“Is there a secret language school where they teach under-35 women to converse in mallspeak with the exact same reedy, mincing, me-me tones?” — tweeted from JFK before my Virgin America LA flight took off.

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“I disliked Prometheus intensely,” writes “Subashini” in a 6.23 post on the Blog of Disquiet. “I do think that having acrimonious feelings towards the film is the actual point — the film seems to be a stand-in for a certain segment of humanity and its imperialist, ruinous ambitions, though like most films coming out of Hollywood this seems to coexist with its appreciation of capital, technology, and involuntary/reproductive labour.

“That in itself doesn’t make it inherently unlikeable, not at all. But as Susan Sontag wrote in ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ ‘Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence — a technological view,” and perhaps it’s the...

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I apologize for omitting Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions (i.e., formerly Six Sessions, and before that The Surrogate) in my initial posting of my best-of-2012 piece, which I called “Half-Time.” I’ve since corrected the error. Fox Searchlight will release this highly praised acquisition (for which they paid $6 million) on 10.26.12.

“I saw Ben Lewin‘s The Surrogate this morning,” I wrote on 1.24.12, “and yes, it’s a touching, thoughtful and...

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Tom Berenger has been jogging around the track for 35-plus years. He broke into features in the mid ’70s and had a great 16-year run — Looking for Mr. Goodbar (’77), In Praise of Older Women (’78), The Dogs of War (’81), The Big Chill (’84), Platoon (’86), Someone to Watch Over Me (’87), Major League (’89), Born on the Fourth of July (’89), The Field (’90), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (’91), Sliver (’93) and Gettysburg (’93). And then he seemed to slip into B-level genre stuff, but he came back two years ago with a significant role in Chris Nolan‘s Inception.

The man is a veteran who’s paid his dues several times over and is now into his...

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Magic Mike did around $18 million on Friday, and is forecasting $47 million by Sunday night — much higher than expected. And Seth McFarlane‘s Ted, the Mark Wahlberg teddy-bear movie which I saw tonight and was more or less okay with, is expected to do a little over $50 million by Sunday night. All the hot-dog-eating, ESPN-watching guys who wouldn’t be caught dead seeing Mike went to Ted — it’s that simple.

Mike got a B from CinemaScore respondents — i.e., it didn’t get an A because some felt that it would’ve been a little better if it had less character stuff and was glossier-looking (“What was up with the orange-y color?”) and cheaper and sillier with dumb jokes.

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For whatever reason the following exchange, which happened at a party in London’s Soho district sometime in early December 1980, has never left my memory. It was a really great gathering, thrown (or so I recall) by Time Out magazine. It was crowded and everyone was half bombed and the music had a great tribal drum thing going on. This is how it went:

Me: Who are we listening to?

Guy #1: What?

Me: (shouting in his ear) Who’s playing?

Guy #1: You know who it is.

Me: I do? It’s not coming to me.

Guy #2: You know who it is…say it!

Guy #1: You know who it is!

Me: Bow Wow Wow?

Guy #2: That’s right.

Three or four days earlier I had been woken up at a place...

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That’s a ’70s Lina Wertmuller film, right? Giancarlo Giannini, just back from a two-month stay in Europe, arrives in a sticky, sweltering Manhattan. Doesn’t feel too badly, walks around, buys Lifeboat Bluray, writes about Tomkat. Checks into nice air-conditioned Chinatown hotel around 2 or 3 pm, goes upstairs for a 90-minute nap. Wakes up at 10:15 pm…whuh?…and comes to a depressing realization that falling asleep again within the next several hours is gonna be a bitch.

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Relationship-wise Tom Cruise isn’t much of a stayer, but then who is? Most couples last five to ten years, longer if they have kids. Cruise’s relationships have mostly tended to last three to six years. Rebecca DeMornay, ’83 to ’85, was the shortest but they were both young. Mimi Rogers was just under three years (May ’87 to February ’90). Cruise’s one long-term relationship was with Nicole Kidman, lasting just over 10 years from ’90 to ’01. Penelope Cruise was…what, two and half or three years, ’01 to ’04? And now the Katie Holmes marriage is toast after six…okay, seven years if you count courtship.

Tom and Katie have a daughter together, Suri, and she’ll be the basis of their post-marital bond for the rest of their lives. It’s no biggie. We all move on, renew, find new oil, rebuild, join new health clubs, re-finance, re-adapt.

