I captured what I could of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s visit last night to the Dictator screening at the Rave plex in Las Vegas. You can’t see much but at least you can hear some of the jokes. I’m loading this before it’s fully processed but I have to split in five minutes so that’s all she wrote…for now.

Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles‘ The Dictator (Paramount, 5.16) screened late last night (11:30 pm) to a packed house at Las Vegas’s Rave plex. I was there — alert, laughing, surprised, pleased — along with Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny (who drove up from Los Angeles just for this) and several Cinemacon invitees. And the film works — it’s frequently funny and fast-moving and inventive. And it’s not just another Borat-Bruno here-we-go-again yaddah yaddah, which I had feared it might be.

Okay, don’t trust me (I don’t care) but it was clear to yours truly and presumably others last night that (a) The Dictator is much, much better than Bruno, (b) it’s not a victim-punking mockumentary but a ludicrously farcical movie-movie with an arc and character development and a payoff — a personal journey of awakening (“like Eat Pray Love,” as Cohen’s General Admiral Aladeen quips during the last third) that is mostly ridiculous but isn’t dismissable, partly because (c) it has actual political content and a great political third-act speech that for some reason reminded me of a payoff moment in a Preston Sturges film (like Hail the Conquering Hero, perhaps).

And it has a brilliant 9/11 terrorist humor scene — yes, that’s what I said. And it makes superb use of a severed head. And it lampoons Middle Eastern sexist-animal attitudes like no film ever has or likely will again (conservative asshole males in Middle Eastern countries are going to have a problem with The Dictator).

And it has two…okay, two and a half clever and amusing supporting performances that generate their own action. I’m speaking of Ana Faris, playing a kind of romantic straight woman role and delivering the emotional anchors as the manager of a Brooklyn natural-food store (and wearing a mousey little pixie cut with her natural brown hair) who befriends and gradually becomes close to Cohen’s Aladeen, and Jason Mantzoukas as a bearded rocket scientist from Aladeen’s home country of Wadiya who was thought to be executed but wasn’t and emigrated to the US, and who befriends Aladeen as a kind of struggling equal and co-conspirator. The good half-performance come from Ben Kingsley, who is his usual expert self but hasn’t been given enough of a part.

The political speech that I love so much addresses the notion that the U.S. is almost as much of a dictatorship as Wadiya. Cohen explains how and why in ways that Bill Maher has articulated many times, but it’s refreshing and delightful to hear a genuinely truthful and blunt and ballsy observation inserted into a comedy of the absurd.

McWeeny has called The Dictator “the single most degenerate Jerry Lewis film ever made” and “a profoundly dirty movie” and that “there are few lines Cohen does not happily cross in his desire to upset.” Yeah, okay. The Jerry Lewis film I was thinking of was Visit To A Small Planet.

McWeeny notes that the script (by Cohen, Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer) has “a few big set pieces that are in startlingly bad taste…if you are easily offended…hell, hell, even if you’re not easily offended…chances are Cohen will find the thing you won’t laugh at, and he’ll push that button repeatedly.” Which is the Cohen m.o., right? I think we all know that, and that the shock aspect is the point and so on.

I have to take a shower and get the hell out of here so I can catch the 9:30 am Warner Bros. presentation but The Dictator is, to repeat, a much more satisfying package than anyone anticipated, or so I suspect.

The screening began about a half-hour late due to Paramount publicists holding things up so that Cohen-as-Aladeen, dressed in white military jacket and beard, and four or five Wadiya armed soldiers could enter from the rear and Cohen could do a comedy routine (which he had delivered a few hours earlier at Ceasar’s Palace in front of a big Cinemacon crowd).

I’ll be spending most of my Cinemacon time at Ceasar’s Palace**, the headquarters and the nerve center, so naturally I’ll be doing 80% or 90% of my filing from here. Does Cinemacon provide complimentary wifi? No. Is wifi available within Ceasar’s for a fee? Yes — nearly $25 effing dollars per day. The greediest, most money-grubbing wifi provider at an airport will charge $12.95 a day or thereabouts. Charging nearly double that is unconscionable.

Cinemacon is an exhibitor thing, but it’s really not about movies — it’s about product. Almost all the movies being pushed here are theme-park rides. Hot whizbang bullshit empty flashy crappola. It’s like the AFM here. And all the people walking around look like they’re cut from the same cloth as John Cassevetes‘ Guy from Rosemary’s Baby. I’m not exaggerating. This place feels vaguely…make that faintly demonic. If Satan were to materialize as a human he would fit right in and go “whoo-hoo!” and order a drink and watch ESPIN. The wrong people are here. People who believe that movies are about fireworks and noise and cliches and cheap distraction.

