My Canadian-bought Ishtar Bluray arrived today. Watching it now, smiling, going with it, chuckling now and then. It’s a comedy, yes, but you have to forget about it being one. Laugh or don’t laugh, but either way it’s Ishtar — one of the best faintly funny farces ever made. About delusion, middle-aged failure, life without a net, the unbearable absence of talent, friendship, futility, pretty eyes, idiot shenanigans and dumb luck.

Ishtar is a bit like a biplane that lifts off a partly muddy runway, rises 30 or 40 feet, comes down again, splashes through puddles, lifts off again…over and over, trying and trying, and you have to love it for that. The fact that it doesn’t roll strike after strike is what’s so endearing. Every so often you want to reach out and give it a nice hug. This is a great comedy about losing. And the Marrakech cafe sing-along (“There’s No Business Like Show Business”) is one of the happiest scenes I’ve ever known.

Annapurna Pictures’ Megan Ellison, 24 year-old daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, will provide sole financing for Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s untitled next film, which Variety describes as “the true story of a U.S. military black ops mission.” Cameras will roll in early summer with Bigelow directing and Boal having written the script.

Their long-planned Triple Frontier project, a larger-budgeted, big-star action thriller for Paramount, will presumably go sometime in 2012.

Ellison’s investment in True Grit bought her an exec producer credit. Annapurna will also reportedly finance and produce John Hillcoat‘s The Wettest County. a prohibition-era pic to star Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf.

I don’t see how anyone can declare that the box-office performance of Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma will “deliver some clarity on the immediate future of the adult comedy,” as Deadline‘s Michael Fleming wrote this morning. He doesn’t mean that the film itself will sink or swim based on how good it is. He’s saying that Average Joe expectations about whether or not to give this Vince Vaughn-Kevin James comedy a shot will amount to a kind of zeitgeist referendum on the vitality of comedies aimed at over-30s.

In other words, Fleming apparently believes that tens of thousands of seminal conversations are happening right now among potential weekend moviegoers. Conversations starting with Movie Guy #1 saying, “Whaddaya wanna go see tomorrow night, Katey? The Dilemma or The Green Hornet?” and Movie Gal #2 replying, “I don’t know, Marty…I was thinking maybe The Dilemma because Vince Vaughn can be funny, but I’ve also been thinking about the state of adult comedy over the last 15 or 20 years, and how the last one I really liked was The Wedding Crashers and before that David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster and before that…I don’t know, Beetlejuice? So I’m starting to think that the culture has given up on adult comedy or maybe vice versa, and that the ghosts of Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch and all the great sophisticated-comedy maestros are lamenting this state of affairs, and so our best bet is probably to just give up and go to The Green Hornet so we can sit there with our 3D glasses on and slowly die in our seats.”

I’ll tell you right now that the people who’ve already decided to wait for The Dilemma on Netflix streaming will leap at the chance to see a half-decent adult comedy, should one come along. Quality is quality and people can smell it a mile off. And none of this has anything to do with The Dilemma tanking or not tanking this weekend. I suspect nonetheless that most have decided by now that The Dilemma is some kind of not-quite-crackling problem movie (“gay” electric cars, bizarre behavior by Vaughn’s character, no big laughs in the trailer) and that it’s probably destined to earn a so-so tally or perhaps under-perform. And I’m saying this without looking at any tracking whatsoever.

Movies that open at South by Southwest tend to be boilerplate fanboy flicks (Kickass, anything from Robert Rodriguez, etc.) looking for an exuberant reception from a baseball- and cowboy-hatted throng that’s ready and willing to cheer any film with any kind of heat, if for no other reason than to celebrate Austin’s center-of-the-worldness. Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver is a different kind of deal (i.e., a mildly creepy oddball comedy) but it’ll still benefit from being exuberantly greeted, etc.

