If you’re having a disagreement and asking someone if they’re insane, you can’t be mild-mannered about it. You need to say the word “insane” as if you’ve spent time in a mental ward and know the meaning of the word. You can’t say “insane” like “tomato” or “laundromat” or “Allen wrench.” You need to get into it. One good example is the way Julie Hagerty says “you’re insaaaaane!” to Albert Brooks in the opening scene in Lost in America. You really have to go with the “aaayyne” part. You have to really bray it out.

Weeds costars Demian Bichir and Mary-Louise Parker were given a tribute last night at the Sonoma Int’l Film Festival. A large audience sat in Veteran’s Hall and listened to a spirited q & a, during which Parker wouldn’t stop praising Bichir’s acting gift and especially his Oscar-nominated performance in A Better Life.

(l. to r.) Sonoma Int’l Film Festival honcho Kevin McNeely, Demian Bichir, Mary-Louise Parker following last night’s tribute.

For whatever reason nobody mentioned that roughly five months hence Bichir will begin directing Refugio, a love story that he’s been writing and re-writing for five years. It will shoot in the U.S. and Mexico. His upcoming feature films include Dom Hemingway, Machete Kills and The Heat. He also has a significant role in The Bridge, a 2013 TV series.

A big invitational dinner followed the tribute. I chatted with Demian a bit and said hello to Mary-Louise. I don’t mean to sound uncaring but I wasn’t a fan of the appetizer (a beet dish). By the time the entree began to be served I had to leave to catch a 9 pm screening of Eric Christensen‘s The Cover Story, a doc about the art of ’60s and ’70s album jackets. But thank you, Sonoma Int’l Film Festival, for a very pleasant evening and for your abundant generosity.

The Cover Story was too much to take. I fled at the half-hour mark. It appears to have been made with the assumption that nobody has heard of the super-groups that reigned in the ’60s and ’70s, requiring that their commercial and artistic exploits have to be recited ad infinitum. It’s very tedious. On top of which the narrator speaks in a slick salesman tone that sounds like his main gig is narrating infomercials for potato slicers and cleaning equipment. The deal-breaker was when he recalled the death of John Lennon in the manner of…oh, Wheel of Fortune‘s Pat Sajak?

Those who saw 42 this weekend should watch The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), a mild-mannered biopic in which Robinson played himself. There are more than a few similarities. Go to 23:00 for the scene in which Branch Rickey (Minor Watson) offers Robinson a job with the Dodgers, but only if he “has the strength not to fight back” — roughly the same scene happens in Act One of 42. Not line for line, but close enough.

(l.) Minor Watson as Branch Rickey and (r.) Jackie Robinson as himself in The Jackie Robinson Story.

Brian Helgeland‘s sports drama overperformed with $27 million. Presumably the HE community has some sort of verdict? Too simplistic, on-the-nose and old-fashioned? Or are you on the Marshall Fine side of the fence?

In Nikki Finke‘s 4th box-office update, posted late last night, she notes that audience composition was 48% male, 52% female, and 83% over-25 and 17% under-25. She also reports that 84% saw the film due to “subject matter.” (And the other 16% saw it for the special effects?) The funny part comes when Finke presumably asks a Warner Bros exec how “urban” the audience was, and the exec replies that “while we do not poll race breakdown, I can tell you we performed extremely well in all the large urban markets. But the highest grossing theaters were the country’s most commercial screens.” Are there any highly commercial screens that aren’t in urban-area markets?

Author, former Variety guy and renowned cineaste Joseph McBride has revealed that he’s written George Stevens, Jr., with whom he co-wrote several AFI tribute specials in the ’80s, and told him he’s wrong about having contributed to the presentation of his father’s western classic, Shane, in a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio on the forthcoming Warner Home Video Bluray.

John McElwee‘s Greenbriar Picture Shows has posted a portion of McBride’s letter, which, I’m told, has appeared on his Facebook page.

“I have written my former writing partner George Stevens, Jr., to share my concern about how the Shane Bluray release is chopping off parts of the film. This obviously must not be done.

