So maybe we're talking nine films instead of seven. Does anyone besides myself feel trapped in by this? Beset by a vague sense of "whoa, whoa....wait a minute"?

Are you aware that in the minds of many people out here, RETURN OF THE KING (New Line, December 17th) has already been decided upon as the likely winner? In the minds of some of these supporters, the inevitability kicked in last year. This is the long-awaited conclusion of the fabulously successful RINGs trilogy, and it's made so much money, and a Best Picture Oscar would be a tribute not just to KING but all three films. I know it sounds premature, but this mindset is out there and gaining.

At this stage of the game, COLD MOUNTAIN (Miramax, Dec. 25) is said to be just under three hours long. A distribution source says it's gotten "good but "not great [or] sensational" reactions thus far; producer Sydney Pollack says that numbers at two recent previews were "the highest I've ever seen." Pollack and director Anthony Minghella are said to be at odds with the usual Miramax interest in wanting a shorter length, although Pollack says neither he and Minghella are "resisting looking for places to trim."

Add to this Nicole Kidman's comments of a month or so ago in which she suggested that COLD MOUNTAIN's love story is "complicated and painful and aches" and that perhaps it's "too out there," and you can't help but go, "Hmmm." (But not too much of this. As I've said before, the best love stories always involve loss, sadness, and tragedy of one kind or another. And there's no such thing as a good film that's too long, or a bad one that's too short.)

THE ALAMO is said to be stronger and better than expected, but that sounds like "talk" to me. Nobody I know has seen it. (I read a John Sayles draft of the script, but that was long before Hancock came and rewrote it.) On paper, the Davy Crockett role (i.e., Billy Bob Thoroton's) is the most appealingly written, followed by Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid).

Exhibitors aren't going to be seeing MASTER AND COMMANDER (20th Century Fox, Nov. 14th) until sometime around Halloween. Fox is said to be keeping its screening-exposure plans on this seafaring adventure flick "very close to the vest."

The trailer for THE LAST SAMURAI (Warner Bros., Dec. 5th) makes it look rich and highly emotional, but it also leaves an impression this Tom Cruise epic will be a Japanese DANCES WITH WOLVES. I've read the script and the similarities are there also.

The unseen film with the best buzz seems to be Tim Burton's BIG FISH (Columbia, Dec. 10th). It's an episodic piece (four stories told within a story about an older guy dying and his son trying to come to terms with who he is and was) with Albert Finney, Billy Crudup and Ewan MacGregor. I don't know. You tell me.

MONA LISA SMILE (Columbia, Dec. 19th), a Julia Roberts, all-female version of DEAD POET'S SOCIETY set in 1953 Wellesley College, sounds like an emotional winner with possible Oscar-level performances from Roberts and supporting player Kirsten Dunst. Maybe. I loved Newell's DONNIE BRASCO and PUSHING TIN, but I had a very tough time with FOUR WEDDINGGS AND A FUNERAL and especially AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE. The cloying potential in this film seems enormous.

It would be just and fitting if 21 GRAMS made it into contention as a Best Picture finalist, but whispering naysayers are saying it's too dark and sad and therefore not for the Academy.

An Academy picture has to be (a) of good to very good quality, (b) make you feel emotionally warmed up on some level, and (c) convey a view or conviction about our inner or outer experience that Academy members can recognize or accept as fundamentally true and perceptive. I'm not sure if 21 GRAMS satisfies on all three counts or not, although it's unquestionably searing and brilliant.

I can assure you LOST IN TRANSLATION, which I'm not supposed to mention any more because people are getting sick of my hacking away at it, doesn't cut it according to the Academy's three-point criteria. It's a sensitive, above-average piece, but it definitely doesn't make you feel good (it made me feel like a drizzly November day) and the view it offers about life on this planet is clearly on the bleak and bittersweet side.

Gary Ross's SEABISCUIT has the heart factor, all right, but I haven't spoken to anyone who doesn't feel this Depression-era fable underlines its emotional points too strongly. (Tobey Maguire might be in for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, partly because he died his hair red. Shallow as that sounds, it's stuff like this that gets the Academy's attention. Ask Nicole Kidman about the benefits of altering your God-given appearance.)

Talk about Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY (Universal, Nov. 7th) being a Best Picture contender is some kind of sick joke. It's being shown at the Showest exhibitors convention in Orlando, Florida (Sept. 29 to October 2) and there's no question that squares and go-alongers will love it.

