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I don't know about anyone else, but I'm thrilled about Penelope Cruz's Oscar nomination for Nine (220 screens). I guess everyone hates this movie, and I know in my heart of hearts that it's not very good. It's frankly kind of a bad idea, although I haven't seen the stage play and I'm of the firm conviction that it is possible to make a good movie out of a bad idea. But that's not why the movie works. It works because it's so completely nutty, as only an all-star Hollywood extravaganza can be. (Plus, how many recent all-star extravaganzas can you name?) It's cheerfully clueless, and moves forward with pride and confidence. And Penelope is the best thing in it.

Penelope is the only one in the cast who seems aware that she's not making Great Art. Her "spitfire" character operates just left of the rest of the proceedings, and she's ready to go off if things get too sludgy or stiff. She draws your eye right to her: she's dangerous and sexy, but also funny and touchingly vulnerable. It's almost the same character that won her the Oscar last year, in Woody Allen's great Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and perhaps even similar to the role that earned her first nomination, in Volver (2006).

What constitutes a remake of a documentary? Would you consider Milk to be based on The Times of Harvey Milk? Rob Epstein, who directed the latter, was thanked in the credits of the former and his film was surely an inspiration. His footage was even lifted or recreated for parts of Gus Van Sant's dramatized version. But Milk was ultimately deemed an original work, at least as far as the Academy Awards are concerned.

If you were to argue the case that the biopic is based on the documentary, where then would you draw the line? Is Monster based on Nick Broomfield's first Aileen Wuornos film (he too is thanked)? Is part of Munich based on One Day in September? And speaking of films by Kevin Macdonald, is The Last King of Scotland at all a remake of Barbet Schroeder's General Idi Amin Dada? It does feature footage from the doc, after all.

There's no denying Cate Blanchett's segment of I'm Not There is lifted from D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, but it's easier to say the latter was merely used as reference. Frederick Wiseman meanwhile insinuates Stanley Kubrick stole much of the first half of Full Metal Jacket from his own boot camp film Basic Training, which was indeed used by Kubrick as uncredited research material. The later fiction film is considered solely based on an autobiographical novel by Gustav Hasford.

"Have fun."

I'd forgotten those two words of blessing passed on from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson during the first five minutes of 2003's The Rundown until I re-watched it last night. They pass each other in a nightclub, Schwarzenegger making a last-minute cinematic pit-stop on his way to the California Governor's office, and The Rock on his way out of the WWE's squared circle and into movie stardom.

It was obviously supposed to be a symbolic passing of the torch, from the last generation's action superstar to the young up-and-comer, but what went wrong? The Rock has only done two action films since then (Walking Tall and Doom, which he wasn't even the star of), and has instead spent most of his career in comedies (Be Cool, Get Smart) or family fare (Planet 51, Race to Witch Mountain, The Gameplan).

Right now, the former pro wrestler can be seen in the high-concept (and lukewarmly reviewed) comedy The Tooth Fairy as a hockey player who gains magical abilities and fairy wings to place quarters under the pillows of toothless children. His next film is Adam McKay's latest Will Farrell comedy The Other Guys. Where's the next generation Schwarzenegger we were hoping for?

Jeff Bridges has already been nominated and/or won several awards for his performance as "Bad Blake" in Crazy Heart (93 screens), including a SAG award, a Golden Globe and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award. And, of course, many people have pointed out the film's similarity to Tender Mercies (1983), the feature that finally won Robert Duvall an Oscar (after being passed over for things like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now) -- not to mention that Duvall is actually in the new film, too. These awards, and potentially an Oscar nomination, are just our way of suddenly waking up and saying, "you know who's really good? Jeff Bridges." Frankly, Crazy Heart is a "just okay" film, but he's great in it. I guess there's just something about sad country singers that captures the voters' attention (with the added bonus that Bridges' character is an alcoholic).

I won't begrudge Bridges his hard-earned Oscar, but it's a case worth looking at. The reason Bridges generally goes unnoticed (with four Oscar nominations scattered over three decades) is because he's so good, and because he works so often. He has worked in many leading roles, but he's not exactly what you'd call a big movie star, and he has worked in many supporting roles, but he's not exactly what you'd call a character actor. He disappears into each role, but he does it without calling attention to the disappearing act, as Brando did. Some actors choose to work less often, and thereby turning each movie into an event. Chaplin was a famous case, and Daniel Day-Lewis is a good example today; he has appeared in just fifteen major movies over a 30-year career. But Bridges works a couple of times each year, and it's easy to take that quantity for granted.

It had to come to this. Now monkeys -- sorry, chimpanzees -- are making their own documentaries.

Well, that's not entirely correct, but that's the angle by which tomorrow's BBC special The Chimpcam Project is being reported by most media. The reality is that the doc is about a behavioral scientist, though it does feature footage shot solely by 11 chimps from the Edinburgh Zoo. And the producer who gave them the smash-proof cameras is now looking to put other kinds of animals in the director's chair as well.