“Patrick McGilligan and I interviewed Stevens in 1974, [and during that discussion] Stevens talked about the importance of deliberate pacing and editing.

“‘It’s related to music or painting, the arrangement of film, and it has an enormous effect on an audience,” McBride quotes Stevens saying at one point. “They never relate to it as being devised, any more than I presume I’m seduced because Renoir devises the composition of what he shows me in a painting. I know he sweated it out, erased it, but he got it. There’s no question about it, there’s the grand man.

“‘It surprises me how well audiences, also critics, reward a film that has that kind of thing in mind, by design, not because it just happened. Sometimes we find really fine quality in a film by looking at it, looking at it, and then looking back at it — why, this darn thing’s designed as the Bolero is designed!”

McBride concludes that “this was a man who took great pains over every aspect of his work, including composition. I am sure he would be appalled to see Shane cut down to 1:66 again when it could be released in the Academy ratio in which he shot it.”

Portion of actual letter from McBride to Stevens, Jr.: “Since your father composed Shane so painstakingly and beautifully in 1:33 (I remember vividly him telling me how he achieved the great composition of Shane framed within the antlers of the elk in the opening of the film), I would not see any value in changing that original ratio for home viewing, even if your father had to go along with a cropped widescreen version for early theatrical engagements during that first all-encompassing craze for widescreen.

“I have seen your father’s 35mm print projected on theatrical screens three times (once by your father himself in Madison the first time I saw the film at the University of Wisconsin, in 1966), and it was carefully preserved (indeed spectacular-looking) and in the 1:33 ratio.

“I have seen recent frame comparisons between Shane at that ratio and Shane at the 1:66 evidently planned for Bluray, and it seems clear that important visual data would be lost if the film were cropped again to 1:66, no matter how carefully and no matter whether it were to be done frame by frame. Your father’s great compositional sense would be at risk here, in my opinion. This great film would be diminished.

“I would hope at least that you could influence Warners to release both the 1:33 versions and the 1:66 versions on a Bluray set so viewers can choose to watch it either way. There may be some of the usual arguments about the public expecting to have their TV screens filled, but I recall how we went through all that when even the clips for AFI Life Achievement Award shows had to be panned-and-scanned, but later the industry and the more knowledgeable segment of the public (the segment that values and reveres classic films) learned to accept black bars at the side to preserve a film’s original 1:33 ratio.”

I went through two paperback copies of J.D. Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye in my youth. The cover of the oldest (which either my father or an uncle gave me) is from the late ’50s, I think. The all-red-with-fine-yellow-lettering version I bought sometime in the ’70s. The just-released poster for Shane Salerno‘s Salinger (Weinstein Co., September) pays tribute to the latter. The talking heads in Salerno’s doc will include Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Guare, Martin Sheen, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow and Gore Vidal.

I tried to get into two Sonoma Film Festival screenings yesterday afternoon but the rooms were sold out. Many of the venues here (mid-sized rooms adjacent to libraries or pubs) have only 40 or 60 or 80 seats. If you’re a press person at a smallish festival you can usually arrive late and get a seat but not here. I finally succeeded with a 6:15 pm screening of Ursula Meier‘s Sister, which I caught at Cannes last year. I just wanted to see something that I know is solid and intriguing and well-made.

I first saw cups like this about five or six years ago at the Carlton Beach restaurant during the Cannes Film Festival. They were for sale yesterday at a Sonoma kitchenware shop for $16 and change so what the hell — cheap.

From my 1.25.12 Sundance Film Festival review: “Set in the early ’90s, James Marsh‘s Shadow Dancer (Magnolia, May) is a low-key LeCarre-esque thriller about a young IRA-allied mother (Andrea Riseborough) who’s nabbed by a British MI5 officer (Clive Owen) and told she’ll go to prison and lose her relationship with her young son unless she turns snitch and rats out her own. She reluctantly agrees, and you know (or can certainly guess) what probably happens from this point on.

