Word on the street is gamers were crashing their cars through the doors of Best Buys, etc. last night to nab a copy of the video game of the year, Grand Theft Auto IV. (Note to all bosses: Your employee is not really sick today.)

The last time a game this big came out was when Halo 3 hit stores last September. The media types said that the box office suffered, down big time from the previous year and killing any chance the Farley Brothers’ The Heartbreak Kid (released a weekend later) had of making any money.

Now, I know this weekend is different. First, it’s the official opening of the summer movie season with Iron Man hitting theaters. Second, The Heartbreak Kid sucked. Still, with Grand Theft Auto IV ready to crush sales records, many (Nikki Finke) think Iron Man should be shaking like the Tin Man in the haunted forest.

I’d like to make a plea to all the gamers out there to take two hours out of your weekend to see Iron Man. Early reaction is very positive, and if there’s any chance of quality pictures being made, you have to see the good ones. Sure, Grand Theft Auto has drug-dealing, organized crime, ultra-violence, strippers, prostitutes…wait. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Big guy in a tin can. But he fights Afghan insurgents! If you don’t see Iron Man, then you are with the terrorists. Now, think about that.

Chris Carter, apparently taking a page out of George Lucas’ handbook “How to Piss Off You Fan Base: Episode I - The Revenge of the Phantom Subtitle,” revealed that “The X Files” sequel is going to be titled “The X Files: I Want to Believe.” You know that feeling you get when you’re about to make out with someone really hot only to find out they’re your second cousin. That’s what this feels like. Thanks Chris.

I was really looking forward to seeing something like “The X Files: Mulder and Scully Vs. The Werewolf.” Apparently the camp factor that helped the show in the early seasons, and disappeared with the conspiracy plot in the later seasons, is totally gone.  So much for high hopes.

Most fun in the world: watching a Beatles movie. No, I’m not referring to Across the Universe. I’m talking about the zany Richard Lester film Help!. Sure the comedic timing isn’t perfect and it’s absolutely, off-the-wall silly, but Help! can’t help but indulge the Fab Four’s tendency toward spirited farce.

I wasn’t alive when the Beatles were around, but the high-profile DVD releases (also for A Hard Day’s Night) certainly indicate a phenomenon the hasn’t died yet. The Beatles and Elvis and good knows who else I’m missing have impressive filmographies when compared to the pop stars of our day. What do we get? From Justin to Kelly.

There are also the direct-to-DVD movies starring Justin Timberlake and Jessica Simpson, but one has to wonder what has changed, culturally-speaking, to result in such blunders from our current chart toppers to result in misfires across the board. Remember the much-hyped Outkast musical. Neither do I.

Of course, looking back, even a movie like Help! had it’s detractors. Here’s how the New York Times film critic at the time described the film: The boys themselves are exuberant and uninhibited in their own genial way. They just become awfully redundant and—dare I say it?—dull. Too true, especially when compared to the Beatles’ iconic A Hard Day’s Night.

Yet, endearing cinematic turns for The Beatles or Elvis, music artists who worked with directors like Lester or Richard Thorpe come once in a blue moon these days. The last artist to make the successful jump from music icon to on-screen success story was Eminem in 8 Mile, directed by Curtis Hanson. Love him or hate him, Eminem’s standing in popular culture cannot be denied, if only because he succeeded where so many other – 50 Cent, Vanilla Ice, Britney Spears - have failed.

Is Hanna Montana the closest thing we can get to a major superstar leap to the big screen? Maybe. The still mass marketable demographic that is the tween audience certainly makes it easier for an artist, real or fake, to realize his or her cinematic potential. Stars like Andre Benjamin, Ludacris, Chris Brown and Alicia Keyes are still going to show up in movies now and then, but I’m eagerly awaiting the next music artist to dominate our culture and deliver a great movie experience. When you watch a movie like Help!, how could you not?

Diamond

Jailhouse Rock (Elvis)
A Hard Day’s Night (The Beatles)

Platinum

8 Mile (Eninem)
Help! (The Beatles)

Gold

Purple Rain (Prince)
The Rose (Bette Midler)

Coaster
Crossroads (Britney Spears)
Cool as Ice (Vanilla Ice)
Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (50 Cent)

Well, No Country for Old Men continues to steamroll the competition in the race for Oscar.  This weekend’s Producer’s Guild of America win means it has officially won top prize from every guild.  Even The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King didn’t do that. (The Peter Jackson fantasy epic lost the WGA Adapted Screenplay prize to American Splendor).

