I hate listening to these courtly parliamentarians (White House Down producer Bradley J. Fischer, producer-writer James Vanderbilt, production designer Kirk Petruccelli) kiss Roland Emmerich‘s ass. All ass-kissing on these suck-up video pieces is inherently boring, and the guys who shoot and cut these things should know that. This aside, I love the smoldering Capitol dome exploding and smoking and flaming all to hell…fantastic. Opening in U.S. and France on 6.28.

In his Vulture review of Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra, Matt Zoller Seitz writes that following about Matt Damon‘s performance as Scott Thorson: “It takes great talent and concentration to play such an opaque soul while still letting us think that we can see into his heart. [Damon] is too old for the part (though the makeup helps sell the illusion a bit), but it doesn’t really matter because he seems to remember what it was like to be a teenager, and lonely, and unformed as a person, and that knowledge infuses the performance.”

I’m not trying to be a nitpicker but I suffered a basic blockage with Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska that I couldn’t get around. The primary plot driver, contained in Bob Nelson‘s script, is a belief by Bruce Dern‘s Woody Grant, an ornery 70-something alcoholic who’s at least partly out to lunch, that he’s won a million dollar prize from a Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes drawing.

Random drunk woman to her companions: “What is the Great Gatsby?” And then, a few seconds later: “Siri, what is the Great Gatsby?” — overheard at Hamburger Hamlet via Caroline An Stockstill, sent along to Overheard In LA, posted by Emma G. Gallegos on 5.26.

The fact that the drunken questioner was ignorant is not a problem. Asking was a constructive and intelligent act on her part. It’s the companions who didn’t know either. Think of that — not one of them had even heard that Gatsby was a fictional rich guy in the 1920s, and that he was created by a writer named F. Scott something. Not even a shard of some aspect of this information welled up in their brains. When I was 19 and drunk at 1:30 am you could have pulled me aside and said “who was Voltaire?” and I would have said, “I dunno, some French guy, writer…why?” I would have at least said that.