The latest Wim Wenders (produced) film, The Open Road, was sounding pretty decent back in February, when Jeff Bridges, Justin Timberlake, and Mary Steenburgen signed on. Now it's gotten even better -- The Hollywood Reporter has posted that both Lyle Lovett and Harry Dean Stanton have joined the cast. I just wish that Wim was heading this feature, since the last time that both Stanton and Wenders were on the same project, it was in the great film Paris, Texas back in 1984. This time around, writer/director Michael Meredith gets the honor (he did write Wenders' Land of Plenty, so this isn't out of left field).

The film is a reconciliation tale that focuses on a man (Timberlake) who is trying to reconcile with his former sports pro father (Bridges) as they head to his ailing mother's bedside. As Christopher Campbell noted back in April of 2007, there's also a girlfriend in the road trip mix. THR says that Kate Mara is the other player in this film, so I imagine she's Justin's love interest. As for Lyle and Harry -- the former plays a Memphis bartender who "lends a helpful ear" to Timberlake's character, while the latter will play his grandfather.

After his creepy stint as Roman Grant in Big Love, it will be nice to see him as a grandfather who isn't some gangster-like Mormon. Then again, maybe he is, but that'd be a totally different sort of story. Production is currently underway in Louisiana.

Ah, Dustin! If you've only been exposed to the latter-day, comic Dustin Hoffman (Meet the Fockers, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium) or the better-known, showy Dustin (Rain Man, Tootsie), then Straight Time will be a pleasant revelation. It's of a piece with his work in All the President's Men, which came a little before this film, and Kramer vs. Kramer, which came a little after, in that he plays a character who feels true to life, someone you might meet on the street and recognize as a kindred soul. Really, his character harkens back to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, albeit a Benjamin Braddock who has been shaped for a life in crime rather than a career in plastics.

Hoffman inhabits Max Dembo like a well-worn shoe. Max has been released from prison after six years. He rides a bus to Los Angeles, gets off with his tiny paper bag of possessions, eats a hot dog. It's only the next day, when he visits his parole officer (M. Emmet Walsh), that it's revealed he did something wrong: he didn't report to the halfway house as ordered, which makes him immediately suspect in the eyes of the parole officer. Max's mood changes swiftly from genial respect to rebellious belligerence to resigned subservience as the parole officer questions him. He knows how the game is supposed to be played. He's been in and out of criminal institutions since he was a kid. That doesn't make it any easier for him.

Max reaches an agreement with the parole officer to find a job and rent a room within the week. He promptly heads to an employment agency, where he meets Jenny (Theresa Russell). She is very young and beautiful; she locks eyes with Max and doesn't look away when he tells her that he's a convict. He convinces her that he is desperate for a job, even as he flirts with her. He gets the job in a canning factory and rents a tiny room. So far, so good. Then he makes a big mistake.

Oh, what times we live in, that we can enjoy foul-mouthed documentaries like The Aristocrats and F**k. I grew up equating "documentary" with "National Geographic," so any nonfiction film that uses four-letter words or would shock my mom, automatically makes me smile a little. As a result, I was slightly biased toward Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project from the moment the film's subject uttered his first profanities during a stand-up routine.

Rickles reportedly has been reluctant to have his live performances recorded until now, but let director John Landis shoot part of his Vegas show. The documentary uses the footage from Rickles' stand-up act as a springboard for a biography and filmography of Rickles, a superficial discussion about intentionally offensive comedy, and a general reflection upon Las Vegas and how it's changed in the past 40 years or so.

A quirky, character-driven throwback to all those lovable, yet meandering '70s flicks, The Wendell Baker Story arrives at a time when people are itching for a large, big-budgeted special effects spectacular. This film is not that. However, it does reunite brothers Luke and Owen Wilson for the first time since they shared the same big screen in Wes Anderson's 2001 pic The Royal Tenenbaums. To make it even more of a family affair, the eldest Wilson brother Andrew helps the younger Luke direct, while the result ends up falling somewhere between Bottle Rocket and Rancho Deluxe; a neatly-wrapped Texas meal that comes with enough mouth-watering sides to keep your belly full as your mind begins to wonder.

