I’ve selected two exceptional portions from Tom Junod‘s profile of Elysium, Behind The Candelabra and Monuments Men star Matt Damon in the current Esquire — the first being a Junod riff about Damon’s almost-regular-guyness and the second a great Beatles anecdote by way of Bono.

Portion #1: Matt Damon “is not a regular guy. He is to regular guys as he says Germans are to Americans — about 5 percent different. For comparison`s sake, let`s say George Clooney is about 15 percent different. Brad Pitt is about 12.5 percent different, and Leonardo DiCaprio has never been a regular guy, so he offers no basis for calculation. But Damon is so close to being a regular guy that he can pass as a regular guy onscreen and off. He can be the same guy onscreen and off, and so he offers audiences the rarest of combinations — the satisfaction of reliability and surprise.

With a single, well-reported article, Slate‘s Sharon Shetty has all but destroyed the credibility of Ken Scott‘s The Delivery Man (Touchstone/Disney, 11.22) and with it the credibility of Starbuck, Scott’s Canadian-made original. Shetty began with my 7.2 “Son of Starbuck” piece, in which I asked how many pints or quarts it would take for a single guy to father 535 children, and came up with some real-world answers that won’t put a smile on the faces of anyone behind this film (i.e., Scott or his star, Vince Vaughn, or the various attached Touchtone and Disney execs).

The bottom line is that it would be awfully damn hard as well as bureaucratically unlikely for one guy to father 535 kids via sperm bank donations as (a) Vaughn’s character would be required to ejaculate over 1,000 times into vials and (b) within the realm and regulations of sperm banks this level of delivery would take about seven years to accomplish.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the journalists in this photo, assembled for the London junket of Edgar Wright‘s The World’s End, were “in the tank” for Wright and the film going in, no matter how good it may have turned out to be. “The World’s End has been getting very good reviews from the UK press,” Faraci writes, “so I’m excited. Of course no matter how good it is, some asshole will show up in the comments and complain that this trip has colored my review of it.” I’m not complaining. I’m just saying “consider the Wright oeuvre and then look at these guys…you’re telling me they’re impartial?”

(l. to. r) Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny, Todd Brown of Twitch, Edgar Wright of A Fistful of Fingers, Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, Jordan Hoffman of Screencrush, Devin Faraci of Badass Digest, Germain Lussier of Slashfilm, Alex Billington of First Showing, Eric Vespe of Ain’t It Cool News, Silas Lesnick of Coming Soon and Steve “Frosty” Weintraub of Collider.

“The number one fact of the new low-budget cinema is that it is no longer impossible to get your film financed, but it is impossible to get anybody to see it,” says The Canyons director Paul Schrader in a new, Canyons-kowtowing issue of Film Comment. Both Kent Jones and Larry Gross give it little pats on the back. Oh, yeah? Then why didn’t The Canyons get into Sundance or South by Southwest? Why did Steven Soderbergh offer to recut it for Schrader, and why did Scharder turn him down? What about the likely bedrock truth of the matter?

The problem, says Schrader, is that “there are 10,000 people doing the same thing you’re doing, right now. And which one of those 10,000 films is anybody going to see? 15,000 films get submitted to Sundance, 100 or so get shown, eight get picked up, and two make money. Those are the economics.

I just don’t relate to short guys, and I don’t mean that negatively. I’ve never agreed with Randy Newman and I completely agree that “it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” But I’ve always felt a certain remove from guys who’ve never grown beyond the size I was when I was ten. When I see a short guy pulling a gun or kissing a girl or beating up some guy in a bar, I don’t say to myself “okay, whatever” — I say to myself “whoa, that short guy isn’t letting his stature determine his attitude or fate!” And I respect their rage. Everyone knows angry short guys can be more ferocious than anyone. Napoleon Bonaparte, Truman Capote, Swifty Lazar, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, etc.

