I’ll tell you what this poster tells me. It tells me that the producers and the distributor are thinking along the following lines: “We don’t really know what we have here….we don’t have a strong idea about the film or how to sell it or what the subject matter might mean to you and your girlfriend so we decided to go hazy and opaque and basically convey nothing except for the fact that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the star. That’s it…that’s our entire play. JGL in a T-shirt and glasses. Are you intrigued?” [Poster snapped by Collider‘s Steve Weintraub during Cinemacon.)

Yesterday Vulture‘s Mark Harris posted a piece about how great Melissa McCarthy is, how unique her achievements have been and how Hollywood and media types have been unfairly slagging her for making the same film over and over. The article is well-written and worth reading but here’s the truth: With the exception of her concerned-mom character in St. Vincent and, okay, to some extent her character in Spy, McCarthy has more or less been playing the same gal.

I’m talking about an angry, immature, neurotic, sociopathic obsessive who acts out her anger or indifference to social norms more and more until the world pushes back at the end of Act Two (or the beginning of Act Three) and says “whoa, girl…you can’t keep doing this, you have to take a look in the mirror and admit your issues,” etc. In response to which a chastened McCarthy takes a look, feels sad, takes a step or two in the right direction and rebounds with a better, stronger game. Like it or not, but this is more or less what her movies are about.

I got into a Twitter dispute this morning with Guy Lodge, who was cheering the Harris piece. My basic point was that McCarthy seems to lack the character and the artistic cojones to up her game in the vein of Woody Allen‘s shift into the big-time when he made Annie Hall (’78).

McCarthy and husband-partner Ben Falcone are operating on a much lower level than Allen. They’re out to make big megaplex dough in the real Hollywood realm of 2016, which translates to the fact that audiences no longer want to see Annie Hall-type flicks in theatres (megaplex comedies today pretty much have to be rude, loud, fecal and assaultive). Plus the team of McCarthy-Falcone seems to lack the necessary integrity to even try to make a good, character-driven movie out of the kind of woman she played in St. Vincent.

This is four years old, but it captures a basic law-of-the-jungle and a universal action dynamic that every living thing on this planet recognizes and bows down to. It’s a kind of real-deal equivalent to that bit in Raiders of the Lost Ark when a cackling Arab is flashing his sword at Harrison Ford‘s Indiana Jones, and then Ford just pulls out his pistol and shoots.

Here are meh-level GoPro capturings of (a) a portion of our scooter journey through the farmlands south of Hue (3.23.16) and (b) a bicycle journey through Hanoi traffic on a Sunday (3.20.16). Unless GoPro footage is really extra-spectacular (skydiving, dropped from a plane, accidentally capturing some disaster, strapped to a seagull’s beak), it’s not much of a turn-on. We’ve become accustomed, jaded. But 10 or certainly 15 years ago this Vietnam footage would have been regarded as half-diverting.

HBO and Rick Famuyiwa‘s Confirmation (i.e., Anita vs. Clarence) pops tonight, and here’s a review by L.A. Times critic Mary McNamara: “If Anita Hill (Kerry Washington) has no political agenda, pretty much everyone else involves does, and Confirmation is admirably ruthless in its presentation of all of them.

“Clarence Thomas (Wendell Pierce) remains steadfast in his denials and, until the moment when he famously lashes out at what he calls a ‘high tech lynching,’ spends much of the film in signature silence, which Pierce deftly uses to suggest a panoply of emotions, from shock and rage to touching bewilderment, without ever quite committing to one reaction or another.

“His team, on the other hand, is quickly focused. Republican Sens. John Danforth (Bill Irwin), Arlen Specter (Malcolm Gets) and Alan Simpson (Peter McRobbie) are first dismissive, then argumentative and finally resort to outright smear tactics.

“The Democrats aren’t much better. Kennedy (Treat Williams) is hamstrung by his own record with women and Biden, who Kinnear portrays in contrasting tones of self-pity and sincere political anguish, is initially reluctant to sully himself or the proceedings with what he fears is personal, possibly vindictive, dirt.

(1) Like Bill Maher and many, many others, I too only choke up during movies. What do 93% of us choke up about? Loss — the joy and nectar of life slowly drying up, going rotten, falling away, becoming mulch; (2) Sarandon’s observation about how Twitter fools will just seize on a portion of something you’ve said and distort it out of context is entirely true — it’s happened to me several times, and my response has been to daydream about punching guys out like John Wayne; (3) She and Maher are 100% correct in saying that Bernie Sanders is offering a “New New Deal” — higher taxes, yes, but look what you get; (4) Sarandon doesn’t want to admit that she’ll eat/accept the Hillary Clinton chicken…”those words can’t come out of my mouth at this time…I’m a vegetarian.”

You can’t be a pool-playing dilletante. Well, you can but there’s nothing more depressing than realizing that you’re no better at the game now than you were at 17 or 18. That happened to me the other night. There’s only one way to play pool and that’s like a would-be Eddie Felson, like Jimi Hendrix and his guitar, like nothing else matters…every day, full concentration, serious, devotional. I used to be half decent at pool in high school. Not consistently but every now and then I would hit the balls just so. When you make a tricky shot there’s nothing like it (I used to improve after a couple of beers), and when you blow a shot it’s awful. Especially the easy ones. All my life I’ve wanted to be good enough to shoot a cross-corner like the one that Paul Newman shoots in The Hustler [below]. I’ve never come close to being that good. I know what mediocre is. I was a lousy drummer and a fourth-rate trumpet player so don’t tell me.

