Month: May 2012

Every time I return to Europe it’s a little less exotic. The mystique of past centuries is a shade less evident, the glories of classic architecture unchanged but less dominant, their impact (spiritual and otherwise) diluted and encroached upon by banal corporatism and international franchises. English is spoken or at least partly understood by just about everyone in Prague now, and that’s very welcome. But in dozens of little ways this town has begun to feel like a faux-environment in Orlando, Florida — Pragueworld. Not to any overwhelming degree, but it’s certainly noticable.

Would I have the old world back? No. It’s glorious to hang in this great apartment (apart from the drunks singing outside my bedroom window at 5 am) with perfect wifi and seven or eight English-language channels on the 21-inch 1995 Sony TV. I can kick back and churn out material without the slightest hiccup or impediment. But I miss that feeling of slight uncertainty and having to adapt to the ways of a strange culture, and having my consciousness slightly re-molded by that.

When my ex-wife and I first came here in late ’87 it was truly a world apart. So different from the States it felt almost spooky at times. The Communists were running the show with impugnity, pollution was rampant and the air was filled with the odor of soft coal. (You could literally scoop the sediment off the window sills.) And the dollar was all-powerful. My ex-wife and I made the mistake of buying too many Czech korunas and realized halfway into our brief stay that we weren’t spending it fast enough. (You couldn’t buy your dollars back — what you had in korunas you had to spend or lose.) Prague used to be a bargain — now everything costs pretty much what it costs in LA or New York unless you venture into the outlying areas where tourists fear to tread.

“Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain,” says Henry Drummond (i.e., Clarence Darrow by way of Spencer Tracy) in Stanley Kramer‘s Inherit The Wind. “You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, ‘Alright, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote, but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”

Welcome to Prague, Mr. Wells, where you can revel and relax with every commercial and technological comfort of home except for watching new Blurays on your 55″ plasma — the one missing element. All this will make you feel very settled and secure, but you can’t re-experience what this town used to be. Yeah, I know — grim up, let it go, move on, be here now. But still…

It’s noon now and church bells are ringing from locations all over town. They can’t take this away, at least.

It feels lazy and whorey to re-post the Park City Cowboy Hat episode, which happened three and half years ago, in December 2008. But re-posting anything is kind of whorey. And even I still laugh at this: “Me to Star Hotel proprietor: “I found a place in Park City but I can’t move in until Friday the 16th. Would you let me crash on the living-room couch for the first two nights (1.14 and 1.15)? Which I’ll pay you for, of course. It would be greatly appreciated if you could grant me this small favor, as you left me in the lurch this year.

“I thought I’d made it clear as a bell that I intended to return, having stayed in your wonderful abode the last two years and leaving my cowboy hat there and telling you I’d wear it when I returned in ’09 and so on. Anyway, can ya do me this one?”

Followup #1 / “Wells to 62 Lincoln and the others who don’t get it: Yes, yes…if I’d left a cash deposit or a credit-card number then the room would have been assured. I’m not an idiot. But leaving the cowboy hat and plainly stating to the proprietor that I’d come back and wear it the following year (especially after having stayed at the Star in ’07 and ’08 and been part of the family there, in a sense) was a very emotionally vivid and pronounced way of stating my intentions. It was a message that is recognized by everyone all over the world. It’s even recognized in the animal kingdom (i.e., leaving your scent on a piece of turf).

“If you go out with a girl and she comes home with you and stays the night and she leaves her underwear or bra or socks in your bedroom after she leaves the next morning, we all know that’s a universal message that says, ‘I want to come back and get to know you better and probably have sex with you again.’ Everybody knows that. Leaving an article of clothing, something with your scent and paw-prints and sweat residue on it, means that you intend to come back and spray your scent around some more.

“If you were to see a 1930s Gary Cooper western and hotel manager Frances Farmer, giving him the old twinkle-eye, asked him if he was coming back after taking his cattle to market, and if he faintly grinned at her and took off his cowboy hat and left it hanging on the wall as he walks out the door, everybody watching the film in any country in the world would know exactly what that means. It would be crystal clear. So don’t tell me. Credit cards are well and good, but to say left-behind cowboy hats and such mean nothing is to be way too ‘dollars and cents’ about this matter.