Following the 3.16 SXSW centerpiece premiere, Summit will open the Mel Gibson dramedy limited on 3.23 and wide on April 8th. In a statement festival director Janet Pierson has said that The Beaver shows “an actress/filmmaker carefully and beautifully tackling a heartbreaking subject in her finest work yet.” Duncan Jones‘ Source Code will open SXSW on 3.11.11. Greg Mottola‘s Paul — an almost whore-ishly typical SXSW-type entertainment — will also be shown.

The cinematographer is Josh Owens. The left-to-right (and vice versa) tracking is what makes it work. Remove the caption copy and Vimeo’s new embed codes (which play on iPhone and iPad) are incredibly compact — less than two lines.

Chicago Tribune‘s Mark Caro has gathered quotes about the much-derided Golden Globes telecast, which will air this coming Sunday. “Rarely do meaninglessness and relevance, sham and suspense, smash up against one another with such flair as at the Golden Globe Awards,” he begins. “They’re a joke, truly — the result of fewer than 100 international junketeers rewarding films and the studios that have plied them with freebies and celebrity access during the last year.”

Quote #1: “As an influencer, no one can deny that the Globes is one of the truly big guns — not just because 17 million people tuned in to their show last year, but because the media pays so much attention to their choices to gauge what films are picking up momentum in the Oscar race” — Sony senior vp media relations Steve Elzer.

Quote #2: “They’re not respected, but they do provide a really big TV show for talent to show themselves and to get themselves into the bloodstream.” — myself.

Quote #3: “I think they’re actually less influential now than they’ve ever been. Winning at the Globes or being in the thick of the argument at the Globes is significant only in that you’re not left out of the party.” — MCN’s David Poland.

Here’s a chart that Caro assembled that shows that while the Globes are a decent indicator as to which films may be Oscar-nominated, in four of the last five years they’ve handed out best picture awards to films other than the Best Picture Oscar winner. (Did I rephrase that correctly?)

I still maintain that Vikram Jayanti‘s 2003 doc, The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret, is one of the funniest and most revealing examinations of the HFPA ever assembled.

I’m secure enough to admit that before this morning I’d never laid eyes on Thomas Hart Benton‘s “Hollywood,” which he painted in 1937. I’m fairly ignorant about the history of 20th Century art in this country. I’m a peon, really. The only thing I’ve read that’s really stayed in my head is Tom Wolfe‘s The Painted Word, a brilliant dissection of the modern art movement from the 1920s to roughly 1974.

From Benton’s Wiki page: “Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, would go on to found the Abstract Expressionist movement — wildly different from Benton’s own style.

“Pollock often said that Benton’s traditional teachings gave him something to rebel against. However, art scholars have recognized the Pollock’s organizational principles continued to follow Benton’s teachings even after his move away from realism, with forms composed around a central vertical pole with each form counterbalanced by an equal and opposite form.

“Benton’s students in New York and Kansas City included many painters who would make significant contributions to American art. Benton also taught the photographer and filmmaker Dennis Hopper briefly at the Kansas City Art Institute.

“In 1941, Benton was dismissed from the Art Institute after calling the typical art museum ‘a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait’ with further disparaging references to, as he claimed, the excessive influence of homosexuals in the art world.”

There’s nothing “oh, wow”-ish about Criterion’s Broadcast News Bluray (1.25), and that’s perfectly fine. It makes James L. Brooks‘ 1987 classic look like it did in the best L.A. or N.Y. screening room prior to opening, or like a sharply focused, slightly grainy, scratch-free print. Needless to say it’s a far better rendering than the 1999 Fox Home Video DVD.

There’s just one problem. The effing firmware on my Sony Bluray player hasn’t been updated since I bought the damn thing in the fall of ’08, and so I can’t watch the Broadcast News Bluray at home. The Criterion public relations guy just told me about the firmware issue. So it’s not a Criterion problem. It’s me — a Jeffrey Wells-isn’t-smart-enough-to-figure-out-how-to-download-firmware thing.

I’ve received two Broadcast News Blurays from the Criterion guy, and both denied me access beyond the opening menu. No feature, no extras, no nothing. But when I popped one of the discs into a friend’s just-purchased Sony Bluray player, the feature and the extras came right on.