While No Country for Old Men deserves every award it gets, the season is quickly becoming very boring.  Is anyone even hearing a hint of dissension in the Oscar race?  Well, I recently wrote an article for BlogCritics.org on how Oscar night can be interesting again.  You can check it out here.  It’s a quiet acknowledgment that the Oscars aren’t supposed to award the best in film.  The Oscars are all about show business.  When Crash won Best Picture, it was shocking and even if the film wasn’t any good. I’d much rather experience a jaw-drop than a yawn.  So, Academy, I urge you to make my jaw hit the floor.

Unless that means giving the Oscar to a disaster like Atonement.

I’m taking a few risks with these predictions, namely being a complete Atonement shut out. Ten years ago, I don’t think I would have said the same thing, but the Academy landscape has changed since then.

Best Picture

• Michael Clayton
• Juno
• Into the Wild
  
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
  
• No Country For Old Men
• Alt: There Will Be Blood

Conventional wisdom would have There Will Be Blood in the final 5, but with so many Paramount Vantage films in the running, it seems like there is bound to be one that doesn’t make the cut. With comparisons to Citizen Kane and other grandiose reviews, is it the final that the Academy doesn’t like because they have to like it? Juno still seems like the most vulnerable, but damn it, money talks and it’s made more than any other potential nominee.

Best Director

• Ethan & Joel Coen, No Country For Old Men
• Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
• Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• Sean Penn, Into the Wild
• Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
• Alt: Ridley Scott, American Gangster
  

I don’t see Jason Reitman making the cut, which is why I picked Scott as the alt prediction. This lineup for the director nomination doesn’t look to have much wiggle room.

Best Actor

• Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood
• Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild
• Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises
  
• Ryan Gosling, Lars and the Real Girl
• George Clooney, Michael Clayton
• Alt: Denzel Washington, American Gangster

Gosling over Denzel, Johnny, and Hanks? The BFCA and SAG seem to think so. If I keep up with the younger hipper Academy motif with my predictions, I can’t put the ‘old guard’ in where the new talented faces can be placed.

Best Actress

• Ellen Page, Juno
• Amy Adams, Enchanted
• Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
• Julie Christie, Away From Her
• Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
• Alt: Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
  

For me, this will be the race to watch, like the Sissie Spacek run for In the Bedroom. Christie’s got a nomination in the bag, as do Page and Cotillard. It may still be a three horse race for the prize. SAG will clear things up. I’m going for Amy Adams over Cate Blanchett because Blanchett has I’m Not There. And Adams, like Gosling, may be on the road to Oscar fave territory.

Best Supporting Actor

• Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
• Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
• Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
• Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
• Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton
• Alt: Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men

I’m honestly a little uncomfortable predicting Hoffman, knowing that Jones had a magnificent year. But Hoffman had a great year, too. I’m banking on his three Oscar-worthy performances trumpting Jones’s two. It all comes down to No Country for Old Men love.

Best Supporting Actress

• Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There
• Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
  
• Ruby Dee, American Gangster
  
• Catherine Keener, Into the Wild
  
• Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton
• Alt: Saoirse Ronan, Atonement

Continuing with my prediction of a complete snub for Atonement, I’m kicking out the film’s most Oscar-worthy performance and putting in Ruby Dee. I don’t see any other surprises, unless the inevitability of one Cate Blanchett catches up with her.

Best Original Screenplay

• Juno
• Ratatouille
• Knocked Up
• Michael Clayton
• Lars and the Real Girl
• Alt: The Savages

Best Adapted Screenplay

• No Country For Old Men
• There Will Be Blood
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• Into the Wild
• Charlie Wilson’s War
• Alt: Zodiac

The Oscar nominations will be announced live Feb. 22 at 8:30 a.m. EST on E!

