I don’t get the thing with the red-haired guy and the tape measure and the restraining order. The only Google uncovering is a movie called Restraining Order starring Eric Roberts.

A few weeks back that call-to-arms Expendables trailer was funny and cool and everyone got it. Then The Expendables started to be screened and the air went out of the balloon. Which is why Stephen Zeitchik‘s 8.6 L.A. Times piece about gender genre loyalty and the epic box-office battle between The Expendables and Eat Pray Love feels a bit behind the curve.

(l.) Javier Bardem, Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love; (r.) Jason Statham, Sly Stallone in The Expendables. Indulgence, travel, mysticism and hot nights with Bardem vs. Stallone-y brawn, wink-wink machismo, exploding body parts, and a beautiful innocent Latina woman being tortured in a concrete room and waiting to be rescued.

I was down with the idea of The Expendables being a standard-bearer for guy movies, but no longer. Any guy who wants to bail on this notion and join me on the metrosexual side and at least give Eat Pray Love a fair shake is welcome to join.

If we were looking at a face-off between, say, Sex and the City 2 — a film that celebrated spiritual emptiness, material indulgence and everything appalling about upscale 21st Century female culture — and Tony Scott‘s Unstoppable, then we’d be talking about something cool and perhaps even socially significant. I’m usually into the Tony Scott experience (Domino was an exception) because it makes the guy sensibility feel slick and cosmopolitan and technologically in-step. I would stand four-square with his latest against any chick flick that falls under the heading of semi-vapid. Which, let’s be honest, is a fair adjective concerning 90% of the output.

But I can’t feel any allegiance or camaraderie with The Expendables, even in a joke-assy, what-the-hell sense. So Eat vs. Expendables is simply not an equal or interesting battle.

I don’t know how good or bad Eat Pray Love is (it’ll begin screening early next week), but the odds are that it’s at least a somewhat better film that the Stallone. The spiritual element may seem effete and/or sanctimonious to some but I doubt if it’ll be presented as laughable or groan-worthy, which is more than you can say for certain portions of The Expendables. And the Eat Pray Love trailers are telling me it’ll at least be fine on a technical level. It’ll look and sound like a movie made in the 21st Century as opposed to The Expendables, which looks and feels like a 1987 Cannon film.

Zeitchik says that Eat vs. Expendables is “as close to a laboratory environment as you can get. For one thing, the two films’ subject matter and intended audience couldn’t sit on further ends of the gender spectrum. There isn’t much in each movie that should appeal, at least according to what Hollywood executives commonly believe, to the non-core gender. The Expendables contains few romantic interludes, while Eat Pray Love doesn’t feature many mercenary gunfights. Julia Roberts is interested in discovering a foreign country. Sylvester Stallone wants to blow one up.

“It’s also a near-perfect test-tube case because the movies are similar in so many other key respects. Both are mid-budget studio films coming out in the dog days of August. Both were made with the goal of pleasing crowds more than critics.” (Really? That was Ryan Murphy and Julia Roberts’ goal? They sat down and said, “Let’s make a movie that the critics will probably hate — well, maybe some of them wil be okay with it — but which women will love”?) Zeitchick also notes that “both pictures are driven by one huge-name star accompanied by a host of smaller ones. And the two are going head-to-head with very little competition.

“Given all this, the film that wins the weekend will provide a given gender with bragging rights (and perhaps, also, hand a few ideas to demographic-minded studio executives). It’s almost like each movie is carrying the weight of its gender on it shoulders (a point made amusingly in the below fan trailer for The Expendables which implores men to turn out for the film next weekend and defeat Eat Pray Love).”

No, no…that’s what I’m saying. The Expendables is not carrying the guy-movie genre on its shoulders. If anything it’s somewhere between a slight and a full-on embarassment to action fans.

“Though both films are tracking at roughly the same rates — in electoral terms it’s a dead heat — Eat Pray Love is actually generating more interest among its core audience than The Expendables is among its audience,” Zeitchk continues. “It may be that men simply don’t want to see the Stallone flick and would be more enthusiastic if they simply liked it more. But another inference appears just as valid: that men just can’t get worked up as women about a movie aimed at them.

