I guess it’s true about Les Miserables not being a critic’s film — it currently has a 63% Rotten Tomatoes grade, which means it’s flunking. (Anything below 80% means trouble, but below 70% means get out the life jackets.) But the real bellwether is the fact that MCN’s David Poland, who seems to have a special place in his heart for musicals as he has befriended more than a few of them, has panned Les Miz rather harshly.

“I am not a moron,” Poland states. “I can deal with building the factual reality in my head when the style of the film decides against being literal. But that is what is so much the failure of Les Miserables…it wants it both ways. It wants to be profoundly intimate, suffering in extreme close-up, the singing-on-the-set choice (the endless hype about which has turned it from ‘choice’ to ‘stunt’), and shooting almost completely in singles and tight doubles. Edit. Edit. Edit.

“But the material is huge and epic and melodramatic. So the effect of Tom Hooper’s direction is like looking at Mount Everest through the wrong side of the binoculars.”

Abbie Cornish is about to finish work on Jose Padilha‘s Robocop, which has been filming in Toronto. (She’s playing Ellen Murphy, wife of Joel Kinnaman‘s Alex Murphy, the street cop who becomes a cyborg enforcer.) But two days ago she was
speaking from her L.A. home about her work in David Riker‘s The Girl, which attracted some heat at last April’s Tribeca Film Festival. I slightly know Cornish socially (we have a mutual friend) and so we had an
easy chat.

Abbie Cornish (r.), Maritza Santiago Hernandez in David Riker‘s The Girl.

Cornish’s performance as Ashley, a somewhat irresponsible San Antonio mom looking out for a young Mexican girl (Maritza Santiago Hernandez) whose mother has recently drowned, “is Cornish’s best part since Candy,” I wrote on 4.30. “She’s a solid actress trying to do the right career thing, and she’s definitely scored here.

“Ashley doesn’t act in a way that exactly elicits sympathy or identification,” I explained. “She’s always a beat or two behind the audience in figuring out her next move. She gradually wakes up and flies right, but a lot of stumbling happens along the way.

“Riker begins with Ashley losing her low-rent job at an Austin (or is it San Antonio?) super store due to pissing off her boss. Ashley is pretty and bilingual, but right away you’re noticing she’s not all that together. She’s trying to get her son back through the courts but is emotionally impulsive and undisciplined and seething about everything. Right away you’re saying ‘I don’t know if she’s going to make it through all the hoops.’

“And then along comes Ashley’s boozing, bewhiskered truck-driver dad (Will Patton) with an offer to join him at his Mexican home for a night of tequila and celebration. Ashley knows that she has to fly straight if she wants her son back, and that child services will be paying unexpected visits to her trailer home to check on her habits…and she drives down to ole Mexico to throw down some tequila with her grungy loser dad?

“Patton tells her the next day that he’s making good dough by smuggling illegal aliens across the border into the U.S.in his truck. This plants a seed. Ashley needs money badly, and eventually decides to bring four or five illegals across on her own. But she hasn’t thought things through and is rather stupidly presumptuous about the conditions of a river that the illegals will have to cross, and tragedy strikes a mother in the group, leaving her young daughter (Maritza Santiago Hernandez) alone and destitute.

“The movie kicks in when Ashley realizes that she’s responsible for this tragedy, and that she’s obliged to help this little girl in some way.

“We realize, of course, that this is the point of the film — for Ashley to woman up and get past her resentments and weaknesses by helping this little girl. And of course, it’s the young girl who ends up helping her. It takes a while but Ashley eventually sets things right, and is presumably in a better frame of mind as far as getting her son back and being a good mom, etc. And Riker lets her off the hook by having the young girl’s grandmother tell Ashley that the river killed the mom, and that it wasn’t Ashley’s fault. But it was, obviously, to a large extent.

“All in all The Girl is a nicely subdued humanistic tale, but I can’t honestly say that I felt all that much support for Ashley, although Cornish does a fine job of portraying her as far as she goes, warts and all. Hernandez registers as the more forceful and clear-headed of the two, truth be told.”

