Here are two capturings of eyeglasses, mostly tinted and some not. The Bling Ring poster is fairly straightforward. The bottom photo was just taken a few minutes ago — six or seven non-prescription reading glasses (strength 2.25 to 2.50), five or six cheap-ass tinted reading glasses, five or six darkly-tinted 3D glasses for screen-glare protection, and two semi-expensive blue-tint reading glasses (strength 2.75). I have several reading glasses because I lose them and then I find them again, but not before buying replacements.

This afternoon’s Boston Marathon Copley Square bombings just don’t seem big or devastating enough for the culprit (or culprits) to have been inspired by a serious foreign-terrorist agenda. It feels like more of a Ted Kaczynski-type deal.

Update: A Daily Mail report says the JFK fire was unrelated to the Boston explosions. The story quotes JFK Museum director Tom Putnam as saying the fire “was the result of an electrical problem.”

The just-released poster for Spike Lee‘s Oldboy (Film District, 10.11) is twice as tall as the cleavered version pasted below. But it doesn’t matter because the full-boat version just shows another ten years etched out in red ink or blood or whatever. The point is that Josh Brolin‘s Joe Doucett has been imprisoned for 20 years, etc. Elizabeth Olsen, District 9‘s Sharlto Copley and Samuel L. Jackson costar.

Eric Lundegaard suggests that Alan Tudyk has delivered the performance of his life in 42, in which he portrays real-life Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman, a racist dog. The peak moment is a scene in which Chapman taunts Chadwick Boseman‘s Jackie Robinson with racial epithets from the Phillies dugout. It’s easily the most searing moment in an otherwise unexceptional film. Tudyk, 42, has been delivering supporting perfs since the mid ’90s but this is his first pop-through. A ballsy performance as people sometimes associate characters with players.

Last week Vulture guy Kyle Buchanan mentioned something about Neil LaBute‘s Some Velvet Morning being a kind of comeback-resurgence film and possibly his best since In The Company of Men (or something like that). It will screen three times at the Tribeca Film Festival, which begins on Thursday, 4.18. It sounds like a major event — a film that may all but erase memories of The Wicker Man and restore LaBute’s rep as a master conveyor of fear and loathing between the sexes.

Alice Eve, Stanley Tucci in Neil LaBute’s Some Velvet Morning.

But this isn’t a good year for me to attend Tribeca (I can’t afford it) and Steve Beeman of Falco Ink is telling me that the Velvet Morning guys won’t be allowing any Left Coast critics or columnists to see it concurrently via DVD screeners or a limited digital viewing window of some kind. That’s a real shame. They’re presumably afraid of piracy but a limited digital streaming option for favored journalists doesn’t seem like much of a risk to me. So if I want to catch it next weekend I’ll have to fork over $1200 or so and probably more.

“Young and beautiful Velvet (Alice Eve) is enjoying a relaxing morning in her New York brownstone when Fred (Stanley Tucci) interrupts,” the synopsis reads. “With suitcase in tow, he enters the apartment with great expectation. Not having seen or heard from Fred in nearly four years, Velvet is clearly surprised. As Fred unloads the reason for his resurfacing, the history and nature of their relationship is revealed. The weight of their reconnection becomes clear as tension mounts and their chemistry reaches its climax.

“Writer/director Neil LaBute continues his exploration of male and female relations in this enigmatic relationship drama. The use of natural lighting and handheld camera highlights the dramatic realism for which LaBute is known. Both lead actors give electric performances, Stanley Tucci as the manic, ego-crushed older man, and Alice Eve, the dazzling ingénue. Their nuanced performances, paired with LaBute’s dialogue, create an intriguing drama with a stunning finale.”

Update: The only thing that gives me pause is the fact that Velvet is a porn-star name. What semi-upstanding parents would name their daughter Velvet? Any woman who would self-name herself Velvet would do so only to enhance her reputation among oily guys who pay for it. Woman: “Hi, my name is Velvet Kowalsky and I’m applying for the marketing position with your company.” Employer: “Uhm…your name is Velvet?”

Remember that line in Woody Allen‘s Husbands and Wives in which a business colleague was telling Sydney Pollack to call a certain lady of the evening, in part because “she has a mouth like velvet”?

