Before the dead-cow bayou muck factor kicks in around the two-thirds or three-quarters mark, Beasts of the Southern Wild (Fox Searchlight, 6.27) earns enough creative impressionist mood points to earn it a Best Picture nomination…which it probably will receive at the end of the day. But I’ve never appreciated the comforts of hot water and soap and clean sheets and clean socks on your feet as did when I emerged from seeing Beasts at the Park City Racquet Club last January.

Mediabistro.com has launched a video series called “My First Break.” The opener features New York Times columnist and reporter David Carr recalling his first front-page byline — a piece about police brutality (i.e., “thumpers”) for the Minneapolis Twin Cities Reader. A great story in itself. I can’t wait for the others.

If right now wasn’t the best time of my life — financially, spiritually, emotionally, health-wise — I probably couldn’t write this, but there are four acts or phases in the life of a gifted or at least driven samurai-poet-artist, and two of them are hell. Well, one and a half.

The first is called “my life hasn’t quite kicked into gear yet but it hopefully will, and if it doesn’t I’ll be flirting with varying degrees of misery for the rest of my life.” (A LexG subcurrent reads the same but has this addendum: “And I so can’t stand not being there that I’m going to drink/compulsively chase girls/smoke pot/gamble/shoot heroin to narcotize the pain.”) I was in this phase until I was 25 or 26, and even after I started to climb out of this things weren’t so great. It didn’t really get good until the late ’80s (when I got married and had kids) and early ’90s.

The second is called “it’s happening and it’s great, but I know it could all slip away if I don’t stay on the stick and work hard and eat right and stay away from the bad habits…I know things’ll be hard anyway from time to time, but I can roll with a downturn or two.”

The third phase is called “yep, this is really working out pretty well…steady as she goes, good writing happening, business is somewhere beteen plugging-along and thriving, sons are doing great, nice comfy abode, travel year round, cats are healthy, terrific scooter to buzz around on, booze is history, good eating habits, anger issues at lowest levels ever, great-quality streaming on 60″ Samsung, relatively lean, no pot belly, most of my hair hasn’t fallen out,” etc.

The yet-to-be-experienced fourth phase is called “my life is fine but the really good years are more or less over in terms of career and good money and pretty women and travel and general excitement, and henceforth I’m looking at a kind of slow, steady-as-she-goes downhill slide. True, the spiritual serenity and and the life-wisdom stuff are peaking now and that’s beautiful, but my days of real electricity and occasional triumph are over.”

The first act is the worst (I’ve been there — it’s awful), the second is good and bad in equal portions and the fourth act is probably not as bad as it sounds — i.e., at least you have your laurels to rest upon.

There’s a fifth phase, of course — “Let’s see, I’m 88 now and I need to wait for the guy to come at noon and replace my wheelchair wheels, but in the meantime there’s a lot to read and my cats love me and I can alway stream a good film whenever I want and it sure is nice to have that package of Depends sitting in the bathroom just in case,” etc.

Come to think of it, this may be worse than the first act. At least you’re in the game when you’re young, miserable and unfulfilled. At least you’ve got a chance to get lucky or strike a vein of some kind. In phase five you’re pretty much finished unless you’re a novelist or a painter or an online columnist, or unless you’re lucky enough to be Norman Lloyd or somebody on his level.

“…and it’s all over much too quickly.” — Woody Allen, Annie Hall.

I’ll get the 60th anniversary Singin’ in the Rain Bluray (7.17), of course. I love the lush, poster-paint intensity of ’50s Technicolor films, and this 1952 Stanley Donen musical certainly has that. The question is whether or not the Bluray will be mastered so specifically that you can see the cheesecloth base of Gene Kelly‘s toupee, but that’s what I like about Bluray detail. I eat that shit up.

But the older I get, the harder it is to really enjoy or even get into Singin’ in the Rain. I can still appreciate what’s “classic” and “joyous” about it. The problem is that it feels — has always felt — forced and a bit clenched.

