I wasn’t over the moon about Lynn Shelton‘s Your Sister’s Sister (IFC Films, 6.15, theatres only) but I was moderately intrigued. It’s not bad. I thought it would get a Rotten Tomatoes rating between 70% and 80%, frankly, but it’s now at 89%. Obviously a sign of approval, but also, I think, of a “go easy” largesse that critics extend to earnest, low-key indie cheapies, especially those with a kind of John Cassevetes improvisational thing going on.

Your Sister’s Sister is one of those acting-class movies that are largely about a small cast (Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt) finding their way into emotional exposures and vulnerabilities and all-around discoveries that aren’t necessarily expressed or even explored in the script. It’s about “okay, this is the situation and here’s the basic plot…well, unless something else happens…and we all have a handle on our characters, of course, so let’s do this thing and see where it goes.”

And I was cruising along with this. Shelton and the cast are obviously trying to do “good” here, and I was rooting for them…yeah! But I ran into a character issue early on, and I couldn’t quite make it go away.

The film starts with a wake for the dead-and-buried brother of Jack (Mark Duplass ), who’s an unfocused, somewhat immature guy in his mid 30s. Various friends share gentle memories of the brother, who died a year earlier from his own hand, but Jack is pissed and unsettled about…well, a lot of things. But not about his best friend Iris (Emily Blunt). The movie tells us that (a) the closeness and trust they share is clearly based on their being strictly pals, and (b) Iris is one of the few solids in Jack’s life.

Note: the following has been divulged by critics all over so it’s not a spoiler, but there are whiners out there who will get upset anyway if I don’t say “spoiler” at this stage.

Reognizing Jack is off-balance, Iris urges him to take a break at her family’s vacation cottage on an island somewhere off the coast of Oregon or Washington, and he goes, “Yeah, okay, I guess so, whatever.” So he arrives at the cabin with his bicycle and backpack, and runs snack into Iris’s lesbian sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), or knocks on the door, rather, as she’s stepping out of the shower. She’s just broken up with her girlfriend of several years and has decided to use the cabin for a little meditation time. Ah-hah, awkward moment, okay…well, here we are.

Then they decide to relax and be friendly and enjoy a little tequila. Actually, they start slamming down shots. And then a randy vibe somehow creeps in and Hannah decides to forget about being gay and tumbles into bed with Jack. Just a little one-nighter so where’s the harm, right?

This isn’t the problem I spoke of. That occurs when Iris shows up at the cabin the next day and Jack gets all nervous — panicky, almost hyperventaliting — and starts lying his ass off so she won’t know what happened with Hannah. My question was “why?” As noted there’s not a hint of even the slightest erotic wannabe current between Jack and Iris, so if their friendship is truly solid and deep-rooted and telepathic then what’s the problem with Jack telling Iris, “This is going to sound weird but your sister and I got bombed last night and…uhm, we did it.”

Only a fundamentally dishonest and out-of-touch-with-himself guy with secret designs and/or longings for his “best friend” would go into lying and dodging spasms like Jack does. It seems to me that if Iris has been secretly in love with Jack all along and would therefore be devastated if she knew he’d slept with her sister, the movie should somehow convey this to us before Jack and Hannah do the nasty, etc. And it just struck me as phony. That’s all I have to say.

Postcript: Here’s an Indiewire-hosed chat about Your Sister’s Sister between Marshall Fine and Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has stated that no unauthorized information was provided to Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal for Zero Dark Thirty, their killing-of-Osama bin Laden that comes out on 12.19. Panetta told a Senate panel Wednesday that no one in Defense gave up any confidential material.

Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow, producer-screenwiter Mark Boal during recent (or fairly recent) filming in Chandigarh, India.

Republican Rep. Peter King of New York, a rightwing attack dog, long ago charged that the CIA and Pentagon jeopardized national security by cooperating too closely with Boal and Bigelow, claiming that they received “extremely close, unprecedented and potentially dangerous collaboration” from the Obama administration.

King’s motive was to push Zero‘s release date, originally set for October 2012, until after the November election. He succeeded. Sony has changed the release date to 12.19. Big deal.

Not to dispute Panetta, but so what if Biggy-Boal theoretically did receive inside info? Why is it incorrect or unethical to provide accurate information to people whose portrayal of an historic event will be watched for decades or centuries hence? ZDT‘s release date has been bumped, the operation is long over, Osama sleeps with the fishes…who cares?

