Yesterday morning Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet posted a Collateral location map with assistance provided by Movie Locations and Seeing Stars. It reminded me of the one absolute rule when it comes to Los Angeles film locations — if at all possible, never shoot west of Highland or north of Playa del Rey. But the Valley is okay.

What was the last genuinely cool film that was mostly shot on the west side? The Long Goodbye? Plenty of ’80s, ’90s and aught films surely qualify.

Before I watched this I was almost ready to use the headline “All Master-ed Out” but then wait, whoa…hold up. This one has sex, audacity. energy, menace, flicking tongues, cops, fisticuffs. Forget the Piss Christ one-sheet that half-smothered interest and those “jeez, uhm, I think I need to see it again” Music Box reviews. The Master is back to urgent, bracing, necessary.

That aside, the apparent decision by the Weinstein Co. and Paul Thomas Anderson to blow off the Telluride Film Festival (8.30 through 9.3) is a highly bothersome thing, if not a tiny bit tragic. It’s been said that for the second year in a row that this much-loved Rocky Mountain festival feels a little light in the loafers. It needs at least one cold-cocking power hitter from the auteurist ranks, and the absence of both The Master and Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder is being felt and meditated upon, let me tell you.

A third hunt-for-Osama-bin-Laden film, possibly from Steven Spielberg? On top of John Stockwell‘s Code Name: Geronimo, a hunt-for-bin-Laden film that the Weinstein Co. may release sometime this fall, and Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, a highly anticipated film about the same topic that Sony is opening on 12.19? Two is a stretch — three is ridiculous.

Here’s a good riff about Shia LeBeouf’s bootlegging character, Jack, in John Hillcoat‘s Lawless, written by New Yorker critic Anthony Lane: “LeBeouf has the expression of a panicking puppy and a name like an Islamic steak house…but he gives Hillcoat’s film a pulse and a purpose that it sorely needs.

“Jack is the runt of the litter who longs to be top dog and the sheen of desperation on Labeouf’s face, as he hares off in a truck with a cargo of alcohol or poses for a photograph like a proper outlaw, tells us everything about the cravings of a small-time crooks.”

The only way I’ll be paying attention to the goings-on in Tampa this week is if somebody blurts out a gaffe of some kind. It’ll show up on Twitter and we’ll all take it from there. I tried to watch some pre-convention discussions with Andrea Mitchell this morning and I realized right away that I can’t do this. It’s pollution. It’s gas.

Oh, and by the way: here’s what RNC Chairman Reince Priebus had to say about this morning’s dustup with Chris Matthews. What an unctuous little worm, this guy…smoke-blowing scumbag.

Tomorrow Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, “a wild and poetic story of a woman’s erotic journey from birth to the age of 50,” will begin filming in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany (northeast of Dusseldorf). This means that costar Shia LeBeouf, who has said he’ll be performing real-deal sex scenes with star Charlotte Gainsbourg (or perhaps with someone or something else), is now in Germany and almost certainly going through a little pre-performance anxiety as he paces back and forth in his hotel room. Who wouldn’t be?

The thing to remember is to not repeat the Cillian Murphy full-frontal experience in 28 Days Later, and that means following the golden rule, to wit: between bouts of athletic engagement, always maintain a state of maximum tumescence in repose. In other words an unclothed actor, as Sid Krassman put it in Terry Southern‘s “Blue Movie,” needs “a little heft” to start with before getting down and going to town. To not have that could be deeply embarassing and perhaps even career-wounding.

A Trust Nordisk press release announced today that Nymphomaniac, which costars Jamie Bell, Connie Nielsen, Mia Goth, Jens Albinus, Severin von Hoensbroech, Peter Gilberg Cotton, Nicolas Bro, Tabea Tarbiat, Janine Romanowski, Jesper Christensen, Tania Carlin, Felicity Gilbert and Shanti Roney, is scheduled to last 11 weeks, mostly in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany and for a shorter period in Flanders, Belgium. Pic is expected to be released in 2013.

I don’t know anything, but I wouldn’t mind the idea of Walter Salles‘ On The Road playing Telluride…if it happens. I was genuinely levitating after catching it in Cannes. And even if Robert Lorenz and Clint Eastwood‘s Trouble With The Curve is “not a festival film,” as a colleague feels, I’d still like to see it there.

I think we’ve said all that needs to be said about the other alleged inclusions: Argo, Frances Ha, Ginger & Rosa, The Hunt (a cloddish and infuriating film about an innocent divorced man accused of child molestation by small-town morons and fair-weather friends), Hyde Park on Hudson, Passion, Rust and Bone and possibly The Sapphires.

There will be festival tributes for Mads Mikkelsen and Marion Cotillard.

I for one am very sorry to hear that Terrence Wackadoodle‘s To The Wonder is not Telluride-bound. A meandering romantic triangle movie with metaphorical applications to the ’08 financial crisis (according to Venice Film Festival honcho Alberto Barbera) sounds like a moody mescaline trip, but almost certainly like the kind of film that would find some sort of sympathetic reception in Telluride (on top of the already scheduled Venice and Toronto festivals). How fruit-loopy could it be?

