Computer trauma update: It’s 3:35 pm on a beautiful blue-sky day, and after almost 24 hours of high anxiety I’m almost out of the woods. I came to my senses last night and realized that buying a brand new computer simply because the hard drive had crapped out was ridiculous. (Thanks to those who stated this in the reader replies.) I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly yesterday. All I was saying to everyone was, “I have to fix this problem fast.”

I found a Brooklyn-based computer repair guy named Marcel (his company is called Big Island Interactive) on Craig’s List around 8 ayem this morning. He told me to just bring over the old unit plus a new hard drive (in case he couldn’t repair the malfunctioning one) and a fresh copy of Windows XP (in case the old Windows data is irrevocably screwed up) to his brownstone apartment on Park Place in the Park Slope area.

So I went back to the Best Buy store on B’way and Houston around 10:30, returned the new computer (Windows Vista is a little twitchy…I played around with it last night), picked up the old one, went uptown to buy a new hard drive and a fresh Windows XP disc, hopped on the Q train and delivered everything to Marcel around 2 pm. A hour later he called and said he might be able to repair the old hard drive — he’ll know more by this evening.

I’m now sitting in a combination post-office and internet cafe near the corner of Flatbush Ave. and Park Place. God willing, the troubles will be over by midday tomorrow.

There’s not much time to file before I have to get back on the Q train and catch a screening of 28 Weeks Later at 6 pm. I recorded an interview with the film’s director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo yesterday afternoon, just before that Spider-Man 3 screening at Leows’ Lincoln Plaza that I didn’t attend because of those wonderful tekkies at Gateway. Maybe I can post this if I can find another decent internet cafe after the screening.

There’s a Friedrich_Nietzsche line that Nick Nolte‘s character says in Karl Reicz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain?: “When in danger, always move forward.”

Today was a moderately good day until the hard drive on my relatively new Gateway laptop (a nice 17-incher with a 160 gig hard drive) hiccuped and froze up and was suddenly functional no more. “A bad hard drive,” the Geek Squad guy at B’way near Houston said about 90 minutes after I first realized I had a problem. No repairs, over and done with, tough luck.

I didn’t purchase unit-replacement insurance when I bought the Gateway for the second time last December (the first unit stopped putting out sound and had to be replaced), so I had to fork over big-time for a brand new unit. The Geek guy swore that Gateway laptops, despite my bad luck, are highly reliablle. Welcomely, the price has dropped to about $700 — down from $1100 five months ago — and of course the new one has Windows Vista rather than Windows XP.

A voice was telling me last November I should buy a Mac; I didn’t listen because I didn’t want to repurchase all the programs (FTP software, photo and video editing, etc.) and because the nice ones cost a good deal more, but I should have just sucked it in and bitten the bullet. If I had I wouldn’t be going through this crap right now. I vaguely disliked and certainly didn’t trust PC’s before today’s misfortune — my feelings are much more adamant now.

All the data and photos and e-mail is being transferred to CDs by that Geek Squad guy (it may take him until tomorrow morning) and I’m going to have to contact all the people I bought programs from and submit the required numerical data so I can re-download and re-install everything. I’ll hopefully be able to file a couple of stories tonight or certainly by tomorrow morning, but wont be back up to full groove speed for at least a couple of days, and more likely not until Thursday or Friday.

The hard-drive issue happened right before I was about to see Spider-Man 3 at the Lincoln Plaza. In Contention‘s Kris Tapley (fresh from a long coast-to-coast road trip) was with me. I’d been told by an IMAX publicist that passes would be waiting for the 5 pm show, but the staffers at the theatre couldn’t find any message or confirmation of this, and by the time they’d sorted it out the sold-out show had begun. So we went to see it a regular 35mm theatre, and then the shit started when I turned on the copmputer to check e-mails. Awful, awful, awful.

Thanks to Houston’s Michael Bergeron for passing along this shot of a pair of Hondo 3-D viewing glasses left over from the original 1953 release of this John Wayne film. (“Ain’t that a Shane?”) It was announced last week that the 3D version of Hondo will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

These 3D specs appear to be in awfully good shape considering they’re 54 years old and made of featherweight cardboard

“I look at the people I meet. No one’s dying to have a lot of responsibility in their lives. Very few people are looking at life and thinking, ‘Gee, I wish there was another thing to occupy my time and energy.’ Our characters are definitely trying to avoid that type of thing.” — Knocked Up star Seth Rogen analyzing schlub culture in Sharon Waxman‘s N.Y. Times piece about Judd Apatow‘s focus on (and identification with) nerdy/schlub types in his films.

