What is Billy Bob Thornton‘s problem? What a sullen asshole. QTV host Jian Ghomeshi introduced him as an “Oscar-winning screenwriter, actor, and director” when doing an interview with Thornton and his band, The Boxmasters. Thornton took offense that he was being referred to (in his head) as some kind of musical hobbyist.

Criterion can never atone for its Third Man Bluray, but at least they’re out of the doghouse now. The reason is their Wages of Fear Bluray, which I’ve seen and is quite beautiful all around. Superb detail and contrast, and grain levels that are acceptable by my stringent standards. A digital creation, obviously, but one that looks like film in the most refined sense. Clouzot himself would be amazed.

I haven’t seen Henri-George Clouzot‘s 1953 classic since catching it at the Thalia in 1981 or thereabouts. I’ve decided, however, that William Friedkin‘s 1976 remake, Sorcerer, is just as strong and jolting, and in some ways a better story, and in other ways more believable, certainly during the first half. The word for decades has been that Clouzot’s film is unquestionably superior. I don’t buy that any more. They’re more evenly matched now.

At the end of a capsule review of William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur, Pauline Kael asked, “Has anyone ever been able to detect the contributions to the script of Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry, and S.N. Behrman? Could they?” They could here, I think, in a discussion of messiahs and gods. Five words — “Quite profound, some of it” — sound like they belong to Vidal.

And I’ve always loved the way Stephen Boyd gestures and glances twice at the sky as he derisively refers to God, whom he refers to as “that.”

Another discussion about grain came up this morning. I was complaining again about Criterion’s Bluray grainstorming of The Third Man, and HE reader “Cde” said that Criterion “doesn’t give films a ‘grainstorm’ treatment. Films give Criterion grain and Criterion accepts [it] rather than trying to scrub away the look of film from decades past with a digital smear.

And I said, “For the 81st time in the last six months, I understand that grain originates on film. What you need to understand is that grain was an unfortunate, aesthetically undesirable monkey on the backs of filmmakers in past decades. It’s not some beautiful and essential element in age-old film composition. Grain is like acne upon the face of classic cinema, and if there had been some first-rate acne medication back in the day we wouldn’t be talking about it today.

“Grain has been sentimentalized out of all proportion by the monks. And Criterion, to go by its Third Man Bluray disc, is one of the monk institutions that worships grain as something that bestows authenticity upon classic film restorations. Which it does, in a way. Except it doesn’t add anything to the artistic intentions of the filmmakers. Nothing except a kind of smothering sandstorm effect, I mean. Do you honestly think that dps of the ’30s through the ’70s said to their director-collaborators, ‘We have a chance to get some really wonderful grain elements from this scene if we light it right’?

“Criterion didn’t ‘accept’ grain in its Third Man Bluray disc — it fetishized it. You could almost imagine the Criterion technicians experiencing erotic arousal as they lovingly retained the grain from Carol Reed‘s 1949 classic.

“As I’ve said many, many times, there are several shades of digital degranulating that can be applied. Grain purists are always saying ‘do you want the real thing as it was rendered back in the ’30s, ’40s or ’50s, or some digitally arid smearing of what the original directors and dps intended?’ John Lowry of Lowry Digital has shown time and again that the grain levels can be taken down in a very delicate and considerate manner without creating a video-game effect.”

“As a young man I had an old man’s career, [and] now maybe as an old man I can have a young man’s career,” the 70 year-old Francis Coppola said recently to the San Francisco Film Society’s Jason Sanders. “I feel like I’m doing what I wanted to do when I was 18.” And in reverting to the creative spirit of a young man, Coppola has made perhaps the worst film of his career (Youth Without Youth) and another that Coppola is self-distributing (the forthcoming Tetro).

It makes you wonder if having enough money to finance your own films (which Coppola has through his wine company) is all that great a thing. It seems to confirm a long-held suspicion that the rough-and-tumble process of commercial Hollywood occasonally results in better films than those financed by genteel types with their artistic hearts in the right place. It’s almost shattering to think that the name Francis Coppola has come to signify the exact opposite of what it stood for in the ’70s — an assurance of audacity, a deliverer of first-rate chops, a maker of films you absolutely had to see.

