It’s 9:55 am and I now have to get in the car and begin the three-hour drive back to Berlin. What have I been doing in Bad Grund, Germany for the last 40 hours? I can’t say until late June. I can only divulge non-explicit incidentals. Green forests and hiking and sitting in outdoor plazas and ordering salads and hanging out and filing stories in a big breakfast room. I can’t say much more than that. Them’s the rules. Update: In an absolutely non-related development, here is today’s front page of the Harz Kurier.

I’m fairly certain that before too long Hollywood Elsewhere will be two-thirds of a traditional reading experience, and one-third of a you-are-there, it’s-all-happening-right-now Google Glass experience — a video camera mounted on my glasses with a live feed going straight to an HE live screen and showing whatever’s going on — whatever’s being seen, heard and said in a walking-around social context (events, premieres, screenings, parties, interviews and randoms minus the private stuff.)

I honestly believe this will start to happen by late 2014 or mid-2015 at the latest. I think that just printed material, photos and videos won’t be enough. People will want more immediacy, direct access — something vaguely akin to a Being John Malkovich experience.

In a 5.16 N.Y. Times story about Google Glass by David Streitfeld, attorney Karen L. Stevenson says that “we are all now going to be both the paparazzi and the paparazzi’s target.”

“Like Somewhere, The Bling Ring sneaks up on you,” Film Comment‘s Kent Jones has apparently written. (I can’t find the actual link but Sasha Stone has.) In other words, Jones is implying, Sofia Coppola‘s film doesn’t feel like that much at first…but then it gradually starts to. And then it does.

“Somewhere during the first visit to Paris Hilton’s house (if it isn’t the real thing, it could just as well be), you might find yourself, as I did, alternately charmed, mesmerized, and horrified by the lives of the characters and the homes they enter. Halfway through the film, Marc and Rebecca wander through what is supposedly Orlando Bloom’s open-plan house at night, viewed from an exquisite remove several tiers above in the Hollywood hills, the sounds of howling coyotes and wailing police sirens quietly echoing in the distance—a suspended spell of uncanny beauty, and one of the most beautifully lyrical stretches I’ve seen in a movie in ages.

“I’m not sure if Coppola’s film ends as satisfactorily as it might have — resolving a narrative about characters who lead unmotivated lives does present its dramatic problems — but I don’t think it matters all that much. Unlike Spring Breakers, with which the film will inevitably be compared (alongside Schrader’s The Canyons), The Bling Ring goes about its business quietly but with a tremendous purity of focus. The film casts such a lovely spell that its full force may hit only after the lights come up.”

In recognition of the just-announced 5.21 screening of a super-lustrous, digitally restored version of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Cleopatra (’63) under the Cannes Classics program at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, here again is perhaps the greatest (and certainly the funniest) red-carpet interview of all time. Mankiewicz vs. Bert Parks, sardonic fatalism, “guillotine about to drop,” etc.

On 5.22 Cleopatra will open for a limited theatrical engagement in 200-plus theaters around the world, followed by the release of the American-market Bluray on 5.28. Here’s a month-old trailer showing off the new restoration.

Except it’s not new. As I pointed out last March, it’s roughly 15 months old. In early 2012 20th Century Fox’s UK video arm issued the exact same Cleopatra Bluray. The British Bluray was called a 50th anniversary edition when in fact it celebrated the film’s 49th year, as it opened theatrically on 6.12.63.

I said in my 2.5.12 review that “if you can somehow make yourself ignore the elephantine, glacially-paced, dialogue-driven nature and just focus on the lavish Todd-AO splendor and large-format clarity, it’s a nice high-def bath.”

What’s with the “aaahh, crap…what is all this?” look on Bruce Dern‘s face? Older guys often wear this cranky expression. Fucking crap, getting older and older, my pants are too lose around my waist, eff me, I need a snort. My late father, who stopped drinking in his 50s, used to walk around with this pissed-off, crabby-ass attitude….”aaaahhhh!” He basically hated what age was doing to him.

This is a still, of course, from Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska. It was released yesterday with a USA Today story about the film, which will have its big debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

“I had been sitting on this Nebraska script even when I did Sideways,” Payne tells Bryan Alexander. “But I didn’t want to go back to a road-trip movie right after that. I was really tired of shooting people in cars. I’m serious. It’s a drag. But after Descendants, I came back to this story.”