I don't know and haven't heard squat about Ron Howard's THE MISSING (Nov. 19, Revolution), except for what I've read on Upcoming Movies. Why is it on a potential Best Picture nominee list? Honestly? Because I saw it on someone else's potential Best Picture nominee list.

I saw Clint Eastwood's MYSTIC RIVER (Oct. 8, Warner Bros.) at the Cannes Film Festival. Eastwood has done a beautiful job behind the camera, but the story (taken from a novel by Dennis Lehane) is a grim, mournful piece about some unhappy Boston-area blue-collar types dealing with the decades-later consequences of a childhood rape. It doesn't let any light in, and leaves you saying to yourself at the end, "Yep...trauma begets trauma. Violated kids grow into screwed-up adults." Acting noms for Sean Penn or Tim Robbins, but that's all.

Hold It There, Kitty-Cat...

Wednesday's lead piece about Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL advanced some questioning, mostly negative views set down in last weekend's London OBSERVER article by Sean O'Hagan. The basic points in the piece ("So has Quentin Just Shot Himself in the Foot?") are that (a) Tarantino has produced a let-down experience that amounts to "a crash course" in his Asian martial-arts cinematic obsessions, and (b) that it's been weakened by Tarantino's decision to not deploy his usual arch and sassy pop-flavored dialogue.

I'm under a review-embargo agreement, but have you ever read and heard so much negative stuff about a movie you've started to believe it's your own negative stuff, and on top of this you've allowed your cynicism about the editing and selling of a film to affect your view of what this film may actually turn out to be? But then you finally see the film and you come out staggering and amazed and resolved never to let advance hype affect your expectations again? I'm not referring to anything specific, of course, but you know what I mean.

Never believe anything you read and only half of what you see. Unless you've just seen a movie that's re-written and re-booted your programming and left you startled and turned around. Hypothetically speaking, that is.

Kicked Around

I'm describing both myself and DUPLEX (Miramax, opening today). I missed the Tuesday night critics screening, but the word on this Danny De Vito-directed comedy had been pretty dismal for months. Which I had trouble believing for a long time because it's difficult for me to accept that a Ben Stiller movie might not be funny. Especially one he co-produced. Stiller has been at least fairly funny in everything he's ever done, and sometimes he's been a scream. I even thought he was hilarious in the junkie drama PERMANENT MIDNIGHT, and that was primarily a drama.

But then Miramax starting bumping the DUPLEX release date, and it was obvious something was wrong. According to Upcoming Movies, Miramax scheduled DUPLEX to open on (1) August 16, 2002, (2) September 27, 2002, (3) February 7, 2003, (4) March 14 2003, (5) October 2003, (6) early November 2003, (7) October 24, 2003 (8) October 3, 2003, and (9) September 26, 2003.

I could also never figure out why the project's original director, Greg Mottola (THE DAYTRIPPERS), left DUPLEX and was replaced by Danny DeVito. I happened to run into Stiller and Mottola in August 2001 at a performance given by Woody Allen and his Dixieland band at the Jazz Bakery. They were obviously bonding over their upcoming collaboration, but not long after Mottola was suddenly out and DeVito was in. The film was co-produced by Stiller's Red Hour Films and DUPLEX costar Drew Barrymore's Flower Films. I called everyone I know who knows or has worked with Mottola, and no one who called back (roughly half) wanted to say or speculate about what happened.

I mention this only because I know Mottola slightly (he guested at a film class I was teaching in '97) and I thought THE DAYTRIPPERS was a way-above-average indie comedy, and I wanted to see him make the next move. I'm not saying if I had been in Stiller or Barrymore's shoes when DeVito took his place, I would have necessarily been concerned. He was already on DAYTRIPPERS when the dreadfully over-baked DEATH TO SMOOCHY came out in March '02. I would have run the other way if I'd seen it in time. Adam Resnick's DEATH TO SMOOCHY script was above-average funny, but DeVito jacked it up with way too much manic energy .

The reason I missed Tuesday night's screening is because someone at Miramax told me it would be taking place at the Miramax screening room on Beverly Blvd. THE STATION AGENT was playing there instead. I later found out it showed at the Arclight. I didn't care that much. I went across the street to a health food store and bought a tin can of Dick Gregory's Bahamian Diet powder. I hadn't eaten anything over the last three or four days except water and fruit juices and apples. I was into abstinence to such an extent that it seemed okay to not see DUPLEX.

Whatever Happened to...?

