Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, "The Artist."

His wit is obviously still as sharp as the blades he wielded in the unlikely role of a scary mob boss in “Drive,” not dulled by this devastating disappointment.

But Brooks was not the only one unjustly snubbed in the 84th Oscar race. What of Tilda Swinton’s implosive portrait of a mother burdened with a profoundly bad boy in “We Need to Talk About Kevin”? Or Michael Shannon’s heart-shredding turn as a man imagining the approach of an apocalyptic storm that’s going to destroy everything he loves in the little-seen drama “Take Shelter”?

We might also question the exclusion of Shailene Woodley’s wise-beyond-her-years teen daughter in “The Descendants” and Michael Fassbender’s tortured sex addict in “Shame.”

We could go on, but there are some worthy contenders this year, so here’s how I’m calling the winners of Sunday night’s Hollywood showdown.

BEST PICTURE

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, "The Descendants."

“Drive” should be parked at the top of this category, but Nicolas Winding Refn’s noirish crime-thriller-with-a-soul was apparently dismissed by Academy voters as just another ultraviolent, car-crashing guy movie. Most members were feeling sentimental this year, so the nominated nine include the maudlin “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” the epic family fare of “War Horse,” and two sweet love letters to the movies themselves, “The Artist” and “Hugo,” which were bound to get love in return (10 noms for the former, 11 for the latter).

There are deserving films of emotional and topical weight, such as “The Help,” about black housemaids and the white women who employed them in the early ’60s South, and “The Descendants,” a comedy-drama about a Hawaiian land owner coping with family crisis. But the heartstring-plucking “The Artist” has the added novelty of being silent and in black-and-white, which seems to be capturing the affections of the Oscar gods.

Should win: “The Descendants.”

Will win: “The Artist.”

BEST ACTOR

¿Quien es Mas Macho? George Clooney o Brad Pitt? It might not make much difference, because while the two “Ocean’s 11” buddies are duking it out for the Best Actor trophy, Jean Dujardin just might silently steal away with the prize for the ability he displayed in “The Artist” to speak volumes with his soulful eyes and eloquent gestures, without uttering a sound. Gary Oldman’s perfectly-pitched stillness as a cunning but desperately lonely spymaster was gold-worthy in “Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy,” and Pitt hit a homer in the sports drama “Moneyball.” But Clooney has never locked into the humanity of a character with more depth and sensitivity than he displayed as a Hawaiian landowner with serious family issues in “The Descendants.”

Should and will win: George Clooney.

BEST ACTRESS

Glenn Close just wasn’t believable as a man in “Albert Nobbs,” but Rooney Mara was supremely convincing as a female street tough in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Meryl Streep

Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, "The Help."

 delivered a dead-on feature-length impression of Margaret “The Iron Lady” Thatcher and Michelle Williams did much the same portraying Marilyn Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” But “The Help” glowed with the gravity and grace of Viola Davis’ African-American housemaid suffering the humiliations inflicted by white Mississippi housewives in the early 1960s. She won a lot of hearts, including those of many Academy voters, no doubt.

Should and will win: Viola Davis.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Even more amazing than funnyman Albert Brooks’ against-type turn as a murderous menace in “Drive” is the fact that he’s not among these nominees. That’s a criminal oversight. The five contenders who did make the cut certainly gave noteworthy performances, particularly Kenneth Branagh playing his personal idol Laurence Olivier in “My Week with Marilyn,” and Jonah Hill as the nerdy baseball recruiting consultant in “Moneyball.” Nick Nolte always looks good playing his rough-edged, weather-

Christopher Plummer, "Beginners."

beaten self and Max von Sydow was yet another silent wonder as a mute in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” but with Brooks unjustly absent from the picture, Christopher Plummer is the outstanding competitor here, having already won several honors for his widower who comes out of the closet at age 75 in “Beginners.”

Should and will win: Christopher Plummer.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Academy voters gave a rare nod of respect to a comedic performance for Melissa McCarthy’s fat-joke-sensitive member of the wedding in “Bridesmaids,” Berenice Bejo managed to say it all with her bright eyes and dazzling smile in the silence of “The Artist” and Janet McTeer was the single saving grace of “Albert Nobbs.” Even more remarkable was seeing Jessica Chastain prove her versatility yet again in “The Help,” her fifth movie in a banner year that included memorable turns in “Take Shelter,” “The Debt,” “The Tree of Life” and “Coriolanus.” But Octavia Spencer has already proven to be an awards magnet for her angry African-American maid with a wicked sense of vengeance in “The Help,” and she’s about to add another trophy to her mantle.

