You should hear the MSNBC commentators and Capitol Hill legislators falling all over themselves in lockstep praise of President Obama‘s whacking of Gen. Stanley McCrystal and tapping General David Petraeus to take his place. One guy actually said that Petraeus “can do the job” and “turn it around.” What? Afghanistan is a swamp, a quagmire, the wrong wicket. Eight years there and we haven’t a prayer of suppressing the Taliban or achieving anything else for that matter. All Petraeus can do is manage an exit — Napoleon retreating from Russia.

Dennis Dugan‘s Grown Ups (Columbia, 6,25) “is like Jason Miller‘s That Championship Season, except with douchebags who think they’re funny,” writes Marshall Fine. “Rather than offer actual punchlines, the film seems to consist of ad-lib wisecracks and insults to which Dugan and the cast repeatedly said, ‘That’s good enough.’ Not by half.

“The story, such as it is, focuses on five friends, one-time teammates on a championship middle-school basketball squad, who went their separate ways. But they reunite for the funeral of the coach who guided them to that championship when they were adolescents, gathering at a church in ‘New England.’

“Yes, that’s what it says on the screen: ‘New England.’ In other words, this is a movie so lazy that the title card can’t even be bothered to specify a single state for its location, let alone a city. Why say ‘New England’? Why not ‘The Northeast’? Or perhaps: ‘The East Coast’? You don’t want to have to think too much, right?

What’s alarming is that there is an entire generation that considers these guys — Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, David Spade — the comedy touchstones of their era. This is why Generation X is doomed.

“Grown Ups is a scam on the audience — a paid vacation for its stars masquerading as a movie that people will actually pay to watch. There are more laughs in any ten minutes of Toy Story 3 than in this entire flimsy piece of garbage.”

For me, the problem with Knight and Day (20th Century Fox, opening today) isn’t that it’s absurd, excessive, preposterous — a largely incoherent, romper room Coyote-vs.-Roadrunner travelogue cartoon. The problem is that it doesn’t go far enough in this regard.

Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz in James Mangold’s Knight and Day

The Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz film adheres to what has become a standard summer-movie formula — the anarchic, exotic-location bullshit action comedy with a soupcon of romance. The difference here is that director James Mangold and screenwriter Patrick O’Neill have (a) cranked up the craziness to a bolder, loonier level than anything seen before, and (b) thrown out most of the connective plot-and-plausibility tissue that other films in this realm make…well, at least some use of.

The problem is that Mangold and O’Neill have inserted strands of reality here and there — little touch-and-go acknowledgments that aspects of the actual world are part of the story. What they should have done, I feel, was throw the book out and jump off the proverbial cliff and really cut loose. You know, turn it into some kind of fuck-all action fantasia.

I’m just thinking out loud, but I’m imagining Cruise and Diaz and the various costars (including Dale Dye!) embracing the fanciful mindsets of escaped mental patients running nude down an English country road. A movie that pops the cork, gulps down the champagne and goes sailing over the waterfalls saying “nothing matters any more….we don’t care and neither should you!…we’re free, you’re free! We can turn into animals! We can spend the whole film driving souped-up stock cars in Utah! We can take over the White House. We can get jobs as bartenders in Cancun!”

And at the same time (illogical as this sounds) have it be, you know, about something. Like Theodore Flicker‘s The President’s Analyst. That 1967 James Coburn film was a silly, slip-shod satire in some respects, but it had a giddy, curiously liberating tone that ended with a shoot-out between the good guys and the phone company. It started out as a vaguely spooky comedy about a shrink having sessions with President Johnson, and ended up as an invasion-of-privacy thing — a Paul Revere rallying cry about the need for free men and women to fight the corporate goons trying to invade our lives.

But of course, Mangold and O’Neill and their bosses at 20th Century Fox didn’t have the balls to venture into the wild blue. They felt obliged to protect the interests of Newscorp stockholders by keeping at least one foot on the ground, or one foot, rather, tromping down on an accelerator as Cruise roars down a freeway with five or six guys shooting at him with automatic weapons.

