This doesn’t mean anything to me or anyone. It’s Saturday afternoon and where’s the harm? If I was serious I’d find a spirit-gum Lincoln beard and a shawl and a stovepipe hat and one of those awful 1860s bow ties. But the guy who did the left-side pic, Mark Frenden, is really fast and skilled. It could look better but he did this in five or ten minutes. Update: The pic on the right is by Zach Copeland.

On 9.19 an L.A. Times story announced a sea change in the fast-food realm. I’ve stopped wolfing down junk food at midnight (that got tossed out with the drinking) and I’m not one to keep track of fast-food industry stats. But Tiffany Hsu‘s story reported that McDonald’s, Burger King and Dairy Queen are over and that Five Guys Burgers is the new king of the hill, closely followed by Smashburger.

Unless Big Five and Smashburger are offering cash bribes or the services of beautiful underage girls, this is presumably about their food tasting better. Is anyone out there a Big Five or Smashburger convert?

The basis of the story was a survey by Market Force Information. 7,600 consumers were questioned. In every region, Five Guys was boss. Smashburger, as noted, was second in every category except overall value. Also popular are In-N-Out, Fuddruckers and A&W.

Dairy Queen ranked dead last in a group of 16 chains considered. Burger King, Hardee’s, McDonald’s and Jack in the Box rounded out the bottom five.

In short, your father’s fast-food world is yesterday’s news.

There’s a Five Guys right up the street from me on Santa Monica Blvd. near Huntley, but the closest Smashburger is way out in the West Valley.

Note to director-writer Peter Landesman: So Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman have hired you to direct your script of Parkland, which is basically about JFK’s murder on 11.22.63 as principally experienced by the staffers, victims and various onlookers at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital.

I haven’t read the script (anyone have a PDF?) but please, please just lock your movie down at the hospital from start to finish and don’t leave.

Please, please don’t show us the shooting at Dealey Plaza, and please don’t introduce us to Abraham Zapruder…none of that. It’s been done to death by too many other films and filmmakers. Don’t compete with that. Just stay at the hospital and wait for the world and its traumatic injuries to come to Parkland. It will soon enough. All you have to do is hang tight and introduce us to three or four doctors and nurses (you can make them up, if you want) and a couple of senior administrators and ambulance drivers and whatnot, and show them making the rounds and talking about Kennedy’s visit and so on.

I don’t care if you’ve written a lot of scenes that happen in other parts of Dallas. If you have, throw ’em out. Forget ’em, burn ’em. The only stylistic edge you’ll have to is to keep it all at Parkland. The ER rooms, the hallways, the offices, the parking lot.

Every so often I try to do the right thing by WordTheatre, the Los Angeles-based org that presents classy spoken-word shows in LA, NY and London. Every time I attend one I feel improved or upgraded on some level. Tonight’s show is an all-African-American thing called Storytales, and it’s happening this evening at the John Ford Anson outdoor amphitheatre.

You can take a picnic basket and a bottle of wine or sparkling water, or you can light up a joint and pass it around. I don’t turn on but it’s an outdoor thing so why not? These events take on a special quality when you’re ripped.

Thee or four of my favorite guys will be performing — Dennis Haysbert (who has one of the most beautiful speaking voices on the planet), Keith David (Crash, The Princess and the Frog, Platoon), Brent Jennings (the glum-faced Moneyball coach who also played the “schtupig” cop in Witness), Barry Shabaka Henley (the portly jazz-club owner who took three in the forehead from Tom Cruise in Collateral) and Tracie Thoms (a stand-out in Rent, Deathproof).

Here’s a recent L.A. Times story about one of the storytellers, Edgar Wideman.

Most of the commenters on this column could give a hoot about WordTheatre (every time I post something about it the reactiion is nil) but HE also reaches an educated, upscale readership so a shout-out seems worthwhile.

As an accredited New York Film Festival press pass holder, I requested a ticket to Monday night’s “secret” Lincoln screening at Alice Tully Hall, as everyone else with the same pass did. It took the NYFF all day to say “sorry, we can’t help.” Uh-huh. I don’t know but I strongly suspect there’s a general coordinated strategy to keep me away from this puppy. Lincoln tickets went on sale today and sold out right away. I’m considering flying to NYC this weekend if I can buy a ticket from a scalper. So I’m asking. I’ll pay an unfair price.

In my mind, Prometheus happened so long ago it doesn’t even feel like it came out this year. I saw it in Prague on a rainy afternoon. Mostly I remember the humidity and how warm it was in the lobby as all the journos and media people stood around and waited for the doors to open. And how I was sweating under my baseball cap and shades. And then wondering why the projectionist was showing it in 1.85 and not 2.35. And then trying to make sense of it…and failing.

Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus ” is impressively composed and colder than a witch’s boob in Siberia,” I wrote on 6.1. “It’s visually striking, spiritually frigid, emotionally unengaging, at times intriguing but never fascinating. It’s technically impressive, of course — what else would you expect from an expensive Scott sci-fier? And the scary stuff takes hold in the final third. But it delivers an unsatisfying story that leaves you…uhm, cold.

“It’s a gray, forbidding film about howling winds and chilly people. It’s a watchable, well made, at times better-than-decent ride, but it really doesn’t hang together. I’m sorry but anyone who says ‘wow, this is really great!’ is just full of it. But there’s no way to kick this around without dropping all kinds of spoilers so I’m going to keep things vague.

