Kopplman and David Levien (Rounders, Oceans 13), following the reluctant re-criminalization of Frank Machianno -- veteran, small businessman, surfer and ex-killer -- as all his old allegiances and alliances draw very close around him.

In a lot of ways, Winslow's book is about how easily civilized, upstanding San Diegan Frank Machianno goes back to being Frankie Machine, descending Dante-style into Hell to try and get out; it's a juicy part for De Niro, one similar to some of his more iconic roles and yet very different; Winslow's book makes no bones about the age of its protagonist, and Frank's sense of honor will make for ripe stuff in the hands of the men who created the principled-yet-predatory jewel thief Neil McCauley in Heat. With Mann on board as the director, this film just moved up several notches on my radar; now, if we can just get Peter Berg to return to that film version of California Fire and Life he was supposedly attached to, it'd be a very good time to be a fan of California crime on the big screen. ...

As Helene McCready -- the mother of the missing child whose disappearance drives Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone -- Amy Ryan delivers one of the most praised supporting performances of the year (see either my review or Erik's for further discussion of the film). She's also in Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and even has a bit part in Dan in Real Life; it's a busy Fall for Ryan, and one some Oscar-watchers are thinking will pay off for her. Ryan spoke with Cinematical about the challenges of her part, working with Ben Affleck, her work in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and even her role on HBO's acclaimed The Wire. You can download the entire interview right here.

Is the rush inspired by a possible writer's strike putting big forthcoming franchise flicks like Star Trek and Justice League in peril? Are there too many movies for grown-ups in the theaters right now? Has Ben Affleck successfully switched careers? And what end-of-year films are two of Cinematical's critics most looking forward to? Joining James on The Rocchi Review this week to talk about those questions and much more is Cinematical's Editor-in-Chief Erik Davis. You can download the entire podcast right here -- and we hope you enjoy.

In Finishing the Game, director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) went back -- both in time and to his indie roots. Shot in 19 days with begged and borrowed equipment and props, Finishing the Game is a mock-documentary set in a never-was 1973 where, after the tragic early death of Bruce Lee, the producers behind Game of Death go on the hunt for a suitable replacement so they can wrap the film and make a few dollars. Finishing the Game doesn't just look at the representation of Asian Americans in film; it's also a sharp satire of the delusions and denials that come from both sides of the camera in movie making. Lin's no stranger to big-money Hollywood -- he recently signed on to direct a reunited Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in the fourth Fast and the Furious film -- but Finishing the Game is clearly a low-budget labor of love. Lin spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco about bad '70s kung-fu cinema, Vin Diesel's D&D game, how he said 'no' to big-studio backers to keep his vision for Finishing the Game, the pros and cons of studio movie making, why he's looking forward to the fourth Fast and the Furious and Asian representation in mass media from Bruce Lee to the here-and-now. You can download the entire interview right here.

If you were looking for a demonstration of how skillful execution can elevate a cliché pitch into a strong film, you couldn't do much better than Things We Lost in the Fire, Danish director Susanne Bier's American debut. Things We Lost in the Fire follows Audrey Burke (Halle Berry) a wife and mother whose world changes when her husband Brian (David Duchovny) is slain in a random moment of brutal violence. In her grief -- and desperate to maintain a sense of connection to her dead husband -- she reaches out to Brian's life-long fallen friend Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), a recovering heroin addict. She offers him a place to stay; the better question is, what does Jerry offer Audrey?

Bier's 2006 After the Wedding was an Oscar Nominee for Best Foreign Film; her 2004 release Brothers followed two siblings -- one as he adapted to life outside of prison and the other as he dealt with his military posting in Afghanistan. (A remake of Brothers, slated to star Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman, was recently announced.) Cinematical spoke with Biers in San Francisco about working with her acclaimed cast, adapting to working with American crews and studios, child actors, shooting people you like, and more as part of a roundtable interview; Cinematical's questions are indicated.

Cinematical: Watching Things We Lost in the Fire, I felt a strong sense of thematic parallelism with Brothers -- these two separate films, but at the same time they're about these families remaking themselves in the light of tragedy. Was that something that you consciously thought of when you read the script for Things We Lost in the Fire, something you wanted to explore again?

