If Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master is going to play the Venice Film Festival, as rumored, surely there’s a decent chance it’ll also play Telluride…no? Along with Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder and Brian De Palma‘s Passion with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace (which will probably be minor at best — DePalma’s best days are long past)

Obviously I can’t deliver the usual energy and absorption when I’m spending much of my time hiking around the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. But I haven’t enjoyed any serious downshifting in ages, and if you don’t do this at least once every eight or ten years you’re probably going to suffer some kind of loss that will diminish creativity or the bank balance or both. Live and let live, right? It’s only for another eight or nine days and then it’s back to the L.A. grindstone.

Eric Kohn‘s pan of Lorene Scafaria‘s Seeking A Friend For The End of The World (Focus, 6.22) is a little too cerebral and tap-dancy, so here’s what my son Dylan told me after catching a screening last week: “It’s a shitty movie. Scafaria doesn’t seem invested in the idea of an asteroid about to hit the earth…she just wants to end the world for any reason. And none of the characters are interested in trying to survive. It feels like nothing. I just wanted the asteroid to come and kill everyone.”

The film “valiantly tries to inject a familiar premise with renewed emotional discernment and instead flails about in search of it,” Kohn writes. “The directorial debut of screenwriter Lorene Scafaria (Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist), Seeking a Friend follows a pair of would-be lovers on a meandering road trip that takes place in the weeks leading up to the destruction of the Earth, a tried-and-true set-up that provides a simple backdrop for exploring lost souls in search of meaning in their final days.

“While smartly observant in individual moments, Scafaria’s thinly conceived story fails to deepen its scenario beyond the basic allegorical possibilities of the oncoming apocalypse.

“Cast in the same disaffected everyman role he embodies to a fault every time out, Steve Carrell plays somber insurance salesman Dodge, whose wife promptly abandons him upon news of Earth’s imminent demise. With 21 days to go before the cataclysmic event, Seeking a Friend launches Dodge’s titular mission through a series of title cards that lead up to the final moments. That recurring device creates the perception of a gradual build to an expected revelatory payoff, but the movie never rises to the challenge. In the process of relying alternately on poetic restraint and gags, the film’s emotional grounding slowly dissipates.”

The essence of Roberto Unger’s three-week-old YouTube video, which explained why he believes President Obama does not deserve to be re-elected, is bluntly phrased but more or less correct. Obama has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States, true, because he is a center-right conservative with an aversion to political combat and bringing pain into the lives of his opponents, which is what any good politician must do.

But Unger is an egghead purist. He is essentially saying “this man is not what he seemed — he is certainly not doing what many of us would have him do — so let’s pull the temple down upon our heads and let Romney win.” And that is insane.

Benoit Jacquot‘s Farewell My Queen, set in 1789 on the verge of Bastille Day, “has its own charm, a matter-of-fact treatment of lesbianism and magnifique costumes and settings [that] opts for the grand European style of Girl With a Pearl Earring rather than a modernist rereading a la Sofia Coppola‘s post-punk vision Marie Antoinette.” Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson called it “an intimate and sexy period spectacle that takes us backstage at Versailles and into territory Sofia Coppola was not willing to go.”

From Variety‘s Justin Chang: “Benoit Jacquot’s venom-tipped account of palatial intrigue and royal oblivion scrupulously maintains a servant’s-eye view but winds up holding the viewer at an unrewarding distance.”

Two or three hours ago I was sitting at an outdoor cafe in Grindelwald (a 20-minute drive from Lauterbrunnen) and staring up at the somewhat spooky, occasionally cloud-covered Eiger — not the biggest or tallest mountain in the world but one that has killed at least 64 climbers who’ve tried to ascend its north face since 1935. Phillip Stolzl‘s North Face implanted the mystique. If the Eiger had a reddish tint it would look a bit like Cecil B. DeMille‘s Mt. Sinai in The Ten Commandments (’56).

For me, Susan Tyrrell‘s most inspired performance was in Anthony Page‘s I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (’77) in which she played a fruit-loopy resident of a sanitarium that is shared by Kathleen Quinlan. Most obit writers are citing her Oscar-nominated performance in John Huston‘s Fat City (’72), by any measure a vivid and honorable thing. She had a tough life after losing her legs twelve years ago. Condolences to family, friends, fans.

“What is the secret of Lena Dunham‘s success?,” asks The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg in a 6.18 article. “She won’t say it, but I will: She is startlingly brilliant — in equal measures smart and funny — and eagerly self-deprecating. Think of a female Woody Allen or Larry David.

“This is something that I had suspected from watching her work, but that was confirmed to me, beyond any shadow of a doubt, by the hour that we spent together in Brooklyn a little over a week ago, during which we discussed a wide range of matters pertaining to her life and work.”

I don’t know what to do with this erotic Sigur Ros video featuring Shia Labeouf‘s willy. I can roll with the nonsensical slow-mo dreaminess, but it’s making me feel like Bosley Crowther watching Psycho. I respect the homage to the Martin Sheen-freaking-out-in-his-Saigon-hotel-room scene in Apocalypse Now, starting around the 6:00 mark. I don’t know what else.

Either you get it or you don’t. But if you get it, you might incur the wrath of the complacent cows in the field. Consider first this June 17, 1960 review of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Pyscho by N.Y. Times critic Bosley Crowther — perhaps the most fuddy-duddy-ish review of Hitchcock’s classic ever written:

“You had better have a pretty strong stomach and be prepared or a couple of grisly shocks when you go to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which a great many people are sure to do. For Mr. Hitchcock, an old hand at frightening people, comes at you with a club in this frankly intended blood-curdler, which opened at the DeMille and Baronet yesterday.

