The designer of this Spanish teaser poster for Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchanged was obviously going for a Saul Bass effect. But using a chain as the primary image is so literal. It’s almost like showing two silhouetted figures with one saying to the other in a dialogue balloon, “Hey, Django…how’d you break free?”

The challenge will be to put away the cynicism before watching this, and then hope and pray that the script, co-written by Guy Thomas, Andrew Scheinman and Reiner, delivers a few curves and change-ups and sliders, and that Morgan Freeman and Virginia Madsen somehow make it all work or at least raise it up to some degree. The trailer indicates sentimental hokum, of course. The former title was Summer at Dog Dave’s. Is there a release date?

If I was directing this Bully PSA, I would tell these N.Y. Yankees to shape up or ship out. I would say to Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Mariano Rivera and manager Joe Girardi, “Guys? You sound like you’re reading from a fucking cereal box. Forget what the copy says. Try to say whatever you feel about bullying in your own words. Just let it come out naturally. Because you sound like you’ve been asked to do this as a favor and you’re looking to get it over with.”

Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone opens in France on Thursday, 5.17, or just after the start of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The Sony Classics release will probably screen there. You can’t go wrong with Audiard, but the story’s about a highly musclebound guy (Matthias Schoenaerts) in love with a killer whale trainer (Marion Cotillard). What can happen between a pretty girl and a killer whale?

I’m sorry, but Schoenaerts’ performance in Bullhead indicated to me that either (a) he’s not terribly bright or (b) he lacks the ability to convey intelligence through actorish technique or what-have-you. There’s something about him that’s Jean Claude van Damme-ish or even Sylvester Stallone-ish.

In a 4.10 article about the restoring of Jaws for Bluray release (Universal Home Video, 8.14), Bleeding Cool’s Brenden Connnelly has run an interesting quote about grain management from Uni’s sr vp technical operations Michael Daruty:

“Grain removal is always a subjective thing,” Daruty begins. “When you’re scanning an original negative and/or the different generations of materials that we might have to go from, grain is something that we just have to deal with. Sometimes it is dealt with in a positive fashion, and there have been other times that, for whatever reason, there’s been a negative [reaction] achieved for too much grain reduction.

“On all of the titles that we are working on for our centennial, we are very aware of the grain processing and grain management. The Jaws restoration went through a little bit of it, just because the original negative needed it, but I’m telling you, I don’t think you’ll see a film as beautiful as this film has come out. We’re very happy with it.”

Watching The Cabin in the Woods made me feel like I did in eighth-grade biology class when I did an autopsy on a frog. It felt novel and different and coldly fascinating — I’d never cut into the chest and stomach cavity of an animal before — but it was basically a clinical exercise that I knew I wouldn’t repeat. I wonder if the frog felt any pain? Too bad if he did. He’s only a little dead frog and I’m big and alive, and biology class will be over in 20 minutes so who cares?

I know for an absolute fact that I’ll never watch The Cabin the Woods again…ever. Because for all the “fun” of wading into a horror flick that fiddles with old cliches and scatters the cards in a way that feels fresh and smart-assy while spilling many gallons of blood, this is one of the coldest and creepiest films of this sort that I’ve ever…uhm, endured.

Yes — director Drew Goddard and producer-cowriter Joss Whedon have taken the old Friday the 13th/Evil Dead “sexually active kids alone in a cabin getting slaughtered by a fiend” formula and tricked it up and turned it into a kind of horror-hotel concept. With — SPOILER! SPOILER! — several older, cold-hearted creeps in shirts and ties and lab coats keeping tabs on the carnage like bored, professional-class cynics watching a dull football game that they couldn’t care less about.

No horror film is about basking in the humanity of the characters and taking emotional saunas. All horror films say to the audience, “You’re fucked.” But even for a genre that has revelled in blood and torture and sadism over the last 25 or 30 years, Cabin In The Woods is a stand-out. Horror isn’t about “scary” this time — it’s about an ice-cold spectator game that will deaden your soul. Nobody cares, everybody suffers, blood everywhere, take the pain, life hates you, we hate you, God hates you, Lionsgate hates you, fuck off, we want to hear you scream for mercy. Oh, and one more thing: you’re so much more fucked that you know.

Goddard and Whedon are saying to us, “Are you enjoying the game we’re playing here? Pretty cool, huh?” Well, sort of…yeah. You’ve shaken things up, guys, and done it differently…fine. But you and your film are so detached from any shred of feeling or a facsimile of human reality (except in a few anecdotal ways) that you make me want to inject novocaine and embalming fluid into my veins. So I can feel like I’m part of the fun and the coolness. Thanks, dickheads.

The Cabin In The Woods reminded me of an eternal truism — never, ever trust excited geek buzz coming out of South by Southwest. The people who go there are invested in SXSW geekdom and celebrating their own aroma and determined to whip themselves into a lather about any film that half does the trick.

I wouldn’t have mentioned this but Village Voice critic Mark Olsen writes that “at the end of The Cabin in the Woods, the world is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate — an actual hand, mind you — yet that is not a spoiler, not really.” Compared to this the “guys in shirts and ties and lab coats” thing is mouse shit.

Whatever strands of truth may be connected to this sloppily-written, seemingly non-sourced report, it’s safe to presume that no one wants to think about Moe Howard having had an illicit affair…please. Some dogs are better left asleep. The idea of Howard being naked for any reason (including bathing) is difficult in itself.

