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his Week:George Clooney Voted for Jeff Bridges, Repo Men, The Bounty Hunter, Goat-footed Old Queen, Asceticism as Art, White Tantra, and more…

George Clooney Voted for the Other Guy. He might be the classiest man in Hollywood. This makes you love him even more—and the fact that his annual girlfriend gets a house or a feature story in Vogue magazine when he dumps her.

A source said the star didn’t vote for himself for this year’s Best Actor Academy Award. Clooney punched his ballot for Jeff Bridges and then photographed it and sent it to his fellow nominee. Clooney’s publicist, Stan Rosenfield, confirmed: “Story is true. According to George, ‘It was an amazing performance.’ He also told Jeff, ‘If you don’t win, you can’t blame me.’”

Movies This Week. REPO MEN. It’s our introduction to the extreme, grisly filmmaking style of Takashi Miike and Chan-wook Park. Worth seeing through your fingers.

REPO MEN goes beyond horror mining the extreme style of Japan’s Takashi Miike’s 2001 film KOROSHIYA 1 (ICHI THE KILLER) and his 1999 film ÔDISHON (AUDITION). In fact, it lifts a carnage fight scene right from South Korea’s Chan-wook Park’s 2003 film, OLDBOY.

Wrong director for this project Steven Spielberg and Will Smith want to remake OLDBOY (man raising hammer). But without the incest? What’s up with that, pray tell? So how will they explain the main character being locked up in a hotel room for fifteen years? What will his crime be? Insider trading? Cutting in line at a supermarket?

The premise of REPO MEN is brilliant and inevitable: In the future diseased organs will be easily replaced by small machines. It is what we all want—long life guaranteed by having new, perfect artificial organs. Problem is, they are very expensive.

The company manufacturing the organs, The Union, has a very generous sign-up program. If you fall behind in your payments, and practically everyone does, the company sends out Repo Men to find you and, without anesthesia, take back their property. Unfortunately, the Repo Men only do the extractions, not the immediate life-saving care.

Apparently there are so many people with artificial organs that the numbers are in their favor. The Union can’t do extractions on everybody. And, the Repo Men have to find you first.

So, most people cannot afford the new organs but selfishly sign up anyhow. Isn’t this the reason for the collapse of the housing market? Put no money down, get a house, and then be unable to pay the high mortgage. Not everyone deserves a house or, in REPO MEN, a new lung.

Repo men Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker) do the dirty work which appears not to pay very well. Remy’s estranged wife Carol (Carice van Houten) keeps nagging him about money.

The man handing out the “repossession pink slips” is Frank (Liev Schreiber), who is only interested in signing up clients and then re-claiming the product. Using the same organ over and over again—what a genius concept! It’s a moneymaker.

Remy wants to get out of the repo business and Jake is very upset. Jake is far too emotionally attached to his partner—it’s a homoerotic subtext that seems to follow Law around in so many movies. Then, when a faulty unit sidelines Remy and he needs a heart transplant, he has to redouble his efforts to make payments. But his “heart” isn’t in it anymore.

The Union has no employee package. Remy can’t make his payments and he has to run underground just like thousands of other people.

Remy meets a singer Beth (Alice Braga) who has had nearly every organ replaced: a heart, a liver, an ear, and a knee. Some surgeries have been done by a black market “surgeon” who happens to be 8 years old.

The twists and plot are imaginative. I liked it and thought it was very well done. The director, Miguel Sapochnik, has certainly done his homework on pushing the horror knob. The extractions are shown and it is gruesome.

Law steps outside his comfort zone and ably enters the action star genre. Whitaker does a fine job but why the adoration of his partner? Does Law need to be loved by all his co-stars? Is it in his contract, or is he just lucky?

Goat-footed old queen! Alec Baldwin has the rare talent of making an insult newsworthy. It’s that clever. Baldwin is at war with Mike Walker of the National Enquirer. The day before he co-hosted the Oscars, Baldwin—angry at Walker for reporting he’d screamed at Tina Fey on the set of “30 Rock”—told the Times of London the veteran columnist was a “whore” and a “queen.” Walker vents in the Enquirer: “Here’s my headline: ‘Alec Baldwin—Raging Closet HOMOPHOBE!’ Grab your pitchforks and torches, Hollywood—the monster lurks among ye!”

Baldwin, who says he never screamed at Fey, doesn’t seem to be afraid of a gay backlash. He told the New York Post Page Six: “Yes, he [Walker] is a goat-footed, wheezy, old queen, and all my male lovers agree with me.”

