Gus Van Sant‘s Promised Land (Focus Features, 12.28) was originally going to be directed by star and cowriter Matt Damon, but Damon gave up the reins due to scheduling issues. It seems to basically be a more solemn Local Hero with a likable young guy in a suit (i.e., Damon) presenting an ostensibly attractive offer to a small town, but representing natural gas interests instead of oil. The story has been more or less fully telegraphed by the trailer.

John Krasinski, Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lucas Black and Hal Holbrook costar.

Here’s “Trailer From Hell” wise man Larry Karaszewski on James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder (1984), which I wrote about four and a half years ago. The point was to urge Warner Home Video to release it on DVD, and if possible to release the original Bridges cut.

Here’s Pauline Kael‘s mini-review: “Debra Winger, in a superb full-scale starring performance, as a radiantly sane young bank teller in LA who has an affair with a curly-haired clear-faced young tennis instructor called Mike (Mark Keyloun). It’s a wobbly affair: She hears from him randomly over the course of two years — whenever the mood hits him, he phones her. One night, he’s supposed to come over late, but he doesn’t show. When she gets a call telling her he’s dead, it’s abrupt, bewildering. She can’t let go of him so quickly, and she tries to find out everything she can.

“Winger has thick, long, loose hair and a deep, sensual beauty in this movie. James Bridges, who directed, wrote the role for her after directing her in Urban Cowboy, and her performance suggests what Antonioni seemed to be trying to get from Jeanne Moreau in La Notte , only it really works with Winger — maybe because there’s nothing sullen or closed about her. The picture is atmospheric yet underpopulated; at times, it feels thin, and it turns into overheated melodrama in a sequence featuring Darrell Larson.

“But its view of the cocaine subculture (or culture) of LA is probably Bridges’ most original and daring effort, and it has a brief, intense appearance by Paul Winfield (as the record producer who brought Mike to LA) that’s right up there with Winger’s acting. With Brooke Alderson, Robert Crosson as Sam, and Daniel Shor as Richard, the performance artist. The Warner executives refused to release the picture until Bridges made some cuts and changes, and they probably breathed a few sighs of relief as they buried it.”

Here’s part of what I wrote in March ’08: “It didn’t register very strongly in the mid-Reagan era because it didn’t shoot for the stratosphere or deliver fierce visceral thrills, which is what audiences seemed to be responding to more and more back then. (The ’70s heyday had drawn to a close, and blunt-impact movies — sci-fi epics, actioners, tits-and-zits comedies — were gaining big- time.) But it handled itself and its subject — the L.A. drug-dealing scene — in a way that was almost deceptively powerful. It’s a sad and somber little piece that leaves a haunting after-vibe.

“And it had some unusually penetrating performances from Debra Winger, Paul Winfield, Mark Keyloun (a newcomer at the time who seemed to work mostly on television after Mike’s Murder and who retired from acting in the early ’90s) and Darrell Larson. There was real ache and loneliness in their emoting. Which lent unusual gravity to a story that structurally was only a murder-mystery.

“An IMDB posting by James Sanford says that Mike’s Murder has “a beautifully evoked, vaguely creepy atmosphere that hangs over every scene….the crime that sets the story in motion remains unsolved at the end, and perhaps that’s how it should be. It’s not important who really killed Mike Chuhutsky, Bridges seems to be saying. Not when it’s so obvious what killed him.”

“It’s been over ten years since I’ve seen Mike’s Murder, but I remember three things in particular: (a) the look of immense sadness on Winfield’s face as his character, a wealthy gay man who had a thing for Mike, considers the character flaws that led to his death, (b) the horrific howl that comes out of Larson, Mike’s not-very-smart best friend, as he’s about to be murdered by thugs for having stolen cocaine from a major dealer who lives in the hills, and (c) a nifty little sequence in the very beginning that shows a hamburger being prepared at Tomy’s on Pico Blvd.”

Here are several clips from the film.

The good part starts at 2:13. Mitt Romney didn’t incubate out of his space egg and burst out of an astronaut’s chest in 1971 — it happened in 1979.

It’s not interesting to hear that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart — a.k.a. Robtsen — have reportedly patched things up and are back together. The shock of loneliness and the pain of separation, being stung by jealousy and betrayal, the drip-drip agony of it all…that’s what we care about. But I did run two or three stories about their breakup so I guess it’s necessary in a symmetrical sense to report the healing. And RPatz still has a bulletproof “get out of jail” card if he ever fucks up.

