My pal Mark Feeney offers this appreciation of cinematographer Gordon Willis, who’s slated to receive a long overdue and vastly deserved lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this Saturday. Three years ago he interviewed Willis at his Falmouth home and, later, provided this, well, illuminating transcript.

The name “movies” is misleading. Before they are anything else, movies are appearance, not motion. That being the case, few people alive have so fundamentally affected the movies - have so influenced their appearance - as the cinematographer Gordon Willis. So fundamentally or so variously: The warm and sinister earth tones of the “Godfather” pictures could hardly be more different from the toxic fluorescent blues of “All the President’s Men” (1976) or the lustrous black and white of “Manhattan” (1979) And that’s not counting how Willis made the daunting technical gymnastics of “Zelig” (1983) seem as effortless as screwing in a lightbulb.

This Saturday Willis is to receive an honorary Oscar, as are John Calley (recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award), Roger Corman, and Lauren Bacall. It’s an especially impressive list. Calley is one of the most respected of Hollywood executives, a key figure during the ‘70s at Warners, later the head of both United Artists and Sony, and an independent producer whose films have run the gamut from “The Remains of the Day” to “The Da Vinci Code.” Corman, of course, is a unique figure in Hollywood history, for decades an impresario of subversive schlock who helped foster the careers of Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme, among others. ">Lauren Bacall you know about - you do know how to whistle, don’t you?

The reason the list is so impressive is, presumably, the same reason the awards are being given now instead of March 7, at the regular awards ceremony. The Academy is trying to sex up the broadcast (and increase television ratings) by doubling the number of best picture nominees to ten and off-loading the honorary awards. But even the Academy isn’t so stupid as to fail to realize that those are often have the worthiest, and most distinguished, recipients. So the last thing it wants is to make the honorary awards seem like a superannuated version of the technical awards (which got off-loaded some time ago).

So it’s a great list – but if you care about the movies, the greatest name on that list belongs to Willis. Bacall’s is the biggest, of course, and she’s great, too. But few people in the history of film in any field have had the kind of run Willis had between 1971, with Alan J. Pakula’s “Klute” (has New York City ever looked more matter of factly kinky?) and 1985, with Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” Willis earned his nickname, “the Prince of Darkness,” with the first two “Godfather” pictures. But he was no less good with radiance – “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” (1982), for Allen, or Pakula’s “Comes a Horseman” (1978), an otherwise forgettable movie whose glorious exteriors make one mourn the western Willis might have photographed for Sam Peckinpah, say.

Willis’s most celebrated shot is probably the long, long Library of Congress reverse shot in “All the President’s Men” (not his idea, and disapproved of its showiness). His most celebrated achievement, and rightly so, has to be the look of the “Godfather” movies: the alternation between shadow and light, the use of tableau-like long shots, etc. Conversely, the accomplishment he gets least credit for, and in some ways it’s his most impressive, is single-handedly making Woody Allen a visual director. Before “Annie Hall” (1977) the first movie Willis shot for Allen, none of his pictures had anything approaching a look. Contrast that with how distinctive, distinguished, and utterly different from each other are the visual presentations of “Annie Hall,” “Interiors” (1978), “Manhattan,” “Stardust Memories” (1980), “Sex Comedy,” “Zelig,” “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984), and “Purple Rose.”

And that leaves unmentioned Willis’s sumptuous, one-of-a-kind evocation of the Great Depression in “Pennies from Heaven” (1981), how in Pakula’s “The Parallax View” (1974) he codified a visual grammar for the paranoid thriller, or how John Houseman credited Willis’s visual scheme for helping “create” Houseman’s character in James Bridges’s “The Paper Chase” (1973). Houseman offered that tribute in the acceptance speech he gave when he won his best supporting actor Oscar. Now Willis will finally get to give one, too.

(Lenny Kravitz and Gabourey Sidibe in "Precious")

"Disney's A Christmas Carol" made $31 million over the weekend -- sounds like a success, yes? Hardly. When you consider that the Jim Carrey full-motion capture 3D extravaganza opened on 6,500 screens at over 3,600 theaters, that number looks a bit more temperate. "Elf" made the same amount when it opened in fewer theaters in early November 2003, and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" earned much more ($55 million) on the weekend of Nov. 17, 2000. (Keep in mind, too, that grosses for the new movie are further inflated by higher ticket prices for 3D and IMAX screenings.) On the plus side, "Christmas Carol" outperformed Robert Zemeckis' last holiday-themed full-motion widget, "The Polar Express," which opened to $23 million in November, 2004.

