From a casting agent’s perspective, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio are as good as it gets. Not only can they both carry a movie, but they immerse themselves totally in their parts. Both, too, have displayed an impressive range: Damon can play an amnesiac superspy (The Bourne Identity) as convincingly as a slap-happy Siamese twin (Stuck on You), and Leo can embody a mentally retarded teen with the same ease as he can Howard Hughes (The Aviator). Finally, both have shown a willingness to learn accents, which opens up a slew of casting possibilities. The question is, which one has a better knack for it? If said agent were casting the part of a lisping Tasmanian eunuch, for instance, which actor would he rely on to nail the inflections?

There are two particularly tricky accents we can compare them on: South African—which Damon uses in Clint Eastwood’s politico-rugby drama Invictus and DiCaprio learned for 2006’s The Blood Diamond—and South Boston, which both actors pulled off for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, in a mano-a-mano dialect duel.

I called on two friends to help me judge. The first is Ryan, a lawyer from Johannesburg. I showed him the above trailer for Invictus and the below trailer for Blood Diamond. Ryan’s thorough analysis after the jump.

Filmmaker Darryl Roberts, whose 2008 America the Beautiful examined our country's weight obsession, is a wee bit behind the times. Apparently, he organized a sparsely attended demonstration outside a Chicago Polo store to protest their use of size-zero models. More than two months ago, the issue came to the public's attention when
Ralph Lauren's dramatically Photoshopped images of Swedish noble Countess Filippa Hamilton spread like wildfire around an indignant Internet. The flames were only stoked with the Countess revealed she had been fired for reportedly being too fat.

Photo by Justin Bishop.

“New York doesn’t do well with uncomfortable silence,” Peter Silberman, lead singer of indie darlings The Antlers, said after an uncomfortable silence between songs at a sold-out Bowery Ballroom, in Manhattan. It would be hard for there not to be a blank moment between songs at an Antlers show, if only to let people weep out the pain. The band’s 2009 release Hospice is all about a terminally ill child in the hospital. Painted with foreboding keyboards, fuzzy guitars relying heavily on crescendo, and Silberman’s eerie falsetto, Hospice is, as Liberman put it when I spoke with him yesterday, “About being shut off with one person and inadvertently destroying a lot of your other relationships.”

I’m not ashamed to say I wasn’t totally thrilled with The Antlers at first. Friends told me stories of crying on the subway listening to Hospice. Others praised its musical vision (“Whatever happened to concept records, man?”). And my bookish friends loved the Sylvia Plath references (“I think it evokes a sense of despair”). I just thought it sounded like something that would have appealed to me the summer after my senior year of high school—a melodramatic palate of loss, leaving, and the mortality of things, all packaged in an operatic shell.

What otherworldly power does Stephen Colbert wield over magazine editors? It was strange enough when he appeared on the cover of Newsweek back in June (an issue he guest edited)—now he’s on the cover of Sports Illustrated. In 2007 and 2008 he did the GQ-Esquire double-dip, a feat usually accomplished only by such icons of maleness as Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Brady. In the past few years Colbert has also been the cover boy for Rolling Stone, New York, and Wired.

By comparison, Jon Stewart, Colbert’s Obi-Wan and still a considerably bigger name, has appeared by himself on only three major magazine covers (Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Entertainment Weekly)—and none since The Colbert Report came on the air, in 2005 (Stewart and Colbert have posed together on the covers of Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly). What gives? Is it possible that magazines with Colbert on the cover fly off the newsstands?

All right, kiddos! Here it is, the Bob Hollywood list, two double-oh nine edish. Now, listen, I don't see every picture that comes down the pike. Never saw Antichrist, for instance, among others. (I mean, hell, they don't pay me that kind of money.) But anyhoots, out of the many, many flicks I did happen to check out this year, here are the ones I liked the most. As for the top three, well, any one of them might actually be my fave of the year. As Bobby Dylan once put it, "It depends on how I'm feelin'."

10. Where the Wild Things Are
A little goofy, but I liked it.

9. Land of the Lost
I just love it when guys take big Hollywood money and make something totally insane.

8. Public Enemies
This flick is a poem. And, no kidding, it's a subtle critique of the Bush years to boot.

7. Julie and Julia
Meryl charmed me. Tucci was aces. A great time at the movies. Ephron-rific!

6. Gentlemen Broncos
I'm all alone on this one, I know. But I didn't laugh harder at anything else this year.

5. Star Trek
Just call it Fun Trek.

The nominees for the Golden Globe awards were announced yesterday, and for every pundit like Entertainment Weekly’s Dave Karger who made an earnest attempt to define What It All Means for the impending Oscar race, there was at least one dissenting voice insisting that the Globes couldn’t possibly mean anything at all.

“I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's a completely meaningless awards show by a scandal-riddled organization on a network desperate for any kind of ratings,” barked Nikki Finke. “Why? Because the Golden Globes have zero integrity…the entire entertainment industry props up this pathetic show because it's seen as a night-long marketing tool. Therefore, it's ridiculous for anyone to consider the movie categories as a window on the Oscar frontrunners.”

