“Two Lovers,” James Gray’s romantic melodrama, set in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Vinessa Shaw, opens today in theatres. (It’s also available on video-on-demand.) For now, let’s just thank Steve Erickson at SpoutBlog for this superb, revealing interview with Gray.

You might not buy this, but I never conceived of my first three films as genre films. They were very personal…I thought about it as an autobiographical form of expression. It seems weird, as if my life was like a ‘70s gangster film, but it’s true.

P.S. Gray is yet another American artist whose following is greater in France than here (and he addresses the matter in the interview with Erickson). The movie opened in Paris in November to rave reviews; in Libération, it was called “a dark and lyrical masterpiece.”

French democracy hasn’t yet evolved to the point of raising celebrities to high electoral office, but it’s good to know that the European halls of power aren’t entirely closed to stars: The eighty-four-year-old Charles Aznavour, born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian, in Paris, to Armenian parents, has just been named Armenia’s ambassador to Switzerland. Aznavour, an exuberantly charming, jazzy singer-songwriter (who, amazingly, was voted Entertainer of the Century, ahead of Elvis, Dylan, and Louis Armstrong in a 1998 Time magazine online poll), plays the concert pianist taking refuge in barroom mediocrity in François Truffaut’s gangland romance “Shoot the Piano Player,” from 1960 (available on DVD from Criterion).

P.S. His talent as an actor was revealed to the French New Wave by his performance, as a mental patient, in “La Tête Contre les Murs” (Head Against the Wall), Georges Franju’s harrowing, hallucinatory depiction of life in an asylum. It’s hard to find; it’s scheduled for a DVD release in France next month; here’s the trailer, without subtitles:

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and romantics across the country will be expressing themselves with dinners, flowers, and candy. Ryan Adams is doing it with new music and a new engagement. The prolific alt-country songwriter, who recently announced plans to split up his band, the Cardinals, and take time off, has now released a digital-only EP, “Extra Cheese,” and announced his engagement to the pop star and actress Mandy Moore. Busy week.

Below, he performs “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)” in Amsterdam in 2003.

Peter Gabriel has pulled out of the Oscars broadcast after learning that his performance for his Best-Song nomination—”Down to Earth,” from “Wall-E”—would be limited to just over a minute. Gabriel will still attend the ceremony, but wanted to express his displeasure over the trimming down of the spots normally reserved for songwriters:

The songwriters are a very small part of the filmmaking process, but we still work bloody hard. I’m an old fart and it’s not going to do me any harm to make a protest. But the ceremony should be fun and I’m looking forward to it.

Below is a rare 1978 interview on German TV.

Today marks the eagerly anticipated New York release of “Gomorrah,” Matteo Garrone’s drama about the Camorra, or Neapolitan mafia, based on the nonfiction book of the same title by the young journalist Roberto Saviano. (The movie opened in Los Angeles in December for a one-week run to qualify for the Oscars; it wasn’t nominated.) Last fall, the Italian police got wind of a plot against Saviano’s life, and provided him with round-the-clock protection.

Mr Saviano and his plain clothes guards—who have become his friends and address him admiringly as “The Captain”—were to be blown up while travelling by car on the Naples-Rome motorway.

If Garrone is planning a sequel, this news account might offer some savory screenplay details.

Mr. Saviano was last seen in public a year ago at an anti-Camorra rally in Casal di Principe, the Naples suburb where the Casalesi clan has its stronghold. Walter Veltroni, leader of the centre-left Opposition, said it would hold a rally at Casal di Principe next month.

P.S. Now through Feb. 17th, BAMcinématek is presenting a retrospective of Garrone’s films.

Barack Obama surprises theatre community by mentioning Macbeth by name in Ford’s Theatre rededication, surprises no one by mentioning Abraham Lincoln repeatedly.

Nicole Kidman donates to help victims of the Australian wildfires.

Ronnie Spector’s sister and partner in the Ronettes, Estelle Bennet, dies.

Fresh on the heels of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” Super Bowl ad, a British ad with “Blowin’ In the Wind.” The client: a mutual retailer.

Limp Bizkit members, evidently in agreeance with each other, reunite.