It’s all crap, really. The movie realm of 2010, I mean, in the sense that now more than ever, Big Budgets mean Iron-Clad Conventionality. The corporate rule book is always followed, always looming. Pinkberry: The Movie isn’t all that funny because it’s a fairly accurate reflection of what’s going on today.

Knight and Day kicks out every so often. I’ll give it that. It’s not hamburger but expensive, well-prepared marbled steak. It looks great most of the time. Every so often Cruise and Diaz have these little mood moments that kind of click into place. But it mostly feels like time — an eternity, in a sense — spent in the recreation yard of a large and lavishly outfitted minimum security penitentiary.

I love the closing line in A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review. In an early scene Cruise says to Diaz, “Sometimes things happen for a reason.” Scott calls this “a statement — perhaps generally true — that applies to absolutely nothing about Knight and Day, including the making of the movie itself.”

General Stanley McChrystal has to be canned or President Obama will look like an even bigger wuss. Those are terms — he must to do an Abraham Lincoln upon his own General George McClellan (who was disrespectful to his commander-in-chef). Because McChrystal “and his hard-bitten, smart-aleck aides nuked the president, vice president and other top advisers as wimps, losers and clowns in a Rolling Stone profile meant to polish the general’s image,” as Maureen Dowd puts it in her current column. No third chances, no slaps on the wrist…fire his ass.

As I wrote on May 2nd, Amir Bar Lev‘s The Tillman Story is “far and away one of the finest films I’ve seen this year, and a likely contender for the 2010 Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It has the stuff that engages and holds and sinks in deep.” Which means, as Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale predicted earlier today, that the fiends at Big Hollywood will probably try and trash it in some way.

Sure enough, BH’s John Nolte responded as follows: “Big Hollywood hasn’t seen The Tillman Story. It wasn’t even high on our radar. But when two of Tinseltown’s top leftist water-carriers” — the L.A. Times‘ Stephen Zeitchik also wrote about it on 6.20 — “carry this much water to assure us there’s nothing political to see here and then assume the highly defensive crouch of challenging us to ‘smear’ it…well, something’s up. And we very much appreciate them letting us know.”

Returning to my 5.2 review: “I felt just as stirred up last night — seething, close to tearful — as I was after my initial Sundance viewing three months ago. Because this is not a film about the Middle East conflict but about a stand-up American family and how they responded (and continue to respond) to an orchestrated governmental obscenity that tried to diminish the memory of a fallen son.

“I’m speaking, of course, of former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, and particularly his April 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan — a result of his being shot three times in the head by a fellow U.S. soldier. It happened because of the usual idiotic confusion, and some young intemperate guys who wanted to be in a fire fight and acted foolishly in the heat of the moment. Tillman was enraged that his own fellows were shooting at him, of course, and his last words were an attempt to get them to wake up — ‘I’m Pat fucking Tillman!’

“The obscenity was the attempt in ’04 by the U.S. military and Bush administration to make political hay out of Tillman’s death by manufacturing a bullshit scenario that claimed he was killed by Taliban troops and that he died in an effort save his fellow troops.

“Of course, 97% of American moviegoers are going to ignore The Tillman Story when it opens because (a) they’re resolutely opposed to seeing any film that has anything to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan and (b) they don’t much like documentaries anyway, and (c) they just want to chill out and be entertained. The fact that The Tillman Story leaves you feeling angry and alive and engaged with the actual world will most likely have no effect on this determination.”

A Reuters story broke today about Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan) being on-board as the new director of the troubled Paramount remake of Footloose. Wait…what? That clattering sound you just heard is 10,000 fans of Hustle & Flow falling out of their chairs.

A paycheck job, obviously. Brewer needs the scratch. He’ll do the work as best he can, and then he’ll presumably make the next “real” Craig Brewer movie.

In a prepared statement Brewer said “he’s been a fan of the original 1984 Footloose, which features hit songs ‘Let’s Hear It For the Boy’ and ‘Holding Out for a Hero’, since he was 13 years old,” the Reuters story says.

“I can promise Footloose fans that I will be true to the spirit of the original film,” Brewer is quoted as saying. “But I still gotta put my own Southern grit into it and kick it into 2011.”

