Isn’t one of the reasons we go to movies to fall in love?  To discover someone who makes us feel better – about ourselves or the world or life? 

Ben Foster, who is having a career upswing thanks to his work in “The Messenger,” spoke recently about looking at the screen to see someone who feels like we feel.  That’s the job of an actor, I guess, and we’ve had some wonderful occasions recently to feel that and to fall in love.

There’s Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe in “Precious,” who is simply awesome as the stifled bud who blossoms.  Carey Mulligan so entranced me with her pixiesh charm, super aware intelligence and Audrey Hepburn-style transformation from suburban teen to sophisticated woman in “An Education.”
Sandra Bullock and Vera Farmiga are hardlyl newcomers but they are both giving extraordinary performances in, respectively, “The Blind Side” and, opening in Boston Dec. 4th, “Up in the Air.”
I’ve just seen “Brothers” which also opens Dec. 4th and features a trio of well-known actors: Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.  For some reason I had only modest expectations for this drama.  First, it’s an American adaptation of Suzanne Bier’s extraordinary 2004 Danish original, also called “Brothers” – and remakes can be depressing affairs if you are even slightly familiar with the original.  And then these three haven’t exactly been overwhelming us lately.  Yet “Brothers” I found to be extraordinarily involving with an astonishing level of performance that began with Maguire’s Oscar-worthy work and continued right down to smaller roles from Sam Shepard as the boys’ troubled, semi-alcoholic military father, Mare Winningham as his maternal second wife, Carey Mulligan (again) in a devastating single scene as a war widow, Patrick Flueger as an unmoored captured soldier and two entrancing children as Maguire and Portman’s daughters:  nine year old Bailee Madison and eight year old Taylor Geare.

Finally — but that’s only final for now — there is Lily Cole as the almost-16-year-old daughter of Christopher Plummer’s mighty magician in Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.”  Cole is so unique and the movie is so wonderfully weird that I think they’re both a bit unclassifiable as well as unforgettable.

***  In the current season of Manhattan’s Brits Off Broadway there is another sterling discovery in an import from Scarborough, England:  Ayesha Antoine.  In Alan Ayckbourn’s latest comical farce “My Wonderful Day,” Antoine, who is 28, plays Winnie, a nine-year-old schoolgirl who is given a writing assignment on “My Wonderful Day.” The joke is that as Winnie spends the day not in school but with her very pregnant house-cleaning mother, speaking French and writing her diary, she is able to observe the goings on of the mostly miserable adults whose antics she observes with a galvanizing mix of wonder and exasperation.  They include a grouchy television personality, his mistress and co-worker, a longtime friend and, climactically, the volcanically irate wife.  Through it all Antoine keys the audience to every inflection with a mostly silent, ever so mesmerizing performance.  That she can play a little girl so well makes you eager to see what she’ll do next.

To make sense of an enormous number of candidates, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences which hands out the Academy Awards winnows the field in several categories by having a committee select finalists for the five nominations which then are voted on by the entire branch.
The documentary committee has chosen 15 features which will become the final five when nominations are announced Feb. 2, 2010.

The lucky 15:

“The Beaches of Agnes,” Agnès Varda, director (Cine-Tamaris)
“Burma VJ,” Anders Østergaard, director (Magic Hour Films)
“The Cove,” Louie Psihoyos, director (Oceanic Preservation Society)
“Every Little Step,” James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, directors (Endgame Entertainment)
“Facing Ali,” Pete McCormack, director (Network Films Inc.)
“Food, Inc.,” Robert Kenner, director (Robert Kenner Films)
“Garbage Dreams,” Mai Iskander, director (Iskander Films, Inc.)
“Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders,” Mark N. Hopkins, director (Red Floor Pictures LLC)
“The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, directors (Kovno Communications)
“Mugabe and the White African,” Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey, directors (Arturi Films Limited)
“Sergio,” Greg Barker, director (Passion Pictures and Silverbridge Productions)
“Soundtrack for a Revolution,” Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, directors (Freedom Song Productions)
“Under Our Skin,” Andy Abrahams Wilson, director (Open Eye Pictures)
“Valentino The Last Emperor,” Matt Tyrnauer, director (Acolyte Films)
“Which Way Home,” Rebecca Cammisa, director (Mr. Mudd)