Zero Dark Thirty costars Joel Edgerton, Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Edgar Ramirez, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Chris Pratt and Nina Arianda.

Sometimes I don’t quite understand what “important” means, but Joni Mitchell is the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century, and a poet of the highest order. So I don’t mind that “Be Cool”, a track from 2002’s “Travelogue,” is today’s ear bug.

It’s mildly drizzly in Prague today. I’ve been here for just about three weeks now, and it’s rained almost every day. Briefly, I mean. One or two days have been totally shower-free. Plus it’s been cloudy and cool. And the apartment, nice as it is, doesn’t seem to want to generate any heat. It’s almost summer and I’m trying to turn the radiator on! I could do with a little Romanesque warmth right now…a little T-shirt action. Anyway I’m outta here tomorrow. Train to Munich, and then a week or so in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

After opening in Italy nearly two months ago and drawing mostly lukewarm reviews, Woody Allen‘s To Rome With Love finally faces the American music at tonight’s opening at the L.A. Film Festival. Expect the first tweets around 9:30 pm LA time, or 6:30 am Prague time — right when I get up.

Sony Pictures Classics is opening it on 6.22. You’d think that the marketing guys would have put out a different trailer by now, one that’s a little more oblique and flavory and not so on-the-nose.

I still say Allen should have stuck with the original title, The Bop Decameron.

“The movie is a magnificent postcard of the eternal city,” wrote NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli, “a carefree romp along cobblestone streets nestled between ancient ruins and Renaissance palaces. A soft yellow glow pervades every scene. It projects an image of the sweet life with all the charms under the Italian sun, set to the tune of old standbys like ‘Volare’ and ‘Arrivederci Roma.’

“Allen has said he grew up watching Italian cinema and was influenced by its grand masters. While there’s nothing neorealist in his latest movie, it has an echo of Federico Fellini‘s The White Sheik, and Penelope Cruz‘s performance in one segment calls to mind Sophia Loren‘s high-end call girl in Vittorio de Sica‘s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

“The movie is made up of four separate vignettes about love swaps, mistaken identities and the cult of celebrity. One features Allen himself playing a retired, neurotic opera director who tries to make a star out of a man who can sing Pavarotti-quality opera, but only in his shower.

“In another episode, Alec Baldwin plays a famous architect vacationing in Rome, reminiscing about his youth in the city. Along the way, he meets a young American student, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who is love-struck by Ellen Page, playing a narcissistic young actress.”

If anyone could throw me a PDF of a relatively recent draft of Now You See Me, I’d be much obliged. “FBI agents track a team of illusionists who pull off bank heists during their performances and [then] reward their audiences with the money,” it says here. Costarring Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, Michael Caine, Elias Koteas and Dave (younger brother of James) Franco.

The Summit pic, directed by Louis Leterrier and most recently re-written by Josh Applebaum, Andre Nemec and Edward Ricourt, will open on 3.15.13.

IMDB trivia: “Michael Caine was locked in his dressing room for a whole night during the shooting of the movie. Caine fell asleep after shooting and couldn’t hear when the director called the day a wrap. Everyone thought that Caine left and the set was closed. Caine wake up in the pitch dark and wasn’t released until the morning until someone heard his cries for help.”

That 43% Rotten Tomatoes rating for Adam Shankman‘sRock of Ages obviously means that some are cutting it a break. (I love Andrew O’Hehir’s rationale that “it isn’t trying to be real — it’s trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before.”) But one guy who’s always been partial to musicals (and who creamed over Dreamgirls) is MCN’s David Poland, and his decision to not be kind to this spoof of the cranked-up ’80s rock scene is telling, I think.

Choice portions: (a) “Shellshockingly bad…worst wide-release film of the summer so far, going away…Project X was more coherent…such a total, horrifying waste”; (b) “I am just stunned that so much talent came to so little…scene after scene, I just couldn’t believe what I was watching…tone deaf”; (c) “Trying to analyze [this] film feels a bit like trying to dissect diarrhea…I felt physically abused by the time the movie ended, like I had suffered a bad case of Jukebox Musical’s Revenge”; (d) “It is utterly soulless…it has no joy…it has no real passion”; (e) “You really have to go back 30 years to find a movie musical this bad. And at least Grease 2 offered a young Michelle Pfeiffer. And Julianne Hough, you may have many talents but you are no young Michelle Pfeiffer.”

