Here’s the re-design that’s been giving me so much grief over the last 36 hours. Grief from others and my own nagging doubts. Here’s the link to the whole thing. The FLASHBOX is one of those bullet-point come-ons providing links to the hottest stories and items of the last few days. DISCRIMINATOR is one of those “this is hot but that’s not” charts — always changing, a scroll bar, six or seven items at a time. The arrows on the DISCRIMINATOR box will be smaller. A friend wants me to kill the second 72 8 x 90 ad. Another says the Twitter box is unnecessary but I kinda like it.

Amy Seimetz has been kicking around as an indie-level director-writer-actress for a good seven or eight years, but before seeing Upstream Color at last January’s Sundance Film Festival I hadn’t paid much attention, to be honest. Seimetz says very little in Shane Carruth‘s film, but sometimes (or should I say often?) a certain mystique arises when an actor holds back and just settles in and the camera just stares. On top of which Seimetz looks a bit like Juliette Binoche in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is a roundabout way of saying she’s obliquely hot.

Amy Seimetz in Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color.

So naturally I wanted to speak with her about Sun Don’t Shine, a dark-toned drama she wrote and directed. It opens on 4.26. Here’s the mp3. I had this idea of Seimetz being a kind of reflection of her Upstream Color character, someone a little vague and imprecise, a woman of few words, etc. So it was a slight surprise to speak with this friendly, fully confessional, almost bubbly-sounding voice on the other end.

Seimetz mentioned that she was going through some “really rough” personal struggles during the shooting of Upstream Color and that maybe some of that came through.

The clip below was shot by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson during the 2013 South by Southwest Festival. I’m having trouble paying attention to what’s being said because I’m so fascinated by that construction-site backround. A covered chain-link fence, tractors, tools. Where the hell are they doing this interview, in someone’s back yard in some nondescript Austin neighborhood?

From the Sun Don’t Shine press notes: “[The film] follows Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and her boyfriend Leo (Kentucker Audley) on a tense and mysterious road trip through the desolate yet hauntingly beautiful landscape of central Florida. From the outset, the purpose of their journey is unclear, and the motivations behind their heated altercations and shady errands are hazy, but sporadic moments of tenderness illuminate the loving bond between the two that exists underneath their overt tensions.

“As the couple travels up the Gulf Coast past an endless panorama of mangrove fields, trailer parks, and cookie-cutter housing developments, the disturbing details of their excursion gradually begin to emerge, revealing Crystal’s sinister past and the couple’s troubling future.”

I spoke last Sunday with Mary and Martha director Phillip Noyce. We went on for a half-hour — here’s the mp3. The nominal subject of Mary and Martha is the ravages of malaria, so tomorrow is an especially fitting day to catch it. But the film is really about much more, and not just in terms of content. It’s a personal film for Noyce as well as a spiritual retreat of sorts.

Mary and Martha director Phillip Noyce.

Noyce’s motive in directing a politically-tinged HBO character drama, he says, was to downshift from his experience as the director of Salt, a hugely successful Angelina Jolie action thriller that required dealing with as many political elements as creative ones. Noyce equates the experience to working in a “washing machine.”

Mary and Martha is about two moms (Hilary Swank, Brenda Blethyn) “coping with the malaria-caused deaths of their sons in Africa, and about the social and political activism these tragedies bring about,” I wrote three days ago. “But it’s clean and direct and earnest as far as the story allows it to go, which is farther than you might expect,”night, and it hit me all over again (and in a sense a bit more this time) how well made it is, how carefully finessed, how exactly right it all feels.

Noyce is primarily known for directing big expensive action thrillers and potboilers (Salt, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, Dead Calm) as well as somewhat smaller-scaled humanistic dramas (Rabbit-Proof Fence, Catch A Fire, The Quiet American) — this is obviously one of the latter.

“The material might be a little on-the-nose, but Noyce knows exactly what he’s doing, and there’s just this sense of convergence — a team of clearly talented people have been told to contribute in just the right way. It’s so well acted by not only Swank and Blethyn but every last costar and bit player (Frank Grillo, James Woods, Lux Honey-Jardine, Sam Claflin, Sean O’Bryan, Ian Redford) and written with such clarity and finesse that it moves along and just sinks right in without a hint of huffing or puffing…it just happens.”

