It’s good to see Marcia Nasatir and Lorenzo Semple, Jr doing their Real Geezers routine again, but let’s try and be a little more current than Trouble With The Curve, which had already had its day and been more or less pushed aside. Whatever they review has to be opening in a few days or have opened a day or two earlier.

Expertly constructed wham-bammers (i.e., “what you see is what you get”) sell tickets and give less sensitive audience members a good time, but they don’t linger. The ones that do always deliver the undercurrent stuff, “the things that are not said.” Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse and L’Avventura deliver this in spades; ditto Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others and Cristian Mungiu‘s Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.

One level below this (and this is flattery I’m dishing here) are the ones that may not have a churning river underneath, but they keep the emotional content in check. They hold their cards to the chest and let the audience absorb what’s there rather than show or explain it or use a laser pointer and say “here it is…see?” (Either you get it or you don’t, but you’d have to be an idiot to miss it.) This is what Ben Affleck‘s Argo does superbly. He never tips the bucket over and spills the water out and leaves puddles on the floor. He always ladles it out just so, concisely and succinctly and yet making sure that the water has all the right nutrients and effervescence. In a word, he believes in brevity. And that is a welcome thing.

It’s not just HE’s “Berg.” Earlier today Garth Franklin‘s Dark Horizons reported that two days after Monday’s screening at the New York Film Festival, Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln will be screened, somewhat restrictively, for high school and college students on Wednesday, 10.10, at several AMC theatres nationwide. The screenings will apparently begin around 7pm.

I’m a student of life. An earnest student. I want to learn. May I attend also?

The screenings in New York, Los Angeles and several other cities will be followed by a live Yahoo q & a with Spielberg and Daniel Day Lewis. The q & a will stream live on Yahoo! Movies at movies.yahoo.com/lincoln-live. Questions will be submitted on Twitter using the hashtag #Lincolnmovie.

Lincoln will screen before the q & a at Manhattan’s AMC Leows Lincoln Square, L.A.’s AMC Century City 15, and in AMC theatres in Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Washington DC, Seattle, Miami, Atlanta and Houston.

Can you order tickets online? Can you find any mention of this special Lincoln screening on the AMC website? Of course not.

Jason Statham‘s Parker is Donald Westlake‘s original guy, all right. Or, if you want, Lee Marvin‘s Walker from John Boorman‘s Point Blank. It is axiomatic that all Jason Statham films suck wind to some degree. (The exception was Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job.) You can’t go by a trailer, but it seems as if Parker might not stink as badly as the others. Thoughts?

That’s Jessica Biel as Vera Miles in Hitchcock, Sacha Gervasi‘s making-of-Psycho film that will open 2012 AFI Fest. I think it’s fair to say that Biel’s mouth is a lot bigger and opens a lot wider than Miles’ mouth. Biel’s mouth might even be bigger than Joe E. Brown‘s. I know, I know — “who’s Joe E. Brown?” He played Osgood Fielding, the old coot who had thing for Jack Lemmon‘s “Daphne” in Some Like It Hot.

Kino Lorber’s forthcoming Fear and Desire Bluray looks great — natural, clean, straight from the lab. Until this release the only way to see Stanley Kubrick‘s first film was to get hold of one of those dupey, cruddy-looking VHS tapes or DVDs, or watch via online stream. So this is great news from a purist, restorationist perspective.

The problem, of course, is that the movie itself is an embarassment. Kubrick called it crap in interviews, and it’s easy to see why. Soldiers caught behind enemy lines in some kind of existential. low-budget conflict in what looks to be a park in upstate New York or New Jersey with the picnic tables removed. Blah, blah, blah. Fear and Desire should be shown to all first-time filmmakers. It will greatly encourage them to know that Kubrick made Paths of Glory only four years later.

The first thing you hear is some pretentious narration, written by Howard Sackler, that goes as follows: “There is war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, or one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist, unless we call them into being. This forest, then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear — and doubt and death — are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.” I wanted to turn it off right then and there.

The only thing that sustained my interest was the fact that Fear and Desire has been mastered at 1.33. Any film that brings even a little discomfort into the heads of guys like Bob Furmanek is, in my book, a good thing. Don’t believe it when these guys say they just want the correct aspect ratio to be rendered. That’s just what they say for attribution.