Less than 72 hours remain until my departure for the Telluride Film Festival, which will immediately be followed by a New York pit-stop and then the Toronto Film Festival. I always go through the same routine at this stage. I make a list of things that need to be done, and I get around to some but others get elbowed aside by column writings. And then five or seven other things arise the day before departure and that grim, clenched head-swirl thing kicks in. Pre-departure screenings: a new DCP of Vertigo, Rian Johnson‘s Looper, two Mads Mikkelsen films (The Hunt, A Royal Affair).

Whenever a heated disagreement erupts on a political talk show, the hosts and the sideliners always say “all right, tone it down, take a chill pill.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “Romney’s birther joke…was awful. It’s an embarrassment to your party to play [the] ethnic card.” RNC chairman Reince Priebus: “I’m not going to get into a shouting match with Chris so you guys can move on.” Matthews: “Because you’re losing, that’s why.” Priebus: “Garbage, garbage.” Matthews: “It’s your garbage.”

I was feeling a little bit sour and pissed off during some of today’s Oscar Poker recording. Mainly because of a view expressed by Box-office.com‘s Phil Contrino that 2016: Obama’s America, that hit-job doc that made $6 million this weekend, is…I don’t want to talk about it. But if you’re really disillusioned by Barack Obama then maybe he’s just as bad as Romney…right, Phil? Same difference?

And 2016 director Dinesh D’Souza and producer Gerald Posner are playing the same one-sided game that Michael Moore plays…right? Peas in a pod.

Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

By the way, Joan Prather, the Malibu-residing costar of Michael Ritchie‘s Smile (’75), is a Tea Party member.

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In an interview with the New York Times, Ron Paul detailed his conversations with Republican National Convention organizers, who he says offered him a speaking slot under conditions he couldn’t meet.

According to Paul, convention planners offered the Texas congressman the chance to speak under two conditions: that he gave a speech pre-approved by Romney’s campaign, and that he give a “full-fledged” endorsement of Mitt Romney.

“It wouldn’t be my speech,” Paul said. “That would undo everything I’ve done in the last 30 years. I don’t fully endorse him for president.”

While the libertarian candidate effectively ended his presidential bid when he announced that he would stop formally campaigning in May, many of his supporters have held on to the hope that Paul could amass enough support to challenge Romney’s nomination. As the Associated Press points out, several hundred delegates

Toward the end of tonight’s Newsroom season finale, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) accuses Tea Party wackos of being RINOs — Republicans In Name Only — and runs down a list of traits and beliefs that define them as such. But he was really describing most of the Republican party these days, which has pretty much become all wacko all the time.

Rightie nutters embrace (a) ideological purity; (b) compromise as weakness; (c) a fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism; (d) denying science; (e) being unmoved by facts; (f) are undeterred by new information; (g) have a hostile fear of progress; (h) a demonization of education; (i) a need to control women’s bodies; (j) severe xenophobia; (k) tribal mentality; (l) intolerance of dissent; and (m) a pathological hatred of U.S. government.

“They can call themselves the Tea Party,” says McAvoy. “They can call themselves conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are — the American Taliban.”

Quite true, but British documentarian Adam Curtis owns this analogy, having presented it eight years ago in his documentary The Power of Nightmares.

In 2004 I wrote the following about Curtis’s film: “[It] weaves together all sorts of disparate historical strands to relate two fascinating spiritual and political case histories, that of the American neo-conservatives and the Islamic fundamentalists. The payoff is an explanation of why they’re fighting each other now with such ferocity (beyond the obvious provocation of 9/11), and why the end of their respective holy war, waged for their own separate but like-minded motives, is nowhere in sight.

“That’s right — the Islamics vs. the neo-cons. You might think the United States of America is engaged in a fierce conflict with Middle-Eastern terrorists in order to prevent another domestic attack, but what’s really going on is more in the nature of a war between clans. Like the one between Burl Ives vs. Charles Bickford in The Big Country, say, or the Hatfields vs. the McCoys.

“It’s not that Curtis’s doc is saying anything radically new here, certainly not to those in the hard-core news junkie, academic or think-tank loop, but it makes its case in a remarkably well-ordered and comprehensive way, which…you know…helps moderately aware dilettantes like myself make sense of it all.

“The film contends that the anti-western terrorists and the neo-con hardliners in the George W. Bush White House are two peas in a fundamentalist pod, and that they seem to be almost made for each other in an odd way, and they need each other’s hatred to fuel their respective power bases but are, in fact, almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth.

“It says, in other words, that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz have a lot in common with Osama bin Laden. It also says that the mythology of ‘Al-Qeada’ was whipped up by the Bushies, that the term wasn’t even used by bin Laden until the Americans more or less coined it, and that the idea of bin Laden running a disciplined and coordinated terrorist network is a myth.

“Nightmares doesn’t trash the Bushies in order to portray the terrorists in some kind of vaguely admiring light. It says — okay, implies — that both factions are too in love with purity and consequently half out of their minds.”