Helen Hunt started as a child actress on TV in the early '70s. She stayed on the tube for nearly 25 years. Her best and biggest series role was opposite Paul Reiser in MAD ABOUT YOU starting around '92. She started to make her mark in features in the early to mid '90s (THE WATERDANCE, TWISTER). Then she hit it really big in Jim Brooks' AS GOOD AS IT GETS, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar.

She won for her performance as Carol, the fretting, single-mom waitress with the sickly son who both attracts and deeply frustrates Jack Nicholson's Melvin, a successful writer who's also an obsessive-compulsive. I didn't just admire Hunt's work in that film -- I loved it. I still think it's one of the most emotionally alive and deeply affecting ever delivered by an actress or actor in a relationship drama, or in any other kind of film for that matter.

Hunt appeared in nothing at all in '99, but she'd become very hot from the Brooks film. The following year she turned up in four films.

The first was Robert Altman's DR. T AND THE WOMEN ('00) as Richard Gere's most significant love interest. Most people saw it as a semi-dud, but it didn't hurt her particularly. Then she portrayed Haley Joel Osment's mom in Mimi Leder's PAY IT FORWARD ('00), a spectacular turkey that everyone hated and which probably did hurt her, to some extent (as it also hurt costar Kevin Spacey).

Next came a relatively minor role as Tom Hanks' abandoned girlfriend and almost-fiancee in CAST AWAY ('00). Then came her performance as Mel Gibson's advertising agency rival (and eventualy his lover and soul mate) in Nancy Meyers' WHAT WOMEN WANT.

In '01 she played a snippy office rival and later an ally and girlfriend of Woody Allen's in THE CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION -- an okay but unexceptional performance in another marginal, so-so film. The IMDB says Hunt appeared in a brief role as a truck driver in Harald Zwart's ONE NIGHT AT MCCOOL'S, which costarred Matt Dillon, Mary Jo Smith and Michael Douglas, but her foootage was cut out.

Then what? Nothing. For two years and then some. Hunt made no films in '01 and no films in '02, and has made nothing so far this year.

Hunt is on the cusp of middle age (she was born in June 1963), which everyone knows can be notoriously difficult time for actresses even of Hunt's calibre. But why would she make absolutely nothing for this long a time? She started as a child actress around age 9 in the early '70s. Nearly 30 years in the Hollywood trenches. Had she been getting more and more sick of the acting game and decided she needed to take a much-needed break?

That's the explanation from her publicist, Stephen Huvane. After finishing the Allen film Hunt "had done five movies in a row and she'd been acting since she was nine, and she was just tired. She need the time off."

Or was she unable to find anything she really wanted to be in? And did her reputation as a piece of work (a director I spoke to in Toronto told me she's not the most well-liked actress in Hollywood) have anything to do with this? This town is full of big-name actors who are not a day at the beach to work with, but people work with them anyway. Why in a fair and equal world would Hunt lose opportunites because of an allegedly (emphasis on that word) tempestuous nature?

Hunt recently appeared on the Broadway stage for a six-month run in Jasmina Reza's "Life Three Times," which co-starred John Turturro.

The IMDB says Hunt is going to appear in what appears to be a medium-budget feature called A GOOD WOMAN, which will be directed by Mike Barker (TO KILL A KING, BEST LAID PLANS) from a script by Howard Himelstein. There's also an HBO movie called EMPIRE FALLS that Fred Schepisi is directing from a script by Richard Russo (who adapted his own novel), and which will costar Paul Newman, Robin Wright and Ed Harris. Both projects are expected to be seen sometime in '04, according to Hunt's credit page.

It strikes me as uncommon for a name actress who starred opposite Jack Nicholson and won a Best Actress Oscar less than five years ago to be making a film with relatively obscure talents like Mike Barker and Howard Himelstein. And for Hunt to be making an HBO movie with Fred Schepisi...well, fine. It just seems as if she's not being offered the stuff she creatively deserves.

"She's doing these two movies because she liked the scripts," says Huvane. "She's been offered many things [these past two years] but she doesn't do things she's not attracted to. That's how she's always worked."

I also called Hunt's partner and producer, Connie Tavel, at the Beverly Hills office of Tavel Entertainment. I got the number from 411. It rang two times and then I heard a fax line tone. Her agent, Bryan Lourd of CAA, didn't take my call. (I would have gone into shock if he had.)

There's obviously a deeper, more detailed story behind Hunt's career trajectory of the past three or four years. There always is. If anyone knows or has heard anything, please write in.