I watched last night’s Presidential debate from the bar at Finn McCool’s, a pub on Santa Monica’s Main Street. About two-thirds of the way through these two 20something jock types came in, and right away one of them looked around the room, noticed that 12 or 15 people were watching the screen and said to his pally, “Oh, okay…everybody’s watching this thing.” In other words, they came in to watch a game and were unhappy about the bar’s two or three screens being otherwise engaged.

I was sitting right next to them and silently saying to myself, “Yeah, it’s tough, chief…I know. Once every four years around October and November people in bars like this actually watch something other than football or baseball games. Not an easy one to swallow, I realize. Especially for guys like yourself, right? Life sucks every so often.”

According to Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, The Sessions director-writer Ben Lewin is surprised that Fox Searchlight has submitted his film for Golden Globe consideration as a drama. Because midway through filming he realized that The Sessions is “actually a comedy,” and this realization led costar Helen Hunt to “recalibrate” her character.

Lewin would be wise to shut that one down right away. Golden Globe submissions and decisions about which films are “comedies” are often a stretch and sometmes absurd, but there’s no way in the world any semi-awake human being on the Planet Earth would call The Sessions a comedy. It uses a humorous line here and there, chiefly during William Macy‘s church-pew counselling scenes with John Hawkes. But it’s obviously just a straight healing story with sexual-emotional flavorings and a kind of tragic undercurrent.

I would say overall that you really have to have a bent mind to even half-smirkingly call it a comedy…c’mon. It’s about a guy with almost no life who experiences a few shafts of emotional and spiritual light before all the lights go out. Where is the ha-hah in that?

It took me most of the morning to recover from last night’s Barack Obama tragedy, and the Black Hole of Calcutta depression that resulted. Thank you, Barry, for yanking out my butt-cork and making me feel as if my soul was draining out and falling to the carpet like sand. Wait…is this happening? Oh God, It is happening. The man has an arsenal of damning facts at his disposal and he’s not using any of them, and he’s losing this debate to that Amiable, Good-Natured, Lying Republican Country-Club Slimeball.

I wrote last night that “I know what it’s like to half-prepare for something and then go out there and just blow it.” You can prepare a lot of or not so much, but you have to want to go into the arena and smile like a Cheshire cat and rip the other guy’s throat out, and one thing that mild-mannered Barry has always had difficulty with is being adversarial and confrontational in a one-on-one situation. All I can say is that he’d better wake the hell up, man up, toughen up, call in Chris Matthews for some debate coaching and get out there and turn this thing around in the next debate. I haven’t been this angry with him since the budget standoff and his reported willingness to compromise with Boehner and the other fiends. I hate wimpitude.

Obama has the wind behind him, he has the edge and he’s likely to win, the numbers are looking good and he all but forfeits the debate because he has to be Mr. Smiley and because he problems with aggression?

Next Monday night’s New York Film Festival debut of Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln is unexpected, for sure, and the bravest thing that Disney marketing has done on behalf of this Tony Kushner-scripted film. Before this moment Disney has been presenting a cautious if not timid face to the world, particularly in its decision to take the AFI Fest’s closing-night slot, which is only hours before the 11.9 opening.

So good on Team Disney — for the first time they are standing by their film with noticable pride and resolve. Because you know the New York blogosphere will not cut Lincoln any breaks, and that a lot of the wise guys are looking to get Spielberg-Williams any way they honestly can. (I’m not the only one.) And you know that N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick and his Lincoln tipster, “Guido Bazin”, will be on pins and needles to see if the crowd agrees or not with Guido’s 9.22 impressions of the film.

It burns me that Glenn Kenny and Kris Tapley will be seeing Daniel Day Lewis‘s Honest Abe by way of Walter Brennan and Matthew Modine before me, but them’s the breaks. I’ve asked to see the film, naturally, but they may have their own plans. It’ll begin to screen in LA next week

I despise the wussy timbre of Daniel Day Lewis‘s Abraham Lincoln voice. Even more than I did before. It’s chalk on blackboard. The only time I was able to stand it was at the end of the trailer, when he gets angry. But it wasn’t enough for a save.