The Sony 4K lip-synch agony that has plagued my life for roughly a month is finally over. Really — the problem has been 100% solved. The solution was to toss the Radio Shack HDMI switcher that I’d been using, and replace it with a Marantz AV Surround Receiver NR1506. I fed the cords from the four sources — Direct TV, Oppo Bluray, Sherwood Region 2 Bluray, 4K Roku player — into the Marantz, and then sent the whole package from the Marantz into the TV (Sony 930C), which has built-in speakers plus a wireless subwoofer. (I junked the Sony sound bar.) The key element is an audio-visual command in the Marantz that accelerates or slows the sound down by milliseconds. It allows me to perfectly synch sound and image if there’s even the slightest issue. I’ve never dealt with such a difficult technical challenge in my life.  Agonizing.

That Region 2 Studio Canal Bluray of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man (4K-scanned, released last July, derived from a recent restoration that played in Cannes 11 months ago) arrived yesterday. It’s the sharpest, most richly-hued version of this 1949 classic I’ve ever seen in my life — quite velvety and sublime. Don’t even mention that discredited grainstorm Bluray that Criterion released in 2009. A tech-savvy friend told me at the time that exquisite studio-lit compositions weren’t available to director Carol Reed and his dp, Robert Krasker, as they were working on location in Vienna, and that rougher, grainier images were therefore inevitable. Bullshit.

I’ve made it quite clear in this column that I wouldn’t touch LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) these days with a 10-foot pole. But back when I used to touch it I would always describe what it did to my brain as a kind of blissful washover that freed me from everything I’d learned in school and thereby delivered radiant truths. The usual mental associations and thought patterns were rescrambled by my senses turning all tingly and Technicolored — an elevator-in-the-brain-hotel sensation leading to heightened sensitivity, receptivity. Which led to the opening of Dr. Huxley‘s doors of perception and the gates of prana, satori, nirvana.

Four or five days ago researchers from London’s Imperial College, working with the Beckley Foundation, published for the first time in the history of LSD visual records that precisely show the effects of the drug on the brain. Here’s a PDF with the findings.

The team administered LSD to 20 “healthy” volunteers and then used various brain-scanning techniques to visualize how LSD alters the way the brain works. For the first time in history the images depicted the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes that that people have sought to verbally describe for decades.

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial: “Normally our brain consists of independent networks that perform separate specialized functions, such as vision, movement and hearing — as well as more complex things like attention. However, under LSD the separateness of these networks breaks down and instead you see a more integrated or unified brain.

“Our results suggest that this effect underlies the profound altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience. It is also related to what people sometimes call ‘ego-dissolution’, which means the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnection with themselves, others and the natural world. 

“This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way, and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug’s effects have subsided.”

Filed from Park City on 1.25.16: “This is a sentimental, briefly stirring, Braveheart-like attempt to deify a brave African-American hero — Nat Turner, the leader of a Virginia slave rebellion in August 1831. But a black Braveheart or Spartacus this is not. Nor is it, by my sights, an award-quality thing.

The Birth of a Nation (Fox Searchlight, 10.7) “will almost certainly be Best Picture-nominated, as it delivers a myth that many out there will want to see and cheer. But don’t kid yourself about how good and satisfying this film is. It’s mostly a mediocre exercise in deification and sanctimony. I loved the rebellion as much as the next guy but it takes way too long to arrive — 90 minutes.

“Nate Parker, the director, writer and star, sank seven years of his life into this film, and invested as much heart, love and spiritual light into the narrative as he could. But the bottom line is that he’s more into making sure that the audience reveres the halo around Turner’s head and less into crafting a movie that really grabs and gets you, or at least pulls you in with the harsh realism, riveting performances and narrative, atmospheric discipline that made Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave an undisputed masterpiece.

Three days ago it was reported that Variety‘s longstanding TV critic Brian Lowry has taken a new media writer gig at CNN. Six days prior (4.6) it was announced that Variety film critic Justin Chang will leave to become Kenneth Turan‘s heir apparent at the L.A. Times. These follow last July’s decision by chief film critic Scott Foundas to take a new gig with Amazon. The old Variety guard…adieu!

Variety‘s film editor Claudia Eller is “interviewing outside candidates,” according to a Penske Media employee, but right now the trade is without a top-dog, marquee-brand, NY-or-LA critic to shoulder the domestic burden.

The exodus (“if that’s the word,” cautions a Variety staffer) started when Derek Elley, David Rooney and Todd McCarthy were let go by the old Reed Business regime in 2010.

After Foundas left for Amazon Variety interviewed a fair number of critics, including a couple of big names, but didn’t hire anyone, probably figuring Chang would be happy to do all the big films. Now with Chang off to the L.A. Times they’ve got no one.

It seems doubtful that their Paris-based critic Peter Debruge will return to fill Chang’s shoes, having only been in Paris for a couple of years. There’s also the London-based Guy Lodge, of course, but right now the stateside ranks are thin.