I wish I could say I find the idea fascinating, or even adorable. But honestly, I haven't been this annoyed about the implied ease of documentary filmmaking since Jonathan Caouette made every young wannabe think they can and therefore should make a film about themselves with his very cheap and very self-indulgent Sundance hit Tarnation (which can now be seen, in parts, on YouTube, where it belongs).

Just because you can make a documentary doesn't mean you should make one. And just because someone seems like a good subject for a documentary doesn't mean he or she should be one. For example, the new documentary Off and Running is about a black teenager raised by two white lesbians -- along with their other adopted children -- who seeks out her birth mother. Sounds like a great subject for a film, but this particular doc, directed by Nicole Opper, is actually quite dull and pointless.

As a list junkie, I'm still having a great time combing over the lists of the best films of the decade. In particular, I'm enthralled by the polls conducted at Indiewire and Film Comment (neither of which I participated in). The polls agreed on seven of the top ten films, and they ranged from well-known films to a couple of titles that feel pretty obscure. One film that reached the top ten on both lists barely ever had any distribution or attention in the United States. It showed up in the spring of 2007 on no more than 2 screens at a time, and its total U.S. gross was about $16,000 (that's sixteen thousand, not million). I saw it on a DVD screener at my house, and to the best of my knowledge, it never opened for a regular run in my hometown. The film is Syndromes and a Century, from Thailand, written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He studied for a time in Chicago, so if you can't pronounce his name, he doesn't mind being called "Joe."

The release of catalogue or older titles is always a mixed bag of anticipation and fear: depending on how many versions of a film were already released, studios may only pour so much money into a re-release, even for an upgrade, and that's assuming there is room for improvement over the content and bonus materials on earlier discs or even in box sets. Meanwhile, of course, there's the whole question of how much you'll still like something that you haven't seen in a year or five, which prompts a little bit of that fear once you pop in a movie again and find the viewing experience different than you remember. (Which is also the reason for my "Shelf Life" column.)

Cliffhanger is a film I remember best as Sylvester Stallone's first major comeback after floundering through a series of mediocre sequels, crappy comedies and stillborn franchise-launchers (gloriously homoerotic though Tango & Cash remains). Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray last week, and although I was curious how well it held up as a film -- notwithstanding its awesome opening sequence -- I elected to choose 8 ½ as this week's "Shelf Life" subject, instead picking Cliffhanger as my "Making the (Up) Grade" target.

On January 12, 2010, the good folks at Criterion released 8 ½ on Blu-ray, smartly capitalizing on the release of Rob Marshall's musical Nine in order to raise awareness among contemporary moviegoers (particularly non-cinephiles) who might not be aware that the musical in part based its story on Federico Fellini's 1963 film. I didn't own Fellini's film prior to its release in high definition, and hadn't seen it in many years – which meant that Marshall's interpretation of the material was unfortunately foremost when thoughts of any version of the story came to mind.

But despite Marshall's award-winning success shepherding Chicago to the screen in 2002, he failed this time to overcome the most obvious challenge inherent in his source material – namely, finding a way to make his main character compelling, much less sympathetic. Less an oblivious, distracted visionary than a self-absorbed megalomaniac, Guido Anselmi in Marshall's film was singularly, consistently unlikeable, and offered few clues why anyone would consider him an artist, much less a "significant" one; if leading man Daniel Day-Lewis' performance evoked anything, it wasn't Marcello Mastroianni's work as Guido in Fellini's film or even Raul Julia's turn in the role on Broadway, but the menacing, failed charm of Robert De Niro as saxophonist Jimmy Doyle in Scorsese's stillborn 1977 opus New York, New York.

In which case, watching the original film wasn't merely preferable, it was necessary. Was Guido always a petulant, irresponsible, irredeemable philanderer? Or did Fellini find greater depths within the character's seemingly superficial heart? And moreover, discover that the tapestry of inspirations and experiences Guido has in the film actually exert some influence over his creativity, intellect, and his passions? It was these questions that lingered as I popped in Criterion's new Blu-ray and sat down to watch 8 ½ again, for the first time.

The Facts:

Before Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was released in theaters last fall, I had a couple of opportunities to preview footage from the film. It only hinted at the twisted and yet somehow purely earnest charms that directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller embedded in ambitious inventor Flint Lockwood's fantastical story. Suffice it to say that I loved the film as a whole -- although I'm not quite sure where I would have fit it in, in retrospect I would have included it in my Top Ten of 2009 -- but of all of these sequences I saw, one had me in stitches every time and ultimately became one of my favorite scenes in any movie released last year: the snowball fight.

The scene starts innocently enough as the town's top cop, Earl Devereaux (Mr. T) asks Flint (Bill Hader) for a favor for his son Calvin's (Bobb'e J. Thompson) birthday. Flint obliges and sends ice cream snowballs raining down from the skies in all sorts of colors and flavors (in a terrific visual gag, children invade rivers of vanilla and chocolate, while only one investigates strawberry). Calvin invites Flint to join in on their snowball fight -- a concept that he's entirely unfamiliar with -- but the scientist turns mad with enthusiasm as he embraces the challenge to decimate his adversaries.