“Surprisingly, it’s the Hulk who lumbers away with The Avengers,” writes Boxoffice.com’s Amy Nicholson in a mostly negative 4.20 review. “In contrast to the last two efforts to deepen Hulk with woe and wrath like a minty Brunnhilde, Mark Ruffalo plays him like a guy who just wrapped up a coffee date. His Bruce Banner is scruffy, mellow and at peace with the fact that he’s a normal-ish man doing his best not to slip into a homicidal rampage. In India, he must have done a lot of yoga.

“As he chills out in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s invisible plane, you sense his compatriots musing, ‘That‘s the living embodiment of rage against the machine?’ It is. And it’s the contrast that sells it. Give Ruffalo his own Hulk movie — hey, third time’s a charm.”

About three hours ago I found myself agreeing with and admiring a Fox Broadcasting Earth Day tweet: “Did you know that if we cut our morning shower time by 2 minutes, we’d save enough water to completely fill the Great Lakes every day?” I raised a smiliar point two years ago, and several little bitches said they need to take extra-long showers for various reasons. I argued that a real man doesn’t linger in the warm amniotic fluid of his mother’s womb and gets his showering done in three minutues flat.

It seems pretty clear that The Avengers is going to work for almost everyone, perhaps even me. (Although I can’t entirely accept the idea of Joss Whedon having hit a home run. I’m guessing it’s probably a triple that Justin Chang and others are calling a four-bagger.) But no matter how good it turns out to be, I know I’m probably going to experience issues with costar Robert Downey because he’s been bothering me ever since he went corporate and turned into a franchise whore and a Republican.

And yet when I read Downey’s views this morning in Carl Fussman‘s Esquire cover piece, he sounded like my idea of a perceptive, highly intelligent fellow. A guy I could easily talk to for hours on end. He doesn’t miss a trick. And yet I know he’s a longtime pal and admirer and to some degree a philosophical colleague of Mel Gibson (“Downey has looked up to Gibson as an older brother and authority figure and mentor for a long time,” a onetime Downey confidante told me last December). And that being a rightie Downey will probably be supporting Mitt Romney against Obama. And if he could he’d be making soul-poisoning franchise flicks like Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man and Perry Mason until he’s 75 years old.

He just bothers me these days, and I used to like his work a lot. We’re really only talking about the last two to three years and not even that because I loved it when he slugged that little kid in the stomach in Due Date (’10). But he seems to have traded in that actor he used to be and become a much slicker model. The guy who costarred or starred in Richard III, Restoration, One Night Stand Two Girls and a Guy, In Dreams, Bowfinger, Black and White, Wonder Boys, The Singing Detective, The Outsider, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, A Scanner Darkly, Fur and Zodiac has apparently left the room.

Downey used to be a drug addict in big trouble. Now he’s totally cleaned up, married, a new father, etc. He’s obviously in a better place, and good for that. But sometimes artists and performers are better at their game, or at least are more creatively interesting, when their personal lives and lifestyles are less settled. There’s something about living a wild-ass life and and wondering what and who the hell you are and going through emotional upheavals that seems to feed the right kind of creativity. Sometimes. And sometimes not. I know that unstable and angry John Lennon was more of a creative firecracker in the early to middle years (early ’60s to early ’70s) than he was in his comeback phase of ’79 and ’80, when he was a happy family man. Sid Ceasar was better when he was a live TV crazy man in the middle ’50s who ate and drank too much. Brian Wilson‘s genius period (’63 to ’68) happened when his personal life was highly unstable and drug-riddled.

It may be that Downey’s Tony Stark performance in The Avengers will be completely fine, and I’ll be able to put all this aside. But I somehow doubt it.

“Downey is in the factory business now, the manufacturing business,” the ex-confidante explained. “It’s a different business than being an actor. He’s in the cartoon business. He’s being successful in cartoons. And the way it works is, you keep doing those movies until people get sick of you and those movies are not available anymore. Bruce Willis did these movies in the ’90s until it ran out for him. He kept doing them when he could do them. This is what Downey is doing now. As long as there are offers, and the calendar has slots to fill, you just say ‘what is the deal?’ and ‘what are the dates?'”