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I’ll give you $100 if any European property owner who isn’t a drug addict, an alcoholic or saddled with mental issues has a backyard like this. But this is more or less par for the course in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn neighborhood that reeks of degeneracy and fatalism and anti-social asshole teenagers and a lack of soap and regular toothbrushing and deodorant and decent take-out food.

Backyard of 190 Pulaski Street, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

I waited 45 minutes to get my passport stamped last night — me and 260 others being served by three shlubby guys. “Look at this way — at least there won’t be any waiting for the luggage,” I said to a guy I’d been on the same jet with. A 45-minute wait would never happen in Europe. There are lines, of course, but nobody waits that long for something as simple as...

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I realize that “Green Leaves of Summer,” which sounds tedious and Godawful in this Brothers Four version, was used in Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds. I just don’t remember the scene…nothing. But this — this! — is good. Name the source of this track and the composer.

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The Silver Linings Playbook “looks fast and sharp — a raggedy-jazz comedy about caustic humor, family, sex, anxiety, therapy, hurt, healing…all of it. Edgy, crackling, push-pushy, what-the-fucky. Directed and written by David O. Russell, adapted from the serio-comic novel by Matthew Quick. Agitated, lacking-in-people-skills Bradley Cooper falls in love with Jennifer Lawrence. Robert De Niro, Julia Stiles, Jacki Weaver and Chris Tucker costar.” — from a 5.21 Cannes Film Festival riff about my first look at a Silver Linings reel.

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Three days ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote about the trepidation she’s been feeling about the inevitable Beasts of the Southern Wild backlash. Two days later Deadspin.com’s Tim Grierson heard her call and posted this fairly well-written riff about the “five worst indie film cliches” in Beasts.

You can read as well as I can, but here are the five in bullet form: One, the film “fetishizes authenticity.” he says. Two, it tries way too hard to be...

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Katey Rich aside, a significant portion of elite female film critics have gone thumbs-down on Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike (Warner Bros., opening today) and are more than partly responsible for its Rotten Tomatoes grade hugging the low ’80s instead of the low to mid ’90s, where it belongs. As far as I can tell the only extra-brainy, big-gun female critic to come down squarely in support of this Warner Bros. release is N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis.

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“As a kid I had a huge crush on John Phillip Law after I saw him in The Russians are Coming!, The Russians Are Coming!,” a producer friends recalls. “Anyway, one day I was in the post office on Fairfax and Santa Monica Blvd. in the late ’80s. That post office was a depressing green-fluorescent lighthole back then. Remember that that whole general area was on the dinghy side before the posh Whole Foods opened across the street and gave the neighborhood a facelift.

“So I’m standing there and suddenly I see a guy with bony white legs in cheap shorts, a faded T-shirt and a torn straw beach hat. I got a little closer as I used the xerox machine, and when I saw who it was I gasped — John Phillip Law. I was horrified. He looked like a homeless person. Later on I heard an anecdote from a close friend who had rented the lower level of a duplex in the hills that Law owned. He said that he/they moved out quickly...

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My British Airways Munich flight just arrived at Heathrow/London, and I’m reading about SCOTUS having just given a Constitutional pass to Affordable Health Care…whoo-whoo! And while we’re at it, WTF? Really wasn’t expecting this. Like, at all. I’m imagining Justice Scalia baring his fangs and going “Aaarrrgghhhh!” How did it happen? I’m about to start my reading but first…another security check line!

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From Cinema Blend‘s Katey Rich: “You can probably tell by now that Magic Mike isn’t exactly the glitter-caked bachelorette party romp promised in the trailers, or at least not entirely. But what’s probably most impressive about the work Steven Soderbergh does, directing from Reid Carolin‘s script, is that it’s got the glitz and the heavy character study, without sacrificing either.

“Shot by Soderbergh through a dingy yellow filter that makes everything feel like it’s been left in the sun too long, Magic Mike is about dreams that curdle and get deferred, about how you need more money than what’s stuffed in a G-string to make it in this world, but how those $1 bills can make it easier to wait — for a little while, at least. It’s also about Channing Tatum...

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If I’m lucky enough to know them, brilliant, bothered urban women with a caustic tongue and an absolute inability to converse about anything without sharing the brutal, often amusing truth of it are the light of my life. Guys too. If I had my way the ones I know who fit this description would never leave, at least before my own demise.