Zeitchik concludes with the following: “So if there’s a disparity among the core audience, where does the Stallone movie make up ground? Well, with women. The Expendables is tracking better with females than Eat Pray Love is with males.”

That won’t last long. Not after women hear about Giselle Itie‘s Sandra character — the only lady with any screen time in The Expendables. Sandra is a cross between a standard-issue Latina spitfire and a kind of perfect, idealized, defenseless damsel-in-distress. She might as well be modelled on Purity Dean, the heroine in Paul Loomis‘s Pure as The Driven Snow.

The Other Guys will easily win the weekend. It made around $13 million yesterday and will most likely accumulate $35 or $36 million by Sunday night. Inception appears to have dropped its usual 30-something per cent (31% to be exact) for a $5.6 million take Friday, a $19 million weekend cume and a grand tally of $228 million. Step Up 3, a film that does not exist in the minds of millions, topped Inception yesterday by $400,000 (i.e., around $6 million) but if it drops today, as expected, it’ll end up with only $15 or $16 million and a third-place finish.

Otherwise there’s a three-way race for the #4 position with both Despicable Me and Dinner for Schmucks making $3.4 million yesterday, and Salt grabbing $3.2 million. Schmucks has more or less collapsed with a staggering 59% drop, which translates into an expected $10 to $10.5 million weekend total and a cume of roughly $46.5 million — all but dead in the water. Despicable did $3.4 million yesterday with a projected $10.5 to $11 million for the weekend and a $210.7 million cume. Salt was down around 45% with an expected $10.5 to $11 million and a grand tally of $91.5 million.

This will sound shallow, but I feel oddly gratified that Paul Giamatti is wearing a wig in Barney’s Version, a Canadian comedy set to debut at the Venice Film Festival. I wanted his thinning hair to stop at Sideways levels, and of course it hasn’t. The film seems lively enough and Dustin Hoffman has some funny lines. I know that the 1997 Mordecai Richler novel that the film is based upon involves three wives and the arrival of one Al Z. Heimer.

Here’s another really shallow thought: I’m cool with whatever Giamatti has a mind to do because he’s a superb actor, but what I’d really, really like is to see him do is play Miles again in another Alexander Payne film. I’m serious. Sideways 2: The Continuing Adventures of Miles Raymond. Some new locale, new challenges, something. I just love Miles’ moroseness, that tortured look, his fundamental decency, etc.

I’m pretty sure this Kevin Pollak bit — i.e., Albert Brooks telling the Aristocrats joke — wasn’t in The Aristocrats. Pollak is amazing. The voice isn’t exactly like Brooks’ but the vowels and inflections are just right. “Whatever, I’m fine..I’ll be in therapy. This is what we do…Helen, you couldn’t be more fired than you are now…I’d kill your family if I knew them…I got nothin’, I’m spent.”

Somebody in Criterion’s editorial department has published a q & a with producer Curtis Tsui, the subject being Tsui’s recent work on Criterion’s upcoming Paths of Glory Bluray. The project led Tsui to visit the rural English home of the late Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director. Tsui is “annoyingly coy” (his own words) when asked to physically describe the house and grounds, but by mentioning an annual three-day arts festival thrown on the estate by Kubrick’s widow Christiane, he provides the geographical location.

I’ve known for decades that Kubrick’s home was near the town of St. Albans, about 22 miles north of London. The website for the Childwickbury Arts Festival provides a map with an icon pinpointing the approximate spot. But when you paste the address — Childwickbury House, St. Albans, Hertfordshire, AL3 6JX, England — into Google Maps, you get a slightly different location to the south.

