It’s mildly drizzly in Prague today. I’ve been here for just about three weeks now, and it’s rained almost every day. Briefly, I mean. One or two days have been totally shower-free. Plus it’s been cloudy and cool. And the apartment, nice as it is, doesn’t seem to want to generate any heat. It’s almost summer and I’m trying to turn the radiator on! I could do with a little Romanesque warmth right now…a little T-shirt action. Anyway I’m outta here tomorrow. Train to Munich, and then a week or so in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

After opening in Italy nearly two months ago and drawing mostly lukewarm reviews, Woody Allen‘s To Rome With Love finally faces the American music at tonight’s opening at the L.A. Film Festival. Expect the first tweets around 9:30 pm LA time, or 6:30 am Prague time — right when I get up.

Sony Pictures Classics is opening it on 6.22. You’d think that the marketing guys would have put out a different trailer by now, one that’s a little more oblique and flavory and not so on-the-nose.

I still say Allen should have stuck with the original title, The Bop Decameron.

“The movie is a magnificent postcard of the eternal city,” wrote NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli, “a carefree romp along cobblestone streets nestled between ancient ruins and Renaissance palaces. A soft yellow glow pervades every scene. It projects an image of the sweet life with all the charms under the Italian sun, set to the tune of old standbys like ‘Volare’ and ‘Arrivederci Roma.’

“Allen has said he grew up watching Italian cinema and was influenced by its grand masters. While there’s nothing neorealist in his latest movie, it has an echo of Federico Fellini‘s The White Sheik, and Penelope Cruz‘s performance in one segment calls to mind Sophia Loren‘s high-end call girl in Vittorio de Sica‘s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

“The movie is made up of four separate vignettes about love swaps, mistaken identities and the cult of celebrity. One features Allen himself playing a retired, neurotic opera director who tries to make a star out of a man who can sing Pavarotti-quality opera, but only in his shower.

“In another episode, Alec Baldwin plays a famous architect vacationing in Rome, reminiscing about his youth in the city. Along the way, he meets a young American student, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who is love-struck by Ellen Page, playing a narcissistic young actress.”

If anyone could throw me a PDF of a relatively recent draft of Now You See Me, I’d be much obliged. “FBI agents track a team of illusionists who pull off bank heists during their performances and [then] reward their audiences with the money,” it says here. Costarring Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, Michael Caine, Elias Koteas and Dave (younger brother of James) Franco.

The Summit pic, directed by Louis Leterrier and most recently re-written by Josh Applebaum, Andre Nemec and Edward Ricourt, will open on 3.15.13.

IMDB trivia: “Michael Caine was locked in his dressing room for a whole night during the shooting of the movie. Caine fell asleep after shooting and couldn’t hear when the director called the day a wrap. Everyone thought that Caine left and the set was closed. Caine wake up in the pitch dark and wasn’t released until the morning until someone heard his cries for help.”

That 43% Rotten Tomatoes rating for Adam Shankman‘sRock of Ages obviously means that some are cutting it a break. (I love Andrew O’Hehir’s rationale that “it isn’t trying to be real — it’s trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before.”) But one guy who’s always been partial to musicals (and who creamed over Dreamgirls) is MCN’s David Poland, and his decision to not be kind to this spoof of the cranked-up ’80s rock scene is telling, I think.

Choice portions: (a) “Shellshockingly bad…worst wide-release film of the summer so far, going away…Project X was more coherent…such a total, horrifying waste”; (b) “I am just stunned that so much talent came to so little…scene after scene, I just couldn’t believe what I was watching…tone deaf”; (c) “Trying to analyze [this] film feels a bit like trying to dissect diarrhea…I felt physically abused by the time the movie ended, like I had suffered a bad case of Jukebox Musical’s Revenge”; (d) “It is utterly soulless…it has no joy…it has no real passion”; (e) “You really have to go back 30 years to find a movie musical this bad. And at least Grease 2 offered a young Michelle Pfeiffer. And Julianne Hough, you may have many talents but you are no young Michelle Pfeiffer.”