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Wednesday, 6.27, 6:50 pm

ditto, 9:35 pm

Wednesday, 6.27, 9:35 pm

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2012 is halfway done and although I’ve been out of the American commercial loop for almost two months (I’m flying back to NY today), I’m dead certain of the year’s best so far. Cannes favorites are included because I’ve seen ‘em and I know what I know. Beyond the top category is a mashup of my April-June assessments plus January-March judgments. The usual admonishments, corrections and disputes are requested.

Best Films of 2012 So Far: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Magic Mike, Miss Bala, Holy Motors (Cannes), Haywire, Bernie, On The Road (Cannes), No (Cannes), God Bless America, Killing Them Softly (Cannes), Amour (Cannes…continues to grow upon reflection but a grueling sit), The Three Stooges, The Sessions (formerly known as The Surrogate), Michael, Rampart, 21 Jump Street, The Grey, Rust and Bone (Cannes) (18)

April through...

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“Magic Mike delivers on its promise of gyrating and pelvic-thrusting, barely-clothed men as the music plays and the lights shine, but beyond that you get a film that comes across as a truly authentic drama with a performance from Channing Tatum that makes you believe you may actually be looking at the movie star Hollywood so desperately wants him to be.” — Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet in a review that posted today at 10:26 am.

“Most audiences, expecting something closer to a masculine Showgirls, might be surprised by the relatively serious tone: Magic Mike crams together several derivative subplots that dangle (sorry) around energetic striptease sequences enacted with the ostentatiousness of an MGM...

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Somebody at Cinemacom (or was it after Cinemacom?) told me that Looper was a lot better than Total Recall. Damnation with faint praise? Maybe. How did he know this? He didn’t — he was just passing along what he’d heard. So it’s all bullshit, right? Maybe not. Looper might be half-good, pretty good or just plain good. Or at least fair.

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Is it possible for an actor’s dignity to be all but destroyed in one fell swoop? If you ask me John Phillip Law (who died in 2008 at age 70) managed this when he strapped on huge white swan wings in Roger Vadim‘s Barbarella (1968) as the blind angel Pygar. There’s a shot of him flying into the heavens with his flamingo legs dangling — he looks like a peroxide dodo bird. When I first saw this I muttered, “You poor man…your agent really screwed you.”

Law was quite the hot guy in Hollywood for about five years. A breakout performance as a Russian submarine sailor in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! got him started. But what man or woman, for that matter, would have been willing to take him half-seriously after Barbarella? The knockout punch...

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The addition of RAM to HE’s memory, implemented a few hours ago, seems to have made everything — posting, loading — much faster. If it doesn’t seem that way to anyone, please advise.

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“There is likely no major American filmmaker so tuned in to the intertwined axes of life and work as Steven Soderbergh,” writes Boxoffice.com’s Mark Olsen in his review of Magic Mike (Warner Bros., 6.29). “In film after film he’s explored the way jobs both build up and destroy the contemporary American soul.

“If at times it is hard to parse from Soderbergh’s prolific output which films are proper, big-time movies and which are in-the-margins sidebars (‘They’re all for me,’ he notoriously likes to say), Magic Mike combines those conflicting impulses perhaps more than any of his other films. The flick is a study of modern economic reality and the rationalizations that get us through the day, acknowledging the glamour and the glitter and sweat required to get us there.”

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The DVD Beaver screen captures and comparisons of Olive Films’ Bluray of High Noon (out 7.17) are thrilling. For the 189th time, here’s my 7.27.07 piece arguing that Fred Zinneman‘s 1952 classic is a far better film than Rio Bravo. Topped off (or resting upon, really) a Dimitri Tiomkin score that just kills, there’s really no argument.

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Okay, with Kevin James-type laughs. Which have worked before with a certain sector of the public. Will Gavin O’Connor get some kind of “thanks” acknowledgement in the closing credits?

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I’m sorry but portions of this trailer for Hit and Run (Open Road, 8.24) really made me laugh, particularly the running joke about Hershey sex and presumed sexual dominance of one race over another, etc. The bit that doesn’t work is when Dax Shepard (who co-directed, produced, wrote the screenplay and stars) and Kristin Bell walk into the wrong motel room. The residents just stand and lie there like Duane Hanson statues. Nope.

The poster calls it Hit & Run and the movie sites are calling it Hit and Run. Which?

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