All to say that the first thing I noticed when I watched this Wasteland trailer is that Luke Treadaway is a little guy. (Roughly the size of Charlie Kaufman.) And Iwan Rheon, Gerard Kearns and Matthew Lewis are no giants-of-the-earth either.

Earlier today Harvey Weinstein, attorney David Boies, MPAA honcho Christopher Dodd and First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams kicked around the Weinstein Co.-vs.-Warner Bros. Butler squabble on CBS This Morning. WB attorneys are clearly the ayeholes in this dispute. “What the hell do they need the title for?,” Weinstein said. “If you watched this as a movie, you would say ‘this smells.'” Why not just choose another title, Harvey? “What should I call it? Something Else? A Movie Formerly Known as The Bee?” The Lee Daniels pic opens on 8.16.

In a 7.9 review titled “Slaughtering Intelligence,” Marshall Fine calls Killing Season (Millenium, 7.12), the Robert DeNiro-vs.-John Travolta paycheck movie, “sadistically violent, over-the-top…laughably bad.”

Fine saw it last week at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, “[and] if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this review,” he notes, “because the only press screening in the U.S. is Wednesday night (7.10) and reviews are embargoed online until 6PM Thursday, 7.11.

Travolta introduced the Karlovy Vary screening “and warned the crowd that the film was violent ‘but not gratuitously so,'” Fine write. “That apparently included the scene where Travolta himself gets shot through both cheeks with an arrow, which embeds in a door, leaving him hanging as unhappily as a butterfly pinned to a specimen tray. That’s just before De Niro waterboards him with a mixture of lemon juice and salt.

“I’d call Killing Season a cat-and-mouse game. But that would insult felines and rodents, both of which are much smarter than this movie.”

Movie Mezzannine‘s Sam Fragoso has polled several critics and posted several lists pondering the ten best films of the 1980s. What wankery. You can’t pick ten effing films to represent the cream of the crop of an entire decade. It has to be least 30 or 40. Here’s Hollywood Elsewhere’s picks, a blend of the best, the most significant, the most enjoyable and and the most influential. I’ve settled on 47.

Warning: It is the respectful opinion of this columnist that anyone who picks Brian DePalma‘s Blow Out as one of the great ’80s films either (a) has a serious aesthetic perception problem or (b) is being intentionally perverse. I tried watching the Criterion Bluray and I couldn’t get past the first 45 minutes or so.

Notice that Josh Brolin is crawling out of a trunk, not a coffin. You know what I see in this? I’ll tell you what I see in this. I see an obvious resemblance to the attitude and stylings of Park Chan-wook, who directed the original Oldboy as well as the loathsome Stoker, and that scares the shit out of me. I see a nod to 1920s German expressionism and to a late 1960s R. Crumb drawing of Weasel J. Weisenheimer, the neighborhood drug dealer. Either way I see high style and black humor. Please, Spike…please turn down the Chan-wook. You’re better than that.

If Fred Maalox of Gainesville, Florida…sorry, if Fred Maalox’s 19 year-old son who’s going to film school had shot this and if everyone in the Hollywood blogosphere was somehow persuaded to watch it, 98% of them would say “this?…what?…whaddaya want from me?” But because it’s from Jean Luc Godard‘s Goodbye To Language, a 3D film to be distributed by 20th Century Fox, and because it’s the great Godard, who arguably peaked in the late ’60s but kept plugging and is still at it at age 82, everyone is respectful and “interested.” Does it feel like a Godard film? Yeah, kinda…but so? I’m not saying it’s a wank, but it could be.

I’m head over heels in love with the idea of Guillermo del Toro directing a new version of Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaughterhouse Five with a script by Charlie Kaufman. The presumption is that GDT would direct in his adult mode — i.e., not overshooting and just letting the material stand on its own, as George Roy Hill did for his 1972 version. GDT has worked out an adult take on the material “that is perfect for it,” my excellent source says. GDT is pushing Universal to belly up and pay Kaufman to bang the script out, but Uni won’t pay CK’s fee unless GDK assures that Slaughterhouse Five will be shot within 12 months.