Yesterday Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt reported that Warner Home Video has set the “cold war classic” Ice Station Zebra for Bluray release on 10.9. Those three words make Hunt sound like a kiss-ass. Shot in 70mm and released in a roadshow format with an overture and a general air of pomposity, Ice Station Zebra (10.23.68) was mostly regarded as a mediocrity. Read Roger Ebert’s review…read anyone’s. And don’t listen to any fanboy crap about it being a guilty pleasure.

Yes, any film shot in 70mm (Daniel L. Fapp delivered the stately, studio-house-style cinematography) warrants consideration as a Bluray, but the only truly good thing about this film is Michel Legrand‘s score.

John Sturges directed from a script based on by Alistair MacLean‘s 1963 novel of the same name, and co-written by MacLean, Douglas Heyes, Harry Julian Fink and W.R. Burnett.

Rock Hudson phones it in as a sub commander. He’s never seemed more narcotized and disconnected and bored. Hudson could deliver when motivated, but when he was bad he really stunk. He was sufficient in Giant and in those Douglas Sirk melodramas, and he peaked in those Doris Day comedies, but load him down with rote dialogue in a lead-balloon film like Ice Station Zebra, and he was almost the Rob Pattinson of his day.

Patrick McGoohan‘s played another perverse intellectual nutter, and was the only one with any snap or bite. Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown were wasted.

Here’s Legrand’s overture:

And here’s the core of the exposition:

In the trailer for Sinister, Vincent D’Onofrio explains to Ethan Hawke that a supernatural predator who feeds on the souls of children is called “Bucchool.” That’s what I’m hearing, at least — Horst Buccholz + ghoul. Which sounds an awful lot like “Bud Ghoul.” To further complicate matters, First Showing‘s Alex Billington is calling this spook “Mr. Boogie.” What’s that, an old blues musician playing in a New Orleans saloon? A loan shark character left out of Scorsese’s final cut of Goodfellas?

Scott Derrickson‘s Sinister played at SXSW screening last March. Hawke plays himself playing a true-crime novelist in a movie. He and the family move into a new house that has a horrific history, blah blah. It was co-written by AICN’s “Massawyrm”, a.k.a. C. Robert Cargill.

“The scaled down nature of the production is impressively old school,” wrote Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn. “Producer Val Lewton, who invented this game in the ’40s with low -budget studio efforts like Cat People, would have loved it. The ghostly visuals creeping into the plot retain an especially chilling value for the lack of information accompanying them, and the supernatural figures are among the scariest to appear in an American horror movie since The Grudge.”

Earlier this evening the Expats.cz guys took me to a “Meme Fest” (i.e., 90-plus minutes of YouTube classics) at Prague’s Bio/Oko, a combination theatre/bar that caters to a hip crowd and is more or less Prague’s Film Forum or Nuart. Would you sit with 70 or 80 too-easily-amused people to watch a lot of YouTube stuff (maybe 40% of which I’d seen) on a big screen? I did. For an hour. Until my patience ran out. But I loved visiting the Bio/Oko, and I loved the Jack Rabbit Slim’s car in the orchestra.

The Expats.cz team (l. to r.): Radka Peterova, Content Manager; Olga Langova, Account Manager; Monika Petrasková, Admin; Jan Purkrábek, Content Administrator; Martin D. Howlings, Managing Director; Jason Pirodsky, Editor.

“Now that Mad Men has drawn to a close and we prepare to spend the rest of the summer looking back on a particularly dense season, we can reflect on all the clues that led to one of this year’s biggest plot turns — Lane Pryce‘s suicide,” writes Vulture‘s Matt Zoller Seitz. “The show’s death obsession dominated recaps and comments threads throughout the last twelve weeks, and with good reason. Every episode contained one or more hints that a major character would die.

“Indeed, more so than any other season of Mad Men, this one earns the adjective novelistic. No single episode can be considered wholly apart from any other; each chapter replenishes the death/mortality motif in imaginative, sometimes playful ways.”

“This video essay, titled ‘A Death Foretold,’ collects a few of the more obvious and subtle predictors from season five. The piece is a joint effort by me; writer Deborah Lipp, who recaps the show for my IndieWire blog Press Play and co-publishes the Mad Men-centric blog Basket of Kisses; and Kevin B. Lee, the site’s editor-in-chief and in-house cutter.”

