Posted on 6.3 and tagged as “Trailer #2,” this is the kind of teaser that you throw together before you start shooting, not after. The Expendables will be out nine weeks hence and they’re selling reputational pomp and circumstance?

Lionsgate’s advertising team (led by co-marketing chiefs Tim Palen and Sarah Greenberg) have gone with a Saul Bass-ian, Vertigo-like one-sheet for Rodrigo Cortes‘ Buried (9.24). Which everyone likes or admires or both. Me included. Any sort of Bass tribute gets my vote.

I reviewed Buried at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s a highly claustrophobic (to say the least) exercise about an American contractor in Iraq (Ryan Reynolds) who’s been kidnapped and buried alive in a wooden box. Cortes uses Hitchcock-like ingenuity in telling this story, but the bottom line is that Buried refuses to deliver the kind of ending that any popcorn-eating moviegoer would want to see.

“You may assume going in that Buried will be a harrowing mental ingenuity/physical feat/engineering movie about a guy managing to free himself from a large coffin-sized crate that’s been buried two or three feet underground,” I wrote. “But what it is, really, is a darkly humorous socio-cultural message flick about selfishness and distraction — i.e., how everyone is too caught up in their own agenda to give a shit about a person who really needs help.

Reynolds’ character “manages to speak to several people on a cell phone that he’s found inside the crate. The prolonged joke is that each and every person he turns to for help (with the exception of his wife) tells him that they first need him to address or answer their needs before they”ll give him any assistance.

“Boiled down, the movie is kind of a metaphor for dealing with tech support or any corporate or bureaucratic employee who specializes in driving complaining customers crazy. Everyone Reynolds speaks to patronizes him, tells him to calm down and speak slowly, asks stupid questions and in one way or another blows him off or fails to really engage and provide serious assistance.”

I’m getting sick of repeating this so this is the last time. Chubby or corpulent or run-of-the-mill fat is associated with “funny,” as The Wrap‘s Leah Rosen reiterated yesterday. But Jonah Hill‘s button-busting obesity in Get Him To The Greek pushes this equation to the breaking point, I feel. The fact that his performance is arguably his best yet — — he’s as funny as he was in Superbad but with more maturity and internal conflict — is a tribute to his talent, but he has to grapple with his girth at every turn.

Jonah Hill, Russell Brand in Get Him To The Greek

He’s so ballooned-up, in other words, that it’s almost an obstruction to the material. It doesn’t “stop” his hilarious performance as record-company flunkie Aaron Green, but it seems to mess with the vibe a bit. Hill is running down a Las Vegas hotel hallway with Russell Brand and it’s hard not to think “Jesus, he’s gonna need oxygen if he doesn’t slow down.” Hill is talking to g.f. Elizabeth Moss about possibly moving to Seattle and you’re thinking “I can’t buy this…he’s just too fat for her.”

Hill’s surplus tonnage is easily the most visually distinctive thing about him, and yet it’s never once commented upon in Greek, a no-holds-barred comedy in which everything and everyone is batted around for fun. Start to finish, nobody utters a single fat crack of any kind. There’s one visual gag about Hill’s exposed ass, okay, but it’s a mild gross-out. (Or it was in the screening I attended yesterday — some people went “eewww.”)

Hill is short, but he’s like a beach ball with legs and arms. As fat movie comedians go, the only ones I can think of who were more super-sized was Sam Kinison and Chris Farley at the end of their respective roads.

(l. to r.) Fatty Arbuckle, Oliver Hardy, Jack Black, Chris Farley.

Look at all the other funny fat guys of yore — Oliver Hardy of Laurel & Hardy, Lou Costello, Fatty Arbuckle, John Candy, Curly Howard of The Three Stooges — and they were all somewhere between big-chubby and run-of-the-mill fat. During their prime none could be called obese (although Hardy grew into this during Laurel and Hardy’s career decline in the mid to late ’40s).

I’m not saying all this to be cruel, but to simply point out that there are gradations and degrees of heavyness, and that there’s a point at which bulk starts to get in the way of humor.

Rosen doesn’t seem to get this. Her piece about Hill says he’s part of a “long line of chubby men who have reigned as box-office stars in comedies almost since movies began.” Calling Hill “chubby” is analogous to describing the current BP oil leak as “problematic” instead of “catastrophic.” (Is it problematic? Yeah, but is it the right proportional term to use? No.) She also calls him “rotund” and “pudgy” — terms that are more polite than descriptive. She also calls him a “double-wide guy” — that I’ll buy.

