“Elektra Luxx is a cartoon — it’s shot in vivid candy colors — yet it’s not wholly cartoonish,” writes Movieline critic Stephanie Zacharek. “[Director Sebastian] Gutierrez isn’t out to make any serious pronouncements about the porn industry. But he’s not looking down on his subject, either. The picture is rambunctiously affectionate; Guiterrez may go for the broad joke, but never the cheap one.”

Two years ago I saw Guiterrez’s Women in Trouble, which, like Elektra Luxx, also toplined Carla Gugino. It wasn’t offensively bad, but it certainly wasn’t any kind of grade-A (or grade B) experience. The other thing to keep in mind is that there’s something about the porn industry (as a subject, vibe or attitude) that almost always stinks up the place. Except when the director is Pedro Almodovar, whom Guiterrez would like to be as good as.

All my life I’ve managed to avoid reading Charlotte Bronte‘s “Jane Eyre“, but I’m going to dash through it this weekend to see if the book, published in 1847, is as morose and chilly and constipated as all the various film adaptations have been. I’m 98% sure that it is, but I want to be able to say that I’ve absorbed it first-hand.

I saw Cary Fukunaga‘s Jane Eyre (Focus Features, 3.11) last night, and it’s full of authentic, high-toned period highs. All the performances (including those from costars Jamie Bell, Judi Dench and Sally Hawkins) seem perfectly aged and restrained in just the right way. And hail to all the other 19th Century downer elements. Everything is exquisitely in place, whipsmart and oh-so-carefully rendered.

But the fretfulness…my God! Jane Eyre is like an Oxford Film Festival mood pocket times ten. It’s like a tattered flag rippling in an early March wind on an English moor. Come to us, all ye educated women of a certain age seeking a Bronte fix! We will envelope you in bonnets and lace and corsets and repression and misery, and make you feel like you’re really and truly stuck in olde country-manor England, full of feeling but afraid to speak of it, much less act. We will saturate you with emotions so damp and muffled that you’ll plotz.

Jane Eyre is so convincing and persuasive in this regard that it made me depressed about my own life, and I’m feeling fine these days.

I wanted to leave about 45 minutes in, but I held fast. One reason was that I didn’t want Wall Street Journal critic Joe “JoMo” Morgenstern, who was sitting in the last row, to see me leaving lest he regard me as lacking in patience and literary couth. But I thought about it being over and being released and the coming joys of getting into the car and driving east to Amoeba Records. In fact, I’ve never been so in love with the Amoeba experience as I was last night at the Clarity screening room.

The best thing about Jane Eyre is Michael Fassbender‘s performance as Edward Rochester. The truth is that he’s been disappointing me in ways modest and small since Hunger, but here he shows his earnest, slightly mad Laurence Olivier chops. Every line he speaks is sharp and grave with a river churning beneath it, and I was especially pleased by that I understood each and every word. Why did this provide particular comfort? Because most of the time I couldn’t understand what Fassbender’s costar, Mia Wasikowska, who plays Jane Eyre, was saying at all.

(l.) Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre; (r.) Charlotte Bronte.

I’m serious. Wasikowska’s eyes are haunted and piercing, and her Jane Eyre face has that silently-suffering quality that the story requires, but her British accent is so….it’s hard to describe but so precociously affected and her delivery is so breathy and trembling and tremulous that I got the gist of what she was saying only occasionally. Most of the time I couldn’t figure what her phrases and/or sentences were conveying at all. Okay, now and then, but it got to the point that I stopped trying to understand her thoughts and started grasping at words.

There’s something opaque and bland about Wasikowska’s face when she’s not turning on the current. I’ve never understood why so many filmmakers are so taken with her because of this. She looks glum and bothered all the time, and in this context her face (which has a sort of Eastern European quality, as suggested by her last name) doesn’t have a genetically English appearance. Jane Eyre is supposed to be plain-looking so that fits, but consider the above drawing of Charlotte Bronte — now that’s a face! That discerning half-scowl…magnificent! And she actually looks like a Brit.

I’ve always been afraid of what the Bronte sisters (Charlotte’s sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights) might do to my mood if I sat down and actually “let them in,” to so speak.

Didn’t the original Cars (’06) become something of an unmentionable, not just in the general animated realm but also in Pixar circles? I look at this thing and I want to take gas.