“There is not an abundance of subtlety or the lately familiar Hitchcock bent toward significant and colorful scenery in this obviously low-budget job. With a minimum of complication, it gets off to a black-and-white start with the arrival of a fugitive girl with a stolen bankroll at an eerie motel.

“Well, perhaps it doesn’t get her there too swiftly. That’s another little thing about this film. It does seem slowly paced for Mr. Hitchcock and given over to a lot of small detail. But when it does get her to the motel and apparently settled for the night, it turns out this isolated haven is, indeed, a haunted house.

“The young man who diffidently tends it — he is Anthony Perkins and the girl is Janet Leigh — is a queer duck, given to smirks and giggles and swift dashes up to a stark Victorian mansion on a hill. There, it appears, he has a mother — a cantankerous old woman — concealed. And that mother, as it soon develops, is deft at creeping up with a knife and sticking holes into people, drawing considerable blood.

“That’s the way it is with Mr. Hitchcock’s picture — slow buildups to sudden shocks that are old-fashioned melodramatics, however effective and sure, until a couple of people have been gruesomely punctured and the mystery of the haunted house has been revealed. Then it may be a matter of question whether Mr. Hitchcock points of psychology, the sort of highly favored by Krafft-Ebing, are as reliable as his melodramatic stunts.

“Frankly, we feel his explanations are a bit of leg-pulling by a man who has been known to resort to such tactics in his former films.

“The consequence is his denouement falls quite flat for us. But the acting is fair. Mr. Perkins and Miss Leigh perform with verve, and Vera Miles, John Gavin and Martin Balsam do well enough in other roles.

“The one thing we would note with disappointment is that, among the stuffed birds that adorn the motel office of Mr. Perkins, there are no significant bats.”

And now this Village Voice review by Andrew Sarris, published a week or so later:

“For many years American and British critics have been mourning the ‘old’ Alfred Hitchcock who used to make neat, unpretentious British thrillers before he was corrupted by Hollywood’s garish technical facility. Oh, for the days of The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Lady Vanishes! Meanwhile in Paris the wild
young men on Cahiers du Cinema, particularly Claude Chabrol, were proclaiming the gospel that Hitchcock’s later American movies stamped him as one of the screen’s major artists.

“A close inspection of Psycho indicates not only that the French have been right all along, but that Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today.

“Besides making previous horror films look like variations of Pollyanna, Psycho is overlaid with a richly symbolic commentary on the modern world as a public swamp in which human feelings and passions are flushed down the drain. What once seemed like impurities in his patented cut-and-chase technique now give Psycho and the rest of Hollywood Hitchcock a personal flavor and intellectual penetration which his British classics lack.

“For one thing, Hitchcock no longer cheats his endings. Where the mystery of Diabolique, for example, is explained in the most popular after-all-this-is-just-a-movie-and-we’ve-been-taken manner, the solution of Psycho is more ghoulish than the antecedent horror which includes the grisliest murder scenes ever filmed.

“Although Hitchcock continually teases his conglomerate audience, he never fails to deliver on his most ominous portents. Such divergent American institutions as motherhood and motels, will never seem quite the same again, and only Hitchcock could give a soft-spoken State Trooper the visually sinister overtones of a dehumanized machine patrolling a conformist society.

“Despite its huge grosses, Psycho makes fewer concessions to popular tastes than an allegedly daring film like Private Property. Psycho takes its audience wherever its director wants to go, while Private Property stays a little ahead of the audience until catching-up finale worthy of Albert Zugsmith.

“In its treatment of outrageous perversion as a parody of an orderly social existence, Psycho has a certain affinity to a modern theatre piece like The Connection in which the audience is forced to respond to its own hypocrisy in making the conventional moral distinctions

“Psycho should be seen at least three times by any discerning film-goer, the first time for the sheer terror of the experience, and on this occasion I fully agree with Hitchcock that only a congenital spoilsport would reveal the plot; the second time for the macabre comedy inherent in the conception of the film; and the third for all the hidden meanings and symbols lurking beneath the surface of the first American movie since Touch of Evil to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films.”

Early yesterday afternoon I was expecting to meet Jett and Dylan at the little Alpine-styled Lauterbrunnen cabin we’re renting, but they weren’t there when I arrived. So I texted them and they said they were in town and would be along. The problem was that they had the only key to the place, and I was coping with a slight call of nature. But I figured I’d wait it out.

The minutes dragged on and they didn’t show. The little devil on my left shoulder began to think about taking care of business behind the cabin. “No!,” said the angel on my right shoulder, “don’t be an animal!” But Jett and Dylan were taking their time. I looked around and noticed that there’s a small driveway behind the cabin — a possible problem — but also that nobody had driven by in quite a while. I also considered the fact that the rear of the cabin is sheltered from view by a hilly mound. Quiet, quiet, no cars, no cars….fuck it, the devil won out and I stepped behind the cabin.

Four or five seconds later a car drove up the driveway with a family in it, and with a three-year-old staring and pointing at me from the back-seat window. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I could guess. And five seconds after that another car drove by with a pretty girl at the wheel. She also checked me out.

If I hadn’t stepped behind the cabin, those two cars would have never driven by.

Even if you click on the captions and bring up the large versions of these photos, the images don’t cut it. You can’t take a photo of “breathtaking” — it can’t be captured.

Sunday, 6.17, around 4 pm.

6.17, 4:55 pm

Dylan, Jett Wells towards end of the hike — Winteregg to Murren with a lot of uphill.