Susanne Bier: Actually, I read the script and I thought '"Ooh, there are some parallels to Bothers: Do I want to do that?" And then I kind of felt that ... firstly, in Brothers, I kind of felt the female part was slightly unexplored; I mean, she could have been the main character, but that was not the story in Brothers. And I all the time had the feeling that there was another kind of story to tell, about her. And suddenly, I had a script, where this story was told, and I felt it was really compelling. And secondly, I've never ever dealt with a drug addict (in film) and I don't have any personal experience with that, and I'm not an addictive personality; I don't really have a sense of it, But I was really fascinated by it. And part of moviemaking is also sort of stirring up your own curiosity; at least, it is for me. I have to be really curious about stuff, and really kind of fascinated by it. And I was really fascinated by the notion of these two highly unlikely people who were going to somewhat save each other; this very unconventional love story. So even if there were parallels, there were a lot more things that weren't the same, and that really drew me to (Things We Lost in the Fire).

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. ... He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it."

-- Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

The detective's job and nature haven't changed much since Raymond Chandler wrote those words in 1945; the streets, though, are another matter. Directed by Ben Affleck, Gone Baby Gone follows two detectives, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Genarro (Michelle Monaghan) as they go down the main streets and back alleys of shabby South Boston investigating the disappearance of little Amanda McCready (Madeline O'Brien). The girl's mother Helene (Amy Ryan) is a drunk, a druggie, a loser. In the early scenes where Helene stands in front of the media circus that's erupted around the case, Ryan brings a perverse, compelling mix of emotions to life in Helene's eyes, fear and confusion and a fierce, wretched kind of glee: She finally matters.

And normally, she doesn't, and she knows it. It's Helene's sister-in-law Beatrice (Amy Madigan) who actually hires Kenzie and Genarro -- Helene and her brother Lionel (Titus Welliver) both can't imagine anything above and beyond the efforts of the Boston PD. Kenzie and Genarro take the case, figuring they'll ask a few questions and earn a few bucks. The cops working the abduction (John Ashton and Ed Harris) are driven and competent and not overly fond of private investigators; their boss, Captain Doyle (Morgan Freeman) lost his own daughter to an abduction-murder years back, so he's driven, too. But everyone involved knows the math: The longer Amanda is lost, the more likely she'll be lost forever. And, through the days that turn to weeks, something happens: Kenzie can't stop looking.

Audrey (Halle Berry) has a pretty good life. Or, rather, she did. We only see how great it was in the rear-view mirror: A rich-but-real marriage to Brian (David Duchovny), two great kids (Micah Nicolas Berry and Harper Burke); a beautiful home. But Brian's dead – horribly, suddenly, because someone angry had a gun – and we see Audrey wandering through her crowded, empty beautiful home, absently comforting her children, preparing for the wake, trying to understand that Brian is gone. The past and present mingle for us, as they do for Audrey; we're pulled into the dislocated murmur and hum of her grief. But something snaps Audrey to attention: She didn't invite Jerry. Audrey doesn't really know Jerry (Benicio Del Toro); he's one of Brian's oldest friends, a lawyer who got addicted to heroin and pretty much fell out of the world. She doesn't really like Jerry, either; we witness past fights and skirmishes between her and Brian about her husband's bond with this lost man. And yet, it becomes very important that Jerry be invited to the funeral and the wake – in part because Audrey would rather think about anything other than what's actually happening, in part because she's trying to hold on to even the smallest fragments of the life that's been lost.

Things We Lost in the Fire could very easily have played at the shallow, simplistic level of a TV movie, or as a lightweight weeper destined to being watched only in rainy-Sunday re-runs on cable. But somewhere along the line, a few interesting choices were made, and Things We Lost in the Fire is all the better for them. Dreamworks chose Denmark's Susanne Bier (After the Wedding, Brothers) to direct Allan Loeb's screenplay; Del Toro and Berry were signed to star. And the end result of those decisions is up on the screen – and far better than it could have been. This is a film that, essentially, earns what it does, one that's not manipulative but rather simply effective, one that confounds or exceeds your expectations as often as it meets them. And, thanks to Del Toro, it's defined by a completely brilliant, wholly absorbing performance from one of our best actors, a piece of acting so good you can feel the entire movie reaching and working to try to come up to his level.