Followup #2 / “Let me try again and this will be the end of it. The Star hotel is a b & b — not a hotel. I stayed there in ’07 and ’08 and was very happy and content to do so. Carol Rixey, who’s been running things until this year (when her son took over), runs it quietly and efficiently, but it’s a homey little place with family pictures and little knick-knacks on the walls. She serves breakfast in the morning, there are always potato chips and pretzels and cheese squares on the kitchen table, and if you’re feeling sick with a fever Carol will sometimes offer you a homemade remedy or a first-aid pack that she keeps in a box near the front entrance. She makes you feel as if you’re staying in someone’s home that happens to function as a hotel.

“And things are very nice and personal there. There are visitors who fit in and those who don’t. You have to be a mellow, quiet, laid-back type in order to be the former. And while Carol is a Texan she kind of reminds me of my grandmother (my mom’s mom) in a tough way. She’s no softy and won’t take any guff, but she’s maternal and caring in her way. And I came to feel very cared for there. I could talk to Carol like she was family and vice versa. And she has good wifi there!

“So when I said to her last year that I’d like to leave my cowboy hat there so I could just pick up in ’09 where I left off in ’08, I was obviously saying to her (in my head at least, and I can’t imagine how she could have interpreted this any differently) that I’d like it very much if she could be a nice and considerate grandma and hold my hat for me, and that I’d be back to stay the following year. Simple and quite clear all around. I trusted her to get what I meant because, I figured, she surely recognizes the trust and affection that we’ve had between us over the past two years.

“But now things have ended badly. Very badly. I just heard from Carol that she considers my having discussed the matter in the column to be a form of blackmail (an hysterical interpretation, in my view) and that she’s given my hat to the Park City police and that I can pick it up there when I get to town. The fuzz, for God’s sake! She’s brought the cops into this! Talk about a violation of the trust that comes with friendship and the values of good grandma-hood! The idea that nice people can turn around and suddenly act erratically and illogically (to put it in gentle terms) is not a very pleasant one, but obviously it happens. Good God.”

From HE reader Alan Jones, and posted in a spirit of respect for all reasonably-stated views and persuasions: “The Avengers is a bad movie. I mean it. I know it has, like, 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, but really, nerds, your super fuckin’ duper hero movie sucks. You shouldn’t be happy, you should be pissed like you were when Watchmen was unleashed on the world and it was hella lame.

“The Avengers is 60% poorly staged action and 40% superheroes bickering with each other. And LexG is right — 1.85 is no way to shoot a nlockbuster. Realistically speaking, I should have enjoyed the bickering. I enjoy it when Joss Whedon writes a script and makes his characters whine about each other. But Robert Downey Jr. has driven his wise-ass shtick into the ground, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans are both big and strong and idealistic (read: boooooring) and don’t even get me fucking started on Jeremy Renner and Scarlett Johanssen, because NOBODY gives a shit, not even in the film’s admirers.

“So what we’re left with of value is Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, and yeah, I guess he’s okay. Whatever. He’s the only character with a hint of an arc (excluding Black Widow and Hawkeye, because no one gives a shit), so we’ll cut him some slack. Regardless, most of these heroes are flat. Really flat. Which leads to an obvious question:

“Where is the homoerotic subtext?

“Seriously? Where is it? There’s five male superheroes in a room, bickering with each other, talking a bunch of shit. With all the time they spend learning to work as a team for the good of the world (and the fulfillment of the plot), there’s an incredible opportunity for innuendo and sexual tension. Most of these superheroes are very muscular and good looking, and at least three of them wax their chests. It all seems pretty obvious to me that there should have been some unrequited romance between superheroes (excluding Black Widow and Hawkeye, because no one gives a shit).

“In particular a little sexual tension could have worked wonders for Thor and Captain America, both of whom (a) feel out of place on Earth in the present day, (b) are stoic and honorable, (c) wear funny costumes, and (d) have enormous (hairless) mantits.

“It’s like they’re made for each other.