This means that some highly touted box-office hits were ignored. Among them were James Toback’s well-regarded “Tyson,” the pro-Anna Wintour answer to “The Devil Wears Prada” called “The September Issue,” “The Story of Anvil,” about a heavy metal duo that has persevered despite lack of sales, recognition or seemingly talent, and Michael Moore’s rambling but touching “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

Not having seen all 15, I do have a few favorites:
“Food, Inc.” has caused me to never eat a Perdue chicken again, as well as make me aware why we continue to have death-dealing e coli outbreaks and why corn products are in nearly 90 percent of the food products sold in supermarkets  – that should mean something when it comes to a nomination
“Valentino The Last Emperor” was one of the most affecting and dazzling movies of the year, much less documentaries
Similarly the behind the scenes look at the casting of a Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line,” “Every Little Step” had enough heartbreak, grit and tension for ten movies
“The Cove” was a clarion call to the world to get the Japanese to stop killing dolphins and whales and it needs to be heard
“The Beaches of Agnes” by the legendary New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda was quintessentially French and quintessentially charming as it considered the nature of art, of memory, of the meaning of life
“Burma VJ” is an underground political act in the face of massive repression and deserves to be acknowledged.
That’s six and there are still nine other candidates and only five slots.  As Dorothy might say, “Oh my.”

What would you pay for a slightly sweaty tee – and the chance to have a picture with its owner backstage as they took it off?
If you were among the theatergoers Wednesday night at Broadway’s SRO hit “A Steady Rain” the answer is a cool five thousand bucks.  That’s what happened when at the curtain for the intermissionless drama starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig as Chicago cops the two stars joined every other show on Broadway asking patrons to donate to Broadway Cares/Equity Fight AIDS.  The annual fundraising has been going on for years and I think every Broadway show participates. 
Jackman and Craig mentioned that they were selling autographed posters of the show for $300, signed Playbills – and they did a hundred – for $100.  Then it got interesting when in a show where more than one reviewer said the only thing missing with having James Bond and Wolverine onstage was that there was no chance for either star to take off their shirt, they auctioned off the t-shirts they were each wearing.  The winner would be able to come backstage, get a photo of the star in his tee and then have it signed.  The bidding got to $5,000 and $4,500 and the stars proposed that the two for $5,000 each each take home a t-shirt.  And they did.
Is this Broadway history being made?  It should be.  And how, I wonder, is Jude Law who is starring as Hamlet on W. 44th Street, going to trump that?
I’m not sure how long the charity appeal continues but “Steady Rain” and “Hamlet” both end their runs December 6th.

“Pirate Radio” which opens tomorrow is a genial, exuberant ensemble comedy about the struggle to broadcast rock and roll in Sixties Great Britain when BBC held a monopoly and allowed only one hour daily of this type of music to be heard on the radio.  To circumvent this ridiculous situation ships parked in the water just outside British jurisdiction and broadcast with veteran deejays, mostly according to writer-director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually,” “Notting Hill,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral”), Australians or an American because they had experience back home. 
Only in this way could the great sounds of the era from British bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and others really be heard via transistor radio.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was on Curtis’ wish list to play the American deejay known simply as The Count and he was flabbergasted and delighted when the Oscar winner agreed to, literally, come onboard.  “Pirate Radio” filmed over six weeks on a tanker in the water and then for another six weeks in a studio.