25 year-old Kenny Wormald, a veteran of the MTV series Dancelife, will play the Kevin Bacon role of a rebellious teen who shakes up a small town. Dennis Quaid will play the John Lithgow role — i.e., stern-faced, butt-plugged Reverend Moore. Dancing With the Stars champion and country singer Julianne Hough will play the Lori Singer role, i.e., the minister’s virginal daughter.

The Paramount release will open on 4.1.11.

“The remake has also lost two directors — Hairspraydirector Adam Shankman and High School Musical helmer Kenny Ortega — over the past two years,” the Reuters story says.

Two or three days ago Ken Russell‘s controversial, long-submerged, curiously-delayed The Devils (1971) turned up on iTunes for sale or rental. This got a little attention in the online press, and then last night….phffft! Yanked, one assumes, by some bigwig at Warner Home Video who hadn’t realized that the digital distribution guys had made it available, or something like that.

Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave in dream sequence from Ken Russell’s The Devils.

This morning I asked a WHV spokesperson to explain this strange turnaround.

“Please help me regarding the issue of The Devils being put on iTunes for a day or two or three and then hastily withdrawn,” I wrote. “This is the second time that The Devils has been put before the public and then withdrawn — the first time in early ’08 when a Devils DVD release was announced and then un-announced, and now with the movie having been recently made available for download and then suddenly withdrawn.

“What in the name of Christ is going on with Warner Bros. and this title?

“I can guess but with this second incident I really do think Warner Bros. owes the intelligent viewing public a frank explanation. This is a highly respected film and arguably Ken Russell‘s greatest, and after going to the trouble of digitally remastering it for distribution (it looked beautiful on my iPhone when I watched it the night before last) Warner Home Video is once again treating it like some kind of ugly hot potato.

“And it’s not right. You know it isn’t. It’s disrespectful and, forgive me, cowardly if, as some suspect, WB is in convulsions about the film because it has the potential to offend the religious right. I have to report about this now because it just happened, but it really is time to explain what is behind all this Warner Bros. weirdness about The Devils.

Do a search for Devils on iTunes movies and this is what comes up. A day or two ago Ken Russell’s The Devils was one of the offerings. I made the mistake of renting it instead of buying. Now I’m out of luck.

“I’ve been told that certain studio guidelines have to be observed, etc. And that’s fine, but what about the studio guideline that says when you issue a press release saying a DVD is coming out, you issue the DVD commercially — no ifs, ands or buts. Or the studio guideline that says when you make a Warner Bros. film available for purchase or rental on iTunes, you make it available for a year or three years or indefinitely but you sure as hell don’t remove it from iTunes after three days?”

Here’s a 3.29.10 article I wrote about the perplexing Warner Home Video Devils DVD situation. And here’s a 5.26.10 article on the same subject by Adam Balz on Not Coming To A Theatre Near You.

At last night’s South of the Border party at the Monkey Bar, staged by Peggy Siegal following the premiere of Oliver Stone‘s doc at Cinema II. I’d seen it twice and written about it two or three times, so I just showed for the schmooze. So did Stone, Mickey Rourke, Fair Game director Doug Liman, Tyson director James Toback, New York Film Festival co-honcho Scott Foundas, and Great Directors helmer Angela Ismailos.

(left) Sean Stone and (second from right) South of the Border director Oliver Stone — Monday, 6.21, 11:10 pm. Didn’t get the ladies’ names..sorry.

(l.) Great Directors helmer Angela Ismailos, Fair Game director Doug Liman. Monday, 6.21. 10:25 pm.

I’ve gotten some heat from persons of Latin heritage over the last 24 hours due to yesterday morning’s “Loud Latinos” post. One of the gentler reprimands came last night around midnight from an HE reader named HoopersX. “Generally speaking I attempt to live my life by the physician’s creed of ‘first, do no harm,'” he wrote. “Sometimes it’s a lot easier to say it than live it. That said, gross generalizations of sex, creed or ethnicity don’t do much to advance one’s point of view.”

