Mom isn’t just weeping after seeing Les Miserables; she’s fairly devastated and having trouble explaining why. Everyone else in the car either has a case of the giggles or is going “okay, I respect your reaction but not so much on my end.” (Tip of the hat to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.)

After 18 bad years behind bars, exonerated West Memphis Three defendant Damien Echols was freed on 8.19.11 through an Alford plea. And then Amy Berg‘s excellent, unavoidably compelling West of Memphis was released, and Echols has been on the promotion circuit (for his book Life After Death as well as the film) ever since.

Echols on Devil’s Knot, the upcoming Atom Egoyan film that was inspired by and mostly based on the West Memphis Three case: “We’re completely against it…I’ve read previous drafts…it’s not even remotely accurate…[it’s been called] a ficitional account based on the mythology of the West Memphis Three…they’ve taken a fringe character who had little or nothing to do with me getting out, and made like the big star and hero and everything…no, we don’t have anything to do with it and want to stay as far away from it as possible.”

If there’s a God West of Memphis will at the very least be nominated for Best Feature Documentary Oscar. A win would obviously be better.

I ran into Echols at two Sundance 2012 events — a West of Memphis after-party and a morning press conference — and again at the 2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival. The possibly guilty party Echols is speaking about in the early part of the DP30 interview is Terry Hobbs.

I like to think of my own life in this way. I am living a kind of Steve Winwood “high” life without the big money, or life as defined by a series of highs rather than one of “stability” in the old-fashioned, white-picket-sense of that term (which my parents invested in). I live in order to feel high and spread highs of a certain kind.

Another way to put it is that I live in order to celebrate dream states that have obviously been made, at root, to fuel the fires of commerce, which is where the vaguely dirty aspect comes in. Except I love revenue. Who doesn’t?

There’s also the “constant fighting with people who disagree and are looking to spread poison by tearing you down any which way” aspect, but that will never go away.

All I know is that writing this column sure beats working. Which is what Robert Mitchum often said about acting. And yet I’m a 15-hour-per-day slave to it.

Many of us are in love with the idea of living the life of a literary Dean Martin but without the drinking and the cigarettes and the endless cynicism. Okay, some of us are. What do I actually mean by “literary Dean Martin”? I don’t know but give me a minute or two and I’ll figure something out. Don’t be afraid to start a sentence just because you’re not sure how to finish it. It’ll come to you. I learned that a long time ago from Patti Smith.

“Art is an inherently amoral and ruthless enterprise, however much we may want to believe otherwise.”

This is a quote from Andrew O’Hehir‘s 12.29 Salon analysis of the Zero Dark Thirty shitstorm. Many of us go to films hoping to be blown away or mesmerized or emotionally melted down, period. We just want the movie to work. We’re not uninterested in its political leanings, or oblivious to same, but most of us, I think, are willing to process this as connected-but-separate dish.

Others want their movies above all to stand on the right side. They want their art to be moral and compassionate. In exactly the same way, I feel, that the Soviet bureaucrats of the 1930s wanted their art to celebrate the glorious wheat farmers of the Ukraine. The Stalinists who’ve ripped Zero Dark Thirty for allegedly being pro-torture are cut from the exact same cloth.

I will bow down to any film that kicks ass. Okay, I won’t bow down to a brilliantly made film that advances an evil agenda, but if the film is as obviously well made as, say, Leni Reifenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will, I will at least have mixed feelings about condemning it. But a film that is morally ambiguous or indistinct will never anger or alienate me. And I don’t care what kind of politics it espouses. I am just as much a fool for Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire, one of the most rousing rightwing thrillers ever made, as I am for Oliver Stone‘s W. or Nixon.

In a 12.27 N.Y. Times interview with Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow, Brooks Barnes writes that Bigelow and ZD30 screenwriter-producer Mark Boal “have succeeded — perhaps a bit too well — in renewing a conversation about America’s use of torture to fight terrorism.”

But Bigelow “was not particularly keen to discuss torture over lunch, she said, partly because she wants her work to speak for itself and partly because she is aware that any public comments could just add fuel to the fire.”

I love and admire Bigelow, but c’mon. The anti-ZD30 rhetoric has obviously been raging over the Christmas holidays, and it’s become clear that the Hollywood Stalinists have probably succeeded in tarring and feathering ZD30 by persuading those who refuse to venture beyond party-chat points that the film is pro-torture (which it’s NOT) and is therefore pushing a politically incorrect narrative. So at this point a little lighter fluid by way of a quote given to Brooks Barnes would hardly fucking matter.

If I were Bigelow I would at least acknowledge that the Stalinists have probably wounded ZD30 badly enough to deny it the Best Picture Oscar, and that I hope they’re happy about that. I would also thank the Stalinists for giving us all an education about the hidden side of their nature.

On top of which if there’s one thing that the Stalinist attack pieces have made clear, it’s that ZD30 isn’t speaking for itself in terms of this topic. As Barnes observes, ZD30‘s torture scenes “are presented with no obvious political tilt, creating a cinematic Rorschach test in which different viewers see what they want to see.”

The only time Harry Carey, Jr. half-got me was when he played young Dan Latimer in Howard Hawks‘ Red River (’48). He’s on his horse, gently calming the herd…”whoa, dogies, whoa”…when Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) come up to chat. Latimer tells Dunson that when they reach Missouri and everyone gets paid he plans to buy his wife a pair of red shoes.