I asked Curtis about this cinematic reunion of Emma Thompson, who comes onboard as one of the character’s mother, and Kenneth Branagh who is the film’s villain, a starchy politico determined to shut down the ship’s radio broadcasts.  It’s the first time the two, once considered comparable to the starring personal and professional teaming of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, have been together in a movie since their acrimonious divorce – even though they have no scenes together.
Did he have to notify Thompson her ex was going to be in the movie – and what was her reaction?
Yes, he did, he said.  And when she came into the studio to do the ADR (additional recording of dialogue for better sound), she asked to see his scenes – and laughed with great relish.

As for Hoffman, he sat down yesterday at New York’s Waldorf Towers on Park Avenue to talk up “Pirate Radio,” which in France was called “Hello Britain” and in Britain, “The Ship that Rocked.”  Hoffman, who often looks like he’s just rolled out of bed on these occasions, sported an immaculately trimmed beard and was in a rather buoyant, jolly mood, which was also rare and most welcome.  His young costar, the British actor Tom Sturridge, was asked what he learned from Hoffman.  Sturridge spoke of the lessons he got simply by observing how Hoffman handled himself daily on the set, of his innate dignity and intelligence.  Quite right.

Q: PHILIP, HOW FAMILIAR WERE YOU WITH THIS STORY PRIOR TO GETTING THE PROJECT?
HOFFMAN: I wasn’t very familiar. Growing up here, I was born in ‘67 and so I was born around the time this thing was taking place and so I don’t remember anything. I was just a baby. [MAKES A BABY FACE, POUTING] I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t remember any stories at all that anybody might have told me about nothing.
Q: RICHARD CURTIS WAS HAPPILY SURPRISED WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD DO THIS. WHAT WAS YOUR RESPONSE WHEN YOU FIRST READ IT?
HOFFMAN: Well, when I read the script it was very funny. He’s a very funny writer. He’s been writing comedy for a long time and he knows how to do it. It was also oddly moving. There was something about it that was oddly moving: that rock and roll is actually that important. We want to say that the arts, because really we could take it there, and we want to say that the arts aren’t important.  But actually they’re as essential as anything else for society. This film in a very subversive way, that’s the message of the movie, that these guys were the conduit to bring the art to the people, to bring that message and that people needed it. They were going to be there. They were going to stay up late. So that’s a cool thing.
Q: IS THAT A MESSAGE THAT YOU THINK IS CONSISTENT WITH THIS GENERATION?
HOFFMAN: I hope so. I hope that people understand how important it is. I hope people understand how important all kinds of music are, understand how important theater is, and films are and books, anyplace where we get our sustenance in that way. This is rock and roll — and it’s vital! It’s vital to a culture. It’s the kind of music that allows people to feel those ways.
Q: ROCK AND ROLL WAS A SUBCULTURE IN THIS PERIOD. WHAT’S THE SUBCULTURE IN ART NOW?
HOFFMAN: I don’t know. I think you’re right. I think it’s much different. I talked to friends about this, the difference between now and back then and what is it, other than being a baby and I don’t remember anything, is that you could live off the good back then. You know what I mean? You remember when I was in college or high school, there was a bit of a feeling of, ‘No one knows where I am. I’m alone.’ Now it’s scary.
Q: NOW EVERYONE HAS FACEBOOK.
HOFFMAN: Yeah, and how much you’re distracted by that and allow yourself to be distracted by it. Me.  Everybody. So I think it is different now. I think it’s harder to make that point clearly as you can in this film about a different time.
Q: YOUR CHARACTER THE COUNT REMINDED ME OF THE ONE YOU PLAYED IN ‘ALMOST FAMOUS’, LESTER BANGS. WHAT IS IT ABOUT YOU THAT ENJOYS THAT GUY WHO’S PASSIONATE ABOUT ROCK AND ROLL?
HOFFMAN: I don’t know. This is funny. When I did ‘Doubt’, people would be like, ‘The character in this reminds me of the character in “Happiness”. What makes you the kind of person to be such a weird…’ And I’m always like wondering, in those moments I always want to remind people, like, because then I’ll say, ‘Well, actually I play a lot of different [characters].’ They’re always like, ‘Well, I know,’ but not really.
So, anyway, I wasn’t a big connoisseur of rock and roll back then. I wasn’t a Grateful Dead guy or anything like that. I just kind of like listened to the radio. I didn’t buy LPs. I don’t know what was wrong with me. My brother did that. I was just out playing. I don’t know what I was doing.
Q: YOU WERE DOING THEATER.
HOFFMAN: No, but as a kid I was outside. I didn’t go to concerts really. It was all about college when I started catching up on that. So I think it’s just a passion for something or you’re mad about something. Those are the two things. You’re passionate about something or you’re mad about something. Those two things together, specifically and personally, can really drive an individual. Those characters have that in common.
Q: CAN YOU TALK ABOUT FILMING THIS? TOM STURRIDGE SAID IT WAS A LOT OF HANDHELD CAMERAS FOLLOWING THE ACTION AND THAT WHEN THE CAMERAS CAME ON PEOPLE GOT COMPETITIVE ABOUT DOING SOMETHING GOOD SO THE CAMERAS WOULD BE ON THEM.
