We’ve all felt instant attractions to certain actors and actresses, and we’ve also felt instant repulsions. I was walking down Eighth Avenue yesterday when the one-sheet for She’s Out Of My League (Dreamworks, 3.12) caught my eye, and…I’m going to let readers guess which one of these dudes I took an instant dislike to. (Hint: not Jay Baruchel.) It was a kind of reverse thunderbolt sensation, and it involved no logic whatsoever. One look at that idiotically dorky smile and I knew.

A recent Criterion newsletter has included this visual clue for the officially un-announced but reportedly forthcoming Criterion Bluray of Terrence Malick‘s The Thin Red Line. If I’d written the caption I would have had the lion say, “I’ve never met a leaf I didn’t like.” That, at least, would directly allude to TTRL rather than “feelin’ red and blu.” A red lion doesn’t need to state the obvious.

Recently whacked Variety film critic Todd McCarthy has officially joined the notoriously dweeby New York Film Festival selection committee. Already in place, of course, are program director Richard Pena, NYFF associate director (and ex-LA Weekly film critic) Scott Foundas, Melissa Anderson and Dennis Lim. McCarthy told me a few days ago he’ll go to Cannes in this new capacity.

“If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Barack Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

“If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

“You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed.

“You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.” — from David Brooks‘ 3.11 column in the N.Y. Times.

Two recommendations-from-vested-parties pop through in Pete Hammond‘s final “Notes on a Season” column (until it resumes late next fall) — one about Anne Hathaway‘s already-praised performance in Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs, and the other about Brad Pitt‘s in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life.

Hammond reports that the Zwick film, which will open during the 2010 Thanksgiving holiday, screened for select Fox executives on the 20th Century Fox lot Tuesday night. Fox co-chair Jim Gianopulos told him “it’s in remarkably good shape considering it doesn’t come out for nine months,” adding that he “would be stunned if Hathaway does not receive a nomination for this. She’s stupendous in this role. Jake [Gyllenhaal] is also very good.”

Last weekend Hammond spoke to Apparition chief Bob Berney about the Malick film, “which will be released the beginning of November but very likely to show up in Cannes well before that.

“[Berney] says the movie is like a dream and [that] Malick fans are going to be extremely happy. He also raves about Brad Pitt’s performance comparing him to Robert DeNiro in This Boy’s Life.” According to Berney people are going to see a side of Pitt they haven’t seen before.” In other words, he rants and raves and gets violent with his kids, and thereby screws up the son played by Sean Penn in his adult years.

My cryptic, sometimes emotionally brusque father went through a lot of bad stuff as a Marine Lieutenant in the South Pacific (Guam, Iwo Jima) during World War II, so you’d think I’d be at least half interested in HBO’s The Pacific, which will debut on Sunday, 3.14.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, I’m not. Maybe because I’d rather not contemplate the source of many of my own emotional difficulties that came about due to my dad’s combat-influenced nature and personality (which included booze until he went into the program in the mid ’70s). That or there’s something about US-soldiers-vs-the-Japanese movies that I’ve never found very compelling. I can think of three exceptions: The Thin Red Line, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Heaven Knows Mr. Allison. Or maybe it’s just something to do with the Pacific region and malaria and spindly coconut trees and tall grass and crazy Japanese soldiers holed up in caves. I don’t know exactly.

That said, Alessandra Stanley‘s NY Times review of what I presume is the first two or three episodes sounds encouraging.

Barack and Michelle Obama hosted The Pacific producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg plus some HBO brass and Congresspersons and whomever else for a White House screening last night.

It would be wonderful to read in a Bob Woodward book some day that Obama took Spielberg off to a corner and said, “So what’s this I hear about you pussying out like a little girl with your Abraham Lincoln movie? I’m a Lincoln man from way back and I don’t get it. What, are you afraid of making another Amistad-type film and people shitting all over you…is that it? Let me tell you something. People have been shitting on you for years already for wimping out on this thing. I read Hollywood Elsewhere and I know what goes. And now you can add me to the agitate roster.