My Bluray player plays everything else, mind. Every damn Bluray and DVD that I own. Except for two others, that is. Blurays of Terminator 2 and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 that I’ve bought within the last six months also won’t play.

Firmware!

I have to admit I’m a little ticked off. When I bought the Bluray player two years ago the salesman didn’t say, “Now, don’t be alarmed but there’s a chance that a couple of years down the road certain Blurays won’t play unless you have the latest firmware update.” If he had I would have said, “Bluray players have wifi capabilities? They can go online and download stuff? News to me.”

Here it is two years later and it’s still an exotic concept. This is where my dumb-guy orientation really kicks in. I have great wifi in my apartment, but I’m not aware of any Bluray player having the capability to download diddly squat. Bluray manufacturer whippersnappers! I guess “update the firmware” is a euphemism for “guess who needs to shell out $150 for a new player?”

Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (IFC Films, 1.21) is a remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 Korean original. The consensus about the newbie at last May’s Cannes Film Festival seemed to be that the older film is better. I’ve never seen the original so that left me out. Ki-young’s film is said to be more Bunuelian with the housemaid acting in a devious and manipulative fashion. She’s much more the victim in the version I saw.

In my 5.13 review I described Sang-soo’s version as “a sexual hothouse melodrama made in the spirit of Claude Chabrol and Brian DePalma. By this I mean that The Housemaid (a) is about dark currents in a perverse well-to-do family and (b) has been made with a highly polished, primary-color sensibility that underlines every plot point and mood pocket, and ends on a note of flamboyance if not insanity that’s more about the director being in love with how it looks than anything else.

“I wasn’t entirely floored, just as I’ve never been that wild about DePalma’s more excessive exercises. Some of what happens in the second half is broad and lurid, and then the stops are really pulled out in the second-to-last scene. But Sang-soo Im (The President’s Last Bang) is a formidable pro, and the cast — especially Do-yeon Jeon, the female lead — give assured high-style performances. That’s the brush this film was made with, and you can either roll with this type of thing or not. I was down with it for the most part. I didn’t fight it, I mean.”

I’m sure that a DVD version of the 1960 original is available somewhere, but I don’t see it on Amazon.

The new Housemaid opens on Friday, 1.21 in NYC. It expands nationwide beginning 1.28. It will also be available on demand beginning 1.26 via Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, Time Warner, Bright House, Charter and Insight.

Another King’s Speech-supporting Guru has thrown in the towel and gone over to the Social Network side. I’m speaking of In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, who’s been predicting for weeks that Tom Hooper‘s historical relationship drama would take the Best Picture Oscar. What changed his mind? Guild nominations, I’m supposing. Not just the DGA, WGA and PGA noms, but those from the ADG (Art Director’s Guild) and particularly the CAS (Cinema Audio Society), which recently nominated TSN but not The King’s Speech.

With The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Appelo and EW‘s Anthony Breznican abstaining, the six King’s Speech GoG holdouts are HitFix‘s Gregg Ellwood, the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, EW‘s Dave Karger, L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen, MCN’s David Poland and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson.

I’ll say again that the final game-over indicators will be when and if Karger and Thompson cast their lots with TSN. Poland, the Lee J. Cobb of King’s Speech supporters, will never go over. He has too much invested in alternate scenarios (i.e., True Grit winning Best Picture, “The Social Network still isn’t going to win Best Picture from the Academy unless they are starting a media branch,” etc.). He has to be the Great Sage who knew the secret workings of the community all along and stuck to his guns despite what many thought would happen, or he has to go down to the sea in ships.

