I put these on the back bumper every Presidential election year. I get them done at Kinko’s on Westwood Blvd. $32 bills and change for six. An old tradition.

I’ll be sitting down with The Hunger Games about 90 minutes hence, but right now I’m having a WTF reaction to the current Rotten Tomatoes reviews. It’s running 100% as we speak, although a critic friend who’s seen it says this doesn’t calculate. “[The film] doesn’t want to make you poke your eyes with scissors or anything,” he says, “but come on.” So what happened to “toned down for young female demo” and “good enough, somewhat chickenshit“?

“A thrilling, intelligent, deeply-felt movie that does not play by the typical rules of franchise building in modern Hollywood.” — Drew McWeeny, Hitfix. “As thrilling and smart as it is terrifying. There have been a number of big-gun literary series brought to screen over the past decade. This slays them all.” — Olly Richards, Empire. “As action, as allegory, as cinema, The Hunger Games is the best American science-fiction film since The Matrix.” — James Rocchi, Boxoffice. “The Hunger Games is that rarest of beasts: a Hollywood action blockbuster that is smart, taut and knotty.” — Xan Brooks, Guardian.

My critic pally says it’s “one of those unimaginative, let’s-recreate-exactly-what-was-on-the-page-while-watching-the-PG13-rating-and-count-our-money adaptations. I’m surprised Chris Columbus didn’t direct it. Lifeless, turgid, rote, irritating…whatever one may say of, say, James Cameron or Oliver Stone, they have never made a movie as crass and calculating as this one.”

This cover shot caught my attention last night as I was buying groceries at Gelson’s. I was mainly thinking, “This again?” 21 years ago that naked Demi Moore pic on the cover of Vanity Fair was a bombshell event. Before that point the words “naked”, “pregnant” and “sexy” weren’t exactly conjoined in the public mind. No longer. 2012 pregnancies are about pride, delight, celebration, serenity and…fill in the blank. But the “whoa” factor has left the room.

This is a ’80s Roger Corman film without the refinement. (Cannon was always afraid of t & a — they never went there.) And what a supporting cast! Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames, David Hasselhoff, Paul Scheer and Cu Gulager. Dimension will release Piranha 3DD on June 1st.

Woody Allen‘s latest, an anthology piece set in Rome, once had a great title — The Bop Decameron. But under-educated people the world over said they didn’t understand what it meant, and so Allen went with Nero Fiddles — a mildly dreadful title. But the under-educated didn’t understand that one either. So now the film is called To Rome With Love — surely the drippiest that Allen has ever gone with in his 40-plus years of filmmaking.

“The film’s former title, Nero Fiddled, while an appropriate and humorous phrase in the U.S., is not a familiar expression overseas and many international territories preferred a more globally understood name,” explains a Sony Classics press release.

I’m sorry but what does that mean? They don’t have schools overseas? What sales reps from what inernational territories were pleading with Woody to dumb it down?

A movie title can’t be too arcane or obscure, of course, but artists should never descend to the water-table level of common comprehension. Let the unwashed masses come up to your level, dude. You’re the artist. You prepare the food, and the rabble sits down to eat it. To hell with ’em if they can’t figure decipher the meaning.

How clueless do you have to be to not know the expression “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”? If you don’t know that one then you’ve probably never heard the one about Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon or George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Abe Lincoln splitting rails or the expression “it’s Greek to me” (a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) or whatever.

To paraphrase a line from the late Hunter S. Thompson, “Has the international community descended to the level of dumb beasts?”

Or is Woody letting his sister, Letty Aronson (who produces his films and deals with funding and distribution), push him around in his old age? Can anyone imagine the Woody Allen of the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s saying, “Oh, the uneducated masses don’t understand what my title means? I’ll dumb it down then…no problem”?

Snow White (Kristen Stewart) as a pint-sized Bruce Wayne with a touch of Frodo Baggins, learning the art of war from a studly handsome assassin who takes pity (Chris Hemsworth), and then waging a military rebellion against the evil, sometimes naked queen (Charlize Theron)…swords, shields, “Hyaahh!!,” sweat, magic, CG, moisture, fireballs…a full serving of the usual Hollywood fanboy/fangirl stuff. A stylistic twist or two, no apparent surprises, same old fast food. Or so the trailer indicates.

