THE LOVELY BONES
The Story: A slain 13 year old girl looks down from heaven recalling her rape and murder.
The Pitch: Witness meetsThe Ice Storm
Who It's For: Literary fiction devotees who haven't yet learned that adaptations of their beloved reading group selections always turn out badly.
Cause for Hope: Director Peter Jackson returns to his strongest Heavenly Creatures territory at the intersection of teenage girls and murder.
Cause for Concern: CGI-fantasyland version of heaven leads one to believe Jackson has spent too much time with trolls and giant monkeys to go back to making movies about humans again.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 7

INVICTUS
The Story: In the aftermath of apartheid, President Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) attempts to unite his divided nation behind a mostly white, underdog rugby team.
The Pitch: Amistad meets The Bad News Bears
Who It's For: The entire family and your high school history class.
Cause for Hope: What could have been an overblown, pedantic story may be genuinely stirring in a non-manipulative way in the calm, understated hands of director Clint Eastwood.
Cause for Concern: Having to watch a movie about rugby, a sport combines the torpor of soccer with the meatheadness of hockey.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 8

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG
The Story: The story of the frog prince relocated to Jazz Age New Orleans.
The Pitch: The Little Mermaid meets Angel Heart
Who It's For: The kids.
Cause for Hope: Disney's first animated African-American star; the throwback 2D animation looks rather quaintly lovable.
Cause for Concern: Encouraging young women to commit intimacies upon reptiles promotes interspecies cruelty.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 7

A SINGLE MAN
The Story: A college professor (Colin Firth) in the early 60's struggles to come to terms with the death of his partner.
The Pitch: Brokeback Mountain meets Mad Men
Who It's For: The very artsy
Cause for Hope: The always watchable Colin Firth; designer Tom Ford's directing debut received very favorable festival buzz.
Cause for Concern: Trailers have attempted to majorly gloss over the film's central gay theme.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 8

THE SLAMMIN' SALMON
The Story: A down on his luck restaurant owner starts a table-waiting contest to repay his debts.
The Pitch: Best in Show meets Rocky Balboa
Who It's For: Comedy Nerds
Cause for Hope: The Broken Lizard Comedy troupe which made this film is always a delight.
Cause for Concern: Table-waiting comedy may not be ready for its moment in the sun.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 9

On paper, the film had everything an awards race could want; directed by Oscar winner Rob Marshall, revisiting the musical soil from which propelled Chicago to a million trophies; a cast filled with more Oscar bait than you can count including Judi Dench, Sophia Loren, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson and led by Oscar's golden boy himself Daniel Day Lewis; a story adapted from a cinema classic.

It should have been Nine's year, but the first indications are, it very much wont be.

Of the three reviews out on the streets, two are tepid at best. Although em>Variety's Todd McCarthy is very positive, this does not add up to the beginnings of a groundswell.

McCarthy called Nine a "savvy piece of musical filmmaking. Sophisticated, sexy and stylishly decked out, Rob Marshall's disciplined, tightly focused film impresses and amuses." He goes on to praise the handling of the adaptation of both the Broadway musical from whence it came and the Fellini film 8 1/2 on which the musical was loosely based.

So much for the nice. Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Kurt Honeycutt begins, "Nine marks the number of terrific acting and singing talents poorly used in this flat rendition of the Broadway musical...The disappointments are many here, from a starry cast the film ill uses to flat musical numbers that never fully integrate into the dramatic story. The only easy prediction is that Nine is not going to revive the slumbering musical film genre."

And over at The Hot Blog, David Poland can't slap enough hurt on the film to make it pay for his disappointment. He begins, Have you ever seen a singer with a great voice and no grasp of the lyrics? That's Rob Marshall. Nine is a movie with two memorable songs, performances that are routinely better than what the performers were given to perform, a problematically intense but not charming performance at the center, and most painfully, a lack of basic storytelling." And goes on in rich detail to count all the ways the film fails to live up to its promise, from a lifeless story construction to a charmless performance from Day Lewis.

