Wow…this keeps hitting me in waves. I guess I’ve been in denial on some level. This is really, really going to a boilerplate Superman origin story. Same old story, more or less. Dying Krypton, Jor-El, “goodbye, my son,” Smallville, Pa Kent, General Zod, “sent here for a reason”…all of it. Maybe with better dialogue, perhaps with better acting. But the same drill. Okay, minus Lex Luthor, Otis and Miss Tessmacher. Small favors.

If you’re making any kind of realistic ’70s movie your wardrobe and hair choices are going to horrify or sicken a good portion of your audience, even those who lived through that sartorially-disastrous decade. This certainly seems to be the case with David O. Russell‘s American Hustle, a title which alludes to honest entrepeneurship as much as cons and flim-flams. The film formerly known as “Russell’s ABSCAM flick” (and before that American Bullshit) finally got a firm title yesterday.

American Hustle montage stolen from Indiewire.

When I said “realistic ’70s movie” I meant one that excludes X-factor people. Nobody wants to admit this and I’m sure I’ll be called an elitist for saying so, but only semi-clueless bridge-and-tunnel people from lower-middle-class “meathead” neighborhoods (i.e., those who weren’t connected to dynamic big-city culture) wore laughably grotesque ’70s threads.

I was bopping around on the fringes in the mid to late ’70s and I never wore a fucking leisure suit or elephant collars or gaudy sunglasses or had godawful “big-hair.” Okay, I wore flared jeans but I was mainly into T-shirts and Frye boots and Brian DePalma-styled khaki bush-safari jackets and that whole American Gigolo/Giorgi Armani/Milan-influenced thing (i.e., nifty sport jackets, Italian loafers, shirts with small pointed collars).

HE to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu: Congrats on yesterday’s start of principal photography on Birdman, your Michael Keaton-Edward Norton dramedy about a somewhat faded Hollywood actor from the CG-bullshit-blockbuster realm trying to revive his career by starring in a Broadway play based on a Raymond Carver story. Nobody likes to put pressure on themselves but the Fox Searchlight release suggests that your film could be released at the end of 2013. If you decide to make the effort and add gray hairs.

A rep for Fox Searchlight, Birdman‘s distributor, says “we’re targeting 2014” so that’s that, I guess. Then again David O. Russell‘s ABSCAM film is only a month ahead of you and that will definitely be released by mid December, Sony has announced. I realize it wouldn’t be easy but you could do it.

A ten-week shoot means you’ll be wrapped on July 1st or by July 15th if you go twelve weeks. If you firmly commit to five months in post-production you could have Birdman ready for release by mid-December. Especially if you shoot for ten weeks. Definitely possible and not all that crazy. If the editing goes well and the Movie Godz are favoring.

Shooting for Cannes 2014 is the simpler and more sensible thing — I get that. And you’ve never done a “comedy” so this is new turf. I’ll assume 2014 unless I hear otherwise…howzat?

In addition to Keaton and Norton Birdman costars Lindsay Duncan, Zach Galifianakis, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone and Naomi Watts. The film will be a New Regency production with Inarritu and John Lesher serving as producers. Pic will be produced by New Regency. Fox Searchlight Pictures will market and distribute.

A Bluray of Andrew V. NcLaglen‘s McLintock (’63) came out three weeks ago. It’s not an especially admirable John Wayne film — a rowdy, overly broad western farce and nowhere near as entertaining in that regard as North to Alaska (’60). Boiled down it has one really good scene (i.e., “the hell I won’t”). And it’s noteworthy for using an exclamation point in the title.

Two questions: What other semi-respectable films have used exclamation points or question marks in their titles? (All I can think of are Them! and Quo Vadis?) And what films are known for being mostly a wash except for one really good or at least half-decent scene?

Roughly 18 hours ago (or sometime yesterday around 2 pm Pacific) Patton Oswalt posted a statement about yesterday afternoon’s Boston bombings. HE is surely among the last sites to link to this but what the hell. While I feel awful for the victims and for the citizens of Boston affected by the sonic impact of this sickening act, I don’t feel the least bit bummed out or dispirited by it, certainly not in a general philosophical sense. Oswalt was bummed by the 9/11 attacks but not this time. He explains as follows:

“This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness. But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak.

“This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago. So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.'”

Last night the first-ever Chicago Critics Film Festival came to a close, and following a screening of a mint-condition 35mm print of Sorcerer followed by q & a with William Friedkin, the legendary director closed with some Dylan Thomas verse for Roger Ebert.

Yesterday’s big twitter topic was about Justin Bieber and his posse visiting the Anne Frank home near Amsterdam and writing in the guest book that (a) it had been “truly inspiring to be able to come here,” (b) “Anne was a great girl” and (c) “hopefully she would have been a belieber.” Meaning that if Ms. Frank had been saved from her fate by time-travelling to 21st Century America she would have become a major fan and bought tickets to Justin’s concerts and jumped up and down and squealed.

Which other significant figures from the anti-Semitic European arena during World War II might have also been Bieber fans if he’d been a popular musical performer in early to mid ’40s Germany?

Adolf Hitler would have probably scoffed at Beiber’s music but would the impressionable Eva Braun have been a fan? Probably not as she wouldn’t have been sure if Bieber is a Jewish or a German-Jewish name and she wouldn’t want to take any chances. Would Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels have been a fan? Perhaps if he could have persuaded Bieber to promote Third Reich values during concerts, but otherwise no. Would Amon Geoth, the Nazi beast portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, have been a “belieber”? Most likely not. Would the bring young female architect whom Geoth ordered shot in the head have been a Bieber fan? Probably not as she wouldn’t have had a chance to hear his music due to being in a concentration camp. (Frank, remember, would have become a “belieber” only by listening to Bieber sing on her bedroom radio at night.) Would Helen Hirsch, the house maid to Amon Geoth whom Embeth Davidtz portrayed in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film, have been a fan? Absolutely!

Here are two capturings of eyeglasses, mostly tinted and some not. The Bling Ring poster is fairly straightforward. The bottom photo was just taken a few minutes ago — six or seven non-prescription reading glasses (strength 2.25 to 2.50), five or six cheap-ass tinted reading glasses, five or six darkly-tinted 3D glasses for screen-glare protection, and two semi-expensive blue-tint reading glasses (strength 2.75). I have several reading glasses because I lose them and then I find them again, but not before buying replacements.

This afternoon’s Boston Marathon Copley Square bombings just don’t seem big or devastating enough for the culprit (or culprits) to have been inspired by a serious foreign-terrorist agenda. It feels like more of a Ted Kaczynski-type deal.

Update: A Daily Mail report says the JFK fire was unrelated to the Boston explosions. The story quotes JFK Museum director Tom Putnam as saying the fire “was the result of an electrical problem.”

The just-released poster for Spike Lee‘s Oldboy (Film District, 10.11) is twice as tall as the cleavered version pasted below. But it doesn’t matter because the full-boat version just shows another ten years etched out in red ink or blood or whatever. The point is that Josh Brolin‘s Joe Doucett has been imprisoned for 20 years, etc. Elizabeth Olsen, District 9‘s Sharlto Copley and Samuel L. Jackson costar.

Eric Lundegaard suggests that Alan Tudyk has delivered the performance of his life in 42, in which he portrays real-life Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman, a racist dog. The peak moment is a scene in which Chapman taunts Chadwick Boseman‘s Jackie Robinson with racial epithets from the Phillies dugout. It’s easily the most searing moment in an otherwise unexceptional film. Tudyk, 42, has been delivering supporting perfs since the mid ’90s but this is his first pop-through. A ballsy performance as people sometimes associate characters with players.