At Poor Richard's

Stanley unleashed

Jan provides more background

Fifteen minutes in, this is my favorite episode of Heroes. I'm loving the exchanges between Parkman and Claire.

I have never thought Heroes to be on the level of Lost at its peak - even today, I still look forward to the latter much more - but i have to say that Heroes rarely disappoints, except for that Ali Larter tripe of a plotline.

Boy, does Eric Roberts look like hell, though.

Please join me in participating in the Screen Jam Oscar Pool.

Just to make things more interesting or different, I've decided to give some of the categories extra weight.

4 points: Picture

3 points: Lead and supporting actor and actress, director, adapted and original screenplay, animated feature, documentary feature, foreign language film

2 points: Art direction, cinematography, costume design, film editing, makeup, original score, original song, sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects

1 point: Documentary short, animated and live-action short film

Tiebreaker: Time of day that the telecast ends in Los Angeles.

I'll post my picks before the kudocast, as we say at Variety, begins. The only time I ever won an Oscar pool was shortly after my kids were born and I had seen next to none of the films, so I'm not counting on my recent viewing experience to help me.

Will there be a prize for the winner? If I can think of something appropriate ... otherwise, just enter for the fun of it.

At dinner the other day, I was telling a friend about a screening of a good movie I had just come from, called Amazing Grace. His response was, "If it's good, why is it coming out now?"

The question was completely valid. Oscar season focuses on movies that come out at the end of the year, and anything that comes out before early fall carries a potential stigma of not being among the best. That doesn't mean a good studio campaign can't make up the difference – see "Crash" or "Little Miss Sunshine" in recent history – but certainly many of us have been conditioned not to expect anything masterful in February.

While it probably won't contend for Best Picture honors, Amazing Grace is good, and its February 23 release has more to do with marking the 200th anniversary of a central plot point in its story, Britain's abolition of the slave trade, than any quality qualms. (Here's a Variety review that essentially dovetails with my feelings about the film.) That being said, it certainly would be nice if there could be more spreading of the film wealth throughout the year, rather than overwhelming us in the winter.

Fine performances are turned in by a cast including Ioan Gruffudd, Benedict Cumberbatch (what a great name), Michael Gambon and Albert Finney, who plays the repentant slave ship captain who penned the words of the renowned spiritual from which the movie takes its name.

Okay, first, the system:

It has never sat right with me when individuals say they are rating the "best" films. Film evaluation is inherently subjective, and what we're really doing when we call out the best movie is calling out our favorite movie.

So about a decade ago, I came up with a system to rate my favorite films, with the prime goal being to acknowledge that subjectivity. I rate the films in three categories, each of which I think are weighted appropriately:

The 11th headline down ... I wouldn't have gone that route.

For that matter, the placement under No. 10 is a little humiliating. And I'm just going to have to give No. 9 the benefit of the doubt.

" ...even when people watch recorded shows later, many are not fast-forwarding through the ads. On average, Nielsen found, DVR owners watch 40 percent of commercials that they could skip over — perhaps because they like ads, don't mind them or simply can't be bothered."

- New York Times

It does make sense to me that people will watch an ad right at the beginning or end of a series of commercials, because you can be captured at the moment you're starting or stopping your fast-forwarding. But I'm surprised many people would actively choose ad-viewing.

I know some people don't like it when Lost spends too much time off the island, but I groove on it.
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A stunning episode of Friday Night Lights tonight, literally putting me on the edge of the couch. Just some quick thoughts:
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From Rick Kissell of Variety:

Nielsen has taken its ratings game to college campuses for the first time, and the early results are good news for young-skewing programs.

It's not surprising that primetime shows with young auds like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Gilmore Girls" have seen their ratings spike up, but a few daytime soap operas have also been big beneficiaries. ...

* * *

Wednesday night TV chat welcome ...

I was and am a Weird Al Yankovic fan only in passing, but when people started talking about him in the comments of Dodger Thoughts, it make me smile and think about my two favorite songs of his: "King of Suede" (sung to "King of Pain") and "The Rye or the Kaiser" (sung to "Eye of the Tiger").
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As someone who has been rooting for Andy Millman and sympathetic to his plight, it was sad to learn Sunday night that he has gotten the fate he deserves.

I had started to come to believe that the Man was keeping Andy down. Turns out, the Man is Andy himself. After becoming willing to surrender himself to play the witless office manager of When the Whistle Blows, which at least was a pragmatic choice, he could not commit to playing a gay man in the play directed by the very literal Ian McKellen. Andy let peer pressure drive him out of character, certifying, at least at his point in his career, that he is not really an actor.

