The other empty space was not mentioning John Lee Hancock's THE ROOKIE as a longshot, which it damn well ought to be by virtue of the simple fact it's a beautifully made, emotionally on-target "people" movie about American small-town life, with a near-great performance by Dennis Quaid.

Here's a summation of what Goldstein wrote, along with some responses.

Patrick says: The two big favorites are CHICAGO and ROAD TO PERDITION: I say: Yes, there is heat behind CHICAGO but I'm not feeling it for ROAD TO PERDITION, good as it is, like I was last summer. I'm hearing others are sorta kinda backing away from it also -- not from any particular animus or change of heart, but because the perspective of distance has led some to conclude it was more of a this-and-that triumph (Connie Hall's photography, Paul Newman's performance, Dennis Gassner's production design) than a powerhouse in itself.

Patrick says: LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS "is a formidable [Best Picture] contender, being the only adventure epic with box-office clout in the field." I say : I can't be fair on this subject since I'm a confirmed RINGS hater, but the mere fact that people keep writing and telling me that not including THE TWO TOWERS in the Oscar Balloon reflects badly on the column...that in itself makes me want to back off and cop an attitude.

Patrick says: ANTWONE FISHER is a contender. I say: He's right.

Patrick says: ABOUT SCHMIDT is a contender. I say: Maybe, but I dunno. I recently told a "friend" of SCHMIDT that "I care for it [and] certainly respect it, but I couldn't disagree with a friend who I saw it with who called it 'kind of a downer.' It starts with our realizing that Nicholson's Warren Schmidt is a porky, morose, overly regulated, emotionally constipated man with a lot of suppressed regret under his belt. It ends with Nicholson realizing he's a porky, morose, overly regulated, emotionally constipated man with a lot of suppressed regret under his belt. That's it...that's the whole payoff. A man who's led an unexamined life gradually decides to lead an examined one, but is none too happy about it once he realizes who and what he is." Bottom line: acting nominations (for Nicholson and Hope Davis, who's somewhat better than co-star Kathy Bates) are SCHMIDT's best bet.

Patrick says: THE HOURS and FAR FROM HEAVEN are contenders also. I say : With critics, elitists and Ivory Tower dwellers, sure, but in which direction will the rank-and-filers lean?

Patrick says: Longshots include GANGS OF NEW YORK, THE PIANIST, MINORITY REPORT and INSOMNIA. I say : Forget MINORITY REPORT, which has never been more than a thoughtful, sometimes very clever genre piece. Ditto INSOMNIA. GANGS...of course. (I'm hoping for better than this.) THE PIANIST...possibly. I've heard some very encouraging things, such as the oft-repeated "it's Polanski' s best since [fill in the blank].")

Patrick says: MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING will score big-time with the Golden Globers. I say: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association hasn't come up with a really big fiasco nomination (or award) in a long time. Here's their big chance.

Five Years Ago

There's an anniversary coming up that some critics, I suspect, would rather forget about. It was nearly five years ago -- Wednesday, October 30th, 1997, or the night before Halloween -- when Paramount publicity had one of its first long-lead screenings of TITANIC. The buzz on James Cameron's $200 million chick flick had been building favorably on Harry Knowles' Ain't It Cool News site over the previous month or so, but it was right after the pre-Halloween screening that I started to hear some very exciting things first-hand.

Things have changed drastically since. It's maybe more difficult to find a German who will admit to having once been an ardent Nazi than to find anyone in journalistic circles who will cop to having once loved TITANIC. It's hard, actually, to think of a big-studio film more despised these days. It's been this way for the last two or three years. You can barely get people to talk about it. To them it's the hoary hodgepodge that the public and the Academy went nuts over but cooler, more dispassionate heads saw for the sentimental hambone crock it was and always will be.