“I know you were a big Hilary supporter to begin with so let’s not crap around. Full disclosure and all that but I’m going to do what I can to shame you and if necessary fuck you up in any way I can in order to persuade you to pull the trigger on this movie. Are we clear on this? Fine. You didn’t know I was liike this, did you? Well, it’s a well-kept secret, I guess. Talk to me in private and I’m Lyndon Johnson. Or I’m starting to be him, I think. A change is coming over — I can feel it.”

“Last night I saw Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Andy Serkis/Ian Dury biopic,” a friend writes. “Although it opened in the UK two months ago to generally good reviews, I’m not sure of US distribution or if anyone here really cares.

The flick is quite good, and Sirkis gives an award-worthy performance,” he opined. “It goes a bit maudlin and overboard on the polio aspect — Dury spent part of his childhood at a home for the disabled — and gets a little Oliver Twist-y in parts. It also uses animation in some transition/montage scenes that recall (500) Days of Summer.”

There’s are reasons, I’m sure, why no US distributor has picked this film up, and why it never played Sundance, etc. I’d love to know what they are. Here’s a guess — selfish, self-destructive rock ‘n’ roll debauchery is not dramatically interesting or compelling. It can be argued, in fact, that it tends to be rather boring.

Yesterday I visited the midtown Manhattan office of AnyClip, a soon-to-launch movie clip-finding site that locates and plays clips (plus dialogue transcripts plus the usual data) from almost any film ever made in the history of human endeavor using only anecdotal or fragmentary information. It’s the smartest film- or dialogue-finding site I’ve ever surfed in my life, bar none.

The AnyClip team (l. to r. rear): Aaron “Chris” Cohen, Aaron Morris Cohen, Nate Westheimer, Matt Lehrer; (l. to r. front) Aaron Fisher Cohen, Gabi Mereilles.

It’ll be up and rolling on March 15th (i.e., Monday morning), concurrent with a visit by the AnyClip team to South by Southwest this weekend and early next week.

With any luck or pluck AnyClip will soon be a major go-to site for film buffs of any stripe, right up there with IMDB and Amazon and Wikipedia, because it’s propelled by what may be the most brilliantly designed movie-and-dialogue-locating software ever coded or created.

I’m not exaggerating — this site can find any friggin’ movie under the sun using any sort of incomplete or half-assed information. Title, stars, costars, dps, directors, whatever…but most impressively, dialogue fragments. And when it strikes paydirt it brings up corresponding clips and pages of dialogue plus rental/purchase links.

I tried to stump the software several times during my chat with co-founders Aaron Cohen and Nate Westheimer, and I beat it only once when the system couldn’t recognize a line from East of Eden. But that’ll soon be taken care of. I forget how many films they’ve stored and referenced so far, but we’re talking thousands upon thousands. The tech team began with broadly popular titles and movie stars, etc., and are working their way through less well-known, more esoteric fare as we speak.

The technological base of AnyClip is located in Israel, and the whiz-kid software designer is a guy named Maor Gillerman, who wrote this morning in an e-mail that he’s “an avid reader of Hollywood Elsewhere since Mr. Wells’ dissection of the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men two years ago.”

The idea behind AnyClip is to engage casual viewers who are curious about this or that film (or who are looking to investigate a flick they vaguely remember in terms of a line of dialogue or a character or an actor, but can’t recall the title of) and prompt them to go to NetFlix or Amazon and rent/purchase. That or just surf around on this site for hours and waste your entire day.

It’s the same subtle suggestion technique I’ve personally succumbed to dozens of times while browsing at West LA’s DVD/Laser Blazer — i.e., deciding to rent or buy Groundhog Day or Out of the Past on the spur of the moment because it’ll be playing on the store monitors, and watching a certain scene or hearing a piece of dialogue puts me in the mood.

I’m not entirely up to snuff on all the search terms and devices, but I know you can find movies with almost any dialogue ever mouthed by any actor since the days of Lewis Milestone and Howard Hawks. And not just the generic, well-known quotes from famous films (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”) but just about any line at all, or even a fraction of one.

AnyClip.com co-founders Aaron Cohen and Nate Westheimer with a poster composed of AnyClip search terms from The Howards of Virginia….kidding!

I told Westheimer to type in “what can a man do with his clothes off for 20 minutes?” and wham, AnyClip found it in four seconds — i.e., the Chicago hotel-room scene between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. It also found every film in the history of the universe that has used that line, or a portion of it. It covers the entire waterfront with every search.