The Orlando Sentinel‘s Roger Moore got in touch last week with a question about Tyson director James Toback. “I thought you might have a take on whatever natural connection Toback might have with Tyson,” he asked. “I know he did the journalism and Jim Brown thing early on. Is the fact that he and Tyson are both outsiders the most relevant factor, or is something else drawing them together?

I answered as follows: “James Toback’s handle has long been that of a brilliant, nervy, larger-than-life type with a risky existential attitude about things. Meaning that he likes to fly high and flirt with the edge, propelled by a standard gambler psychology mixed with charm and audacity and the usual big-city appetites.

“Being a gambler, Toback has always loved sports and the company of athletes. And so he’s naturally attracted to Tyson, a former world champion athlete who’s also a bit of a danger junkie. Like every boxing champ since the begining of time, Tyson put his life and career on the line every time he stepped into the ring. His edge attraction has led him to flirt with ruin in the form of drugs, arrests, living beyond his means, biting Holyfield’s ear, etc. Always a bit of the mad man lurking within.

“I also think Toback feels sorry for Tyson now that his high-flying days are over. Which clearly comes through in the film.”

I went searching for Moore’s piece on the Orlando Sentinel website, but the search engine is ridiculous. Sony Classics is opening Tyson on 4.24.

I should have linked by now to Moises Chiullan’s 4.6 piece about the Star Trek screening at the Alamo Draft House. (Leading excuses include yesterday’s half-day shutdown, urgent business in the city, screenings, etc.) In any case here it is. Rapturous, glowing, hosannahs, fanboy flutter, my wife loved it, etc.

If I sound a bit cynical, it’s because I’ve concluded that any mainstream feature that premieres at the Alamo Drafthouse is going to inspire waves of orgasms among the Austin fanboys and film obsessives. Which you can never trust, I suspect, because these guys are always allowing their reactions to be colored by feelings of hometown flattery (“You chose our fair city to preview your brand-new movie? We love you!”). And because you can’t trust fanboys, especially when the film has anything to do with galactic derring-do.

Having seen about 25 or 30 minutes worth of Star Trek footage last December (or was it late November?), I have to say that director JJ Abrams‘ vision of a new-generation Star Trek starring nothing but under-35 types feels like a kind of GenY Bugsy Malone in space. At least as far as Chris Pine‘s Cpt. Kirk and Zachary Quinto‘s Spock are concerned. Everyone else seems a good 10 to 15 years younger than the actors in the original Gene Roddenberry TV series. Or is this because actors in the mid ’60s looked older than their counterparts today?

The upside is that Abrams has at least come up with his own take, sufficiently divorced from the William Shatner-Leonard Nimoy imprint. What I saw was visually striking (i.e., well designed), thrilling and so on. And I like Quinto’s sharply focused manner — the steady gaze of his jet-black eyes and the way he drills in on his matter-of-fact dialogue. So I didn’t feel like it was the wrong way to go. A lot of people are going to be delighted with Star Trek. It’s going to make a lot of money.

It did, however, feel friggin’ young to me. I guess I had trouble believing that the senior administrators who selected the crew of the Enterprise would adopt as their motto, “We have a ship that cost several billion to make and requires the best crew we can find, so let’s not choose anyone who looks older than 35!”

My main problem was with Pine. The man has nothing going on behind his eyes. He has the face and the soul of a guy who makes surfboards and boogie boards in his Venice Beach garage. Or that of a Santa Monica lifeguard. Or a Harley Davidson salesman on Lincoln Blvd. south of Washington. On top of which I felt that Anton Yelchin‘s Checkov accent was way over the top.

Anyway, here’s Chiullan’s take:

“Star Trek is an unrelenting, slam-bang naval war movie that rarely catches its own breath,” he wrote. “Shades of swashbucklers and submarine thrillers alike are all over the storytelling with all kinds of smash-bam-kaboom stuff going on throughout. It’s packed to the gills with escapist heroism with a healthy dose of optimism. There’s plenty of room for interpretation for those who want to look for some allegory that is or isn’t intended. The key is that Abrams and his team have bottled that ’77 stuff of legend.