I responded as follows: “You say you try to live by the physician’s creed — ‘first, do no harm.’ The reason I wrote that piece yesterday morning is that harm was done to me, or rather my eardrums and sense of decorum. Those three braying, boomy-voiced guys in the cafe drew first blood. I was just quietly sitting and reading and these three donkeys turned the cafe into a Latino AM talk-radio show with the volume level turned up to 8 or 9.

“I lived for a year [11.08 to 11.09] in a middle-class Hispanic community in North Bergen, New Jersey and know whereof I speak. New York-area Latinos tend to converse (not always but often enough) in a loud and grossly exuberant manner. They speak much more loudly than they need to because…I don’t know why. Because they fucking feel like it? Because it’s in their blood? And like I said yesterday, I’ve been among Latin people in other parts of the world and they really do seem to be classier people than their New York cousins.

“As BCarter3 said yesterday, ‘It’s a class thing, not an ethnic thing. The further down the social scale you go, the louder the public conversations.’

“And this doesn’t make me Don Imus — it makes me someone who’s unafraid to say what he’s heard and seen and felt out in the real world. It’s not a rumor — common, coarse people are out there in force.

“We’re not living in a Henry James world or a John Reed-and-Louise Bryant world or an F. Scott Fitzgerald Egg Harbor world or an Ernest Hemingway-in-Paris world of the 1920s or even a Bob Dylan West Village world of the early 1960s. In many if not most of our 2010 social realms, refinement is out the window for the most part. The best seems to have come and gone in terms of culture. Things are cool in my realm — I like my gig and love what I do — but they do seem to be generally downswirling at the same time in an educational cultural Ms. Manners sense. As Jose Ferrer‘s Turkish Bey character said in Lawrence of Arabia, ‘I am surrounded by cattle.'”

A friend wrote the following this morning: “Hey, Jeff…not sure if you heard but your “Loud Latinos” post has caused a bit of a stir with the guys at Latino Review. And others on Twitter…it was a topic of much discussion on Twitter last night.”

This morning an email from Ralph Morales said, “You think Hispanics are loudmouths? We think uou [sic] are a jerk.”

Another guy called “Loud low-rent Latino” wrote, “Well, for your information I have observed savage white men speak and behave at obnoxious levels without consideration on Several occassions [sic] so next time muster up some balls and let those loud savage Latino men know that they are disturbing you or else move into a monastary [sic] everyone is free to be loud you narrow minded bigot.”

Did everyone get that? “Everyone is free to be loud.” I rest my case.

“Can you imagine that goofy gravelly voice of his coming out of a masked crimefighter?,” an IMDB guy wrote a few months back. Well, we don’t have to any longer with the trailer out. Clearly, Seth Rogen is not taking the “earnest” and “committed” approach to playing newspaper heir Britt Reid in Michel Gondry‘s The Green Hornet. That’s for Christian Bale, he clearly decided, but not me.

Rogen is playing the part joshingly, one step removed, like a superhero fan not quite accepting or believing that he can be one himself, nose pressed against the glass but enjoying the show for its rock-out aspects.

Rogen initially committed to making a comedic farce version with director Stephen Chow, but then Chow was muscled off the project (“We can make a lot more money, guys, if we make a semi-conventional, same-old-crap superhero flick instead of a comedy”) and replaced by Gondry.

So what we’re left with is basically The Drunk Knight becoming the Sardonic Smart-Ass Knight as he gets to do all kinds of cool, loud, bang-smash crime-fighting stuff with Kato (Jay Chou) that might be diverting if superhero flick fans hadn’t seen this exact same stuff 1749 times over the last ten to fifteen years.

Cameron Diaz is playing Lenore Case, the classy and compelling would-be girlfriend (a thoroughly stock role by way of the Batman movies). Christoph Waltz snags his first Inglorious Basterds straight-paycheck role as Chudnofsky — a gangster/crime-lord bad guy. And Tom Wilkinson plays Britt’s disapproving father who gets offed by the ne’er do wells at the end of Act One. Who else? Oh, yeah….Edward James Olmos and Edward Furlong. Fine.

I haven’t seen The Green Hornet, so why do I have this strong feeling that I have seen it? I can see it in my dreams right now. The watching of it six or seven months hence is going to be a mere formality.

