Here’s a whipsmart, spot-on interview between Huffpost’s Ricky Camilleri and brilliant, tart-tongued producer and author Lynda Obst, whose new book is “Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From The New Abnormal in the Movie business.” Really superb stuff. Essential viewing…really.

With Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring opening stateside on Friday, 2.14, I’m re-posting my Cannes Film Festival review from roughly three weeks ago: “There’s a self reflecting, shallow pool, empty-hall-of-mirrors vibe delivered by Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring. I don’t know what could’ve resulted from a film about fame-worship and malignant materialism, but don’t we know about the yield of shallowness going in? Aren’t the urban GenY kids who live for some kind of nocturnal proximity to the vapidly famous…aren’t they self-parodying to begin with? Weren’t the actual Bling Ring kids extremely self-mocking before they were even caught?

I’ll be seeing Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel at a Prague press screening on Thursday morning, 6.13, and will therefore be able to bang out a review before it opens Stateside the following day. So I’ll get into it soon enough, but for the time being I’m discounting all of the rave reviews from all of the geek-friendly critics and columnists who grew up in the ’80s…anyone who’s ever declared even a vague allegiance to the manipulations of superhero flicks. Just as I discounted last summer’s over-the-top Avengers huzzahs along with the South by Southwest raves for Cabin in the Woods. You can only listen to non-vested hard guys.

Steel is basically a dark Nolanesque take on the Supie legend — last night somebody called it “The Clark Knight.” A majority of reviewers are calling Man of Steel good or mostly satisfying but not great. Remove the geek-love deference factor and what this really means is that it’s probably not bad or fairly decent but not all that nutritional when you get right down to it. If you listen to Variety‘s Scott Foundas Steel is defined by a “humorless tone and relentlessly noisy (visually and sonically) aesthetics [that] leave much to be desired.” In the view of Indiewire critic Eric Kohn, it “takes a more self-serious approach, constructing a sullen tale [with a] dreary atmosphere [and a] brooding storyline.” And if you listen to David Poland, it more or less blows.

I was searching around for a choice clip of Key Largo costar Harry Lewis, who died last weekend at age 93. I always thought that Lewis (whose Largo character was called “Toots”) was playing Richard Widmark‘s “Tommy Udo” in Kiss of Death. Anyway, no clip but I found this alternate ending to John Huston‘s 1948 melodrama. It’s been sitting on YouTube since early ’08, not that I noticed.

A Bluray of Joe Dante‘s The Howling (’81) streets on 6.18. I’ve always had a soft spot for this film, probably because it doesn’t embrace werewolf tropes as much as satirically comment on them while slipping in social satire. On top of of which it’s tartly written (by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless), performed just right, tightly edited and just an all-around pleasure. And short — only 91 minutes.

I’ve always gathered that President John Kennedy had his head in the right place about civil rights, but he was a bit soft in the gut when it came to pushing for change in ways that really mattered. But on this, the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s 6.11.63 civil rights speech, N.Y. Times op-ed contributor Peniel E. Joseph claims that his influence was more significant than generally understood, especially from the standpoint of complacent white America and the Eisenhower mindset that most lived by at the time.