It was different just after that 10.30.97 screening. I remember hearing an enthusiastic, bordering- on-giddy report on Thursday morning from Todd Gold of PEOPLE magazine's L.A. bureau, where I was working at the time. Then I heard another one, second-hand, that supposedly came from VANITY FAIR writer Kim Masters. Then I saw TITANIC myself the following week, and I came out of the afternoon screening feeling so moved I was careful to restrain myself when describing it to others, for fear of seeming like a sap. But then people everywhere (save a very cynical few) were having the same reaction, more or less.

TIME's Richard Corliss panned it outright (he called it "dead in the water"), and then SALON's Stephanie Zacharek trashed it. I took Owen Wilson to see it (we used to be semi-palsy) and he walked out after the first 15 minutes. I'm sure there were other naysayers, but it was very, very hard to find any in the early days when it was just starting to be seen and the public hadn't yet been invited.

Janet Maslin's review in THE NEW YORK TIMES compared it to David O'Selznick's GONE WITH THE WIND. Others invoked the emotional tradition of D.W.Griffith. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY critic Owen Gleiberman called it "the first disaster movie that can truly be called a work of art....it floods you with elemental passion in a way that invites comparison with the original movie spectacles of D.W. Griffith." THE NEW YORKER's Anthony Lane wrote, "At the close of the century, Cameron is pushing at cinema much as D.W. Griffith did at the start - raising the stakes of the spectacular, outwitting the intellect, and heading straight for the guts."

I still say it's a good (sometimes very good) romantic actioner with a deeply emotional final 20 minutes, and a drop-dead brilliant closing sequence. Half the game in making a film that works is crafting a great ending, and Cameron sure nailed this one. "It's all in the ability -- willingness -- of a viewer to be affected by TITANIC's occasionally simple, sometimes grandiose emotionalism," I wrote in my 12.14.97 L.A. TIMES SYNDICATE column. "It does not traffic in subtlety. You either let it in (as Bill Paxton's character remarks at the finale) or you don't."

The praisings of the CHICAGO READER's Jonathan Rosenbaum summed it up best, I think.

"For all the hokeyness, TITANIC kept me absorbed all 194 minutes both times I saw it," he wrote. "It achieves a certain elemental purity. I saw TITANIC twice at the same theater -- first with an audience of 'industry people,' including other reviewers, then a couple of weeks later with a less professional crowd --and the difference in the audible responses was palpable. It's as if I'd sat the first time with the ship's owners and the second time with the passengers.

"Morally and conceptually, this movie could almost have been made in 1912, the year the Titanic sank and the year that D.W. Griffith made MAN'S GENESIS, THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY, and THE NEW YORK HAT. The characterizations of heroes and villains, which appear to be drawn with the utmost sincerity, all seem cut from the same Victorian cloth as those in Griffith's melodramas. For better and for worse, this is a movie that appears to believe in what it's saying -- and the lack of cynicism is refreshing."

Refreshing then, close-to-embarrassing now. Or is this just an industry thing? Question: Have hinterland sentiments about TITANIC become as rancid and revisionist as they've seemed to me over the last two or three years among my circle of friends? I'm curious.

Confederacy...Yo!

Wet-behind-the-ears director David Gordon Green (GEORGE WASHINGTON) has been tapped by Steven Soderbergh's Section 8 and Drew Barrymore's Flower Films, to pilot the long-delayed film version of John Kennedy O'Toole's A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, which will roll film next spring for Miramax Films.

My only regret is that Philip Seymour Hoffman seems like the likeliest candidate to play the lead character of Ignatius J. Reilly. His acting in LOVE LIZA has kind-of purged me of any interest in seeing him play another emotional down-and-outer, which is how Reilly has been sometimes described.

Let me put it more simply -- I don't want to see anyone of any body shape play an arrogant, pretentious, supercilious fat guy who lives with his mother in New Orleans and can't hold down a job. I know it makes me sound like a lowbrow to pooh-pooh a project that so many elegant Hollywood A-listers are in love with, but my interest is nil.

