I did a total turn-around on Channing Tatum in Magic Mike, but unless he continues to be a three-hour-a-day gym Nazi every day for the rest of his life, he’s going to become a serious beefalo when he hits a certain age. It’s in his genes, and he can’t do anything about that. He’s going to turn into Aldo Ray in The Green Berets when he’s 38 and eventually Teddy Kennedy when he hits his 50s. Enjoy the lean times while they last, pal.

In a recent Daily Beast Hero Summit, Aaron Sorkin has confided that his Steve Jobs movie “is going to be three scenes, and take place in real time.” Further, each of the three 30-minute scenes will take place backstage before a major product launch. The three products Sorkin is referring to will be the original Macintosh in 1984, the something-or-other, and the iPod….right? The Jobs material begins at 22:35.

When N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis catches a writerly wave, the result isn’t just stirring but occasionally joyous because it doesn’t capture but re-animates the “it.” For me anyway. Her just-posted Silver Linings Playbook review is such a piece of writing — at par with her brilliant August 2004 review of Michael Mann‘s Collateral:

“A virtuoso of chaos, David O. Russell has supreme command over a movie that regularly feels as if it’s teetering on the edge of hysteria, in respect to the characters and director both. But Mr. Russell doesn’t just choreograph bedlam, he also tames it, and worrying that it might all go kablooey with one shout too many. Like a singer who quavers tauntingly, thrillingly close to going off-key, Mr. Russell never loses control. Watching him pull back from the brink can be a delight.

“As its title announces, Silver Linings Playbook honks, waves and pleads for happiness. Happy endings used to be de rigueur in American movies, and while they often still are, the feelings accompanying them tend to feel as canned as Katherine Heigl’s laughter, maybe because filmmakers no longer buy them, or think that we don’t.

“Russell’s affinity for sight gags and the slap and tickle that makes lovers of combatants derives from his affinity for screwball comedy, a genre that emerged in the 1930s and that he borrows for his own singular purposes. His movies embrace different problems and character types — a strung-out drug addict rather than an alcohol-soaked swell — but like the classics of the form, they have zippy, at times breakneck pacing, rapidly fired zingers and physical comedy that, taken together, reflect the wild unpredictability of the greater world.

“The world in Silver Linings Playbook looks different from the way it does in old screwball comedies, of course, but it too is racked by pain and worry, and there are lost jobs and pensions amid its hiccupping laughter. For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks.

“Silver Linings Playbook is crammed with people talking and shouting and weeping and also yielding to what are sometimes called boundary issues but which here turn out to be the mad, loving scrambling of people finding and saving one another. These are characters who get in one another’s faces and occasionally punch a loved one right in the kisser. They must go on, they can’t go on, but together they do.”

This also from Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny:

“For a romantic comedy or dramedy, as I guess you’d call this film, to really work, you can’t just sit silently and watch the mechanics of the thing play out. You have to get personally invested in seeing the two main characters find some peace and love with each other, and Silver Linings Playbook does that better than any film of its type that I can name in the last few years. It might be my favorite romantic film since Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and I think that’s because this film acknowledges just how hard we make things for ourselves, and just how easy they could be if we got out of our own way sometimes.

Like Flirting With Disaster or Spanking The Monkey or even I Heart Huckabees, this is a film with its own cadence [and] its own particular sense of music, and it is a tremendous success for writer/director David O. Russell. Seems like he got out of his own way here, and the result should be nothing but sunshine for him and for audiences this holiday season.”

I’ve been wanting to say something, but my liberal mentality kept shutting it down or something. The righties never say in so many words that they want to cut back on entitlements in order to significantly reduce the deficit, but that’s what they want to do. They’re afraid to say this in so many words, of course, because for most Americans entitlements cannot and must not be fucked with, come hell or high water. But they almost certainly have to be…don’t they?

As much as I think it’s essential to restore Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthiest individuals and the big corporations, the righties aren’t wrong when they say that upping tax rates on the bucks-up crowd won’t cut into the deficit that much. The only way to really, really get things in order is to cut down on entitlements, which have grown quite a lot over the last 30 years (or so I understand). There — I’ve said it. It needs to be faced. Well, doesn’t it?

For openers, raise the retirement age to 70. 65 is way too young to leave the workforce. It’s not the way people live these days. 65 is the new 50 or 55. 70 is the new 55 or 60. Once you stop working you start to die anyway so the government would be doing people a favor by insisting on retirement at 70.

Wow…where did this come from? I initially dismissed the idea of a series produced by Netflix, but you can sense right away that House of Cards (a 10-episode deal that begins in early February) is top-grade stuff. Sharp, cut-to-the-chase dialogue by Kate Barnor, Sam Forman and Michael Dobbs. Seemingly one of Kevin Spacey‘s best roles in a dog’s age, easily in the league of his Margin Call guy. Two episodes directed by David Fincher (whoa!), three by James Foley and two by Joel Schumacher.

Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner, obviously a fair-minded, highly intelligent and deeply respected artist and good fellow, and Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil on the personal side of Abraham Lincoln, and less so the film. Kushner: “There is very little evidence that [Lincoln] was robustly heterosexual.” Yeah, agreed, but William Shakespeare was “definitely bisexual”? That’s a new one, no?