My compassionate ex-boss Kevin Smith tweeted this morning that he’ll be retiring from theatrical filmmaking after he directs Hit Somebody, a hockey flick reportedly spanning 30 years, and Clerks III. Smith is one of those guys who clearly has (and is constantly reformulating) the whole cultural equation in his head — just listen to him riff during one of his talking-tour appearances — but has never quite made a film that delivers on his full potential.

Kevin has always waved me off when I’ve told him what I think he should do, but this is what I wrote this morning after I read the news.

“Who retires at 42, Kevin? You started out as a filmmaker 18 years ago with Clerks, and just because distribution systems are oppressive and weighted against your kind of material…I know it’s unpleasant and a grind, but you can’t not work in films, man. Not as a hard and fast prohibition, I mean. That’s like an ambitious writer saying he’s decided not to write any more books. Even if you’re totally convinced that you don’t want to work in films, never say never. To anything. You should at least try some theatre.

“I don’t care (and you shouldn’t either) how unhappy or unfulfilled filmmaking has made you. Like it or not, you’e here on the planet to do what you can do to brighten or make rich or at least decorate the world as best you can, and I don’t see how that effort doesn’t include at least the occasional film when the material and the time seem right. You don’t have a choice. You have to carry the weight. You’re 42, man, which is when the juices start to really uncork for most writers.

“I presume you’re going to focus on TV and online efforts plus the usual speaking tours, but I wrote years ago that you have a major work in you — a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff for the slacker generation. I still believe this. Maybe on the stage and maybe as a theatrical film or maybe as an online or VOD thing. I’m thinking of some kind of balls-out, drag-out husband-and-wife-and-their-friends whiplash-dialogue thing with few if any laughs, and lasting two or three hours. You’ve been married long enough to write it — you know all about this shit. You have to write & direct this, Kevin. You could be a funnier Neil Labute.”

Last night was split between premiere screenings of (and after-parties for) Gus Van Sant, Matt Damon and John Krasinski‘s Promised Land (which I gave a thumbs-up to yesterday) and Walter Salle‘s On The Road, which I’ve been friending since my initial viewing in Cannes last May. The after-events were at West Hollywood’s Fig and Olive and a sixth-floor balcony suite at the Chateau Marmont, respectively.

(l. to r.) On The Road director Walter Salles, costar Kristen Stewart and composer Gustavo Santaolalla — Thursday, 12.6, 11:40 pm.

Kristen Stewart and Francis Coppola received most of the attention at the latter event. I spoke briefly with Robert Pattinson about his costarring role in Maps To The Stars, a David Cronenberg film that will shoot in LA in the spring, he said. Previous brief chatter at the Promised Land party happened with Van Sant and Krasinki, who co-wrote Promised Land. The latter spoke enthusiastically about the scriptwriting side of things and mentioned that he’s been speaking with Cameron Crowe about possibly teaming on a project.

(l. to r.) Promised Land star, co-writer Matt Damon, costar & co-writer John Krasinki, Variety‘s Jeff Sneider at Fig and Olive — Thursday, 12.6, 10:05 pm.

(l. to r.) Graemm McGavin, Arbitrage director-writer Nic Jarecki, Francis Coppola at On The Road Chateau Marmont after-event — Friday, 12.7, 12:20 am.

Promised Land director Gus Van Sant.

Promised Land costar & cowriter John Krasinki at Fig and Olive — Thursday, 12.6, 9:45 pm.

Main culinary event at Promised Land after-party, which was funded by the good folks at Focus Features, the film’s distributor.

Graemm McGavin — Friday, 12.7, 12:50 am.

Michael Cimino‘s relatively new Twitter account (it’s really him) is moderately exciting. But I can’t lie down for anyone attempting to mythologize John Ford beyond (my idea of) realistic proportion. Ford is the greatest artist, a timeless poet, etc.? Sorry but I had to take issue, as I have nmerous times before.

John Martin Feeney’s sense of pictorial balance was rarely matched, but he peaked from The Informer to My Darling Clementine, and then resurged with 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And even that had problems (starting with the fact that Stewart and Wayne were way too old for their characters). Ford’s iconic Monument Valley films of the ’50s and early ’60s have gotten all the attention because they’re simple to digest, but they lack the shaded complexity and the unpretentious straight-deal naturalism of his best films (like The Grapes of Wrath and Drums Along The Mohawk) and they’re way too sentimental.

