Wilnervision!

Kathryn Bigelow just won the DGA award, which means she’s likely to take the Best Director Oscar, too — assuming she gets nominated, of course.

I’m still not sure she will; “The Hurt Locker” is very good movie, and the best thing she’s done in twenty-odd years, but it strikes me as exactly the sort of unconventional genre work that gets shafted on a regular basis by the Academy.

I made that very point, and several others, in a post for NOW Daily just the other day. Take a look, if you’re so inclined … or just weigh in below. It’s all about the conversation.

Consider the Hollywood romantic comedy. Our lives would be very different without it, because we wouldn’t have all these ridiculous expectations of love, courtship and the pageantry of weddings.

It’s not that I don’t believe in romance — it’s worked out pretty well for me so far, actually. But there’s definitely an unrealistic standard being set by the rom-com industry.

With my latest MSN Movies gallery, I use the release of “When in Rome” to consider the world of the rom-com, and how it doesn’t always measure up to the world we inhabit. Like, never.

Join me, won’t you?

With just days to go before the Oscar nominations, the week’s movie selection is the usual mixed bag of late-January studio dumping and indie titles jockeying for screen space. And since I’ve got a long day ahead of me, let’s get right to it!

“Body“: Rossana Foglia and Rubens Rewald’s complex Brazilian tale of death, obsession and identity that somehow refuses to resolve into a thriller. Instead, it does whatever the hell it wants to do, and lets us draw our own conclusions. Kinda invigorating, actually.

“La Donation“: Bernard Emond completes his trilogy of misery with this airless tale of a Montreal doctor (Elise Guilbault) who finds new purpose working in a remote village. It’s like “Doc Hollywood” or “Cars” — only, you know, dour and suffocating.

“Edge of Darkness“: In which we all get to watch as Martin Campbell turns his own terrific BBC miniseries into a crappy Mel Gibson revenge picture. My review should be up later today (UPDATE: there it is!), but the bottom line? Stay home with the DVD this weekend instead.

“Grown Up Movie Star”: Like most Canadians, I was utterly unaware of this movie until it got into Sundance. (Strange how no drums were beating for Vincenzo Natali’s “Splice”, the Canadian Sundance entry I actually want to see.) I’m still in the dark, having had a conflict for the press screening; Susan liked it, though Jason was less enthused.

“When in Rome”: I know Kristen Bell will probably never get another role as good as “Veronica Mars”, but that doesn’t mean she should throw herself into every romantic comedy that comes her way. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, good. “Couples Retreat”, not good. See how that works?

“The Yes Men Fix the World“: Andy and Mike are at it again, tilting against corporate wind machines with little more than fake websites, a strong sense of moral outrage and some truly monstrous pranks. Bless their pointy little heads.

Seriously, though, I hope you’re all planning to stay indoors this weekend. It’s harsh out there.

Zelda Rubinstein, the small medium of “Poltergeist”, died yesterday, aged 76. And so did Howard Zinn, the social historian name-dropped by Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting”. Also, ABC has cancelled “Ugly Betty” and Chris Matthews is kind of an idiot.

And in the middle of all that, I find myself transfixed by this AP photo of Cameron Douglas, who yesterday pled guilty to drug-dealing charges in New York. It’s like a Magic Eye puzzle; if you cross your eyes at just the right angle, you can see his dad circa “The China Syndrome”.

I’m right, aren’t I? And now you cannot look away.

Why won’t “Orphan” die?

Jaume Collett-Serra’s terrible, terrible thriller — the one where Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard adopt a child and suffer terribly for their compassionate gesture — has clawed its way from the bottom of last year’s worst-movie lists into a sort of guilty pleasure. And not just a guilty one; when I did that radio spot with my brother last month, one of the callers named it one of the three best movies of 2009.

No. No no no no no, for the love of god no. “Orphan” is a lot of things — demented, unbalanced, preposterous, self-serious, ludicrous, embarrassing — but “best”? No. Unless that “Best” is immediately followed by “Squandering of Talent”.

