I’m sure I’ll eventually read how they digitally pasted Chris Evans to the face of a ten year-old kid but if anyone has the lowdown, please inform. I presume it’s the same technology that allowed Brad Pitt to become a dwarf-sized codger in Benjamin Button and Armie Hammer‘s face to replace a stand-in’s in The Social Network.

Four days ago I reported on an LA Film Festival screenwriter seminar in which Diablo Cody said that her dream project would be a biopic of Brian Wilson. (Which seemed like a cool idea.) And today River Road Entertainment announced it has secured the Wilson’s “life rights” (as well as those of his wife Melinda Wilson) and is actively developing a feature film about the legendary singer, songwriter and leader of The Beach Boys with Oren Moverman (director and co-writer of The Messenger) handling the script.

What’s done is done…fine. But I could feel the passion in Cody’s words and eyes when she said she’d love to write a Wilson biopic, and I’ve read Young Adult since last Sunday and I’d say her writing is a bit sassier and more layered and more believably angst-ridden than the writing in The Messenger (even though, yes, Moverman got an Oscar nomination for it). If I was Pohlad I’d definitely try to bring her in to polish or punch up Moverman, to lend a little spritz or spunkitude or marquee-power.

The Messenger told me that Moverman basically does gloom and need and hurt, but Wilson’s life story is drenched in that stuff from the get-go. A movie about Wilson needs someone who can inject some wiggy flavor and attitude that would make it play a little nuts in a way that mirrors Wilson’s head. I’ve met Wilson and I’ve heard the stories. He’ll never be sane, and that’s a good thing.

If you were Bill Pohlad, head of River Road, and you had an either-or choice between Moverman and Cody, would you honestly choose Moverman? Okay, maybe you’d want someone to lay down the framework and the architecture, but the story of a guy losing his grip and getting obese and succumbing to a downward-swirl syndrome needs a touch of wackitude and surrealism, a sense of the absurd…or maybe a sense of the ever-present balance between nutbaggery and genius. You can’t just glumly and dolefully “tell the story”…this happens and that happens and blah blah.

Cody had to know about the River Road/Moverman deal when she mentioned her interest last weekend right?

You can agree with Movieline‘s Christopher Rosen and suggest that Transformers 3 star Shia LaBeouf is shilling insincerely by saying that “the last hour of this movie is the greatest action sequence of Michael Bay’s career, which would put it on the same level as the greatest action ever made.

“You don’t breathe for the last hour. There’s just no letup, but it’s also not completely overwhelming and disconnected, as the second movie was. You didn’t know what was fighting what or where you were geography-wise. There was no way to be able to tell a story, whereas this is very Black Hawk Down action. The geography is very clear. There’s only four or five dudes you need to be following. The enemy is very clear. The second movie was so…complicated. The best movies are simple.”

So I asked a friend who’s seen it, and he says LaBeouf isn’t wrong.

The last 40-plus minutes of Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon amount to “the mother of all battle sequences,” he says. “It’s truly a Battle Royale. Nonstop mayhem battle….and your mouth is open that he did this. It’s really noticably epic…a big selling point.

“Except it’s a Transformers movie, you know, and it’s 2 and 1/2 hours or maybe even a bit longer. They had told me it was 2 hours and 20 minutes when I walked in but I don’t know [about that].

“And there was a guy who got up at the beginning of the screening and said they were trying to show a new brighter 3D process…there’s a highlight aspect, a brighter image in mind…the whole goal is to show it brighter so the glasses don’t darken the image. They’re going to show this in theatres that are equipped to do this, this special version. If they want to save 3D at all they need to do this.

A recent Variety story said that Paramount and Bay “have gone beyond simply asking exhibs to turn their lamps up to proper brightness [for Transformers 3]…Par is taking the unprecedented step of releasing a special digital print aimed at delivering almost twice the brightness of standard 3D projection — even more than the dual-projector IMAX Digital theaters.”

Jake Kasdan‘s Bad Teacher (Sony, 6.24) isn’t funny. It’s horrible, in fact. I’m sorry to be judgmental but any film critic who’s given this catastrophe a pass or called it…you know, amusing or enjoyably raucous (and there are plenty who have) really does have to be sent to detention and regarded askance. Some people can’t be trusted with comedies, and anyone who looks at this film and says “yeah, has some funny bits, not bad” has truly questionable values, not just as a cineaste but as a human being.