HOFFMAN: Tom said that? I didn’t feel that [laughs]. Be my guest. I’m serious. I’m the last person in the world that would feel that. ‘Turn the camera that way, good man.’ Seriously, that’s me.
Q: BUT YOU’RE NOT YOURSELF. YOU’RE THE CHARACTER.
HOFFMAN: But even the character, it’s like I can’t help it. That’s just me. That’s seeps into every part that I play. I don’t have that competitiveness. I don’t feel that way. I don’t have a desire to do that because these characters are like that. So he’s saying something that’s very true. These characters are upping each other. That’s they’re nature. They challenge each other.  But in the actual filming of it, if there was something that made sense for my character to say or to do you would say it or do it. But it wasn’t about getting a camera to see me at all. If the camera missed me it was just fine, really fine. In fact better than fine a lot of the times.
Q: DID YOU FEEL THAT THERE WAS SOME IMPROVISATION ALLOWED?
HOFFMAN: Yeah, there was.
Q: AND THAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW WHERE THE CAMERA WAS GOING TO BE?
HOFFMAN: You didn’t know where the camera was but I’m saying the idea of fighting for the camera, the way you put it, I’m actually wondering if Tom really put it that way.
Q: HE DID SAY COMPETITIVE EDGE.
HOFFMAN: But “fighting for the camera”?
Q: NOT REALLY.
HOFFMAN: I don’t think he said that. That’s a very different thing and that kind of spins it in a way that’s not really true. There’s a competitive edge because those are the characters and that’s the story and you’re an actor and you have to fulfill that given. But the actors on this set were not fighting for the camera.
Q: THE COUNT IS AN EX-PAT AMONG A GROUP OF BRITS. YOU’RE THE AMERICAN ACTOR AMONGST BRITISH ACTORS. DID YOU DRAW ANYTHING FROM YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE IN PLAYING THE CHARACTER?
HOFFMAN: Yeah. I think it was a real outsider, obviously outside the room in a way a lot of the time. There’s something to be said for not belonging to that tribe. You’re kind of coming in and going, ‘I didn’t grow up in this tribe.’ You have to get along with that tribe. That’s why I took it in a way. I love that. That’s who I am and that’s how I am. I’m much more of a loner like that. I kind of go and mix myself between a lot of different kinds of people and cultures. I always have. So it is that feeling and it is the character that I play, he’s feeling [that] and you can see how he acts out in the movie. It has a lot to do with putting a stamp on his identity, who he was and who he is and such.
Q: IT WAS INTERESTING TO SEE HOW HARD IT WAS TO LISTEN TO POP MUSIC. IT WAS ONE HOUR A DAY.
HOFFMAN: That’s right.
Q: THERE WAS NO INTERNET OR ANYTHING. SO THIS WAS A MISSION THAT HE HAD. DID YOU SEE IT AS SOMETHING PROFOUND FOR CULTURE IN A WAY?
HOFFMAN: Well, you know, yes. I do feel that way.  But it’s funny, too. That’s what you feel which is my job and everyone’s job, that you feel that pertaining to the story at hand. You’re moved by that basically probably because of something inside of you understands that. So when I’m working, when I was doing all that, I was thinking about something else completely. I wasn’t even thinking about the story. Everyone understands that. That something was the best that’s pretty great and it’s gone. And then the idea that you would actually cop to that is huge. People don’t cop to that kind of thing because it’s an incredibly vulnerable thing to cop to.
Q: DO YOU ACTUALLY USE FACEBOOK OR TWITTER, ANY OF THAT STUFF?
HOFFMAN: That Twitter thing.  I remember I went to this Twitter…I’m a caveman. ‘What is Twitter?’ But I did a Twitter account, I did, but I’ve never used it. I go like this, ‘This is absurd. I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing. This is stupid.’ In fact when I hear Twitter I go, ‘God, that’s like mind numbingly boring.’ The word itself, I literally go, ‘How do they do that?’ Facebook I can understand. I can understand that because it’s kind of a full blown email system.
Q: WHAT’S YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE MUSIC THAT RAN THROUGHOUT THIS MOVIE NOW THAT YOU’VE BEEN IMMERSED IN IT?
HOFFMAN: Absolutely, I grew up on that era. That was the stuff that was pumping over the radio. That’s what I’m saying. I grew up and I sat in the back of a car in 1973 when I was six and listened to the radio without a seatbelt on and someone smoking up front. It was all the music that you’re hearing in the film. There was nothing that I heard in this film that I didn’t hear as a kid in that car. That’s what I’m trying to say, music is like water. It’s like air. You don’t remember. Do you know what I’m saying? My respect for it is the same way that I respect I have blood in my body. That’s what I was trying to say earlier, that people don’t understand that it’s as essential as those things because it is that. We are in a time when people do really want to separate it somehow. They want to make it like, ‘Well, not that. That’s more important.’ I understand that with the economy and everything, but what is it, you don’t remember it.
Q: YOU HAD A SHORT RUN ONSTAGE IN NEW YORK AS IAGO IN ‘OTHELLO.’  DID YOU LEAVE TO GO MAKE A MOVIE?
HOFFMAN: No. I had to go back to work [DIRECTING] on ‘Jack [Goes Boating].’ 