Nebraska is about Woody and son David Grant (Dern, Will Forte) and debts and a possible winning pot from Publisher’s Clearing House. Has anyone ever won anything from Publisher’s Clearing House? Ever? PCH was used for a joke in a Fletch movie, as I recall.

Payne tells Alexander that he shot Nebraska in black and white because it’s “cool…[it] just felt like the right thing to do.” That’s fine, Mr. Payne, but did you check with Vinny Bruzzese before committing to monochrome?

To hear it from N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes, Vinny Bruzzese‘s Worldwide Motion Picture Group is either a proponent of the increasingly synthetic and cheese-whizzy nature of mainstream movies, or an outgrowth of this. Either way Bruzzese sounds to me like a slick and opportunistic type who would have gotten along just fine with Christopher Moltisanti while he was looking to refine and sell Cleaver.

Worldwide Motion Picture Group honcho Vinny Bruzzese conferring with Miriam Brin, WMPG’s head of script analysis.

Bruzzese is apparently less of a calculating, self-created fiend than an inevitable manifestation of a development and production community that has less and less of a clue with each passing year. Either way he’s basically selling feelings of safety by advising production execs to favor cookie-cutter banality. Irving Thalberg would have taken one look and had the “gravelly-voiced” Vinny thrown right off the lot.

“For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success.” WMPG “also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“’Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,’ Mr. Bruzzese said. ‘If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.’

“Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. ‘A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

“His recommendations, delivered in a 20- to 30-page report, might range from minor tightening to substantial rewrites: more people would relate to this character if she had a sympathetic sidekick, for instance.

“Script ‘doctors,” as Hollywood refers to writing consultants, have long worked quietly on movie assembly lines. But many top screenwriters — the kind who attain exalted status in the industry, even if they remain largely unknown to the multiplex masses — reject Mr. Bruzzese’s statistical intrusion into their craft.

“’This is my worst nightmare,’ said Ol Parker, a writer whose film credits include The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. ‘It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

“Mr. Parker drew a breath. ‘Look, I’d take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing,’ he said. ‘But this feels like the studio would listen to my grandmother before me, and that is terrifying.’”

The first Great Gatsby reviews began breaking a couple of hours ago, and the consensus so far is that no one except for The Hollywood Reporter‘s somewhat approving Todd McCarthy is feeling especially charmed or elevated. Most of the critics published so far are generally unenthusiastic about the excesses of Baz Luhrmann‘s 3D, CG-ified adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novel.

Declaring that “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling,” Variety‘s Scott Foundas says that Gatsby is “like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as staged by Liberace. Indeed, it comes as little surprise that the Aussie auteur behind the gaudy, more-is-more spectacles Moulin Rouge and Australia has delivered a Gatsby less in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel than in that of its eponymous antihero — a man who believes bejeweled excess will help him win the heart of the one thing his money can’t buy.”

“The Great Gatsby uses the unbridled excess of the Roaring Twenties as an excuse to unleash the unbridled excess of 21st century digital effects, but we’re left with nothing but roar,” writes TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde. “Baz Luhrmann sucks the life out of Fitzgerald’s immortal novel and replaces it with empty filigree and overbearing style.”

“As is inevitable with the Australian showman who’s never met a scene he didn’t think could be improved by more music, costumes, extras and camera tricks, this enormous production begins by being over-the-top and moves on from there,” writes THR‘s McCarthy. “But given the immoderate lifestyle of the title character, this approach is not exactly inappropriate, even if it is at sharp odds with the refined nature of the author’s prose.

“Although the dramatic challenges posed by the character of narrator Nick Carraway remain problematic, the cast is first-rate, the ambiance and story provide a measure of intoxication and, most importantly, the core thematic concerns pertaining to the American dream, self-reinvention and love lost, regained and lost again are tenaciously addressed.”

“To accuse Luhrmann of overkill is a bit like faulting a leopard for his spots,” Foundas adds. “Love it or hate it, take it or leave it, this is unmistakably his Gatsby through and through, and as with all such carte-blanche extravaganzas (increasingly rare in this cautious Hollywood age), it exudes an undeniable fascination — at least for a while.

“In the notes for his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald famously wrote, ‘action is character,’ but for Luhrmann action is production design, hairstyling, Prada gowns and sweeping, swirling, CGI-enhanced camera movements that offer more bird’s-eye views of Long Island (actually the Fox Studios in Sydney) than The Hobbit did of Middle-earth. Arguably, the movie reaches its orgiastic peak 30 minutes in, with the first full reveal of Gatsby himself (Leonardo DiCaprio), accompanied by an explosion of fireworks and the eruption of Gershwin on the soundtrack. Where, really, can one go from there?”