There’s a minor line that Groucho Marx says to a steward in Night of the Opera — “Hey, turn off the juice before I get electrocuted!” AnyClip found A Night at the Opera like that, and a clip from that particular scene plus other films and scenes that used the words “juice” and “electrocuted” — it’s really amazing.

I could go on and on and on, but that’s the gist of it. Oh, yeah, there’s a Blu-ray searching software that they’ve also come up with in which you can search a Bluray you’re watching using this and that term. I didn’t respond as strongly to this as the dialogue-search thing, but fine, cool, good to go.

And just to reiterate: there are three AnyClip guys named Aaron Cohen — bossman Aaron Morris Cohen plus Aaron “Chris” Cohen and Aaron Fisher Cohen. Here’s a video about the army of Aaron Cohens that inhabit the greater New York City area or the tri-state area or whatever.

NBC muscled Larry David, Madonna and Ricky Gervais to sit in front of an audience for The Marriage Ref and make cracks about some banal-bizarre reality clips? David/Madonna/Gervais are brilliant, highly driven, high-demand people with enough money to fill warehouses, and they sat for a reality-show equivalent of The Hollywood Squares? This is close to surreal.

Green Zone‘s “pathological wish to thrill delivers diminishing returns,” writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. “It gave better value in the Bourne films, which, for all their low moods, were fired by basic fantasy, whereas the excitements of Green Zone sit uneasily with its examination of the real and recent past.

“The credits say that it was inspired by ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City,’ Rajiv Chandrasekaran‘s nonfictional account of life within — and beyond — the Green Zone, but the book’s task was to unearth a fiasco, its comedy so black and dense that you could pump it out of the ground.

“Many filmmakers would have leaped at the textural contrast between life on the street and the sheen of unreality inside what Chandrasekaran calls Baghdad’s Little America, but Greengrass is too caught up in the hero’s quest to notice.

“The fact that Green Zone begins with a bombing raid should come as no surprise. Greengrass made two of the Bourne films and United 93, and his attitude to the average viewer remains that of a salad spinner toward a lettuce leaf. You don’t so much watch a Greengrass film as cling on tight and pray.

“The zone of the title is the enclave from within which the Coalition Provisional Authority tried to govern Iraq after the war, in 2003, and our hero is Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon). Boy, is he a hero: fit, pensive, rough when required, and so unceasingly moral that, on entering the hotel room of a blond, unaccompanied American reporter named Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), he engages her in a constructive discussion of journalistic sources and then — I can still hardly believe this — he leaves. No shock, no awe, no combat-calming sex. All he wants is truth.

“Miller heads a unit that, in the wake of the invasion, is told to seek out weapons of mass destruction; with hindsight, we realize that he might have had more success looking for live unicorns, but there you go.

“What lends the film its grip and its haste is also what makes it unsatisfactory, since the end result of Miller’s hectic hunt is to ‘solve’ the puzzle of W.M.D. ‘If you pull this off, you might just save the country,” a CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson) tells him, but that is a fantasy more lurid than anything in the Bourne franchise.

“One of the charges against the Bush Administration was that it sought to encase Iraq in a narrative far too naive and restrictive for any nation to bear; and, in its small way, Green Zone, a left-wing movie that looks and sounds like a right-wing one, suffers from the same delusion. The story of American involvement, in the eyes of this film, is neither a monstrous folly nor a patient, difficult path to democratic peace. It’s a wrap.”

This wildly absurd, sexually provocative Lady Gaga music video — a hot-lesbos-in-prison and a Beyonce/rat poison thing — is called “Telephone.” Directed by Jonas Akerlund-as-Quentin Tarantino, it premiered just before the Oscars. High-style, in-your-face stylistic flamboyance, etc. It simultaneously aroused and dead-bored me.

Where would Lady Gaga be without the 1.2 pounds of mascara and eyeliner she puts on each eye? I chuckled at the dick-rumor joke.

Everyone claims to like babes-behind-bars B movies, but I can’t think of one made since Jonathan Demme‘s Caged Heat that I’ve been able to even watch for its entirety, much less enjoy. Where is the lesbian prison movie that delivers the quality of Robert M. Young and Miguel Pinero‘s Short Eyes?