Should win: Jessica Chastain.

Will win: Octavia Spencer.

BEST DIRECTOR

I’m going to go with the way things ought to be. The director of the year’s Best Picture should win for helming that picture. Of course it often doesn’t happen that way, which is one of

Michel Hazanavicius

the great mysteries about how the minds of Academy members work. But the new kid on the block, Michel Hazanavicius, has already taken top honors at the Directors Guild Awards, which bodes pretty well for a directing Oscar win for “The Artist,” his black-and-white valentine to America’s silent era, although “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s fanciful, family-oriented 3-D billet-doux to early French cinema, has the veteran craftsman running a very close second.

Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” was an imaginative but lightweight adult fairy tale, Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” was an artful meditation on existence and mortality that meandered between powerful and plodding. In “The Descendants,” Alexander Payne brought out the best in George Clooney while painting a painfully funny and moving portrait of a shattered family slowly beginning to pull itself together again. But Hazanavicius has it.

Should win: Alexander Payne.

Will win: Michel Hazanavicius.

Quick guesses in other categories:

Best original screenplay

Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris.”

Best adapted screenplay

Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Payne, “The Descendants.”

Best animated feature

“Rango”

Best documentary feature

“Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.”

Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese brought to “Taxi Driver” not only a shared passion for European neorealist film but also the knowledge of what it is to feel lonely. The experience of isolation is what they both had in common with the film’s central character Travis Bickle, played with such implosive power by Robert De Niro.

“We identified with him,” Scorsese said of his first collaboration with Schrader. “We knew how he felt.”

Schrader was raised in Michigan by strict Calvinist Christian parents, and didn’t see a movie until he was 18 and could manage to sneak away to theaters, where he eventually fell in love with film.

Scorsese was born in Queens to devoutly Catholic Italian-American parents who often took him to the movies because he was too stricken with asthma to live a normal childhood playing with other neighborhood kids. He fell for movies early in life.

All of this fascinating background comes from a rich package of bonus features included in the 35th anniversary Blu-ray edition of “Taxi Driver,” featuring a revelatory making-of documentary and engagingly forthright interviews with Schrader and Scorsese, who also collaborated on two other modern classics, “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Fortunately for both men, they found better ways to work through their alienation than Bickle does. Their unbalanced, insomniac Vietnam vet takes a job as a dusk-to-dawn cabbie on the sleaziest streets of New York, meets and is rejected by a beautiful-but-vapid campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), fails in an attempt to assassinate her candidate, meets and makes a connection with a young prostitute (an amazingly savvy 12-year-old Jodie Foster) and (spoiler alert!) at the peak of mental overload slaughters the little girl’s slavers in one of the most shockingly realistic, graphically bloody denouements ever seen in a mainstream non-genre film.

Schrader’s pitch-dark screenplay was rejected by many a timid studio until producers Michael and Julia Phillips (“The Sting,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) stepped in to champion its cause, finally securing a deal with Columbia Pictures.

Bernard Herrmann finished the masterfully haunting, atmospheric musical score on the day of his death, Christmas Eve 1975, less than two months before the film‘s release. In remastered 5.1 surround, it’s never sounded better.

Packaged in a hardback cover with postcard reproductions of the U.S. poster and scenes from the film, this one is a must for any film buff’s collection.

— Gene Triplett

BY DENNIS KING

Like lemmings, we movie critics line up every late December to release our lists of the year’s 10 best movies.

It’s a necessary chore, but try as we might to be independent minded there’s a numbing sameness to most critics’ lists. Dictating the year’s “best” films is so often a rote ritual, driven by urgencies of the upcoming awards season and marked by a certain inevitability as studios march out their prestige pictures and promotional blitzes to generate maximum holiday fanfare. Thus, most top 10 lists are necessarily top-heavy with these inescapable Oscar contenders.

The fated suspects show up on every list – “The Artist,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Descendents” and so on. And rightfully so. These are indeed among the year’s indisputable best. (* Below, see the 10 best voted by members of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. A worthy roster indeed.)

In a mild act of contrariness, we hereby issue our highly subjective list – not of “bests” but of spiffy double features comprised of some of the year’s coolest flicks. Not all of these movies will show up on others’ lists and they might not all figure into the manufactured hype of the pre-Oscar run-up. But they’re popcorn pairings we found to be neat and natural fits.