Noyce’s next project is a kind of futuristic Hunger Games-meets-Phillip K. Dick film with Jeff Bridges and yet-to-be-cast costar. It will shoot in South Africa. The Weinstein Co. is producing.

Is a vague but persistent sense of dread just part of being 40-plus, or do teens and 20somethings feel it also? In 1967 the Troggs sang that “love is all around” but not today, baby. Today it’s dread, foreboding, negative anticipation — an uh-oh climate of “I don’t know what’s coming but nothing all that good, I fear…another bombing, another financial crisis, another mass slaughter by some wackjob, my Siamese cat will be run over…something.”

It’s not just the existential climate of 2013. You know Edvard Munch and Franz Kafka felt this. Kant, Rilke and Heidegger too. Cary Grant dealt with this throughout his entire life. It’s the weight of the world, man. But if you want to make it go away, all you have to do is pop a Tylenol. Seriously.

A 4.19 piece by Time‘s Maia Szalavitz acknowledges that Tylenol “isn’t the most obvious remedy for dread. Unlike, say, heroin or a stiff drink, it isn’t known to provide the emotional escape that fear of dying might require.” But a recent clinical study indicates that Tylenol seemed to make a difference among some Vancouver-residing subjects who were asked to contemplate death…”[it] somehow reduced anxious compensation.”

Daniel Randles, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, tells Szalavitz that the results of the limited study “don’t prove that Tylenol can treat existential despair.” But I am nonetheless now thinking about buying some Tylenol and seeing how I feel after a few days. All I know is that I sense the tingling presence and the threat of death, doom and financial ruin everywhere, and it might not be so bad to have some of that feeling medicated away.

With the 66th Cannes Film Festival jury being chaired, as previously announced, by director, producer and swaggering industry heavyweight Steven Spielberg, the following were announced last night as jury members: Nicole Kidman, French actor Daniel Auteuil, director Ang Lee, Indian actress Vidya Balan (who?), director Lynne Ramsay (“Hey, Lynne, you’ve just quit Jane Got A Gun in a traumatic and headline-making way…want something to do that’ll put the spring back in your step?”), director Cristian Mungiu and two-time Academy Award winner Christoph (called “Christopher” in the Cannes press release) Waltz.

I spent all morning working with a brilliant web maestro who converted Hollywood Elsewhere to WordPress. We’ve been trying to make the new re-design look right, and it just won’t. And then I spent a long time having an email argument with a close colleague who thinks the design we’re working on is basically shit and that I’m moving too fast. (I want to get this done before flying to Germany.) He’s telling me that I need to hire a serious pro. But I don’t want to re-invent the wheel here.

You have to be good at a certain craft or art form (as I am with writing) to know when you’re not so good at something else. I am at best a mediocre designer. My design tastes are overly conservative. But I have a reasonably good sense of visual balance and I know when something looks pretty good or at least tolerable. But I’m not good enough to amaze myself. Which is why I feel beat and beaten.

All good members of the online cognoscenti are hereby required to give this trailer their full consideration and then offer whatever comment and criticism that may seem appropriate.

Hunter Todd‘s Worldfest, an annual Houston event for the last 50-odd years, is no one’s idea of a major-league, must-attend film festival. But at least it’s getting some press over an alleged racial profiling incident last Saturday in which Todd asked a woman dressed in Muslim attire to allow him to check her backpack.

Is it really that crazy for a nice-enough guy like Todd (whom I’ve met) to ask a female University of Houston student who was dressed “in a full Muslim hijab” to let him please check her backpack to make double-sure that festival attendess aren’t about to be blown up? This was five days after the Boston bombing, remember. Then again this woman may have been (and may still be) an idiot. If I was wearing Muslim garb I sure as hell wouldn’t walk around with a backpack, for Chrissake. Would anyone with a shred of common sense? You can bet she would have been questioned if Worldfest was based in Tel Aviv.

The Houston Chronicle‘s Robert Stanton reports today that University of Houston student Mike Rudd “confronted Todd [after Saturday’s incident] and accused him of racially profiling the UH student.” Seriously?