I started watching movies, really watching movies, in 1999, the year considered by most to be the best in recent film history. Judging from the trouble I had compiling my 2007 list, I’d say last year was an even greater achievement than 1999 for filmmaking as a whole. I’ve never seen so many movies in one year, and I’ve never loved so many of them. I’m even skipping the bottom five list I usually put together. (Lucky for you, Next.) What’s the point when there is so much to celebrate? Without further ado, here is TheFilmChair.com’s Top 10 for 2007.

1. No Country for Old Men – Perfect isn’t a word you can ever use in describing a human creation. I’m sure the Coen’s film isn’t technically perfect. But it feels perfect. Every move it makes is calculated, leaving the audience punch-drunk from the opening sequence. Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is an iconic villain. Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is a hero for our time, once unflappable, but now only bewildered. Perfect.

2. I’m Not There – Todd Haynes motion picture inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan is pure cinematic artistry. No other film this year so effectively presented what you can do with film, though no other subject would demand nearly as much from the medium. If you want to call it a biopic, then you would certainly use the word unconventional. If you call it what it is, then you can start like this: I’m Not There is a transcendent, experimental masterpiece

3. Ratatouille – In any other year, I think Ratatouille would be my pick for Best Picture. Hell, it taught me to spell the word ratatouille. In terms of classical cinematic storytelling, no other picture achieves what Brad Bird’s animated film about a rat who aspires to be a French chef achieves. In terms of animation, you’ve never seen computer animation used with such a painterly touch.

4. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – This epic Greek tragedy in the Old West defies its genre. And it’s the most starkly beautiful film set to celluloid this year.

5. Juno – A film that looks like every other hip teen indie proves to be the closest thing to a solid American drama we get this year (see number 7 for more on this). Funny, smart, and oh so poignant.

6. There Will Be Blood - Watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s towering film about a misanthropic oilman is like being involved in an abusive relationship. It accosts you. It seduces you. It has a hypnotic manner, drawing you in until landing a vicious punch. Daniel Day-Lewis is astonishing as oilman Daniel Plainview.

7. The Lives of Others & After the Wedding – At a time when American dramas are focused anywhere but on their stories, two foreign dramas, one in German and one in Dutch proved to be two of the most emotionally evocative films of the year. The Lives of Others tells the story of an East German Stasi who must spy on a playwright, and After the Wedding shows what happens when a secretive business man challenges the principals of an idealistic aid worker. These engrossing stories are fine example of what can be done when simple story ideas are executed flawlessly – by the directors, the actors and everyone else involved.

8. Michael Clayton – The year’s biggest surprise. I never thought anyone could channel Lumet like Gilroy does here, but this socially conscious thriller is as riveting as it is intelligent. George Clooney proves once again he’s not just a star; he’s an actor.

9. Into the Wild - Sean Penn’s films never moved me before. Of course, none were as celebratory as his drama about a young man who gives up a life of privilege to pursue a nomadic life, traversing America in search for simple human truth.

10. The Wind that Shakes the Barley – A deeply moving and evocative film, Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner brings the director’s realist touch to a film with the emotional scope of the grandest epic.

Honorable Mentions:
Romance & Cigarettes | Once | Black Book | Lust, Caution | The King of Kong | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Brand Upon the Brain | Charlie Wilson’s War

Best Actor – Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood

Best Actress – Ellen Page, Juno

Best Supporting Actor – Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men

Best Supporting Actress – Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There

Best Director – Ethan and Joel Coen, No Country for Old Men

Best Ensemble – The cast of Hairspray

Best Song - “Falling Slowly,” Once

Quote of the Year – “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood. Ugly, pretty. Handsome, what have you. The right person will still think that the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth sticking with.” — Mac MacGuff, Juno

Nikki Finke is reporting that tomorrow night’s Critics Choice Awards will have stars. Apparently it’s a non-union show, which means no picket line. It also means that this year the BFCA awards show will finally, FINALLY, get the place it deserves ahead of the HFPA’s Golden Globes. It’s been a more accurate predictor of the Oscars for years and doesn’t do things like nominating Oprah’s movie (The Great Debaters) just to have Oprah show up on Globe night.

Anyway, here’s how I see the night going down.

Best Picture: Into the Wild (There’s too much love for Into the Wild for me to comfortably predict anything else.)

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood (Though, they did give him the acting award for his last role.)

Best Actress: Julie Christie, Away From Her (But this is the most likely category in which you may see a tie. BFCA has a tie in some category almost annually. Marion Cotillard could get kudos here too.)

