My movie-monk life won’t be fulfilled, I’ve just decided, until I visit the site where Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant shot the crop-dusting scene from North by Northwest. For whatever reason I’ve never learned before today where the location actually was. It’s just east of the intersection of Corcoran Road and Garces Highway (155) outside the towns of Wasco and Delano, near Highway 46 off interstate 5.

In a 2.12 Huffington Post-ing, Center for Transatlantic Relations senior fellow Michael Brenner explains how President Barack Obama has gradually revealed his true nature as that of a “moderate Republican before the species became extinct.”

The Obama enigma “grows day by day,” he writes. “Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. ‘Obscene’ Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute into well-earned rewards for a good-guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis means placing it the callous hands of Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley of health care fame; the plotting of exit strategies from Afghanistan by 2011 becomes a ‘long as we have to’ occupation. All these contrapuntal reversals against a sound track of non-stop exhortation and a restless shuttling from one photo-op to another. Who is this guy, anyway?

“A few elements of Obama’s personality are now evident: a strong narcissistic streak, an ingrained sense of superiority, a nimbleness — intellectual and political — enabled by the incredible lightness of his conviction about anything, an audacious ambition yet no gumption for a fight. Behind these traits, there is something even more basic discernible. Obama is two people, one superimposed on the other.

“The visible surface man is the epitome of an enlightened, Ivy League, socially responsible liberal. This is Obama the community organizer (albeit an exceptionally non-confrontational one), Obama the African-American political activist who attends Jeremiah Wright‘s cosmopolitan church, Obama the orator who routinely hits the high ‘Cs’ of the call to conscience, Obama the optimist who appeals to, and for the better angels of our idealistic American selves. This is Obama the African-American who moved enough voters to be elected President of the United States.

“To this portrait, we must juxtapose the other Barack Obama who has surfaced as he quickly shed his ‘liberal’ skin amidst the trappings of the White House. This other personality, I contend, is the underlying one — truer to the man’s core nature.

“This is the Obama who twice in his young career sought out positions in big corporate law firms; this is the Obama who was raised by three Kansans who instilled in him conservative heartland values; this is the Obama who relishes wealth and what it can buy; this is the Obama who feels more at ease with his Wall Street buddies (Jaime Dimon, et al) playing golf than with anyone of the Move On American crowd; this is the Obama who chose as his trusted confidant that unscrupulous, liberals-be-damned fixer Rahm Emanuel; this is the Obama who absorbed the spirit of Ronald Reagan‘s America he himself has said stands as the model of inspirational leadership.”

Derek Elley‘s Variety review of The Ghost Writer “is nonsense…it’s Roman Polanski‘s best in years,” says an HE reader who’s also seen it. I’m also struck by an observation from Screen Daily‘s Fionnuala Halligan that the film “bears all the hallmarks of Polanski’s distinctive style” while Elley said that Polanski “brings not a jot of his own directorial personality or quirks” to the film. Disparate much?

(l. to r.) Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Pierce Brosnan in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer.

Here’s a rave by the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw. He calls it “a gripping conspiracy thriller and scabrous political satire, a Manchurian Candidate for the 2010s, as addictive and outrageous as the Robert Harris bestseller on which it’s based…Polanski keeps the narrative engine ticking over with a downbeat but compelling throb…this is his most purely enjoyable picture for years, a Hitchcockian nightmare with a persistent, stomach-turning sense of disquiet, brought off with confidence and dash.”

There also seems to be an undercurrent of approval in this analysis of the paranoid current in Polanski’s films by N.Y. Times contributor Dennis Lim.

At the very least I’m intrigued and encouraged. I’m also beginning to wonder if Elley’s review is another Hurt Locker-ish dismissal — a case of Elley once again being the odd man out?

Rachel Maddow‘s MSNBC interview with Quentin Tarantino begins with a clip from the infamous Donny Donowitz baseball-bat scene (i.e., the one I took great exception to last August), and then with Maddow smiling and chuckling and seeming to say “hey, Quentin, very cool” and so on, as if she’s heartily approving of (or is certainly cool with) the scene.

Seeing this got me all riled again. Here’s the nub of what I wrote six and a half months ago:

“The scene in which Inglourious Basterds starts to smell rancid is one in which Brad 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).

“The bottom line is that Pitt and Eli Roth, who plays Sgt. 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.”

