This June Squibb bit on Jimmy Kimmel…what’s the difference? Twelve hours, 18 hours …as long as you’re not a full 24 hours late. That’s where I draw the line.

A 2.21 NPR report briefly explores how people tend to place more stock in artists who behave eccentrically than those who do not. “Part of the reason people love Lady Gaga and Vincent Van Gogh is that these are very eccentric artists,” the copy reads. It follows that “people [tend to harbor] strong, unconscious stereotypes that eccentric artists are better.”

Hollywood Elsewhere to anyone who can shed light, but particularly Howard Hawks biographers Joseph McBride and Todd McCarthy: The forthcoming Criterion Bluray of Howard Hawks‘ Red River (’48) is described on the Criterion website as being a “4K digital restoration of the rarely presented original theatrical release version” that runs 127 minutes, as opposed to 133-minute version that was on the Masters of Cinema Bluray that streeted on 10.28.13.

The Criterion disc will also include a 2K restoration of the “longer version” (i.e., 133 minutes), which is the same version found on the Masters of Cinema Bluray.

The one-sheet for the forthcoming Godzilla (Warner Bros., 5.14) has a nice inferno-ish quality. Molten lava, blast furnace, etc. A colorful descendant of the black-and-white cityscapes of Tokyo aflame in the original Gojira. The movie, of course, will almost certainly be sludge. At last summer’s ComicCon director Gareth Edwards said that his Godzilla “will be portrayed [more] as an anti-hero rather than a villain,” adding that the beast “is a representation of the wrath of nature…we’ve taken it very seriously and the theme is man versus nature and Godzilla is certainly the nature side of it. You can’t win that fight. Nature’s always going to win and that’s what the subtext of our movie is about. He’s the punishment we deserve.”

I don’t know what city is going to be attacked within the film (looks like San Francisco), but principal photography began last March in Vancouver, and then things moved to Honolulu in late June. Principal photography wrapped on the weekend of 7.13/14.

I am committed to catching a 12:10 pm 3D screening of Pompeii at West Hollywood’s Grove plex. I am a lamb going to slaughter. With a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 31%, Pompeii almost certainly sucks ass. And yet RogerEbert.com’s Glenn Kenny, of all people, has given it half a pass. “The action scenes are choice, and once the clouds of ash and shooting fire and churning seas start up, Pompeii achieves a momentum that most sensationalist studio fare can’t touch.” I am determined to hate on this film, but whenever I see something with a pre-determined prejudice, I always notice one or two things that I like and I come out shrugging and going “Aaahh, didn’t blow as badly as I expected.”

Not only is TheWrap critic Inkoo Kang dead wrong in stating that the conclusion of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar (Adopt, opening today in N.Y. and L.A.) is “weak” and “strangely numbing” and “a tacky resolution.” She’s so dead wrong that I’ve decided that henceforth she needs to be regarded askance. (There’s a difference between having a distinct opinion and apparently missing what other sensible, informed critics have observed.) Salon‘s trustworthy Andrew O’Hehir has described Omar‘s finale as “a shocking final explosion that seems inevitable in retrospect.” And N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott has declared that “the film’s final scene feels shocking and abrupt, but also chillingly inevitable, consistent with the logic of a situation that defies all reason.”