Still, what went "wrong"? It's possible that the 3D hand that gaveth all summer (with films like "Up" and "G-Force" benefiting from exposure in the format) can also taketh away. A huge 74% of the movie's grosses came from the 32% of theaters that were able to show it in 3D, meaning that audiences realized they had to see this with the funny glasses or not at all. Add to that a whoop-de-do marketing campaign (posters featuring a manic Carrey aboard a Victorian rocket) at serious odds with the film's more reverent tone, and possible word of mouth that this wasn't the kiddie thrill ride it was being sold as, and you have a Christmas cracker that didn't pop all that loud. "Polar Express" ultimately built to a very solid $162 final US gross, and it's possible that "Carol" may yet do so.

Other new releases fared passably but not spectacularly. "The Men Who Stare at Goats" made $13.3 million, about as good as could be expected for a George Clooney movie with a weird title. The aliens-are-among-us shenanigans of "The Fourth Kind" sucked in $12 million worth of credulous viewers and "The Box" -- a paranoid thriller from "Donnie Darko" director Richard Kelly that was gingerly mishandled by Warner Brothers (which sold it as a Cameron Diaz "Twilight Zone" episode and only screened it for critics at the last minute) -- made $8 million.

Michael Jackson in "This is It" held on strongly its second week -- dipping only 40 percent from opening weekend -- but "Paranormal Activity" seems done now that Halloween is over and with nearly $100 million in tickets sold overall has nothing to be ashamed of.

The story of the weekend in limited-release land was "Precious" (photo above), the tough inner-city inspirational drama that has been building steam ever since its debut at Sundance last January. Reviews were over the moon (mostly) when the film finally was released in New York, LA, and elsewhere last Friday, and the buzz was such that the talk was of little else at a dinner party I attended Saturday night in suburban Boston -- two weeks before the film opens here. (Usually, movies don't land on that radar until well after they've debuted locally.) "Precious" made $1.8 million at 18 screens, which is a $100,000 per-screen-average, the 12th highest on record. Yes, a big thumbs up from Oprah and Tyler Perry and a glowing feature article in the New York Times magazine certainly helped. Is this the year's Oscar winner? I think its too unpolished and melodramatic at points -- arguably one of the movie's strengths -- to take the big prize, but the real win for "Precious" is that millions of people are going to see it.

More numbers from Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady at Movie City News.

I've been meaning to blog a heads up about this since Friday but it's still not too late: IF you're a fan of the Fab Four AND you have serious Rock Band chops AND/OR you want to see the 1964 classic "A Hard Day's Night" -- rockfilm 101 -- for the first or twenty-first time, the Somerville Theatre is where you want to be today (Sunday) at 4, when the Independent Film Festival of Boston hosts "Meet the Beatles/Rock the World". The movie starts at 4 p.m. The Rock Band videogame competition starts at 6 p.m. Go: Live vicariously 60s-style then a la 2009. Just try not to get blisters on your fingers.

A couple of weeks ago, I complained that the Chris Rock, black hair documentary "Good Hair" was hard to find if you lived in Boston. Roadside Attractions, the movie's distributor, has informed me that it's exiled no more. It's now at the AMC Boston Common. I just cancelled my two-hour bus excursion to Randolph. Thank you, Roadside. Thank you, AMC.

(Meet your new Oscar hosts)

It sounds like a rat pack-era comedy duo, doesn't it? As if Dean Martin had jettisoned Jerry Lewis and picked up, um, author James Baldwin. Hopefully the Steve and Alec show will be funnier than that; it certainly won't be as risky. With last night's announcement that the white-haired comedian/banjoist (still beloved despite prostituting his immense talent in so many horrific recent films) and the smart, mercurial actor (newly beloved for his ongoing "30 Rock" brilliance) will share hosting duties for the 2010 Oscar ceremonies on Sunday March 7, Academy telecast producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman have gambled on... well, nothing, actually.

These two will be very funny, very professional, and very comforting. Given the other announced changes coming down the pike -- ten best picture nominees for the first time in 66 years, honorary awards shunted off to an earlier banquet -- it makes sense that we'd get a pair of known quantities to guide us through the earthshaking changes. With luck, we should expect an extra-special, star-studded edition of "Saturday Night Live," a show that Martin and Baldwin have hosted a total of 29 times combined. With even more luck, Baldwin will have an unscripted hissy-fit when Dakota Fanning cuts off his Teleprompter sight line.

One of the undying frustrations of this job involves hoping an audience will see a film I like only to discover that, contrary to the popular tagline, it's not playing near a theater anywhere near them. Such is the case with "Good Hair," the smart and very entertaining documentary in which Chris Rock pulls the curtain back on black hair-care culture. It opened in Boston last Friday and is virtually nowhere to be seen. As of today, it's playing only in Revere and Randolph, which is wonderful, but not at a single theater in Boston or Cambridge (it did spend a week at the lackluster Fresh Pond Cinema).

