Late this morning I spent about 90 minutes touring Studio Babelsberg, the oldest large-scale studio complex in the world which last February celebrated its 100th anniversary. I was hoping to see some remnants of Cloud Atlas (Warner Bros., October), the Wachowskis-meet-Tom Tykwer epic that shot here last year, but alas, all the sets have been struck. But it was great to just roam around and take in all the history and the detail and the endless knick-knacks and eye candy for the soul.

Studio Babelsberg is an all-in-one super-factory for filmmaking — sound stages big, medium and small, a sprawling carpentry shop, a superb prop museum and costume warehouse. You could spend hours and hours inspecting everything.

For a guy like myself, a fan of German cinema since I was a kid, this was like coming home and visiting a grand cathedral at the same instant. Studio Babelsberg is where Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, Josef Von Sternberg‘s The Blue Angel and Robert Wiene‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were shot. Ditto significant portions of Roman Polanski‘s The Pianist and The Ghost Writer, Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, the Wachowski’s V for Vendetta, Brian DePalma‘s Passion (i.e., “DePalma Lesbo Action”)and Roland Emmerich‘s Anonymous, among many others.

It’s located in Potsdam, the leafy university town about 35 minutes southwest of Berlin by train. It helped that this was the first really warm and fragrant day since I arrived in Berlin seven days ago.

Many thanks to corporate communications chief Eike Wolf, who gave me the tour and introduced me around. He also invited me to a Studio Babelsberg gathering in Cannes at the Grand Hotel in eight or nine days.

I would have stuck around for lunch but only one guy takes orders at the studio cafeteria — one guy! — and the line is endless, and most of the dishes include piles of french fries.

Update: “It’s great you made a point of going out to Babelsberg,” a critic friend has just written. “I was there in 1990 before the studio had its latest modernization. Just wonder if your guide pointed out that the striking moderne buildings put up in the late ’20s and early ’30s were designed by none other than Albert Speer.”

Babel Marlene

European street set where the Warsaw ghetto portions of The Pianist were shot.

Eike Wolf, head of corporate communication for Studio Babelsberg AF — Friday,

I misheard Eike Wolf when he said that one of Hugh Grant’s roles in Cloud Atlas is that of a “woman” — I thought he said “Roman.”

The train conductor’s uniform worn by Kate Winslet in The Reader.

I was prepared before seeing Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows this afternoon at Berlin’s Cinestar plex. It has a shitty Rotten Tomatoes grade (51% positive), and the word has been out for a while that it’s spotty at best with a dopey script and not much cohesion. But it looks so rich and sublime, you see. It’s an absolute pleasure to just sit and watch and not listen to or care about.

Burton creates visual art that you can hang on a museum wall, and if you can shut off the usual movie-watching expectations Dark Shadows is a very pleasurable way to spend 113 minutes. Just pretend you’re strolling through a motion-y MOMA exhibit.

I felt underwhelmed but not pissed off. I shrugged, smirked and mostly dug what it was. No anger. Just don’t go expecting anything like Beetlejuice or Ed Wood or Sweeney Todd or Edward Scissorhands — those days are over, I’m afraid. And take comfort, at least, that it’s better than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland.

Forget the underwritten characters, the obligatory fire-and-destruction CG in the third act, the ridiculous introduction of a werewolf manifestation during the last ten minutes and all the other stupid crap. Burton has never been much of a storyteller — we’re all used to his shortcomings in this department. He’s a production designer who feeds off off the feature film racket. And so he’s obliged to hang his darkly creepy visual panache and downbeat attitude humor on the clothesline of at least a semi-rickety plot with semi-fleshed-out characters, etc. He directs films because they give him a bigger audience and a much bigger payday than creating art for galleries or whatever.

I knew early on that Dark Shadows would be a thin sandwich and that I had to settle into it as a visual thing only or leave. And that’s what I did — I stayed and more or less grooved on Johnny Depp‘s lovely black-and-white skin and inky black hair and the lustrous orange in Helena Bonham Carter‘s hair and the delicate, fine-boned beauty in the face of Bella Heathcote and the gray turbulent sea at the foot of a rocky cliff and that standardly gothic home in which the Collins family resides, etc. And Michelle Pfeiffer‘s huge ’70s hair and eyeliner and unpainted toes. I was fine with all of this. I just sat there and sank into it and didn’t nod off, not once.

But God, that third act is awful! “The script is shit and I think even Burton knew it when he was shooting,” I told myself around the 40-minute mark, “and he didn’t mind because he knew guys like me wouldn’t mind either.”