The satire and the spunk are infectious, and I’ll never stop marvelling at Donald O’Connor‘s acrobatic ragdoll dancing in that “Make ‘Em Laugh” number. And you can’t wave away Kelly’s choreography (especially in that opening vaudeville number with O’Connor) and his boundless energy and bright-lights smile. And Debbie Reynolds is fun. I’ve always been irritated by Jean Hagen‘s fake-screechy voice, but the movie hinges on this so she — it — has to be endured.

But there’s something chilly and fake about this film that’s hard to describe, but is absolutely there. It tries so hard to entertain that its like watching four seals bouncing beach balls on their noses for 103 minutes straight while balancing on a high wire. And O’Connor is such a jerky and robotic actor that if you let him, he’ll drive you nuts in this thing. Underneath that elastic puss he seems terrified of everything, including himself.

Is it because The Artist covered the same era and told a vaguely similar story about Hollywood types grappling with the dawn of the sound era, and because I’m sick of thinking about that whole 1920s movie-within-a-movie realm? Maybe.

Hollywood routinely casts actors who are obviously unrelated by blood to play parents and their children — actors who are so genetically disparate that your brain and life experience boil over like water in a pot. “Are you trying to piss me off?,” you mutter at the filmmakers. “I’m trying to go with your damn movie and you’ve got a baboon playing the son of a giraffe. Presumably you’re aware that giraffes don’t give birth to baboons and that many ticket-buyers are aware of this also, so why are these actors sharing a family dinner? Why?”

The enterprising Todd Solondz has been known to challenge and sometimes beat Hollywood at this game. I’ve never been able to tolerate his icky films to begin with, but at times his family castings have been ludicrous. Three years ago I wrote that one of the reasons I bailed on Solondz’s Life During Wartime at the 65-minute mark was “because the tall and large-boned Allison Janey could never be a sister to the tiny pipsqueak British actress Shirley Henderson — not in a million fucking years.”

But one can see at a glance that Solondz has outdone even himself in Dark Horse, his latest film, by casting Jordan Gelber, a fat, balding, curly-haired New York Jew, as the son of the slender, light-brown-haired Christopher Walken, the real-life product of a Scottish mom and a German dad who at best could be mistaken for a Ukranian Jew, and the famously blonde and WASPy Mia Farrow, whose dad (John Farrow) was Australian and mom (Maureen O’Sullivan) was Irish.

Don’t get me wrong — I can’t wait to be tortured by Dark Horse. I’ll see it any way I can while I’m still in Europe (i.e., if the downloading isn’t regionally blocked) or at least when I get back to New York later this month. All film critics and writers are required to not only submit themselves to the Solondz experience in a receptive, open-pored way, but to try and follow the example of the late Bingham Ray and praise his films whenever and however possible. Or at least be quiuetly respectful.

Many critics, I’m sure, are sincere in their admiration of Solondz. It’s obvious that A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review is as earnest as the day is long.

Jordan Gelber, Mia Farrow in Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse

I despise Solondzworld. It was obvious years ago that the man is obsessed with the ick factor (child molestation, incest, dysfunctional shut-ins), and that he’s unable to divorce himself from his more-or-less constant theme — i.e., the inner monster in us all will always crawl out and can probably never be restrained. Solondzworld is a place of constant guilt and denial and venom and nightmares. Whenever I spend time with Solondz’s characters, I tell them to “do the merciful thing — get out your father’s AK-47 and shoot yourself in the mouth…easier and less complicated that way.”

From his Wiki bio: In July 2010 Solondz completed the script of his next film, Dark Horse, which was filmed in the fall of 2010. Solondz commented that “there’s no rape, there’s no child molestation, there’s no masturbation…and then I thought, ‘oh my God, why didn’t I think of this years ago?'”

Inspired by a two year-old Sacramento Bee piece by Stephen Magagnini, a Roger Ebert tweet asks “if the term is ‘Asian American’ fading into history, like ‘Oriental’ before it?” That led me to ask, “When’s the last time I heard anyone in a film say ‘Oriental’?” From my perspective, the answer can be found at 2:48.

Movieline film critic Stephanie Zacharek has announced on Twitter that she’s been laid off by Movieline effective 7.13, and that her “Chief Critic” position is being eliminated. Which means what in terms of the Hollywood fortunes and online publishing strategies of Jay Penske‘s MMC, which also owns Deadline.com?