Armond White‘s City Arts review of Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln is by no means a savage pan — it’s written carefully and politely with as many attaboy’s as White can muster — but it’s partly negative, for sure. And when you’ve got White, who has kissed Spielberg’s ass in review after review of his films over the years, tapping out a Spielberg assessment that expresses measured disappointment, then you’ve got trouble in River City.

It was sometime in the early ’80s when I began using “happiness pills” as a term of disdain and derision. It came from a phoner I did with screenwriter Ed Naha, who later went on to co-write Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (’89). Ed was nice and obviously bright, but a little too euphoric and positive-minded. Alpha, alpha, gimme-a-break alpha. Like he was scared of even glancing at the sardonic or cynical or battle-weary side.

It got to the point in our conversation that I started to mutter to myself, “Is there anything in the world that you’re not fucking delighted by or blissed out about, you relentlessly Pollyannic fuck?”

I complained about him later with a friend, saying that he must have been swallowing great handfuls of happiness pills. Ever since then I’ve used this term whenever I meet someone who overdoes the cheerful. Because it feels like a kind of cover-up. It feels strenuous. Like Sally Hawkins‘ Poppy character in Mike Leigh‘s Happy Go Lucky (’08).

And yet oddly, I haven’t been feeling this way since I stopped drinking.

Happy fascists are still a drag but they don’t bring me down and make me want to run out of the room like they used to. It may not sound deep, but happiness is a choice, I think. You do have to say “I’m not going to be the mildly judgmental, vaguely pissed-off guy…I’m going to be kinder and gentler and more turn-the-other-cheek about stuff and see how that goes.” Which I’ve been more or less doing. A friend told me the other day that I’m less crazy and less funny without the Pinot Grigio. Maybe.

But I still can’t abide the kind of happiness that seems to come from a place of fear and/or avoidance.

From four and a half years ago: “Hawkins’ Poppy character epitomizes a sort of person I’ve never been able to tolerate — the emotional fascist who’s relentless about being happy, smiling and sparkly, but who also insists — here’s the problem — on forcing her bubbliness upon others (acquaintances, strangers, anyone) with the ultimate idea of converting them to their way of looking at life, or at least giving them a contact high to take home.

“What’s especially oppressive and dictatorial about smiley-faced brownshirts like Poppy is their determination to gently bully you into submission. If you don’t get on board with the mutual-alpha, they’ll interrogate you like Laurence Olivier‘s Zell (the Nazi character in Marathon Man), looking at you with a quizzical grin and asking, ‘Are you happy?’ or ‘Having a bad day?’ Speaking from experience, I can advise that the best response is ‘I was feeling pretty good, actually, until you asked me that.’

“The term ’emotional fascism’ was first coined by Elvis Costello in the ’70s, and it’s real, you bet. There’s a scene when Poppy’s friend Zoe says, ‘You can’t make everyone happy’ and Poppy replies, ‘There’s no harm in trying that Zoe, is there?’ I am here to stand up and say that yes, there is harm in it, and would all the Poppy girls of the world please refrain from ever doing so again in my presence? It’s like being beaten with Mao’s little happy-face book during the Great Cultural Revolution.

“There are many of us, I’m presuming, who look upon cheery, cock-eyed optimists as people you sometimes have to speak to at parties — sometimes it’s better just to suffer quickly and get it over with so you can move on — but if you see them coming down the street do cross over to the other side and duck into a book store or something, and then stay there for a good 15 minutes, just to be safe.”

The mid-to-late ’50s, Roger Corman-esque tone isn’t bad, and it’s interesting to be reminded that Lindsay Lohan — God help her — really does have that certain je ne sais quoi. She has hot fires burning, but all she does is make campy junk. That isn’t to say The Canyons is necessarily that, but the idea, obviously, is something fey and ironical in quote marks. Plus the sound editing doesn’t feel quite right. And I don’t know about James Deen. Is it just the trailer in black-and-white or is the feature also?

I have put this carefully as I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I’ve been on my knees about Jean-Luc Godard‘s Weekend since…I forget when but probably at the Bleecker or the Carnegie Hall Cinema in the late ’70s or early ’80s. And then I saw it again on laser disc in the ’90s. And then two days ago the Criterion Bluray arrived and I went “yes!…another meticulously mastered Bluray in 1.66!” And yet I haven’t popped it in. And I’ve been wondering why,

I’m really busy these days, of course, but it’s not just that. I think it’s past-posted. I don’t think it matters the way it used to . I used to think Weekend was the Great Universal Story of the Cancer of Middle-Class Consumerism but now…I don’t know. There’s something about Weekend that’s a little bit over. But I’m very, very glad and proud to have it in my library. I’ll probably settle into it on Saturday or Sunday.

An anonymous Bluray.com reviewer has written that he “can categorically state that the film has never looked as healthy as it does on this Blu-ray release. Detail and especially depth are very impressive. Contrast levels are stable and clarity, particularly when there is plenty of natural light, is simply terrific. There are no traces of problematic lab corrections. Unsurprisingly, the film has a very consistent, very strong organic look. Some of the longer sequences from the first half — such as the notorious sequence where the camera follows closely Corinne and Roland’s car as it passes by the long line of angry drivers on their way to the countryside — look especially good, allowing the viewer to get a terrific sense of what Godard and Raoul Coutard were trying to accomplish in a single continuous shot.”