So all that leaves us with an awards race right where it was last week, with the flawed campaigns of Precious, The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air keeping Oscar locked in their three-way death. Below is our end of the week check on the conventional wisdom of Oscar-land, with only three months and change to go:

↑ Up In the Air: Won the National Board of Review Best Film award which gives Air, dismissed by some as too lightweight, some needed gravitas.
↔ Precious: Strong showing at the Spirits nominations, but doubts persist about how well the heavy-handed story will wear in the long campaign. The National Board omitted the film from its top ten list altogether.
↓ The Hurt Locker: Was bizarrely ineligible for Spirits nominations as it was entered last year. Needing a break out win if its to maintain its place in the top three.
↓ The Lovely Bones: Met very mixed reviews in its London premiere, some saying the story is too Law And Order to make a serious contender.
↔ Invictus: Respectful but not jumping for joy buzz from early screenings. With Oscar having showered so many trophies on director Clint Eastwood already, will be likely reluctance to let him into the front of the race with a merely so so turn.
? Avatar: The last remaining question mark, unviewed by the critics. Despite a preponderance of early evidence to the contrary, some dare to hope for another Titanic to sweep the Oscar table clean.

Although at first glance it seems to be divided down national lines with the American critics coming out with the pitchforks and battle axes while critics in the UK, where the film debuted last night, seem to mostly like it.

In the US the trade critics are first out of the gate with their notices, and they are not one bit pleased with what Mr Jackson has been up to all these years, tinkering away with the little tale of a slain girl looking down from heaven and remembering her rape and murder.

Variety's Todd McCarthy writes, "Unfortunately, the massive success Jackson has enjoyed in the intervening years with his CGI-heavy "The Lord of the Rings" saga (the source of which receives fleeting homage in a bookstore scene here) and "King Kong" has infected the way he approaches this far more intimate tale...the director has indulged his whims to create constantly shifting backdrops depicting an afterlife evocative of The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz one moment, The Little Prince or Teletubbies the next."

And at the Hollywood Reporter, Kurt Honeycutt bemoans that Jackson has turned Alice Sebold's magical otherworldly tale into a simple Law and Order-like thriller, while conceding it works okay on that level.

Over in the UK however, The Times' critic calls the film a return to Jackson's pre-blockbuster form that she showed in cult classic Heavenly Creatures. While Total Film gives Bones four stars, calling it, "A sister film to Heavenly Creatures, brimming with not just tears but imagination, thrills and verve. It's heart-on-sleeve, sure, but it also has a whiff of awards potential."

But while the Bones lingered, America's awards pundits had, sight unseen, all but written off the film's Oscar chances, locking in Precious, The Hurt Locker and Up In the Air as the race's lone heavyweights. On The Envelope's pundits poll (in which Defamer casts a vote) Lovely Bones came in a distant ninth place for best picture favorites. On Movie City News' Gurus of Gold poll, Bones takes the number eight slot.

The pundits have been pining for a shake-up in a race that seemed depressingly settled half a year before the Oscar show. Could Bones be coming in with enough support from some people at least that it will stampede the race? The question will soon be the subject of many a column, blog item and tip sheet in awards land.

Via Awardsdaily.

Suddenly the Universe is a very cold and empty place.

• Apparently we are not a nation of people waiting for Amanda Woodward to return to Melrose Place. Heather Locklear's trip back to the series did little to ease its struggles, lifting its gruesome ratings by a mere 15 percent to a 0.8 rating in the 18 - 45 demo. [Hollywood Reporter]

• Meanwhile, just as the world was sending its mocking obituaries to the printers, guess who's having a good week? Jay Leno is up five percent this week, "matching its highest ratings in six weeks." [Hollywood Reporter]

• With two and a half months to go, the Super Bowl's ad space is almost sold out. CBS reports a 90 percent sell-out rate thus far, meaning only six slots are still available. Like everything else these days, Super Bowl ad sales are being viewed as a barometer of the nation's economic health. [Ad Age]

• A Writers Guild report of diversity among its ranks finds "little if any improvement" for the prospects of women and minority writers. Variety writes that the report "found that women scribes remain stuck at 28% of TV employment and 18% in features while the minority share has been frozen at 6% since 1999." [Variety]

• Jennifer Hudson will play Winnie Mandela, the ex-wife of the ex-South African President Nelson Mandela in Winnie, a biopic to be directed by Darrell J. Roodt, maker of Cry the Beloved Country. [Variety]

• Roger Ebert may be off the airwaves, but his influence lives on, remarkably, as the online buzz king. A survey by Nielsen of which critics dominate the internet reveals that Ebert remains a goliath online, crushing all the competition combined. [thehotblog]