“For what it’s worth Scott shoots the hell out of Prometheus, but the script isn’t integrated. It’s half-assed and lacks a clear hard line. The fault, I hear, is mainly with Damon Lindelof‘s rewrite of Jon Spaihts‘ straightforward Alien prequel script. Roughly 40% delivers some absorbing futuristic technological razmatazz and exposition on a long voyage to a distant planet, 30% to 35% is proficient scary-icky stuff (slimy alien snakes) and 20% is some kind of half-hearted spiritual quest film on the part of Noomi Rapace‘s Shaw character, a scientist who wears a crucifix.

“The spiritual-religious angle is what disappoints the most because it’s only flirted with. The script starts off in a semi-solemn, semi-thoughtful vein, asking questions about the origin or spawning of humanity and the possibility of alien creators or “engineers”, but none of this develops or pays off, and things eventually devolve into standard shocks and creep-outs.

“Most ticket-buyers will go looking for a standard alien flick and come away going ‘hmm, I dunno but this isn’t quite it.'”

It’s my belief that a serious Best Picture contender needs to say “this is how the world is,” and not “which view of the world do you prefer?” We all choose different versions of the stories we want to believe. It goes on all the time. And I don’t believe that a film that focuses for an hour on the basic rudiments of survival on an ocean-drifting lifeboat (finding food and water, not getting eaten by a Bengal tiger) can be compelling enough to earn a Best Picture nomination. I just don’t.

Young guys growing their hair long in the mid ’60s required some brass because of fierce resistance from various authority figures, but there were two separate arenas in which long hair began to advance and dig in among teens and early 20somethings — the cities and the campuses, where things manifested much more quickly starting in ’65 (but not ’64), and the middle-class suburbs, where it took a lot longer for anyone to walk around with super-long Blue Cheer or Grand Funk Railroad hair or a Bob Dylan Jewfro, say.

It started with modest little Beatle bangs in ’64 and ’65 with radical campus hard-asses growing their hair to Rubber Soul lengths by the fall of ’65. But things were relatively cautious and straight-laced in the pot-smoking ‘burbs.

Obviously longer hair caught on big-time in the cities and campuses in ’66, but even then it was rare to see a guy with Buffalo Bill hair on the Harvard or Yale or NYU campuses, and you didn’t really see long hair start to get fizzy and freaky among non-collegiate suburban youths until late ’66 or ’67. And you didn’t see serious Blonde on Blonde Dylan-fros and heavy-duty Geronimo hair with headbands until mid to late ’68 or ’69, even, in the ‘burbs of New Jersey and Connecticut.

A lot of middle-class kids who weren’t musicians or Timothy Leary disciples or radical-ass Harvard University geniuses looked like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (’67), for the most part. You didn’t even see sideburns among more or less straight-laced guys until ’69 or ’70. By 1969 or ’70 even corporate, three-piece-suit types were wearing what were called “executive chops.”

I’m bringing this up because David Chase‘s Not Fade Away, which screened today for New York Film Festival journos and got thumbs-up responses from at least two guys I know (Kris Tapley and Marshall Fine), appears to play it fast and loose with mid ’60s hair changes, to judge by the trailer.

I’ve asked around and the film, about a young New Jersey rock band going through various convulsions and challenges and changes, takes place over a period of three and a half years — from late 1963 (“[it] begins in the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination,” according to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn) and ends (or “dovetails,” as Kohn puts it) sometime during the 1967 Summer of Love. Much of the film, to go by press materials, take place in ’64. and long hair just wasn’t evident back then. It really wasn’t evident in ’65, as I’ve said. The big flowering was in ’66 and ’67.

I’ll have to see the film, of course, to make a final judgment about accuracy, but it looks as if Chase has re-imagined the mid ’60s. To go by the trailer, the hair that started to happen in ’66 and ’67 and which really took hold in ’68 and ’69 happens in the ‘burbs in ’64, ’65 and ’66.

I hope I haven’t been too technical here, but hair evolution from ’64 to ’69 was a very specific, stage-by-stage thing. It roughly paralled the long-hair styles of the Beatles themselves — just look at their stylings in ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68 and ’69. It’s all there.

It’s good to see Marcia Nasatir and Lorenzo Semple, Jr doing their Real Geezers routine again, but let’s try and be a little more current than Trouble With The Curve, which had already had its day and been more or less pushed aside. Whatever they review has to be opening in a few days or have opened a day or two earlier.

Expertly constructed wham-bammers (i.e., “what you see is what you get”) sell tickets and give less sensitive audience members a good time, but they don’t linger. The ones that do always deliver the undercurrent stuff, “the things that are not said.” Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse and L’Avventura deliver this in spades; ditto Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others and Cristian Mungiu‘s Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.

One level below this (and this is flattery I’m dishing here) are the ones that may not have a churning river underneath, but they keep the emotional content in check. They hold their cards to the chest and let the audience absorb what’s there rather than show or explain it or use a laser pointer and say “here it is…see?” (Either you get it or you don’t, but you’d have to be an idiot to miss it.) This is what Ben Affleck‘s Argo does superbly. He never tips the bucket over and spills the water out and leaves puddles on the floor. He always ladles it out just so, concisely and succinctly and yet making sure that the water has all the right nutrients and effervescence. In a word, he believes in brevity. And that is a welcome thing.