Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel reported today that Sony has bought all int’l media rights (excluding U.K. TV) plus domestic home entertainment rights to Edward Norton, Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ Obama doc, called By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. The heretofore untitled film will open in U.S. theatres via HBO Documentary Films, Siegel wrote. But when?

The fact that no projected release period was included in the story probably means By The People will come out in ’10. Which I feel will feel be too late in the game. The ’08 election was a long miniseries that everyone absorbed from hundreds if not thousands of different media and camera angles as it happened. I could maybe watch a first-rate review of it one more time later this year, but not next year. The world will have moved on. Enough already. The big Achilles Heel of this project has always been the fact that Norton, Rice and Sims have been moving at a glacial pace.

You’d never know it from the jacket art, but this is Criterion’s Bluray edition of Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s The Wages of Fear — originally released in 1953, due in stores on 4.21.09. Haven’t read any reviews; catching it later tonight. If Criterion has applied the Third Man grainstorm treatment, all bets are off.

The reason I’ve never warmed to Anna Faris is because I don’t think playing all those ditzy nutters has required all that much “acting” from her. I think she’s been tapping into a thing that she feels naturally comfortable with, and she’s been enjoying the work and the juice and the money…whatever. But it’s come to the point with me that when Faris is in a film, I pretty much know what she’s going to do. This was certainly the case with her performance in Observe and Report.

Anna Faris at Monday evening’s Observe and Report premiere in Los Angeles.

She’s always been delivered a great anarchic spirit in playing those dingalings, but I’m not sure she can do much else. She’s been playing more or less the same note on the cello since her first Scary Movie in 2000. Wouldn’t she have tried by now to play…whatever, a Sigourney Weaver-like corporation chief with an MBA or a steely Russian assassin in a spy film by now if she had it in her? Where would Dustin Hoffman have been if he’d done nothing but play variations on his preppy Benjamin Braddock character in The Graduate from ’68 to ’77?

Kal Penn‘s decision to quit House (with his Lawrence Kutner character committing suicide) for a gig as associate director in the White House’s office of public liaison is admirable. He seems like a good guy. I never had it in for him personally. But I still maintain that in some…no, several of his films (the Harold and Kumar and Van Wilder pics but also in Mira Nair’s The Namesake) Penn was extremely convincing as a dumb-ass.

The way I hear it, Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds is currently clocking at 2 hours and 45 minutes. No official confirmation — just information from a guy in a position to know. But this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s read the 165-page script. A minute a page, right on the button.

Because of Joe Leydon‘s South by Southwest review, I went to Observe and Report last week expecting some kind of semi-bold game-changer — Seth Rogen as a twisted but mordantly humorous Travis Bickle, certainly no Paul Blart Mall Cop (and perhaps even a kind of anti-Blart), and maybe even a “comedy” without laughs that goes in a much darker and twisted direction than any 21st Century laugher has before.

Well, it’s darker and creepier, all right, and I suppose it deserves a point or two for not shovelling the usual dumb-ass shtick. And yes, Rogen’s Ronnie Barnhardt, a psychologically distressed mall cop, represents a new level of myopia and malignancy in big-screen comedy. And so yes, Jody Hill, the director-writer, has certainly avoided the usual b.s.

Except he doesn’t in the end. Or in the beginning and the middle, for that matter. Observe and Report is my idea of amateurish, sloppy, and even cowardly crap. I didn’t completely hate it, but I was constantly scowling and seething at Hill’s flaunting of the absurd unreality of it, and I never laughed once. Sorry, but take away the shock value and it’s a deplorably bad film.

I blame the SXSW critics for building it up too much. If I had gone to this thing cold I might have come out feeling a bit more accepting or at least forgiving. But to say that Hill’s film is coming from a similar aesthetic or stylistic zip code as Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver shows appalling judgment. And to express serious excitement about it means…I don’t know, that certain critics have been bored with recent films and are lunging at straws?

There’s no way you can listen to guys like New York‘s David Edelstein (“earns its cathartic climax”) or Cinematical‘s Scott Weinberg (“a wonderful freakin’ thing”). Trust me, they’re jerking themselves off.

Observe and Report is basically absurdist shtick with no investment in any kind of human behavior you can even begin to half-believe. Which Hill had to sell in order for the twisted-Ronnie stuff to kick in to any degree. The lesson for me is that Hill lacks even rudimentary skills in the building of story or theme or verisimilitude. He obviously thinks he’s on to something here because he’s nervy. Which he is — I’ll give him that. But there’s a lot more to this game.

It’s one thing to make a stupid comedy with idiotic occurences that could never happen in real life, but Observe and Report is trying to do something else here — to look with some degree of semi-comic honesty into the enraged and diseased heart of a lonely fat bipolar nerd (Rogen) who was brought up dysfunctionally and creepily by an alcoholic and once-promiscuous single-mom (Celia Weston).

Observe and Report has instead persuaded me that Hill is a copout compromiser who lacks the courage of his interests and instincts. He’s made a semi-dark nerd-psychopath comedy and (just to be safe) a moronic, logic-free, dumb-ass Paul Blart comedy with an ending that…I’d better be careful here. I could certainly call it radically un-Bickle-esque. Unless you believe (like me) that everything that happens in Taxi Driver after the Lower East Side shootout is Bickle’s fantasy.

I found the Observe and Report finale infuriating for a film that is supposedly delving into the dark side and dealing with human derangement with at least a semblance of bluntness.

I haven’t time to get into the performances (need to be in the city to deposit a check)…later.

Not once have I detected a whiff of substandard sound quality on a Beatles CD. They sounded as good as they sounded on vinyl in the ’60s due to the best sound-recording technology at the time (i.e., not exquisite but at the same time not half bad). And then they sounded a little bit better when they were remastered/enhanced for CDs in the ’90s. But they were never any kind of “problem.” Which makes the coming 9.9.09 release of all 12 Beatles albums in a digitally remastered state seem extremely dubious. It’s just greed, man.

My Dallas-based server, Orbit/The Planet, was attacked last night around 11:30 pm eastern. HE was immediately shut down by this. The problem was fixed sometime in the wee hours, new DNS coding was assigned to all the clients, and it has taken a while for the new DNS to propagate. HE was viewable earlier this morning in both Virginia and Los Angeles, but it didn’t return to my neck of the woods until about 10:50 am eastern. It was still down in Austin, Texas, a few minutes ago. To guard against any further HE wipeouts due to catastrophic attacks, I purchased the services of a secondary DNS server based in Manchester, NH.