(l. to r.) Lou Costello, John Candy, Anthony Anderson, Sam Kinison.

I saw this yesterday afternoon in the meat-packing district. What sold me is that Alfred Hitchcock‘s sunglasses could almost be empty eye-socket holes. Reminding us, of course, of that slumped-over dead farmer discovered by Jessica Tandy in The Birds. What killed that Michael Bay-produced Birds remake that Naomi Watts was going to star in?

Last year someone finally YouTube-d John Magnuson’s Lenny Bruce performance film — a 45-minute capturing of one of Bruce’s final nightclub appearances, at San Francisco’s Basin Street West, sometime in late ’65. I chose this excerpt because the material between 3:15 and 9:00 is especially good.

I enjoy Bruce’s weary-bitter delivery in this thing. His energy is down — he’s half-performing and half-muttering to himself, depleted from his various court battles — but he’s still “Lenny Bruce.” Dustin Hoffman ‘s performance as Bruce in Bob Fosse‘s Lenny didn’t get that slightly irritated hipster vibe. DH smiled too much, for one thing. If Bruce smiled it was only for an instant, and always he half hid it when he did.

Who uses the word “schtark” these days? Who ever used it except Bruce?

There are probably some under-30s who haven’t heard that much about Bruce, so here’s a starter quote from music/cultural critic Ralph J. Gleason: “Lenny Bruce was really, along with Bob Dylan and Miles Davis and a handful of others (maybe Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and Allen Ginsberg in another way) the leader of the first wave of American social and cultural revolution which is gradually changing the structure of our society and may effectively revise it.”

Vanity Fair.com‘s Rebecca Keegan is reporting that two days ago in Washington, D.C., Avatar director James Cameron “convened a meeting of more than 20 scientists and engineers in Washington to brainstorm fixes for the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.”

“‘I know a lot of smart people who regularly work a whole lot deeper than that well,’ says Cameron, referring to BP’s 5,000-foot gusher. ‘I figured this group of top sub guys and deep-ocean scientists and engineers could maybe come up with something constructive.’

“The director did not, as many news outlets reported, respond to a call from the Environmental Protection Agency, but rather organized the meeting himself , and invited government bodies including the E.P.A., the Department of Energy, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coast Guard to participate.

“Cameron says he first contacted BP a month ago, but was told they had the crisis handled. ‘I didn’t want to be another well-meaning idiot with a bunch of suggestions,’ Cameron says. ‘But when the situation went on without a resolution, I figured the guys I knew had to be as smart as the engineers at BP, so it was time to sound the horn.;

“Tuesday’s 10-hour engineering brainstorming session included representatives from the federal agencies, as well as Anatoly Sagalevich, the Russian Mir sub pilot who first took Cameron to the Titanic; oceanic explorer Joe MacInnis, who participated in Cameron’s deep-sea documentary Aliens of the Deep; professors from the Universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara; Navy salvage contractors; and Cameron’s brother, Mike, an engineer with whom the director built a pair of mini remotely operated underwater vehicles (R.O.V.) that explored the Titanic wreck.

“The group made recommendations to various agencies, which will funnel them to BP. ‘It was fertile,’ Cameron says.”

How can Big Hollywood spin this and the Penn/Haiti story negatively? There must be some way. C’mon, Nolte — this is what you’re good at.

Vanity Fair.com‘s Laura Jane Estes has written a summary of David Brinkley‘s VF article (appearing in the July issue) about Sean Penn‘s Haitian humanitarian camp-down. “If it looks as though Sean Penn is just another Hollywood star courting headlines with a camera-ready cause, look again,” Estes begins.

“With a midlife milestone looming (Penn turns 50 in August), his marriage to Robin Wright Penn seemingly finished (‘She is a ghost to me now,’ he observes), and a teenage son, Hopper, having recovered from a life-threatening skateboard accident, the Oscar-winning actor decided to redirect his focus and his priorities.

“Instead of shooting another film or hawking his latest (Fair Game, in which he portrays Ambassador Joseph Wilson, playing opposite Naomi Watts as ‘outed’ C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame), Penn ended up committing himself to the people of Petionville, a once-affluent Haitian suburb where he now runs a camp for 50,000 displaced earthquake survivors.

