Roughly three months hence Eureka Video will release a Bluray of Orson Welles‘ Touch of Evil (1958) with six different versions of the film, which really amounts to three versions presented in both 1.37 and 1.85 aspect ratios. One, the 96-minute 1958 theatrical version. Two, the 1958 preview version that runs 108 minutes. And three, the 1998 reconstructed version, running 112 minutes, that was put together by Walter Murch, Bob O’Neil and Bill Varney.

Two aspect ratios for each version…so hardcore, so film-nerdy. But the orange backdrop is, for me, a problem. To advertise a revered classic film taking place in a Mexican border town and shot in the gritty environs of Venice, California, Eureka chose one of the most needlessly intense and eye-sore-ish colors in the spectrum? A color that says traffic cones and prison jump suits?

I’ve just written the following in a comment thread: “Nobody believes in a righteous, true-blue America any more. Certainly not in the way everyone did during World War II. ‘America the Beautiful’ has been over, patriotically-speaking, since the mid ’60s. What Captain America does, curiously, to dream a little dream about what it was to be a true believer during World War II, and to be a kind of goody two-shoes type of guy who wants to serve and salute and defeat the bullies, etc.

“Maybe that’s the door or window that allowed me to get into this, or that let Captain America into my realm…whatever. In a kind of a dopey, stylized way it recreates the special glow of that gone-forever era, or at least as it might have been. I was saying to myself that ‘this is kind of silly, of course, but Joe Johnston and his team really believe in this yesteryear dream-reality themselves. Because they’re selling me on it…me!’

“It’s not just a very heartfelt comic-book film, but one that seems to fly by as quickly and fleetingly as a comic book, even though it lasts a couple of hours. That’s an important aspect. It never gets loaded down with convictions that it’s delivering something momentous and meaningful…and yet it is in an odd way.

“Captain America is not in the least bit ‘realistic,’ of course. Everything it contains is about memory and echoes and haze. And about browns and ambers and sepia-tones. But it’s a highly sincere and convincing visitation of an imaginary yesteryear, and for the first time in a long time I felt a semblance of what it might have been to be a true-blue good guy and to be ‘part of the team.’ And I’m no team player.”

In the view of the sometimes very wise Kris Tapley, Captain America is “the best Marvel film since Iron Man, and perhaps better. It conjures the most endearing character of the build thus far, a well-defined leader who will certainly leave audiences ready to follow him into Marvel’s next ambitious project.”

And from MCN’s David Poland: “I kinda love the sepia-spirited movie that Joe Johnston made out of Captain America. Few films are perfect, but the ones that can keep you in even at moments they threaten to pull you out are almost as rare.” And costar Hayley Atwell — I’m paraphasing — could be the focus of a Douglas Sirk movie, and she has truly stirring ta-tas!

“The response to each movie is its own little war,” Poland once wrote. The word he was searching for was “battle.” And many of these are skirmishes. But the Captain America argument (which has begun to sound a bit more reasonable with Joe Johnston’s film managing a 62% Rotten Tomatoes rating as of early this afternoon) is, in my mind, a war.

At the very least it’s the Hatfields vs. McCoys, and I’m a Hatfield carrying my flintlock over my shoulder, and I mean to pick off as many of them McCoy varmints as I can.

I know I’m contradicting my previous remark about there being “no “wrong” or “right” in responding to a film. I guess I’m talking Hatfields vs. McCoys in an Iowa caucus sense of the term. It’s all about persuading the uncommitted and talking down the other side and then smiling and shaking hands the morning after the vote, etc. Something along those lines. Just as I knew Hillary Clinton and John Edwards had to lose to Barack Obama in Iowa, the enemies of Captain America — easily one of the best-made films of the year — must be surrounded and shelled and defeated at all costs.

Even though I realize that the pro-America team is probably destined to fail with younger viewers, and perhaps with people in their teens and early 20s. You have to be a little bit older, I’m starting to think, to really appreciate this film. You need to have gotten and appreciated the craft that went into mid ’70s-to-early ’80s Spielberg films and the quality that went into The Rocketeer and Sky Captain and to have fully understood what truly first-rate, beautifully designed, perfectly calibrated superhero chops are. You need to have that knowledge in your head and heart to really get Captain America, I think.