Word just in, announcing the lineup for this year’s New Directors/New Films series, which will be screened March 25th through April 5th at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MOMA. It’s a promising list; it includes a pair of unusual Sundance hits—“Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire” (which this magazine excerpted in 1996), about a Harlem teen-ager who is the victim of incest; and “We Live in Public,” a documentary about the Internet visionary Josh Harris’s scheme to Webcast his life—as well as “Louise-Michel,” a French comedy about laid-off workers who hire a hitman to dispatch their former boss. (It was reviewed enthusiastically in Libération at the time of its release, late last year.)

P.S. The title of “Louise-Michel” alludes to Louise Michel (1830-1905), an anarchist and poet who was a heroine of the Paris Commune of 1871.

If you’re in Baltimore, you can catch Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960-61 musical-comedy pastiche, “A Woman Is a Woman,”—a high-spirited romp with a depressing core, the director’s reproachful view of Anna Karina, the lead actress, whom he would soon marry—at the Charles tonight at 9; and you can see his “Vivre Sa Vie” (the grandly melancholy modernist melodrama, also starring Karina, that he made, in 1962, in response to the previous film’s failure) at the same venue this Saturday, next Monday, or next Thursday, Feb. 19th. Coming up in the Charles’ series of films by Godard from the nineteen-sixties: “Pierrot le Fou” and “Made in U.S.A.” My colleague Michael Sragow, of the Baltimore Sun, as well as a local bulletin board, both tell me that the series has been attracting good crowds.

So did Film Forum’s recent American-premiere run of “Made in U.S.A.,” a brooding political slapstick (and Godard’s last feature with Karina) that he made in 1966 as a last-minute favor to the producer Georges de Beauregard, at the same time that he made “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” (and which was never released here due to issues involving rights to the novel, by Donald Westlake, on which it was based). I introduced a screening of it there, and was gratified to find that Godard’s classics still (or finally) have an enthusiastic following. Film Forum has brought these two films back as a double-feature, now through Feb. 24th. The actor László Szabó, who co-stars in “Made in U.S.A.” and appeared in character roles in many of Godard’s films of the nineteen-sixties (as well as in “Passion,” from 1982), will do a Q. & A. following the 6:15 screening on Feb. 13th. (He knows lots of good stories.)

P.S. I’ve seen the production reports for “Made in U.S.A.” and “Two or Three Things”; they weren’t, for the most part, actually shot at the same time. “Made in U.S.A.” was mainly filmed in July, 1966, and “Two or Three Things” mainly in August, though there were a few days in which Godard filmed for both—and several shots that appear in the former film, of a woman subjected to torture, had actually been made for the latter.

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In one of those strange but apparently true episodes that the Web serves up daily—Britain’s Guardian newspaper confirms it—the Royal Opera will commission Mark-Anthony Turnage to write an opera about, yes, the life of Anna Nicole Smith.

Turnage is one of the world’s most prominent composers, and his deep knowledge of jazz music may well help him serve up an opera that echoes Berg’s “Lulu” in its breaking of both societal and musical taboos. Two caveats, however. Berg got his source material not from the headlines but from two plays by one of the great writers of his time, Frank Wedekind (famous for “Spring Awakening”), who offered the composer a great, totemic, anonymous central character, whereas Turnage’s librettist, Richard Thomas, will be working with raw material. And Smith’s cultural milieu, if one could define that loosely, is one of vapid bubble-gum pop, not of the kind of dark, complex jazz that Turnage likes to reference. The fictional Lulu was reckless, but completely self-aware; was Smith, in real life, self-aware? Or will Thomas and Turnage have to make her so?

(Photograph: Danny Moloshok/AP.)

The Public Theatre announced that Anne Hathaway will play Viola, the cross-dressing twin heroine of “Twelfth Night,” directed by Daniel Sullivan, in a Shakespeare in the Park production beginning June 9th. Incidentally, William Shakespeare married a woman named Anne Hathaway, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-six; she was three months pregnant at the time. They had three children (an older girl and a set of twins, a boy and a girl) and remained together until Shakespeare’s death, in 1616, at the age of fifty-two. In his will, the sole possession he left to his wife was the “second best bed.” Carol Ann Duffy, in her poem “Anne Hathaway,” imagines what might have gone through Hathaway’s mind upon receiving the news of her inheritance.

Anne Hathaway

“Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …” (from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love-
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

—by Carol Ann Duffy from “The World’s Wife”