The normal 21st Century thing is for major newspapers to fire their movie critics, so it feels almost surreal to hear that the Orange Country Register is looking to hire one. I could make several suggestions to editor Ken Brusic, but let’s keep it to one for now: former Arizona Daily Star critic, OK magazine critic, blogger and Twitter guy Phil Villarrreal. Do you have to be a Republican to be considered? Is it realistic to expect to even find more than one or two Republican film critics? Kyle Smith, Michael Medved and who else?

As Hitler videos go, this isn’t half bad. Except the Akin thing will go away within two or three days…okay, a week. And the brainiac who wrote the copy has misspelled “know” and “disappear.” And the Stalin reference makes no sense. But some of it is funny. “We never called Romney a felon…yeah, right.”

This morning I’m a tad more knowledgable about factors that may have led to Patrick Goldstein having taken a buyout from the L.A. Times and shut down his 12 year-old column, “The Big Picture.” A key thing for any working journalist to consider is to think about the amount of content you produced ten years ago, and then ask yourself “would that cut it in today’s media environment?” Ten years ago I was banging out two columns per week for Reel.com, and no, that would not cut it today.

This, I gather, is the crux of the Goldstein exit saga. He wouldn’t agree to grim up, eat more Wheaties and churn out more stuff. He wouldn’t get with the 2012 program.

You could assert that it was unrealistic for anyone who had Goldstein’s gig to run with the mindset of “I’m going to write one column a week and tap out a few blog posts in the margins.” It seemed that more than a few of his columns, boiled down, were basically “I just went to lunch with so and so” along with that “summer movie posse” thing (show kids some trailers) he’s been doing since forever. We all go dry or stale from time to time and need to re-charge, but it did seem as if Goldstein was out of ideas or running low on gas or something along those lines.

There’s also a view with although the L.A. Times is structurally unsound with creaking timbers and financial wolves circling (hence my remark yesterday that it’s “largely a gutted, dying organization”), Calendar, run by John Corrigan, is actually a fairly lively place to be. It’s now employing six movie writer-reporters in hopes of ramping up on that Oscar season ad income. The latest new staffers are Mark Olsen and Glenn Whipp, adding to Rebecca Keegan, Steven Zeitchik, Amy Kaufman and Nicole Sperling. So Goldstein is gone, okay, but new writers, new ideas and new innovations will quickly rush in and take his place.

Last night I saw A Liar’s Autobiography, a 3D animated film about the life of the late Monty Python headliner Graham Chapman (1941 — 1989), based on Chapman’s comedic memoir that was initially published in 1980. No reviews permitted until the beginning of the Toronto Film Festival, but here’s a clip from Chapman’s funeral that worked nicely as I slumped in my seat.

The film, a Bill and Ben Production, uses Chapman’s recording of his autobiography, made shortly before he died of throat (or tonsil) cancer. Produced and directed by London-based Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson, the film had several animation companies working on different chapters of varying lengths. ” John Cleese has recorded new dialogue which will be matched with Chapman’s voice, Michael Palin will voice Chapman’s father, Terry Jones will play his mother, Terry Gilliam plays Graham psychiatrist…and they all play various other roles,” says the Wiki page. Eric Idle was apparently the only Monty Python fellow who abstained.

With getting specific or even geographical I’m hearing Ben Affleck‘s Argo, Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, Robert Lorenz and Clint Eastwood‘s…wait, not Trouble With The Curve? I thought that sounded right, made sense. Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone, Ken Burns‘ Central Park Five and what else? What about a little wackadoodle Terrence Malick action?

Patrick Goldstein‘s “The Big Picture” column, which began 12 years ago, has breathed its last. Goldstein explained nothing in his final installment except “this is my last.” No, he wasn’t whacked. Rather, he’s taken a buyout. But was he asked to take it or did he go up to his editors and say, “Can you guys give me an effing buyout so I can blow this pop stand?” Had they leaned on him to change his game (file more often, become chattier) and he said “naaah”?

Patrick Goldstein

I wrote Patrick and asked what’s up, what happened, what he’ll be doing. A new online column? Radio silence. Nikki Finke is reporting that part of his deal is that he’s agreed not to trash the L.A. Times. In other words, he’s not allowed to speak candidly.

Whatever happened, the L.A. Times has been swirling around and down for a long time. It’s largely a gutted, dying organization, and no longer the kind of place, apparently, that understands and fully supports the kind of in-depth, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” film-industry column Goldstein has been writing all these years.