After last night’s screening I asked a couple of very young boys what they thought, and one of them half-smiled and said, “It’s okay.” In other words, he didn’t like it. And then a friend in his 40s said almost the same thing — “Not bad!”

The boldness of going right back to high school with a re-imagined Peter Parker (in the person of Andrew Garfield) figuring out who and what he is and ignoring the first three Spider-Man movies is moderately entertaining in itself. And to be free of the jowly, suit-wearing Republican known as Sam Raimi! It’s as if a rainshower has fallen in the forest and everything is moist and new again. And those POV shots aren’t half bad.

An 11 am screening of Sarah’s Key prevents me from getting into Captain America until sometime this afternoon, but Drew McWeeny‘s HitFix review says most of what I would have said and some other stuff I wouldn’t have written because I’m not enough of a geek.

“Captain America: The First Avenger is one of the finest movies yet from Marvel Studios, and a big departure in tone and storytelling from most of the films they’ve made so far. It is a strong indicator that the more willing the studio is to experiment, the more exciting the payoffs can be. In this case, there’s no clear precursor to this one in anything else Marvel’s done, and it feels like branching out and trying something this different freed them up.

“It helps that director Joe Johnston shot the film like he had something to prove and Chris Evans appears to have been born for this role. Everything came together here in a way that I’m not sure anyone could have predicted, and that indefinable chemistry is one of the things that makes this feel so special.

“The first and most immediate difference between this and the other movies Marvel has made so far is the time frame over which the story plays out. The film starts in the present day, then flashes back to the early days of WWII. The main story plays out not over days or even weeks, but over years. It is, in essence, a look at the entire WWII career of Captain America, and his origins as Steve Rogers.

“It isn’t structured like a typical superhero film, either. It focuses on two main arcs over the course of its running time. First, there’s the story of Rogers, a skinny weakling with a lion’s heart who is chosen to be the test subject in the Super Soldier program headed by Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) and how he learns to handle the power he’s been granted. At the same time, we follow the efforts of Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), aka The Red Skull, whose HYDRA is starting to outgrow its origins as the dark science division of the Nazis thanks to his discovery of a strange glowing cube that once resided in the vault of weapons kept by Odin in Asgard.

“The collision between these two story arcs is what keeps driving the movie forward, but there is plenty of room built in for digressions, and the end result feels like reading an entire collection of issues of the same book.

“Marvel has been working towards this moment for a while, and there have been a few moments where it felt like they were making missteps with the individual movies in their rush to reach The Avengers, but they’ve saved one of their very best movies for last, and I suspect Captain America: The First Avenger will send audiences out of the theater rabid to see what’s next.”

I’m predicting here and now that Captain America will be better than The Avengers. Another ensemble superhero piece? Blah. Give me the purity and cleanliness of what I saw last night any day.

And I need to say without malice (and in fact with a certain arm-over-the-shoulder compassion) that the five big critics who’ve panned it so far —Kirk Honeycutt, Karina Longworth, Emmanuel Levy, Marshall Fine and Tim Grierson — need to unblock themselves somehow. I don’t know what’s wrong with them or what they’ve been eating or not doing enough of, but they’re wrong, wrong….no, that’s rash. There is no “wrong” or “right” in responding to a film. But they clearly are not seeing. They won’t or can’t let this movie in.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson tweeted last night that Captain America “left me cold.” WHAT?

The reception to Captain America may be one of those watershed moments in the 21st Century that defines who and what we are as people, as critics or columnists, as film disciples. I don’t want to go nuts here, but I think it’s safe to say that people will be trashing this amazingly concise, uplifting, fliuid, dazzling, emotionally earnest yesteryear art spectacle at their own longterm peril. They’re going to have to live with what they’ve written for years, and it will stay with them like a snapping turtle biting into their foot.

I’ve been got so caught up with this, that and everything else over the last three days that I somehow forgot to post last weekend’s Oscar Poker chat — sorry. Oscar Poker #41 didn’t include boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino, who’s become too much of a swaggering, in-demand big shot to take ten or twelve minutes to discuss box-office receipts with the likes of Sasha and myself. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

It’s 11:30 pm and everyone needs to wind down for an hour or so before crashing. But Joe Johnston‘s Captain America (Paramount, 7.22) screened tonight at the Grove, and I was knocked over, levitated, delighted. I could feel the mixed energy in the room, and it’s obvious that some are going to “meh” this amazing film. “It’s okay,” “Not bad,” etc. Wrong! I’m just going to re-post tonight’s tweets and let it go at that…for now.

