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• Kevin Smith is back making a Kevin Smith movie (meaning it’s biggest fan will be Kevin Smith). But this time he’s “extremely well-hung,” casting wise. Somehow, Kevin, I get exactly what you’re trying to say.
• Late night shows are in “backchannel conversations” to return to air. However, nobody wants to be first, so networks are gingerly approaching an “informal agreement” and the hosts themselves are mum as not to alienate their writers. Meaning: No new news on the writers strike.
• Awards shows are getting spooked over the strike, too. We could miss Steven Spielberg getting yet another lifetime achievement award January 13. Strike or no strike, I’ll be working on these hand warmers.

Under discussion:

Southland Tales  (2007)

Smiley Face  (2007)

Margot at the Wedding  (2007)

Redacted  (2007)

Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:

• Redacted: Bill O’Reilly can finally get a look at the film he’s sight-unseen been threatening to boycott, while Magnolia finally gets to put that whole all-press-is-good-press maxim to the test. Here’s my review from Telluride; for a recap on the possibly-contrived battle between director Brian DePalma and producer/distributor Mark Cuban, see here, here and here.
• Beowulf: Is director Robert Zemeckis not doing press for this film because he knows it’s a bad idea to compete with the post-Comic-Con gushage over Angelina Jolie’s nakedness?
• Smiley Face: Kevin and Paul are big fans of Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy, which came off a successful festival run to be all but abandoned by its distributor. The film opens on one screen in L.A. today before going straight to DVD. Listen to Paul’s interview with Araki here.
• Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is disappointing, despite Nicole Kidman’s strong performance as a wicked sister. Read the review here.
• Southland Tales: What can I say? I thought it was funny.

Here are some quick reviews of two SDFF films that I watched via screeners before touching down in Denver, and the one film I managed to see in town before succumbing to jet lag/altitude exhaustion. Oddly and entirely accidentally, all three films have something to do with aging males and their identity crises.

Karl Rove, I Love You

A self-mocking psuedo-documentary from the mind of Dan Butler (a journeyman supporting actor best known for a recurring role on Frasier), Karl Rove, I Love You has far less to do with the titualar “ultimate supporting actor” than with the personal fallout of engagement in our super-polarized political culture. What begins as a documentary on Butler as the archetypical “invisible” character actor (he’s consistently compared to Philip Seymour Hoffman, only “less famous”) morphs into a document of Butler’s mid-life crisis passion project, a one man show designed to expose the world to the “Real” Karl Rove. Butler begins the project wanting to hit the Bush administration where it hurts, but slowly comes to empathise with Rove, turns his show into a mildly-satiric love-letter, and alienates his single-minded friends and collaborators in the process.

Not always laugh-out loud funny, but well-paced and consistently engaging, Karl Rove, I Love You uses the natural conflict between (pervasively and unquestioningly liberal, and largely openly gay) Hollywood and (socially conservative but morally ambiguous) Red State actors to explore how angry obsession can offer the same kind of madness, identity salvation and pure pleasure as romantic passion. But more interestingly, it’s also about breaking down a black-and-white cipher and finding a whole person. It always feels more like a sitcom than a credible documentary (and the last twenty minutes really push the limits of disbelief), but it’s just creepy enough to work.

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