Second best line: “You promised me that Hugo would be under two hours.”

The Dictator “is frequently funny and fast-moving and inventive,” I wrote from Las Vegas on 4.24. “And it’s not just another Borat-Bruno here-we-go-again yaddah yaddah, which I had feared it might be.

“Okay, don’t trust me (I don’t care) but it was clear to yours truly and presumably others last night that (a) The Dictator is much, much better than Bruno, (b) it’s not a victim-punking mockumentary but a ludicrously farcical movie-movie with an arc and character development and a payoff — a personal journey of awakening (‘like Eat Pray Love,’ as Sacha Baron Cohen‘s General Admiral Aladeen quips during the last third) that is mostly ridiculous but isn’t dismissable, partly because (c) it has actual political content and a great political third-act speech that for some reason reminded me of a payoff moment in a Preston Sturges film (like Hail the Conquering Hero, perhaps).”

On the promotional circuit for whatever film Kristen Stewart, being as inwardly directed as you or me or perhaps more so, is constantly trying to say things that don’t lend themselves to promotion. But that’s not the job at hand so she’s asked all the usual-usuals (as usual) and she’s always saying “well, yeah, kinda…uh-huh, thank you…I guess so” and other defaults. An obvious reticence and discomfort angling toward otherness…right?

After spotting this two or three years ago I thought Stewart might share the moodiness and perhaps some of the talent of Sean Penn or Marlon Brando. Or that she might at least indulge in experiments from time to time that might unleash something. Now I don’t know. Because Snow White and Huntsman (clip at 9:40) looks profoundly ridiculous, and I’m wondering when will the Penn-like, Brando-ish career experimentation start…or is she just going for the money and saying “fuck it” and whatever else?

It’s very heartening to sit in a warm Berlin apartment on a Sunday morning with a strong cup of coffee and watch YouTube fragments of Friday night’s Real Time, etc. You have to be out of the country to feel this particular form of affection.

“Did anyone notice that the projection framing” for a faux-IMAX (or ‘Lie-MAX’) Boston Common screening of The Avengers, for which customers pay an extra $6 per ticket, “was so off-kilter that all the actors’ heads were cut off just above the eyebrows in every shot? Did anyone care that they were seeing only about 70 percent of the movie they’d been awaiting for years?

“Nah. No one noticed. And that’s why AMC, Regal, and the other chains will keep charging you exorbitant fees for movies that are under-projected, mis-framed and otherwise presented so poorly their makers would weep if they knew.

“Why should the theaters bother to do it right? They know audiences don’t care, that they’re too mesmerized by the 3D digital bread and circuses on the screen to understand that they’re being ripped off.

“I wrote about this issue last year, and while some projection practices at the Common have since improved (and others have remained), the underlying problem is the same: Not enough people at the individual theater level care — or are in a position to be able to care — about how a movie appears to the people who are paying money to see it.

“Kinda makes you want to stay home and fire up your 42-inch plasma screen with the surround sound, doesn’t it?” — from a 5.4 Ty Burr Boston Globe piece about typically shitty projection standards in Boston as well as a general lament about exhibition presntation in general.

The Watch is the adjusted title (post-Trayvon Martin killed by George Zimmerman) of Neighborhood Watch. My insect antennae are telling me it’s a curious little comedy about small-town, middle-aged doofusness, and that the alien plot is ridiculous. Fox’s squeamishness is understandable, but changing the title won’t matter. It’s thin. It’s going to tank. I’m sorry but I can smell it.

It also tells me that Vince Vaughn has heard the cries and is doing what he can to lose some weight — good on him.

Sydney Pollack, whom I knew and interviewed from time to time over a 26-year period, died nearly four years ago. He was always a fretting, hard-working, impassioned director-producer who never took his work lightly, and who was determined every time to make his films as intelligent and full-bodied and emotionally whole as humanly possible. I liked him personally and respected him tremendously. He was a straight shooter and an affable, fair-minded guy.

On top of which Pollack was probably the greatest commentator and raconteur that mainstream Hollywood ever known or worked with — a guy you could talk and listen to for hours.

