Sam Mendes directed this Apple face-time iPhone4 ad, which goes on for 1 minute and 52 seconds. It’s enough to make you want to start your own Fight Club. Hello, the world gets it at the 30-second mark! The ad starts to feel a bit tiresome at 45 seconds, and by the one-minute mark it’s like “okay, cool…enough.” And that’s when the torture starts — 52 seconds more! And Mendes didn’t realize this?

The big Manhattan all-media screenings for Knight and Day (20th Century Fox, 6.23) are happening this evening. (I’m catching the 8:30 pm showing.) Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has seen it and says it “works.” (Forget the link — Indiewire isn’t loading.) And yet it’s “tracking badly because it’s not a pre-sold title and its two stars are not at their peak right now.”

If a tracking survey guy called me and said, “On a scale of one to ten, how keen are you on seeing Knight and Day?,” I would probably say I’m at level seven. I’m at eight and a half for Mangold and Cruise, but Diaz is a four, at best (her ditsyness drives me nuts plus she’s been looking a little long-of-tooth) so it averages out to seven.

That said, I don’t see how typical Eloi sentiments would be especially problematic. Could it be that they don’t understand that Knight and Day is filet mignon to the Wendy’s hamburger that was Killers? You’d have to be pretty fucking dumb not to see that at a glance.

“Truth is, the studios are facing a new reality,” Thompson writes. “Tracking is no longer accurate because audiences are getting wind of feedback on films via Twitter and other social networks. It’s hard to buy an opening weekend gross now. But with a movie that plays — which Knight and Day does — it will build good buzz. That’s why the studio is not only wisely opening the movie on Wednesday, but sneaking it this Saturday too.

“James Mangold‘s movie, written by Patrick O’Neill, boasts a clever high concept — it pits masculine/dark/muscled action star Cruise against feminine/light/sexy comedienne Diaz. It’s a meta-movie that deconstructs and riffs on its genre formulas. And Cruise and Diaz are a delightful combination. She more than holds her own with him — they both know exactly what they are doing. Fox believes that the movie will pick up steam as it goes.”

Marlon Brando video tributes are ubiquitous, but this one offers a silent, slow-mo glimpse of the ambush-murder scene in Elia Kazan‘s Viva Zapata (’52), which I haven’t seen in too many years. (It goes from 2:05 to 2:27.) It’s without question one of the most devastating, perfectly composed death scenes ever filmed, and one of the trippiest.

The clip doesn’t include Brando-Zapata dropping into a kneeling fetal-ball after being drilled by 100 rifles, but the footage of Joseph Wiseman‘s Fernando Aguirre howling with rage as the white horse escapes is breathtaking.

I’m wasting my breath in asking again why there’s been no success in clearing up the rights issue over this film, which would permit a DVD/Bluray to be released. I know that a Viva Zapata DVD is obtainable in Mexico. I was about to say that after the rights issue is finally settled that Zapata needs to be re-mastered by Criterion — bite my tongue. Knowing these guys, they’d probably put out some Stagecoach-level release, squawky and scratched and grainstormed all to hell because their tech guys decided not to digitally tweak the elements in any way.

It was reported two days ago that BP “has tested Kevin and Dan Costner‘s Ocean Therapy device, a centrifugual-force-deploying vacuum cleaner that separates oil and water, and released a statement saying that not only does the device work, but that officials are ‘excited’ about its potential.”Okay, fine but no one should ever use the word “excited” in a prepared statement of any kind. Over-used, generic, meaningless. Only phonies use it.

I ran a little congratulatory summary about the device on 5.23.

“We were confident the technology would work but we needed to test it at the extremes. We’ve done that and are excited by the results,” said Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer. “We are very pleased with the results and today we have placed a significant order with OTS [Costner’s Ocean Therapy Solutions] and will be working with them to rapidly manufacture and deploy 32 of their machines .”

As posted on New York/”Vulture” (i.e., don’t blame me, not my idea, etc.).

Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire (formerly Knockout), a spy thriller starring mixed martial arts champion Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas and Bill Paxton, was research-screened last night at the Arclight Sherman Oaks, with Soderbergh in attendance. A guy I know and trust was there, and has shared some positive impressions.

(l. to r.) Soderbergh, Carano, McGregor, Douglas. (Art stolen from The Playlist.)

“Mallory Kane (Carano) is young, tough, beautiful, determined, and a freelance covert operative. She is hired out by her handler, Kenneth (McGregor), to various global entities, to perform jobs which governments can’t authorize and heads of state would rather not know about.

