The great movie day of this year’s holiday was the day after Thanksgiving.  The holiday itself was great fun, but the hosting responsibilities and the dishes and the concern that all were fed took off some of the relaxation.  (We did watch the last act of Heat… and thanks to the presence of Jeff Wells… yes, Jeff was at my home for Thanksgiving… I threw the DVD in the machine so we didn’t have to watch the full screen version… he demands a good letterbox.)

The best fun of the evening, however, came care of the commercially released Shrek DVD.  There are lots of cool features on the two discs, but nothing quite as Christmas Morning as the Re-voice Studio, which allows people to put their own voices into a dozen scenes from the film.  While Jeff’s elder son watched coolly from a distance, his younger son and my 12-year-old nephew and 11-year-old niece re-voiced scene after scene, laughing and imitating and giggling time after time after time.  The “game” requires a DVD-Rom player, but if you have the equipment, it’s a lot of fun.  (I can barely wait to play with the toy with adults only.)

With all the leftovers in the refrigerator, Friday came and my duties with the Miami Film Festival came into focus.  I was planning on watching a documentary that I had high hopes for.  So I called up a friend, who came over, and we popped the leftovers into the over to heat and the movie in the VCR to play.  The leftovers were more successful than the film.  In fact, we got through not only that film, but about a half dozen others that I had brought on "vacation" with me. 

Before heating up the pie, I decided to shoot movie fish in a barrel and popped in Fox Searchlight’s The Deep End, which I had in the apartment, thanks to the upcoming BFCA voting. 

Wow! 

The film was one of my favorites at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.  I never had a chance to see it again during its successful theatrical run.  But what a beauty of a film!  A classic film noir in the shade of blue.  As I watched, I thought about the remarkable arrival of both white-skinned, tall, thin, non-American redheads, Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett and how similar the two were… and how different.  I thought about the great small performance by Raymond J. Barry.  When the laugh beat came as the ER doctor turned hood instructed Swinton on CPR, I wondered about art and whether the artist was obligated to change the script to fit the actor’s history or if giving it no quarter was right or if the guys who made the film actually wanted people in the know to have a little chuckle about then.

Swinton should be Oscar nominated.  And directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel  would be Oscar nominated if the director’s branch was as adventurous as the writer’s branch.  (Of course, the writer’s have the advantage of 10 nominations to play with, while the director’s have only 5.  Look for an adapted screenplay nod for The Deep End.)  But most importantly, it’s a really terrific film.

How does one follow that experience (enhanced by half a pumpkin pie and a can of Ready Whip)?  Only one answer… Amelie.

So much water under the bridge since I first saw the film at Telluride.  Would it hold up?  Yes.  And like a fine wine, it got better.  Beats that seemed long to me, like the amount of time spent at the Parisian photo booths, seemed to pass effortlessly.  The little trips off into tangential directions seemed even more to form, relaxed in way that similar efforts in movies like Run Lola Run (a different kind of genius) were unable to achieve.  And the more subtle story points all rose to the surface, gently floating above, just waiting to be plucked.

One leaves Amelie floating on air.

But earth is not far.  And my nephew’s call, desperate to see Harry Potter, was the bazooka shell in my balloon.  But I went, out of love for my nephew.  The seats were in the third row.  And having had The Harry Potter Experience and having my sister sitting by my nephew, I felt comfortable making a run for the exit as soon as the lights went down.  Unfortunately, the only other films at the multi were Shallow Hal and The One and I had wallowed in Shallow Hal already, so… given my state of reverie, I made it through about 10 minutes of The One, experiencing Jet Li’s two characters who couldn’t speak English much better than I speak Mandarin… had to run.

After walking the streets of Santa Monica, I stepped back into Harry Potter for the last 20 minutes and wasn’t disappointed… it was still… well… a grand marketing tool. 

A number of you wrote in to question my doubts about Harry Potter hitting the $300 million mark.  Of course, hitting $200 million in about two weeks is an impressive start.  And while I admit that $300 million looks pretty good, I’m still not 100 percent convinced.  The two films I look at as comparisons are The Phantom Menace and Toy Story 2.   The thing about TS2 is that by my analysis, Harry Potter is only about $40 million ahead of TS2’s trajectory, thanks to an earlier start (the week before Thanksgiving, as opposed to the weekend of Thanksgiving).  That would come up short of $300 million.  As for The Phantom Menace, people forget that despite the bad reviews, The Phantom Menace was one of the leggiest pictures of the last few years.  Yes, it opened huge.  But it held up better than other films that opened huge.  A weak commercial field this December, other than LOTR, could make Potter’s ascension easier.  But don’t be surprised if the domestic final is $310 million or something like that.  Warner Bros. is already, smartly, pushing away questions about the video release.  But kids will expect to be seeing the film at home come April.  And I would be shocked if they were wrong. 

The rest of the movie weekend was pretty quiet. A little bit of this here, a little bit of that there.

But my trip back to Miami was eventful, again, thanks to a studio marketing department.  Ironically, the department in question was Warner Bros and the movie that made my trip to Miami memorable was Training Day. 

When you hear people hyping a performance in September for Oscar, one tends to do a bit of eye rolling.  But Denzel Washington’s performance is tremendous… really up there amongst the best of his career.   Playing the bad guy is not something we’ve seen much of from Denzel and as much as I enjoy evil turns by guys like Travolta, Washington delivers a performance that is free of movie star stuff.   As “my nigger” continually comes out of “Malcolm X’s” mouth, I wondered why I wasn’t more shocked.  And the reason was that the performance was so strong, so poised, that I was with that character, not with Denzel Washington. 

The film also marks an impressive uptick in the previously stalled career of Antoine Fuqua, who made a film with style and substance, with the former never (or almost never) overwhelming the latter.  And that is saying something for the man who gave us The Replacement Killers.  No doubt, his finest stroke was finding a really strong script (credited to screenwriter David Ayer, previously of U-571 and The Fast & The Furious). 

Training Day is not so fine a gem as The Deep End.  But it is a solid, adult movie, a powerful step above the Paramount gotcha films.  (By the way, those Paramount films, which seem to feature John Travolta more often than not, are about the only recognizable brand product you’ll find from a studio these days.  And the studio has been successful with, I believe, every one.  Finding an audience for films made at a price.)

All things considered, a lot to be thankful for.