“As Vanity Fair‘s July issue reveals in detail for the first time, a week after the quake hit last January — killing an estimated quarter of a million people — Penn, a longtime political activist, joined forces with L.A.-based, Sarajevo-born philanthropist Diana Jenkins (creating the humanitarian organization J/P HRO), lined up crisis veteran Alison Thompson to assist in recruiting an A-team of relief volunteers, and flew from his home in Malibu to a ravaged hillside in Port-au-Prince — with a dozen doctors in tow.

“Ever since, Penn, wearing camouflage khakis and carrying a Glock handgun, has been living in a tent not much larger than an army-surplus locker. And this spring the actor and his organization–who toil alongside Haitian colleagues, fellow aid workers, and army rangers — were designated by their fellow NGOs and U.N. officials as the ‘camp manager’ of the Petionville facility.

“Author Douglas Brinkley, the historian, V.F. contributing editor, and a decade-long acquaintance of Penn’s (the pair volunteered in New Orleans in 2005 shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina), traces the humanitarian and personal motivations of the typically press-averse Penn, examining his desire to become an activist in the Phil Ochs mold.”

The first five minutes of Get Him To The Greek, which I’m going to see tonight in a state of absolute wide-awake alertness. Posted by Funny or Die and linked to last night by Brad Brevet‘s Rope of Silicon.

The idea, I think, behind Billy Eichner‘s aggressive microphone routine and trying to bully people into committing to see Sex and the City 2 (“I saw it and I liked it!”) is to engage in a kind of theatre that pushes it. He’s obviously “playing” a hostile-belligerent gay fan of the series, but I’m not sure to what end. The “fuck you” is surprising but not exactly “funny.” It’s weird. It may be a case of Eichner simply being an asshole.

Apologies to anyone who posted a comment last night or this morning and didn’t see it appear. This was due to my having turned up the discriminator on the all-but-worthless Movable Type spam controls. Instead of blocking spammers, it wound up attacking legit commenters. My bad. Every day I spend at least 30 to 40 minutes (maybe closer to an hour) banning this and that spammer and deleting their posts. Still trying to figure out the right plug-in to use.

It hit me a day or two ago that an awful lot of women these days — actresses and broadcasters to some extent, but mainly average, non-famous women in the under-30 range (including movie publicists) — speak with thin little pipsqueak voices. Couple this with a general tendency to use mallspeak accents and phrasings (which 85% to 90% of under-30 women have done in order to sound like everyone else) and it almost seems as if inane peep-peep voices have become a kind of generational signature.

Go to any bar and restaurant and walk around and listen to women’s voices…”peepity-peep-peep” and “squeakity-squeak-squeak,” over and over and over.

For whatever reason these women have decided that sultry, smoky, husky voices — the kind that Lauren Bacall and Glenda Jackson and Anne Bancroft and Patricia Neal used to play like soulful wind instruments — aren’t as appealing or have perhaps been categorized as unattractive, and that they need to project more of an amiable “ooh-ooh” Betty Boop thing.

I’m obviously not reporting scientific data, but it does seem as if an awful lot of Minnie Mouse voices are being feigned or emphasized these days, and that the rich, intriguing tonalities found in the wonderfully adult voices of Meryl Streep or Ann Sheridan in the 1940s, or Jessica Lange or Katherine Hepburn or Greer Garson or Faye Dunaway or Jodie Foster aren’t heard as much.

You can’t be one of those super-cool women who wear short skirts and long jackets and speak with a peep-peep voice. You have to sound like Anouk Aimee or Simone Signoret or Joan Crawford or Jane Russell….that line of country.

I really do think it’s affected to some extent. Chosen. Performed. Almost anyone can go deeper or higher if they want.

There’s that old story about director Howard Hawks telling a young Lauren Bacall (i.e., before he cast her in To Have and Have Not) that it’s sexier to speak in a lower register, and that she should give it a shot. Bacall took Hawks’ advice and trained herself to speak with a deeper voice. It was that simple.

So if Bacall can do this, anyone can in either direction. And I think — suspect — that a lot of younger women have persuaded themselves, perhaps not consciously, that squeaky-peepy works best in today’s environment. Mistake.