I'm not arguing that the movie would set the box office on fire (it's holding its own around the country), but it doesn't even appear to be given a chance to do so here. A lot of the audience for it - black folks and their many curious friends - lives in town and has real interest in seeing "Good Hair," at least judging from the confused emails in my inbox asking when it's opening. Should we cry documentarism? Until today, "Capitalism: A Love Story" still occupied a screen at the AMC Boston Common, and "This Is It," more of documentary than I, at least, was prepared for, occupies several, not to mention a few at the Regal Fenway.

I live in Boston. I don't drive. If I wanted to see "Good Hair," I'd have to borrow a car or beg someone to take me, which in several cases would involve soothing the culture shock of my designated driver. (But that's partly what the movie wants.) Public transportation turns out to be a less than realistic option. I think I broke the usually reliable MBTA Trip Planner, trying to find the optimal route from my house to Revere. "The following error occured with your choices," it told me. "Unable to return an itinerary. There is no service available at the date, time and/or location you requested or the system is being updated." Trip Planner's suggeted route to Randolph hilariously produced a two-hour journey (the movie is only 98 minutes!) that culminates with a 33-minute walk to the theater.

As it happens, Howard Cohen and Eric d'Arbeloff, the two men who run Roadside Attractions, the distributor of "Good Hair," are from the Boston area. And when I called, Cohen told me, sympathetically, that he tried to get the movie downtown but that AMC, which runs the 18-screen megaplex on the Boston Common, didn't have room. He says he's willing to take the chain at its word (which didn't stop my eyebrow from going up). But, Cohen says, the real crime here isn't so much that one exhibitor didn't play Rock's movie. It's that there aren't enough theaters for Rock's movie to play, a problem Ty Burr addressed in a story yesterday about the new Stuart Street artplex in the theater district. And Cohen is right. There's an exhibition crisis. And it tells several stories about Boston.

It's the one major city in America where "Good Hair" isn't playing near a black neighborhood - or at least a theater heavily frequented by black moviegoers. Of course, the backhanded beauty of this situation is that we all wind up watching movies at the Common by default, mixing, even by default, than we would at the MFA, ICA, or Fenway Park. Boston isn't Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. According the census bureau, it's about 25% black, but the truth is that Boston is a town defined, in part, by its surrounding suburbs, where there are a lot more theaters and smaller black communities. In the rest of the state, blacks account for about five percent of the population.

For what it's worth, this business with the Chris Rock movie is an exception. You can always find a Tyler Perry movie at the Common. And when "Precious" opens next month, it's likely to have long, healthy life somewhere in Boston. But "Good Hair" is also the exception that proves a rule. There's also a possibility that it could show up at the Landmark theater in Kendall Square in a week or two.

So somewhere around the sixth inning of Game 1 of the Turnpike Series, Warner Bros. decided to give America a look at Clint Eastwood's annual slab of Oscar chum. It's "Invictus," apparently the story of how Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon learned to give speeches with South African accents. Freeman is Nelson Mandela. Damon is in a tight shirt. And this movie is kidding, right?

Freeman turns to Damon's rugby star to win the country a World Cup. It's a true story, and the World Series is the place to promote it. But when Damon, locked in a scrum, his face squirted with blood, screams to his fellow players that "This" - sigh - "is our destiny," you have to wonder when post-apartheid South Africa turned into "Braveheart." He could be talking about the championship. He could be talking about the Academy Awards. Who knows: These rolling eyes of mine might be all wet come December. But that poster to the left, made by a fan, apparently, with the movie's original title, shows that no matter how unpromising things now look, they once were worse.

The announcement earlier this year that Michael Jackson would be doing 50 concerts in London was greeted with equal parts euphoria and cynicism. Was he doing it for us? Was he doing it for money? Then in June, less than a month before the start of the sold-out engagement, Jackson died of drug-related cardiac arrest, and the news that a film of the show’s rehearsal footage was on the way added another of layer ambivalence. Awesome. Creepy. But, for now, “This Is It” is the fierce last word on the matter. Jackson had no apparent plans to phone, fax, text, or IM it in.

The movie itself still arrives, screened for critics only hours before opening, with an eerie taint. It comes days before Halloween; its star, while far from death at the time, a diminished version of his electrifying self, his face a wan mask. Next weekend, that popular chiller about the couple in the haunted house won’t be the only paranormal activity at the box office. Yet, watching Jackson pop, lock, rock, writhe, thrust, and clutch his crotch, even at 50%, leaves a feeling of woe: This show really would have been major.

Over the summer, news outlets heavily ran some of the footage – or footage very much like it. The question is whether an hour-and-a-half of the same would be any fun, especially when so much of it is barely camera-phone quality. The opening minutes seem doubtful. Jackson chops, poses, and slides his way through “Wanna Be Starting Something.” He doesn’t commit to any sort of vocal styling. And you can see him thinking about how to work the song out.