Finke’s complaint offered a more harshly worded version of similar sentiments put forth by a number of online commentators, including indieWIRE’s Eugene Hernandez, who noted that “true to their nature, the Globes favored star wattage, giving surprise nominations to Julia Roberts for Duplicity and Tobey Maguire for Brothers in lead acting categories…at the expense of a variety of performances from smaller films that had been gaining momentum.” Add Hernandez’s focus on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s failure to recognize indie film actors with a perceived shot at the Oscars, such as The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner, to Finke’s charges of pandering and corruption, and you might come to the conclusion that the H.F.P.A.’s love for big stars such as Roberts and Sandra Bullock isn’t “real.” After all, the Globes’ true nature is to provide “star wattage” for a “night-long marketing tool”—so why not brush it all off with an “it’s Chinatown, Jake” shrug? Except that HitFix’s Gregory Ellwood didn’t get that memo. His response to Bullock’s nom for The Blind Side? “Ladies and gentlemen we have a serious candidate for Best Actress now.”

More infinitely sage words from the mind of Jason Binn, self-proclaimed "Founder of Niche Media." (See also yesterday's platitude/tautology du jour, in The Timeless Twisdom of Jason Binn, Vol. 1.)

On the Today Show this morning, Time’s managing editor, Rick Stengel, unveiled the magazine’s Person of the Year: Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Stengel talked about who was in the running—Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs—and how General Stanley McChrystal was a close second. As head of the Fed, Bernanke is in charge of the “most powerful, least understood government force shaping our lives,” Stengel said.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Push it like Beckom: Jesse Beckom III hurling a bobsled toward the start line at the beginning of a competition.

What’s it like whipping down a one-mile bobsled track in less than a minute at speeds nearing 100 m.p.h.? “It’s one hell of a rush in all honesty,” said Vancouver 2010 Olympic hopeful Jesse Beckom III, who called me last week from Calgary, Canada, where one of the world’s 15 approved bobsled tracks is located.

Beckom, 32, knows a thing or two about adrenaline rushes: they’re what pumped him up as a linebacker on Iowa State University’s football team in the late 1990s. In fact, football is how Beckom got into bobsledding in the first place. United States bobsledders usually come from other disciplines such as football or track, or maybe hockey or soccer—sports that combine speed and explosion.

“It’s funny—most people think, O.K., well it’s a bunch of little guys jumping into a sled,” Beckom says. “The guys on the U.S. team are about six foot to six foot three, and from about 200 to 250 pounds. In training we are squatting 300 to 600 pounds. Most people think we aren’t strong guys. We’re all strong and fast.”

In 2000, Beckom was working on his masters degree in community and regional planning at I.S.U. when his former football coach Charlie Partridge got a call from bobsled driver Travis Bell, who wanted to know if any football players might be interested in bobsledding. That’s how Beckom’s Olympic dream began.

A bobsled crew consists of a driver (or pilot), and, in a four-man sled, three pushers (or brakemen). Women only race two ladies to a sled, whereas men compete in both two- and four-men sleds. The team’s goal is simple: to get its bobsled down the track faster than its competitors can. Achieving that goal, however, is something akin to rocket science.

There is a more and more insistent question being asked by right-thinking people about why we dwell so obsessively on the domestic problems of celebrities. It’s an issue we debate all the time at Newser, where we dwell with quite some verve on these matters: How much is too much? At Newser, mindful of right-thinking sensitivities, we provide a sliding bar that lets you emphasize the serious and consequential and minimize the meretricious and trivial—but almost no one chooses to do so.

If there is reason to question the massive amount of celebrity coverage, there may be an even greater question about the coverage of would-be, or never-were, or used-to-almost-be celebrities—for instance, Barry Williams, who once played Greg Brady in The Brady Bunch, who, I read on Newser, has taken out a restraining order against a knife-wielding girlfriend.

Now I suppose one thing we learn from Tiger Woods’ travails is that, even with his billion dollars and supernatural talent and seemingly lovely wife, he’s got problems, too—that’s leveling. But how satisfying can it be to find out Barry Williams is all screwed up?

I have sometimes thought that the great celebrity pile-on is a kind of replacement in the news business for funny pages. Celebrity bad behavior, after all, is a relative relief from cataclysmic news; it provides, too, like a good comic strip, an ongoing saga in a disconnected world; plus there are simple and clear-cut good guys and bad; what’s more, we all share these stories with each other as our grandparents might have shared a chuckle about Dagwood and Blondie.

Bonny Billy & The Picket Line Funtown Comedown (Drag City)
No one really knows where Funtown is, except that it’s someplace that (allegedly) exists outside of Louisville, Kentucky. It’s not on maps. You won’t find it in your dog-eared copy of Lonely Planet: Kentucky. Hell, Google won’t even help. But Bonny “the artist formerly known as ‘Bonnie Prince’” Billy (née Will Oldham) and a virtually unknown group of musicians called The Picket Line recorded a live album there and called it Funtown Comedown. And theirs is exactly the kind of sound you’d expect to come from a group called Bonny Billy & The Picket Line playing at some unmapped place in the backwoods of Kentucky: nasally folk that vacillates from quiet to wild and sounds even better if everyone sings along.
Verdict: Buy it (because, in the spirit of all things Funtown, it’s only out on vinyl)

This is how “meet cute” happens in James Cameron’s Avatar: At night in a jungle on the alien moon Pandora, Jake Sully, a cocky Marine played by Sam Worthington, stumbles into a pack of snapping, six-legged predators called viperwolves. This jarhead is about to become a viperpuppy chew toy when a lithe huntress named Neytiri (Star Trek’s Zoe Salanda) intervenes. Luckily for Jake, Neytiri is handy with a bow and arrow. She’s also smart, bilingual, spiritual, great with animals, and—for a 10-foot-tall cyan-colored woman with a tail—a babe.