“I don’t mean to say an action movie aimed at adolescent males is quote unquote “bad” if it isn’t a little gay, because that would suggest that the only merit to a blockbuster like The Avengers is its ability to trick homophobic teenage boys into unawarely getting aroused at the sight of a grown man’s muscular chest covered in oil (on the other hand, it’s pretty funny to think about 300 in that context). However, a little sexual tension in The Avengers would have been value added. Since all five characters spend most of the film bitching at each other anyways, Whedon probably should have gone ahead and filled it with double entendres and congratulatory ass-slapping.

“It’s not like this would have been the first summer blockbuster to include this sort of subtext. Since the 80’s, the action genre has gone hand-in-hand with homoerotic imagery. By now most people know there was a little extra effort put into the Maverick-Goose relationship in Top Gun, but in the past decade homoeroticism in action films has reached new heights.

“The most obvious example of this phenomenon is in Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes. Lest we forget, the conflict between Sherlock and Watson is stoked by the jealousy that Sherlock feels when Watson decides to move out and live with a woman, and then they spend the rest of the film arguing like an old married couple. I can only assume that Ritchie, instead of trying to explain why two middle-aged men would be sharing an apartment, decided it would be funnier to turn them into a gay couple. I didn’t bother watching Sherlock Holmes 2. Not because I’m not a masochist, but the trailers feature Sherlock (in drag!) and Watson literally hiding from their enemies in a contained space that may or may not resemble a closet, so go ahead and chew on that.

“My favorite example of a mainstream action film with gay subtext (or sur-text) is 2 Fast 2 Furious. In The Fast and the Furious, Paul Walker and Vin Diesel fight (and bond), so in the sequel Paul Walker and Tyrese also fight (and bond)… if by ‘fight’ you actually mean ‘hold each other close and roll around in some dirt.’ This particular fight scene resembles dogs playfully jumping on each other and nipping at each other’s necks (the type of play-fighting that sometimes turns into humping). This trend continues in later Fast and Furious films. In the latest instalment, Fast Five, there is a showdown between Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, two ridiculously muscular men with bald heads and sweaty biceps who, if they weren’t action stars, could easily find a career in gay porn (depending, of course, on the size of their junk). When the event finally arrives, there’s something touching about the way they look at each other, equals on opposite sides of the law, before they go mano e mano apeshit.

“Fast Five, like The Avengers, is two and a half hours long. That’s way too long for any movie that isn’t attempting to convey something penetrating about the human condition. Fast Five does do a couple things right — it’s two hours of shitty exposition and boring ‘character development’ combined with one scene of intense homoerotic conflict and 30 minutes of well-staged car chases. The Avengers, on the other hand, is just two and half hours of bullshit. In short, The Avengers could have been, and should have been, much gayer.”

With the reader’s indulgence (or not) while I take some time off, here’s a revisiting of Oxford Wifigate, which happened three years and four months ago. This was the piece, incidentally, that created the term “mood pocket,” which has since become part of the vernacular.

“Just a few more licks to post on this cranked-up, trumped-up Oxford Film Festival media-panel fracas, and that’ll be it for good,” I began.

“(a) I forgot to mention in my initial post about this yesterday morning that I tried using my AT&T air card service (which I pay $60 bucks a month for) and that it worked for a while and then it didn’t. I’m used to it being a temperamental device, but when it crapped out on me along with the hotel wifi and the ethernet cable connection, something collapsed inside. I felt as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse were going for the kill.

“(b) If I had it do over again, I would have gone to the friggin’ media panel and listened to moderator James Rocchi do his brilliant pontificator routine while I waited for a chance to get a word in edgewise in front of 50 or 60 people who’d been partying like the panelists into the wee hours the night before. When I said to a couple of fellow panelists (Rocchi and someone else) on Friday morning that I wouldn’t doing the panel due to fatigue and rage and a general deadness-of-the-brain, I wasn’t coming from a place of firm resolution but from what you might call a mood pocket. Mood pockets are temporary emotional foxholes — not a home or a fortress or any kind of fortified structure but a place you’ve just sort of crawled into for a bit.

