Disney has confirmed that sometime in late April 2015, or roughly five to ten days before May 1, 2015, I will attend a screening of Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers 2 and just sit there and die of pique, the boredom plateauing and my soul dtopping out of me and seeping onto the carpet. I actually might not die if Whedon shoots it in 48 frames per second, but will he and Disney have the balls to grab the steer by the horns and man up and do the technological thing that needs to be done?

If I was half-mad and possessed of unlimited funds, I’d be on my way right now to LAX and a flight to Chicago for a special 70mm screening of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master at the Music Box Theater. If I know Roger Ebert, Michael Phillips, Mark Caro, Ray Pride, Michael Wilmington and Jonathan Rosenbaum, they’ll all be there. The gate will go to The Film Foundation, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history.”

Nobody and I mean nobody in the history of film criticism has mentioned what I’m about to bring up. It’s about a hidden aspect of Spartacus, which I just saw again a couple of nights ago. It’s a question for Howard Fast, who wrote the original 1951 “Spartacus” novel, but he’s gone so let’s just face it. It’s about sex and territoriality and rage that would have been unstoppable.

The issue would have been about the animal anger and resentment that Kirk Douglas‘s Spartacus would have felt over the fact that Jean Simmons‘ Varinia, the love of his life, had been forced to have relations with several of his fellow gladiators, as was the custom during captivity in Lentulus Batiatus‘s gladiator school in Capua. The result would have been heavily strained friendships between Spartacus and his slave-revolt comrades after they’d broken out and become free men.

If Spartacus was anything like Detective James McLeod, whom Douglas portrayed in Detective Story, he would have been an intensely jealous guy and no day at the beach. No matter how he intellectually rationalized what had happened — all slave women at Capua were ordered to have weekly sex with gladiators at the direction of Charles McGraw‘s Marcellus, the sadistic gladiator boss — he still wouldn’t be able to handle it in his gut. Any ex-gladiator who had “known” her would be on Spartacus’ shit list, and he would have given them dirty looks and subliminal attitude and maybe even put them into forward skirmishes with Romans in the hope that they’d get killed.

Matrimonial relations between Spartacus and Varinia wouldn’t have been very pleasant either. Every time Spartacus looked at her he would see Heironymous Bosch fantasies that would torture him. He would see John Ireland‘s Crixus or Nick Dennis‘s Dionysus or Harold J. Stone‘s David thrusting themselves inside her, sweating and groaning like lions. Remember when Warren Beatty‘s Ben Siegel said to Annette Bening‘s Virginia Hill, “I was just wondering if there was somebody you haven’t fucked?” That’s how it would be almost all the time between Spartacus and Varinia.

Don’t give me the movie version with Spartacus and Varinia consumed by perfect love and rolling around the grass — that was put in for the box-office. Everybody knows how guys get when they’re jealous. They just can’t get the sight of their wives or girlfriends orally pleasuring other men.

Notice that Spartacus’s best friend was Tony Curtis‘s Antoninus, the one guy in his inner circle who hadn’t been at Capua and therefore had never, ever “had” Varinia.

David Chase‘s Not Fade Away, a period drama about the travails of a New Jersey band in the mid ’60s, will debut at the 50th New York Film Festival on Saturday, 10.6, as the Centerpiece Gala. Pic costars John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett and Christopher McDonald. The soundtrack is produced by longtime Bruce Springsteen E Street band member and Sopranos cotar Steven Van Zandt. Paramount Vantage will open Not Fade Away on 12.21.12. Chase knows what he’s doing, but this sounds smallish, funky, good-timey.

Chase can romanticize Italian-American New Jersey culture all he wants, but I lived in New Jersey for a while and I know what those guys were like. They were very gang-ish, very unto themselves. And they were bullies. They would give you hostile looks (“Wanna start somethin’?”) in school hallways. One time three or four of them were sitting on a park bench, and as I walked by one shouted in my direction, “Hey, man…you a guinea?” No, I said. “Then what good are ya?” And they weren’t that hip at the end of the day. So fuck them, okay? Not now but if I could go back in a time machine I would take a baseball bat and tell them to go fuck themselves if they looked at me cross-eyed.