I saw The Master for the second time last night, and was once again delighted. On the way home in the car I started developing my impression of Joaquin Pheonix as Freddie Quell….muh!…neeeee-heeee! It’s not easy, but the main thing is to jut your chin out and purse your lips like (a) you’ve just had a sip of pure lemon juice and (b) you’re about to play the trumpet. And then think like a backyard geek and imagine you’re some kind of impulslve, grinning, slithery reptile.

Don’t flick your Freddy tongue but think it — imagine that you’re a bullfrog and you’re looking to shoot your tongue out and slurp down a fly but don’t actually do it.

Be quiet and watchful and compulsively sip from a flask. Tilt your head slightly in the presence of any woman you’d like to fuck, and lean inward and go “heeehhuhhhmm.” And always blurt your words out with a lazy, sloppy slur. Never say “I don’t know” — say “Uhdunnoh.” And then say “eeeeeuuuhhhnnnh” again. And then moan a little bit. And then giggle. And take another swig.

Lou Lumenick‘s 9.21 N.Y. Post story about a Lincoln sneak last Tuesday night in Paramus, N.J. story was up yesterday afternoon and then it went down, apparently due to a software upgrade. And then it re-appeared early this morning. I thought it might be a little snarky to quote one New Jersey guy who might be the new Andre Bazin (who knows?) or some Jersey Shore Guido about Steven Spielberg‘s latest, but Lumenick has definitely posted his story — that’s a fact — so let the cards lay and the chips fall.

Andre Guido Bazin praised Daniel Day Lewis‘s lead performance but he called Lincoln boring and suffocating with too many low-lit interior talking scenes — no slaves, burning of Atlanta-type scenes, no battles, no Civil War horrors, no cranked-up thrills.

“What an absolutely disgusting, loathsome, toenail-fungus lowlife!,” a colleague more or less said after reading the Lumenick story last night, reflexing trying to protect the Spielberg brand. “What a wretched piece of stinking scum he must be!”

Lumenick is more even-handed in his story.

“Please keep in mind that changes — possibly substantial ones — can be made right up until its world premiere at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles on November 8, the day before Lincoln’ opens wide in theaters,” Lumenick cautions. “So take this with at least a grain of salt.

“‘The performances of Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, and Hal Holbrook were great,’ wrote this person, a passionate moviegoer who is not connected with the film industry. He flatly predicts that Day-Lewis will get a Best Picture nomination in the title role, and says that Sally Field was miscast as Mrs. Lincoln, [and that] Joseph Gordon Levitt as Lincoln’s eldest son was okay but he really didn’t add anything to the story.

“‘My biggest issue with the film as a whole was, it was boring,” the civilian viewer wrote. ‘With the film centering on the vote for the 13th amendment, ending slavery and the Civil War, you’d think Spielberg would have made a more exciting, riveting film. So much of the story takes place in small, smoky dark rooms with Lincoln talking to one or two people, that my mind began to wander. It felt claustrophobic.

“”If he had shown the horrors of slavery and the Civil War, it might have evened out the story. They pretty much kept the film centered around the politicians.’

Lumenick concluded the story by writing “I’m a big Spielberg fan, and I hope Lincoln works. If there are indeed problems with Lincoln‘ — and, keep in mind, this is one nonprofessional’s opinion — Spielberg has seven weeks to try and fix things like, say, the pacing. And as Spielberg [once noted], test screenings can be deceiving. Close Encounters certainly worked out okay.”

The reason everyone laughed when Jill Biden made “the gesture” is that they all remember Julie Gregg from The Godfather, the pretty Italian-looking woman who played James Caan‘s wife Sandra, making the same gesture while she was talking to her girlfriends during the opening wedding scene. They knew it right away.

Which was more pathetic and contemptible? The geek-love overkill that greeted the 2012 South by Southwest debut of Joss Whedon and Drew Godard‘s The Cabin in the Woods (the Bluray of which released five days ago) or the geek-love overkill that greeted Whedon’s The Avengers (streeting 9.25 via Disney Bluray) which opened theatrically about two months after Cabin?

Sometimes people need a few months to see things clearly. I presume I don’t have to nudge anyone at this stage of the game. I knew Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers were flashy but thin the day I saw them, but that’s me. I apologize for being more perceptive than most but…well, not really.

Remember that SXWW rave of Cabin in the Woods from Variety‘s Peter Debruge that ran on 3.9.12, and how he called it a genre-buster and a game-changer?