An hour later the cattle go on a stampede and Latimer is trampled to death. They find what might be his body but can only presume it’s him because he was wearing a checkered shirt. Dunson tells Garth to give full pay to Latimer’s wife, “just like he finished the drive…and, uh, … anything else you can think of.” Garth replies, “Like a pair of red shoes?”

And that was it. Carey never had a better part or brought it home in as an actor quite as fully. He wasn’t a great performer, just a good-enough one. But getting stomped into mulch by hundreds and hundreds of cattle hooves, godawful as that experience had to be, gave him dignity, or gave it, rather, to poor Dan Latimer.

Carey’a becoming a regular in the John Ford hambone stock company from the late ’40s through the mid ’60s sealed his fate. All he could do was play amiable or spirited second bananas on horseback.

Harey Carey, Jr. was a very well-liked fellow. On this point agreement was wide and far. Much of his likability (among boomers, at least) came from his playing the kindly ranch counselor Bill Burnett in the Walt Disney Mickey Mouse Club serial The Adventures of Spin and Marty. He made three other films with Hawks — Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Rio Bravo. He lived a long and fruitful life, and died today at age 91. God rest his soul.

The good news is that Criterion has a Badlands Bluray coming out on 3.19.13. The bad news is that they’ve cleavered the aspect ratio down to 1.78 to 1. The good news is that I still have my copy of a 1999 Warner Home Video Badlands DVD, and it’s presented at 1.37 to 1. [See jump page.]

I don’t know for a fact that this WHV DVD presents the definitive full-frame, open-matte version of Terrence Malick‘s 1973 classic, but it sure looks good. I’ve watched it three or four times and can tell you it has acres and acres of spacious headroom.

What happened to The Guilt Trip, the Seth Rogen-Barbra Streisand relationship comedy that opened nine days ago and has…what, fizzled? It was killed by 64% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics and has only made a lousy $14.5 million since opening nine days ago so I guess you can call it a bit of a wipe-out. Okay, a shortfaller. It’ll probably end up with…what, $25 million? It cost $40 million to produce plus distribution and marketing costs.

Nobody wants to watch a dramedy about a Jewish mom badgering her emotionally aloof son, right? Looked a little sleepy? Not funny or novel enough? Streisand used to be a draw, but she’s been out of the leading-lady game since the mid ’90s. I think it’s telling that I forgot to run a Guilt Trip review when the embargo broke. I was okay with it. I just forgot. Okay, I couldn’t muster the energy to write it. I guess that’s why it died. Nobody cared that much.

Pic was exec produced by Rogen and Streisand, directed by Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) and written by Dan Fogelman.

It’s basically a Jewish mother-and-son car trip movie. Rogen plays an inventor, Andy Brewster, who’s trying to sell a natural-elements cleaner to the big chains without much success. When he discovers that the beloved ex-boyfriend of his widowed mom, Joyce (Streisand), is living and working in San Francisco, he invites her to join him on a cross-country trip as he tries to sell his cleaner (which has a really hard-to-remember name that kinda sounds like Science Cleaner but is actually Scioclean or something like that) so they can wind up in San Fran and reunited with the old boyfriend.

And yet the way Joyce nags and nudges pisses Andy off and puts him in a bad mood half the time. The film has a nice ending, though — I’ll give it that. Adult chuckles, low-key tone, character-driven, no vulgarity, not classic or landmark but likable and moderately entertaining and occasionally heartfelt.

I was grateful for Rogen’s low-key personality, although he plays it a little too somber and dour here and there. I was grateful that it didn’t go all crude and sloppy in search of lowest-common-denominator animal laughs.

I saw The Guilt Trip 27 days ago at a special invitational screening in Century City that Rogen and Streisand attended.

Quentin Tarantino attempted one of his career-resuscitation moves when he cast Breaking Away‘s Dennis Christopher and 48 HRS. and Drugstore Cowboy costar James Remar roles in small Django Unchained roles. Very good for all three. But I’ve watched Django one and a half times and I never recognized Christopher or Remar. Certainly nothing they said or did popped through. I had to read about it, etc.

(l.) Dennis Christopher as Dave Stoller in Peter Yates’ Breaking Away (’79); (r.) as Leonide Moguy in Django Unchained.

That’s because my eyes were half-open and my attention was at half-mast. I shut down early in order to shield myself from the lemme-outta-here Quentin wank effect. I didn’t give a damn who was saying what or playing whom and wearing a sheet with misplaced eye holes or aiming a rifle at whomever. I just wanted to it to stop.

I guess now that I know to look for Christopher and Remar I’ll take take notice if I watch Django again, but the odds of that happening are slim to none.

Scott Feinberg‘s 12.27 Hollywood Reporter story about how Academy members are having difficulty with online Oscar voting (possibly due to forgetting passwords, but with more than one industry source describing the site as a “disaster,” says Feinberg) is the equivalent of a weatherman reporting rainshowers on election day.

It simply means that some of the older voters (who tend to vote in a conservative, status-quo, go-along way) might possibly throw up their hands and not vote, which probably means a slight weakening of support for lazy-default favorites like Lincoln, Life of Pi and Les Miserables. I can’t imagine what else it might portend. Older people have always had and always will have trouble with passwords and whatnot, and software guys always have and always will create websites that they know deep down will give a bit of grief to low-tech, slow-on-the-pickup users. They’ll never admit it, but software guys enjoy this on some deep perverse level.