“For all her looks and youth, Mallory is still the best in her field, and her skills are in constant demand. But when one of her operations goes awry, Mallory needs to use all her skills, tricks and abilities to escape an international manhunt, make it back to the United States, protect her family, and exact revenge on those that have betrayed her.

“The associations that came to mind were (a) any Bourne movie, (b) any Mission Impossible movie, (c) Taken, (d) Michael Clayton, (e) Wanted, (f) Panic Room, (g) Obsessed, (h) The Informant, (i) Body Of Lies, (j) Edge Of Darkness and (k) Red Eye.

“First and foremost for me were the strong parallels to The Girlfriend Experience. There are lots of closeups of our female lead, who’s no actress but whose skills in her field probably make her more interesting than a star in the role. And there’s an almost complete lack of affect on her part, and yet, for me, a lot of engagement in her situation.

“Another GE current, unlike most big thrillers, is Soderbergh’s focus on the nuts and bolts of the situation. This is what creates and sustains the drama — how does one get out of, or in to, situations like these? For me ‘reality’ is much more interesting than movie fiction.

“The fights are great. I’ve been in, and have personally choreographed, a lot of staged violence, and this was quality stuff. It does my heart good to see a young woman really kick ass. The brutality and desperation of the fights, in fact, at times seemed to appall more than thrill the audience, which is as it should be. As I write this (i.e., the following morning) I’m still thrilled.”

The screenplay is by Soderbergh’s Limey collaborator Lem Dobbs. The Lionsgate film is reportedly slated for a January 2011 release.

Credoaction, a liberal-activist website, is collecting petition signatures that might persuade Disney not to advertise on “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” a forthcoming eight-episode series on the Discovery Channel in which Palin, a slayer of Alaskan wildlife and an advocate of “drill, baby, drill,” will serve as a kind of tour guide.

“Disney is a long-time advertiser on The Learning Channel, and unless the company specifically demands that its ads not be shown during this Palin show, that ad revenue may be funding this monstrosity,” the website states.

An extremely late-arriving defense of Sex and the City 2 director Michael Patrick King appeared this morning on Big Hollywood. The author, John Nolte, skews Glenn Kenny, yours truly and other liberal-type critics for slamming the film’s cultural attitudes and inflammatory politics or, in Kenny’s case, for criticizing Nolte.

It’s fun to kick this stuff around, but you can’t wait this long after the release of a terrible film. SATC2 has been dead for what…at least a couple of weeks?

Indiewire‘s report about this morning’s sudden death of Peter Brunette is sad, obviously. I knew and liked Brunette. Condolences to his friends and family. Bob Dylan‘s line about “death’s honesty” doesn’t seem to apply here since removing a vibrant man from the planet at a relatively young age seems rude.

Brunette was covering the Taormina Film Festival when it happened. I visited Taormina just last month. Joe Leydon says that this is how he’d like to go, on the job and doing what he loves best. If your number is up and you’re going no matter what, Taormina is a peaceful spot for it. A much better place to die than, say, Newark, New Jersey.

Any movie villain can be diseased and malicious, but the legendary high-style baddies that live on for decades have all been no-laugh funny. They’re required to be deranged and demonic, of course, but they always deliver their lines with a certain flourish that says “if you don’t want to laugh or chuckle, fine…but I’m double-tracking all the same.”

Line deliveries by no-laugh-funny villains aren’t “dryly funny” or “offhandedly funny,” but contemplatively funny. They don’t mouth their lines with any humorous English, in other words, but their characters are amusingly skewed — darkly, weirdly so — when you recall them, and they always raise a smile at odd moments.

I’ve quietly laughed longer and harder at Jack Nicholson‘s Jack Torrance in The Shining over the years than at any Jim Carrey or Seth Rogen or Adam Sandler performance. Ditto Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan in Sexy Beast, Robert Mitchum‘s preacher in Night of the Hunter, Al Pacino‘s Tony Montana in Scarface, William Hurt‘s wackazoid gangster in A History of Violence, Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, etc.

Which reminds me that Universal Home Video still hasn’t announced a date for their inevitable Scarface Bluray. They’ve milked this 1983 Brian DePalma film with how many DVD versions? Time for the big step-up.

MB: “I told him it didn’t make any sense, clippin’ you that way. He fucked up.”

TM: “You fucked up too, Mel.”

MB: “Don’t go too far, Tony.”

A couple of Jonah Hex look-sees are happening today; reactions will post 48 hours hence. Except I’m not feeling a lotta Hex-ian vibration out there. Is it me or is the corn-oil just simmering in the saucepan? Walter Winchell sending out a general telegram to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea — what’s the hoo-hah? Apart from the usual LexG/Thelonious Monk riffs about Megan Fox, I mean.