No Star Trek film “has never been this visually dynamic. The camera work is full of lens flares, reflections, and focus effects that really sell the atmosphere. You also have a more nuts n’ bolts, gaskets n’ pipes-styled Enterprise, where the ship feels like a labyrinthine submarine merged with an aircraft carrier. The mixture of practical and CG alien and creature effects are also fantastic, with all kinds of new stuff never seen before in the franchise in terms of design or quality.

“Bruce Greenwood grounds the movie early on in a scene with Kirk at a bar. Chris Pine puts his own spin on Kirk that faithfully captures what hotshots like him are all about at that age. There have always been smart, capable guys who do stupid things for the hell of it, wanting a direction for their life to drop out of the sky. Karl Urban plays “Southern” as Dr. McCoy more authentically than any European or Australian who’s tried in recent memory. Simon Pegg steals each scene he’s in where he opens his mouth, which is to say every scene in which he appears.

“Everyone else is great, but I don’t want to go on forever here. The Enterprise crew all do impulsive, stupid things, but that’s what that age is like, isn’t it? I’ll add that Anton Yelchin is fine as Chekhov. Don’t let early reports from footage screenings convince you his pronunciation gag ruins things. He plays it straight as an actual speech impediment, and it worked for me.”

Directed and written by Nora Ephron, Julie & Julia (Sony, 8.7) is primarily about devotion and rapture in the preparation of exquisite cuisine. Or, to speak more fundamentally, about how the best things in life come from love and worship. It’s built upon the life of famed chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep) but more particularly Child’s influence upon fan, fellow devotee and author Julie Powell (Amy Adams).

The through-line of the film is an online project by Powell, begun in 2002, in which she wrote about her daily experiences of cooking each of the 524 recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Powell eventually turned her blog into a book, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (Little, Brown, 2005), which was retitled Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (Back Bay Books, 2006) when it went to paperback.

Ephron’s screenplay is adapted from Powell’s book as well as My Life in France, an autobiography cowritten by Child and Alex Prud’homme. Both books adapted by Ephron were written and published in the same time frame of 2004-06. Ephron began filming Julie & Julia in March 2008. Obviously aimed at an older female crowd, this seems moderately inviting from my perspective.

Besides the Powell angle, the film also covers the years Child and her husband Paul Cushing (Stanley Tucci) spent in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s, when he was a foreign diplomat who was eventually investigated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy for alleged communist ties.

Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel reported today that Sony has bought all int’l media rights (excluding U.K. TV) plus domestic home entertainment rights to Edward Norton, Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ Obama doc, called By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. The heretofore untitled film will open in U.S. theatres via HBO Documentary Films, Siegel wrote. But when?

The fact that no projected release period was included in the story probably means By The People will come out in ’10. Which I feel will feel be too late in the game. The ’08 election was a long miniseries that everyone absorbed from hundreds if not thousands of different media and camera angles as it happened. I could maybe watch a first-rate review of it one more time later this year, but not next year. The world will have moved on. Enough already. The big Achilles Heel of this project has always been the fact that Norton, Rice and Sims have been moving at a glacial pace.

You’d never know it from the jacket art, but this is Criterion’s Bluray edition of Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s The Wages of Fear — originally released in 1953, due in stores on 4.21.09. Haven’t read any reviews; catching it later tonight. If Criterion has applied the Third Man grainstorm treatment, all bets are off.

The reason I’ve never warmed to Anna Faris is because I don’t think playing all those ditzy nutters has required all that much “acting” from her. I think she’s been tapping into a thing that she feels naturally comfortable with, and she’s been enjoying the work and the juice and the money…whatever. But it’s come to the point with me that when Faris is in a film, I pretty much know what she’s going to do. This was certainly the case with her performance in Observe and Report.

Anna Faris at Monday evening’s Observe and Report premiere in Los Angeles.

She’s always been delivered a great anarchic spirit in playing those dingalings, but I’m not sure she can do much else. She’s been playing more or less the same note on the cello since her first Scary Movie in 2000. Wouldn’t she have tried by now to play…whatever, a Sigourney Weaver-like corporation chief with an MBA or a steely Russian assassin in a spy film by now if she had it in her? Where would Dustin Hoffman have been if he’d done nothing but play variations on his preppy Benjamin Braddock character in The Graduate from ’68 to ’77?