Contents of goody bag provided by Cinemacon.

** Yes, I’m aware that management spells it Caesars Palace without the apostrophe, but of course thast’s nonsensical. I refuse to play along.

I take full responsibility for flirting with actually shelling out for the upcoming German Bluray of John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (’62). How much better can this black-and-white film look on Bluray compared to the DVD? Somewhat, I’m sure, but is it likely to be cause for cheering in the streets? It was always obvious that James Stewart and John Wayne wore toupees during filming, and now the evidence will be even more distinct.

The Leonardo DiCaprio biopic rule of the 21st Century states that you don’t have to even vaguely resemble the person you’re playing. Leo didn’t look a bit like Howard Hughes, the resemblance between DiCaprio and J. Edgar Hoover was zilch, and the idea of Leo playing Frank Sinatra (which Martin Scorsese has discussed with a straight face) is ludicrous. So Lindsay Lohan can totally play Elizabeth Taylor as she looked during the making of Cleopatra in ’61, ’62 and ’63. She’ll just have to gain a little bit.

The Lifetime film will be a joke, of course, because it’s not a Liz movie as much as a Liz- and-Dick movie, and I guarantee that budget-minded Lifetime won’t be able to find an actor who can even come close to impersonating Richard Burton. It’s a gross understatement to say that Burton’s voice was highly distinctive. Nobody will be able to “do” it…forget it. No decent Dick = no movie.

I arrived in Las Vegas two hours and 5 minutes ago. The room at the Hard Rock Hotel is very pleasant (black and white motif) with satisfactory wifi. It’s about 90 degrees out and a little less than a mile between the Hard Rock and Caesar’s Palace, which is ground zero for Cinemacon. So yeah, maybe I’ll cab it. I have to get over there but I need to file a couple of things first.

Is that a view or what?

As I mentioned the other day, I once tried to play drums (i.e., none too successfully) in a semi-conflicted Connecticut blues band. It was fun but I was the weak link. The band had five names at different stages of the game — the Golden Rockets (which I hated), the Sludge Brothers, Blind Pig Sweat, Amos Bouldcox and Dog Breath. My problem wasn’t a lack of joie de percussion, but that I obliged to bang it out on a conventional drum set when my true gift was in the realm of thigh-slapping and coin-jingling and simulating bass riffs in my throat. Today we have sensitive-enough microphones that would permit me to do that.

Hollywood Elsewhere has to drive out to Burbank airport around 10 am in order to arrive at long-term parkling by 10:35 or 10:40 am in order to catch the shuttle and be at the gate by 11 am for a Las Vegas flight that leaves around 12 noon. Okay, I guess I don’t have to be there precisely by 11 am but why flirt with fate? Because there’s always something else I want to post, that’s why, and I’m compulsive that way.

Arriving LV at 1:05 pm. Check in at the Hard Rock by 2 pm. Off to Ceasar’s Palace on foot by 3 or 3:30 pm. Pick up badge by 4 or 4:30 pm. And then do a little filing between then and the first event.

Did I mention this is all about Cinemacon? I didn’t? Ah, well. “It’s the charge, it’s the bolt, it’s the buzz, it’s the sheer fuck off-ness of it all. Am I right?” Wells to Katherine Brodsky: Name the film, the screenplay author, the actor who said it and so on.

Roger Sterling (John Slattery) dropped acid with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Jane (Peyton List) on Mad Men this evening. It amused him for the most part. He didn’t appear to experience the exhilarating first hour (i.e., elevator in the brain hotel) and he didn’t travel inward in any noticable way, much less get “beautiful” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the term. He held onto himself, kept his distance. Stared, listened. Which I found comforting and disappointing. Roger just wasn’t made for those times. And he doesn’t know or care all that much about Jane.

You don’t have to drop acid to realize that we’re all intertwined and vulnerable, so delicate and ethereal and humming the same ohhm, sharing the same pulse…everything and everyone in ways that defy strenuous attempts to explain. And all you have to do is let it in. Or not. But it’s there either way. For this and other spiritual “aha!” moments and sink-ins I have LSD to thank. I wouldn’t touch it with a 20-foot pole today, but without it I never would have known what I know or at the very least remember, for whatever that’s worth.

