31 years ago I was interviewing Jack Nicholson at the Carlyle. The promotional agenda was Tony Richardson‘s The Border, but the subject was mainstream audiences, and more particularly that classic Samuel Goldwyn line that “if people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop ’em.” Nicholson put it more succinctly: “They don’t want that — they want this.”

What they’ve seen and enjoyed before, he meant. Comfort, familiarity, assurance, command. A nice five-foot wave they easily catch and surf back to shore on their boogie boards. They don’t want metaphors and meditative undercurrents. As Nicholson put it back in February ’82, “They want their meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy on the side.”

Which is why, as Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet reported earlier today, the public has bought 538,100 tickets to see J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost since it opened on 10.18 compared to 30.7 million tickets to see Gravity. It’s also been reported that Gravity has racked up $500 million worldwide.

I find it amusing that one of two things probably happened in the creation of this Nymphomaniac orgasm-mugshot poster. One, Shia LaBeouf talked Lars von Trier into letting him pose with a cigarette rather than join the crowd. Or two, Von Trier was shrewd enough to realize that one (but only one) person should be depicted as a rebel. “I’m obviously in this film, but I have other things on my mind,” LaBeouf seems to be saying. “I might even be indifferent to shuddering orgasms…maybe. In any event I like imagining that I’m James Dean in 1955.”

“It is most likely that scissors were invented around 1500 BC in ancient Egypt,” says the Wiki page. “The earliest known scissors appeared in Mesopotamia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.” The Noah page says that “the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, composed about 2500 BC, contains a flood story almost exactly the same as the Noah story in Genesis” and that most Biblical-era historians and scholars believe that the two floods are one and the same. It is therefore conceivable that scissors were (a) around during Npah’s time and (b) that Noah might’ve used a pair to trim his locks. But professional-looking buzz cuts were impossible. You can’t be too much of a stickler for hair realism in Hollywood epics. You have to be tolerant of eccentricity among hair stylists and vanity among actors. But I draw the line at accepting the existence of electric barber shears 2500 years ago.

Russell Crowe as Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

Thursday, 11.21, 1:12 pm on a train from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang. The charm of decades-old trains is a mixed bag. Look around and it could be 1958 or ’48. At least six hours (and quite possibly more) to travel 300 kilometers.

I’m not saying that Hoi An’s Boutique hotel isn’t a soothing, in-all-ways appealing, first-class experience. It is. I’m saying that I’ve stayed in places like this before and I’ll stay in places like this again. They’re great but they deliver what boils down to a blue-chip, top-of-the-line McDonald’s experience in terms of familiar deluxe elite splendor. And that’s fine. The clientele is very happy here. I’m happy here. I’m just saying I’d rather be swerving around water buffalos on a scooter.

Rubble stirred up by the recent typhoon, which was actually downgraded to a tropical storm by the time in hit Vietnam.

So I’ll be missing the first American Hustle media screening in Los Angeles on Sunday, 11.24 (the invites just went out). No one will be allowed to “review” until Wednesday, 12.4 at 9 am, but the Twitter responses will be fast and furious starting…oh, around 9:30 or 10 pm on 11.24. I’m back on 11.25 so my first viewing will be on Friday, 11.29. The response from people like myself will either be (a) “yes, yes…we feel the same way!” or (b) spotty counter-punching. Sometime around 11.29 or 11.30, remember, is when the same earlybirds will most likely be starting to view Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street.

And to think of poor Donald Sutherland today, playing a heavy in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Yes, of course…he’s delighted to have the work and the exposure and to be in the swim of it, etc. But to have stood at the top of the mountain…well, at least he had those moments. Over two full decades of them. The Dirty Dozen to M.A.S.H. to Klute to Don’t Look Now to Little Murders to Eye of the Needle to Ordinary People to that brilliant soliloquy as “Mr. X” in JFK…nothing to snort at. What percentage of the under-educated wankers who live for the Hunger Games series know anything about Sutherland?

I scootered down from Hue to Hoi An in the rain today.  Off-and-on rain but at times it was fairly torrential. Helmet, goggles, windbreaker, leather gloves…soaked to the bone. The 130-kilometer drive (roughly 80 miles) happened almost entirely on narrow rural roads (some not much wider than a typical American driveway) and for a short period over mountainous terrain. It took about four and a half hours, not counting a stopover for lunch. I’d like to see Dan Quayle or Glenn Kenny do what I did today. Forget the traffic — I’d just like to see them deal with the elements. As in Rome, nobody pays much attention to traffic laws in Vietnam except for stopping at red lights. Everybody improvises, anything can happen. The roads were occasionally smooth but always winding and often muddy and bumpy and pot-holed. Near-accidents happen every other minute, it seems, but vehicles never collide. Everybody just ducks and weaves and zips around and somehow it all works. We passed through one little shanty village after another. Hills, flat plains, dense forest patches, rice fields, cattle, wild goats, water buffalos…I’ve never travelled through any place in the world quite like Vietnam.

“My thinking…got altered today because I talked to someone who saw American Hustle and said it’s totally the real dealio in a big, big way. This source is smart, informed and seasoned, and so I took this as exciting news that this race still has some surprises left in it.” — Variety‘s Steven Gaydos in an HE comment posted earlier today.

In any sort of fair and just world, Berenice Bejo‘s performance in Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past would be, at the very least, nominated for Best Actress. She is riveting, volatile, vulnerable, ferocious and anguished in this exceptionally complex and poignant film. I’ve rarely felt as riveted by the complexities and recriminations of a family’s domestic drama, and Bejo’s portrayal of a mother grappling with enormous guilt and divided loyalties is sad and penetrating and lasting. What are her chances then? Not so hot apparently. The apparent locks are Blue Jasmine‘s Cate Blanchett, Saving Mr. Banks‘ Emma Thompson, Philomena‘s Judi Dench and Gravity‘s Sandra Bullock…and not one of these performances can hold a candle to Bejo’s or, for that matter, Adele Exarchopoulos‘s knockout performance in Blue is the Warmest Color. The fix is in, life is unfair, etc.

I was reminded of a famous JFK quote when I read Cathy Horyn’s 11.14 N.Y. Times piece about the legend and the whereabouts of Jackie Kennedy‘s pink suit (“a classic cardigan-style Chanel with navy lapels”) that she wore on 11.22.63. In an interview with Death of a President author William Manchester, Mrs. Kennedy recalled that her husband wanted her to make a stylistic statement during their Dallas visit. “There are going to be all these rich Republican women at [a lunch they were scheduled to attend], wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets,” JFK told her. “[So] be simple — show those cheap Texas broads what good taste really is.”

In a subsequent dispute with publishers of Manchester’s book, Mrs. Kennedy managed to dilute “cheap Texas broads” into “rich Texas broads” and then “those Texans.”

Angelo Bertolotti, the 87-year-old father of the late Brittany Murphy, is alleging that his daughter…I can’t do this. I can’t report about allegations that a 32 year-old actress whose career was on the skids may have been iced by government spooks with rat poison or insecticide…please. Especially when it’s been alleged that Murphy was killed “because she spoke out in support of Julia Davis, a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower” blah blah.

Too icky, too weird, too dicey.

Murphy’s decision to hook up with notorious conman-scumbag Simon Monjack, who curiously died five months after Murphy’s passing, clearly indicated some kind of blindspot or obsessive element in her personality. I’m now presuming (or at least entertaining the notion) that this characteristic may have been inherited.