So, here are our top five double features for 2011:

“The Artist”/”Hugo” – A film buff’s dream double: French director Michel Hazanavicius’ silent valentine to silent cinema and Hollywood’s rocky transition to the era of “talkies,” and American master Martin Scorsese’s 3D epic of a mechanically gifted Parisian boy and his encounter with visionary French film pioneer Georges Melies. (Add in “My Week With Marilyn” and the knockout performance of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe and you have a cinephile’s eureka trifecta.)

“The Tree of Life”/”Melancholia”- Two brainy, abstract movies that address philosophically wonky, cosmic questions: Oklahoman Terrence Malick’s visual poem couches in its dead-on evocation of a 1950s boyhood in America’s heartland multiple big questions about creation, the afterlife and God; Danish trickster Lars von Trier’s dreamy duel examination of clinical depression and the end of the world is both beautiful and terrible to behold.

“War Horse”/”Buck” – Equine magnificence in all its earthy glory: Steven Spielberg’s painterly adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s classic young adult tale and the Tony-winning stage play is a gloriously old-fashioned horse opera; documentarian Cindy Meehl’s aw-shucks film portrait of original “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman is a life lesson in the intricate relationships between horses and people, one that brings out the best in both.

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”/”Project Nim” – Monkey business, low and high: The chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that populate director Rupert Wyatt’s surprisingly smart and emotionally resonant reboot of the fallow franchise based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 sci-fi novel are indeed a gnarly, frighteningly feral and hyper-realistic bunch; Oscar-winning documentary director James Marsh takes an unflinching and unsentimental look at Nim, the chimpanzee who was the focus of a landmark experiment aimed at showing that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. A sad, funny and unsettling biography of an animal we tried to make human.

“Moneyball”/”Seven Days in Utopia” – The Zen of baseball and golf: Director Bennett Miller’s portrait of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) shows that nerds, with the obsession over stats and box scores, can indeed win baseball games; director Matt Russell marshals the gnarled, wizened countenance of Robert Duvall to tell the spiritual tale of a troubled young pro golfer (Lucas Black) who recaptures his mojo by hanging out in the rustic, sagebrush environs of Utopia, Texas.

* Here’s the OFCC Top 10 films of 2011

1. “The Artist”
2. “Drive”
3. “The Descendants”
4. “Hugo”
5. “Shame”
6. “Moneyball”
7. “Midnight in Paris”
8. “Melancholia”
9. “The Tree of Life”
10.“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

For a writer with the self-described affliction of “writer’s blockade,” the acerbic and opinionated Fran Lebowitz still has much to say. But whether she’s occasionally scribbling her thoughts in classic humorous essays collected in two still-vital volumes – 1978’s “Metropolitan Life” and 1981’s “Social Studies” – or just frankly speaking her mind, Lebowitz is a classic New York writer of the old school.

Her prickly personal story, her revered place on Manhattan’s literary landscape (she was a pillar of Andy Warhol’s literati scene in the 1970s and ’80s) and a whole slew of her pithy observations on the general decline of arts and culture are on grand display in “Public Speaking,” director Martin Scorsese’s cozy, barstool documentary on Lebowitz and her bookish world.

A veteran of the days when writing really mattered and barroom conversation was a contact sport, Lebowitz grudgingly bears up to constant comparisons with such boulevard wits as Oscar Wilde, Oscar Levant and, of course, Dorothy Parker.
Although her decades-long inability to commit words to paper (except for a pair of children’s books in the ’90s and a rare occasional essay) is legend among New York writers, the 60-year-old Lebowitz is nonetheless a literary lioness whose roar is still heeded by the city’s intellectual elite.

Armed with razor-wire wit and an endless facility for cutting bons mots, Lebowitz for much of the film holds court from a plush red-leather banquette in the Waverly Inn, that most clubby Greenwich Village writers’ hangout.

While the subject matter is meandering and freewheeling, Scorsese is a wise enough craftsman to give Lebowitz full reign while still managing to corral her random observations into a meaningful cultural context.

With archival footage looping in such New York cultural icons as Truman Capote, Thelonious Monk, Jack Parr and Candy Darling, with conversational interludes featuring Lebowitz’s long-time friend, novelist Toni Morrison, and with clips of intellectual dust-ups among James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, it’s clear that Lebowitz casts a long shadow in Manhattan’s landscape of salons and saloons.

“Public Speaking” artfully showcases this writer’s writer who seldom writes. Fran Lebowitz is an entertaining and thought-provoking one-woman show, whether it’s on paper or in person, and her words still carry the weight of hard-won wisdom, a questing curiosity and the golden touch of the writer.