If you think about it, movies are kind of like ghosts; they can fade from our view, disappear from our sight, and yet still linger in the air like an unexpected chill or lurch from their graves clutching at our memories and minds. That's what happened with Carnival of Souls, a 1962 black-and-white horror film that was made by director "Herk" Harvey and a like-minded group of first-time, last-time film makers taking a break from their day jobs at Centron, a studio devoted to industrial films and educational shorts. Carnival of Souls played a few drive-ins at the time of its release, but truly found an audience as late-night re-run material, popping up in the wee small hours of the morning to haunt and tease viewers with its slow, dreamlike sense of isolation, knockout cinematography, eerie score and the ripe and vital power of the lead performance from Candace Hilligoss. David Lynch and George A. Romero both cite Carnival of Souls as an influence on their work, but Carnival of Souls isn't just influential; it's worth seeing on its own as a very different kind of horror film, one that works as a dream-like slow poison as opposed to the short sharp shocks of modern horror films.

Carnival of Souls begins like a '50s youth-gone-wild film, as a group of joy riders careen down a dusty road; when one of the cars goes off a bridge, though, the fun is over. Mary (Hilligoss) staggers from the river muck like Ophelia saved from drowning, dirty and dazed; we follow her as she goes back to her life, working as a church organist in a small Kansas town. She's taking a job in Salt Lake City, and drives there with a faintly desperate air of aspiration in her gaze; she seems desperate for a new start. But her journey's haunted and troubled; faces materialize in the darkness, and a bizarre pavilion manifests itself out of the flat heartland, calling to her. She takes a room in a boarding house, trying to settle in and fending off the attentions of her boozy, woozy neighbor. But Mary's every effort begins to unravel; she's still followed by specters, troubled when a simple shopping trip descends into a nightmare where no one can see her, drawn over and over to the striking and spooky 'fun fair' she drove past on her way to town. The ultimate revelation of Mary's fate isn't shocking ... but the way Carnival of Souls reaches that destination is full of bizarre visions and troubling sights.

Following up 1998's Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age falls on a double-edged sword; it's both overly familiar and bizarrely strange. The familiarity comes in how well, and how faithfully, Elizabeth: The Golden Age recreates the look and feel of its predecessor; the same glowing, bold use of color and light, the same mix of shouted imperatives and whispered conspiracies. The cinema in Elizabeth: The Golden Age is distinctive, but it's also not new; while Elizabeth struck audiences with a blast of pure excitement, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is going, less boldly, where another film has gone before. Cate Blanchett returns as Elizabeth I, 27 years after the events chronicled in Elizabeth have put her on England's throne. Geoffrey Rush is back as Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's most trusted and cunning advisor. In Elizabeth, the threat to Elizabeth's reign and life was from within, as a tangled web of claims and conspiracies threatened her life. In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, while the threat of internal sedition is still present, the greater threat comes from Spain's King Phillip (Jordi Mollà), determined to bring England back to the fold of the Catholic Church under the sword. Stirring material, drawn from history -- and material we can't help but feel like we've seen before.

The strangeness of Elizabeth: The Golden Age is harder to articulate, but I think I can best convey it by relating an offhand comment I heard at the Toronto Film Festival the day after the press screening of Elizabeth: The Golden Age. A fellow reviewer a few rows back was chatting with a friend about a sequence where Cate Blanchett's queen rallies her troops on the shores of England to be ready to repel an invading Spanish army. Elizabeth is on horseback, and attired in regal yet warlike fashion, the very image of a warrior-queen. The person I was eavesdropping on was making light of the scene: " ... and I kept thinking, 'If she's going out to lead troops against Spain, then why'd she spend so much time on her hair?'" She and her friend laughed, and I couldn't help but see the offhand joke as something deeper, a pure demonstration of how alien and bizarre the past can be to us: I think that if you were going out to convince hundreds of armed men to face death in opposition to overwhelming odds in the name of your right to rule, over your interpretation that it was God's will that you and not another should sit on the throne and wear the crown ... well, I think that you'd want to look as good as possible. Elizabeth's reign may have led to the world we live in, but the world she lived in was very different from ours, and the mind occasionally staggers trying to comprehend such strangeness.