The producers haven't signed Hoffman because it's obviously a character with his name on it -- he knows he'd be great in the part and so does everyone else -- and so, according to one insider, his agent is exploiting this in order to get the highest fee possible, etc.

The script of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES is by Scott Kramer, who is also producing. Barrymore has agreed to play a principal character named Darlene.

Producer Scott Rudin (THE HOURS) tried to get DUNCES made for over eight years, starting with his purchase of the O'Toole book in '93 with plans to have Soderbergh direct. According to a Michael Fleming VARIETY story there was some hoo-hah in June 2001 when Rudin and Paramount Pictures refused to sell DUNCES to Miramax, despite receipt of a check from Miamax for $1.5 million. Kramer, who has tried to launch a DUNCES flick for over 20 years, was reportedly irate at Rudin and Paramount's position at the time, but things have since been resolved.

The title of O'Toole's book comes from a Jonathan Swift line that goes, "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Punchy

As promised, I went again to PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE last weekend and, as expected, found it more arresting than I did when I first saw it at the Toronto Film Festival. The plan was to jump into it again for today's column, but then Steve Kaplan, a writer who used to do pieces for me when I was editing THE FILM JOURNAL in the early '80s, suddenly turned up in my mailbox with a pretty good riff on it. So here goes...

"Anderson knows he's dealing with the heart of strip mall darkness -- the Valley, geographically part of LA but as sunbelt middle-American as Gila Crossing, New Mexico. The Valley is his Yoknapatawpha County, and he wants us to take it seriously. So he's always striving to give it mystical resonance and depth with ooh-aah objective correlatives. Hence the plague of frogs in MAGNOLIA and the pump organ left curbside in PUNCH DRUNK LOVE.

"These things are really there to signal an undercurrent of irrationality and cosmic dread in a sub-Lynchian kind of way. Perhaps Anderson really wants to remake BLUE VELVET in Pasadena. He certainly gets a lot of mileage with this implication of a substratum of hidden meanings below the placid (albeit rancid) Valley pavement..

"Anderson's best submerged effect, of course, is the casting of Sandler, who gets to establish his dark side -- the pain and rage beneath his best selling comic/geek exterior. This is a little bit like Scorsese putting Jerry Lewis into THE KING OF COMEDY, but not in a supporting role -- here it's the whole shooting match (and no DeNiro for counterpoint). Sandler's usual schtick, in his HAPPY GILMORE mode, is the holy fool who gets the girl -- the devolved Jewish nebbish triumphing over the uptight and the adult . In PUNCH DRUNK LOVE his introverted untermensch also gets the girl, but without being able to trot out his usual panoply of sight gags, pratfalls and bowel humor.

"Hence without putting out the usual shotgun blast of wildness that might attract a leading lady (so that she might mother this crazy, mixed-up Yid), the lack of energy -- Anderson is obviously reigning in Sandler's persona -- leads to a curious black-hole effect. Except for selected over the top rages -- the glass-door episode you mentioned in your column, the bathroom, the Honolulu phone booth -- Sandler's character is the return of the repressed. How could Emily Watson even notice him, let alone fall for him? Only because the script requires it, or there is no film.

"PUNCH DRUNK LOVE is fascinating precisely because it does not fulfill the cliches of the typical Hollywood character arc. You never know what will happen next, precisely because there is no character driven reason for anything to happen next. And yet it's not exactly unique in the Sandler oeuvre. A typical Sandler comedy is essentially a shapeless bag of bones hung over a skeleton of hack one-liners and gross-outs. His movies have a loyal fan base precisely because they're stoopid...yo! in a post-Beastie Boys, borscht-belt way. What Anderson does is take that usual Sandler personna and make it grow up, into the bad-fitting, shitty blue suit of adulthood.

"There are lots of missteps along the way, but in comparison to the boring conventions of market- tested plots, cowritten by a committee of Writers Guild hacks, this imperfect, limited, and compromised blast of anarchy is nonetheless mildly refreshing." - Steve Kaplan, New York City.