Attention must be paid to the just-posted words of HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny: “The ugly truth is that the industry is chasing a fanboy audience that perhaps they need to stop chasing. I spent so many years at AICN complaining that no one was making films that catered to my interests, and now I find myself thinking that perhaps I don’t need to be catered to in quite so naked and craven a fashion.” Bravo! Especially coming from McWeeny, who, let’s not forget, wet himself over Sherlock Holmes.

“I would happily give up the non-stop barrage of superhero films and fanboy ‘favorites’ if it meant there was room for real innovation and a wider array of voices in studio filmmaking. There is a fine line between serving an audience and shamelessly pandering to them, and when the studios decide to go whole-hog and pander without hesitation, and the result is box-office failure after box-office failure, the message seems clear: chasing the fanboys isn’t working. They are unreliable, they are ungrateful, and they aren’t turning out for the ‘sure things’ that have been greenlit specifically for them.”

He shouldn’t have taken the bloody wig and earings off. He should have hung in there and toughed it out.

As everyone knows, Tony Curtis played at least 65% of Some Like It Hot in drag and speaking in a woman’s voice. What’s less widely known is that on a special edition DVD interview Curtis admitted he couldn’t quite make his Josephine voice sound right so another guy dubbed him. The guy, according to co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, was actor-singer Paul Frees. You’d think that this very significant information would would be in Taschen’s SLIH coffee-table book, but it’s not.

Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty recently traded online fisticuffs with Kevin Smith…heard this one? Whitty drew first blood by noting “how angry Smith seemed lately,” he recapped today, “and how he’s been far too willing to immediately take to Twitter to lambaste any perceived attackers. Which prompted Smith to rip into Whitty on Twitter, calling him “old [and] out-of-touch” and faling to get what he’s trying to do with his self-distributed release of Red State.

(l.) Kevin Smith; (r.) Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty

“But I didn’t say Smith’s idea was a bad distribution model,” Whitty explains. “Nor did I attack him personally — at least, not by my standards. What I did say is that I thought he’s [seemed] to be in a terrible, touchy mood for a while now. Certainly he seemed to be taking himself way too seriously and lashing out at criticism far too quickly. I’d written about some of this behavior before, but it seemed to be getting worse recently. Someone who’d always appeared to be an easy-going, self-deprecating Jersey guy was getting awfully thin-skinned and long-winded — and far too quick to combine the two in endless, two-thumbed monologues.

“Smith says he’s not angry. He says he’s happier and more in control that he’s ever been,” Whitty wrotes. “‘I’m sorry I’m not that Kevin Smith character you created for the Ledger,’ Smith fired off in one of his increasingly heated missives.

“If he’s talking about the fellow I met back before Jersey Girl came out, I guess I am too. Not that I ever thought I created that persona – not that I ever thought it was a persona — but I kind of liked that guy. I hope we see him again sometime.”

I’m going to say it again for the seventeenth time. Now that he’s been married a while and is getting in touch with his angry side, Smith needs to write a Who’s Afraid of Viriginia Woolf-type stage play about two GenX couples. Four people of Smith’s age getting drunker and drunker as they sit around in their pullover hockey shirts and Converse sneakers and backwards baseball caps and start ripping each other to pieces.

My brand-new Time Warner internet began delivering 1997-level DSL service after six days on the job, and it took me over two hours to arrange for a tech guy to come by tomorrow to fix the problem. I had to fart around with billings and payments and figure out stories to write, and I needed to talk with friends and family. I had to find a trustworthy cat sitter to come in and feed the guys while I’m in Austin for South by Southwest (for which I leave on Thursday, returning about eight days later). And it just went on and on like that….awful.

Warner Bros.’ decision to formally whack and totally fire Charlie Sheen from Two and a Half Men was, from a corporate perspective, unavoidable. Maybe they figured he’d destroyed his credibility as a semi-relatable human being. He’d gone too “tiger” and gone over the waterfalls. Sic semper shark-jumpers. Or the suits just thought about it long and hard and decided there was more downside than upside in Sheen staying on.

If it had been my call I would have given Sheen another go. I would have said, “Okay, no more insane coke rants, no more Tiger Blood…none of that. You’ve gotta calm the hell down and be mellow and serene and self-effacing, and then we’ll just do this. Because, as you and I know, the ratings will be great at first and they might continue that way and we, like you, just want the dough. Fuck it, right? But you have to fire those hangers-on and suck-uppers that we’ve seen on Sheen’s Korner. We hate those guys. And if you don’t get rid of them, the deal’s off. But if you do, we’re good.”