The Associated Press reported today that in their weekly protest against the barrier near the village of Bilin, Palestinian protesters “have added a colorful twist to demonstrations against Israel’s separation barrier, painting themselves blue and posing as nativist characters from Avatar. In so doing they were obviously equating their struggle to that of James Cameron‘s ten-foot-tall smurfs, and the Israeli position to that of Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang‘s. What say ye to this, Jim?

In a Valentine’s Day piece called “This Video Will Get You Laid,” Matt Zoller Seitz salutes the realm of “emotional gotcha” cinema with a montage of romantic moments.

Derek Elley‘s partial trashing of The Hurt Locker at the 2008 Venice Film Festival told me I had to henceforth regard his reviews with a grain of salt. That said, his Berlin Film Festival pan of Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer seems to put a damper on expectations.

I’m particularly concerned about this passage: “Pic’s literalism is also its biggest handicap. Eight years since his last major success, The Pianist, the 76-year-old helmer brings not a jot of his own directorial personality or quirks to a political pulp thriller whose weaknesses (let alone lack of any real action or thrills) are laid bare when brought to the screen is such a workmanlike, anonymous way.”

The full Oscar-nominated screenplay for Armando Ianucci‘s In The Loop is now available online. And here‘s a note from Iannucci about the script.

The Wolfman cost a ton of money (something close to $100 million), and it makes you feel like you’re stuck inside a deep stone pit with Universal werewolves prowling back and forth and worrying about the grosses. Rowwrrlll! — make it shorter! Rowf! — let’s throw in another beheading! Owwooooohhll! — we need to at least get those research scores into the 70s! Let’s bring in Walter Murch…snarrrrrll!

You can’t say it doesn’t look great — every scene is expertly smothered in fog and smoke and ominous shadows, or is lit by candles. Cheers to cinematographer Shelly Johnson and production designer Rick Heinrichs. But it makes you feel trapped, confined, shackled.

I saw it with an Eloi crowd (i.e., radio promotional) at the Grove last night, and after 20 or 30 minutes the room had no pulse. The crowd watched, waited and seemed to be saying, “This is it? This? Well, we paid to see it so we might as well stick it out but this just isn’t happening, man. Where’s the juice? This thing is just…what is it?”

Benicio del Toro, who plays the doomed Larry Talbot, looks miserable in every scene. He does the job, hits the marks, mouths the dialogue, etc., but his eyes say, “Good God, get me outta here! I’ve been very well paid, yes, but I’m stuck in a piece of shit and my soul is writhing in pain.” Plus he’s been given an awful pudding-bowl haircut.

Why, I was asking myself, is a guy who looks like the cousin of Emiliano Zapata playing the son of a British nobleman played by Anthony Hopkins? Flashbacks of Benny’s deceased mom (i.e., Hopkins’ widow) show she was Latin, but she looks like Dolores del Rio instead of Juanita Zapata so it still doesn’t make sense. It just throws you out of the film for the guy who played a Mexican policeman in Traffic and Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh‘s epic playing a late 19th Century Shakesperean actor holding poor Yorick’s skull.

They should have gone with…I don’t know, Chiwetel Ejiofor?

I was slumping lower and lower in my chair. Indigestion, depression. The color was draining from my cheeks.

Poor suffering Emily Blunt, I was muttering to myself. Look at her trying to make something — anything! — work in terms of her cliched character.

There’s one short clip in The Wolfman that delivers a neat sense of fright. A little balding gremlin who strongly resembles Hugo Weaving is shown crawling onto a bed. But that’s it. The rest of it is rote exposition and shock-boo! cuts. There’s nothing lower in the scary flick universe than shock-boo. It’s the last refuge of hack director who can’t think of anything else, and when it’s repeated over and over and over, as it is in The Wolfman, shock-boo isn’t just irksome or tedious — it’s infuriating.

This above all else is why The Wolfman feels like it’s unfolding waist-deep in a swamp — i.e., because there’s nothing going on underneath. Rent Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage and savor the quietly creepy vibe. Another film that had this was Mark Pellington‘s The Mothman Chronicles . A cup of serious dread is worth a truckload of shock-boo.

You can actually sense the anguish of everyone involved, including the editors. That would be Walter Murch — Mr. Fix-It! — Dennis Virkler and Mark Goldblatt.

What was the last outright stinker that Benicio made — a paycheck job that added several dozen gray hairs to his head? That would be Excess Baggage, I suppose, with Alicia Silverstone. I guess he can stand it if he does this once every ten years. It’s how he suffers for his art.