Because the first 44 minutes of this movie really and truly stink. The remainder of it, mind, might be the greatest second half of a motion picture ever made. In fact, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and say that again, loudly. For all I know the second half of Bad Teacher might be absolutely miraculous. Please see it because of this very realistic potential. For all I know Jake Kasdan, the 37 year-old director, might be an astounding comic wizard and Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg might be amazing screenwriters….of films that suddenly become good after the first 44 minutes.

It. Doesn’t. Make. You. Laugh. Ever.

Cameron Diaz plays a bone-dumb, past-her-prime, ferociously empty ding-dong who couldn’t wangle an interview to be a junior-high-school teacher if she handed out brown bags filled with $25,000 in used bills to each and every person on the educational food chain, plus blowjobs to all the guys. She gets away with stuff that no teacher could begin to get away with, but that’s what funny about this thing, right? She guns her car in reverse on the school grounds, going 40 or 45 mph like Steve McQueen in Bullitt and risking hitting some kid. Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

I haven’t seen Friends With Benefits but Justin Timberlake, who plays a hot guy teacher whom Diaz wants to hook up with, has totally blown the good will he acquired by playing Sean Parker in The Social Network. Jason Segel plays a gym teacher who likes to get high….forget it. I don’t want to discuss him any further because all I could think about was how heavy he is and will be down the road.

The fundamental comic idea in Bad Teacher is that everyone on the junior-high teaching staff is either dippy or slow-on-the-pickup or a contemptible idiot or emotionally retarded, and all the students are relatively sensible and adult-minded and matter-of-fact. The other basic idea is that the motivations of the teachers are almost entirely transparent. If they’re thinking fiendish thoughts, they walk around with a ten-foot-square illuminated sign on the top of their heads that says ‘THINKING FIENDISH THOUGHTS.”

Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher.

All I know is that during the first 44 minutes I sat there with my mouth open, aghast. I watched and watched and waited and waited. Nothing in this film is funny, I kept muttering to myself. I mean, it has a teacher character named Miss Squirrel (Lucy Punch), and when she’s introducing herself to Diaz she actually pretends to be a little squirrel, holding her paws up and chewing on an acorn and going “chuck, chuck, chuck.” C’mon!

Some comedies just know how to turn the key in the lock and click…it all just kicks into gear. Don’t ask me how to explain it but the first 44 minutes of Bad Teacher are pretty close to sickening. It doesn’t have the first clue about turning a key or even about the existence of keys or locks or tumblers or anything in that realm. It asks you to believe in relentlessly stupid motivations and shovels shite dialogue and idiotic occurences, and I finally just couldn’t take it. Really.

So I bolted, and on my way up the escalator I met a Sony publicist. “Jeff…you’re leaving so soon?” Yes, I’m sorry but it’s just not funny and I can’t take it any more. “Oh…well, I’m sorry.” I’m sorry too, I said, but on the other hand I’m on my way out of the theatre so I’m starting to feel better!

I’m sorry but that’s it for Kasdan. I didn’t like Orange County or Walk Hard all that much, and now he’s in Hollywood Elsewhere movie jail and will stay there until he finagles a “get out of jail card” by making something half-decent. Plus he’s only 5’6″ tall. He’s done. And that’s it for Stupnitsky and Eisenberg too. They’ll probably become huge successes in this town over the coming years and live like sultans and buy expensive motorcycles and have great-looking girlfriends, and they’ll just be living out another chapter of “When Good Things Happen to Bad People.”

I told several people (including publicists and agents) at the Better Life party later that night that I’d just seen Bad Teacher and hated it, and to a man they all said, “Yeah, I heard it doesn’t work” or words to that effect.

Jason Staham has starred in exactly one good movie — The Bank Job. (He co-starred in Lock Stock, etc.) I guess that’ll never happen again . Memo to Clive Owen (plus his agent and manager): Don’t ever wear a moustache in a film ever again.

If I was all bloody and tied down to a chair, I’m fairly sure I could manage to do an aerial back flip and then land just so. Did I say “fairly sure”? I know I could!