Tony Curtis has written one of the best behind the scenes accounts of one of the greatest comedies ever made in the just published “The Making of ‘Some Like It Hot,’ My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie.”

Partnered with Hollywood film historian Mark A. Vieira, Curtis’ breezy look back is buttressed by facts, dates, road, studios, scenes, wardrobe fittings, and buttressed by a sheaf of publicity shots, many in color, that I’ve never seen before. 

The big revelation?  Sex with his leading lady.

Curtis had previously spoken (and probably written) about the 1950 affair the two had when his star was rising and she was yet to gain firm footing in her ascent as Hollywood’s most famous blonde.  For that first rendezvous Curtis borrowed the Malibu beach house of Howard Duff, the good-looking actor who was married for years to Ida Lupino.  It was brief; Monroe remained an enigmatic puzzle but was sexually spectacular, Curtis writes.  Their paths rarely crossed in the years that followed.

Cut to 1958 and Billy Wilder, the legendary writer director of classics like “Double Indemnity,” “The Lost Weekend,” “Sunset Boulevard, “Stalag 17” and Monroe’s “The Seven Year Itch.”  Vieira unearths how Wilder developed his idea for a comedy about two guys in drag – in 1958 a controversial idea to hang an entire picture upon – and how he needed a star to get the $2,8 million picture financed by United Artists.  Frank Sinatra was first choice. Mitzi Gaynor, who had won raves for the musical “South Pacific” and costarred with Sinatra in “The Joker Is Wild” was the leading candidate to play the romantic interest, the all-girl-band band singer Sugar Kane.  Sinatra skipped away and Wilder cast Curtis and Jack Lemmon as his compatriot, the two Chicago musicians who hide out in drag in the all girl band to escape a rubout from gangsters.

