Yesterday Vanity Fair‘s website posted a huge group photo celebrating Paramount’s 100th anniversary, which is also in the July issue. I wouldn’t have even linked if the web version didn’t have the zoom and name-tag function — otherwise the heads are too small. Anyway, nice touch. Some have claimed that certain actors have been Photoshopped in. I don’t doubt it, but which ones?

If I’d done this I would have inserted color holograms of all the stars of classic Paramount films (Alan Ladd, William Holden, Grace Kelly, etc.) and have them sit or stand right next to Chris Rock and/or Glenn Close. Or at the very least I would have created an alternate group shot with all these folks included. Double-wide, twice the size.

Actual Prometheus Coors spots began airing in early May — really.

Ex-mobster Henry Hill, the guy played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, has gone to that Queens cocktail lounge in the sky. He checked out sometime yesterday (i.e., 6.12) at age 69. Natural causes?

“We had it all, just for the asking. Our wives, mothers, kids, everybody rode along. I had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen. I had a sugar bowl full of coke next to the bed. Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I’d bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I’d either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. Didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. When I was broke I would go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over.”

This is a trailer for European audiences? (Not to mention North Africans, Chinese, Japanese, Middle-Easterners, Mongolians and men and women of India, etc.) The editor was apparently jacked on sugar and Adderall and getting a blowjob from someone half the time. I’m not saying Django Unchained is some solemn 1959 Ingmar Bergman film, but c’mon…this makes it seem like Saturday morning fizz.

Here’s another one — longer, more complex, more violent, more Samuel L. Jackson.

Every day tourists are tooling around Prague on Segways, those electric-powered two-wheel thingies. They’re billed as “green” transportation devices, but what’s greener or healthier than walking? In Ken Russell‘s The Devils, Cardinal Richelieu is shown being pushed around on a two-wheeled cart by an assistant. Russell intended this as a metaphor for corruption, of course — i.e., “this guy is so powerful and arrogant and smug that he can’t even be bothered to walk.” How is the concept of riding a Segway any different?

I can feel it — I can feel that assured, less-is-more, in-the-pocket traditionalism coming out of Trouble With The Curve (Warner Bros., 9.28), a father-daughter relationship drama mixed with a sports story about a hot baseball pitcher (Justin Timberlake) discovered by an aging scout (Clint Eastwood) on his last round-up.

Clint Eastwood during filming of Trouble With the Curve in Macon, Georgia.

Amy Adams plays Clint’s too-short daughter (i.e., wouldn’t she be as tall as Alison?). And Matthew Lillard (an apparently decent follow-up to his work in The Descendants) and John Goodman costar.

I’m not saying it’s baity except for a possible Best Actor nom for Eastwood, this quite possibly (but not necessarily!) being his last acting job, given his 82 years on the planet. Didn’t Eastwood tell someone that Gran Torino would be his last performance? I’m figuring that Randy Brown’s script had to be pretty good to make him want to act again.

I couldn’t find the original link, but an IMDB guy has claimed to have read/heard an interview with “steady” Steve Campanelli, camera operator on Trouble With The Curve and other Eastwood flicks. Campanelli said in the piece that Trouble is “a cross between Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby, but with a happy ending.”

Here’s a J. Edgar-related interview that Campanelli gave to CJAD AM’s Ric Peterson and Suzanne Desaultels.

The only thing giving me the willies is Robert J. Lorenz, a producer of three Eastwood pics (Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima) and a longtime AD, having directed Trouble Behind The Curve. He’s a Malpaso “house” helmer in the same way that former stuntman Buddy Van Horn “directed” Pink Cadillac, The Dead Pool and Any Which Way You Can. Curve will be clean and steady because Lorenz surely took his cues from Clint all during shooting, but I’m feeling a bit uncertain. Just a bit.

Here’s a J. Edgar-related interview that Campanelli gave to CJAD AM’s Ric Peterson and Suzanne Desaultels.

(l. to r.) Clint Eastwood, camera operator Steve Campanelli, 1st Assistant Camera Bill Coe, and actor Bee VANG on the set of Gran Torino.

