Two factors appeared today in Bradley Cooper‘s favor: (a) He’ll be costarring with Ryan Gosling in a Derek Cianfrance drama called The Place Beyond the Pines, which’ll begin filming on 7.25 in upper New York State; (b) it was revealed that he’s fluent in French.

Do these counterbalance Cooper’s work in The Hangover Part II, The A-Team and All About Steve? No. But like those who play piano and can quote Shakespeare at length, I’ve always been impressed by French-speakers. Others in this small Hollywood fraternity include Oliver Stone, Todd McCarthy and Sharon Waxman.

It was officially okay to review Super 8 (Paramount, 6.10) as of 12:01 am today. Nothing yet from Metacritic, but the Rotten Tomatoes score is now at 92% positive. If you read the reviews a certain portion are mixed-positive rather than flat-out raves. I’ve only seen an incomplete version; I’ll be reviewing after catching an IMAX version tomorrow night.

This British half-poster for David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is intriguing enough, but the French version, for me, is more erotically charged.

Cameron Crowe was in New York in April when The Union, his Elton John-Leon Russell doc, played at the Tribeca Film Festival. But has he submitted to any kind of public q & a in Los Angeles, which will happen at the Aero theatre 12 days hence, since the double debacle of Elizabethtown (’05) and the never-filmed Deep Tiki (late ’08)?

The ostensible topic of his 6.12 discussion with Peter Bart at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre will be Harold and Maude, but c’mon…this is a coming-out event, no? Crowe has directed and written We Bought A Zoo, a possible Oscar contender, that’s coming out later this year, and has, in any event, many questions to address.

Question #1: How is We Bought A Zoo coming along? How would he describe it? Is it some kind of light family-enterprise film? Is it The Sundowners with zoo animals? Could Disney could have made this film in the early ’60s with Dean Jones and Hayley Mills? Or are there thematic/emotional elements that make it something else?

Question #2: Does Crowe agree that his own story of the last six years — a hard-knocks tale of a gifted filmmaker who’s riding high and then runs into a career ditch and has to struggle for years to make it back to the top, and loses his marriage along the way — is somewhat similiar to Jerry Maguire?

Question #3: If he could go back in time and do it all over again, would Crowe refine or rewrite or recast Elizabethtown? Could anything have been done to avert the disastrous critical reception that greeted it in late ’05?

Question #4: What happened exactly with Deep Tiki?

Question #5: What about Crowe’s Marvin Gaye biopic, which he’s reportedly been working on for years?

Question #6: When will The Union be screened in Los Angeles?

Here’s a 1.7.11 article I wrote about Crowe’s situation.

The following appears near the end of the piece: “Crowe is clearly due for a little light shining down, a clearing in the woods. As a guy who once heard the roar of the crowd and held mountains in the palm of his hand, he needs to stand on a plateau and feel the kind of serenity and satisfaction that can only come from making a film that people admire and pay to see in great numbers.”

So the bootleg redband Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trailer (i.e., the shaky-cam version that hit YouTube on 5.28) is finally gone and an official Sony green-band version is up. I don’t get the strategy in toning things down. The redband version was cool and everyone knows it. Whatever.

Two remarks about that United Airlines D.C.-to-Ghana flight that returned to Dulles airport on Sunday because two guys had come to blows when one reclined his seat too far back, etc. The Washington Post reported that a passenger behind the reclining offender “smacked [his] head. A fistfight ensued, the plane returned to Dulles, and two F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base shadowed the flight until it landed safely.”

One, the guy who slapped the seat-reclining douche deserves thanks and praise from tens of thousands of air-travellers who’ve suffered from this. Two, one should never get into a slapping match with a seat-recliner. The way to deal with this is to (a) politely ask the offender to grow some manners and decency and respect the 18″ private-space rule, and when he doesn’t (because they never listen) (b) “accidentally” spill wine or Coke or coffee on his head. Offer sincere and heartfelt apologies and offer to get him some napkins. If he doesn’t adjust his seat, repeat the procedure.

People who recline their seats in coach are scum — there are no two ways about it. The second-worst offenders are parents with infants who won’t stop crying, which is obviously due to over-coddling. The third-worst offenders are fat-asses and really old people who wait until the very last second when the flight is disembarking to stand up and take their carry-on luggage out of the overhead compartment (which always takes forever), causing everyone behind them to wait and wait and wait.

I do it like R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. I stand up in the aisle and get my overhead baggage out so when it’s time to move I don’t hold anyone up.

I’m watching the new Bluray of Henry King‘s Twelve O’Clock High — a highly regarded 1949 military drama about Americans running daylight bombing runs out of England in the early days of World War II. And within ten minutes I’m reminded of the difference between a highly competent, good-enough director (in this instance Henry King) and someone with a little more visual pizazz.

It begins in 1949. After buying a toby jug at a London curio shop, a now-retired officer (Dean Jagger) visits the 918th’s abandoned airbase at Archbury. Memories come flooding back. It’s like that scene in The Best Years of Our Lives with Dana Andrews roaming around a field of abandoned B-17s. Jagger looks down and the camera adopts his POV, looking at winds rippling through tall grass. Then the camera pans left and slowly moves up to the sky and you’re thinking, “Ahh, we’re going to see planes overhead without a cut…the past blending into the present!”

And then King blows it. He fade-cuts into a shot of planes cruising down and landing on the field in 1942. A fade-cut! He could have even put the civilian Jagger into the same shot with the planes. It could have been such a great moment.

The quality of the Bluray, by the way, is exceptional. It looks like “film” (i.e., you can feel the grain) but also clean as a whistle. The details and tonalities are perfect. The blacks and the shadings are about as good as any well-shot 1940s black-and-white film can deliver.

When I buy a Bluray of an older film that I’ve seen several times in various formats (projected, broadcast, cable, VHS, DVD), I want it to look better, dammit. It has to be an improvement of some kind — sharper and more vivid, deeper blacks, that “straight from the lab” look…something. In this regard Fox Home Video’s Bluray of The Hustler is a disappointment. It looks exactly like the DVDs I’ve been watching over the last decade or so. In fact, it looks a bit soft at times. The more I watched, the more my spirits sank.

I don’t want DVD quality when I buy a Bluray — I want more. I don’t care if that means the film looks DNR-ed to some extent — I have to get that sense of seeing something better or cooler or “extra” on some level. So call me an unsatisfied customer. It’s a nice rendering and good enough, but I paid money for this Bluray (hard cash at Kim’s) and I feel a wee bit flim-flammed.

“You wanna Bluray of a black-and-white film you’ve loved all your life?,” says the carnival barker. “Well, here it is!” But it doesn’t look any different, you say. Well realized as far as it goes, but not the least bit improved, as it were. It’s fine but I’ve seen this version before…exactly. “But it’s a true capturing of what the film actually looks like!,” says the carnival barker. “And that’s our task…to make our Blurays look as good as the film, in the truest sense imaginable. And you know if you pop in the most recent DVD of The Hustler of your 50″ set this new Bluray will seem like an improvement.”

But not the kind I want, I’m thinking. I’m nodding and feigning acceptance and kind of half-smiling at the guy, but I don’t like it.

Update: In his 5.13 Bluray.com review Jeffrey Kaufman called this disc “absolutely gorgeous.” He said that the film’s special edition DVD from a few years ago “looked pretty spectacular itself, and that same sharpness and clarity is only increased on this new release.” No, no…that’s just it. The Bluray looks fine but the resolution has not been heightened, increased, sharpened, etc. It’s the same thing only bigger….that’s all.