The over-praising of The Searchers in particular (which began 33 years ago with Stuart Byron‘s New York article “The Searchers: The Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood“) has gone on long enough. It’s a noteworthy western but take it easy.

I was asked a couple of weeks ago if I think Garrett Hedlund‘s performance as Neal Casady/Dean Moriarty in Walter Salles‘ On The Road is an award-calibre thing. In a sense, certainly. But in reality, not quite. For as good as he is (and I think Hedlund easily matches or even slightly surpasses Nick Nolte‘s performance as the same guy in 1980’s Heart Beat), the competition is too tough. Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor are brutal fields this year. But first-rate work is its own reward as it leads to other good things.

Same thing when it comes to Kristen Stewart‘s performance as Marylou. It’s great to see her kick back and get sensual in a meditative art film that exudes soul and swoon and pastoral splendor and real-deal undercurrents instead of…you know, phoning in a Twilight or Snow White performance. She’s starred in indies before but never one as good as On The Road. But her role isn’t big enough or strongly written enough to win special attention. It would be one thing if she was playing “the” supporting actress role (as Sissy Spacek did in Heart Beat), but she isn’t — Kirsten Dunst is also in the mix. And Best Supporting Actress competish is fierce: Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables), Sally Field (Lincoln), Helen Hunt (The Sessions), Amy Adams (The Master), Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook), Ann Dowd (Compliance), Susan Sarandon (Arbitrage).

“The experience of sitting through all 160 minutes of Les Miserables can feel less like an awards bash than an epic wake, at which the band is always playing and women forever wailing. By the end, you feel like a pinata: in pieces, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes.” — from a 12.6 review by The Guardian‘s Catherine Shoard.

I saw Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40 about six weeks ago, or on Thursday, 10.25. It was a mid-afternoon screening on the Universal lot on a hot day. I wrote the following to Apatow and the Universal publicist who invited me a few hours later. Well, that’s not true. I wrote a version of this letter, but I finessed it today…sorry. [Warning: Mild spoilers herein.]

“Judd — I don’t know if you personally signed off on my seeing This Is 40 this afternoon, but thanks if you did. I appreciated the opportunity & value the respect shown by your or the powers-that-be in allowing me to have an early looksee.

“Basically I think This Is 40 is a fairly ballsy act of self-portraiture as far as it goes. By that I mean it’s self-portraiture plus Apatow schtick for the first 75 minutes, which isn’t exactly in the realm of an Ingmar Bergman or John Cassevettes film in terms of frankly revealing the inner life of a filmmaker, but it’s certainly attempting that kind of thing while simultaneously going for the big audience. A less brave director wouldn’t have even flirted with a film like this. I mean that.

“All right, that’s the kiss-ass part of this letter and here comes the truth.

“I have to say that I think This Is 40 works best during the last hour, give or take, or roughly beginning at the 75 minute mark. But I think Leslie Mann is excellent all through it. She’s the spiritual anchor of the film, I think. I also loved the performances of Albert Brooks, John Lithgow and Melissa McCarthy. (This is still sounding kiss-assy.) But I honestly didn’t care for Charlyne Yi. Chris O’Dowd explodes in The Sapphires but his material wasn’t as good as it needed to be here. It’s an in joke having the manatee-like Jason Segel play a fitness trainer, right?

“And you’ve got your older daughter Maude playing…I have to say this carefully. She’s playing…I don’t want to make a mistake. She’s portraying a rather…don’t hate me for thinking these things about Maude’s character but it’s well-known that teenage girls are a pain to their parents. Your younger daughter is totally cool though.

“I loved the line about Megan Fox having painted an image of a vagina on her dark underwear. And the line about the last of Graham Parker‘s fans being taken away in an ambulance — that was excellent.

