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.

MPI is opening Mathieu Demy‘s Americano in New York on 6.15. That tells you it’s something modest, but Peter Debruge‘s Variety review plus the cast (Demy, Salma Hayek, Geraldine Chaplin, Chiara Mastroianni, Carlos Bardem) makes me want to catch it at least, and it pains me not to have that shot until I return to the States later this month.

“To look at French actor Mathieu Demy is to see a synthesis of his parents, directors Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy,” Debruge wrote. “The same could be said of his directorial debut, Americano, which blends his mother’s unpretentious almost-verite style with a certain forlorn romanticism likely inherited from his father.

“Working on both sides of the camera, Demy plays a Parisian real estate agent who returns to Los Angeles after his mom’s death to sort out her affairs. Among the loose ends are, eventually, a Mexican stripper played by Salma Hayek, whose sultry presence is the pic’s best shot at American distribution.

“With the exception of the incredibly sexy striptease that introduces Hayek’s character rather late in the story, Americano avoids the kind of sensationalism that would make it an obvious fest or arthouse item. Shot on grainy Super 16 in neighborhoods that haven’t changed in decades, Demy’s film echoes an earlier era, like a bottle sent out to sea in the ’70s that’s only just now washing ashore.

“Though Demy’s approach breaks no new ground, directorially speaking, Martin’s personal journey finds a fresh angle on a universal piece of wisdom. Every mother’s son believes he’s the star of his own life; “Americano” captures that humbling moment where one realizes perhaps he has only been a bit player in his parents’ story, not the star, as initially believed.”

Yesterday morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino and I trudged into the valley. Contrino is certain that Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike will be a big hit with younger, shallower women. (Shallower than Sasha, I mean. Channing Tatum isn’t her type.) Prometheus may not hold all that well, we decided. Rock of Ages, That’s My Boy, etc. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer will probably underperform. Brave and Pixar were discussed, but Sasha’s cat managed to stop the recording at some point so that portion is mostly gone. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

This is Helen Hunt‘s finest, most affecting scene in her entire career. The way she says “fries” is dead perfect. And she handles Jack Nicholson‘s classic line with just the right…hesitancy. And acceptance. I don’t care what Guy Lodge or Gabe the Playlist or anybody else says — at times this film has a quality that really, really works. It’s obviously the last successful emotional touch movie that James L. Brooks made. The Bluray is out tomorrow.

Lauren Greenfield‘s The Queen of Versailles (Magnolia, 7.20) “is an oddly spelllbinding, must-see documentary,” I wrote on 1.19.12 during the Sundance Film Festival. “The backdrop is the vacation-timeshare empire of former billionaire David Siegel, and how things began to collapse after the financial meltdown of 2008. But the focus is about how his marriage to 40something Jackie Siegel, a clueless, fake-boobed 40something bimbo, began to rot around the edges when the money began to evaporate and budgetary restraint became necessary.

“Jackie is truly appalling — a metaphor for a kind of profligate soul cancer, a poster lady for American emptiness in the 21st Century. She’s not without “good” qualities, but she makes Imelda Marcos look like June Cleaver.

“She admits to Greenfield that she had kids because she knew her nannies would take care of them. She is compulsive, immature and uneducated — an eight-year old. She’s had a deceased pet stuffed and keeps his remains inside a glass case. When times get tough dogshit turds are seen on the floor of her home. She asks a car-rental rep at an airport who her driver will be, and is surprised to discover that she’ll have to drive the car herself. (I wonder if this last bit was genuine — it seems too much even for her.)

“The press notes say that The Queen of Versailles has “the epic dimensions of a Shakespearean tragedy,” and there is a kind of grandiosity about the downswirl that affects the lives of David and Jackie and their seven or eight kids and their domestic staff.

“It follows their riches-to-rags story over a two…make that a three-year period. It begins before the ’08 crash when Westgate, Siegel’s timeshare company, is bringing in millions hand over fist, and finishes with a financial move that David made in November 2011.

“The material centerpiece of the film is a ridiculous, half-built, 90,000-square-foot mansion — inspired by the palace of Versailles — that David began building in flush times. And then comes the crash and it all gradually turns to shit.

“The Queen of Versailles is a portrait of American cluelessness by way of absurd financial irresponsibilty. It’s a cautionary tale about the cost of living an unexamined life — of living an unrefined and largely uneducated life that’s solely about yourself and your tacky creature comforts and never seeing beyond that. What Greenfield shows is a metaphor about 21st Century American greed, and what happened to the faux-royal easy-money crowd after the good times stopped rolling.

“It’s also a kind of comedy, if you watch it with the right frame of mind. I’m calling it another Al Qaeda recruitment film — the best I’ve seen since Sex and the City 2.”