I gather Patrick came in one day, looked around at the L.A. Times newsroom, figured the jig was up and why prolong the agony?, made a face like he’s John Wayne looking at Dean Martin in the opening minutes of Rio Bravo, hocked a loogie and spit into the spitoon, took the check, said “adios” and got on his horse and rode into the hills like Shane. He’ll take a few weeks off and start writing again, I mean.

A friend says “it has been known for several weeks that the new editors at the Times had laid down the law to Goldstein, insisting [that] he write much more frequently in return for the big check he was getting. It was no more ‘one column a week’ and occasional internet pieces, which he kept resisting. The guy would rather go to his kid’s little league games and in reality write about baseball instead of showbiz.”

A friend was asking why The Sapphires, which I half-loved after seeing it in Cannes, isn’t in my Oscar Balloon “best of the year” list. I said it’s because it only really works for the first 40% or 50%, and that the second half doesn’t have the same snap-crackle-pop. Now I’m wondering what other films fit this description. Nominations? A friend says “is it any good?’ and you go “yeah…well, it is for about an hour and then it runs out of gas.”

“I saw John Hilcoat‘s Lawless this morning — a bootlegging movie about backwoods macho bludgeoning, stabbing, gouging, shooting, throat-slitting, shotgunning and all that good exploitation yeehaw crap,” I wrote on 5.19 from the Cannes Film Festival. “It’s a better acted, more finely photographed and much more violent upgrade of an early ’70s Roger Corman film. So why did they screen it here? It’s a drive-in movie for rednecks, and I’m sitting in Grand Palais on the Cote d’Azur watching this flotsam?

“It’s set in 1931, the height of the Depression, and I guess I wanted something classy and fabled like Phillip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox…no such luck with Hillcoat.

“Tom Hardy plays a time-travelling robot with a hick accent who can’t be killed with a throat-slashing or with two or three shots to the chest…he jes keeps on a’comin.

“As far as I’m concerned Hillcoat is no longer someone to watch. He’s a thick-fingered plebe. The Proposition, for me, was crude, sadistic, high-style hash about amber lighting and grubbily dressed actors whose faces were smeared with chicken grease. The Road, his post-apocalyptic father-son movie, was half-decent but was mostly about compositions filled with grayness and ash and waste of one kind or another. And now this sludge.

“‘Two good things about Lawless,’ I tweeted. ‘(1) Guy Pearce‘s ultra-venal, almost Dracula-like villain, and (2) a nice nude scene featuring Jessica Chastain.'”

I can’t think of another commercial theatre that I like more than the Aero. The fact that it’s a tastefully programmed rep house with first-rate projection standards is only the half of of it. The other half is that it’s a living, commercially solvent remnant of what theatres in every small and mid-sized town in this country used to be. It’s what John Travolta said of Jackrabbit Slims in Pulp Fiction — “a museum with a pulse.”

Except movies look and sound a lot better at the heavily refurbished Aero than they ever did in single-screen houses in the ’60s and ’70s.

Plus the Aero is on a nice quiet street (Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue) with two yogurt shops nearby and nice, settled-down people walking around and no coarse, squealing low-lifes laughing too loudly over glasses of wine. Everybody who hangs out on Montana “gets it.” Okay, it may feel a little too sedate at times. I’ll admit to having said to myself once or twice, “This has to be one of whitest streets in Los Angeles.” I prefer a bit more uptown hurly burly, but it’s awfully nice to hang on Montana Ave. and know that representatives of the devolution of American culture will not appear.

Last week I did a phoner with Arbitrage director-writer Nicholas Jarecki. Here’s the mp3**. I’ve been cranked about this New York-based melodrama since Sundance, which I called “a solid Sidney Lumet potboiler…tough and real, aromatic and well-threaded.” It contains Richard Gere‘s “best performace in a long time” and a serious, stop-the-presses, pop-out performance by Nate Parker.

Jarecki’s process in refining the screenplay and editing the film was thorough, methodical and painstaking. Therre was also a lot of rehearsing involved. The work shows. Every step of the way the film feels tight, realistic, fat-free.

Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions wil unveil Arbitrage on 9.14, theatrically and simultaneously on VOD.

Gere plays a smooth but fraying-at-the-seams trader-financier involved in high-stakes flim-flammery and a manslaughter cover-up, and he’s not doing one of his slick operator turns. He’s really gotten hold of the soul and raison d’etre of such a guy, and not in a way that encourages outright hissing, curiously enough. He’s never lovable, but is always half sympathetic, in part because you can’t help but admire his ability to keep going and deflect the gathering chaos.