Watching a great artist decide where to move doesn’t seem much more exciting than watching a waiter set a table: When’s dinner? That, of course, is the terrible punch line of this entire experience: This is it. So, instead, we devour even Jackson’s lassitude. It’s our last supper. (Besides, what waiter is going to serve you wearing a tuxedo jacket with one sequined lapel and two shoulders that look like something from a Tim Burton movie?)

Lest anyone get the morbid sense that the film is a necrophiliac’s delight (though, in part, it is), Jackson often feels vibrantly, reassuringly human. He sashays with one of his female dancers at one point. He puts the spotlight on his band and dancers, and his perfectionism never approaches divadom. When Jackson stands over the keyboard of the show’s musical director, trying to coax a single, right note out of him, and says, “I just want to hear it the way I wrote it,” what’s so funny is how little it is for him to ask. But also, it’s a side of Jackson we never got to see. His Peter Pan syndrome and his professionalism truly coexist. He wants the show to be flawless. He also wants every element of the experience to appear to emanate from his every gesticulation. He’s a life force. He’s the Wiz.

He’s also a man with too much integrity to let anyone else call the shots. Indeed, the director of both the concert and this movie, Kenny Ortega, seems more like a jolly personal assistant, repeatedly telling Jackson how much he loves him. It’s the sort of thing you expect to hear a fan seated way at back of the Kodak Theater blurt out as a star accepts an award. Jackson actually responds in kind: “I love you, too.” Ortega is a Hollywood veteran (he choreographed “Dirty Dancing” and directed the “High School Musical” franchise), and the movie is a dutiful tribute to its star. The crosscutting of different footage isn’t seamless but we get a decent sense of how most of the numbers would go. The crew filmed an inspired sequence in which Jackson inserts himself into classic Hollywood movies like “Gilda” and “The Big Sleep,” alongside Rita Hayworth and Humphrey Bogart. The sequence is for “Smooth Criminal", and it now posthumous logic. Of course a legend plays with legends.

Clearly, Jackson expected just enough of himself to aim for some highpoints, even in these run-throughs. He tells the dancers and crew begging him to let go and really sing that he’s saving his voice for the actual performances. But you get the sense that he had to test how hard he could push that complex instrument of his. So even as he demurs when the band breaks out the gospel tambourine at the end of a Jackson Five medley, he still puts his foot into some of the songs. His singing voice is rarely more beautifully acrobatic than on the movie’s version of “Human Nature.”

This all calls to mind the comeback concerts of Jackson’s friend Liza Minnelli, who hit Broadway last year at less than her best but was determined to bring the house down every night. There was no reason to think that Jackson wouldn’t have accomplished the same thing. Even if he didn’t manage to blow the crowds away 50 times, he would have risked it all trying.

It's official: "Paranormal Activity" is a phenomenon. In its fifth week in release, the plucky little $15,000 horror movie (just look at those production values!) finally went seriously wide -- onto 2,500 screens in 1,985 theaters, up from 760 the week before -- and held its water. The weekend's $22 million take took the total gross for "Paranormal" to $62 million and the $11,000 per-theater-average means there's still a lot of want-to-see for this movie.

Much more to the point, "Paranormal Activity" rolled right over "Saw VI," which took in a measly $14 million in its debut weekend. Rarely do you get two variations on the same genre going head to head with so clear a winner: the unnerving single-camera suspense of "Paranormal," a movie that can scare you silly while basically showing you nothing, versus the cynically explicit gross-outs of the bottomed-out "Saw" franchise. Time to hang it up, Jigsaw -- we can frighten ourselves just fine.

"Where the Wild Things Are" took a sizable 56% drop in its second weekend, which makes sense, really: It's a market correction that filters out the family audience with younger kids that went last weekend and got burned by the film's dark whimsies.

"Astro Boy" ($7 million) and "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" ($6.3 million) were toast, but the weekend's biggest loser may have been the aviation biopic "Amelia," which taxied into 800 theaters and made -- ouch -- $4 million, with a $5,000 per-theater-average that was about the same as "Saw VI." Not quite the reception star Hilary Swank is used to; the crippling reviews didn't help. By the way, which two movies had a higher PTA than "Paranormal Activity"? "An Education," Lone Scherfig's witty coming-of-age tale, is averaging $13,000 at each of its 31 theaters, and -- from the sublime to the ridiculous -- Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" is raking in an average $12,000 at each of its six venues. Which proves there's a larger audience for genital mutilation than previously thought. Don't tell the "Saw" producers.

More box office numbers from Box Office Mojo and Movie City News' Leonard Klady.

Chris Rock in "Good Hair," opening today

Two local doings this weekend --

The Boston Bike Film Festival comes to the Brattle today and tomorrow. If you push a bipedal piece of metal around the city on a regular basis and/or want to make Boston better for bikes, it's worth checking out this high-spirited collection of shorts, videos, films about the bicycle lanes on Comm. Ave (now they're talking my language) and even an auction. Here's the schedule -- Mayor Menino, I expect to see you there, with helmet.

