The trailer for Oliver Parker‘s Dorian Gray, slated to play next month’s Toronto Film Festival, indicates that the film may be mildly reprehensible. Oscar Wilde‘s tale of moral decrepitude among 19th Century London elite has apparently been coarsened into a semi-blatant sex-and-horror pic in hopes of reaching young horror hormonals. Wilde’s rotted corpse, lying inside a stone tomb at Pere Lachaise, is waiting for TIFF reactions before deciding what to do.

Today is the day to see By The People: The Election of Barack Obama at the Sunshine. Amy Rice and Alicia Sims’ doc opened yesterday without hoopla to qualify for the Best Feature Doc Oscar. The official breakout happens on HBO in November.

Say a prayer for the U.S. moviegoing culture. The public paid $22.5 million to see GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Friday, and indications are that it could earn anywhere from $55 million to $60 million by Sunday night. If there was any film this summer that screamed “crap, CG cheeseball, soul-killing, don’t see it!” it was G.I. Joe. And the empty vessels went anyway. This is an omen of desecrations to come. The bad people have won. We’ve all inched closer to the edge of the cliff.

Another visual thing — Uma Thurman‘s red hair, her eyes, the brightly colored pacifier, the yellow mustard background, etc. Katherine Dieckman‘s Motherhood (Freestyle, 10.16), which I don’t even remember having played at Sundance ’09, costars Anthony Edwards, Minnie Driver, Samantha Bee, Alice Drummond and Arjun Gupta.

Nothing to do with anything; purely an impulse post. I’m just in love with the moment when we reach the bridge and the camera pans right. Sometimes the visual is enough.

“I wrote the first sentence — ‘If Dad hadn’t shot Walt Disney in the leg, it would have been our best vacation ever!’ — and the rest was automatic,” recalls John Hughes in a piece about the writing of “Vacation ’58,” which became National Lampoon’s Family Vacation. I’ve always loved Hughes’ original story; I never liked the film all that much.

The original Griswold family

“I used the voice of a boy to cover my lack of skill, and to flatten the big moments. In Rusty’s prosaic language, a ruined vacation and an assault with a deadly weapon upon an entertainment legend enjoyed comparable importance. I called to mind a clamor of relatives, situations, catchphrases, and behaviors. I was mindful of my feelings as a child witnessing phony pop inventions go to hell. I understood that the dark side of my middle-class, middle-American, suburban life was not drugs, paganism, or perversion. It was disappointment. There were no gnawing insects beneath the grass. Only dirt.

“I also knew that trapped inside every defeat is a small victory, and inside that small victory is the Great Defeat. This knowledge — along with a cranky old lady; strange, needy relatives; a vile dog; and everything that could possibly go wrong on a highway — was enough to make a story, plug a hole in the magazine, and get on to the next issue.”

Vanity Fair.com’s John Lopez has recut a Julie & Julia trailer to accomodate last year’s report that Julia Child was a kind of World War II spook.

The shouters and shovers at recent town meetings being held to discuss health-care initiatives are “probably reacting less to what [President] Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman.

“That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the ‘birther’ movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

“And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

“Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

“Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the ‘angry white voter’ era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

“But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.”

Charlyne Yi is a fascinating reason to see Paper Heart, a lightweight faux-documentary that costars (in the dreariest, least assertive way possible) Michael Cera. Fascinating because she represents a relatively fresh sensibility among comedians (if that’s what you want to call her), which is to say a comic who’s better at making you cock your head and go “wait…is that it?” than getting laughs.

She’s a kind of shtick-free permutation of a 21st Century Andy Kaufman — a curious comedian whose strangely undeveloped (i.e., arrested) childlike personality is about behavior and conceptual weirdness and being button-cute in a kind of hospital-gown One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest way.

Her weirdness is underlined at the very beginning of Nick Jasenovec‘s film, which opens today, when she’s seen asking several people if they “believe” in love while saying time and again that she doesn’t. That’s interesting to hear from a 23 year-old, but the film never provides a hint about why Yi is so averse to, as she puts in in the press notes, “love at first sight” or any of that “Julia Roberts/English Patient/sobbing in the rain stuff.”

There has to be a story behind this (or a series of stories) but instead this made-up (or at the very least unconvincing) doc-with-marionette-sequences presents Yi as some kind of plucky little chipmunk-cheek alien with a pixie grin and nary a thought of any depth or consequence, or any kind of semi-developed curiosity. She doesn’t seem rooted in any sort of recognizable experience. She’s like a cyborg programmed to be “different” for its own sake. And that voice…my God! It’s like she decided years ago that she didn’t want to move past the emotional state of being eight or nine years old.

Every little girl knows something about love — families and pets and rock-star worship start them out, and then sooner or later, usually by the time they’re 16 or 17, they start to experience a semblance of the real romantic version (with a boy or a girl…whatever). It’s a common enough thing that if a woman turns 23 without having ever felt or tasted, even briefly, that curiously heightened state of hormonal-and-spiritual arousal, and in fact has come to a decision to be foursquare against it as a concept, then you’re talking about someone with a relatively unique history, and one you’d like to hear about.

Charlyne Yi

You look at Yi and figure, okay, she’s not conventionally “hot” so she hasn’t had much action so far, and she’s obviously invested in being a curio type so naturally she would create a character who’s atypical but still…there’s nothing here except nerditude. Not in the film, at least, because it provides no answers, no layers, no payoff…zip.

What happens is that she half falls in love, puppy-dog style, with Cera, the biggest and nerdiest 20something one-tricky-pony in the film business. Really — the sameness and underwhelmingness of the man is almost stunning. He has this clever deadpan/dorky space-cadet thing going on — obviously very bright, a little bit “cute”, a little smartass, a little aloof/withdrawn and topped with a mall-nerd haircut that infuriates me. He was perfect in Superbad — wise, sly, an almost transcendent figure — when paired with the hyper, motor-mouthed Jonah Hill. He was agreeably whatever in Juno but since then seems to have…I don’t know, calcified or something.

Which isn’t to say Cera isn’t lightly likable and “appealing” in a bright-but-vacant sense, but I predicted last September that he might be two or three years from being over, and I see no reason to back away from this. He doesn’t do anything other than radiate that same old Cera-ness , over and over and over. You have to do more than this to stay in earth orbit. You can’t just be a zone case.

But I say again that Yi is worth watching and reacting to. She’s got an original vibe that deserves your contemplation. I’m not sure that she has anything to say or put across other than odd quirk, but she’s got something, whatever it is. Something a bit more, I mean. An otherness that you can’t quite dismiss. Or which at least is more interesting than Cera’s.

It’s extremely rare when a main-title sequence (a) conveys the tone, style and milieu of the film to come, (b) suggests what the story will be about and even hints what kind of person the main character is, and (c) uses music that underlines what’s being “said.” This almost never happens, but it did 15 years ago when Tim Burton put together the opening-credits sequence for Ed Wood.

I’ll never forget a report about the 1995 L.A. Film Critics Award ceremony that described how the film’s composer Howard Shore cut critic Andy Klein to the quick when Klein praised his music for suggesting/embracing the dryly satiric tone of Burton’s movie. Shore’s music obviously does this, and yet he resented anyone thinking he’d composed anything that would make sophisticated viewers smirk. Amazing.