They’re…what, trying to save money? They’re arbitrarily shaving expenses because the books are suddenly scaring them? They seem to be saying that they don’t see the value any more in having film critics as major contributors, and that’s a weird thing to say. It would have been one thing if MMC had decided that they like Movieline critic and contributor Michelle Orange, say, better than Zacharek. But by eliminating Zacharek’s chief film critic job altogether they’re saying that no critic matters that much. Which is a way of saying “to hell with having a critic at all.”

This is what struggling newspaper owners have been saying for years, of course, but MMC is supposed to be a thriving, on-top-of-it online operation. So what gives? There’s a story here. I trust someone will report it sooner or later.

I’ve been predicting all along that President Barack Obama will squeek through to a victory over Mittens Romney, nudging him by two or three points at best and more or less surviving by the grace of God. If he does any better it’ll be because something will drop into his lap that will make him look better to Joe Schmoe, who always votes like a grunting superstitious dumbass.

“The first look at the 2012 FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast has Obama as a very slight favorite to win re-election,” writes N.Y. Times election handicapper Nate Silver. “But his advantage equates to only a two-point lead in the national popular vote, and the edge could easily swing to Romney on the basis of further bad economic news.

“Mr. Obama remains slightly ahead of Mr. Romney in most national polls, and he has had a somewhat clearer advantage in polling conducted at the state level. Mr. Obama would be about 80 percent likely to win an election held today, according to the model.

“However, the outlook for the Nov. 6 election is much less certain, with Mr. Obama having winning odds of just over 60 percent. The forecast currently calls for Mr. Obama to win roughly 290 electoral votes, but outcomes ranging everywhere from about 160 to 390 electoral votes are plausible, given the long lead time until the election and the amount of news that could occur between now and then. Both polls and economic indicators are a pretty rough guide five months before an election.

“While the economic indicators suggest that the economy is growing sluggishly — at a below-average pace of about 2 percent growth per year — it is not yet in recession and incumbent presidents often receive the benefit of the doubt from voters. A favorable precedent for Mr. Obama is George W. Bush, who narrowly won re-election in 2004 under similar circumstances.

“One of the confusing aspects of this presidential race so far is that national polls have often shown a race that is nearly tied — or Mr. Romney sometimes leading — while Mr. Obama has more often had the lead in polls of crucial battleground states. Sites that project the presidential outcome based on the state polls have thus seemed to show a tangible advantage for Mr. Obama, while those that look at the trend in national polls seem to imply that the race is too close to call.

“Any evaluation of the presidential race needs to reconcile this discrepancy. That America is highly divided along partisan lines does not negate the basic mathematical identity that the whole must equal the sum of the parts.”

“Cronos is not in any way a perfect movie, but it’s a movie full of conviction,” Guillermo del Toro tells Mike Goodridge in the latter’s new book, FilmCraft: Directing. “When you make your first movie, whatever mistakes you make are very glaring, but if you have conviction, and I would even say cinematic faith, this also shines through.

“I recently watched Cronos again and I thought, ‘I like this kid,’ he has possibilities. After your first movie, with a little bit of craft, diligence, and more importantly, experience, you learn to make virtues out of some of your defects.

“What I mean is that any first movie has good moments, even if it is not entirely perfect. It can be a filmmaker as famous as you like, such as Stanley Kubrick, whose first film Fear and Desire (1953) is about 70 minutes long and stars Paul Mazursky. It is very stilted, very awkwardly paced, full of stuff that doesn’t work, the actors speak in a patois, and it has a very non-naturalistic rhythm. But what is incredibly fascinating is that the very stilted quality, that artificial rhythm, eventually became Kubrick’s trademark in later films.

“He bypasses it in more naturalistic films like The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), but comes back to that type of hyperrealism or strange filtered reality in his later movies, and he is in complete control of it there. Kubrick used the tools he acquired in making other films to transform what you thought was a defect in Fear and Desire into a virtue.”

http://www.amazon.com/Cronos-The-Criterion-Collection-Blu-ray/dp/B0043VUHUU/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1339086738&sr=1-1