Tsui mentions a video clip of a November 1957 interview between Mike Wallace and Paths of Glory producer-star Kirk Douglas that he wanted to include on the disc. He couldn’t manage this (“the piece was impossible to land,” he says) but there’s a link to a University of Texas at Austin website that hosts the video. Tsui calls the interview kind of “mind-blowing,” explaining that “the types of questions that Wallace tosses out would catch almost anyone off guard and would never be allowed by a protective publicist today, and it’s really pretty stunning to see Douglas thinking on his feet and parrying those blows like a total pro.”

If you want mind-blowing, consider this quote from Wallace’s introduction: “Just the day before our interview, Mr. Douglas had completed shooting on The Vikings for which he had grown his hair long and he hadn’t yet had the chance to see his barber.” In other words Wallace is not only mindful of the regimented, bordering-on-military approach to men’s hair styles in 1957, but feels a need to actually prepare the audience for the shock of seeing Douglas’s coif, which is maybe a tiny bit longer and fuller than an average haircut worn by a typical Man in a Gray Flannel Suit. Lockstep conformity was the rule among urban male professionals of the ’50s, but Wallace’s remark borders on the absurd.

The other half-comical aspect is a pitch for Phillip Morris cigarettes that Wallace delivers before doing the Douglas interview:

You could call George Gallo‘s Middle Men a kind of crime comedy except it isn’t funny — Giovanni Ribisi‘s hyper performance kills any instinct you might have to laugh at anything in this film — so I don’t know what to call it. I know that after it was over it felt sublime not to be in the presence of actors shouting and sweating and doing lines and smoking and screaming at each other and waving guns around. God!

Middle Men is kinda like Goodfellas but with the emphasis lever turned all the way up, and despite agreeable performances from Luke Wilson, James Caan and Kevin Pollak, this is the central problem. It’s too cranked up. Which, in my book, means it’s all about the less well-known cast members (i.e., everyone who isn’t Wilson, Caan and Pollak) “acting” instead of being. Which gives you a headache after a while.

In all walks of life people of any intelligence usually dial themselves down. Whatever people are feeling or seeking or angry about or whatever, they’ll always turn their 9 or 10 feelings down to 4 or 5 or 6 at the highest. The only people who don’t understand that calm or restrained behavior will always work better than fierce emotionalism are idiots or druggies or people with thyroid issues, and who wants to spend 110 minutes with that kind?

What’s interesting, of course, is that while real-life people usually dial it down, the facts about who and what they are eventually leak out in little ways, and that’s what gives you the willies — those “tells,” those unintentional secretions of truth.

This sort of thing is a lot more subtle, of course, than some hyper, bearded, drugged-out, cigarette-smoking monkey screaming and spraying saliva as he pokes the hero in the chest and blows smoke in his face and whatnot. But in the eyes of under-talented filmmakers, this kind of thing is more appealing from a cinematic standpoint than the dialed-down behavior I’ve just described. There’s a place for shouting and screaming, but if you do it too much the audience will shut down. And that’s what happens when you’re watching Middle Men. You start saying “lemme outta here.”

It’s mainly Ribisi’s fault. Giovanni effin’ Ribisi. He’s so over-the-top in this thing that I don’t think I want to see him in any kind of film for the next four or five years. Really. I’m going to start make a list of all the films he’s and start figuring out excuses for not seeing them.

(l. to r.) Middle Man costar Kelsey Grammer, director and co-wrter George Gallo, producer Christopher Mallick.

Ribisi’s performance is mainly Gallo’s fault, of course. It’s the job of a director to rein the actors in and guide them toward that sweet spot, and Gallo, clearly, hasn’t a clue about how much is enough or too much. I have to figure that Gallo, a somewhat older guy, didn’t want Middle Men to look like it was directed by some decrepit, over-the-hill dude who doesn’t understand the pace of 21st Century cinema and how to reach the ADD crowd by always keeping things cranked, so he decided to turn it on and turn it up and pile on the narration, etc. Some critic said the only thing Middle Men doesn’t have in this respect are pop-up ads.