Woe to Baldwin. Now the Enquirer will dig up and print all the dirt it has been collecting on him since he launched his movie career.

Asceticism as Art: Sitting in Silence with Marina Abramović. Serbia-born performance artist Marina Abramović is renowned for her works of physical endurance and mutilation. She has plunged a knife between her fingers at high speeds, brushed her hair until her scalp bled and taken pills that induced seizures—all in the name of art.

Marina Abramović is the subject of her own solo retrospective at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art in NYC), which will include documentation of her past performances as well as re-enactments.

But the pièce de résistance involves the artist herself: for the roughly 700 hours that the exhibit is open, Abramović sits in MoMA’s second-story atrium and invites the public to sit and gaze at her in silence in an act of marathon mutual meditation.

Abramović sits illuminated at a table in the center. Security guards patrol the perimeter. And a long line of hopefuls anxiously wait their turn.

It’s like visiting an enlightened master who does not speak but merely exposes his enlightened beingness.

If sitting in the atrium day after day is an act of artistic penance for Abramović, withstanding the line must be an act of penance for the public. There is no time limit set on how long people can sit. Some viewers hang out for 20 minutes (about the average), others stick around for more than an hour.

Ha! Abramović is not doing anything new in staging an ascetic practice for public consumption. In From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation by Walter Vandereycken and Ron can Deth (one of my favorite books), the phenomenon of “hunger artists” and “living skeletons” were all the rage for centuries past. The authors write: “Although the art of fasting enjoyed great popularity particularly at the end of the previous century, there are indications from earlier periods that people earned their bread through fasting on stage. Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present runs at MoMA from March 14 to May 31, 2010. www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/965

White Tantra. When living in New York, I attended several weekend workshops of White Tantra. Yogi Bhajan became Master of Kundalini Yoga at the age of 16 in his native India. The practice of White Tantric Yoga, as with most sacred Eastern wisdom, had previously been a tradition passed on from teacher to student in a mystical and selective way. As a pioneer of this age, Yogi Bhajan decided to open the experience of White Tantric Yoga to anyone who wanted to commit to the discipline.

Until 1986, Yogi Bhajan traveled throughout the world presenting as many as thirty workshops each year to thousands of students. In 1987, using his unique abilities as Master, he began to present White Tantric Yoga as a video-taped series. He said the tapes would continue to have the same effect when he was no longer in his physical body. Yogi Bhajan passed from his physical body in October, 2004.

One of the practices was to sit across from your partner and stare into their face for a very long time.

The Bounty Hunter. Is Aniston impervious to good scripts? Corny, predictable story, no chemistry between the stars and Aniston hides her face with her hair.

Only in Hollywood movies do people divorce on a selfish whim. Why not put people together who had a contentious, nasty divorce? There is absolutely no good reason why Nicole (Jennifer Aniston) and Milo (Gerard Butler) got married. No better reason why they divorced. Did Milo leave his clothes on the floor? Was Nicole smoking in bed? We are never told. All they do is reminisce about the good times they had together. Huh?

Anyhow, Daily News reporter-on-the-rise Nicole is on to a big story involving a supposed suicide and dirty cops. But, while getting a good lead on the story, she misses her court date for a traffic ticket (bad girl!) and a warrant is issued for her arrest. Nicole has a nerdy co-worker/stalker (Jason Sudeikis) and a boozy mother (Christine Baranski).

Just so happens Milo, who used to be a detective before becoming a lazy loaf, is now a bounty hunter!

If Nicole had stolen Milo’s parents life savings and blew it on craps, well, maybe his delight in sending her to jail would be realistic. Why is he gleeful about serving the warrant?

Like most of Butler’s romantic roles of late—I’m thinking of THE UGLY TRUTH with Katherine Heigl—the only way to play opposite his sexy slob man-whore is total disgust. Heigl was the perfect foible for Butler’s unshaven, loudmouth lout. But Butler’s quote is now too high for him to play the unromantic loser. Underneath that gruff bounty hunter is a lovesick puppy whimpering for another chance with his ex-wife.

Both Aniston and Butler have lousy hair. Aniston’s weave is set so low that half her face is hidden. You just watch her moving her hair around as a personal prop. Butler is given Julius Caesar bangs and lots of fake black hair. Don’t they do hair and makeup tests anymore?

I hope Aniston, who has now worked with two co-stars of her media nemesis Angelina Jolie (Butler was in LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE and Vince Vaughn co-starred with Aniston in THE BREAK-UP and Jolie’s MR. AND MRS. SMITH), does not plan on doing a movie with Billy Bob Thornton.