Today, Zack Handlen spins up the DVD for the latest installment of the AV Club’s I Watched This On Purpose — and what he finds may chill your soul. Or, if you choose to watch any of the clips embedded in the piece, you may laugh until you pull a stomach muscle.

My latest MSN DVD column is up, in which I find the experience of watching “Michael Jackson: This Is It” to be rather different from what I expected.

I mean, whatever your feelings about the performer — I tend towards “nutbar”, myself — the rehearsal footage that makes up most of Kenny Ortega’s memorial document may surprise you.

This is the first time we’ve been able to glimpse Jackson without his media mask in more than a decade; even in those court appearances, he was surrounded by his entourage, and the stuff he blurted to the cameras just seemed weird. Here, he’s a man trying to put together a stage show, putting aside most of his illusions to concentrate on the work.

It’s fascinating. And what’s more fascinating is the certainty that if Jackson had lived to see this movie, he’d probably be trying to suppress it, or bathe it in glitter, or something. The man was complicated.

According to industry estimates — and this Hollywood Reporter article — “Avatar” is set to break “Titanic’s” box-office record sometime today.

The 3D experience with the giant blue cat people will overtake “Titanic’s” global gross of $1.843 billion, and keep right on going.

Seriously, there’s no end in sight: It’s still dominating the charts in North America, having just logged its sixth straight week at number one.

The last movie to do that, by the way? “Titanic”. Has any other filmmaker ever been able to duplicate a blockbuster hit so perfectly? I mean, sure, Cameron’s an engineer, but this is ridiculous.

In other news, Jeff Bridges won another acting award for “Crazy Heart”, so that was nice.

When Forbes.com story runs a story about “Hollywood’s Biggest Flops“, well, how can you resist? Until you actually read the piece, and see the method by which the writer came up with her formula:

To calculate our list we looked at movies that featured big-name stars (like Penn, Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers) but failed to earn back their budgets at the box office. We used numbers from Box Office Mojo and IMDB to get estimated budgets and earnings. We then figured out what percentage of its budget each film failed to earn back. We’re only looking at box office revenue here, not DVD and TV sales, which can often make up for box office shortfalls. But we’re also not including the cost of advertising, which often adds another one-third or more to a film’s budget.

So, production budget minus global box-office. But only for movies with “big-name stars”. Oh, and the budget estimates were taken from the IMDb, which is not always the most reliable source for anything. Indeed, it’s so unreliable that the author herself chooses not to trust it when it comes to Marc Forster’s “Stay”:

IMDB reports the film’s budget at an estimated $50 million, but that seems incredibly high. We gave the producers at News Corp. studio Twentieth Century Fox the benefit of the doubt and estimated the budget at $30 million. Even at that level the film failed to earn back 73% of its budget at the box office.

So what else made the list? “All the King’s Men”, “The Invasion”, “The Express” and a couple of Eddie Murphy comedies. Oh, and “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford”, which earned $15 million on a budget of $30 million — which is actually quite an accomplishment for a three-hour minimalist Western that was barely supported by its studio.
But wait! The landscape isn’t littered with as many bodies as you might think:

One film that surprisingly didn’t make our list was 2007’s Evan Almighty, starring Steve Carell. The Universal Pictures follow-up to the successful 2003 film Bruce Almighty is commonly cited in Hollywood as a huge flop. The film cost an estimated $175 million to produce and earned $173 million at the box office, meaning it missed covering its production budget by only 1%. The film was still a disappointment for the studio, which expected great things from the comedy. But compared to the films on our list, it was a relative hit.

Right. Except that it was a massive bomb. The standard line is that a movie needs to gross three times its budget to break even; “Evan Almighty” didn’t even come close. And is it really appropriate to weigh a failed studio tentpole on the same scale as something like “School for Scoundrels”, which makes the list because people still think Billy Bob Thornton is a big-name star?