“But you can’t know until you see it, of course, and I’m telling you the ending delivers jolts and eerie turns that I didn’t see coming.

Marsh (best known for the docs Project NIM — a.k.a. “the monkey movie” — and Man on Wire) plays everything down and subtle and subdued — the acting, the lighting, the colors. The grayish mood of Shadow Dancer recalls, welcomely, the BBC adaptations of John Le Carre‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.

“My only problem was that I missed at least 30% or 40% of the dialogue due to those damn impenetrable Irish accents. I understood Owen and his MI5 colleagues pretty well, but it was touch and go with Riseborough and her IRA brethren. I was able to catch an Irish word or two or a phrase now and then, but I was mostly in the dark. This has happened many, many times before (particularly with Paul Greengrass‘s Bloody Sunday). Films with significant Irish dialogue need to be subtitled — period.

“I can’t wait to see Shadow Dancer again on Bluray, when the subtitles will presumably be added, at least as an option.”

Shadow Dancer opened in England last August.

Last night I read a 4.12 Nick Pinkerton piece about Jerry Lewis. It’s a fairly scalding portrait, but it doesn’t read like a hatchet job. I asked Lewis biographer Shawn Levy (“King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis“) for a response. “It’s Jerry through-and-through,” he replied. “The sheer longevity of the man and the neediness — staggering. He’s outlived everyone you can consider a peer (my theory is that they’re beta-testing something bespoke for him in Hell), and yet he still preens and condescends and crows like he’s got things to prove and scores to settle. A remarkable man, and captured to a tee by the story, I think. A very nice job.”

“Critics have a duty to be clear with readers,” Marshall Fine has written in a 4.12 essay. “Not to warn them, per se, because that implies something about relative merit. But to be clear or honest [when the case applies]: This is a movie in which nothing much happens. Or this is a movie in which what does happen doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or is deliberately off-putting or upsetting.”

I am one of the few critic-columnists who actually says stuff like this from time to time. But I disagree with Fine siding with the virtues of audience-friendly films, particularly when he uses Brian Helgeland‘s 42 as a sterling example.

“You know what an audience-friendly film is,” Fine writes. “It tells a story that engages you about characters you can like and root for. {And] yet movies that seek to tell a story that uplifts or inspires often get short shrift from critics. 42 is being slagged by some critics for being manipulative, [but it] happens to be a well-made and extremely involving story about an important moment in history.”

Wells response: 42 is okay if you like your movies to be tidy and primary-colored and unfettered to a fault, but it’s a very simplistic film in which every narrative or emotional point is served with the chops and stylings that I associate with 1950s Disney films. The actors conspicuously “act” every line, every emotional moment. It’s one slice of cake after another. Sugar, icing, familiar, sanctified. One exception: that scene in which Jackie Robinson is taunted by a Philadelphia Phillies manager with racial epithets. I’m not likely to forget this scene ever. It’s extremely ugly.

Back to Fine: “The fact that 42 works on the viewer emotionally, however, is often seen as a negative by critics who aren’t comfortable with movies that deal with feelings, rather than ideas or theories.”

There’s an audience, Fine allows, for nervy, brainy and complex films like To the Wonder, Upstream Color, Room 237, Holy Motors and The Master. But “all of those are not audience-friendly,” he states. “Most of them were barely watchable. But if you read the reviews, you would find little that’s descriptive of what the movie actually looks or feels like while you’re watching it. Which, for a lot of people, was a negative experience in the case of those particular titles.

“How many people saw them because of positive reviews that were misleading? How many might have thought twice if the review mentioned that, oh, well, this film is all but incomprehensible, even if you’ve read a director’s statement on what it means? Or, well, this movie has very little dialogue and takes a 20-minute break for a flashback to the beginning of time? Or this movie is about an inarticulate movie star caught in moments by himself during a movie junket?”