On Saturday over at the West Newton Cinema in, um, West Newton, the director of the excellent inner-city-school documentary "Heart of Stone," Beth Toni Kruvant will host a Q&A after the 3:45 and 6:15 shows. The film's also playing at the MFA.

Among the major new releases, "Amelia" is a big, glossy, half-empty bio of Amelia Earhart starring Hilary Swank. "Astro Boy" is a slick, half-full CGI attempt to rescuscitate the beloved manga/anime figure. "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" is an interesting male "Twilight" variation sunk by a boring male ingenue and a fun but not particularly scary John C. Reilly. That leaves the genital-mutilation hijinks of "Antichrist," Lars von Trier's latest blow against the empire -- remarkable moviemaking, deeply screwed-up gender politics, laughable pretensions even when they work. Oh, that Lars. "Motherhood," the Uma Thurman comedy, is a dud says Wesley, but the secret sleeper of this weekend may be Chris Rock's "Good Hair," about the triangular relationship between black men, black women, and black women's hair.

All right, I'm impressed. I know, the book is encoded in everyone's DNA at age 3 and Warner Brothers has been giving it the full market push and the upscale/boho/intelligentsia mediaverse has been going nuts for months now (I mean, the New Yorker? Really?). But personally I wasn't sure if Spike Jonze's marvelous, haunting, melancholy film version of "Where the Wild Things Are" would translate to middle America. It's an art film about childhood that plays best to audiences willing to plumb their own deep emotions on the subject, not little kids and parents who just want more shiny things thrown at their heads.

So it's nice to report that in very busy week at the box office -- 40 percent up from last weekend and thank the weather gods for that -- "Wild Things" landed atop the pigpile with $32.5 million at 5,000 theaters. The data broke down in interesting ways: Unlike a lot of family films, this one skewed older, with 43% of the audience 18 and older and only 27% made up of parents with children under 12. That means the word was out that this was not "Shrek 4" but something darker, richer, and maybe not for the tater-tots (unless your five-year-old is a fan of "Being John Malkovich"). Still, we'll see next week whether the opening for "Wild Things" was the real thing, when word-of-mouth factors more heavily than marketing. (You can get a fascinating preview by reading the user comments over at IMDb.com: totally polarized, with the 10-star raves for now outnumbering the angry one-star tantrums. Let the wild rumpus start!)

Thriller "Law Abiding Citizen" cruised past lousy reviews to an unexpectedly beefy $21.3 million and second place on the strength of stars Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler; it'll probably fall off sharply next weekend on its way to On Demand and a long afterlife as Blockbuster New Release shelf filler. Both "Wild Things" and "Citizen" had strong per-theater-averages ($8,693 and $7,353 respectively) but the third-place contender, "Paranormal Activity," a.k.a. the little horror movie that could, was the weekend's PTA champ, expanding from 160 theaters to 700 and scoring a $26,500 average take per theater. The movie's $20 million gross for the weekend brings its total up to $33 million, or three hundred times its $11,000 budget. How about that? A DIY movie that actually pays back its investors.

The only other major release, chiller remake "The Stepfather," made a pretty good $12.5 million all things considered, and has already has been entirely forgotten by everyone who saw it.

More box office numbers at Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady of Movie City News.

Without entering too far in the fray over what anyone was thinking regarding that flying-saucer balloon and the boy who was, then wasn't (ever), in its basket, a few things struck me. I watched it all unfold on one of the monitors at my gym. As has been noted by all the coverage of the coverage, every news outlet had something, even MSNBC's "The Ed Show," whose host interrupted his rant on President Obama's not doing enough to get health care passed to talk to a woman who knew the boy from their time together on TV's "Wife Swap" (although that interview might have been Wolf Blitzer''s). In any case, we feel due for a Baby Jessica incident. We got, instead, farce worthy of Alexander Payne.

The looping footage of the runaway balloon (it looked something from a 1950s science-fiction film) tapped into our obsession with a particular method of flight. (I'm just ruminating I guess, since really what everybody wanted to know was where the boy actaully was). But visually, the images of the incident reminded me of, among other things, the opening sequence from “Everlasting Love,” with Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans, which begins with a hot-air balloon accident that winds up have nothing specifically to do with the same-sex stalker movie that follows. “Up,” too, sprang to mind, with its motley million of balloons carrying aloft a geezer and a scout. The movie, of course, has a happy ending (anticlimactically enough, so did yesterday’s incident). The scout in “Up” finds himself airborne by happenstance. But he takes to the adventure nonetheless. You sense that this is fantasy the little boy wanted to experience for himself: a trip in a balloon that might have taken him to a distant land of talking dogs and mothering birds. His name, of all things, is Falcon. But that Falcon turned out not to be in the basket but hiding, (allegedly) in the Heene family nest suggests a kind of fear of punishment for flight that is the antithesis of what movies about boys and balloons are about. What is the opposite of the Icarus myth?