What a difference a little Jenny Craig makes, eh? Seriously — I respect anyone who can take it off and keep it off. Kill the pasta and the booze and the breads and the cheeses and get serious with the workouts, and the results can be amazing. I was thinking as I watched the Mad Men finale that Christina Hendricks is almost at the tipping point. No longer. Can I say “she’s never looked more tantalizing” without sounding like a sexist dog?

But performance-wise? Chops-wise? I’ve always found “Joan,” Hendrick’s Mad Men character, to be such a brittle drag. She’s always glaring, always seething, always clamped down with a stick up her butt. If I saw her coming in my direction in real life, I’d cross the street on instinct. She never warms up.

Damn those awful, stupid, ridiculously lengthy Brightcove video embed codes. Brightcove needs to be drummed out of the business.

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Guy Lodge have posted Oscar 2012 spitball assessments. The usual-usual but intelligently composed, as usual from these two. And they offer a between-the-lines sense that two or three would-be Oscar titles might be ailing or even discounted at this point.

I don’t know who I am or who anybody else is, but somehow I’d forgotten about Ben Lewin‘s The Surrogate being re-titled Six Sessions.

Forget Kris and Guy’s acting nom maybes — too early. Woody Harrelson for Seven Psychopaths?

The funniest line is from Tapley: “The trick in an awards season these days is to keep people looking the other way, because if they see you coming, they could talk you to death. Guilty.”

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil was going to join Sasha Stone and I for a similar rundown of possible contenders on Oscar Poker about eight days ago but he was too busy so we postponed and now Kris and Guy have stolen the thunder. This is what happens, Tom, when you say “can’t tomorrow…let’s do it later”…okay?

Here’s a report from The Daily Beast‘s Howard Kurtz about last night’s “celebration not just of the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, but of journalism itself, of that brief moment when newspapering was hailed as a noble profession. So it was hardly surprising that The Washington Post, afflicted like most papers by declining circulation and shrinking staff, chose to put on a big bash at the Watergate office building, where the third-rate burglary took place in 1972.”

The following discussion between Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Charlie Rose was posted today by The World Today‘s Brendan Trembath:

Charlie Rose: “Suppose you had the internet and email and Twitter and all that we have today — would it have made covering Watergate different?”

Carl Bernstein: “Yeah — two things. One, I think that how the information would be received by readers and viewers would be very different because there’s so much inclination to look at information from a partisan or ideological source and use that information to reinforce pre-conceived prejudices and beliefs.

“So different in the way it’s received, but in terms of going out and getting the information, there’s no substitute whatsoever for the basic methodology. I mean I went to work when I was 16 at the Washington Star and that’s what you learn to do.

“And that’s what we still do. You talk to people and you know, one thing, you know this Charlie, one of the things that’s happened in journalism, a lot of is there’s a lot of manufactured controversy, when people throw a microphone in front of you or come in with a notebook and say, you know, tell me what this is all about and they leave the room. You learn things by sitting and listening and really learning and being open-minded.

“And the pre-conceived notion of a story that you have when you go out is never the same as what the story turns out to be and it’s because you’re there in person because…

Bob Woodward: “Well human sources are the key.

Carl Bernstein: “Human sources, that’s it.”

Bob Woodward: To answer your question, I think the internet could have helped with connections and so forth, but we talked to some journalism students at schools and they somehow think that the internet is a magic lantern and that you could just Google ‘secret fund’ and out would come all the data you need.

(Laughter)

Bob Woodward: “And, you know, that’s just not true. The good stuff is not on the internet.”

I don’t like the word “hydrate,” which has always struck me as some kind of fussy bullshit way to say “drink a lot of water.” I only know that if someone who’s not an officer or NCO stationed in the Mideast uses that term in what I judge to be an overly assertive manner I’ll start regarding them askance.

I know it sounds weird to object. Why not just roll with it, right? “Yeah, I’ll need to hydrate during my ten-mile hike,” etc. But something about the sound of it bothers the hell out of me. People have been gulping water since the dawn of the species and now they’re hydrating? I’ll bet Jim Thorpe or Jesse Owens never heard the term, and would have ignored it if they had. I know I’ll never use it if I can help it, and woebetide anyone who says it in my presence. Okay, once or twice but that’s it.