This morning a friend who lives in West Los Angeles (north of Barrington/Wilshire) begged off attending a screening later this week at the Writers Guild theatre (100 yards south of Wilshire/Doheny) because “it’s not in my neighborhood.” What? “From your house to the WGA is a hop, skip and a jump,” I replied. “20 or 25 minutes. Okay, a half-hour.” Nope. After 5 pm and until 7:30 or 8 pm that drive takes an hour, he said. “I know that traffic has probably gotten worse since I left in ’08,” I admitted, “but I can’t believe it takes that long…c’mon.” It really does, he claimed. Especially with everyone texting in their cars all the time. They take that much longer to respond to traffic surges, and if you multiply each distracted texter by 1000 or 3000 or 5000 in a given mile-stretch, it really slows things down.

Every week there are movies I need to see that I know (forget “strongly suspect”) will be deflating to sit through. Especially during the March-April doldrums. Because this is a time in which films seem to take things from you rather than give. They sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Which is why it’s a good time for Blurays and DVDs of oldies and obscura and films like…say, Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row or Blurays of Buster Keaton‘s The General or Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Battle: LA represents one kind of ordeal (i.e., unrelenting shakycam + CG assault) and Carey Fukanaga‘s Jane Eyre surely represents the other end of the spectrum. (One glance at Mia Wasikowska in costume and I feel instantly weakened.) And then there’s the brownish-bleachy color in Dana Adam Shapiro‘s Monogamy, that sense of slowly bleeding to death while watching Abbas Kiarostami‘s Certified Copy and the casting issue (yet to be discussed) that gets in the way of Jonathan Hensleigh‘s Kill The Irishman. I don’t even want to think about even glancing at Red Riding Hood or Mars Needs Moms or Electra Luxx…forget it.

You know what isn’t half bad, even though it’s opening this Friday only in New York? Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, about the writing, performing and filming of Mart Crowley‘s The Boys In The Band. It seems to overemphasize here and there and could stand a little tightening, but it’s a very decent, above-average capturing of early to late ’60s gay culture and showbiz culture in New York and Los Angeles. It conveys what an enormous struggle it was for Crowley to write the play, and what a huge strike it was for everyone involved in the play and the film (or both), and how quickly it all evaporated after the Stonewall rebellion of ’69, and yet how Boys lives today in a historical sense and also a tragic one, given the fate of most of the original cast members.

I saw Rango tonight and the ravers aren’t wrong. It’s too subtle and referenced and movie-savvy for kids, but it’s great for tweeners and and any adult who knows from Sergio Leone and Chinatown and Apocalypse Now and yaddah-yaddah. It’s the smartest and most enjoyable mainstream animated feature since Toy Story 3, and an agreeably hip western that’s satiric and yet “sincere.”

Sunday, 3.7, 9:40 pm

Well, semi-sincere. You’re supposed to smirk and chortle, and to be honest I didn’t really chortle all that much. But I was smiling now and then and generally glad I was seeing it, and pleased with the fact that Rango knows about holding back until the very end and then paying off — always the mark of a good film.

I despise the exaggeration that most animated films traffic in, but Rango is, for an animated film, restrained and relatively dry, and I very much respect director and cowriter Gore Verbinski, co-screenwriter John Logan and lead voice-star Johnny Depp and everyone else for having prepared and shaped and honed it just so. Rango will probably be nominated for a Best Feature Animation Oscar in early ’12. You could even…yes, you can call it the best film of 2012 so far.

Rango is all about water (or the lack of), hence the Chinatown parallels. Honestly? I didn’t think it was making a great deal of sense at first, or really going anywhere to the extent that I felt engaged in the narrative. But it definitely comes together during final third.

The best moment in the whole film is a discreet little kissing scene that’s all about deft, gently acknowledged emotion.

Cheers for Depp (who voices Rango, the lead lizard) and Isla Fisher (lead female lizard, although I frankly couldn’t understand her half the time), and good old Ned Beatty (an old turtle by way of John Huston‘s Noah Cross), Bill Nighy (a rattlesnake gunslinger by way of Lee Van Cleef), and Alfred Molina (as a grungy, bearded, Spanish-accented armadillo named Roadkill).