Can there be any doubt that it was American schlubs who contributed a significant portion of last weekend’s huge Spider-Man 3 haul? Apatow’s Knocked Up characters pointedly mention wanting to catch Spider-Man 3 in the film. Way to go, Judd and Seth…that’s really something to be identified with and be proud of.

“And The Winner Is” columnist and Oscar-race analyst Scott Feinberg had a look last month of a rough-cut of S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, the Abu Ghraib/Iraqi War documentary from Oscar-winner Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) that Sony Pictures Classics may not release until “sometime next year,” he says. Here‘s Feinberg’s report:

“Morris says he has a longstanding fascination with ‘iconic images,’ including the photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima that inspired Clint Eastwood‘s two latest films (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima), and most recently the photos of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, which [inspired Morris to make] this film.

“As always, Morris manages to get all the principle figures — Lynndie England, et. al. — to open up quite candidly about the roles they played in interviews that are made even creepier because they are shot using Morris’ Interrotron camera, which enables interview subjects to look directly into the camera while answering Morris’ questions.

“Although I haven’t seen every minute of the film — nobody has, because it’s not yet complete — I can say that it appears to have the makeup of an Oscar nominee. Aside from an Oscar nod, there are two potentially controversial things to look for whenever the film is released, probably sometime next year:

“(1) This film, in its current form, includes previously unseen, tremendously graphic, and uncensored photographs and cell-phone videos from Abu Ghraib — prisoners being forced to masturbate, touch each other, etc. Morris indicated that he and distributor Sony Pictures Classics, which has given him his biggest budget and complete creative freedom thus far, hope the film will be given some leeway by the ratings board because it is a documentary, but acknowledges that if it does come back with an NC-17 rating, he would probably cut it until it was an R rather than release it to such a limited audience; and…

“(2) Morris is not shy when it comes to expressing his opinions about the ‘pointlessness’ of and ‘lives wasted’ in Iraq. I know what he means so I don’t have a problem with it, but those who disagree will likely attempt to cast him as a Michael Moore-type extreme liberal.”

One comment: S.O.P. is complete enough to show to a journalist in April and yet Morris may not release it until ’08? What’s that about?

“There are three things that Democratic political candidates tend to do when talking with constituents: they display an impressive grasp of the minutiae of their constituents’ problems, particularly money problems; they rouse indignation by explaining how those problems are caused by powerful groups getting rich on the backs of ordinary people; and they present well-worked-out policy proposals that, if passed, would solve the problems and put the powerful groups in their place.

“Barack Obama seldom does any of these things. He tends to underplay his knowledge, acting less informed than he is. He rarely accuses, preferring to talk about problems in the passive voice, as things that are amiss with us rather than as wrongs that have been perpetrated by them. And the solutions he offers generally sound small and local rather than deep-reaching and systemic.” — from a very wise, thorough and well-written New Yorker profile of Obama, dated 5.7.07 and called “The Conciliator.” The author is Larissa MacFarquhar.

Bruce Willis attempted to spin the recent anti-Live Free or Die Hard buzz (i.e, that it’s been marginally deballed in order to earn a PG-13 rating and therefore may not be a genuine kick-ass Die Hard flick) by calling Harry Knowles at home a day or so ago.

Since the PG-13 brouhaha arose out of a Peter Biskind interview with Willis in the new Vanity Fair, Willis told Knowles that “his comments had been taken out of place and that Biskind focused on [the rating issue] more than he felt was justified, especially since at the point in which he talked to Peter about Die Hard 4, he hadn’t actually seen it yet.

“According to Bruce, he feels this Die Hard is right there with the original, and that if you didn’t know it was PG-13, you couldn’t tell, because it got him to the edge of his seat at least 6 times. Now, it might not have as many ‘fucks’ as in the past, but the action and intensity, he swears, is there.”

Willis once called me at home…13 and 1/2 years ago. He was pissed over an Entertainment Weekly article that I’d written (my sources were as good as they could’ve been) that said that his swaggering big-star behavior was largely respon- sible for shooting complications and added production costs on an action film called Striking Distance. He felt he’d been sand-bagged and called to vent (naturally) and maybe figure who my sources had been. I respected that he did this himself and didn’t have some flunky publicist call instead.

Fay Grim and Broken Engish star Parker Posey “refuses to play a role in the hoary media ritual,” observes N.Y. Times writer David Carr. “Most actors manage to bring every conversation gracefully and stealthily back to their brilliant, courageous career choices. Posey, 38, is precisely the opposite, [and] discursive in the extreme.”