Two days ago I was buying Aleve and some Emergen-C packets in a pharmacy, and I was waiting behind a 50ish woman who was having a couple of prescriptions filled. Except she wasn’t entirely certain or satisfied that the medicines she was getting were doing the job, and she was telling the pharmacist about all the aches and pains she’d been experiencing and asking for suggestions and yaddah yaddah. It went on and on and on. Eight, nine, ten minutes.

I’ve stood behind women like this before. She was apparently unmarried (no ring) and presumably a bit lonely, and here was a chance to have a nice nourishing session with the next best thing to the family doctor (which nobody sees any more because general practitioners don’t exist) — a pharmacist at a CVS store. And so I waited and waited and waited, as did the two people behind me. And this woman couldn’t have cared less. She needed counsel and advice, and she was a little worried and fretting and needed a friendly medical authority in her life, and she needed to talk about this and that and “are you sure because I tried this last week and if anything I felt worse,” etc.

On top of which the woman had one of those too-short quasi-pixie haircuts that so many hairdressers tell mid-50ish and 60ish women to try because longer hair doesn’t look good because their hair isn’t as thick or buoyant as when they were younger and looks raggedy if worn at a longer length and therefore emphasizes age. But this shorter cut has become so ubiquitous that if you’re a woman who’s reached that threshold (55 or beyond, let’s say) there’s nothing that makes you look older and says “timid and going downhill and planning to move into an assisted living facility ten years from now” than to wear your hair shorter.

There’s nothing more reprehensible in any men’s clothing department than Gold Toe socks. These are truly the sock of schmucks. John Travolta was wearing a pair when he danced with Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and in my mind his stock dropped about 20 points right then and there. You’d have to be awfully clueless to walk up to a display of Gold Toe socks and say to yourself, “Out of all the socks being sold in this store, these are the shit!” If someone takes their shoes off and I can see they’re wearing a pair, I would immediately write them off. Just saying.

Collider.com’s Adam Chitwood confided today that the third trailer for The Dark Knight Rises will be attached to prints of The Avengers when it opens on 5.4. This is heartening news because henceforth we’ll all have a Dark Knight trailer to look at that doesn’t begin with a boy at a football game singing “Oh, say can you see…?” God, I hate that trailer! I literally flinch when I hear that soft eunuch voice.

For as long as I can remember Haiti has ruled as the #1 misery nation on earth. It is also, if you want to be cynical, the gift that keeps on giving for documentarians looking for some new tale involving agony and cruelty and God’s yawning indifference. There is only one solution for Haitians, and that is to get the fuck out of that country (through the love of baseball or anything else that works) and never return.

Each time a hopeful or encouraging action happens in Haiti, a much stronger counter-action comes along that nullifies and ushers in a renewed sense of despair.

David Darg and Bryn Mooser‘s Baseball in the Time of Cholera will have its world premiere at 6 pm this evening at the Tribeca Film Festival. Olivia Wilde is a co-executive producer. Subsequent screenings will happen Monday, 4.23 at 12 noon, on Friday, 4.27 at 9:45 pm, and on Sunday, 4.29 at 10 pm.

There are few things in life that are more clarifying and soul-soothing than to walk onto a Manhattan subway platform and check out a movie poster that’s been graffiti-ized and/or defaced in some way, and to realize in a flash that this — this! — probably represents the final audience-confronting reality, at least more than those reactions from the South by Southwest horror geeks and hyperventilators two or three weeks ago.

Photos from the Les Miserables shoot indicate that director Tom Hooper isn’t looking to spiff up or Hollywoodize this musical rendering of Victor Hugo‘s 1862 novel. It’s a piece about the destitute poor of 1830s Paris and everybody looks like hell, particularly rail-thin Anne Hathaway‘s Fantine and her tennis-ball haircut. Actually, there’s one Hollywood-type “up” moment in this clip — i.e., a joyful smiling look between Hathaway and Hugh Jackman‘s Jean Valjean. But I can roll with it.