Tweet #1: “Retro-Captain America is my favorite Marvel movie ever, by far. LOVED IT! Best Joe Johnston flick since The Rocketeer! Fast & fleet & spiffy. Exactly the right tone for a 1940s-era patriotic superhero flick. Not comic, not satiric, not a jape. And yet it speeds right along, cuts to the chase, does it right.”

Tweet #2: “Captain America doesn’t end traditionally or wholesomely or even conclusively — it ends like a continuing serial — but what happens is a complete surprise. And the film as a whole is a lot more ‘sincere’ than tongue-in-cheek.”

Tweet #3: “Captain America is the delightful opposite of a dark, heavyweight, super-labored, wannabe-Chris-Nolan movie. Loved the brownish-amber colors, the patriotic ’40s ambiance, the concise shape and pace of it. No fat, no slack…punch it.”

Tweet #4: “Anyone who comes out of Captain America saying ‘meh, it’s mildly okay’ is aesthetically blocked. They just don’t get it. Captain America moves, mad-dashes, soars, whooshes, runs, delights & barrel-asses. It’s pure art direction, pure mood, and all of a piece. And mostly unpredictable.”

Tweet #5: “Captain America made me feel good about the spirit of ComicCon. Three hours ago I was still fantasizing about strafing the fanboys.”

Last night I finally saw Mike Cahill and Brit Marling‘s Another Earth (Fox Searchlight, 7.22), a spare but imaginative low-budgeter about loss and recovery and redemption. It’s partly a sci-fi fantasy about the approach of a second earth, but you’re supposed to let that go and focus on the meaning of Earth #2 — a 99% duplicate of our own world — and the escape it offers to people who are unhappy and “want out.”

Another Earth star, co-writer and co-producer Britt Marling, and director, co-writer and editor Mike Cahill following last night’s screening at the Landmark.

(l. to r.) William Mapother, Marling, Cahill.

Marling plays Rhoda, a high-school grad whose plan to attend MIT is destroyed when she absent-mindedly and somewhat drunkenly crashes her car into another. The impact kills a mother and child, and sends the father (William Mapother), named John, into a coma. Rhoda goes to prison for manslaughter and is released four years later. Numbed by guilt and unable to get her life rolling, she takes a job as a high-school janitor. When Rhoda learns that John has come out of his coma, she pretends to be a cleaning-service rep in order to clean up his skanky home (he’s been despondent and drinking) and make herself feel better by brightening his life a bit.

And all the while Earth #2 is up in the sky, moving closer and closer. Voice contact is eventually established and people realize that every last person, personality, car, seagull, cat, dog, continent and iPhone has an exact double on the approaching planet, but also that certain things may be a little different. Rhoda enters a contest that, if she wins, will give her free passage to Earth #2, where — perhaps — her double hasn’t killed anyone in a car crash. But at the same time she’s happy with John by making him feel better and less depressed. He, meanwhile, is starting to fall in love with her, and tries to get her to change her mind about travelling to Earth #2 if and when she’s lucky enough to win.

Yes, it sounds far-fetched and insufficiently worked out, and probably beyond the grasp of a mini-budget indie. But Another Earth works regardless because it’s reasonably well crafted and comfortable with being small-scale, and because Cahill and Marling let you know just enough to float the story and no more. The lack of detail works in its favor to some extent. And it’s short. And it’s convinclngly acted by Marling, a young Meryl Streep-meets-Jennifer Warren type whose eyes are almost exactly like the eyes of a girlfriend I had a long time ago, and by Mapother, and that’s more or less okay as far as it goes. And it ends well.

But it has two problems.

One, Earth #2 gets bigger and bigger as the story moves along and Cahill-Marling don’t explain what’s actually going on, scientifically speaking. Two months ago Cannes journalists saw Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia, which is nominally about another planet crashing into the earth, and I for one couldn’t stop thinking about this and Earth‘s similar shots of an approaching planet. There’s no talk about obliteration, but Earth #2 is heading straight for our own and nobody explains that it’s going to pass us by. Even big-metaphor movies can’t ignore the science altogether. Sometimes you can under-explain things too much.