“The Golden Compass”, which cost roughly the same amount as “Evan Almighty”, recovered from its domestic face-plant (total North American box-office: $70 million) by grossing $300 million overseas — and even with that considerable take, it was still considered a failure.

And where’s “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li”? $12.7 million worldwide on a budget of $50 million … come on, that totally qualifies. And Michael Clarke Duncan is at least as big a star as Steve Carell.

Stories like this make my head hurt.

With “Legion” pitting man against angel at the megaplex this weekend, I just had to build an MSN movie gallery about other theological thrillers.

… and dammit, I just realized I forgot “Stigmata”. But in my defense, I bet you did, too.

You’ve got to love the thinking here. Sony staked out this weekend for its supernatural thriller “Legion” months ago … so what do the distributors of “Creation” do? They pick the very same weekend to release their movie, presumably in the hopes that all those posters of a shirtless, winged Paul Bettany (holding a machine gun, no less) will somehow draw audiences to their tepid little period piece, which stars Bettany as Charles Darwin.

Yes! Spillover effect for the win! You know, assuming they don’t bother to look at the posters or something. And really, does anyone actually say “Two for the Paul Bettany movie” when they step up to the ticket window?

So. Diving in, then:

“Creation”: The stunt casting of actual couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Charles and Emma Darwin is supposed to add some chemistry to the dramatization of the origin of “On the Origin of Species”. It doesn’t, but it’s not really the actors’ fault; Jon Amiel just doesn’t seem interested in investing his plodding prestige drama with any life. Kieran agrees — though Susan liked it a little more than either of us.

“Extraordinary Measures“: You know how sometimes a movie will take a true story and oversimplify it to the point of pandering stupidity because it doesn’t have any faith in an audience’s ability to follow a complex story? This is one of those movies — and worse, it’s further hampered by Harrison Ford’s laughable performance as a maverick research scientist who is entirely fictional. Because Brendan Fraser’s turn as a father trying to save his kids’ lives wasn’t compelling enough, apparently.

“The Last Station“: Christopher Plummer surprised me in “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” by pulling out a terrific, understated performance — which the film tried its best to ignore, but that’s a different problem. Here, he’s back to hamming it up as Leo Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman’s pokey costume drama, which features additional hamming from Helen Mirren and Paul Giamatti while James McAvoy looks on and tries to keep his dignity.

“Legion“: When angels declare war on humanity, Paul Bettany and his divine abs may be the only thing standing between us and annihilation. Oh, and Dennis Quaid is involved somehow, too. There was no press screening, so I’ll be discovering how closely this hews to the plot of “The Prophecy” right along with everyone else. UPDATE: Turns out it’s more of a “Terminator” riff. Huh.

“Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands“: Peter Mettler’s environmental documentary delivers exactly what it promises — a series of hypnotic aerial shots of massive ecological devastation, taken from heights that make them appear almost beautiful. Only 43 minutes long, so the Royal has arranged Q&As after each screening; Mettler himself will be in attendance tonight and tomorrow, and Marc Glassman — film critic and editor of POV Magazine –will be there Sunday evening.

“Revanche”: I’ve been waiting more than a year for someone to open Gotz Spielmann’s intricate, noir-tinged drama about a cop and a crook who share a common wound; this weekend, it gets a limited engagement at the Bloor that’s basically a teaser for next month’s Criterion DVD release. It’s not ideal, but it’ll have to do.

“The Tooth Fairy”: Look, I don’t begrudge Dwayne Johnson making family comedies. He’s got that larger-than-life presence that makes him perfect for concepts like this. (And Stephen Merchant is in it, too.) But … it just looks horrible, you know? And it’s opening in mid-January. So I shall do the noble thing, and wait for the DVD.

Oh, and if you need something else to see this weekend, check out Cinematheque’s Best of the Decade program. It’s all Jia Zhang-ke, all the time, with the director introducing “Platform” tonight and “Still Life” and “The World” playing on Saturday. And give the box-office people my best.