• Making 2012's grosses look like the change fallen under the cushions of your sofa, the video game Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 reported sales of more than $550 million in the first week of its release. The LA Times puts production costs on the game in the $40 - $50 million range (a fraction of 2012 or Avatar), putting its total budget including marketing somewhere around $200 million. Who's in the wrong business now, movie people? [LA Times]

• Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson told a reporter that, despite his PG-13 rating he had upped the violence in his upcoming film after early test screening audiences "were simply not satisfied" with the depiction of a character's death. [Hitfix]

• Nikki Finke reports that investor Carl Icahn has been snatching up MGM bonds like "A bat out of hell." [Deadline]

• The LA Times reports further on Disney's heroic decision to pull the plug on McG's attempt to America's memories of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with his remake. The paper writes that execs saw the project, scripted by novelist Michael Chabon as "too dark" and that they will take another stab at it somewhere down the line. [LA Times]

(Whether or not the phrase, "For God's sake, it's not the fucking Elvish afterlife, Peter!" was uttered at any given point we can not say.) Now, thebadandugly.com reports the movie's release date has been pushed from March 13, 2009 to the far more vague "fall 2009." First Valkyrie, now this: We'd just gotten used the fact that we'd have to wait months for our one-eyed Hitler-hunter yarn. But at the rate things are going now, it seems like we'll never get a change to enjoy kicking back to a brutally raped and murdered tween's mile-high observations about the family who has yet to discover her skeletal remains. It's no fair!

• The Lovely Bones Delayed [thebadandtheugly.com]

There's trouble in paradise. Our spies have reported that Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones has ceased filming due to a rift between the big man and his art director over the best way to depict Heaven. [...]

The Wellington crew are having a break while the creative differences are sorted.

Meanwhile, at the Speed Racer premiere in London, Empire reports that Bones cast member Susan Sarandon has expressed dissatisfaction with her character. "I play the comic relief, an alcoholic grandmother - my first grandma - but she doesn't really seem like a real grandmother because she has a lot of hair and jewellery and nails and liquor. I don't think I ever talk without a cigarette and a drink in my hand."

"Peter Jackson is really a nice guy and very interesting. It was really a very different way of working. We had a good time, I'm really curious to see what it's like because he kept pushing me to be more and more extreme and sometimes that's when you make your big mistakes so I'm not sure how it will come off - it will be interesting to see it from the point of view of the audience."

Portraying Heaven on screen is a far dicier proposition than, say, the Fires of Mordor—all those feathers, fluff, and pearly gates threaten to tip your vision too easily into the Realm of the Cheesy Afterlife. (Just ask the guy who thought sticking Robin Williams in a Monet painting in What Dreams May Come was a good idea.) Still, we have high hopes for any Jackson film, and we only pray he doesn't use this production to indulge his more volatile creative instincts, pushing a tray of painstainkingly hand-sculpted femurs and ulnas into his prop master's face, screaming, "These bones aren't nearly lovely enough!" before storming off to his trailer.

• Scoop! Lovely Bones Hits A Snag [flicks.co.nz via slashfilm.com]
• Speed Racer Premiere Report [Empire Online]

THOSE old "creative differences" are to blame for director Peter Jackson's firing of Ryan Gosling from "Lovely Bones." "Peter couldn't stand Ryan," said one source.

Though Variety reported that Gosling had "stepped down" and was replaced by Mark Wahlberg, our source said, "Ryan cut his own hair, and was fighting with wardrobe. He was so demanding . . . Peter booted him two days before filming started." The flick is based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. A rep for Gosling did not return calls.

Given that Jackson, the veteran director of feature films that have grossed more than a billion dollars domestically, surely realizes that the price of working with Genius involves tolerating the talent's occasional behavioral quirks and would be unfazed by matters as trivial as those mentioned above (or the weight gain referenced in Variety), we're inclined to speculate that Gosling's on-set behavior was considerably more unconventional than reported. Perhaps the notoriously intense actor insisted on preparing for his most heart-wrenching scenes by laying down in a pile of bones he claimed were those of a murdered teenage girl, a pre-performance ritual that he considered indispensable to meeting the emotional demands of his role, but which understandably made the crew uneasy. Happily, however, Jackson should have a more docile collaborator in replacement Mark Wahlberg, whose needs should prove no more onerous than requesting that no one knock on his trailer door as he performs the six-hundred crunches that comprise his daily acting prep.

• Last-minute Ax [Page Six]