The balloon lends itself to cinema. The Heene’s actually lent itself to an abduction show on the Fear Network (we do now have a Fear Network, don’t we?) That seems apt, as well. The national fear was that Falcon, in a sense, was being abducted. But there is also a degree of foolishness about the balloon. It can just seem reckless. Beautiful, too. Its contents are also an apt metaphor for what all the coverage produced: helium and hot air.

Behold the coming attraction preview for "Edge of Darkness," a wronged-daddy action movie slated for release next January (in the same slot where this year's "Taken" did dandy business). A few things to note: Mel Gibson's back in righteous kickass mode! He's even adding new shades of crazy to his portrayals -- step away from the shaving cream, Mel. It's been a while since Gibson dealt out a whole lot of hurt onscreen rather than inflicting it on moviegoers. Remember "Payback"? I do.

Second, there's a local hook, since the script's co-written by hometown boy William Monahan ("The Departed") and since director Martin Campbell shot all over the Bay State in August of 2008. (Not that shooting here necessarily results in a good movie. In fact, I wonder if it ever does. Really. I mean it.) It does indicate -- and this is amply evident in the trailer -- that there will be more bad Bahstan accents onscreen this January than you can shake an overpriced Fenway frank at.

The film's adapted from a well-regarded 1985 BBC miniseries, and the remake gets points for casting Ray Winstone and Danny Huston. It also gets those points removed again for casting them as, respectively, a menacing hit-man figure and an evil corporate smoothie. I'm looking forward to "Edge" -- in a guilty-pleasure way, mostly -- but I wish casting directors would start thinking outside the box.

("Two for the Road," at the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday with director Stanley Donen)

Is "A Serious Man" bad for the Jews? A sharp, sharp post by my colleague Michael Paulson parses whether Joel and Ethan Coen are or are not of the self-loathing tribe. (I'd say no but, as always, it's complicated.)

Is "A Serious Man" bad for you, the moviegoer? Depends on how strong your constitution is, and how perverse your sense of humor. I know people who hate this film (that includes Wesley, and Ella Taylor at the Village Voice ripped it a new one). I've also talked to people who just find it depressing as hell. Conversely, I know people (myself included) for whom "Man" is a profoundly satisfying Kafkaesque comedy that asks the big questions and leaves you pondering the answers. And, yes, the Coens like people; they just don't ennoble them. Theirs is that rare thing, a cinema entirely without romance. Hard to take sometimes but also necessary sometimes, and a perfectly valid artistic stance.

"Couple's Retreat" is the opposite of "A Serious Man" in so many ways I don't even know where to begin. It's also just plain bad. But put it in the time capsule as an example of unexamined middle-class attitudes regarding relationships and consumerism. Again I ask: Why isn't Tim Allen in this movie?

Stanley Donen comes to the Harvard Film Archive this week. Yes, the guy who directed "Singin' in the Rain," so go already. Mark Feeney talked to the legendary director for last Sunday's paper and the Globe movie blog recently served some outtakes from the conversation. Donen will be present at the screenings of tonight's (10/9) "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" and tomorrow's (10/10) "Two for the Road," the latter a lovely and little-seen swinging-60s classic about the travails of a married couple played by Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney (in photo above). As the used to say in the New York Times TV listings: Pounce.

Last month our Globe colleague Mark Feeney spent an hour with Stanley
Donen at his office on Central Park West. The director is the subject of a
retrospective, “Debonair: The Films of Stanley Donen,” running at the
Harvard Film Archive through the end of the month. He’ll be at the HFA to
present “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954) on Friday and “Two for the
Road” (1967) on Saturday. Each night’s screening starts at 7. Tickets are
$12.

Donen’s best known for his musicals: “Seven Brides,” “Royal Wedding”
(1951), and “Funny Face” (1957), all of which he directed on his own, and
“On the Town” (1949), “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), and “It’s Always Fair
Weather” (1955), all of which he co-directed with Gene Kelly. Feeney’s
profile of Donen ran last Sunday. In an outtake that didn’t make it into
the paper, the director responded to a question about whether the musical
as a genre will ever come back.

“It’s never gone. There have been good ones, [although] not nearly as
many [as there used to be]. It’s an economic situation. The reason they
went away, in my opinion – which I maintain is better than anybody else’s –
is that when talkies hit, musicals hit. So this is a brief lesson. When
talkies hit, the owners of the studios thought, ‘Oh, talk? Oh, sound? Then
we’ll give them music because that’s the best sound we can give them.’ And
that was the beginning of musical films: ‘The Jazz Singer,’ “Broadway
Melody.’

