Could one fairly describe Alynda Wheat, the new People film critic who’s replaced Leah Rozen, as a scholastically correct film monk in the tradition of Karina Longworth, say, or Stephanie Zacharek? Or perhaps some kind of spirited resuscitation of the spirit of Pauline Kael, or maybe some kind of film-dweeby Rachel Maddow type?

I don’t personally know Wheat, but she doesn’t appear (emphasis on that word) to be any of these things, or even a “member of the cloth” as it were. She’s just a good snappy writer from Entertainment Weekly, apparently, who used to write about TV.

How well does Wheat know the films of Ernst Lubitsch, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Agnes Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, etc.? More to the point, are there any People readers who give two shits who these directors were? Or care about any perspective other than one that expresses their own secular theology? Is it unfair to dismiss People readers as intellectually challenged girly-girl types? I honestly don’t think so. Was Wheat hired because the editors wanted someone who wasn’t snobby, who hailed from the under-35 demo and could “speak Eloi” or…you know, communicate with whatever vague sensibility is thought to represent the readership?

The answers to these and other questions will, I’m sure, be revealed soon enough.

No great shakes — I was in Weehawken, New Jersey around 7:45 pm and I’d never taken the ferry to Manhattan before, so I did. It was warm enough to stand on the windy deck with just a T-shirt and spring jacket. The video needs something else, I realize. A huge howling serpent would do. Rising out of the Hudson, splashing around, tipping the ferry over, etc.

I’m sorry for anyone who’s been told they have only a few months or a couple of years to live, or who’s back on crack or has attempted suicide, or both. I feel sorry for anyone who claims to enjoy watching dogs try to chew each other to death. I feel nothing but loathing for the guy who took snaps of poor Dennis Hooper as he fell to the ground. (And yes, I’ve read the accompanying article.) The tabs are pure ugliness, pure hallucinatory nowhere-ville. They’re worse now than they’ve ever been.

A Knopf publicist called me back this morning about Michael Feeney Callan‘s Robert Redford biography, which I wrote about yesterday. It’s a Knopf title and not Simon & Schuster, as Amazon.com claims. The earliest the Redford biography will be out, she said, will be spring 2011 but more likely summer 2011. Changes, edits, revisions, etc. With either release the book will have been in the works for a minimum of 13 years, since Callan was definitely on the case in early ’98, as I explained yesterday.

I pulled off the Jersey Turnpike this morning to do a little work at one of those junk-food rest stops. Average Joes obviously don’t choose the grub at these roadside joints, but in a way they do by buying and wolfing down the Roy Rogers fried chicken and Nedicks hot dogs in mass quantities. You can buy a salad or a chicken wrap or a smoothie — they have those alternatives — but everyone’s scarfing down the chemicals and the batter and the burgers.

All you have to do is sit in one of these places for a half-hour or so and study the customers — the way they look and dress and shuffle around. These folks are bored, lazy, unhealthy. Not paragons of vim and vigor. I know, I know — I should tend to my own issues and leave well enough alone. But I can’t help myself. I look at these guys and go “sheeesh.”

The photo below is of a man named John Robinson, who worked as a sideshow freak fat man in travelling circuses in the 1880s or 1890s. There are two or three guys sitting around in my roadside rest stop right now who are roughly the same size.

There are next to no electrical outlets near the seating areas, and I’m suspecting that the guys who designed these nightmare malls have deliberately hidden the electrical outlets to keep guys like me from plugging in. Update: Five minutes ago a guy who works here (uniform , baseball hat) noticed my distress, came over and showed me an outlet hidden behind a table of Starbucks condiments. Thanks, man — much appreciated.

The late John Robinson

Actuals report that the predicted second-place finish by Kick-Ass didn’t quite materialize. Instead of getting slightly beaten by How To Train Your Dragon by a margin of a million or less, Kick-Ass managed to eke out a $200,000 margin of victory over the animated DreamWorks release. In so doing Kick-Ass and the Lionsgate team have just barely saved face — fine. The bottom line is that Matthew Vaughn‘s satiric comic-book actioner did semi-respectably, but did not whoop or kick ass by any stretch of the dictionary.

What was deemed very likely earlier this month is now assured — Olivier Assayas‘ five-hour-long Carlos will screen out-of-competition at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. As noted before, a five-hour sit plus a press conference plus writing a review is going to nearly eat up an entire day. I’d personally love a chance to see Carlos before Cannes for the sake of time efficiency alone.

Which means I have to drive to New Jersey again and buy gas and read magazines in a reception area and blow most of the day. Which means limited posting from whatever cafes or McDonalds or Starbucks that I’m able to slip into. I hate McDonalds on general principle, but they also tend to have few if any electrical wall outlets; Starbucks will always have at least one or two outlets near tables.

The best movie trailers (i.e., the most stylistically or aesthetically admirable) emphasize impressions and intimations over specific plot reveals. The worst trailers basically offer compressed versions of the films they’re selling, delivering 80% or 90% of the story line and effectively saying “okay, you’ve now been told pretty much what the movie will be, and what 90% of the key plot points will be. If you want to see the longer version with those final plot points included, please come back and buy a ticket on opening day.”

But even the classiest trailers are obliged to include catchy lines and noteworthy visual moments. The initial trailer for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps showed Michael Douglas‘s Gordon Gekko (a) receiving his 1987 cell phone as he gets out of prison and (b) checking out some rich black guys as they get into a shiny black limousine. The newish, month-old trailer uses the cell-phone gag as well. Which is too bad in a way because while it was amusing at first, it’s now been milked to death. So when we see this moment in the feature it won’t mean much. The audience will be saying “okay, fine…next?”

It led me ask why don’t filmmakers (directors, screenwriters, producers) dream up and shoot material that alludes to the basic components in a given film — tone, story, attitude — but which isn’t intended to be used in the feature cut. Material, in other words, that’s intended to be used strictly for trailers. Creative add-ons, content-related out-takes, advertising B-roll. In which case trailer-cutters wouldn’t be filching from the movie and killing the enjoyments of the original material.

There are certain behavioral tendencies among industry folk that one observes over the years — tendencies that don’t seem important enough to mention in an article or even an item, and yet they happen. For example: Some people who work for big-time movie stars tend to not only think like their employers, but to literally imitate their voices and manner and personalities. Bizarre but true. They strive to become, in effect, not just the movie star’s sibling, but almost a kind of twin.

It’s natural, of course, for people to hire assistants who seem like somewhat-lesser mirror reflections of themselves; it’s obviously sensible and comforting to work with people you feel a natural bond with. The curious thing (and I’ve definitely noticed this a few times) is when the employer-resembling employee deliberately sets out to become a sort of version B to the point of mimicking the employer’s speech patterns, adopting similar habits, dressing the same, etc. That’s all I’m going to say. I could name names but what’s the point of agitating or embarassing?