“Who are we kidding? We’re kids. We get to go play. We’re not curing cancer…we’re just [here] to entertain you guys” — Theron at Wondercon.

Universal is opening Snow White and the Huntsman on Friday, June 1st.

Enough with the onslaught of Prometheus teasers and trailers already. This one apparently dropped after (or at the same time as) yesterday’s domestic trailer debut.

I’ve been handed a couple of tickets to see the big swanky restoration of Abel Gance‘s Napoleon at Oakland’s Paramount theatre on Saturday, 3.31. The film will run 5 and 1/2 hours and the show will run longer, beginning in the late afternoon with two or three intermissions plus a dinner break. I saw a shorter version 31 years ago at the Radio City Music Hall with a live orchestral score, composed and conducted by Carmine Coppola. It was truly fabulous all around — ecstatic, unforgettable.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is presenting the show. The Napoleon restoration is by historian, documentarian and archivist Kevin Brownlow, and restoration guru Robert Harris is a co-presenter. We’re talking four special screenings at the Paramount (3.24, 3.25, 3.31, 4.1).

For whatever reason there are no plans to take the Napoleon show to any other cities. I can’t figure why. You’d think film buffs coast-to-cast and worldwide would gladly pay top dollar to see this, especially with the live orchestra and all. Talk about a once-in-a lifetime thing.

The problem for me is that I’ll have to shell out $500 to make the Oakland show. The roundtrip Southwest air fare (Burbank to Oakland) will run about $300 minmum and then there’s renting a car for $40 a day with a one-night $100 hotel cost (and maybe a bit more) plus meals and Diet Cokes and whatnot.

I’ll never see Napoleon on a big Polyvision screen again and I remember what a jolt it was in NYC in ’81, but I’m still having trouble with plunking down five Ben Franklins and perhaps a tad more. You have to show a little discipline in life. I’ve never splurged like this for a single viewing of a film. Even if a Bay Area friend lets me crash on their couch it’s still a $400-plus tab so I don’t know. I’m mulling it over.

I could always rent a car in LA and drive up, but I’d have to leave on Friday if I want to be rested for the Saturday afternoon show. Friday to Monday rental at $40 a day would be $120 plus insurance plus gas — figure $220 or so. But I’d have to stay Friday and Saturday night at a motel/hotel and that would be a couple of hundred plus meals so I’d be right back to $500 or so.

I’m going to a friend’s wedding in the Palm Springs area next weekend, and that’s a big deal that I don’t want to miss. The tab for that will be $500 plus a wedding gift so I don’t know about Oakland. I really want to go but it feels excessive. Why don’t they just bring the show to LA?

I’ve always liked the films of Jay and Mark Duplass (Cyrus, Baghead, Puffy Chair) and that introspective thread they always weave into their material. But their latest, Jeff, Who Lives At Home, which I paid to see last night, is about a gentle-mannered, perceptive, lethargic stoner (Jason Segel) who’s the size of a Tibetan Yeti, and his delusional douchebag loser of an older brother (Ed Helms) who’s much smaller. And it’s really hard to care about the fate of guys who are this lost and pathetic.

I’ve always attributed the line “life is hard but it’s even harder when you’re stupid” to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which is to say author George V. Higgins. But apparently this was John Wayne’s line first. But you know what’s hardest of all? Watching movies about guys who are stupid. Or, put another way, movies which aren’t interested in using stupidity to deliver broad comedic goofs, but as a way to get into the curiously absurd but wise way of things in a bright-guy vein.

That’s the Duplass way, their signature, I get that…but not this time.

Segel’s character, Jeff, is roused from his ripped basement apartment stupor when he (a) is watching some TV face named Kevin push a product that will get you going and help you lose weight or whatever, and then (b) gets a phone call from a pissed-off guy asking for Kevin. Jeff is persuaded henceforth that the name Kevin holds some cosmic significance for him. So he’s on a bus to take care of some household-repair thing for his mom (Susan Sarandon) and decides that some black kid on the bus named Kevin is part of this chain of fate. And then he gets ripped off by Kevin’s friends while having a few puffs, etc.