And as long as we're on the topic...

"PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is a dynamic bit of cinematic whoopee from P T Anderson. What a score! Is it available on CD? Often Anderson sets his action to the beat of a waltz, much like Kubrick. The merging of an art-like canvas with the live action and the tempo of repeated tracking shots at the end, I feel, made the film float along like a Jacques Tati film. I want to see PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE three times. And that was Robert Smigel as the dentist, by the way. Smigel has been in four other Sandler films. Hail Smigel, the hand that wags Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog!" -- Michael Bergeron

Snipers

"I guess if you're 3000 miles away from Washington, D.C., it's easy to feel that what's going on here is some kind of referendum on the national character. It's not - it's a maniac coming out of nowhere and killing people of all races and backgrounds as they shop, pump gas, wait for buses and go to school. People are scared to leave their homes except for necessities. Children can't go outside for school recess. High school football games are being cancelled or moved all over the area. This is not thrilling; it's genuinely scary.

"20th Century Fox did the only sane thing it could in postponing PHONE BOOTH. Do you really think only a few yahoos would complain if this film came out now? Almost everyone would come down on Fox if they released this thing. According to a WASHINGTON POST story, a trailer for the picture ran locally and people thought it was a sick joke. If the studio tried to spin some sort of reflecting reality angle, nobody would believe them. They would be called insensitive idiots at best and money-hungry ghouls at worst. This movie would probably play to as many empty houses as Madonna's SWEPT AWAY did last weekend.

"There were no TV movies on John Kennedy's assassination playing on November 25, 1963 and no movies about terrorists released on September 20, 2001. There's a time and a place for examining tragedies but not while they're still going on. That nut is still out there and no one knows where or when he'll strike next. Heck, by the time you read this, he could have shot me." -- Jerome Wilson, Greenbelt, MD.

Dali-esque

"SPELLBOUND's most noted feature was the surrealistic dream sequence by Salvador Dali. However, those images were deemed too far-out in the vein of UN CHIEN ANDALOU, and were reshot by William Cameron Menzies by order of the producer. Hitchcock had little to do with the finished 'dreams.' However, Dali frequently used doors as metaphors in his paintings. Perhaps Dali influenced Hitchcock to film the florid scene of a series of doors opening that you mentioned. All in all, SPELLBOUND is an under-appreciated, affecting classic. When I feel the burden of angst, I'll tacitly entreat, 'Where's my Ingrid Bergman?'" -- Arizona Joe

Role Playing

Jeffrey Gentile, having beaten out his nearest competitor, Joshua Hebrew, by mere seconds, was first to identify Friday's cast. They appeared together in COME SEPTEMBER (1961)

Today's cast: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Zsa-Zsa Gabor, Colette Marchand, Michael Balfour, Katherine Kath, Jose Ferrer, Muriel Smith, Mary Clare.

What's That Line?

Suzanne Nicholas of Jersey City, New Jersey, was first to identify Friday's dialogue. It's from INTERNAL AFFAIRS (1990). The stars speaking are Andy Garcia (Guy #1) and Richard Gere (Guy #2). Pic was directed by Mike Figgis and written by Henry Bean.

Three women walking down a hotel corridor pass by a group of guys in the opposite direction. One of the guys gives Girl #1 an inviting look, and she returns it. (The following passage is from a script and not a movie transcript, so it may not be exactly what some of you remember.)

Girl #2: Well, how did that feel?
Girl #1: What do you mean?
Girl #3: What does she mean? You just had... treadmill sex with whatsisname!
Girl #1: It was just a friendly competition.
Girl #3: Oh, please...
Girl #1: It was.
Girl #2: That boy is cut, I could scrub my clothes on his stomach.
Girl #1: I really didn't notice.
Girl #3: [play-punching Girl #1 in the arm] You are such a lying 'ho!