Ioncinema has posted an exclusive clip from Todd Solondz‘s Dark Horse (6.8). Synopsis: “A man-child (Jordan Gelber) falls in love with a similarly unstable woman (Selma Blair). Living with his parents, (Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow), he starts an odd romance with the emotionally numbed young woman, while alternately developing an odd relationship with his father’s secretary (Donna Murphy).”.

Last night Manhattan-media wise guy and Forbes/Daily contributor Bill McCuddy “saw what was technically the New York premiere for Rock Of Ages at the Sunshine, and not only did I love it but it played like gangbusters in the room. Some applause breaks after a few numbers. Nice round of applause at the end. Plenty of laughs in the right places all throughout the film.

“Okay, so Julianne Hough was there with her family and director Adam Shankman encouraged hooting and hollering before the screening. But this thing just really works on a ‘campy rock and roll good time’ level. Hough called it a ‘dude-sical’ because men will like it too. I don’t think my poker game will go alone, but any guy going with his wife or girlfriend won’t regret the ride.

“Publicist Peggy Siegal avoided packing the room with stuffed-shirt media types” — McCuddy means guys like me — “and had lots of aging rockers like Mick Jones and younger musical stars like Rob Thomas in the place. Good word of mouth should expand it way beyond the Smash and Glee crowd.”

Choke, gag…the Glee crowd? I’m almost certainly going to loathe this film, body and soul. I’m sorry but I can tell. I’d like to have a good time and I’m glad McCuddy and last night’s crowd enjoyed it, but we all know what it means when the stuffed shirts are kept away. I can smell obviousness and shallowness. I can smell the void.

“And two of the longest french kisses in motion picture history — one of which Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity will look away from — are effing hilarious,” McCuddy continues. “And the Tom Cruise haters can stay home because this is the most fun he’s had since Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.”

“By the way I’ve just read that the steamy lap dance between Hough and Cruise was taken out because it was too steamy. It was not in the print we saw. I have to say I don’t know how it would have worked in the story because Hough’s character is devoted to her boyfriend at the club and that scene would have played against her loyalty. Didn’t miss it but then again it was a lap dance so of course I missed it.”

“Django Unchained played the hottest of the three — big laughs, applause, whoops. Popcorn-plus entertainment in an old-Southern setting. Audacious attitude, swagger dialogue, fast gunplay and best of all, a former slave (Jamie Foxx) coming back to the plantation and whoopin’ on the overweight slave master who made his slave life hell. Can’t miss. Big money in all markets, thumbs-up reviews, the whole shot” — instant response when this trailer was shown at that 5.21 Weinstein press preview event in Cannes.

“I had lunch with the great Ray Bradbury on the Disney lot in ’83, a week or two before the debut of Something Wicked This Way Comes. (The chat was facilitated by veteran Disney publicist Howard Green.) I especially recall Bradbury talking about how writing was pure joy to him, and how banging out three or four pages was always the high point of his day.

“‘Pure joy?,’ I remember saying to myself. ‘In what parallel universe?’ Doing HE is actually fun most of the time, and when it isn’t it’s not too difficult. But in the bad old typewriter days I equated writing with digging ditches. ‘I don’t care how successful Bradbury is,’ I muttered. ‘Is he taking…what, happiness pills? Writing is pain. He’s just spewing.'” — Reprint of August 2010 article called “Most Happy Fella” on the occasion of the death of Ray Bradbury.

“I love criticism [and] always have. I love it as it was practiced by Baudelaire and I love it as it was practiced by David Foster Wallace, and I love it as it was practiced by Nick Tosches, even when he was writing about albums he never even listened to.

“I often tell people that I would have been happy to have aged into the Stanley Kaufmann of Premiere, had the magazine lasted. I am in complete concurrence with Manny Farber: ‘I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can’t imagine anything more valuable to do, and I’ve always felt that way.’