In a piece about audience reactions to Craig Zobel‘s Compliance, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn notes that “walkouts have become a regular occurrence.

“At last night’s New York City premiere at the IFC Center, one woman loudly announced her disapproval to the room around the halfway mark. ‘Gimme a break!’ she spouted before storming out, not realizing she was subjecting herself to a post-screening workshop.

“At the end of the movie, a panel moderated by Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano elaborated on the movie’s conceits. Along with Zobel and costar Ann Dowd, Marano was joined by practicing psychologists Nando Pelusi and Stanton Peele.

“When Peele asked the audience if they would behave similarly, the outbursts erupted with a consistency that lasted until the theater manager had to clear the room. Among the guests that night was longtime 60 Minutes host Bob Simon, who took the high road. ‘I would’ve known that wasn’t a cop within a few minutes,’ he insisted. A younger viewer said ‘I’m highly educated and wouldn’t have known.’

“The key reaction came from a woman at the back of the room. ‘It’s difficult for intelligent people to watch such unintelligent behavior,’ she said.

“That made it official: Compliance digs out a universal superiority complex and forces it into battle mode. It’s a movie that feeds on collective emotions — anger, denial and, most of all, fear — but also triggers explosives along the faultlines of class.”

MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz sat down with Lawless costars Shia Lebeouf and Jessica Chastain, and got Shia to confirm that he’ll definitely be doing Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac and that he’ll be dropping trou and having sex on camera and so on.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela McClintock has reported that Nymphomaniac “follows the erotic adventures of a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) from her youth to age 50, as recounted to her husband (Stellan Skarsgard).”

No clue how LaBeouf’s role fits into this, but he’ll presumably engage with Gainsbourg in some capacity.

Von Trier “is splitting the English-language project into two films and will shoot a softer and more explicit version of each,” McLintock added.

Lawless screenwriter Nick Cave has admitted a basic truism to L.A. Times columnist Steven Zeitchik, to wit: “If beautiful movies can influence you to go out and hug your children, then we have to be honest and say that other movies can inspire you to do bad things. To say they can’t is to deny all movies their power.”

Well…of course! What is lively, impassioned, straight-from-the-heart movie criticism but descriptions of the various mental and emotional states that movies have put us in, and how cleverly or clumsily they’ve managed it?

What movies have put bad thoughts in my head? We’re talking about a very long list, I fear, but almost every film Kate Hudson has made (with the exception of Almost Famous and The Killer Inside Me) has made me want to knock people’s hats off. Yes, including her ass-cancer film. Ditto early Matthew McConaughey. (I’ve twice alluded to Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick here, and this riff is inly three paragraphs long.

The seasoned, storied and widely respected film maven and essayist F.X. Feeney tried and failed to post a response to two recent Heaven’s Gate pieces — last Sunday’s “Don’t Buy The Bullshit” and Monday’s “To All Heaven’s Gate Revisionists.” So he asked for help. Feeney is pretty much the founding father of the campaign to upgrade the reputation of Michael Cimino‘s calamitous 1980 film, and so I’m honored to hear from him and to provide him this forum.

“There’s no such thing as a ‘neglected’ masterpiece,” Feeney begins. “The firebombing Heaven’s Gate suffered at the hands of its first critics is evidence that it played on the deepest nerves in a viewer from the get-go. People wanted a masterpiece, didn’t feel they got one, and reacted with venom and scorn. Fair enough. There’s nothing a filmmaker, or admiring critic, can do or say. A film has to speak for itself.

“This was essentially the argument Jerry Harvey mounted by screening Heaven’s Gate in its entirety on Z Channel, 30 years ago this coming Christmas. The ‘director’s cut’ was thought destroyed. No copies existed in the United States. David Chasman, a studio exec and friend of Harvey, alerted him to the existence of an intact print in a British warehouse. That was what eventually aired at Z, and it was this rather fragile fading copy with its accidental sepia sequences which became the basis of every VHS, laser and DVD copy that has screened ever since.

“No negative of Cimino’s original version exists, and all the surviving elements have long been in decay. This is why he has undertaken a restored version at the invitation of the Criterion Collection, for premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September.