“(c) Imagine I’m the film festival chief and you’re coming to my town to watch movies and take part in a panel discussion. I pick you up at the airport, take you to the local motel. You notice after unpacking your things in your room that the bathroom has a strip of yellow tape across the entrance that says ‘out of order.’ You come up to me and ask what’s up, and I say ‘Uhhm, I know, it’s fucked up…but you can use the bathroom near the front desk in the lobby and’ — I hand them a roll of peach-colored Charmin bathroom tissue — ‘there are also woods right outside, so you can always go there in a pinch.’ Let’s say one of the panelists doesn’t show up the next day. Now, I might be disappointed in this, having paid for their airfare and hotel room costs and so on, but if I were honest with myself I might allow that an emotional cause-and-effect symmetry might have been a factor.

“(d) ‘Regardless of the wifi-gate specifics, the cool kidz are ganging up on you,’ a journalist friend wrote me today, ‘and the winners write history, so to speak, even if they’re idiots. I was initially horrified and then I thought about it in context. That things were so screwed up with the motel wifi that you thought something was wrong with your own shit is a major organizational error on their part. But you’re cool with the fest people, and frankly controversy is the BEST publicity known to man…but all these other critics? I haven’t seen them writing shit up all over the place, have you? They showed up for a panel, but have they been pimping that place large?

“‘If you post any further followup, the only recommendation I have from a debater’s standpoint is that you reiterate that the no-showing for the panel is something the festival organizers and you are cool about, and that you’d challenge these other folks to show any of their coverage of the trip or experience that isn’t Defamer fodder that has nothing to do with promoting the festival. You ‘agree’ with all the jerks that you answer to the festival folks, and according to them, you’re cool. So what’s the problem?’

“(e) ‘Don’t let the bastard commenters get you down,’ a seasoned journalist pal wrote two or three hours ago. ‘The Oxford coverage is great. If I wanted to read bland coverage of movies and other crap at a small regional film festival, I can go to Variety or the Reporter or one of those earnest film blogs that think covering every last lame movie is important. but your bizarre adventures (and your very fine tourist photos) is what makes your site so fucking readable. The only thing i would change is (a) add some photos of cute Oxford girls and (b) maybe an mp3 of Scott Weinberg or one of the other pissheads getting into a verbal harrangue with you over this thing.”

“(f) ‘Hey Jeff, how are you? I just wanted to email you to make sure that you and your readers know that I am Scott Feinberg from the L.A. Times and NOT Scott Weinberg the guy who commented on your post about the Oxford Film Festival, since I’ve been getting emails for hours from people who think you and I are in a big fight, when in fact I consider us to be friends. Perhaps you can post a clarification?’ Sorry, Scott — clarification posted.”

From from HE reader Colin Biggs, an appraisal of a film that has already connected: “Wes Anderson is an acquired taste. His cavalcade of eccentric loners has spawned some of the most fervent fandom and some of the most bitter vitriol. Even previous works like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, two of Anderson’s best, have their detractors. So it seems the young romance and warm, yellow tints of Moonrise Kingdom invite remarks of being ‘too twee’ and ‘reeking of hipster-ism’, but at the end of the day Anderson’s seventh directorial effort is one that looks at childhood from the faraway distance of an adult mind.

“A mail correspondence between Sam (Jared Gilman), a very efficient boy scout, and Suzy (Kara Hayward), the product of two intellectuals, initiates a love that soon sets a town asunder. Suzy and Sam abscond away from their respective families in a New England town to make a life for themselves. Their living in the wild is not as far-fetched as it would be for star-struck lovers as Sam is an expert in the outdoors and Suzy is too cool to care about the problems that come with living in a forest.

“Moonrise Kingdom serves as wish fulfillment — a yearning for a time when children could experiment with this and that without the worries and anxieties that come with adolescence in 2012: updating relationship statuses, sexting, pregnancy worries, etc. The island these two have created is infused with all of the positive feelings of the sixties before they were ripped away by the Manson murders and Vietnam. A scenario like this just could not play out in modern-day America.