Wells response: I also think that critics should just say what it’s like to watch certain films. If a film is great or legendary or well worth seeing they need to say that, of course, but they also have to admit how it plays in Average-Joe terms and how it feels to actually sit through it. I’m not saying “nobody does this except me,” but who does do this? New Yorker critic David Denby strives to convey this, I think. Andy Klein does this. I’m sure there are others. But I know that it’s a clear violation of the monk-dweeb code to speak candidly about how this or that monk-worshipped, Film Society of Lincoln Center-approved film actually plays for non-dweebs or your no-account brother-in-law or the guy who works at the neighborhood pizza parlor. Guys like Dennis Lim will never cop to this.

It also needs to be said that “audience-friendly” is a somewhat flattering term. The more accurate term is audience-pandering. Pandering to the banal default emotions that the less hip, more simple-minded and certainly less adventurous portions of the paying public like to take a bath in. Because these emotions are comforting, reassuring, and above all familiar. That is what 42 does, in spades.

Last Tuesday The Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington and Alan Yuhas profiled 13 Republican senators who’ve pledged to filibuster any legislation that restricts the ability of people with dicey backgrounds to buy guns. The 13 are Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky), Sen. Marco Rubio (Florida), Sen.James Inhofe (Oklahoma), Sen. Richard Burr (North Carolina), Sen. Mike Enzi (Wyoming), Sen. Jerry Moran (Kansas), Sen. Pat Roberts (Kansas), Sen. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Sen. Dan Coats (Indiana), Sen. Mike Crapo (Idaho) and Sen. James Risch (Idaho). Whores servicing the gun industry — plain and simple.

Yesterday afternoon Time Out Chicago‘s Jake Malooley posted a nice summary of Thursday night’s Roger Ebert tribute at the Chicago theatre. Pallies and colleagues shared their feelings along with Ebert’s widow Chaz (a great lady) and family members. The memorial for the departed critic lasted two and a half hours.

Photo stolen from Variety story filed by Scott Foundas.

“Variety critic Scott Foundas called Ebert a ‘gentle giant,’ as opposed to the likes of Pauline Kael, who inspired in her disciples a fierce partisanship. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy concluded his memorial tribute saying, ‘In film criticism for 46 years, there was Roger Ebert — and then there was the rest of us.” Christie Hefner said she was mortified to recall showing Ebert film reviews she had written for her college newspaper while he was interviewing her for a story ‘on Hugh Hefner’s daughter.’ She later went on to review films for the Boston Phoenix.

“Joan Cusack read aloud a heartfelt letter from the Obamas. Brother John remembered a nervous first run-in with Ebert at the Carnegie Deli in New York while on the press tour for The Sure Thing. ‘Don’t worry,’ Ebert whispered to the young actor. ‘I liked your movie.’ Cusack said that Ebert ‘didn’t always love your movie, but he always gave you a fair shake. His writing was often better than the writing in the film.'”

Honest Wells anecdote: I was in the same Toronto elevator as Cusack in ’02, and on the way down I heard him quietly mention that he’d heard Ebert had fallen asleep during a screening of Menno Menjes‘ Max, in which Cusack played an Austrian art dealer who has dealings with Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor).

“Several filmmakers underscored Ebert’s fairness [in] advocating for small-budget art-house cinema alongside reviews of Hollywood blockbusters. Director Gregory Nava (El Norte) said there was a time when Ebert ‘was the only major critic in this country who would look at our movies,’ i.e., indie films telling minority stories. Michael Barker, president of Sony Pictures Classics, called Ebert ‘the conscience of the movie business.’

Filmmaker Andrew Davis — whom Ebert imagined directing ‘the perfect Chicago movie’ — had fond remembrances of his friend, even taking the chance to read Ebert’s glowing review of Davis’s The Fugitive.

“Ebert’s boozy past made a brief appearance when Old Town Ale House proprietor Bruce Elliott told a bawdy barroom tale. (Apparently, Rog had a fondness for large-breasted women.) Comedian Dick Gregory did some off-color standup before comparing Ebert to a turtle: ‘Hard on the outside, soft in the middle and always willing to stick his neck out.'”

Presumably more HE regulars have seen Upstream Color by now. Reactions?