And by the way, what “young and beautiful” blonde 20something who isn’t holding down a senior executive-level position with a major corporation can afford to live in her own “New York brownstone”? At best somebody like Velvet might be able to afford a share…maybe. On her own she might be able to afford some small, moderately dumpy apartment in Brooklyn or Queens.

This Man of Steel teaser is the most promising, intriguing and even exciting come-on yet. Rage, bad reception, a bad acid trip. It’s the only thing to put the hook in so far. For the first time I’m saying to myself “hmmm, yeah, possibly” instead of “Zack Snyder doing another Superman movie?…yeesh.”

“From now on your job is to be a distraction so people forget what the real problems are.” A very significant percentage of the films, actors and actresses celebrated on the MTV Movie Awards tonight are more or less about fulfilling this goal. At least as far as the under-35 audience is concerned. If I think about it I’m sure I can come up with exceptions. Give me until tomorrow morning.

In this trailer for Carlo Carlei‘s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s “little stars” riff (read by Hailee Steinfeld) is truncated. Let’s presume that the whole passage will be in the film: “And when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.” It’s the “garish sun” line that’s missing. Adaptation by Julian Fellowes.

I’ve never seen sharper, cleaner footage from over 100 years ago, ever. Posted two years ago, originally shot around 1900 (partly in Cork, Ireland). Footage was motion stabilized and slowed down to correct speed (from 18 fps to 24 fps), and then upscaled to HD via enchancement software. There are apparently no grain monks among historical film preservationists, but if there were they would probably argue for keeping the naturally faded and jumpy look of old film and against digital enhancements.

For those stalled by Ms. Jackson’s reference to Hogarth, she means William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) — “an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called ‘modern moral subjects‘. Satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as ‘Hogarthian.'”

Why is it that no one except myself has even mentioned what would seem to any observant person like a somewhat plausible (if not entirely plausible) reason for the vague, sketchy, mostly dialogue-free nature of Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder? The reason I’m suggesting (apart from the fact that Malick’s natural inclinations are to jettison characters and dialogue) is that he’s a very private fellow, notoriously so, and yet, paradoxically, he very clearly based the narrative bones of To The Wonder on his own personal history, as I pointed out on 8.19.12.

Variety‘s Steven Gaydos commented as follows: “I’m sure this isn’t the first time someone connected the dots between an artist’s obsessive desire for secrecy and privacy in life and their obsessive desire for full-frontal exposure of everything personal and painful and private in their art.”

It just seems queer that not one reviewer has brought this up. Not even as a talking point, not even as gossip…nothing.

From the article: “I’ve heard or read bits and pieces over the years, but a 5.21.11 ‘The Search’ document by Brett McCracken called ‘39 Facts About Terrence Malick‘ reports that in the early 80s, Malick, raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, fell for Michele Morette, ‘a Parisienne who lived in his building in Paris and who had a daughter, Alex. After a few years the three of them moved to Austin, Texas. Malick married Michele in 1985, but they divorced in 1998.’ That same year, McCracken writes, “Malick married Alexandra ‘Ecky’ Wallace, an alleged high school sweetheart from his days at St. Stephen’s school in Austin, Texas. They are still married and currently reside in Austin, Texas. Ecky Wallace is the mother of actor Will Wallace, who appears in The Thin Red Line, The New World and The Tree of Life.”

Are you going to stand there and tell me that Neil (Ben Affleck) isn’t Malick, Marina (Olga Kurylenko) isn’t Michele and Jane (Rachel McAdams) isn’t Ecky?

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of wee-hour entrapment when you can’t sleep. It happened this morning around 2:15 am. I awoke on the couch fully dressed with the lights on and the TV blaring. I got up long enough to jettison the externals and kill the lights and flop. Pointlessly. Nothing. if I’ve been through this once I’ve been through it 100 times. The best thing you can do is accept the situation and get up and turn the lights on and start working. At least that way you’re doing something with your time. Instead I watched Peter Bogdanovich‘s Mask, which I haven’t seen in 27 or 28 years. Sleep usually kicks in around 5 or 5:30 am, and that’s what happened this morning. What a drag.