“I saw the love and the struggle and the humanity in Leslie’s “character”, of course, and the strain and the pressure in Paul Rudd‘s (i.e., yours) but mainly I felt the effort to sell their lives by way of fast schticky-angsty humor. I kept wanting the schtick to be dropped and the plain, awkward ordinaryness of life to come through in a Bergmanesque way. And I kept thinking to myself ‘boy, this movie is not a very attractive advertisement for West LA/Brentwood Liberal Values & Lifestyles’ and ‘I’m kind of glad this movie isn’t coming out before the election because it might persuade some people to hate liberals.

“You know how Bill Maher goes on about the Republican bubble that rightwingers live inside of, the thick gelatinous membrane that keeps out all the facts and the general reality of things? That’s what I felt during the first hour or so of This Is 40. Like I was stuck inside a Westside Liberal Membrane for people who live north of San Vicente and west of Bundy. ‘I’m not sure if I like these people very much,’ I was telling myself. ‘These people need to quit whining and complaining and basically take their fingers out of their asses and smell the wind coming off the sea, and the daughters need to read the Baghavad Gita or go work on a horse ranch or go to Africa to help impoverished people.

“It’s hard to put into words, but I read portions of the script when Universal put it online last week (or was it the week before?) and I’m re-reading certain portions as we speak, and a lot of it reads better than it plays. During the first hour, I mean.

“But like I said, it takes off and finds the groove and kicks into gear around the 75-minute mark. Starting with the scene in which Rudd is weeping in his BMW, which directly follows the scene in which he realizes that Graham Parker is not going to save his company financially. Of course, this is something that everybody in the audience knows from the get-go, but which takes Rudd over an hour to figure out.

“But after this point the anger and the fighting and the resentments really let loose, and that’s when the movie starts to really work.

“So much of the hassle and the tension of things comes from the Graham Parker situation, and that just didn’t fly for me. It’s hard to root for anyone who’s so blind to the realities of the music market that he’s pinning his hopes for survival on the ascendancy of Graham Parker and the Rumor. Rudd’s character has done pretty well for himself in the music business (a syou have in the film business), obviously, but suddenly he’s an idiot who thinks that he can sell Graham Parker in a big enough way so that his financial pressures will be alleviated? And the solution at the end is representing Ryan Adams, another getting-old guy?

“I have to say that being 40 is a pretty easy thing, Judd, if you don’t mind my saying. It’s officially the start of middle age but the ‘uh-oh’ feeling doesn’t really kick in until your mid to late 40s. I’ll tell you this: I look at photos of myself when I was 40 and I think to myself, ‘Wow…almost a spring chicken! Okay, a little bit of wear and tear has started to show by that point but very little, really.’ 40 is when your face begins to acquire a little character, and when moms enter the MILF stage. It’s pretty hot when you get right down to it. So I don’t get the angst.

“What guy is dumb enough to tell his wife or girlfriend that he took Viagra or Cialis before making love to her? It’s not only printed on the warning label. I think 15 year-olds know that when they get older they’re not supposed to tell their girlfriends that they’re taking it. It’s almost on the level of ‘go when the light is green and stop when it’s red.’

“Brooks kills it in every scene he’s in. McCarthy is really great because she never goes for the laughs. Lithgow is too pursed and pinched at first, or so I thought, but then he saves it at the very end, and that scene between he and Leslie.

“Marriage is hard, marriage is a grind, it’s not easy to keep the fires going, etc. Your film honestly deals with all that stuff, warts and all. And it honestly states that teenage girls (even the ones sired by the director-writer) can be whiny, abrasive and self-absorbed and dismissive of their parents. I just didn’t buy the quirky oddball humor in the first hour (particularly any and all material related to anal probes) and I didn’t buy the Graham Parker/music business material. But the final 50 minutes is pretty good stuff.

“So there’s my positive streak, my admiration, what I liked. ‘Get through the first 75 minutes so you can savor the really good final 50 minutes.’ Do I need to work on that line?”

No ZDT, eh? I would be hugely surprised if the quirky, contrarian-minded LACFA picks Silver Linings for Best Picture, and flabbergasted if they go for Lincoln, Argo or Les Miz. The Master has faded and they know it. And Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild simply don’t have the horses. If they had real vision and brass balls (which of course they don’t) they’d celebrate the mad abandon of Anna Karenina. The only left-field contenders I can think of are The Grey or Looper…is that what you’re thinking, Glenn? One of these?