“I haven’t seen it yet, but Cimino’s excitement was palpable when I spoke with him, a few months ago. He has made global adjustments in color and sharpness. The visuals in this next iteration should be newly rich. He has also deleted the problematic intermission. His task ahead was to remix the audio.

“I haven’t spoken with him since he took this on, so don’t know how well it’s been resolved, but one acute technical problem that has afflicted Heaven’s Gate from its beginning, even onto DVD, is that you can’t hear the dialogue. The picture was originally mixed and its sound tested in what is now the Cary Grant theater, on the MGM (now Sony) lot. This optimal setting was deceptive. When Jerry Harvey and I screened the film in that setting, twice, late in 1982, we could hear every pin-drop. Nobody else anywhere has ever experienced the film under such perfect conditions.

“Here’s hoping others now may. This restoration should be a great event for anyone who already loves the picture, and an excellent opportunity for dissenters like my dear Jeff — my favorite sparring partner on this topic — to give this work of epic, unrestrained ambition a fresh chance to disgust them all over again. Or…? Is it possible even you may see it with fresh eyes, my friend?”

Much of Hit and Run (Open Road, 8.22) is a very cleverly written, refreshingly original, angular-attitude comedy that reminded me (in the early stages, at least, and in portions throughout) of David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96), and that is high praise indeed. That classic comedy had inspired character flavor, unusual detours and flaky oddball dialogue, and so does Hit and Run. And while this stuff was happening during last night’s premiere screening, I was delighted.

The story is basically about a former getaway driver for bank robbers (Dax Shepard) whose easy backwater life under the Witness Protection Program with a classy educated girlfriend (Kristin Bell) is thrown into chaos when his past catches up with him. Boil it all down and it’s a premise for a car-chase comedy, for the most part. There are two or three high-speed, burning-rubber scenes that are passable but nothing special. But the character stuff, particularly the intimate give-and-take between Shepard and Bell, is rooted and intelligent and genuinely funny.

Credit goes to Shepard, who wrote the screenplay, but also, I’ve read, to longtime g.f. and fiance Bell, who contributed to the flavor and undercurrent of this material.

And not just the Shepard-Bell scenes but several others. Hit and Run is off on its own road — at times it hums with unusual, off-tempo hilarity. There’s a completely brilliant scene in which Bradley Cooper, playing a hyper, white-rasta blue-collar sociopath, gets into an initially polite dispute with a tall, pissed-off black guy in a supermarket checkout lane about the quality of dog food. (Trust me, it’s a great scene, and ten times funnier than anything Cooper did in either of the two Hangover films.) Costars Tom Arnold. Michael Rosenbaum, Beau Bridges, David Koechner and some red-haired guy who plays a highway patrolman (I’ll eventually find his name) also deliver cool bits and crafty humor. Hit and Run is not your alcoholic brother-in-law’s dumbass comedy.

But Shepard, who also co-directed (with David Palmer) and produced, must also accept blame for the generic car-chase elements and all the super-crazy-ass, muscle-car shit… squealing tires, clouds of smoke, “aggghh!” It’s been done for decades, this stuff. Steve McQueen and Peter Yates got the ball rolling 44 years ago with a landmark car chase in Bullitt (’68), John Frankenheimer upped the ante in Ronin and Quentin Tarantino added lore with some lively back-country road thrills in Death Proof (’07). But there’s nothing new to put on the table.

So how could Shepard have created such a genuinely inventive, unusually well-written relationship comedy on one hand, and at the same time an almost dreary Fast and the Furious thing for yokels?

The burning rubber stuff was inserted for two reasons: (a) Submental males really like fast cars and (b) Shepard is a car and motorcycle freak who sees himself on a certain level as an inheritor of the Steve McQueen mantle. No, I say — he is an inheritor, if he wants to develop his talent, fo the mantle of Billy Wilder, David O. Russell, I.A.L. Diamond, Garson Kanin, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Arthur Richman, the original author of The Awful Truth. He and Bell should step up and write relationship comedies and dramas.

Generally Hit and Run is a major career uptick for Shepard, who before this point had mainly irritated me, to be honest. I found his performance as a none-too-bright L.A. hipster in The Freebie especially irksome, and I hate that grotesque tree tattoo he has on his upper right-arm and shoulder, and particularly those little red leaves or flowers that resemble an outbreak of measles or small pox. But now he’s okay. Now I respect him.