“Eventually the freedom that Sam and Suzy have must end as a hurricane threatens to wash their kingdom away. Scoutmaster Ward (a delightfully neurotic Edward Norton) organizes a search and enlists the aid of Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman) to find the children. Suzy’s mother sends Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) out to find the children as well. Parents and adults in Anderson films are often wildly irresponsible, but Norton and Willis serve as beacons for excellent background characters. These men are not without their own problems, yet they take to the call of action with ease.

“For those unaccustomed to love in an Anderson tale, don’t assume the romance is sickeningly sweet. Confronted with Suzy’s mentions of love, Sam responds by noting ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ When the adults enter the tale, then the fleeting romance becomes clear: love doesn’t always last. Suzy’s parents, Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand) entire relationship can be summed up in this exchange. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Laura tells Walt. “Why?” he asks. A loveless marriage can sometimes spring out of the universal condition, but that is not this film’s concern.

“In Moonrise Kingdom all of the wonder, terror, and bliss of youth can be experienced without the worries of what comes with age. What Anderson gives us is pure unadulterated joy without all of the neuroses. It’s a slice of life from a simpler time, if just for a moment.”

In a July 2008 riff inspired by David Carr‘s Night of the Gun, I wrote the following about my own adventures with reckless behavior:

“Carr’s book reminded me of the ‘farewell, my dignity’ aspect of drug use. Constant assaults on your self-esteem, stains on your sheets and your soul, humiliations unbridled. One way or another, if you do drugs you’re going to be dragged down and made to feel like a low-life animal. Because that’s what you are as long as you let drugs run the show.

“Drugs didn’t exactly ‘run the show’ when I was 22 or 23, but they sure were my friends. I saw my life as a series of necessary survival moves, spiritual door-openings, comic exploits, adventures, erotic intrigues — everything and anything that didn’t involve duty, drudgery, having a career and mowing the lawn on weekends. Pot, hashish, mescaline, peyote buttons, Jack Daniels and beer were my comrades in crime.

“(I’m going to leave aside discussions of my Godhead Siddhartha discoveries with LSD, and I’d just as soon forget my relatively brief encounters with blithering idiot marching powder from the late ’70s to mid ’80s.)

“The particular story that David Carr’s book brought back was me and my upper-middle-class friends’ flirtation with opium and, for a brief time, heroin.

“The way we saw it, smack was much hipper than your garden-variety head drugs. Opiates were more authentic, we figured, because guys like William S. Burroughs and Chet Baker had done them. Where today I see only the danger, the depravity and the recklessness, back then we saw only the contra-coolness.

“I was never much of a user, but I did flirt from time to time. I was a candy-ass in junkie circles because I confined myself to snorting and smoking the stuff. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that ‘chippers’ (casual users) have to be careful because heroin will make you throw up if you smoke or snort too much because your body isn’t used to it. Which mine never was because I wasn’t…you know, dedicated.

“I was living in a crash pad in Southport, Connecticut. My sole source of income at the time was working part-time for a guy who ran a limousine driver service. Business guys looking to go to Kennedy or LaGuardia or Newark airports would call and I’d come over and drive them to the airport in their car, and then drive it back to their home. It doesn’t sound like much of an idea, but there were definitely customers calling from Westport, Weston, Easton, Wilton, Georgetown, Redding, Southport and Fairfield.

“My deal with my boss, Peter, was to be on call at all times. A guy leaving for the airport in a couple of hours would call Peter, he’d call me, I’d drive over and so on. So one afternoon — a Sunday, possibly — a friend and I happened to have some of that snort-smoke stuff, and had retired to a barn out back for a little indulgence. We rolled a nice fat joint and soon I was royally Baker-ed. But just as we got back to the house the phone rang. It was Peter telling me to dress nicely and be at a certain client’s home in 45 minutes if possible, certainly no later than an hour. A trip down to Kennedy.

“If I were less of a fool I would have said then and there, ‘Sorry, Peter — no can do.’ But I was broke and needed the money. Go for it, I told myself. I figured I’d take a quick shower, change into a dress shirt and sport jacket, and be relatively straight by the time I got to the client’s house. But the shower didn’t help and I looked like a wreck. My pupils were little black micro points. So I put on a pair of deep-black shades and then had the inspiration to put on a cowboy hat, the idea being that the manly-conservative cowboy vibe might rub off and make me look less drugged out.