Extras on the DVD include seven deleted scenes totally 11 minutes and short promotional interviews with Scorsese and Lebowitz.

- Dennis King

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies”

In the talky convergence of film and fine art cultures that informs “Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies,” it seems the only question left unanswered is whether these two lofty figures of the Cubist movement preferred their popcorn with or without butter. This odd but intriguing 2008 documentary is due out on DVD Tuesday.

The brainchild of art dealer and occasional filmmaker Arne Glimcher, the film essentially asserts that, rather than remaining sequestered in their garrets creating landmark artwork, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and their cohorts in avant-garde Paris of the early 20th century were fully engaged with the “new technologies that promised the annihilation of time and space as it was known.”

Thus, the film argues in discursive and meandering ways, the early works of Thomas Edison, the Lumiere brothers and other techno wizards exerted a profound influence on modern abstract painting, especially on Cubism, conceived in 1907 by Picasso and Braque.

Glimcher exerts his considerable influence in the art world by rounding up an impressive array of talking-head luminaries – including artists Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl and performance artist Robert Whitman – to expound on the thesis. While their comments lavish over various arcane aesthetic concepts, there never seems to be a coherent purpose for their theorizing.

The appearance of Martin Scorsese as a sort of guru-narrator gives the film its best moments of clarity. And with the insertion of witty clips from early cinema – most notably the clever trick photography of Georges Melies and scenes of Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance – the documentary some credibility in its argument that evolving technology serves as an engine to drive artistic invention.

DVD extras include three short films – “Slippery Jim” (1910), “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) and “Frankenstein” (1910).

“Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies” is not rated and runs 62 minutes. It’s being released by New Video Group.

- Dennis King

Behind Phil Spector’s lush, multi-layered acoustic “Wall of Sound” – the richly engrossing recording style that defined an entire epoch of pop music – the visionary record producer was busily evolving into a world-class eccentric, a resentful egotist, a self-styled unappreciated genius and a convicted murderer.

Recent bizarre news images of Spector, with his fright-wig hairstyle and sallow eyes, belie the smart, whippet thin, mod hipster who scored his first pop hit (“To Know Him Is to Love Him”) at age 17 and went on to produce in his painstaking, inimitable style countless generation-defining recordings of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, ranging through “Be My Baby,” “He’s a Rebel,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Let It Be” and “Imagine.”

“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector” offers up a fascinating if erratic documentary portrait of this tortured genius at the nadir of his career and life, while he was first being tried for the shooting death of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson one hazy-boozy night at his Alhambra, Calif., mansion.

British director Vikram Jayanti constructs his film around a series of BBC interviews he conducted with the notoriously reclusive Spector in the midst of his first murder trial in 2007.

While Jayanti supports the interviews with rich archival footage of musicians reminiscing and performing Spector’s signature songs, with printed critical analyses from rock journalist Mick Brown and with spotty peeks at Spector’s murder trials (after an initial mistrial, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years to life), it’s the interview revelations from the eminently quotable Spector that provide the film’s most juicy bits of celebrity psychopathology and music history.

For instance:

Despite his wealth and myriad successes, Spector still deeply resents those who ostracized him as an oddball in high school. He also resents rock great Buddy Holly (“He got a postage stamp even though he was only in rock ’n’ roll for three years,” Spector sniffs.)

Spector views his own accomplishments, his “little symphonies for the kids,” as being on par with the works of Bach, Michelangelo, Leonard da Vinci and Galileo.

Spector claims credit for salvaging the careers of filmmaker Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro by not shutting down the release of “Mean Streets” for the unauthorized use of “Be My Baby,” and for massaging the Beatles’ chaotic studio tapes into the classic “Let It Be” album.

Spector views editing as a cheat, a lazy shortcut to great music. He scoffs at Brian Wilson’s celebrated “Good Vibrations” as a mere “edit record.”

Despite his obvious megalomania and paranoia, Spector proves to be hugely entertaining in conversation – although he clearly emerges here as a deeply troubled, profoundly delusional and creepily dangerous man.

Jayanti’s film works best when it’s letting Spector speak. It falls far short of providing any real insight into his guilt or innocence in Clarkson’s death. And its sketchy depictions of the murder trial are more maddening than enlightening.

Still, as a sort of rock-Shakespearean tragedy of hubris and human frailty, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector” is essential viewing for any baby boomer who ever rhapsodized over the radio romanticism of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” or puzzled over the queasy, misogynistic mysteries of “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).”