“Not since Scream has a horror movie subverted the expectations that accompany the genre to such wicked effect as [this], a sly, self-conscious twist on one of slasher films’ ugliest stepchildren — the coed campsite massacre,” Debruge wrote. “The less auds know going in, the more satisfying the payoff will be for this long-delayed, much-anticipated shocker, which was caught in limbo for more than two years during MGM’s bankruptcy.”

I wrote the same day that “a little voice inside is wondering if Debruge might be a little hopped up by that Austin fanboy atmosphere. Dispassionate observers who have no investment whatsoever in fanboy horror or susceptibility to Austin mania need to see this thing straight and cold. We’ll take it from there.”

And I took it from there on 4.11.12 when I wrote the following: “The Cabin In The Woods reminded me of an eternal truism — never, ever trust excited geek buzz coming out of South by Southwest. The people who go there are invested in SXSW geekdom and celebrating their own aroma and determined to whip themselves into a lather about any film that half does the trick.

“I know for an absolute fact that I’ll never watch The Cabin the Woods again…ever. Because for all the ‘fun’ of wading into a horror flick that fiddles with old cliches and scatters the cards in a way that feels fresh and smart-assy while spilling many gallons of blood, this is one of the coldest and creepiest films of this sort that I’ve ever…uhm, endured.

“Yes — director Drew Goddard and producer-cowriter Joss Whedon have taken the old Friday the 13th/Evil Dead ‘sexually active kids alone in a cabin getting slaughtered by a fiend’ formula and tricked it up and turned it into a kind of horror-hotel concept. With — SPOILER! SPOILER! — several older, cold-hearted creeps in shirts and ties and lab coats keeping tabs on the carnage like bored, professional-class cynics watching a dull football game that they couldn’t care less about.

“No horror film is about basking in the humanity of the characters and taking emotional saunas. All horror films say to the audience, ‘You’re fucked.’ But even for a genre that has revelled in blood and torture and sadism over the last 25 or 30 years, Cabin In The Woods is a stand-out. Horror isn’t about ‘scary’ this time — it’s about an ice-cold spectator game that will deaden your soul. Nobody cares, everybody suffers, blood everywhere, take the pain, life hates you, we hate you, God hates you, Lionsgate hates you, fuck off, we want to hear you scream for mercy. Oh, and one more thing: you’re so much more fucked that you know.

“Goddard and Whedon are saying to us, ‘Are you enjoying the game we’re playing here? Pretty cool, huh?’ Well, sort of…yeah. You’ve shaken things up, guys, and done it differently…fine. But you and your film are so detached from any shred of feeling or a facsimile of human reality (except in a few anecdotal ways) that you make me want to inject novocaine and embalming fluid into my veins. So I can feel like I’m part of the fun and the coolness. Thanks, dickheads.”

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick has tweeted that Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln had a test screening in New Jersey last Tuesday night. I’ve gotten hold of a story that Lumenick posted on the N.Y. Post website about six or seven hours ago and then took down. It’s saved in Google Archives and it seemed fair to repost it, but colleagues have persuaded me it’s better to leave it alone for now.

This is just a teaser and therefore dialogue-averse for the most part, but the cutter doesn’t let you soak into anything. Not even a two-second emotion. It’s just a blur. The film looks like tabloid slop. Lilo is 26 and going nowhere. Nobody will admit it, but some secretly want her to do an Amy Winehouse. That would be tragic, of course, but what else can she do? She’ll never be in a good film. She’s living in a mud pit of her own digging. She’s obviously manic and devoted to cheap highs.

I am often slow and sluggish when it comes to watching screeners. I’ve therefore failed to watch a screener of Paul Lacoste‘s Step Up To The Plate (a.k.a., Entre Les Bras), a well-reviewed French foodie doc now playing in NY, DC, Boston, San Diego and Denver. It opens in LA on 10.12. . As a makeup to the film’s publicist Sylvia Savadjian, here at least is the trailer and an apology.

Generic Synopsis: “In 2009, the three-Michelin-stars French chef Michel Bras decides to hands his restaurant over to his son Sebastien, who has been working with him for 15 years. Step up to the plate tells the story of these extraordinary dishes prepared by a father and a son, in the hilly landscape of Aubrac region. We follow this gastronomic transmission, and enter intimately in their family ties. Between Jonathan Nossiter‘s Mondovino and Raymond Depardon‘s La Vie Moderne, this documentary draws a moving and joyful portrait of this outstanding family devoted to haute cuisine for three generations.”