A decision was made two months ago to push back a scheduled 12.22.10 opening of The Green Hornet to 1.14.11, ostensibly to allow tecchies more time to work on the 3D conversion. (This came after the original 6.25.10 release date had been jettisoned, of course.) My suspicion had been all along that Sony management decided to convert because they felt the goods hadn’t quite been delivered and that a dimensional enhancement might make a box-office difference. I also think they were punting, a January release being cheaper and less competitive.

Every time I run across a decent-looking YouTube clip from Shampoo, I have to post it. It just gets better and better, this thing. The understated satiric tone is such a pleasure to settle into. And it’s so rare to find a lead protagonist as screwed up as Warren Beatty‘s George Roundy — immature, scrambled mind, compulsive — who’s this vulnerable and touching. His final line is “I don’t trust anybody but you.” One of the saddest endings of a comedy ever.

And riding a Triumph with no helmet! And finding an empty lot in the Beverly Glen or Coldwater Canyon area that you can just pull into and have a heart-to-heart. Those days are so far gone it’s not funny.

Oh, to have been gay and feisty and lucky enough to have been at the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, which is where and when the gay rights movement began. You can’t “nice” people into abandoning oppression or prejudice. You have to tell them to stop it, and nothing says “no” like a little street action. Shoves, shouts, cuts, bruises and broken glass have a way of getting right to the point.

Instead of accepting a typical rousting by the NYPD for the crime of being themselves, the patrons at this West Village bar at 53 Christopher Street hit back. They fought, jeered, threw beer bottles, broke windows, and persuaded the arresting officers to take refuge in the bar out of concern for their own safety. A few more nights of disturbances followed, and it was clear to those on either side that things would never be the same. A year later the first Gay Pride parade happened, and the long drip-by-drip process of de-prejudicing straight American began.

Homophobia obviously lives some 40 years later. In early May an Obama adminstration spokesperson referred to rumblings about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan possibly being gay as a “charge.” But it’s a different country now than it was back then, significantly, and it’s a real emotional pleasure to savor the spirit of awakening and revolt that the Stonewall riots signified, if only to grasp the changes that have happened and the upheavals that were required.

This is what Kate Davis and David Heilbroner‘s Stonewall Uprising — a doc based on David Carter‘s “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution” — does for the average viewer, gay or straight. It takes you back to the bad old days and shows what it was like to be gay in the ’50s and ’60s (“There was no out — there was only in,” as one veteran recalls) and allows for a sharing in that flashpoint Stonewall moment.

(l.) Stonewall Uprising co-director Kate Davis, (r.) director John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) during Stonewall Inn after-party following last Wednesday’s premiere screening at Film Forum.

David Heilbroner, Davis, Mitchell.

The chief accomplishment of Stonewall Uprising is the concise delivery — the discipline and tight editing and impassioned, first-person recollections that provide a blow-by-blow, hour-by-hour history of how that night unfolded. I was in the grip of it from the beginning. I got a kind of contact high from it, in a way. I recommend the film to anyone with the slightest interest in the ’60s rebelllion dynamic, or who simply wants to learn a few things about the Stonewall convulsions without buying Carter’s book.

I remember talking to an older actor in the late ’80s who wasn’t exactly enlightened in his view of homosexuality, but he once confessed that he respected — feared — the anger of gay people. “Those guys are brutal,” he said. “You don’t ever want to mess with the fags…whew. They’re like hornets.” I don’t think too many older homophobes had that trepidation before Stonewall.

It’s fascinating to consider how homosexuality was generally seen in the mid to late ’60s. It really was the Pleistocene era. Consider this 2.12.65 article in Time magazine called “Psychiatry: Homosexuality Can Be Cured,” and this May 1967 article in Harper’s magazine, “A Way Out for Homosexuals,” by a “curing” proponent named Dr. Samuel B. Hadden. Or The Detective, the 1968 Manhattan melodrama in which Frank Sinatra‘s character, portrayed as relatively decent and humane in his attitude toward gays, says at one point that “these people are sick.”