Cameron has stuffed Avatar with enough futuristic battle scenes and fantastical creatures to rally hordes of 14-year-old boys to the box office when the film opens Dec. 18. But, as always in a Cameron film, the most interesting roles in Avatar belong to the women.

Sigourney Weaver is Grace Augustine, a driven, idealistic scientist who runs the Avatar program, overseeing the technology that allows humans to explore Pandora’s hostile environment. In Avatar, Weaver and Cameron are reteaming more than 20 years after they made Aliens, the film that sealed the actress’s status as the first genuine action heroine. Weaver’s Grace is a brilliant, fearless, and often grouchy foil for the military-industrial complex that is strip-mining Pandora. She’s the human conscience of the film and, as a perfectionist with contempt for authority and reverence for science, a pretty good facsimile of Cameron himself.

On Pandora, the guys may wear the sharpest looking gear—human soldiers don giant exoskeletons called AMP suits and the alien patriarch sports a nifty feathered headdress—but it’s clear who’s really in charge. Amid a sea of hothead military types, Lost’s Michelle Rodriguez is the most coolly capable as a helicopter pilot named Trudy, a smoother update of Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), the tough Latina from Aliens. Trudy’s assured delivery of the line, “You’re not the only one with a gun, bitch!” is this movie’s “Hasta la vista, baby!” moment. Neytiri’s mom, Mo’at, played by CCH Pounder of The Shield, is the shaman of her clan. And to whom does Mo’at pray? On Pandora, even God is a she, and her name is Eywa.

Tonight, Buckingham Palace staffers will celebrate the holiday season with a small office cocktail party and presents from Queen Elizabeth II, who will be gifting wine decanters. Valued around $30, the glass decanters are engraved with the royal EIIR cipher. Maj will make an appearance at the staff reception along with her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and her daughter, the Princess Royal. However, before anyone can start sipping eggnog, the palace will have to scramble to squash rumors that Prince William is being groomed for eminent ascension to the throne by sharing his grandmother's duties as a "Shadow King." Royal aides continue to insist that the leaked financial documents substantiating this claim are merely misinterpreted memos regarding the royals' taxes. In January, the Shadow KingPrince will make his first official overseas visit, heading to New Zealand in the Queen's stead.

If ever there was an apt time for a Robin Hood movie, it’s now. With unrepentant financial institutions back in full force, and Washington refusing to regulate Wall Street’s extravagance, we could use a hero who steals from the rich, gives to the poor, and thumbs his nose at the law. But we’ll leave it to Oliver Stone to give the titans of finance their comeuppance in Wall Street 2, because that’s not how Universal seems to be marketing Ridley Scott’s upcoming Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe. Instead, they are essentially selling it as a sequel to Crowe and Scott’s 2000 collaboration, Gladiator. (The abundance of chainmail and coats of arms also recalls Scott’s 2005 crusades film, Kingdom of Heaven, set during the same period.)

Check out the new teaser trailer and compare the number of elements we recognized from Gladiator to those identified with Robin Hood.

Gladiator elements, in order of appearance:
• Russell Crowe’s Caesar do.
• The blue-tinted, foggy, snow-flecked woods of Northern Europe by twilight.
• The lone wolf, presumably representing Crowe.
• Crowe swinging axes into trees and people.
• An old, grizzled man being savagely murdered.
• A sword-weilding Crowe, leading men in battle on horseback.
• Blood.

Photographs courtesy of William Jacob Photography.

Take a stroll down Fifth Avenue on New York’s tony Upper East Side on a Saturday afternoon, and it becomes quickly clear that it’s not just the neighborhood’s two-legged residents who are living the high life. Dogs—particularly of the exorbitantly expensive, well-shampooed, small variety—are everywhere, peeping from designer carrying cases or tugging at hand-tooled leashes.

But it’s a rare occasion when the area’s cherished pets are welcomed to that other hallmark of upper-crust New York: the society party. Last week, the Neue Gallerie, the Fifth Avenue museum specializing in early-20th-century German and Austrian art, did just that, inviting dogs and their owners to its Neue Hund holiday cocktail party on the ground floor. (Although people were allowed to visit the galleries upstairs, dogs scampered around the lobby level only.)

Many of the guests were from the design profession—not surprising, since the Neue Gallerie is known for its collection of Bauhaus works and for commissioning pieces from well-established designers for its gift shop. VF Daily dropped in (embarrassingly, sans canine) to observe the scene and to question a few partygoers about their cultured little companions.