- Dennis King

“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector”

Not rated
1:42
3 stars
(Language)

Juliette Lewis

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Juliette Lewis has come by her Hollywood rock ‘n’ roll wild child image honestly, picking film roles and playing music that are dangerous and different.

Since stunning movie audiences when she was barely 18 as Danielle Bowden in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of “Cape Fear” (earning  a supporting Oscar nomination), the Los Angeles native has tackled some of the edgiest characters out there, including a serial slayer in Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” a psycho-killer’s girlfriend in Dominic Sena’s “Kalifornia,” a corrupt cop’s mistress in Peter Medak’s cult favorite “Romeo is Bleeding,” a worldly-wise young drifter in Lasse Hallstrom’s “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” a mentally challenged woman in Garry Marshall’s “The Other Sister,” and a nine-months-pregnant kidnap victim in Christopher McQuarrie’s “The Way of the Gun.”

In 2003, Lewis took a break from acting to satisfy her musical urges, which were just as exotic as her dramatic appetites, forming a band called Juliette and the Licks, shaking up a punk-pop concoction that was equal parts Iggy Pop, P.J. Harvey and ’90s alt-rock, and filling two full-length albums with it (“You’re Speaking My Language,” “Four On the Floor”) in 2005-06.

In 2009, she went solo, expanding the colors of her musical palette — with a touch here and there of the blues — on “Terra Incognita,” before turning back to acting in earnest.

And earnest she is in Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction,” the true story of working-class Massachusetts woman Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) who put herself through law school and spent 18 years proving her imprisoned brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) innocent of murder.

Lewis is already drawing critical raves for her brief but indelible performance as an unprincipled, low-living woman whose testimony puts Kenny in jail.

She kicked off our recent phone interview by complimenting my “nice accent,” of all things, making me self-conscious about my Okie drawl. So, I asked about our mutual Oklahoma City acquaintance, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips.

A: Well, you know, I met him a couple of times at his shows so I don’t know him past that, other than I’m a big fan of his, and he seems like a real good guy.

Q: The reason I asked is because you actually appear in the Flaming Lips documentary “The Fearless Freaks.”

A: I know, I remember that show. Me and my sister went there, and we had our own animal suits that we rented. We didn’t know that they gave you suits, so we came with our own. And I got to be an animal onstage.

Q: What kind of animal were you?

A: I think I was a mouse.

Q: When was that?

A: Oh, that was like six years ago. It was before I was touring with my own band.

Q: Bet that was fun. Well, let’s talk about “Conviction.” You were fantastic in this film. With the little time that you were in it, you made more of an impression on me than anyone else in the cast.

A: Oh wow, I appreciate that. Yeah it’s been really wild because I didn’t make movies for about five years because I was just making records and touring, and that became my main bread and butter. So I turned stuff down because I just wanted to give everything to my music. So it was only last year I started doing films again. So it’s been really exciting for me to just play all kinds of different roles.

No matter how big or small the part is … this is a perfect movie that gave me the opportunity to do something I’d never done in film before, which was to completely transform. I didn’t want you to see me anywhere, any of my mannerisms. And also I never played a part where in one scene I had to go through so many transitions or emotions, you know, like between feeling guilty and grief-stricken to vengeful and then being totally disconnected. And then at the end being manipulative.

So yeah, it was a really wild thing to be a part of.

Q: Did you pursue this role, or did they come to you with it?

A: Oh no, Tony (Goldwyn) just offered it to me, Tony the director. And I just make a decision based on “does this give me something new to do in film?” And I felt it did, but I’m also slowly finding my way back into movies again, and I feel like this is a new chapter in my career, or it’s the beginning of one, you know, in my 30s now. This is the most dramatic thing I’ve done in the last 10 years. I was out on “The Switch” earlier this year, which is a comedy, and I’ll be in “Due Date” which is another comedy in November.

Q: What kind of preparation or research process did you go through for this role in “Conviction”?

A: This movie was really interesting because there was a world of research. Because it’s a true story and this person is a real person. I never met her, but I had all the ingredients there, that she lied and she kept lying, and I knew she was an alcoholic. I studied with a dialect coach, a woman named Liz Himelstein, to get her accent together.

But with that said, every personality is different. And a lot of the essence of the part is something that I have to sort of channel and come up with.

So I added the ingredients like the facts of the case. Like the scenes I’m in, that’s all verbatim things she said in interviews.

So even the way she messes up phrases, that’s her actual language. But the way in which she conveys her feelings, that was left for my interpretation.

Q: There was one word in there that was really off-kilter, that caught everybody’s attention.

