I wanted to tap something out about Greg Mottola‘s Adventureland (Miramax, April 3), but I have to be at a 6 pm screening of Paris 36. I rather liked Mottola’s film for many reasons, but the fact that it’s a settled, unforced and proportionately buyable ’80s relationship drama is definitely one. I love teen flicks that are psychologically layered, unextreme, unbawdy and raggedy. And Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart have all the right stuff. They do nicely by themselves and the film. Anyone who trashes this movie deals with me. I’ll write more about this later.

B’way and 50th, 3.25.09, 4:50 pm.

The 2009 Oscars will happen two weeks later than last year — on Sunday, March 7, 2010 rather than Sunday, February 21, 2010. So that’s two more weeks of Oscar advertising. This is a one-time delay to avoid coinciding with the Winter Olympics, which will go from 2.12 through 2.18. So why are they staging the Oscars two and a half weeks later? Why not just a week later, or Sunday, February 28? The ’08 Oscar show aired on Sunday, February 22.

For what it’s worth I passed along talk on March 1st that Sean Penn had been talking to Bobby and Peter Farrelly for their Three Stooges pic. Because earlier this afternoon (i.e., while I was watching Adventureland in the Broadway screening room) Variety‘s Michael Fleming announced that Penn’s definitely on board in that capacity.

Jim Carrey is going to play Curly, and reportedly plans to gain 40 pounds — good God! — and most likely get a Curly tennis ball haircut. (Where is is written that overweight is funny in and of itself? Because all it puts out in my eyes is grotesque.) And MGM is reportedly “zeroing in” on Benicio del Toro — a.k.a., Che Guevara — to play Moe

I accept the proposition that the Farrelly’s don’t have their edge any more and the torch has been passed to the Judd Apatow gang, but this is a great cast. They’ve all played retarded obsessives before — Carrey all his life, Penn in I Am Sam (which makes me cringe every time I hear because it should have been called Sam I Am), and Del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Let’s all take a moment of silence to remember the Stooges who were talked up at one time and might have been — Russell Crowe as Moe, Johnny Depp as whomever, Mel Gibson as Curly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Curly, Robert Downey, Jr. as Larry, etc.

My most wanted buys over the next two months are Criterion’s Bluray of Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s The Wages of Fear (and they’d better not Third Man me this time!), due 4.21; Criterion’s DVD of Stephen Frears‘ The Hit, due on 4.28; and Paramount Home Video Three Days of the Condor Bluray, due 5.19.

The Wages of Fear, The Hit, Three Days of the Condor.

That’s on top of Criterion’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle DVD and Redemption Films’ Girl on a Motorcycle DVD, which are also out on 5.19.

In a 2.17.09 interview with High-Def Digest’s David Krauss, Warner Home Video’s George Feltenstein said that a “murderer’s row” of WHV classics — Gone With the Wind, North by Northwest, The Wizard of Oz — will be out on Bluray later this year. Since that article the GWTW and Wizard of Oz Blurays have been announced (but without a specific date) and the North by Northwest Bluray hasn’t been announced. Is it being bumped into ’10?

The first official response regarding the outrage about alternate subtitles on the Let The Right One In DVD and Bluray, which Icons of Fright wrote about two days ago and which I reported yesterday morning, came from a senior Magnolia guy. “Apparently we were supplied with two different translations by the producers,” he explained, “and for some reason the DVD division used the alternate subtitles for the DVD.

Yeah, but what reason? I never got a clearly worded reply on this.

The Magnolia guy emphasized, however, that “there was no conscious decision to ‘dumb the film down’, which is absurd because the theatrical titles were perfectly understandable and accessible.”

And yet a piece of reporting that was posted yesterday on The Digital Bits revealed that the person who changed the subtitles works for Magnet, the Magnolia distribution arm for oddball films. One presumes that the decision was a conscious (as opposed to unconscious or subconscious) one on someone’s part. As the general consensus is that the alternate subtitles represent a kind of dumbing down of the film’s dialogue, it is therefore fair to say that the subtitles were consciously dumbed down.

The bottom line is that some Magnet person felt that subtitles that were simpler, less wordy, and more American-ized sounding would play better with the DVD market, which is thought to be a little more downscale that the folks who pay to see films of this type in art theatres,.

A Magnet spoksperson said the following to the Digital Bits: “We’ve been made aware that there are several fans that don’t like the version of the subtitles on the DVD/BR. We had an alternate translation that we went with. Obviously a lot of fans thought we should have stuck with the original theatrical version. We are listening to the fans feedback, and going forward we will be manufacturing the discs with the subtitles from the theatrical version.”

Digital Bits asked Magnet how people will be able to identify the new discs, when they’ll be available in stores and if there will be an exchange program for those who have the existing version.

“There are no exchanges,” Magnet replied. “We are going to make an alternate version available however. For those that wish to purchase a version with the theatrical subtitles, it will be called out in the tech specs box at the back/bottom of the package where it will list SUBTITLES: ENGLISH (Theatrical), SPANISH.”