“But I was feeling way too wasted as I got into my car so I got my friend to drive me over in his. I figured the stuff would wear off sooner or later and I’d be okay.

“I started to feel more and more nauseous as we drove over. When I realized with a jolt I was going to be sick, I rolled down the window and lurched halfway out and spewed. Except we were moving at a good clip — 40 or 45 mph — and so the vomit splattered along the side of my friend’s bright red car.

“You need to imagine yourself raking leaves on the front lawn of your beautiful Southport home, your toddlers playing nearby and birds chirping in the trees, when all of a sudden you see this ratty red Impala rolling left to right with some guy leaning out the passenger window and spraying clam chowder. You have to think of it in those terms.

“It was all we could do to keep the client from calling the police once he saw me — pasty-faced, straw cowboy hat, unable to stand straight, slurring my words, flecks of vomit on my sport jacket. I was screamed at and, of course, fired by Peter. Never before had I felt like such a piece of detritus, and nothing has happened since to equal this. It was so humiliating that the opiate-usage thing ended very soon after. I told myself I was the rebellious but capable son of suburban middle-class parents who led productive, organized, reasonably moral lives, and here I was acting like a complete degenerate.

“The purple rage on Peter’s face, the look of contempt in the client’s eyes, my own self disgust. If these things didn’t wake me, nothing would have. But they did. Thank you, hand of fate.”

Cheers at the very least to Les Miserables dp Danny Cohen, who also shot Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech as well as Shane Meadows’ This Is England (’06).

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Last night I was feeling so distraught about Criterion’s upcoming 1.85 fascist Bluray of Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront that I went on iTunes to buy the special edition 1.33 to 1 DVD version (the one that came out in 2001). So I bought it for $9.99 and…good God! It’s the 1.85 Bob Furmanek version!

It appears that Sony restoration honcho Grover Crisp and Sony Home Video are pre-emptively circulating the newbie in advance of the Criterion, perhaps to familiarize the public with a whacked-down Waterfront as a way of managing an end run around traditionalists like myself.

TCM has allegedly been screening the 1.85 version for several years but you know what I mean…the powers that be are trying to eliminate all traces of the good old boxy version. They can’t send out memory police to physically seize all existing copies of the 1.33 version so they’re focusing for now on iTunes. Pretty soon Crisp and Criterion and friends of Furmanek will be able to say “1.33 Waterfront…what’s that?”

I repeat: Crisp invited me to see the 1.33 version at a Sony screening room (I went with my son Dylan) sometime in the early aughts, and he was very proud and satisfied with it. But then Furmanek and the 1.85 fascists showed Crisp (or people close to Crisp) data about Columbia chief Harry Cohn mandating a 1.85 aspect ratio in all non-Scope Columbia films from April 1953 on, and Crisp capitulated.

But here’s the thing and I don’t mind admitting this, given my extreme distaste for the fascist mandate: director Elia Kazan shot his 1.85 version of On The Waterfront with skill and finesse and a nice sense of balance, and so it’s not that painful to watch. Most (roughly 80%) of the shots look “right” without a sense of vital or interesting information having been chopped out.

And yet (and this is IMPORTANT) the famous taxicab scene with Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger looks quite cramped and claustrophic; ditto that Hoboken bar scene between Brando and Eva Marie Saint. The faces are there and you’re getting what you need to understand the story and appreciate the mood, but you’re not being shown what looks classic and true.

The 1.33 version of On The Waterfront will always look better. It breathes with smoky, smoggy air and all kinds of beautiful headroom, and it shows you more of the Hoboken world of 1953 and ’54 than the 1.85 version does. It looks like life as it was lived and felt and understood at that time, and the 1.85 version look like Furmanek and his pallies are doing a not-unpleasant science experiment.

In the highly unlikely event that Criterion decides to issue its On The Waterfront Bluray with both aspect ratios (1.85 and 1.33), I wouldn’t hesitate for a second in watching the 1.33 version every time.