There are currently two Rotten Tomatoes reader reactions to Hit and Run that I find infuriating. A guy named Adam Foidart says “it can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a crazy madcap comedy or lean more towards the dramatic implications…and balance it out with some laughs.” Wrong — this mixture is precisely what makes Hit and Run feel original and satisfying. Films that work only with primary colors are almost always oppressive and obvious. I have the same response to Chris Lee‘s remark that Hit and Run “can’t decide if it wants to be a romantic comedy or an outrageous comedy.” No, dumbass — the best comedies always mix it up.

Update: Just before the start of Tuesday night’s Hit and Run premiere at LA Live, a friend sent me Kim Masters‘ Hollywood Reporter story (filed at 5:10 pm) about Universal having decided to cut Kristen Stewart loose as part of a decision to forget about a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel in favor of a solo-stud Huntsman movie starring Chris Hemsworth. Stewart, Masters reported, “will not be invited to return if the follow-up goes forward.”

Screenwriter David Koepp has also disengaged/been disengaged from the project, says Masters…whatever this actually means or implies.

“Who jettisons Stewart, a star of a certain magnitude, off a sequel to a modestly successful fantasy actioner like Snow White and the Huntsman?,” I wrote in a brief column piece as I sat in the audience before Hit and Run began. “Universal, that’s who. In so doing they [seem to have] essentially proclaimed that KStew is a devalued commodity in the wake of her betrayal of RPatz…no? Are we living in the early ’50s? Box-office-wise, Universal appears to regard her as a kind of Hester Prynne. You’re supposed to ask whether a big studio would jettison a male star off a franchise under similar circumstances.”

But when the film ended and I turned the phone back on, a message from a Universal rep claimed that Masters had gotten it wrong. “THR story is not accurate,” a Universal rep asserted. “The studio is pursuing a Huntsman spinoff but exploring all options to continue the franchise. Nobody has ditched Kristen. No directors attached, no decisions made other than to look at a Huntsman sequel/spin-off. [So] we’re exploring options to continue the franchise and no decisions have been made.”

Update: Universal Co-Chairman Donna Langley has released a statement that says “we are extremely proud of Snow White and the Huntsman and we’re currently exploring all options to continue the franchise. Any reports that Kristen Stewart has been dropped are false.”

I don’t know what the truth is, but Masters has always been a reliable reporter and not given to invention. Did Universal make an early tentative decision about going pure Huntsman and pure Hemsworth sans Stewart, and then experienced severe Twitter blowback and tried to walk it all back? Or is the real truth of the matter contained in Drew McWeeny‘s 8.15 Hitfix piece (“A Full Day of Snow White Speculation Reveals The Tabloid Appetites of Hollywood Press”), which posted at 3:10 am? Key quote: “David Koepp leaving the project is new. That’s it. Other than that, Kim Masters didn’t break news today. She simply repackaged it, sensationalized it. and caused a huge firestorm over the headline.”

Portion of letter to source, sent this morning: “Did it occur to anyone at Universal, whatever their actual calculations & determinations, that at the very least this would LOOK like they were jettisoning Kristen Stewart over a Hester Prynne morals clause? And that jettisoning her RIGHT NOW, a couple of weeks after her RPatz infidelity tabloid blowup, would make them APPEAR to be SEXIST PRIGS & INCREDIBLY CLUELESS? It would have been another thing entirely if they’d announced this a week or two BEFORE the “sordid affair with Rupert Sanders” thing broke. I’m guessing/presuming that Drew McWeeny has it right in his piece, but if you could shed any additional light it would be greatly appreciated.”

Two days ago I did a phoner with Compliance director-writer Craig Zobel. I started by mentioning my admiration of his riveting low-budgeter (Magnolia, 8.17), and that I’d seen it twice (initially at Sundance ’12) and that it’ll remind people of the Milgram experiment of the early ’60s. And it leaves you with two things: (a) Always question authority and (b) be kind and considerate and trust in your own…unless they’re alcoholic assholes. Here’s the chat.

We didn’t discuss Z for Zachariah, a post-apocalyptic drama that Zobel will direct with Tobey Maguire starring and producing with Matthew Plouffe.