“This went along, roughly, until 1950, when the filmmakers realized
that dubbing the musicals for foreign distribution _ unlike the action
pictures, the shoot-em-ups, which translated easier _ musical pictures were
a nightmare. So the people who were making musicals started cutting back on
the money for musicals, and that’s how there got to be fewer. They have
never disappeared, but that’s the main reason [for the shrinkage]. You
can’t dub Barbra Streisand with another voice singing in Spanish.”

Donen said he intended to check out “Nine,” which opens next month,
though the main attraction was personal rather than professional. “Didn’t
Rob Marshall direct it? Yes, I’ll see it. I’m sort of a friend of Maury
Yeston,” the composer.

The current movie Donen expressed the strongest interest in seeing
was “The Informant!” “I like Steven Soderbergh and his work a lot,” Donen
said, “and I’m very interested in what he's done shooting with that RED
camera technology.” The other working filmmaker Donen made a point of
praising was Mike Nichols, but that, too, may be as much personal as
professional. Donen's companion is Elaine May. She and Nichols first became
famous as the comedy team Nichols and May.

On the subject of “Nine,” IMDb lists it as having no fewer than 15
producers. (Yeston’s the last one, alphabetically.) Can that be some kind
of record?

Who's the most bankable actress in Hollywood? Not the flashiest, sexiest, most talented, or biggest-grossing, but the star who offers the best return on investment? Forbes says it's Naomi Watts. A new list at Forbes.com ranks the ten "best actresses for the buck" and puts the star of "The International" at the top. This smells a little off when you look over Watts' recent resume -- "International," "Funny Games," "Eastern Promises," and "The Painted Veil" are all worthy movies to one degree or another, but none of them burned up the box office. The trick to getting on this list, I guess, is to keep your asking price low (below $5 million per film for Watts, as opposed to a Nicole Kidman/Angelina Jolie-sized paycheck) and have a popular smash or two. In Watts' case, that would be "King Kong" and the two "Ring" horror movies.The Forbes team concluded that her last three movies earned $44 for every dollar she was paid.

In second place on the list is Jennifer Connelly, mostly on the strength of the box-office success of "He's Just Not That Into You," a film in which she's just part of a larger ensemble. That goes to the heart of the silliness of such lists: Does anyone really think "King Kong" made $500 worldwide because of Watts? Nuh-uh: The star of that movie was Peter Jackson. The stars of "He's Just Not That Into You" were the book it was based on, the genre (date-night ensemble comedy romance), and the collective weight of a cast that included topliners Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston.

Forbes.com is on firmer ground with the third name on the list: Rachel McAdams. There's a genuine rising star for you, an actress who's still being paid comparatively less than her older peers but has a devoted following among teenage girls and their big sisters thanks to "The Notebook," "Wedding Crashers," "Red Eye," and now "The Time Traveler's Wife." The same rule applies to #9, Anne Hathaway -- a large and selective audience does, in fact, turn out for a movie because her name's on the marquee. You could even say the same about #5, Meryl Streep: Audiences came to "Mamma Mia" for ABBA but stayed for La Streep, and "Julie & Julia" would be French toast if she weren't in it. But #4, Natalie Portman? Without George Lucas she wouldn't be on this list. Hilary Swank (#10) is here because she's extremely picky, appearing in very few films and high-profile award winners at that. Cate Blanchett (#8) is a gifted workaholic who made two films in 2008: one happened to star Brad Pitt as an old man aging in reverse and the other featured a guy named Indiana Jones. No disrespect to one of my favorite actresses, but Blanchett didn't sell these movies.

That leaves #6, Jennifer Aniston -- actually a very good example of a solid mid-range star with a solid Middle American following whose movies bring in solid, above-average returns. She's more of a audience draw for "He's Just Not That Into You" than Connelly, "Marley and Me" made a mint, and even "The Break-Up" was a box-office success. If actresses were stocks -- which is what this list is all about, really -- Aniston would be a utility.

Since she now no longer needs the movies or, perhaps, since the movies no longer need her, Lindsay Lohan has turned to fashion. That was her guest-judging last month for a round on "Project Runway." (Ra'mon, my friend, I knew you were doomed when, upon seeing La Lohan, you doubled over in star-shock.) In any case, she seemed lucid enough. In welcoming her to the show, Heidi Klum mentioned that Lohan was designing a line, but I didn't give it a second thought since, like everyone else, I'm due to unveil a collection next month.