Everybody has an idiotic high-school incident or two (or three or four) that they’d rather forget about so it’s a little below-the-belt for Washington Post reporter Jason Horowitz to dredge up an embarassing episode from Mitt Romney‘s past, which occured in 1965 at Michigan’s Cranbrook School. But hold on — this was a homophobic incident in which Romney, aided by jerkwad friends, clipped off the blonde hair of a guy named John Lauber because his hair style seemed effeminate. And that makes it fair game because only major-league asshats pull stuff like this.

And for this story to come out in the wake of President Obama’s statement of support of gay marriage? Excellent timing.

I know (or knew) all about high-school bullies picking on guys because they didn’t act right or dress in the right way or whatever. I tasted some of this first-hand because I was quirky and theatrical. And now we know that Romney was one of these fucking guys.

Romney was just asked about this incident and apologized for it, naturally, but I think we all know that if you’ve acted like a serious dick in high school you’ve pretty much flown your colors and you won’t change. Not really. You’ll modify and clean yourself up, but you are who you are. As we get older we learn how to hide our unappealing stuff so it’s meaningless for a guy Romney’s age to say “I’m sorry,” “I was wrong” and “that wasn’t cool.” The point is that he was arrogant enough to pin the guy down and cut his hair off in the first place.

This is the second significant character incident that will dog Romney between now and November 6th — this and the dog on the top of the station wagon.

The currently configured 2012 Cannes Film Festival public screening schedule was posted today or recently or whatever. Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Them Softly won’t screen until Tuesday, 5.22. David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis doesn’t show until Friday morning, 5.25, and Jeff Nichols‘ Mud screens on Saturday morning…after I’m gone.

Tweets indicate that last Friday night a research screening of Ruben Fleischer‘s The Gangster Squad (Warner Bros., 10.19) happened at Mann’s Glendale Marketplace 4. Soon after an IMDB poster named josephford876 posted a review.

I’ve no way of knowing if this guy actually saw Gangster Squad or not, but he writes like a legitimate Regular Joe with repetitions and failure to link actors to character names and whatnot. I’ve been suspicious all along that Fleischer (Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less) is out of his depth on Gangster Squad, and that at the very least he lacks the kind of Michael Mann– or Curtis Hanson-level chops to pull off this kind of period-piece gangster melodrama. So at the very least Ford’s review, however legit or illegit, reenforces this prejudice.

“I was honestly underwhelmed,” Ford began. “It’s a very, very stylized film and its aesthetics reminded me of Sin City and Watchmen. The film uses a lot of slow motion, a lot of which takes away from the film. It’s very action-packed and the first half hour is excessive violence. In short, it’s style over substance.

“I was worried that the film would be out of the range of the director based on his previous works, and that belief was reaffirmed in the first act of the film. This isn’t a conventional, atmospheric and stylish LA noir. It’s only stylish in the sense that there’s a lot of slow motion and constant, jarring flashbacks, but it’s not what I expected from a drama piece [set] in the 1940s.

“The film is also more comedic than I expected, and the comedic undertones take away from the film itself. The audience was cheering and clapping all the time, and it’s the kind of film that is definitely entertaining but nothing special. It’s very straightforward, very predictable, and obviously an enjoyable experience, but I really expected something serious like L.A. Confidential.

“This isn’t that kind of film — even people around me and with me that enjoyed the film said this was more like Sin City and Watchmen because of its excessive slow motion.

“I don’t want to bash the film. This obviously didn’t work for me, because I expected something a little more serious, but this was way too stylized and in some ways, a film that didn’t take itself seriously.

“The film revolves around Josh Brolin‘s character, so he and Sean Penn are the leads. Ryan Gosling is given significant weight too, so he’s up there as well. The others are part of Josh Brolin’s assembled ‘Gangster Squad.’ The characters are also caricatures, really nothing special.

“Penn, however, was great, and even though he was playing a caricature himself, he was very enjoyable as a mobster. There were several lines that reminded me of the brashness of some great screen gangsters. I love Gosling — Drive is my kind of film so maybe that’s some indication why this was a little excessive for me — but even his character felt like an extension from his previous performance in Drive.

“These two characters were the only ones that stood out for me.

“The film looked complete for the most part, although there were some CGI things that needed fixing. It’s also funny because as a temp track they used music from Inception and The Dark Knight, which obviously will be taken out as the film gets scored, but that was interesting in and of itself.”