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men (This year’s lock all the way to Oscar. Think J-Hud in Dreamgirls.)

Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There (Cate needs a good precursor boost to put her back in the running for Oscar. If Amy Ryan wins for Gone Baby Gone, we may have a runaway for Ryan. If Cate wins and goes onto Oscar, the BFCA can say they called it even though everyone has been calling it since the movie was announced.)

Best Director: Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (BFCA splits the director award, and often gives it to an unlikely candidate.)

Best Writer: Diablo Cody, Juno (Can’t wait to hear this acceptance speech.)

Best Ensemble: Blah–I mean Juno

Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille

There are other categories that I don’t really care about unless they result in an Oscar. But tune in tomorrow night at 9 p.m. on VH1 to see the winners. It may be the only show this Oscar season to actually be, well, a show.

The best Christmas presents I received this year were from Aaron Sorkin and Diablo Cody. From those two screenwriters came two screenplays. From the screenplays came two of the year’s smartest, most entertaining films.

Charlie Wilson’s War, a film about a Texas congressman who decides to wage a covert war against the Soviets by supplying the Afghans with weapons in 1980, is a lesson in geopolitics, probably a 400-level class. It’s not nearly as inspiring as either The American President or The West Wing, but Sorkin here has created three of the best characters he’s ever written. In the hands of Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks (as Charlie Wilson), Charlie Wilson’s War is an ensemble comedy so smart and so fast you’d swear it came out in the 1930s.

Juno is not a 1930s comedy, though. No, Juno is an even rarer gem. It’s a film just as smart as Charlie Wilson, though a lot hipper, and one that utilizes and even defines certain contemporary American archetypes. Cody’s screenplay is a marvel, but like Sorkin, her words are only as good as the performers. Ellen Page is perfect as the pregnant 16-year-old who decides to against an abortion and instead plans to give her baby up for adoption. Show up for Cody’s sharp, savvy screenplay, but stay for Page’s performance.

I Am Legend starts out as a solid, suspenseful flick about the last man on earth after everyone is wiped out by a deadly plague. Well, almost everyone. There are some humans who turned into vampire/zombie things that are comically designed when compared to the solid setup the film gives them. They don’t really show up until the last third of the film, which like Castaway is pretty much a one-man-show. Smith is up to the challenge. The FX guys obviously aren’t.Then there’s Depp in Sweeney Todd, as hunk of coal number two.

Star power aside, Depp brings nothing to the role. Nothing. He can’t sing, or at least, he can’t emote. He lacks the power and theatrics demanded of a role in Sondheim’s operetta about a vengeful barber cutting throats in Victorian London. Director Tim Burton, as usual, gets caught up in creating the world of Todd, allowing everything to come to a crashing halt when Depp performs, weakly.

So that was my holiday. Today is the first day of 2008, and like most years, my location prohibits me from doing a 2007 Top Ten list right now. There are still a couple 2007 films to see. Check back in a couple weeks.

Holiday Recap Movie Ratings
Juno–****
Charlie Wilson’s War–***1/2
I Am Legend–**1/2
Sweeney Todd-**

I don’t like Nicole Kidman. It’s nothing personal, I just never really enjoyed watching her strain her way through her art house movie roles. She’s never proved herself to be a superb actress. She’s solid, but hardly extraordinary. And with the measly opening for The Golden Compass ($27 million for this $200+ million fantasy epic), we are again reminded that she is not yet a movie star.

Kidman has never had a box office smash, the closest being The Others in 2001 which made $95 million at the North American box office. The film that earned her the Best Actress Oscar, The Hours, only garnered $41 million, which was a smashing success considering the film, but a meager take otherwise. Her other Oscar film, Moulin Rouge!, only made $57 million, though its post-theatrical success may have most people thinking otherwise.

Only one Kidman film has ever grossed more than $100 million and that’s Batman Forever, a film where she plays second fiddle to a popular superhero. My question is, after the flops of The Invasion, Bewitched, The Stepford Wives and now The Golden Compass, how can Kidman save her career?