If I was Rian Johnson…no, fuck that, I’m not Rian Johnson and never will be. Although I sometimes bat tweets his way like it’s a Sunday tennis game with Eric Clapton.

So the MUBI guys are doing a Tony Scott celebration, and while reading their copy I was once again reminded that no journalist seems to care why this sharp guy with a red baseball cap, this creative go-getter, this dynamic turbine of a director killed himself last August. Nobody is asking any questions, at least, and it just seems odd.

When a guy who lived in front of a worldwide crowd reaches up and turns out the light, I think it’s fair after a decent interval to (a) ask what really happened, and (b) to expect a candid answer. Life is constantly about experience and facts and questions and learning, and I want to know, dammit, what the hell led him to that bridge. It happened four months ago, and I think enough time has elapsed for Scott’s widow or brother Ridley or someone in the family to just man up and tell it straight. I didn’t know Tony Scott personally, but I talked with him three or four times and I felt as if I did know who he was through his films. We all felt that to differing degrees. And it doesn’t feel right for this this issue to just sit there like a blank sheet of paper.

Producer Friend: “I have to say that I’m stunned that you liked Les Miz. I really thought that our tastes were in synch. Not always, I guess. Did you see Todd’s Hollywood Reporter review? I expect many of those to come. Zero Dark Thirty is the movie of the year (along with The Grey, which stands not a chance).”

Me: “I didn’t ‘like‘ the film exactly. Certainly not as a gathered-together whole. I was swept up and intensely moved by the last 40 minutes. There’s a difference between giving the entire film a pass and succumbing to the final act, I think.”

Producer Friend: “The truth is that Tom Hooper‘s use of constant close-ups, the dutch angles and the wide-angle lenses were very odd choices. I was bored to death by much of it. I thought Cohen/Carter were silly and over the top and that Russell Crowe was just dismal. Kudos to Anne Hathaway, though. When I nominate do you recommend that I put Les Miz ahead or behind Zero Dark Thirty?”

Me: “Zero Dark Thirty is a far more rooted and relentless film of our time than Les Miz…please. It is genuine instant history, and so on-the-stick.”

Producer Friend: “Duh, I was joking.”

Nick Clement, a Connecticut film buff who has always burned brightly and has always celebrated the important stuff in the right way (even when he falls for films that I consider dubious or worse), wrote the following this morning: “I’m just wondering if you can shed any light on WTF is going on with the release of Silver Linings Playbook? It still hasn’t opened anywhere in CT — another weekend comes and goes and it’s still not here…and it seems like it’s crested at around 500 screens total — what are they doing?

“Same goes for Anna Karenina, which isn’t playing in any decent theater in the Hartford area. What gives? Why make these movies, promote them for MONTHS on end in trailer form, and then never release them? There are plenty of people in CT who would watch these two movies…don’t get it, makes no sense — do you know anything?”

Response: I said from the very beginning that the girly-girls who’ve supported generically coy dumbass romcoms staring Kate Hudson, Katherine Heigel and Cameron Diaz may not show up right away for SLP even though it delivers exactly what they like and want because it also traffics in anxiety and meds and sports and therapy and other cross-currents that dippy girls aren’t familiar with and/or feel a little bit threatened by.

I’m presuming that the Weinsteiners are looking to tough it out with SLP in limited release throughout December in hopes of being named Best Picture or snagging Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) or Best Actor (Bradley Cooper) or Best Supporting Actor (Robert De Niro) trophies by this or that critics group or from HFPA or Oscars noms in January, and then break it wide. But it does seem odd that avid film buffs can’t see it at all in Connecticut or at least in your area, according to your letter.

In fact SLP is now playing in Greenwich, and will break open a bit (i.e., show up in the Hartford area) around Christmas, I’m told by a Weinstein rep.

“Still thinking about how brilliant Killing them Softly is,” Clement adds. “My father and I went to see it over last weekend and we loved it.”