With Transformers coming to DVD next week, I was thinking about science fiction -- how it plays on-screen, how it works as a genre and, most importantly, how a big-number budget doesn't mean a high-quality film. But there are plenty of movies to check out if you want a few examples of how a lack of funds doesn't automatically translate to a lack of ideas. For this list, I wanted to concentrate on a more modern set of films - no '50s Ed Wood-style cheapies, nothing deliberately camp (with one exception), nothing that was more concerned with set design and irony than story and ideas (The American Astronaut, Forbidden Zone) and nothing that played more as horror than science fiction. I wasn't able to track down budget numbers for one of the films (The Quiet Earth), but the rest add up to a fairly modest $3 million -- total; even if you assume that The Quiet Earth cost a million dollars, you're still looking at seven amazing films for a very reasonable $4 million. Or, more bluntly, less than Michael Bay spent on slow-mo spray-on-sweat shots of Megan Fox and a urinating robot gag. And, finally, I'm sure there are some great low-budget sci-films I've missed or overlooked or just not seen ... and I'd love to hear about your picks in the comments selection below.

The Quiet Earth (1985)

Striking, unsettling and beautiful, this New Zealand indie takes the basic plot of the '50s end-of-the-world film The World, the Flesh and the Devil and puts a glowing, gorgeous spin on it -- more contemplative than tense, more philosophical than plot-driven. A scientist (Bruno Lawrence) who's been working on an experimental energy source finds that he's ... the last man on Earth. And while he does find two other people wandering the desolate world, he's still forced to try and find himself. Lawrence is impressive -- essentially carrying the first third of the movie -- and Geoff Murphy's direction is full of haunting images and fascinating ideas. Most importantly, The Quiet Earth doesn't come wrapped up with a bow -- you have to actually think about it, and it invites contemplation as firmly as it resists easy conclusions.


Primer (2004)

Made for a reported $7,000, Primer is that rarest of all science fiction films -- a low-budget brain-bender that both demands and rewards repeat viewings. Friends and fellow engineers Shane Carruth (also director, writer, editor, composer, etc, etc. ...) and David Sullivan are working on their own business in their off-hours, and one of their experiments results in a weird statistical anomaly they can't explain -- and, the more they explore it, leads the two to develop a bizarre sort of time machine. The machine is dangerous, it's risky, it's barely understood ... and it works. And pretty soon, you're watching the film as the characters live it -- is what's happening really what's happening now, or is someone else messing with the time stream? And is one of our characters that 'someone else'? Primer takes a simple, tired cliché and extrapolates that idea to every logical illogical conclusion with riveting, dizzying effect.

He's the sultan of screams, the head honcho of horror, the duke of disgust -- whether you measure by the sheer metric tonnage of his output or the harder-to-quantify level of his influence, Stephen King bestrides modern American horror like a colossus. And with horror film interpretations like Carrie, The Shining, Christine and The Dead Zone, some of King's books also found a grasping, vulgar and vital second life thanks to the stewardship of some great horror directors. With Halloween upon us, though, I thought I'd take a look at some of the less noteworthy King adaptations -- and name the 7 worst page-to-screen projects taken from King's work. I set myself a few ground rules (only theatrical releases, nothing shot for TV, nothing that wasn't feature length) and dived in to the plethora of projects that have sprung from King's work to go looking for the trash, not the treasures. Some of these films are here because they deviate wildly from the source material; some are here because the source material wasn't that good to start with; all of them kinda tick me off in one way or another. Again, the list below is highly subjective -- because really, aren't they all?

1) Sleepwalkers (1992)

Do you recall this big-screen tale of feline shapeshifters and small-town terror? Probably not -- Sleepwalkers died at the box office, even with Ron Perlman and Madchen Amick in lead roles. Revolving around a mother-son duo of hungry shapeshifters who can only be sated by the flesh of a female virgin, Sleepwalkers was directed by Mick Garris -- who would go on to helm the small-screen adaptations of The Shining and The Stand. Based on an unpublished story by King, Sleepwalkers is so tedious that even the presence of scene-stealing creep-out queen Alice Krige (Habitat, Star Trek: First Contact) can't snap the movie out of its torpor.

2) Cujo (1983)

This is a specific case where, yes, the problem's not necessarily with the movie but rather with the source material, pitting a family against their beloved dog -- who's gone insane with rabies. King himself has admitted that Cujo was written in pretty much one beer-fueled sitting -- which he himself has almost no memory of. Dee Wallace Stone and Danny "Who's the Boss?" Pintauro play the mother-son combo facing the death-dog in the finale -- but, even beyond the low-wattage cast, as far as premises go, this "Old Yeller in hell" tale may be the thinnest one King ever committed to paper, and it shows on screen.