Wilder still needed a box-office star and, seemingly out of nowhere, he heard Monroe wanted to work with him again.  As Curtis tells it with a mixture of assurance and insecurity, filming was nightmarish.  In the summer of 1958 Monroe hadn’t worked in two years.  Her last movie “The Prince and the Showgirl” was a disappointment.  Proof that some things haven’t changed: Hollywood buzzed about a “comeback” as if she had been gone like Garbo. Another point, well documented, is how negative, how nasty every piece about Monroe was, from the first news conference to every set visit and interview.  There were cracks about her weight, her artistic aspirations, her tardiness, her marriage to Arthur Miller.

She was, Curtis recalls, very good on some days, capable of doing brilliant long takes in virtually one take.  And then there were the days where nothing worked and it took two days and way too many takes to get her to say one line correctly, “Where’s the bourbon?”

The sex?  That came in the middle of filming in San Diego for the Florida beach scenes. Monroe, minus Miller who had gone back to Connecticut,  invited Curtis to spend a night.  He did, although married as well.  His wife Janet Leigh was then pregnant with Jamie Lee Curtis and among the many photos are shots of him with daughter Kelly visiting Daddy on the beach.

When Monroe became pregnant, Curtis recounts a bizarre scene where he was summoned to her dressing room in the presence of her husband – his distaste for the always grim Miller is undisguised.  A discussion followed about whether the child was his or Miller’s.  No one ultimately had to worry who would claim the baby.  Monroe suffered yet another miscarriage, from yet another ectopic pregnancy, which Miller used in the press to lambaste Wilder as a tyrannical director who forced his poor wife to work in 104 degree heat.  It was never that hot in San Diego Curtis counters and Wilder, with whom he had a difficult relationship, was nevertheless the soul of patience with a star who practically gave him a nervous breakdown.

Curtis is now 84 and “Some Like It Hot” stands alongside “Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Boston Strangler” and “The Defiant Ones” as among the crowning achievements of a long and often impressive career.  His book highlights the hard work, pressure and personalities common to any filmmaking.  But it also suggests how a comedy that has stood the test of time, one that didn’t have a scripted ending when filming began, benefited from a few miracles, like Wilder’s persistence, Lemmon’s daffy fearlessness in drag as “Daphne” and Monroe’s very real movie magic.  In a time when everyone in the business seems afraid to say what really happens or what they really think, “The Making of ‘Some Like It Hot’” is also a welcome antidote.  Curtis couldn’t stand Miller or Paula Strasberg, Monroe’s acting coach, or May Reis, her secretary, and he says so.  He found Lemmon a straight arrow who really did think only of the work and was never competitive.  He’s candid about his insecurity, calling himself at one point “The handsomest man in Hollywood,” and then worrying why Wilder doesn’t praise his Cary Grant imitation or his Josephine the way he does Lemmon’s and Monroe’s work.

For Monroe fans, and I am one, the chronicle of bad behavior, selfishness and sheer unprofessionalism makes for one depressing revelation after another, and yet.  And yet she could conjure from the thinnest material – and she thought Sugar Kane an uninteresting, regressive “dumb blonde” role, one she did because she needed money to support Miller and pay his legal bills – one of her most magnetic portraits. A Life magazine cover boasted, “A comic Marilyn sets movie aglow,” and they weren’t kidding.  Can’t you still hear her, breathless, running at the climax down to the pier after she’s ditched the bike and is in her heels, yelling, “Wait for Sugar.”  Thanks to Curtis and Vieira, how she got there is no longer quite the mystery.

Tony Curtis and Mark A. Vieira’s “The Making of ‘Some Like It Hot,’ My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie” ($25.95, Wiley) should be in bookstores everywhere.  My interview with Vieira will air on “Beyond the Subtitles” on Art International Radio  (www.artonair.org) later this month.