Wendell Baker (Luke Wilson) is a low-maintenance conman whose friendly, good-natured optimism hinders more than it helps him; so much so that all he ends up doing is conning himself. Knee-deep in his latest scam (which involves driving to the border to sell fake Texas drivers licenses to illegal immigrants), Wendell figures he has it all worked out. Not to mention there's a little lady (Eva Mendes) waiting for him back at home, if he remembers to pick her up from work on time. He's such a free-spirited, "everything will turn out just fine" moron that even when the feds bust him, he shakes off a lengthily prison sentence as if he accidentally forgot to pick up a bottle of water on the way to the gym. But that's Wendell. The way he sees it, life is too short to feel pain. But when his sweet-as-pie girlfriend Doreen decides to ditch Wendell because he's too busy mending rifts between the blacks and the skinheads while in prison, the old "you don't know what you got until it's gone" theme hits him harder than a bull at a rodeo.

If you are the kind of person who gets a little sick of all the good cheer at this time of year, then you just might be in the mood for a little more "coal in your stocking." That is when the downer Christmas movie gets its chance to shine. Most holiday flicks are all about making you feel good about family and Christmas and all that good stuff, but some films decide to go the other route and make you feel so damn awful about what you're watching that suddenly a burnt turkey and a family fight at the dinner table don't seem so bad.

Here are some of what I think are the most depressing holiday movies. If nothing else, at least they remind us it could always get worse. ...

One Magic Christmas (1985)
This movie is all about the guilt. In a long line of films that are meant to make you feel guilty about all of the overspending and extravagance of the holidays, One Magic Christmas stands out. It follows a poor family with no hope of a Christmas in sight, as the mom (Mary Steenburgen) works too hard and has lost her joy in the season. Sure enough, a Christmas angel (in the creepy form of Harry Dean Stanton) shows her the error of her ways. Throw in the extra plot lines of a kidnapping, a shooting and a drowning, and you have yourself one heck of a depressing Christmas flick.

As Cinematicess Martha Fischer and I were spitballing ideas on how to create a regular feature that would spread some love to all those wonderful character actors out there, my first impulse was to call it "The Walken Award." But Martha, being quite appreciably smarter than I, said "Scott, if you're trying to create a column about underrated or unacknowledged character actors ... Walken's not your flagship guy. Everyone already LOVES Christopher Walken!" And she was right. So I flipped through my Favorite Actors file and tried a few new names on for size. "The Dabney Coleman Award? Nah, too grouchy. The Harry Dean Stanton Award? The M. Emmet Walsh ... Maybe just a bit too obscure... Oh jeez, I got it: J.T. freakin' Walsh!" It was perfect, mainly because Walsh was such a fantastic character actor, but also because he's now sadly demised -- and therefore it felt kinda "right" to name an award after him.

Unfortunately, a bunch of smart movie geeks had beaten me to the punch ... by a few years, at least.

After publishing our piece "The J.T. Walsh Awards: An Introduction," I got an email from a reader informing me that a very popular website called Fametracker has long been running a feature column called "The J.T. Walsh Memorial: Hey! It's That Guy!" -- which means that A) they got there first so the name obviously belongs to Fametracker, and B) brilliant minds really do think alike. Rest assured that this was not an attempt to shanghai or piggy-back another website's concept -- apparently the 'net's just full of people who really dig character actors -- especially J.T. Walsh.

So we ask you, the Cinematical reader, to help us come up with a new name for this award. I'm still partial to "The Walken Award," but I'm even more partial to getting some help from our loyal readers. So think hard about those wonderfully familiar faces that seem to pop up in every single movie, and then leave your suggestions in the comments bin.

It's hard to believe, I know, but it's been a whole year since Cinematical was officially born. Actually, our birthday was last Saturday, March 10, but we were so busy with our heads buried in movies we let it slip right by. A lot has changed around here in the past year - we've gone from being a little film blog with former editor Karina Longworth blogging all by her lonesome, to a site with a full-fledged staff, covering festivals, reviewing lots of movies, and bringing you up-to-the-minute movie news. Now Karina has moved on to another project (although we're very glad she's still around writing her excellent new column, Laws and Sausages, and doing some other cool stuff for us), and spandy-new Editor-in-Chief James Rocchi is at the helm, with Martha Fischer and me rounding out the editorial team, working hard to continue to bring you what you've been coming here for, while adding a few refinements here and there. It's been a great year at Cinematical, and we're looking forward to the next one. In the meantime, here's a look back at the past year in Cinematical: