Without saying anything I need to say something else about Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Network screenplay. On top of my previous observation that some may be inspired down the road to compare the finished film to The Treasure of Sierra Madre. What I’m saying is, I believed each and every line without reservation. It didn’t feel written but creatively transcribed and pruned in the highest interpretation or understanding of that term.

Here’s a well-written, unusually candid-sounding recollection of the late John Hughes by Molly Ringwald, posted in today’s N.Y. Times. I can’t recall reading anything like this by any actor or actress about a just-passed director. Usually it’s all hearts and flowers.

“None of the films that Hughes made [after The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles] had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view.

“A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in The Breakfast Club: ‘When you grow up…your heart dies.’

“I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Though it does seem sadly poignant that physically, at least, John’s heart really did die. It also seems undeniably meaningful: His was a heavy heart, deeply sensitive, prone to injury — easily broken.

A lot of famous actors performed cheap and regrettable gigs when they were young, and would naturally like these necessary-at-the-time, nose-holding gigs to be forgotten all around. Joan Crawford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Debra Winger, etc. Don’t even start.

Yesterday Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny tried to dispute the indisputable, statistically fortified and hardly radical concern (recently voiced in rant-form by myself, Bill Maher, Roger Ebert and N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott) that a significant sector of the under-25s out there haven’t exactly shown themselves to be paragons of intellectual vigor and spiritual curiosity, and that their enthusiastic support for boon-to-humanity movies like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Transformers 2 along with their corresponding disinterest in hardcore gems like The Hurt Locker (because Summit hasn’t bought enough TV and print spots to remind them that it’s playing as part of a specific youth-market campaign) is a fairly depressing and deplorable thing.

McWeeny has argued against this, primarily, by playing the age card and describing what’s been written as the result of generational bias and illusion. The age-old “damn these kids!” phenomenon that every older generation has bitched about since the hey-hey day of the Greeks and the Romans, etc. Older farts do this so pay them no mind, etc. The title of the article is “Why do older movie critics suddenly want everyone off their lawn?” and the lead image is that of Clint Eastwood snarling in Gran Torino.

Playing the age card is easy, of course. Just point or allude to the ages of the people you’re disagreeing with and go “wow, crankheads!” and “these guys need to flush out their arteries” and so on. Throw in some patronizing attitude for emphasis and people your age and younger will buy it. The filmgoing world is fine. People my age (especially the bulky geek types wearing corporate-brand T-shirts and cutoffs and ugly sneakers) are a lot smarter and wiser than these guys realize. Kids who wouldn’t pay to see a well-reviewed film with a gun at their head unless their peer group said it was okay can’t be blamed if the ad guys don’t try and target them specifically. These old guys basically need to grow some fresh perspective by jumping into Rod Taylor‘s time machine and becoming 33 years old again.

So go for it. Read McWeeny and buy into the generational bullshit he’s selling. Ignore everything your mind tells you when you go to the mall on a Friday night and watch the wildebeests and grapple with those kneejerk thoughts about how they seem to be from a genetically separate planet. Purge your head of all the signs and hints and indications and statistics about how things are getting more and more putrid and common and corporate and de-individualized. Forget the whole cultural downswirl notion that’s been obvious to anyone with a smidgen of observational acumen for at least the last 20 to 30 years.

I have two sons, 21 and 19, who aren’t representative of the above-described tendencies among the under-25s and who inform me by word and deed and implication what’s going on (and not going on) out there. They know what goes, I know what goes and I’m not Lionel Barrymore in Key Largo so don’t tell me. I’m an X-factor guy with an obsessive lifestyle and a taste for edge experience and the freedom of mind to buy a pair of dorky-looking yellow sneakers if the mood strikes. Three computers, a motorcycle, no property, a thriving business, nothing settled.

Whatever. Be my guest. I’m played out on this topic for now. The batteries are drained. Maybe I can jump into it later. But McWeeny needs to be fair and link to my “Morlocks Are Feasting” piece and not just the “Eloi” thing, which is strictly an Ebert-quote thing with a tiny little closing-graph riff about how I briefly surrendered to vague feelings of disgust when surrounded by a herd of three-toed sloths from Fairfax High School during my last L.A. visit

Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny has also weighed in along these lines. I don’t know what to say about this except that I understand how it’s much easier to write a stark contrarian piece than to respond to things in some curlicued or tap-dancy middle-ground way. Whatever.

I meant to run a comparison of these two posters for An Education last week but I couldn’t convert a PDF image of the Australian version (r.) with my Corel photo manipulation program…don’t ask. And then In Contention‘s Guy Lodge ran with it yesterday. Sony Classics’ domestic poster (a) conveys a neutral romantic vibe and (b) conceals/Photoshops the fact that Peter Sarsgaard‘s character in the film is much older than Carey Mulligan‘s, which of course is a major plot point.

Sony Classics’ An Education poster, intended for U.S. audiences (l.); the Australian version (r.).

The Aussie poster doesn’t focus on their faces in order to include the romantic ambiance of Paris, which I personally find much more appealing than the two-shot. Oh, wait…I get it. The Sony Classics ad guys figured that under-25 American Eloi/moron class would feel alienated by a shot of Paris (“eewww…is this movie in French?”) and decided to go generically “romantic”. Both posters conceal the fact that the story takes place in 1961, which would probably be a problem for a certain Eloi percentage as well.

This went up…good God, 15 months ago. But it’s still funny. Not just the verbal repetition but the same emotional infusion stabs, over and over and over. Easily the equivalent of Shia Lebouf’s “no, no, no” video. (Thanks to Slashfilm.)

I was thrown a few weeks ago when I read a statement from Freestyle Releasing’s publicist that My One and Only (8.21) that it’s based on the life and times of George Hamilton ( Love at First Bite, Godfather III, Viva Maria, A Thunder of Drums). It’s actually about Hamilton’s indefatigable gold-digging mom, Ann Devereaux (Renee Zellweger) and blah, blah. Zellweger is a problem but let’s keep an open mind until next week’s premiere screening. The young Hamilton is played by Logan Lerman , and Mark Rendall plays his red-haired brother Robbie. Hamilton exec produced, Richard Loncraine directed and Blame It On Rio ‘s Charlie Peters wrote the screenplay.

The studio-released version of James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder (’84) is now available through Warner Bros. Archives.

The on-camera manner and seemingly balanced personality of anti-heath care protester William Kostric, who stood outside President Obama‘s town-hall meeting yesterday with a gun strapped to his leg, isn’t all that crazy-seeming. As right-wing extremists go, I’d rather listen to him than mouth-foamers like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. But for every Kostric out there, there are probably nine others who are more rabid and wild-eyed and hair-trigger. If it were only possible to just clap our hands three times and get rid of these guys, painlessly and untraumatically…

I’m as sensitive and activist-minded as the next guy and am no fan of the torturing that went on during the Bush years. But what got me about this ACLU spot is the off-angle cutting and the mesmerizing faces of Oliver Stone, Phillip Glass, Rosie Perez and Noah Emmerich. None of Emmerich’s performances over the years have inspired any kind of kinship or sympatico, but I suddenly feel cool about the guy because of this video riff. Go figure.

If a movie is bad in an altogether grand-sweep way, it is also bad in hundreds of small particular ways. Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, which is going to choke and die when it opens on 8.21, is such a film. I didn’t think very much of it after seeing it at Cannes — I mainly complained that it’s too long-winded — but I caught it a second time last night and it really didn’t go down well.

Spoiler whiners are hereby warned to stay the hell away because I’m going to spoil the hell out of a certain scene that happens in the first act. Not a crucial scene in terms of plot turns, but one that exposes the Basterds game.

Inglourious Basterds, as costar Eli Roth and others have stated, is basically a World War II Jewish payback movie in which all kinds of brutal and sadistic killings of Germans (be they troops, officers or members of the Nazi elite and/or high command) are presented as not only righteous but delicious because “them Nazis,” in the parlance of Brad Pitt‘s Lt. Aldo Raines, are viciously anti-Semitic and deserve it all to hell.

I began hating Inglourious Basterds for the boredom (which is to say the repetition and the banality of making a movie about a cruddy ’70s exploitation movie and self-consciously smirking about this movie-ness from start to finish) and the acting (which is mostly wink-wink “bad” in a kind of ’70s grindhouse way) but mainly for something that didn’t hit me when I first saw it three months ago. I realize it’s a Quentin movie that’s basically about Quentin’s bullshit, but — I’m trying not sound like a rabbi here — Inglourious Basterds reeks of arrogance and sadism and indifference to the value of human life.

It’s a movie in which brutal death happens every which way, and by this I mean stupidly, callously, carelessly, plentifully. I began to hate it early on for the way it takes almost every character down (including ones Tarantino appears to favor) with utter indifference. Kill this one, kill that one…this is too much fun! Especially since we’re doing it to the Germans, who did what they did to the Jews. Shoot ’em, beat ’em, burn ’em, strangle ’em, roast ’em….yeah!

I hated it, in short, because it doesn’t give those German pigs a fair shake. I hated it because it has the same attitude about those damn Nazis that the damn Nazis and the other anti-Semites had about the Jews in the lead-up to the attempted implementation of the Final Solution. As Shepherd Wong says in Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily, “Two wongs don’t make a wight.”

I know, I know — a film that wink-winks its way through an arch movie-movie landscape can’t be faulted on moral grounds because it’s not playing with any kind of real-world cards. That’s a fool’s rationale. There’s no such thing as pure off-the-ground fantasy. All movies are tethered to some kind of world view that takes stock of the way things are outside the realm of make-believe. And the reality of this movie is basically a result of Tarantino having divorced himself so totally from making films about real life in favor of movies-about-movies that he’s drawing upon nothing except cool-cat attitude and smug satisfaction and fair-weather-friend (i.e., Harvey Weinstein‘s) flattery.

Tarantino has stuck his finger up his ass and given it a good sniff and smelled lilacs and gardenias so many times that he’s lost his mind, which is to say he’s lost whatever sense of proportion he may have once had about the relationship between free creative imaginings (which he’s obviously had a rollicking good time with in years past) and the way life actually is when you get dressed and put your shoes on and get in your car and put the key in the ignition and deal with the situation.

Inglourious Basterds is proof that QT has gone batshit crazy in the sense that he cares about nothing except his own backyard toys. He’s gone creatively nuts in the same way that James Joyce, in the view of some, crawled too far into his own anus and headspace when he wrote Finnegans Wake. (With no apostrophe between “n” and “s.”) All I know is that this is a truly empty and diseased film about absolutely nothing except the tip of that digit.

The scene in which it all starts to smell rancid is one in which Pitt and the Basterds — a ragtag group of Jewish soldiers conducting guerilla-style search-and-destroy missions throughout German-occupied territory — interrogate a captured German soldier. He is Sgt. Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel), who appears in the above trailer starting at the 16 second mark and exiting at 48.

The bottom line is that Pitt and Roth, who plays Sgt. Donnie Donowitz (a.k.a., ‘the “Bear Jew”), behave like butt-ugly sadists in this scene while Sammel behaves like a man of honor, character and dignity.

Tarantino has Sammel defy Pitt by saying “fuck you and your Jew dogs” so it’ll seem right and fair that an anti-Semite gets his head beaten into mashed potatoes with a baseball bat. But what speaks louder is (a) Sammel’s expression, which is clearly that of a man of intelligence and perception, (b) his eyes in particular, which have a settled quality that indicates a certain regular-Joe decency, and (c) his refusal to give Pitt information about nearby German troops that would lead to their deaths if he spilled.

Isn’t this is what men of honor and bravery do in wartime — i.e., refuse to help the enemy kill their fellow soldiers, even if it means their own death?

Compare this anti-Semitic but nonetheless noble fellow with the smug and vile Pitt, who does everything but twirl this moustache as he contemplates the delicious prospect of seeing blood and brain matter emerge from Rachtman’s head.

And then comes a protracted and tedious build-up in which we hear Roth’s baseball bat banging against the stone walls of a darkened tunnel as he approaches the daylight and Sgt. Rachtman, who is kneeling next to Pitt. Whack, whack, whack, whack. Forever, interminably. Only a director who has truly lost his bearings would make an audience listen to that sound this much — 14, 15 times. And then Roth finally comes out of the tunnel and beats Rachtman to death. And then he screams and shouts with joy, going all “whee!” and “yeah!” and “all right!”

This is one of the most disgusting violent scenes I’ve ever sat through in my entire life.
Morally disgusting, I mean.

It didn’t make me want to see the Inglourious Basterds Germans come out ahead, but after this point I felt nothing for Pitt and his boys except loathing. All I knew is that they’re scum and that if they wind up dying, fine. No skin off mine. I don’t think this is the reaction Tarantino was looking for. I’m a Martian, I realize, and it’s quite possible that most viewers of this film are going to be cackling and giggling along with Pitt and Roth, but maybe not. Either way it’s not going to make anything after the first weekend.

If you half-liked and half-disliked Basterds the first time, my advice is to let well enough alone and don’t see it again because it’ll totally fall apart. You’ll be moaning and writhing in your seat like me. I tried to keep it down, but Jett told me later on that I was over-the-top with it.

There’s a feeling of gathered moral clarity — a certain down-to-it, no-mucking-about, time-to-face-it vibe — in Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Five Minutes of Heaven (IFC Films, 8.21). It’s basically a film about two veterans of the Irish troubles in the ’70s (Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt) looking back at a brutal political killing and trying to do or say something that will put the ghosts to rest. Except ghosts have a tendency to hang around. The darker the memory, the more they rule.

Split between Ireland’s present and its violent past in the early ’70s, Heaven is basically about Neeson’s character of 16 or 17 having shot a young boy from the other side (now that I’m thinking back I can’t remember which is Protestant and Catholic), and dealing with the victim’s still enraged and inconsolable younger brother (Nesbitt) when an Irish TV show brings them together to talk it over and come to grips.

Nesbitt’s character seems a bit dim — okay, intellectually challenged — but the ferocity of his feelings about Neeson is quite penetrating. They’re so intense that he can’t handle them, as evidenced by his darting eyes and hyper breathlessness and a general sense of a looming panic attack.

And the sad, guilt-ravaged expression on Neeson’s face seems tethered to some awful place deep in his soul. One look at him and you know there’s no way he’ll ever get past what he did, and that he himself knows this best of all.

Five Minutes of Heaven is obviously a smaller film than Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, a jarring look at the Third Reich’s final hours in a bunker in Berlin, but it’s about something that not only matters in terms of Ireland’s past — political murder and the personal rage that not only follows but stays alive for decades — but applies to today’s Islamic jihadists.

The film is so tight and focused that Guy Hibbert‘s screenplay could have been a theatre piece to start with, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. Plays tend to have more of a lean and sharpened quality than films as a general rule, and there’s no denying that Five Minutes of Heaven is some kind of hard diamond.

My only real problem is with the title. It alludes to the pleasure of getting revenge, but it’s obviously too oblique to mean anything to Joe Popcorn. It doesn’t mean that much to me and I’ve seen the film. I believe that if you lose control and wind up killing someone you hate, you might feel the satisfaction for 10 or 15 seconds, at most. If you’re any kind of human being you’ll be feeling the guilt pangs in less than a minute. How Hibbert figures that the pleasure would last for five minutes — an eternity in such a context — is beyond me.