A: “Railroad?” That was in the script. And I thought it was a typo. And I told the writer, “Don’t you wanna fix this?” And she went, “Oh no, that’s what she said.” And she said “stature of limitations” (instead of) statute of limitations.

That was really fun, and then of course makeup and hair, that was a huge part. ‘Cause I wanted you to see the amount of damage that she’d been through over 18 years. When you see, you know, when you can see a person and you can go, “Wow, where have they been?” And I wanted you to feel that.

Q: I know you said the script was verbatim, but how much did you bring to this character beyond that?

A: Well, all of the behavior and where she gets emotional, where she gets angry, all of that is the way I interpret the dialogue. And then, of course, when I’m getting up to fill my drink, or if I’m being distracted, all those things are my physical language.

But as far as lines, I added a couple of lines but that’s pretty much as written. It’s just sort of the life I gave it is something else. You can’t really write a person’s interpretation of it.

Q: You mentioned “Due Date,” which stars Robert Downey Jr. Could you tell me a little bit about that film?

A: That’s a real cameo, and it’s one scene. (Director/co-writer) Todd Phillips, he just calls me up and says, “Hey, I got a part for you,” and then I come down. He’s proven himself as one of the best comedic directors out there right now, and this movie with Downey, and first of all, Zach Galifianakis is one of my favorite comedians. Downey, I played with, of course, in “Natural Born Killers.” It was a fun day at the office for me with those two.

Q: So are you doing anything at all musically, or putting it on hold for a while?

A: Yes. I just toured the states and Canada in a van, no less. And we were on a monthlong tour and we didn’t play Oklahoma, but I was out with The Pretenders last year and Cat Power was pretty incredible.

And so now I’m on my downtime. It’s the gestation period. I’m going to be writing more, and I’ll probably make another record next year. But now I’m finding the balance, because I was pretty much just making music and touring for five years, and I really feel like I found a strong, good solid audience that is gonna take the ride with me when I do it again.

Q: The music you’re making with The New Romantiques, how does that differ from the music you were making with The Licks?

A: Well, they’re not called The New Romantiques. I flirted with that name for a minute, and then it was out on the Internet, and blah, blah, blah. But “Terra Incognita” is a proper solo album in that it was written with a good friend of mine. I wrote half of it on piano and then (Omar Rodriquez-) Lopez of Mars Volta produced it and he also played instruments on it, and then I put a band together after the fact.

So, the way I approached songwriting was completely different, and I focused a lot more on melody and space and dimension in the music and the songs. Big old guitar riffs and rock drums. Because with The Licks it was proper, straight-up-and-down guitar rock, and on this new record I have a blues song called “Hard Lovin Woman,” I have this really what I hope to be or aspired to be a kind of Bowie-esque, softer song called “Suicide Dive Bombers,” and then your banging rock ‘n’ roll track, “Terra Incognita.” And so it goes all over the place, and I feel like it’s a real personal record. It’s just me and my different musical tastes.

I’m about to release a new video that’ll come out next month. But I always tell people to go on MySpace and all that jazz to hear the music.

Q: Is the next record going to be more of what we’re hearing on “Terra Incognita”?

A: No, it’s funny because I feel like every new thing musically is a reaction to the last. So my next record, I’ve already been writing the songs. It’s all really rhythmic. I’m an explorer, adding more electronic sounds to the drumbeats, and then it’s really hooky choruses. It’s just totally different. It’ll be a really fun record where “Terra Incognita” was more sort of my weird record, for lack of a better description.

It’s not gonna be too long. That’s the thing. I got into this game way too late and I have so much to say and do, so I’m not gonna wait a year.

Q: I look forward to hearing it. Well, I’ve already taken up my time allotted so I’ll turn you loose.

A: “Turn Me Loose,” that’s a Loverboy song. “Turn Me Loose.” OK, I’ll see you later. Bye.

Listed on wimgo Movies under Biography

Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of ’Shutter Island’ pays homage to Gothics

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Dennis Lehane has learned how to describe “Shutter Island” to a potential reader or viewer without giving away any of the dark plot twists or clues to the shocking surprise ending of his chilling Gothic thriller.

“I’ve had a lot of practice, so don’t worry about it,” the author said in a recent phone interview. “The first thing you would say is, ‘You’ll never see where it’s going.’ The word you hear most about this book is, ‘It’s a trip.’ I mean, it’s taking you on a pretty wild ride.”

Published in 2003, the Boston-born writer’s eighth novel, set in the year 1954, tells the story of two U.S. marshals investigating the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from a federal hospital for the criminally insane on one of the remotest of the Boston Harbor Islands.