“So in case you wonder why I tend to take the pulings and mewlings of pseud jagoff opinion-mongerers calling themselves ‘critics’ so personal-like, well, it isn’t just because I’m a reactive sorehead lunatic. The current logistical irony is that, in the contemporary environment, I’m compelled to explore making a living in other forms of writing. One of which, as it happens, is….well, I imagine you can guess.” — Glenn Kenny in a 6.5 Some Came Running essay that bounces off Poland-vs.-McWeeny and Carr-vs.-Scott.

…and I mean that with absolute, standing-at-attention respect and a somewhat firm conviction that Amour will be down to the wire for Best Foreign Language Film. But I stand by my initial reaction. I saw my father die in stages. It was perhaps the most dreadful deterioration I’d ever witnessed first-hand. He was a pretty sharp (and if truth be told, caustic) guy for several decades, but what nature did to him was sickening. He was fairly pissed off about it himself.

Sasha Stone knows that I love, admire and care for her like very few others, but this is the most odious and repellent collection of words conveying a stunningly inane and dissociative thought that I’ve seen online or in print this year, hands down.

If the makers of the Liz and Dick TV biopic with Lindsay Lohan and whatsisname as Richard Burton can just make an excuse to include footage of Lohan-as-Taylor walking out of the water in that white, nearly-transparent bathing suit in Suddenly Last Summer…which happened, yes, in ’58 or ’59, or a good two years before Burton came into her life during the filming of Cleopatra…if they just work that scene in somehow, the movie will be halfway home.

If I was a gambler I would bet the farm that they won’t do this. Why? Because many if not most people in this business lack that instinctual nose for what the public wants. In other words, many of the people who make movies should be doing something else.

Listen to The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth in this 6.6 introduction to this latest Peter Jackson/set of The Hobbit video: “Well, when we least heard from The Hobbit word was not good [for] at CinemaCon back in April, the director unveiled ten minutes of footage in the new fancy-pants 48fps format and attendees were mixed on the results to say the least.” Hah! Were you there, Kevin?

I have never felt so close to or supportive of Peter Jackson in my entire life. Between the 48 fps thing and his producing West of Memphis he’s the new HE Good Guy. And a brave guy and a tough hombre at that. And the people who put down what they saw in Las Vegas 45 or 50 days ago will not be feeling so proud about what they said five or ten or twenty years hence, believe me.

That Las Vegas screening of 48 fps Hobbit footage was the technological equivalent of the debut performance of Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris on 5.29.13. Or that infamous Montmartre screening of L’Age d’Or on 12.3.30. What happened that day in Vegas wasn’t “cinema,” for certain, and in fact it heralded the death of interest in cinema for the CG-fantasy-spectacle-ComicCon crowd…and so what? That crowd and that market hasn’t cared about cinema for decades.

24 fps (or, if you ask me, the preferred 30fps) cinema is for people who care about the real deal elements — story, style, character, theme, metaphor. There are tens of millions out there who live for this kind of movie, the kind that gets into your soul and excites your memory and your reflections and makes you glad you’re alive and kicking and attuned to the moment. That kind of film is eternal and will never go away.

But 48 fps will raise the impact and penetration levels for those who see movies as ADD thrill rides…which is what, 75% or 80% of the market out there? It’s a Godsend, trust me.

Yesterday the Philadelphia Weekly‘s Matt Prigge ran a piece about the last six “name” directors who are committed to shooting on film to the very last, women screaming, tortillas all over the floor, cannonballs smashing through the chapel walls, damn the Mexicans, “use your sabers!” Aren’t there more than six? Imagine, in any event, the clenched jaws and fevered sweat of Paul Thomas Anderson, young Fess Parker, Wes Anderson, Chris Nolan, Steven Spielberg, alive-again Buddy Ebsen, Rian Johnson, Hans Conreid, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Thomas Anderson…”fuck…fuck!…get the Panavision Panaflex…shoot…shoot to the last!”