Yesterday Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt reported that Warner Home Video has set the “cold war classic” Ice Station Zebra for Bluray release on 10.9. Those three words make Hunt sound like a kiss-ass. Shot in 70mm and released in a roadshow format with an overture and a general air of pomposity, Ice Station Zebra (10.23.68) was mostly regarded as a mediocrity. Read Roger Ebert’s review…read anyone’s. And don’t listen to any fanboy crap about it being a guilty pleasure.

Yes, any film shot in 70mm (Daniel L. Fapp delivered the stately, studio-house-style cinematography) warrants consideration as a Bluray, but the only truly good thing about this film is Michel Legrand‘s score.

John Sturges directed from a script based on by Alistair MacLean‘s 1963 novel of the same name, and co-written by MacLean, Douglas Heyes, Harry Julian Fink and W.R. Burnett.

Rock Hudson phones it in as a sub commander. He’s never seemed more narcotized and disconnected and bored. Hudson could deliver when motivated, but when he was bad he really stunk. He was sufficient in Giant and in those Douglas Sirk melodramas, and he peaked in those Doris Day comedies, but load him down with rote dialogue in a lead-balloon film like Ice Station Zebra, and he was almost the Rob Pattinson of his day.

Patrick McGoohan‘s played another perverse intellectual nutter, and was the only one with any snap or bite. Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown were wasted.

Here’s Legrand’s overture:

And here’s the core of the exposition:

In the trailer for Sinister, Vincent D’Onofrio explains to Ethan Hawke that a supernatural predator who feeds on the souls of children is called “Bucchool.” That’s what I’m hearing, at least — Horst Buccholz + ghoul. Which sounds an awful lot like “Bud Ghoul.” To further complicate matters, First Showing‘s Alex Billington is calling this spook “Mr. Boogie.” What’s that, an old blues musician playing in a New Orleans saloon? A loan shark character left out of Scorsese’s final cut of Goodfellas?

Scott Derrickson‘s Sinister played at SXSW screening last March. Hawke plays himself playing a true-crime novelist in a movie. He and the family move into a new house that has a horrific history, blah blah. It was co-written by AICN’s “Massawyrm”, a.k.a. C. Robert Cargill.

“The scaled down nature of the production is impressively old school,” wrote Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn. “Producer Val Lewton, who invented this game in the ’40s with low -budget studio efforts like Cat People, would have loved it. The ghostly visuals creeping into the plot retain an especially chilling value for the lack of information accompanying them, and the supernatural figures are among the scariest to appear in an American horror movie since The Grudge.”

Earlier this evening the Expats.cz guys took me to a “Meme Fest” (i.e., 90-plus minutes of YouTube classics) at Prague’s Bio/Oko, a combination theatre/bar that caters to a hip crowd and is more or less Prague’s Film Forum or Nuart. Would you sit with 70 or 80 too-easily-amused people to watch a lot of YouTube stuff (maybe 40% of which I’d seen) on a big screen? I did. For an hour. Until my patience ran out. But I loved visiting the Bio/Oko, and I loved the Jack Rabbit Slim’s car in the orchestra.

The Expats.cz team (l. to r.): Radka Peterova, Content Manager; Olga Langova, Account Manager; Monika Petrasková, Admin; Jan Purkrábek, Content Administrator; Martin D. Howlings, Managing Director; Jason Pirodsky, Editor.

“Now that Mad Men has drawn to a close and we prepare to spend the rest of the summer looking back on a particularly dense season, we can reflect on all the clues that led to one of this year’s biggest plot turns — Lane Pryce‘s suicide,” writes Vulture‘s Matt Zoller Seitz. “The show’s death obsession dominated recaps and comments threads throughout the last twelve weeks, and with good reason. Every episode contained one or more hints that a major character would die.

“Indeed, more so than any other season of Mad Men, this one earns the adjective novelistic. No single episode can be considered wholly apart from any other; each chapter replenishes the death/mortality motif in imaginative, sometimes playful ways.”

“This video essay, titled ‘A Death Foretold,’ collects a few of the more obvious and subtle predictors from season five. The piece is a joint effort by me; writer Deborah Lipp, who recaps the show for my IndieWire blog Press Play and co-publishes the Mad Men-centric blog Basket of Kisses; and Kevin B. Lee, the site’s editor-in-chief and in-house cutter.”