If anyone has a PDF of the script of Straight Outta Compton, which F. Gary Gray may reportedly direct for New Line, please forward. It was reported almost two years ago that Andrea Berloff (World Trade Center) would be penning the biopic about N.W.A., the mid-to-late ’80s gangsta rap group comprised of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren and Yella.

Because I failed to check Twitter as last night’s 7:30 pm premiere screening of Cabin In The Woods began, I didn’t read breaking reports about Gary Ross decision to not direct Catching Fire, the Hunger Games sequel. I didn’t read the news, in fact, until 9:45 pm when I sat down at Sam Woo’s. My first reaction was “great!…so there’s a decent chance that Tom Stern‘s jiggly-ass, bob-and-weave close-ups won’t be used on Catching Fire? Whoo-hoo! I’ll have the vegetable dumplings!”

Diplomatic side-stepping always prevails when a significant person leaves a company or a project. Statements never allude to anyone being unhappy or frustrated or quitting or being canned. It’s always a calm mutual decision, never about emotion, always about practicalities. So you can bet the deed to the ranch that Ross’s departing statement — “I simply don’t have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule” — is only one piece of the pie. Although it probably was a factor.

It is axiomatic that when a movie is a huge hit, the suits always want the sequel to be made and released quickly before the public mood changes and the zeitgeist turns another page. So whatever polite and supportive noises the Lionsgate guys were making during meetings, the subtitles read “Let’s not spend too much time twiddling our thumbs on Catching Fire…we need to make this sucker sooner rather than later so we can juice the guys we gotta juice, so we can make more money so we can juice the guys we gotta juice. We need to get the third and fourth film made right after the sequel so we can maximize the merchandising and ancillary revenues and generally go to town and fly to Paris and light cigars and dazzle our wives and girlfriends. We’re not artists — we’re Lionsgate executives. We see life in relatively simple terms.”

When Twillight director Catherine Hardwicke walked away from directing New Moon it was allegedly because she didn’t want to make the sequel under deadline and budget constraints that would have cramped her creative style, according to an Entertainment Weekly interview. Those constraints were at least partly imposed by Summit honcho Rob Friedman, who is now Lionsgate’s co-chairman. Do the math.

The Lionsgate guy who told Deadline‘s Nikki Finke and Michael Fleming last weekend that things were hopeful as far as Ross directing Catching Fire now says, “I am in shock.” The source and his colleagues “expected the deal to go down right after Easter weekend,” Finke reports. “And they even went so far as to privately deny an internet report that Ross had told the studio at the start of last week that he would not helm the sequel because he didn’t want to repeat himself.”

The line about needing to “juice the guys we gotta juice, so we can make more money so we can juice the guys we gotta juice” is from a mid ’70s film noir set in Los Angeles. Name the film, the director, the character who said the line and the actor who played him.

Three paragraphs in Guy Lodge‘s Variety review deliver all you need to know about the plotting and the human characteristics in Peter Berg‘s Battleship, which opens overseas in a couple of days. I’ve actually made the three graphs into five.

“Cut to Oahu, Hawaii, where jobless layabout Alex (Taylor Kitsch) is celebrating his 26th birthday in a dive bar with disapproving older brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), a straitlaced Navy recruit. After Alex commits a drunken infraction designed to impress leggy physiotherapist Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), Stone issues a final-straw demand: Alex is to join him in the Navy.

“In seemingly no time at all, Alex has graduated to lieutenant level despite equally feckless behavior in uniform, and is in a serious relationship with Samantha, whose stern dad (Liam Neeson) just happens to be commander of the Pacific fleet.

“All principals are conveniently involved, then, when Planet G’s alien spacecraft crashes into the Pacific and rises ominously from the depths near the naval base in Oahu. A reconnaissance mission led by Alex and scrappy female officer Raikes (Rihanna) aggravates the visitors into opening fire, setting the stage for a protracted series of back-and-forth pyrotechnic attacks of increasing sound and fury until an abruptly curtailed finale.

“‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ mutters Alex, a veritable Cassandra of the high seas — and that’s after two destroyer ships have already been blown to smithereens. Bright enough to quote Homer back at his commanding officer, but dim enough to think the Japanese wrote ‘The Art of War’, he’s too blandly inscrutable a hero to root for with much enthusiasm, which goes for most of the characters.

“The exception is Decker’s Samantha, who’s so unctuously inexpressive, we might actively root for her demise under one of the enemy’s flaming razor-balls.”

Let’s remember that the well-known shot in Jaws (starting at 3:35) of Roy Scheider peeking out at the water over the shoulder of some guy he’s talking to is a steal from Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess. I’m speaking of a shot of Karl Malden peeking over the shoulder of a guy he’s conferring with in order to check out Montgomery Clift, who’s standing on a sidewalk a few yards away.

There’s nothing wrong with theft, mind. The greatest poets have done it, or so said T.S. Eliot.

..for a big new film (not Prometheus but something generically showy and splashy) that’s mostly about teasing and trailing in the creative wake of other films. A teaser for a trailer for a sham of a mockery of a mockery of a sham of a trailer for a teaser and a hand-job. Or, as this 4.10 Ben Fritz L.A. Times article states, “Movie trailers have become a main event…the internet and rabid fan culture have turned movie trailers, once seen only in theaters, into works that are promoted and analyzed as avidly as the films they advertise.”