Here’s a chunk of David Denby’s review in The New Yorker:

In my book the best film critics aren’t just about smarts or perception or passion — they’re about gourmet personalities. Like any good friend or acquaintance or FM talk-show host, they’re people you enjoy for their attitudinal “brand” as well as their thinking-cap riffs, for their persistent attitudes and moody asides and occasional derisions. A particular flavor, a burn-through quality. As James Wolcott wrote in 2006 about legendary critic Dwight McDonald, “His verdicts would mean nothing to us now if he hadn’t invested them with a humming force of personality and humor that opened up daylight wherever his mind gusted.”

Peter Rainer has earned his stripes in this regard. A pantheon critic who’s been around since the ’70s and understands The Whole Equation and Knows Whereof He Speaks, Rainer is an erudite, smart-assy guy whose succinct and creamy prose has, over the last thirty-odd years of filings for the L.A. Herald Examiner, the L.A. Times, New York magazine and the Christian Science Monitor, conveyed a personality as distinct and recognizable as Jerry Lewis or Zach Galifianakis or Leo Durocher‘s.

Distilled to essence, Rainer is, in my mind at least, Mr. Cranky with smarts and class and cultivation. I don’t read Rainer for any F.X. Feeney-like exuberance and generosity of spirit — I read him for the ascerbic wit and the snoot.

Early this morning, being unable to sleep, I began reading Rainer’s new review and essay compilation book, “Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era” (Santa Monica Press, 5.15). It’s a good, rich, reflective read — a tangy if judiciously spotty journey through the last three-plus decades of film-savoring. Each essay took me back to this or that distinctive film as it seemed at first blush. I nodded, remembered, laughed, chuckled, smirked, pondered, time-tripped…all that stuff.

In Rainer’s words: “This book should not be mistaken for a comprehensive survey. The vagaries of the profession do not allow for that. It covers three decades of reviews and essays written during an especially turbulent and transformative film era, drawn from my years at big-city papers, city magazines and monthlies, alternative weeklies, and national newspapers.

“With the exception of a few trims and minor restorations, the reviews remain the same as when they were written. In a number of instances, especially in my writings over the years on Richard Pryor, Stanley Kubrick, Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy and film noir, I have retained a few repetitions, which seemed preferable to messing with the original constructs. Here and there I have added postscripts, but I have resisted the fetish, not to mention the impossibility, of bringing things ‘up to date.’ These pieces are best approached as snapshots in time, captured in the heat of the moment.”

Rainer’s book is good Hollywood Elsewhere food. I plan on dining out on the various chapters over the next week and a half or so. I’m especially planning on running a counter-punch piece on Rainer’s dismissive review of Alan Parker‘s Evita.

A former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 1998, Rainer arguably deserves to be ranked alongside Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Andre Bazin, David Denby, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, David Thomson, Anthony Lane, A.O. Scott and the afore-mentioned McDonald. I’ve only read about 25% of it, but “Rainer on Film” is worth the price and then some.

Berlin’s Holtzendorffstrasse, just south of Kantstrasse — Sunday, 7:15 to 7:40 am.

I’m briefly side-stepping Hollywood Elsewhere‘s blanket policy of ignoring Iron Man 3 by pointing to a spoiler piece by Entertainment Weekly‘s Anthony Breznican about Ben Kingsley‘s Mandarin villain. Eff this movie, eff Marvel, eff Downey, eff the fanboys who are keeping CG comic-book sludge in the pipeline 24-7. But the Mandarin scheme and backstory is at least an interesting spin on a tediously familiar cliche — I’ll give it that.

A Frankfurt-based rep for British Airways baggage told me a half-hour ago that my two bags are on their way to Berlin’s Tegel Airport and should be available by noon or thereabouts. No breathing easy until the chickens have hatched, of course, but this is somewhat comforting news. Fingers crossed.

If you’re determined to kill the serious bad guys, it’s inevitable that some not-so-bad and innocent guys (including women and children) are going to be cut down also. Ugly, sad stuff. How many innocent people died needlessly as a result of Julius Caesar‘s many military campaigns? How many kids were killed by the armies of Alexander the Great? Zeal will always overstep its bounds. Fatal mistakes will happen. Even the best war technology is imprecise. War is cruel, messy, heartless.