Emasculating him creatively, Extras has taken Andy to the depths in a sort of fascinating way. He can't just blame the BBC or his moronic agent – it's clearly on him and his lack of backbone. Sure, it'd be nice for Andy if he had just the slightest bit of competent support to rescue him, like Michael Scott does in The Office, but there's work to do on his own.

As sad as Andy's descent has been, I'm sorry that there is only one episode re-maining in the series this season. I am looking forward to seeing him get back on his feet a little bit, if that's allowed.

So, The Last King of Scotland won Best British Film at the British Academy Film Awards over The Queen, but The Queen won best film over The Last King of Scotland. Neat, huh?

Meanwhile, The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine took film honors at the Writers Guild Awards. On the TV end, The Sopranos and The Office were the big cheeses.

Coming out later this year, We Own the Night is the third film by my cousin, writer-director James Gray, following Little Odessa and The Yards to complete a New York-based trilogy of sorts. We Own the Night stars Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall and Eva Mendes.

James showed a not-quite-polished cut of the movie to friends and family this past week, and I have to say, I'm really excited for him. The film is taut, tense, intense. It might look like a simple genre film at first - one brother's a cop, the other operates on the fringe of the law - but it is sharply plotted with nuanced relationships among the characters and great performances, including some from unknowns.

And while this wasn't important to me personally, I think this is his most marketable film. Little Odessa, in particular, was a pretty straight tragedy - elegaic in many ways and heartbreaking - but even with Tim Roth in a strong lead performance, not as easy to promote. We Own the Night, I hope, will get more attention.

In a strange confluence of events, four articles I wrote or co-wrote for Variety were posted in the same afternoon:

Friday Night Lite at ABC

The network that once publicly thanked a higher power for Fridays almost seems to be dreading the end of the work week now.

Having joined other nets in retreating from firstrun scripted programming on Saturday nights like the Chicago Bears from a first down, ABC has gone a step further by abandoning first-run fiction during the bloc formerly known as TGIF.

In this sweeps month of February, the Alphabet web has filled its Friday schedule with a combination of "Grey's Anatomy" and "Brothers and Sisters" encores, newsmag "20/20" and never-say-die "America's Funniest Home Videos." ABC hasn't aired an original scripted program in Friday prime time since Nov. 10, when "Men in Trees" made its final foray before planting itself on Thursdays.

ABC now goes 70 hours without first-run scripted fare, from the end of "Trees" Thursday to the 9 p.m. start of "Desperate Housewives" on Sunday. ...

Several Oscar contenders cast their movies in far-flung places, a trend that might lead you to believe Hollywood has developed a go-to blueprint for such challenges.

No such luck. Mostly, casting the international movie remains a mad scramble.

"You just call everybody you know," says casting director Victoria Thomas of "Blood Diamond," nominated for five Academy Awards. "You just do whatever you need to do."

Complicating the process is the desire for local authenticity, which often means that the right person for the job is someone the director has never heard of, as was the case with Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima." ...

First-times mix it up with vets (Co-written with Alex Belth)

It's safe to say that Ben Sliney, national operations manager at the Federal Aviation Administration, did not seek out the role of Ben Sliney, national operations manager in "United 93."

Yoshi Ishii, a Japanese publisher and broadcaster in Los Angeles, had no aspiration to play a sympathetic military postman in "Letters From Iwo Jima."

Some long-suffering actors might wish it weren't so, but several Oscar-nominated films banked on non-pros who possessed qualities key to their stories. ...

Writers are known as wordsmiths, imagined as devourers of literature, but well into his adulthood, WGA Screen Laurel honoree Robert Benton was anything but.

"I grew up in a small town in Texas, and I was seriously dyslexic before anyone knew what dyslexia was, so it was very difficult for me to read," the 64-year-old Benton recalls. "I always thought of myself as seriously stupid, and most of the people in my town would have agreed with me.

"My father, unlike anybody else, when he would come home from work, instead of saying, 'Have you done your homework?' would say, 'Do you want to go to the movies?' So I would." ...

I get all these ideas of topics to write about and store them. And then a week goes by and I look back and say, "Wow, that's a lot of ideas that ... I didn't write about."

Anyway, while I fix the hitch in my get-along, enjoy tonight's viewing.

I've already enjoyed tonight's Lost, so for once I'm ahead of the curve. Feel free to chat about that or anything else ...

Here's Brian Lowry's preview at Variety. (By the way, in case you didn't know Variety has knocked down its pay wall.)

For those Zeljko Ivanek fans out there, when you watch Lost, tell me if he looks gaunt to you.

It was just one moment from an Academy Award-nominated performance, shot in a rather pedestrian living-room set, but it was a high-wire act for Jackie Earle Haley.

Small Spoilers Warning
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... chat time!