The book became a movie in 2010 under the direction of Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as the investigators and Ben Kingsley as the institution’s inscrutable head psychiatrist. Now it’s out on DVD, and Lehane was doing a round of interviews in the hope of enticing a few more thriller lovers into taking a “trip” behind the walls of Ashecliffe Hospital, where nothing is remotely what it seems.

Rachel Solando, who murdered her children, is loose somewhere on the island, having inexplicably escaped a locked, guarded cell under constant surveillance. A killer hurricane is rolling down on the island as U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) search for the missing inmate, and Daniels is beginning to suspect the existence of radical experimentations and surgeries being performed on the patients.

Or is something wholly other going on?

Lehane is the author of two other novels turned into well respected films: “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” directed by Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, respectively.

Dennis Lehane

Unlike those stories, which took a lot of time to plan out, Lehane said the complete narrative of “Shutter Island” came to him in one night — in his sleep.

“Yeah, one night I had this bizarre, almost waking dream,” he said. “It’s hard to describe. I got up, scribbled everything down on a piece of paper, woke up the next morning, and there it was.”

He wishes every book could come to him so easily.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said. “That would be awesome actually.”

Lehane was on the set during the making of the film, and actor Ruffalo got to know him a bit.

“Yeah, I went out and had drinks with him,” Ruffalo recalled in a separate interview conducted Sunday in Beverly Hills. “I really liked him. He’s a great guy. A great writer, really down to earth. But, you know, using that book for the movie was fantastic for me because that did 90 percent of my work.”

And Ruffalo also praised Scorsese for skillfully translating Lehane’s complex and atmospheric novel to the screen.

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, from left, in "Shutter Island."

“Scorsese, he shows you movies to inspire you,” Ruffalo said. “So we were steeped in ‘Out of the Past’ and ‘Laura’ and all of these films that were from that noir sort of period, which is Gothic. And so, basically I was trying to really do as best an impersonation as I could of Robert Mitchum. And so I think that translates really well. It’s hard to do that, especially with a book with that many turns and twists in it. It’s really hard. And so hats off to Marty again for that.”

Lehane agreed that his vision had been accurately captured on film by the director, who, surprisingly, was working from a screen adaptation written by Laeta Kalogridis.

(Lehane said he never attempts to turn his books into screenplays because “it’s just like operating on your own child if you’re a doctor. I don’t see how anybody can do it.”)

“I loved it,” the writer said. “I mean (Scorsese) got it. He got what I was playing with and what I was trying for. And he did cinematically what I did in the language of the novel. The language of the novel is heightened in such a way that you should be aware very early that you’re reading a novel, that this is an homage to Gothics, that this is basically a book about being a book in a lot of ways.

“And he made a movie about being a movie. The movie is in your face as a movie right from the beginning. You should realize very quickly you’re not in the real world, you’re in Oz.”

The only thing more mind-numbing than watching 57 movies over 123 straight hours without sleep would be watching someone else watching 57 movies over 123 hours without sleep.

That was the assignment given to Vice magazine editor and bon vivant Gavin McInnes during a five-day marathon of movie watching in 2008 that is weirdly documented in the off-the-reservation DVD “A Million in the Morning.”

Sponsor Netflix hired McInnes to report on the proceedings and Jason Goldwatch to direct a film documenting the event, billed as the Netflix World Movie Watching Championships. Contestants were vying for $10,000 prize plus a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most consecutive hours watching movies. Participants were sequestered in a plexiglass booth in New York’s Times Square where judges and spectators could observe them watching a non-stop string of movies, old and new.

Initially, Netflix reportedly planned to use the finished film as a promotional infomercial and to offer it on its website. But something went horribly and hysterically awry during the five days of filming that caused the DVD rental giant to back out of the project, leaving McInnes and the production entity Decon holding hours and hours of raw footage, which they’ve cut into a renegade DVD that’s by turns hilarious, profane, nonsensical and utterly delirious.

Disavowed by Netflix, “A Million in the Morning” slyly capitalizes on all that did go awry during the making of the documentary – namely that McInnes, having vowed to stay awake during the entire marathon, found himself going stark raving loony from sleep deprivation. As the host grew increasingly disoriented, he began wandering off into the streets of Manhattan on wildly incongruous tangents (a babbling confrontation with fitness guru Richard Simmons, an impromptu encounter with Times Square fixture, the Naked Cowboy, and so on).