Look at the above photo of Gallo (center) and Middle Men producer Christopher Mallick, whose actual history with an internet porn-billing service in the ’90s is the basis of the story. Do they not look like waste management guys from North Jersey? They could be sitting around Satriale’s and talking about loan-sharking with Paulie Walnuts. More to the point, they could be associates of Christopher Moltisanti during the making of Cleaver. One look and you know they’re not X-factor types on the level of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. Fuhgedaboutit.

Will Tony Scott‘s Unstoppable turn out better than The Taking of Pelham 123? It looks kick-ass to me, and hail to those that know how to really and truly deliver on these terms. As long as the reason(s) for the train being unstoppable seem logical and reasonable, all will be well. It’ll be total ice cream. You know Scott can do this kind of thing blindfolded with one hand tied.

Last fall I wrote that Pelham 123 should be considered as a Best Picture candidate. And it should have been. So maybe people will consider Unstoppable a bit more seriously in this light. 2010 is looking like a shitty year as we speak so who knows? Shouldn’t there be at least one high-end popcorn movie to round things out?

Will Unstoppable land with a thud? Will it be come to be regarded as the best train movie since Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train or Buster Keaton‘s The General or — the all-time greatest — John Frankenheimer‘s The Train, which used real trains and not a single frame of CGI? Or will it be thrown out with the trash?

When the words gets out that you’re toast and it’s just a matter of time, some people have a tendency to step back a few paces, or turn away and cut off contact. I’d like to think that I’m not one of them, but I’ve seen these responses time and again. One thing’s for sure: Christopher Hitchens is evading nothing in terms of analysis. He’s dealing with it like a man.

When my sister was on her way out with cancer, days or hours from liftoff, my brother (who’s now dead himself) told me he hadn’t visited her in the hospital because “I don’t want to sit in a room and watch her die.” You effing asshole, I thought to myself. It’s not about you, it’s about her.

Death is like walking across a rickety wooden bridge across a huge and deep chasm. It’s not the other side of the chasm that scares you, but grabbing hold of the railing and stepping out and making your way across. People about to do this want people with them, I think. It comforts them that they have people supporting them and telling them in a roundabout way that it’s okay to cross, and that it’s safe and pleasant on the other side.

The MPAA’s decisIon to give an R rating to Yael Hersonski‘s A Film Unfinished (Oscilloscope, 8.18), a respected Holocaust documentary, seems petty and lame. The board reportedly didn’t want minors exposed to two sequences containing frontal nude shots of Warsaw Jews being shoved around by Nazi soldiers. Brilliant!

“In a world where young people are bombarded with meaningless entertainment, it’s unfortunate that a film with real educational and historic value would be denied to them by an organization that is supposed to be working to help them,” Oscilloscope’s Adam Yauch said in a press release.

Throughout the ’90s and into the early aughts I knew, liked and sat down a few times with Richard Sylbert, one of the finest production designers who ever lived. Thinking about Emma Watson ‘s haircut led me to clips of Rosemary ‘s Baby, and then a two-part piece (taken from the RB DVD) about its making, and five or six clips of Sylbert on it. And I was just taking a few moments to think about him. Here are links to part #1 and part #2.

Sylbert discusses this and that decision about Rosemary’s Baby — the New York locations, the writing of the script with Roman Polanski, his advising Polanski to use Charles Grodin to play Dr. Hill, and how this Paramount film, which came out in ’68, was the beginning of the ’70s, in a sense. Sylbert was a wise and perceptive and eloquent man — he knew everyone and everything about 20th Century filmmaking, and knew all the biggest people and their foibles and neuroses, and he always told the greatest tales, and with a great New York voice.

I feel the same way about Emma Watson‘s radical hair removal as John Cassevetes felt about Mia Farrow‘s Vidal Sassoon cut in Rosemary’s Baby — appalled. “The stylist just grabbed the back of my hair and took a whole ponytail of hair out,” Watson tells EW. “It felt amazing.” This is what happens when you let a hairdresser do whatever he wants and you don’t show authority. Those guys will always, always cut a client’s hair shorter, every time.