Scott Bowles in USA Today quoted me in his story about performances that should not be overlooked by Oscar voters. I’d add Joseph Gordon-Levitt (and the rest of the cast, who were all brilliant) in The Lookout and Irfan Kahn and Tabu of The Namesake, Paul Schneider for Lars and the Real Girl (and he was just as good in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”), and Michelle Pfeiffer in Stardust.

It is a shame that Will Smith’s reasonable comments have been taken out of context and he has been forced to apologize.
Here is what he said:

Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming. I wake up every day full of hope, positive that every day is going to be better than yesterday. And I’m looking to infect people with my positivity. I think I can start an epidemic.

I hope he still thinks so. What he was saying is that even people who inflict great evil on the world usually believe that what they are doing is right. Recognizing that is an essential element of understanding the nature of evil and how to prevent it. No one who understood Smith’s point — or who has ever spent five minutes observing his behavior — could imagine he was in any way endorsing Hitler’s actions. Tim Gordon, as usual, has it right: “this is a situation where an actor gave an opinion and the interviewer twisted the context only after he received an answer that left room for further interpretation.”

Writer-director Michael Davis has stripped the action movie down to its essence in a mind-blowing mash-up fueled with testosterone, adrenaline, and weapons-grade plutonium. No esoteric references in the title. No Robert McKee-mandated 10 pages at the beginning to make us fall in love with the hero. No pause for a hot sex scene. Oh, there’s a hot sex scene, but there’s no pause. Insert your own shooting joke here. There’s time for a few “Who is that chef?”-style expressions of increasingly furious amazement. But there’s no time for a detour to check in with the wise man in the forest, that former insider who knows all the secrets. This is pure action.

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My favorite movies this year, all pretty much tied for first place:
The Namesake
Charlie Wilson’s War
Atonement
Gone Baby Gone
Into the Wild
No Country for Old Men
Juno
Once
No End in Sight
Lars and the Real Girl
And runners-up:
Sicko
King of Kong
Persepolis
American Gangster
The Savages
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
There Will be Blood
Michael Clayton
Waitress
The Lookout

This was a very good year for family movies. Here are the best:
Bridge to Terabithia
Golden Compass
Surf’s Up
Enchanted
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Hairspray
Transformers
Stardust
The Water-Horse
Ratatouille
Runners-up:
Bratz
The Last Mimzy
Game Plan
Meet the Robinsons
Shrek 3
The Astronaut Farmer