Exactly — that’s what I found so engaging about her. Not once did she try to steer our chat over to the merits of Fay Grim. And yet with Carr…

“Wasn’t Apocalypto amazing?√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù she says. √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúDid you love it? I have it on DVD. I’ve watched it like, oh, my God, I am Jaguar Paw. It was so powerful. It was so interesting. The karma of him, right? This past year to have this whole thing happen to him where he was like shunned by Hollywood and then he makes this — I mean he’s a rebel. He’s a passionate person who, you know, you see it all in that movie.”

Wasn’t the point of the Malibu sugar-tits bust that Gibson acted like a drunk? Plus the fact that Gibson had made Apocalypto well before it happened.

“‘What are they doing?’ a 5-year-old boy asked his parents when an explicit sexual scene showed up on his TV screen [a few days ago].

“The boy’s father, Paul Dunleavy, was appalled.

“‘It was two people doing their thing, it was full-on and it was disgusting,’ said Dunleavy, who asked that his son not be named. ‘It wasn’t something you’d expect to see on Cinemax, never mind Disney.'” — from a 5.2.07 N.Y. Daily News story by Adam Nichols called “Cable Porn Gaffe: The Full Mickey!”

“The movie industry has been in the business of big — big stars, big stories, big productions, big screens and big returns — about as long as it’s been a business,” writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in her Sunday piece called “Defending Goliath: Hollywood and the Art of the Blockbuster.” And, she adds, “as long as the movies have told stories, they have used spectacle to sell those stories.”

Dargis’s point is that there’s not a whole lot of difference between emotionally primitive ’50s style spectacles like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur and the current assortment as represented by 300 and Spider-man 3. She chooses not to mention a crucial difference, though. Today’s blockbusters (which are of a much, much lower gene-pool order than ’90s blockbusters like, say, Titanic or Terminator 2) are far more emotionally primitive and at least five times dumber than any primitive-attitude mega-budget costume flick of 40 or 50 years ago.

To put it simply and bluntly, the culture has seriously devolved since the days of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the quality and mentality of current blockbusters simply reflect that process.

In reporting that John Malkovich is “in talks” to costar in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn Ater Reading, a half-serious, half-doofusy dark comedy set to begin shooting in August with Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Frances McDormand playing major roles, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that the Coens’ screenplay “is being kept under wraps” and that “it is unclear what Pitt’s character will be.”

Brad Pitt, Ethan and Joel Coen, John Malkovich

I can clear that mystery up since I finished the script this morning. Pitt is playing a dumb health freak and workout trainer (i.e., dumb in the way that William H. Macy‘s character was on the not-fully-comprehending side in Fargo). The trainer is called Chad Feldheimer, and is described in the Coen script as “fortyish and well-muscled.”

The story kicks into gear when Chad partners with a fellow gym worker — a neurotic 40ish woman named Linda who’s looking for a way to afford some heavy-duty plastic surgery in order to improve her love life — in trying to shake down an embittered CIA employee named Osbourne Cox (Malkovich) who’s written a CIA tell-all that contains lots of sensitive hot-button material. Cox has lost the disc, though, and Chad has found it at the gym he and Linda work at.

I don’t know who’s playing Linda, by the way, but it’s not McDormand. It’s a splendid part. Whoever gets it is going to have something she can point to with pride for decades to come. I would offer it to someone a bit older but pretty — Julianne Moore. Someone who doesn’t need plastic surgery as much as a four-day weekend at an ashram.

The script isn’t all that secretive because I was sent a copy a few days ago, and if guys like me are reading it you can bet a lot of others are also.

I love Burn After Reading. It’s about hubris, stupidity, ineptitude, unbridled egotism — all traits that the Coens have worked with before to delicious and splendid effect. It’s arch and sardonic and inflected with that wonderfully dark Coen attitude and some really first-rate character-embroidery (a la Fargo and Barton Fink), and yet it’s sometimes laugh-out-loud funny in the vein of The Big Lebowski and Intolerable Cruelty.

If they do it right (I’m particularly jazzed by the idea of Emmanuel Lubezski doing the hand-held photography), this may well turn out to be, for the Coens, an uncommon mainstream hit. It reads, in fact, like one of those once-in-a-blue-moon Coen sweet-spot movies, and I say that as someone who wasn’t at all delighted with The Ladykillers or The Man Who Wasn’t There, was “comme ci comme ca” with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Miller’s Crossing, and who still finds it difficult to watch Raising Arizona without getting irritated.