The film does cast a glancing look at the array of movie watchers competing for the prize – a competitive eating champion from New York, a Sri Lankan who holds several bizarre endurance records, an East Indian who had the then-standing movie-watching record, a Texan who appeared on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” But mostly it chronicles McInnes’ “spiral down a rabbit hole of sleepless dumbsnoozery.”

As he consumes increasing amounts of Red Bull, coffee and alcohol, McInnes ricochets between the competition (in which one contestant declares “West Side Story” “absolutely atrocious”) and his own babbling asides (including a crackbrained mathematical theory that leads him to conclude “that we don’t exist’).

It’s all very edgy and very funny, like a reality TV version of Martin Scorsese’s night-in-hell comedy “After Hours,” or a looser, more profane spin on Dave Attell’s “Insomniac.” It’s guerilla filmmaking at its zaniest.

By the way, the title derives from a particularly demented moment in the inkling of dawn when McInnes looks at his watch and declares the time “a million in the morning.”

“A Million in the Morning” retails for $12.98. You can purchase the DVD and watch clips on the film’s website www.amillioninthemorning.com.

- Dennis King

Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” is a film flogged by nasty weather and an oppressive atmosphere of moral isolation and sinister suggestion. Its gray rains and nagging winter winds carry with them a relentless chill of delicious paranoia that is sure to excite fans of twisty cinema thrillers.

Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor "The Ghost Writer."

While not in the same league with his seminal thrillers “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” Polanski’s first film in four years delivers some pleasantly tingling surprises, a masterly McGuffin worthy of Hitchcock and enough stellar performances to score as a solid commercial enterprise.

Seen side-by-side with the recent, belabored “Shutter Island,” another bleak thriller of moral isolation by another master, Martin Scorsese, the advantage definitely goes to Polanski.

“The Ghost Writer” stars Ewan McGregor as a cocky scribe of best-selling biographies — referred to throughout only as “the ghost” — who is persuaded by his agent to take a big paycheck for polishing up the final draft of a bland memoir by former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, debonair as usual).

Dispatched to a soulless glass-and-teakwood compound on a wintry island off America’s northeast coast, the ghost is met by Lang’s icy blond assistant Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall, sporting a crystalline British accent) and his tart, broody wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams, throwing off vague Lady Macbeth vibes), and is set to task.

It quickly becomes apparent that this is no simple writing job. First, the scrupulously guarded manuscript is dull and poorly written, and its author, Lang’s longtime political aide, has died under mysterious circumstances.

Second, Lang is a self-absorbed prig who is stingy with information and preoccupied by news that he’s about to be indicted by the World Court in the Hague for being party to war crimes in Iraq. (Any resemblance between Lang and real-life British Prime Minister Tony Blair is no mere coincidence since the story’s author, Robert Harris, was once a close Blair associate.)

As the ghost sets out to untangle Lang’s real story and find some semblance of truth, the narrative meanders off merrily into a maze of intrigue (break-ins, car chases, threatening bodyguards, stolen documents, hidden messages, turncoat political alliances, CIA skullduggery and the like).

And McGregor finds himself cast in the classic Hitchcock dilemma of an ordinary bloke in way over his head, caught up in a tangle of devious circumstances beyond his control or understanding. And, clearly, Polanski relishes this homage to Hitch by cranking up the ominous musical score of Alexandre Desplat, editing with nail-biting rhythms and maintaining an unsettling sense of dread.

He’s aided by a top-shelf cast that turns in crafty performances even in the briefest of roles. For instance, TV sitcom mainstay James Belushi is a hoot as a blustery American book publisher; Eli Wallach, at 94, is wonderfully crusty as a snoopy old beachcomber; and Tom Wilkinson is dangerously obtuse as a tweedy Harvard professor with a clandestine past.

With McGregor carrying the yeoman’s freight as the self-effacing, nameless protagonist, it’s left to Brosnan, Cattrall and Williams to provide vivid flourishes of character coloration to enliven the film’s relentless monotones. Each delivers delightfully, especially Williams, who lends Ruth various facets of calculation, aloofness, bitterness, seductiveness and vulnerability.

For his part, Polanski may have lost a step or two since his filmmaking peak, and certain moviegoers may be decidedly put off by his checkered personal life and long-running legal problems. But “The Ghost Writer” deftly adds another neat, noirish chapter to a film career marked by nimble storytelling, wrenching personal tragedy and dubious international playboy antics. As they say in the book business, it’s a good read.

— Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“The Ghost Writer”

PG-13
2:08
3 stars

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall.

(Language, brief nudity/sexuality, some violence, a drug reference)