“Todd acknowledges that he singled out the woman because of the Muslim attire she was wearing,” Stanton writes. “He said he initially did not know if the person was a man or woman. ‘She’s dressed in a full Muslim hijab and was carrying a heavy backpack, and I was concerned about the safety of my guests,” Todd said. Todd denied racially profiling the woman. He said he was on guard because of the explosion that rocked the Boston Marathon just days earlier, killing three people and injuring at least 140.

“‘What am I supposed to do?,’ he asked. ‘Allow a terrorist to blow up 200 people?'”

It’s been nearly 15 years since I caught a show at the Greek Theatre, but I would go to this May 5th Los Lobos concert if I wasn’t going to be visiting the Monuments Men set in Germany. Conventional wisdom says Los Lobos peaked a quarter-century ago but I really liked The Town and The City (’06).

There’s absolutely no question that Pain & Gain director Michael Bay said to Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez that “I apologize for Armageddon” — here’s the mp3 of Bay blurting out these exact words — but he meant the hyper-fast pacing of that 1998 blockbuster and not the film as a whole.

Pain & Gain director Michael Bay at last night’s Los Angeles premiere.

Two days ago I reported that Bay had “literally apologized” to Rodriguez in a 4.21 Miami Herald piece “for the frame-fucked, machine-gun cutting of Armageddon.” But then other outlets ran this and sloppily made it sound as if Bay was apologizing for the entire damn thing. And then Bay said on his website that he’d been misquoted by Rodriguez.

In a piece called “I’m Proud of Armageddon,” Bay said Rodriguez had gone “too far in reporting false information. He has printed the bare minimum of my statement which in effect have twisted my words and meaning. What I clearly said to the reporter is [that] I wish I had more time to edit the film, specifically the the third act. He asked me in effect what would you change if you could in your movies if you could go back. I said I wish we had a few more weeks in the edit room on Armageddon.”

Here, again, is the line in which he says the phrase “I apologize for Armageddon.” (I’ve tried six times to post a somewhat longer passage in which Bay talks about the process of cutting Armageddon‘s third act, but the damn thing won’t play.) Bay can’t deny what he said, but the mainstream press — not Rodriguez — did distort his meaning by implying Bay was apologizing for making a crappy film or something. Which he certainly didn’t do.

The Bay apology story is apparently being covered on tonight’s Access Hollywood (which goes on at 7:30 Eastern). Rodriguez offered to let Access Hollywood record his tape of Bay saying what he said but the staffer he spoke with declined, apparently deciding that running a transcript of the conversaton would suffice.

Neil LaBute‘s Some Velvet Morning screened last night at The Tribeca Film Festival, and occasional HE correspondent Clayton Loulan sent along some impressions. “The film was shot over eight days (yes…days) in Brooklyn,” he begins, “and the question on everyone’s mind was will this film erase or mitigate the sins of LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace and The Wicker Man? The short answer is yes but the longer answer likely has to do with how the ending hits you.

Some Velvet Morning star Alice Eve, director-writer Neil LaBute beforre last night’s Tribeca Film Festival showing.

“In a chat with LaBute after the screening, he said he knows what people expect from him and was very conscious in the writing and directing of the film of both playing to expectations and giving people something else entirely. My feeling is that Velvet teeters on the brink of self-parody before pulling back on the wheel and flipping you the bird. You’ll either appreciate that or you won’t.

“It’s the story of the older Fred (Stanley Tucci) and the younger Velvet (Alice Eve), two ex-lovers who spend 83 minutes in conversation throughout what feels like every room of Velvet’s more than spacious apartment. Fred has left his wife and shows up with his bags packed and ready to move in with Velvet and start over. Velvet has moved on and just wants to have lunch with one of her friends. We begin to peel back the layers of their backstory. Battles ensue. Objects are broken. Insults fly. Their motivations shift and each party has equal chance to play the aggressor and the persecuted.

“Some Velvet Morning doesn’t feel as outwardly provocative as In The Company of Men and the scope is smaller, but more precise. This one plays like the scalpel to Men’s sledgehammer.”

In my mind, a major auteur like Wong Kar Wai directing a martial arts film is like Stanley Kubrick directing a 1987 cop-buddy drama starring Jim Belushi. There’s nothing more soul-numbing or soul-draining than the regimentation of a martial-arts film. I was going to title this “Two Wongs Don’t Make A Wight.” I don’t know what I was thinking.