I haven’t read Will Beall‘s screenplay (which is based on Paul Leiberman‘s 2008 seven-part L.A. Times series titled “L.A. Noir: Tales From The Gangster Squad”), but the just-released trailer for Ruben Fleischer‘s The Gangster Squad (Warner Bros., 10.19) indicates a fairly fast and loose approach to facts a la Brian DePalma‘s The Untouchables (’87).

It’s being sold as a “get Mickey Cohen” movie in the same way The Untouchables was a “get Al Capone” flick. But just as the real-life Eliot Ness was portrayed as having made noise and gotten tough with Al Capone, in real life he pretty much stood by while the feds nailed the Chicago gangster tor tax evasion. Likewise the real-life Gangster Squad, led by John O’Mara (Josh Brolin in the film) and Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling, ditto), never killed or jailed or put legendary L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) out of business. They mostly seem to have messed with his operations to some extent, or otherwise harassed and irritated. But that was it.

Like Capone, Cohen did time for tax evasion. Two stretches, in fact — one from the early to mid ’50s and the second from ’61 through ’72. The real-life Gangster Squad may or may not have played a role in helping to put Cohen in jail for the first tax-evasion rap, but so far I haven’t read, learned or been told that. (I had a chat yesterday with Tere Tereba, author of “Mickey Cohen: The Life and Times of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster,” and she didn’t seem persuaded that the Gangster Squad had that much to do with it.)

“During the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the United States and Canada partnered to rescue six U.S. foreign service members who had evaded the hostage-taking at the takeover of the American embassy in Iran,” says the Wiki page. “The governments were able to convince Iran that the six hostages were members of a film crew who were scouting the area for a movie titled Argo. The hostages were able to escape the country under their fake identities.”

Directed by Ben Affleck; produced by Affleck, George Clooney, Grant Heslov. Starring Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Clea DuVall, John Goodman, Michael Parks, Taylor Schilling, Kyle Chandler. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Warner Bros. will open domestically on 9.14.12.

In an inwardly directed q & a, New York‘s Frank Rich has addressed conventional wisdom concerns that President Obama‘s history-making announcement that he supports gay marriage could hurt him in an election year when he needs to win swing states like North Carolina. “That’s always been the rationale for Obama’s dawdling,” he writes. “Don’t rock the boat in North Carolina — or Florida or Virginia or Colorado — by speaking out on gay marriage until after November 6 has passed.

“The counter-argument I’d make is that Obama looked like a phony and a coward each day he fudged this issue, and that his taking a strong and principled stand will have a halo effect on his leadership in general, including among voters who are ambivalent about gay marriage or opposed to it. Just look at Andrew Cuomo, whose approval rating remains high upstate and among Republicans, not just among liberals in New York City and its suburbs.

As for the threat that Mittens Romney will now an issue out of Obama’s conversion, Rich writes, “Just let him try. The real political issue for Romney as he tries to attract centrist voters in a general election is if he can avoid being tainted by the homophobes he pals around with.

“Last week, Romney let the religious right drive away his openly gay foreign-policy spokesman Richard Grenell before he even started the job. More embarrassing still, it wasn’t the once-powerful religious-right big guns, the Robertson-Falwell-Dobson types, who put Romney on the run, but Bryan Fischer, a crackpot bigot who hates Mormons as much as he does gays.

“Then again, Romney couldn’t stand up to Rush Limbaugh when he called Sandra Fluke a ‘slut’ or, this week, to that boisterous supporter at an Ohio rally who called for Obama to be tried for treason.”

With Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (Ali, Nixon) having rewritten Peter Morgan‘s screenplay of a long-discussed, long-developed Freddy Mercury biopic to which Sacha Baron Cohen is attached to star and co-produce, Cohen and producer Graham King are after Stephen Frears (The Queen) to direct.

That’s the gist of Jeff Sneider‘s 5.8 Variety story, as far as I can discern. He includes a statement that Baron Cohen’s deal to play Mercury “is expected to close in the coming weeks.” But the Frears aspect seems (a) a wee bit flaky as “negotiations have not yet begun” and (b) a wee bit underwhelming as Frears has been doing a fairly good job of convincing his admirers that he may not be the same guy who directed Prick Up Your Ears, The Hit, My Beautiful Laundrette and The Grifters any more, certainly after directing tripe like last year’s Tamara Drewe and the allegedly unexceptional Lay The Favorite (which I missed at last January’s Sundance Film Festival).

The story “focuses on Queen’s formative years and climaxes with the band’s heralded appearance at Live Aid in 1985,” Sneider writes. Translation: SBC’s Mercury won’t waste away and die of AIDS as the film “won’t focus on the singer’s last days.”