All the fans want is for Magnolia to put this person on a downtown Manhattan street at a designated time and location any time over the next couple of weekends. This person will be the fox. The hounds — i.e., the fans who were so outraged by this decision and will now have to purchase an extra DVD or Bluray of LTROI when the corrected version appears — will agree to give the fox a two-block lead. The fox agrees not to take a subway or a cab. He/she will have to stay on foot during the entire chase. The hounds agree not to physically harm the fox when he/she is caught, although the throwing of fruit and vegetables will be allowed.

Reading Suzie Woz‘s USA Today article about Max Records, the 11 year-old star of Spike Jonze‘s Where The Wild Things Are (Warner Bros., 10.16) brought a wonderfully cleansing thought into my head.

I don’t want to see Where The Wild Things Are because I don’t like movies about kids. Not any more. Exceptions will always occur (and thank god for that), but I pretty much don’t give a damn about coming-of-age movies or learning-a-tough-lesson movies or movies about young kids going through an adventure that changes their life and/or has a profound impact. Really, throw all that shit out the window.

I’ll tell you one reason why I’m not the only one thinking this. The Great Recession has been scaring the hell out of people, and with everyone getting down to brass tacks and doing what they can to survive parents are realizing that they haven’t done their kids any favors by funding a cut-off, over-indulged fantasy realm for them to live in. That’s what the Wall Street pirates have been doing in a sense since Bush came in and look what happened.

Kids need to grow up and grim up and learn the skills and disciplines that will allow them to survive. So enough with the Spielberg-aping films that portray a child’s world as a magical-fantastical kingdom in and of itself that adults might be able to learn something from.

I loved E.T. when I first saw it 27 years ago, but the last time I watched (i.e., when the last loaded-with-extras bullshit DVD came out) I had a moderately hard time. There’s no filmmaker who’s more sentimental, manipulative and emotionally cloying than Steven Spielberg when it comes to under-age characters. His films are like McDonald’s french fries; they tend to age very badly.

It’s taken years to realize this, but I think my profound dislike of kid films initially came from the one-two punch of Spielberg’s Hook (’91) and George Lucas‘s The Phantom Menace (’99). (Jake Lloyd‘s performance as Anakin Skywalker was surely one of the most agonizing ever delivered in motion picture history.) Those two left me doubled-over, and then along came Spielberg’s A.I. and I was really done with kids playing lead roles. A ten-year process, that.

I don’t think I’ve been able to really go with a film about a kid (or kids) since. I’m sure I’m forgetting a good kid-in-the-lead film that’s been out over the last seven or eight years.

The Hook-Phantom Menace-A.I. whammy was a bit like my getting sick from eating too much corn bread at my grandmother’s home when I was ten. I wasn’t able to even smell corn bread for two or three decades after that.

This prejudice is partly about my pretty much having had it with kids in real life. Unless they’re your own children or your girlfriend’s or they’re natural-born geniuses (I would have loved to have known Pablo Picasso when he was 6 or 7), kids are not people you want to hang with for the most part. Ideally, I mean. They tend to be dull (i.e., obsessive), anarchic, shallow, uninteresting, overly self-regarding and for the most part unengaged in anything other than their own insipid, corporate-created distractions.

This sounds like a joke but we need to go back to the Victorian tradition of kids being seen but not heard and sometimes being taken out to the woodshed when they act up. They need to talk and share about their own lives, of course, but they really do need to ask more questions about the experiences of adults in the real world. They also need to be made to eat on their own on a card table in the den on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day and Easter.

We also need to return to the standards of most early to mid 20th Century movies in which kids were not the primary focus. There were some excellent studio-era films made with kids in the lead, of course. Standouts off the top of my head are The Boy With the Green Hair, The Red Pony, Old Yeller, Night of the Hunter, My Life as a Dog, The Silence, The Sixth Sense , etc. But by and large pre-1980s films stayed away from films in which kids played the lead(s), and we need to get back to that.

And that includes teenagers. I hate teenager movies unless they have characters who remind me of myself when I was 16 or 17, which is to say a kid with at least a semblance of a brain and a semi-developed vocabulary and actual curiosity about the world outside his/her immediate realm. Twilight met that test for me — I believed in that film almost all the way through. Another exception is Risky Business, which I’ll be able to enjoy when I’m 95. Heathers is another. But serious quality-level teenage films are very few and far between.

And I don’t want to hear any crap about how I’m getting colorfully cantankerous and channeling Andy Rooney. The ones out there who believe that American culture should celebrate and nurture adolescence as an end in itself are the loonies, not me. The wake-up call of the Great Recession means — or certainly should mean — that the age of the “infantilization of movies” (a term coined by Pauline Kael, as I recall, in an attempt to describe the influence that Spielberg and Lucas began to exert in the mid ’70s) is coming to an end.

Woz reports that audiences will get a chance to check out a trailer for Where The Wild Things Are on Friday if they happen to see Monsters vs. Aliens. Otherwise, I’m sure it’ll turn up online a few days after that.

I guess this pretty much settles the inspiration question raised by that writhing, tree-root shot from Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist, which I posted yesterday. I’m told the below still is from Henry Otto‘s silent Dante’s Inferno (1924), but it looks a little too artful and well designed for a reportedly mediocre, low-budget affair that ran only 60 minutes. I’m wondering if it might be from Harry Lachman‘s Dante’s Inferno (1935), which starred Spencer Tracy and Claire Trevor.