How moronic do you have to be to even begin to think and behave like this? I’ve known plenty of stoners in my time and none of them have even approached the outer region of this level of deranged behavior. My schizophrenic sister would make these kind of associations now and then when she didn’t take her medication, but she never acted on them like Jeff. She’d just mutter about stuff while sitting at home and listening to music and watching MTV.

The only people who are affected, say, by the shape of a mound of whipped cream on a cup of hot chocolate and then begin to study the shapes of clouds in the sky, convinced that when they find the cloud that has the exact same shape as the whipped cream that their life will somehow take on a magical quality…this is not what stoned do-nothings are about. This is what people who’ve crossed the River Jordan into the Realm of Cuckooville are about. There are no stoners, in short, who are as off-the-reservation stupid as Segel’s Jeff. So for me, the movie went right out the window during the first ten minutes because I can’t invest in the plight of morons who lack the basic-intelligence instincts of dogs and cats.

That said, I liked Sarandon’s character in this thing; ditto Judy Greer‘s wife-of-Ed-Helms. I would have been entirely content to watch a movie about these two, and the hell with the guys. Really.

I was behind this couple at the Westside Pavillion a couple of nights ago. The excitement they were feeling when it was finally their turn to order from the counter guy was almost sexual. It was certainly infectious. I was imagining their delight as they sat down in their seats with a double-large popcorn tub with extra butter, an extra-large Red Twisters, two hot dogs with mustard, two half-gallon-sized cups of Coke. It was playtime. They were really happy.

The centerpiece of Lionsgate’s Hunger Games campaign “has been a yearlong, four-phase digital effort built around the content platforms cherished by young audiences,” writes N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes. “A near-constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live Yahoo streaming from the premiere.

In so doing, Lionsgatemarketing honcho Tim Palen “appears to have created a box-office inferno.

“Analysts project that the The Hunger Games, which cost about $80 million to make and is planned as a four-movie franchise, could have opening-weekend sales of about $90 million — far more than the first Twilight and on par with Iron Man, which went on to take in over $585 million worldwide in 2008.”

“Selling a movie used to be a snap,” Barnes writes. “You printed a poster, ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads. Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired [as] the dark art of movie promotion increasingly lives on the web.”

There is ample evidence that young females are by far the shallowest and most myopic moviegoers in existence as they (a) tend to financially support the worst kind of romantic crap, and (b) otherwise support movies that cater to their delusional dreams (romantic idealism and young-female empowerment) while showing no interest in films that portray reality as most people on the planet earth perceive and understand it. They live in their own membrane.

Palen’s genius is (a) he understands and respects the passion that drives the under-30 female demographic, and (b) has taken this understanding and learned how to exploit it.

Film restoration guru Robert Harris has inspected the forthcoming Chinatown Bluray and called it, from his grain-monk perspective, lacking. “It doesn’t look film-like,” he says, possibly due to “too much de-graining.” There are shots of Jack Nicholson, he adds, “that have no visible grain whatsoever.”

Plus the base transfer used for the Bluray “probably goes back to around 2005-6,” he notes, “and was probably the basis for the earlier DVD. Unfortunately, or fortunately, a great deal has occurred technologically since that time.

“That said, and let me make this point loud and clear, 99% of viewers are going to love this Blu-ray. It’s colorful, clean, and, well…pretty.”

What Harris means by “pretty,” of course, is that the Chinatown Bluray looks nice and shiny. Which means that the Bluray rubes (i.e., people like myself) will be delighted.

I don’t feel proud of being a Bluray bumpkin, but my eyes like what they like and they don’t like what they don’t like. I was a bit conflicted about but nonetheless pleased with Universal Home Video’s shiny Spartacus Bluray for the simple fact that it looks three or four times better than the Criterion DVD version. I am also a huge fan of Universal Home Video’s DNR’ed Psycho — easily one of the most beautiful black-and-white Blurays in existence, partly because it was made to look shiny.

At the same time I love Criterion’s straight-from-the-elements Sweet Smell of Success and Paths of Glory Blurays.

“For the record, I’m not suggesting that [the Chinatown Bluray] not be purchased,” Harris states. “I”m just saddened by the fact that what I’m seeing is not what it might have been.”

HTF commenter named Mark VH responds: “So, in other words, it’s right up Jeff Wells’ alley. Lovely.”

Chinatown laser disc signed by the film’s producer, Robert Evans, in 1995.