MILD SPOILER CONTAINED HEREIN: Both Variety‘s Justin Chang and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy sound underwhelmed in their just-up reviews of Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus (Friday, 6.1), although not to the extent that you’d call either response a pan. They’re both more or less saying “very decent, at time very stirring and technically impressive but with a rote scary-alien finale and some philosophical questions about the origins of man…meh.” Or something like that.

At least they were kinder to it than Le Monde‘s Isabelle Regnier.

McCarthy: “Prometheus, a visual feast of a 3D sci-fi movie, has trouble combining its high-minded notions about the origins of the species and its Alien-based obligation to deliver oozy gross-out moments. Ridley Scott’s third venture into science-fiction, after Alien in 1979 and Blade Runner in 1982, won’t become a genre benchmark like those classics despite its equivalent seriousness and ambition, but it does supply enough visual spectacle, tense action and sticky, slithery monster attacks to hit the spot with thrill-seeking audiences worldwide.”

“As the survivors are pared down to a precious few, the grisliness and gross-out quotient increases; a self-inflicted Cesarian section may be a screen first (certainly the result of it is), while Fassbender’s fate is similarly imaginative and far funnier. This project started life as an intended prequel to Alien but morphed into something else. Unfortunately, the closer it comes to a climax, the more you feel the elements being lined up to set the stage for a sequel to this film, most of all in a coda that feels like a craven teaser trailer for the next installment.”

Chang: A mission to uncover the origins of human life yields familiar images of death and devastation in Prometheus. Elaborately conceived from a visual standpoint, Ridley Scott’s first sci-fier in the three decades since Blade Runner remains earthbound in narrative terms, forever hinting at the existence of a higher intelligence without evincing much of its own.

“Technically, Prometheus is magnificent. Shot in 3D but without the director taking the process into account in his conceptions or execution, the film absorbs and uses the process seamlessly.”

A day before today’s French debut of Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus, Le Monde critic Isabelle Regnier trashed it. I’m translating it word for word as we speak, but the headline reads as follows: “Prometheus – Alien betrayed by his own creator, Ridley Scott.”

The snippiest quote in the 5.29 review doesn’t read all that eloquently (blame Bablefish) but here it is : “In the role of a company man being paid handsomely for his work, Ridley Scott follows the typical commercial road map. His mission: ressurect the Alien franchise and give the audience something a copy of something they like, nothing more.”

Wells to HBO publicists: How would you feel about sending screeners containing the first two or three episodes of Aaron Sorkin‘s The Newsroom to me in Prague? That wouldn’t be such a big deal. An int’l Fed Ex form instead of a domestic one and a bit more money. I really don’t want to be behind the eight ball on this one.

HE reader John English found Men in Black 3 “a fun, fluffy return to form for the franchise,” he writes. “It buries all those bad Men in Black II memories, but honestly, ten years later, who remembers anything about all that specific about that decade-old film? But enough of generalities. This is about age gaps.

“The present day in MiB3 is firmly established as 2012, and the time Agent J travels back to is firmly established as 1969. That’s a 43-year difference. Now the only time anyone gives their age is Young Agent K (Josh Brolin) who reveals he’s 29. It’s a funny line. K apparently ages quickly. This also means that Current Agent K is 72. Okay, I can accept that. In real life Brolin is 44 and Jones is 65, so Agent K aged horribly in his 20’s, and then it slowed down. Like Walter Matthau.

“But then we have Current Agent O (Emma Thompson) and Young Agent O (Alice Eve). Thompson is only 53 years old, but Eve is 30, not 10. Okay, so maybe K and O are the same age? You’re telling me Thompson’s okay with playing a 72-year-old with no aging make-up?

“And then there’s Will Smith‘s Agent J. Smith is 43, but with the events in this movie, that means Agent J is really over 50 years old. And J does not act like he’s over 50.

“The screenwriters really wanted the year to be 1969 so they can have the moon launch and the hippies and the clothing and Andy Warhol (nice one, Bill Hader), but it feels like a script that was written six years ago, when the ages would have been less of an issue. Even so, why does Emma Thompson take a role that says she’s over 70?”