If that were true (sorry, put down your credit cards), I'd like to think I'd avoid the horrified reaction to the collection Lohan showed at Paris Fashion Week on Sunday. She designed the collection with the talented Spanish designer Estrella Archs for Ungaro, the venerable brand where mysteriously Lohan has been installed as artistic adviser. I don't know all the details (although, really, what more is there to know?). Either way, this strikes me as desperately unsound, like relying on the least drunk person at the party to be the designated driver. The collection Lohan and Archs (pictured above, looking understandably glum) have designed would certainly not have survived the anorexic-junkie-starlet challenge on "Runway." (Though come judgment hour, I can imagine the Spaniard throwing Freckles under the bus.)

The intrepid Eric Wilson was behind the scenes on the eve of the Paris show. And the LA Times's Envelope blog contributes its two cents along with a photo of Lohan that suggests that she's doing everything in her power to add 30 years to her young life. It's as if she's currently in the process of becoming Donatella Versace. Let's pray it's for a movie.

"Singin' In the Rain" and "On the Town" at the Harvard Film Archive tonight. C'mon, why would you want to be anywhere else? (A week from Sunday, on the 11th, the HFA shows as part of its Stanley Donen festival my single favorite MGM musical, the cynical but insanely creative "It's Always Fair Weather." This one's got it all: Cyd Charisse dancing in a boxing ring, three guys soft-shoeing with garbage can lids on their feet, and Gene Kelly tap-dancing on roller skates -- see above, and pardon the French.)

Most adorable new movie of the week, no matter how many critics grinch it? "Whip It," exactly what you'd expect a Drew Barrymore movie to look and sound like.

Biggest disappointment? "The Invention of Lying," which is sadly not the Ricky Gervais breakthrough we all were hoping for.

Best new movie you can't bring your kids to? "Zombieland," a gutbuster in every sense of the word. Simple, bloody, and bloody funny, the movie tosses in an Extra Double Secret Star cameo that kicks it up to another level, albeit briefly.

Best new movie you can't take a Republican to? "Capitalism: A Love Story," in which Michael Moore hits enough targets to get most of us good and outraged while delivering his most generic movie yet.

Best chick flick for men: "The Boys Are Back". Best performance by an aggravating environmental naif: Colin Beavan in "No Impact Man." Clearest sign that 3D is completely borging the family-film genre: "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2" are rereleased in bulge-o-rama.

Also: At midnight tonight (Friday) the Coolidge brings on "Halloween" -- the 1978 John Carpenter original, not the Rob Zombie remake. Accept no substitutes. (Michael Myers wouldn't.) If you can't wait until midnight, the Brattle kicks off an excellent retrospective of Edgar Allen Poe-derived movies starting with the 1964 Roger Corman "Masque of the Red Death". A great Vincent Price performance and cinematography by Nicholas Roeg help you overlook the wee fact that the movie doesn't make a lick of sense.

As smart as Daniel Craig is as James Bond and as tolerable as Hugh Jackman's Wolverine has become, the knowledge that these two have teamed up to play human beings on Broadway is depressing. They're playing action figures at the megaplex. To be fair, in their respective franchises they both work very hard on their bodies (and I suppose their souls). But I wonder why this sort of stunt doesn't get pulled more at the movies. It'd be nice to see either man in a film that doesn't require an entire small country's worth of people to do special effects.

The play is called "A Steady Rain," which sounds naughtier than it probably is, and Craig and Jackman play a couple of Chicago cops. The reviews have been kinder to them than to the show. But these are two good actors who I think many people want to see star in something that can't be turned into a video game -- at least not easily.

Yes, the 32-year-long European episode of "The Fugitive" ended over the weekend with the great and greatly elusive Roman Polanski arrested in Zurich for a long-standing statutory rape charge in the United States. He was in Switzerland accepting a special honor from the Zurich Film Festival. The arrest caught Polanski by surprise. It also creates suspense. Will Polanski be extradited to the U.S. for sentencing? Will the French government, intervening on the director's behalf (he's a French citizen now), be able, as Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner put it, to help "this affair rapidly find a favorable resolution"? Will the Zurich Film Festival go on?

Polanski and his lawyers spent the first part of 2009 trying to overturn the verdict in the 1977 case. Some of the renewed interest in the legal aspect of the scandal stems from "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," Mariana Zenovich's indecently fascinating documentary about Polanski and the charges against him. Zenovich fashioned a psychological study out of Polanski's tragedy. His pregnant wife Sharon Tate was killed in the Manson Family murders, and her death seemed to break (or free) something in him, at the same pushing him toward a sort of darkness. The film also examined the legal case against him, revealing that there may have been some impropriety between the judge and the case's prosecutor. Oh, and Zenovich sits down with Samantha Geimer, the minor in the case, who has since asked that the charges be dropped.

Who knows what's going to happen now? The entire legal rigamarole is like a parlor game I never went to school for. He's either coming back to the United States, where he hasn't set foot since the whole mess began, or he's not. In the meantime, I noticed that Polanksi's Wikipedia entry hasn't been updated. Apparently, there's some rigamarole over that, too.