Don’t even talk about the tidal-gravity affects of a huge planet coming this close, etc.

The second problem is Mapother, who doesn’t have the face or the manner of a guy you can relax with and relate to. There’s a reason why certain actors become movie stars, and that’s because they’re attractive and likable and cool to hang with, and whom we can accept as stand-ins for ourselves. And the truth is that there’s something faintly demonic in Mapother, who has previously played bad guys — most notably in Lost and in Todd Field‘s In The Bedroom — for a reason. He’s a bright and likable fellow in person but he creeps you out in close-ups with that demented face and those warlock eyes, and it just feels wrong for Marling to fall in love with him, and it feels a bit scary when he loses his temper two or three times during the story because you believe it all too completely.

I did what I could do settle into the film being about rebuilding a ruined life and finding the strength to forgive and move on. I managed to do that for the most part, but it would have been a smoother, more absorbing experience if someone besides Mapother had been cast. Sorry, but I couldn’t get down with him.

Robert Redford is going to direct and star in The Company You Keep, based on Neil Gordon‘s 2003 novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by the great Lem Dobbs.

Redford will reportedly play a former Weather Underground militant (in the tradition of Bill Ayres, Bernardine Dohrn or Mark Rudd) wanted by the FBI for a 30-year-old bank job who is forced to abandon his daughter and go on the lam when a young reporter (Shia LaBeouf) outs him. As he “evades a manhunt and seeks out old comrades,” according to a Publisher’s Weekly synopsis, we meet “a sprawling cast of drug dealers, bomb-planting radicals turned leftist academics, Vietnam vets, FBI agents and Republicans who collectively ponder the legacy of the ’60s.”

Another movie about boomers looking back at the ’60s? Okay, maybe this can work. Let’s not pre-judge. But two issues need solving.

Problem #1: The radical left bombings and bank-robbings happened in the early ’70s, so for Redford’s character to still be hiding his identity in 2012 (or whenever the movie comes out) he would have had to be living under a false identity for 40 years. That’s too many decades. Redford and Dobbs would have to back-date the film to the 2000 or thereabouts, if not the mid to late ’90s.

Problem #2: I can’t believe Redford as an ex-radical. He was edgy and watchful but never that angry in his youth. I believed him right away as Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men, as Bill McKay in The Candidate and as the book-reading CIA agent in Three Days of the Condor. But never as an ex-bank-robbing radical. No way. Not Bob.

In “St. George and the Godfather,” Norman Mailer wrote a line about Miami cops chasing protestors with nightsticks and other guys running alongside the action (i.e., not really in the heat of it) “like Robert Redford,” or words to that effect.

I love that Mike Nichols story about casting The Graduate, and about telling Redford that he just couldn’t buy him as the solemnly resentful, sexually inexperienced Benjamin Braddock. “Be honest,” Nichols said to Redford. “Have you ever struck out with a girl?” Redford said, “Whaddaya mean?”

This is for real. An actual Deadline Hollywood game will debut on Facebook this summer. Does this mean that the game (which I presume will have an app for smart phones) will somehow insert the Tyrannosaur-ish personality of Nikki Finke into the software, in the same way that the seething machismo in Sylvester Stallone‘s John Rambo is woven into the various Rambo games?

The Hollywood Elsewhere game would be some kind of travel-and-adventure-and-political-peril thing. The player would go from film festival to film festival (Sundance, Cannes, Toronto), wearing different color shoes, using little cowboy hats as currency, guestimating the value of films, encountering bad wifi, etc. Actually, I take that back — that’s a fairly shitty idea.

What about the David Poland/Movie City News game? What would that be about? How about the Sasha Stone/Awards Daily game? Or the Scott Feinberg game? Or the Glenn Kenny/Some Came Running game?

Maybe the best thing is to think beyond software and going back to the concept of a simple Monopoly-style board game with dice and little plastic men and “get out of jail” cards and all that. I don’t know. Give me time to figure it out. So far I’m not enthused.

Below is an excerpt from Paul Thomas Anderson‘s screenplay of The Master, the so-called “Scientology movie” that’s been filming since June. The Weinstein Co. will release it during 2012 Oscar season. It costars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Laura Dern. The other excerpt is from Herman Melville‘s “Moby-Dick“. Read and compare.