I’m reminded of this gift of gab by Simon Abrams‘ 5.4 Movieline review of the recently released Jeremiah Johnson Bluray.

“Pollack’s stories about the making of Jeremiah Johnson are easily the highlight of the film’s audio commentary track,” Abrams says, “including such tales as when he had to lay down chain-link fence in the snow to help the film’s trained horses cross treacherously snowy, mountainous terrain, or when he got a live grizzly to chase Redford, saying that the bear had to be teased as if it were a domesticated dog.

“Pollack was such a gifted raconteur that many of the minor details he relates on the audio commentary prove how effortless his total recollection of shooting Jeremiah Johnson was, like when he anticipates the moment in a scene where Redford trips while wading around in freezing water. Redford’s fall that isn’t particularly impressive, but the breezy way that Pollack anticipates the minor event certainly is.”

Here’s my Pollack obit, written the day his death was announced on 5.27.0.8.

And here’s how I described Pollack’s DVD commentary tracks, imagining how Pollack himself might have put it : “Look, I don’t know everything but I do know this much, and I’ve been around enough to understand what tends to work and what doesn’t, and I tried to make this particular aspect work. I don’t know if I succeeded or not but people have told me I did so okay, maybe. But what I really love is the process — the shaping and refining — even though it gives me gray hairs. And I believe in having a sense of humor, or at least a sense of irony.”

You can’t trust Amazon for aspect ratios, but the Jeremiah Johnson Bluray page says it’s 1.77 to 1, which is unusual. What will the 1.85 aspect ratio fascists make of this, if true?

“But the one thing that has haunted me my entire life is finding the truth about my parents.” Honestly — how could Amazing Spider-Man screenwriters James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and/or Steve Kloves have written a line this groan-inducing and on-the-nose? They’re not stupid. They know what they’re doing. There are obviously more skillful and subtle ways of conveying Peter Parker‘s angst. And yet they wrote it.

Directive from a dictator: “From this point on no one will be allowed to compose a shot in which a character drops off the side of a super-tall skyscraper and falls 40 or 50 or 60 stories before stopping the fall and swooping back, blah blah. All directors and screenwriters of all superhero movies will henceforth have to make do without them.”

I love Berlin. I only got around a little last night (i.e., Friday) but much of it feels quiet and uncluttered and laid-back. Very little traffic of any kind. No real crowds anywhere. Everywhere you look there are soothing, almost whispery little dark streets. And cool-looking cafes and restaurants, and none overly crowded. Areas like Potsdamer Platz, where the Berlin Film Festival happens, are glitzy and brightly lit and tourist-afflicted, but this seems more the exception than the rule. Or so it seemed last night.

Adjacent to Amtsgerichtsplatz, a small park on Holtzendorffstrasse in southwest Berlin.

This is a town for people of taste and refinement. The cultural atmosphere feels cool and right and unhurried. In Paris there’s often the roar or at least the hum of traffic, and certainly the sound of scooters everywhere, buzzing around like hornets. Not so much here. Or at the very least, much less so. Huge sycamore trees with titanic leaders line the street where I’m staying. Big trees and abundant shade in a big city always instill a sense of calm. If someone had told me last night that I couldn’t stay indoors and I had to pitch a tent in Amtsgerichtsplatz, a small park across the street from where I’m staying, I would have been okay with that.

Last night at an Italian place I accidentally knocked over a bottle of black vinegar on the table, and it hit the floor and broke open. The black vinegar began to spread across the brick floor like blood in Francis Coppola‘s Dracula. A table of four people nearby were staring at it also. I was struck by how much we all were on the same wavelength, how we were more taken by the curious visual look of this black substance spreading across the floor than by any unsettled feelings about something being broken or a sense of “oh, what an asshole that guy is, knocking over a bottle of vinegar,” etc.

I thought for sure with jet lag and my screwed-up sleep clock that I would wake up at 3 or 4 this morning, but I crashed around midnight and slept right through to 6 am.

Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby offering readers special timeshare rates for vacation homes and year-round residences in Wellswood Park in Torquay, England — just south of Exeter, 20 minutes northeast of Plymouth. Not really. Somebody sent me this photo yesterday.

Beware of new brick walls