Because I’m straight, I’ve never gotten much less enjoyed Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (’62). So even though I’m totally queer for black-and-white Blurays, I’m on the fence about getting this one. Warner Home Video is putting out a 50th anniversary Bluray on 10.9.12.

And to think that a mere ten years later, Marlon Brando held up the same dead rat by its tail and pretended to take a bite, and then said to his pretty but appalled young lover, “You know, I’m gonna get some mayonnaise ’cause this really is good with that.” And then some laughter as he walked down the hallway and said, “Rat’s asshole with mayonnaise…hah-hah-hah!”

DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze is calling the Masters of Cinema 1080p Bluray of Double Indemnity “just brilliant! [It] far exceeded my expectations. The more prevalent and consistent grain [is] the biggest attribute [but] the contrast layering is superb and the Bluray exudes a powerful film-like presence. There is more information in the frame, notably at the bottom edge [plus it’s generally] brighter and more detailed. I was mesmerized by my viewing…fabulous!”

Dr. Svet Atanasov, writing for Bluray.com, says “this is undoubtedly the best presentation this stylish noir film has ever seen on any home video format. Detail and clarity are very good throughout. The daylight sequences look sharp and fresh, while the nighttime sequences boast pleasing depth. The blacks are lush and stable, never looking boosted, while the grays and whites are well balanced. I am most pleased with the fact that there are no traces of overzealous sharpening corrections.”

From a 6.12 N.Y. Times article by Michael Cieply about the all-but-total disappearance of American realism in movies: “Last year Hollywood’s top 20 domestic box office performers included just two movies — The Help and Bridesmaids — with realistic stories about American life, contemporary or otherwise, according to boxofficemojo.com. The rest took place in a fantasy world, like Thor, or abroad, like The Hangover Part II and Fast Five.

“In 1992, by contrast, 15 of the 20 best-selling American films were rooted in realistic, if sometimes twisted, American experiences. Those included Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3, A League of Their Own, Unforgiven and Boomerang, all of which were released from May to August of that year.

“By 2010, pressure to generate international sales, which now account for about 70 percent of Hollywood’s worldwide ticket revenue, had pushed the simple portrayal of American lives almost completely off the big studio schedules in May, June and July.

“[Mainstream movies] have ceded the cultural mirror role to TV,’ said Martin Kaplan, a professor of entertainment, media and society at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, referring to the studios’ diminishing taste for films that reflect the home audience. “Shows like South Park, Family Guy and Modern Family are where Americans now go to try to figure out who we are.”

Incidentally: Bured in paragraph #15 or #16 is a statement that Billy Bob Thorton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car is “set for release by Roadside Attractions next year. Written by Tom Epperson, the film is about British visitors, led by John Hurt, who collide with a Southern clan headed by Robert Duvall.” Hurt is quoted as saying the film “is like an American version of a Chekhov play.”

Anyone born in the late ’40s, ’50s or ’60s grew up with an idea of a sometimes rough-and-tumble American political system that favored the powerful, as always, but enabled the middle and lower-middle classes with a certain amount of security and opportunity. Millions worked their tails off and got ahead, particularly during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon years. The result was a general sense of fairness and faith in a basically decent system that other countries admired.

That idea is out the window now. Since Reagan, I mean. The oligarchs run the show and the middle and lower-class are humping it double-time on the treadmill so they can stay in place, and many have fallen off and are lying on the floor, grimacing.

As this 6.12 N.Y. Times book review reminds, “The happy one in a hundred had 12 percent of all income in 1984; that had risen to 24 percent in 2007,” and “the bottom 80 percent to 90 percent of the country is struggling hard and has tasted none of the fruits that have been showered on the wealthy. From 1980 to ’05, during which markets soared and America got indisputably richer, fully 80 percent of the nation’s income gains went to just the top 1 percent [while] most Americans’ incomes stagnated, with the middle class getting nowhere.”

What can we Americans do about this? Hmmm. Wait, wait, I’ve got it — let’s elect one of those oligarchs President of the United States! Wow. Thank God for the insight and good common sense of the American rightwing community.