“I know, I know, you’ll probably scream and cry that your little world won’t let you go…”

I don’t know if Devin Faraci has been “beautiful ” or not, but he understands the LSD thing pretty well.

Sasha Stone and I had an okay time on the phone today…mostly. It all started with my telling her about Richard Linklater‘s Bernie, which I really liked after seeing it the second time last week. But I wasn’t getting through. I tried but I couldn’t explain it right. Which is a way of saying that Bernie, a perfectly made film that doesn’t fit into any one category, is probably toast.

Then we talked about the Cannes lineup, and in so doing revealed that we’ve read very little so far and haven’t thought much about the selections. But it was a start.

Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

For what it’s worth, I finally caught up tonight with Game of Thrones (the second episode apparently), and it might be the most intriguingly acted and smartly written drama of this type that I’ve ever seen. I loathe the idea of any medieval fantasy TV series based on a series of fantasy novels blah blah, but Thrones operates on a somewhat more refined and cultivated level. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have created a literate and semi-upscale (as far as it goes) HBO series about grimy, cynical, ruthless people walking around in tunics and carrying swords. This level of accomplishment is unusual, it seems, for a property that has a related merchandise line (action figures, etc.), two video games and a ready-to-wear Helmut Lang collection about to hit the market. Seriously — medieval CG fantasy bullshit isn’t my cup and this wasn’t too bad. And the gratuitous nudity was okay.

In a 3.26 New Yorker profile of Veep creator Armando Ianucci, Ian Parker reports that Ianucci, for research, toured the White House with Reggie Love, who was then President Barack Obama’s special assistant. And Love, Iannucci recalls, “referenced The West Wing — the show — by saying ‘This is the Roosevelt Room…this would be where Josh and C.J. would…’ And I’m thinking, ‘Why couldn’t you say this is where President Obama sat with Hillary Clinton?'”

At Seville’s Plaza de Espana, the officers’ club in Lawrence of Arabia — i.e., the palace-like buidling where T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) first arrives after being driven into “Cairo” following his trek across the Sinai desert with Farraj (Michel Ray) and Daud (John Dimech).

I’m with Reggie. I do this all the time in my head. To me famous buildings and locations aren’t so much about their own history as backdrops used by great or significant movies, or the basis for sound-stage or CGI duplications.

When I visited a section of Belgium’s Ardennes forest, site of the Battle of the Bulge, in late ’99, I didn’t say to myself ‘this is where the American troops incurred heavy casualties from the German counteroffensive” as much as “this is where Van Johnson and John Hodiak and George Murphy fought the Krauts in William Wellman‘s Battleground.” Yes, I know that film was shot on Hollywood sound stages and against locations in northern California, Oregon and Washington state.

When I visited the United Nations building in Manhattan in the early ’80s, I remember thinking, ‘These are the steps that Cary Grant walked up after getting out of the cab in North by Northwest…and here’s the main entrance hall he walked into…now, where’s the lounge where he met Lester Townsend?” I’ve never been to Mount Rushmore but that, to me, is a total North by Northwest touchstone, and secondarily a famous mountainside monument. All I would want to do after seeing the big faces would be to find James Mason‘s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home (which of course doesn’t exist).

When I visited Spain’s southeast coast with my two sons in late May of ’09 my plan was to visit the a beach called Playa del Algarrobico, which is where the seaside town of Aqaba was built for Lawrence of Arabia. Except I didn’t get there, and I deeply regret that. But I did visit other Lawrence locations in Sevilla.

In early 2000 I drove out to Glendale to visit the JFK Oval Office set of Roger Donaldson‘s 13 Days, and every last detail has been recreated even though the camera couldn’t hope to capture these particulars. Same thing with the West Wing set built to duplicate the Nixon White House in Oliver Stone‘s Nixon (’95), which Stone and publicist Stephen Rivers allowed me to visit. To me visiting these sets was just as cool and in some ways better than if I’d been allowed to tour the actual West Wing.

If I ever get out to Dyersville, Iowa, you can bet I’ll visit the Ray Kinsella farm where the cornfield baseball diamond was built.

I could go on and on. Whatever and wherever, what matters to me is what film was shot here and whether or not the actual locales used for the film still exist, or if the geography of the actual locales resembles the sound-stage replications.

Veep premieres tonight on HBO at 10 pm.