Parker is the dude you remember after Gere because he plays a kind of pawn in the tale, but in a way that exudes rock-solid character and dignity. This is a breakout role for the guy, trust me.

Tim Roth is highly flavorful and amusing as a colorful Colombo-type detective. Also excellent are Susan Sarandon (as Gere’s wife), Stuart Margolin (Gere’s attorney), Brit Marling (his oddly idealistic daughter), Laetitia Casta, Josh Pais and Larry Pine.

** I’ve mistakenly left a blank “waiting for Nic” section in at the very beginning of the recording — it finally starts about 60 or 70 seconds in. I’ll fix it this evening.

“If Tony Scott didn’t inspire a lot of respect from critics, he does have some dissident champions among serious cinephiles. More than one colleague dinged me for liking his films, as if happily admitting to their pleasures was an unpardonable breach of good taste (or correct politics). There was plenty about his work that was problematic and at times offensive, yet it could have terrific pop, vigor, beauty and a near pure-cinema quality.

“These were, more than anything, films by someone who wanted to pull you in hard and never let you go. Years after I met him, Mr. Scott sent me a note of thanks for my review of Domino, embellishing it with a witty self-portrait of a figure in a red cap smoking a very large cigar. He looms large on this little rectangle, a blank screen he filled with vivid energy.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a tribute piece (“A Director Who Excelled In Excess”) appearing in today’s print edition.

Domino was perhaps my least favorite Scott film of all. But Man On Fire was right at the top. Yesterday I sent the following this to a journalist friend yesterday who was looking for a quote or two about Scott’s under-appreciated films:

“While I suspect that Tony Scott’s politics were liberally inclined, Man on Fire was, I submit, perhaps the most brilliant right-wing revenge thriller ever made, and one of the most satisfying post-9/11 movies about socking it to the ‘other’ — anarchic, ruthless, swarthy non-American sociopaths.

“Denzel Washington‘s Creasy, an ex-CIA operative working as a bodyguard for a young American girl (Dakota Fanning) in Mexico City, fulfilled every right-winger’s violent fantasies when he went all ballistic and medieval on the gang members behind her kidnapping. He might as well have been torturing and killing Al Qeada members, and you can bet that he was doing exactly that in the minds of many who watched this manic, jolting, brilliantly edited 2004 film.”

“You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism,” writes New York‘s Jonathan Chait in an 8.19 piece called “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Is On Your Screen.” This is noteworthy? The creative communities that supply television and film have always been left-liberal for the most part, and the hardballers who run the business side have always, with some exceptions, always been obliged to accomodate and promote lefty liberal content.

“The liberal analysis of the economic crisis — that unregulated finance took wild gambles — has been widely reflected, even blatantly so, in movies like Margin Call, Too Big to Fail, and the Wall Street sequel. The conservative view that all blame lies with regulations forcing banks to lend to poor people has not, except perhaps in the amateur-hour production of Atlas Shrugged.”

Wells interjection: The notion that unregulated Wall Street wheeler-dealing led to the 2008 financial meltdown is a “liberal analysis”? How is that an especially liberal thing? Isn’t the applicable term “factual”? Are there any available straight-up, verifiable facts that don’t support the “Reagan Did It” analysis?

Back to Chait: “The muscular Rambo patriotism that briefly surged in the eighties, and seemed poised to return after 9/11, has disappeared. In its place we have series like Homeland, which probes the moral complexities of a terrorist’s worldview, and action stars like Jason Bourne, whose enemies are not just foreign baddies but also paranoid Dick Cheney figures.

“The conservative denial of climate change, and the low opinion of environmentalism that accompanies it, stands in contrast to cautionary end-times tales like Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and the tree-hugging mysticism of Avatar. The decade has also seen a revival of political films and shows, from the Aaron Sorkin oeuvre through Veep and The Campaign, both of which cast oilmen as the heavies. Even The Muppets features an evil oil driller stereotypically named ‘Tex Richman.'”

“[Early to mid ’90s right-wing advocacy groups] Americans for Responsible Television and Christian Leaders for Responsible Television would be flipping out over the modern family in Modern Family, not to mention the girls of Girls and the gays of Glee, except that those groups went defunct long ago.

“In short, the world of popular culture increasingly reflects a shared reality in which the Republican Party is either absent or anathema. That shared reality is the cultural assumptions, in particular, of the younger voters whose support has become the bedrock of the Democratic Party.”