Kidman’s closest run in with success after The Others was 2005’s The Interpreter, a political thriller co-starring Sean Penn and directed by Sydney Pollack. The film made $72 million, featured a surprisingly strong turn from Kidman as a U.N. interpreter and will likely make a ton of cash in TV rights.

The Interpreter proved that Kidman, with the right role and the right co-star and the right director, could in fact be a legitimate success. But the film wasn’t the usual art-house film with an excruciating performance. It wasn’t a dubious comedic role that even Faith Hill could outperform. No, The Interpreter is classical filmmaking, the kind that Pollack is good at and the kind that Kidman, who has all the qualities of an elegant star, can use as a vehicle for her persona. I believed Kidman’s performance in The Interpreter more than I have any of her other performances. Kidman needs another film as smart and well-made as The Interpreter, one that doesn’t rely heavily on her star power to be a success.

Jodi Foster has been doing this for years, taking on commercial projects and surprising audiences with just how good of an actress she can be. Foster’s role in Fincher’s 2002 film Panic Room was initially Kidman’s, but Kidman had to drop out because of an injury. From there Foster has made Flightplan, Inside Man and The Brave One, all films that showed off Foster’s acting chops without relying on Foster as the main draw. All were successes in their own right, with the exception of The Brave One, a film that did rely more heavily on Foster as a star. And it still made $36 million domestic.

If Kidman wants to her next role to be a success, she better keep her eyes out for another Interpreter. Her career needs the boost that can come from a series of hit thrillers. Once we’re in the seats because of the film, maybe then we’ll start to fill the seats to actually see Kidman.

Much is being made of the box office failures that have been the so-called Iraq War films. Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Reese Witherspoon-starrer Rendition and now, Robert Redford’s star-powered Lions for Lambs have all tanked, struggling to attain anything they could call respectable box office tallies. Politics aside, these weren’t good films in the first place (though I can’t speak to Rendition, which I avoided, but does have a lousy 55/100 on MetaCritic.com).

There’s a broader cultural imperative evident in these failures and the successes of other films. Why is American Gangster a big box office hit, and now potential Oscar-contender, while films so overtly in tune with the political landscape continue to flounder? The easy answer is escapism. But as films are a reflection of the culture, we can’t help but pay attention to the films that have made an impact while America was at war.

Here are a few: A History of Violence, The Departed, Million Dollar Baby, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Children of Men, Mystic River, Grindhouse, Saw, 300, Sin City, Kill Bill, and a brand new vision of the superhero Batman. Throw in the onslaught of fantasy films and even musicals since 2001 and you have a genuine idea of how we really are responding to the post-9/11 world.

When America is at war, there is no single genre of film that resonates with an audience, be it popular or elite. In WWII audiences were drawn to war films because it was a war worth fighting, but also because those were the films the market demanded. Most of those films are classics even today, including the seminal propaganda romance Casablanca. As the medium grew its escapist quality combined with serious cultural reflection resulted in war time movies being the ones we still hold dear today. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf War, all of these conflicts resulted in films that have maintained their position as classics. We rally around film when we are at war and the artists behind these films produce their most enduring works.

There are exceptions of course, but looking at the rise of the fantasy genre, the return of the movie musical and an obsession with violence, torture and zombies since the start of our war against the Taliban and continuing into Iraq, we see again the culture rallying behind the medium. The films of the mid- to late-1990s can’t hold a candle to the films that have been produced in the early 21st century, much like the films of the 1980s couldn’t compete with the quality of the Gulf War films (1990-1992).

With these Iraq War films, we are seeing, quite abundantly, a betrayal of the audience by filmmakers and studios and people are not responding. The segmented, polarized audience of the past few years had decidedly adopted two opposing viewpoints, one of black and white, good versus evil and one of extreme moral ambiguity in the face of evil.

So what’s an Iraq War film? It’s the hopeful, yet bleak Children of Men and not Lions for Lambs. It’s the internal conflict of characters in The Departed and not that of the characters in In the Valley of Elah. It’s the discussion of the morality of torture in Saw and not that same discussion in Rendition. It’s a return to the realistic, sober, socially conscious films of the 1970s with Michael Clayton and the upcoming release of the most violent musical to ever hit the screen with Sweeney Todd. We’re watching Iraq War films all the time. And when you get right down to it, the only films that aren’t our Iraq War films are the films actually about the war.