It’s conceivable, of course, that The King’s Speech could win the Best Picture Oscar and in so doing become this year’s Shakespeare in Love. If this happens a moderate impact-grenade sensation (similar to the response to Crash‘s 2006 win) will be felt throughout Los Angeles and New York, and in certain pockets of America there will be a great hue and cry. (People in other pockets, I realize, won’t react at all, or will say “why didn’t they give it to Black Swan?” or whatever.) Another result of a King’s Speech win is that people like myself and Sasha Stone and other Social Network pallies will have to fold our tents and run for the hills and hide out like Butch Cassidy‘s Hole-in-the-Wall gang until things blow over. Because the King’s Speech contingent will be roasting our asses from dawn to sundown for days on end.

Creating and maintaining an elaborate deception is always stressful. And since this is the main activity in Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma (Universal, 1.14), sitting through it makes you feel whipped and shagged. It’s a bear. And it’s not especially funny. Okay, some at my screening were chortling from time to time, but at no time did anyone let go with quaking convulsive laughter. Which obviously suggests something about the engine under the hood.

It suggests that the spectacle of Vince Vaughn continually lying to the two most important people in his life — i.e., his best friend and business partner (Steve James) and his live-in girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) whom he’s about to propose to — is not only unfunny but repulsive.

Allen Loeb‘s Dilemma script, which I’ve written about twice (earlier this month and last February ), is about Vaughn getting all sweaty and anxious about whether or not to share some devastating news with James about his wife (Winona Ryder ) boning some tattooed, not-terribly-bright stud muffin (Channing Tatum). Should Vaughn risk upsetting James, who’s not exactly a model of emotional stability and is under pressure to deliver a prototype of an electric muscle car, or forget about butting in and let sleeping dogs lie? He splits himself between the latter and former path, but mainly he lies. Mainly out of fear. (Which is to say an absence of character.) And then he decides to stonewall Connelly besides. Spread it around.

Like I said, a few were guffawing here and there. But why? What exactly is so funny about lying to people you care about? Laughter is usually about recognition and release of suppressed feeling, so those who laughed during my screening were presumably saying to themselves, “Hah! That’s the way it is, all right. And Vaughn is so good at exposing our sad foibles!” Which is basically a way of saying “that’s me, all right…lying my ass off and digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole and risk losing the trust of people I care about the most. I do this all the time….hilarious!”

I know all about the classic character arc known as the Three D’s — desire, deception, discovery. This is the basic underpinning of two classic Billy Wilder films, Some Like It Hot (’59) and The Apartment (’60). The main character wants something, decides that deception is necessary in order to attain it, and then realizes he/she can no longer lie due some fundamental recognition of the limits of his/her own moral behavior. It’s a classic and proven formula, but Howard and Loeb’s application doesn’t work. Because, I believe, Vaughn’s deception is truly pathetic and alienating. Only an asswipe would behave this way.

11 months ago I wrote that there’s only one thing to do in such a situation. Vaughn’s loyalty would be to James, not Ryder, and so one way or the other he’d have to share what he suspects. No right guy would have to think about this. He’d start out by stressing to his pal that he doesn’t really ‘know’ anything but that he’s seen something disturbing and that maybe something’s up and maybe not. And then he’d suggest that the friend might want to hire a shamus to learn the facts or whatever. But come what may you must share what you’ve seen and/or suspect.

I also had credibility issues with the idea of two whale-sized guys hooked up with ladies who look like they eat nothing but apples and tangerines. Yes, this happens in real life, but relatively rarely. The birds-of-a-feather syndrome. And make no mistake — Vaughn these days looks like like Keith Olbermann after a three-month cheeseburger and milk-shake diet, and James looks like he’s on the verge of a heart attack. I’m trying to show restraint in my argument, but my experience is that only the wealthiest and funniest fat men on the planet have super-slim girlfriends or wives, and even when this happens the wife-girlfriend will usually gain weight as a bonding/sympathy gesture. (Guys do this also when their wives get pregnant.)

So yes, I realize this is a hang-up of mine, but I kept saying “fat, fat, fat, fat, fat…look at those guys!” all through it. James is apparently a lost cause but what’s Vaughn’s issue? He was rail thin when he starred in Swingers 14 years ago, and now he looks like a wrestler.