Three or four hours ago it was announced that Sean Durkin‘s Joplin, about the last six months in the life of tragic-iconic rock-blues singer Janis Joplin, will star Tony-winning actress Nina Arianda (Venus in Furs). Her Ukranian heritage doesn’t allow for much resemblance, but Arianda, 26, has the emotionality and, one hears, the pipes. Durkin’s most recent film is Martha Marcy May Marlene. One presumes he’ll try to create a Joplin biopic that doesn’t feel like a “Joplin biopic.”

My Masters of Cinema Region 2 Bluray of Double Indemnity arrived yesterday afternoon. I popped it in and immediately noticed that it looked pretty good and very much like “film”, which is fine, but not what anyone or his brother or cousin would call dazzling. It looked as good as it could, I suppose, but not that much better than it did on DVD six or even fourteen years ago. I went right to my favorite scene:

PHYLLIS: You’re a smart insurance man, aren’t you, Mr. Neff?

NEFF: I’ve had eleven years of it. That and the extermination business.

PHYLLIS: Extermination?

NEFF: Neff’s Digital Mosquito Removal. Started it a couple of years ago.

PHYLLIS: Doesn’t insurance keep you pretty busy?

NEFF: Yeah, but there’s a need for both, and I’m good at both. Everybody needs insurance and…well, look around us right now, right here in this living room. You and I are covered under billions of digital mosquitoes. I love that anklet, Mrs. Dietrichson, and I love that towel you were wearing a few minutes ago, but I also like clean air. I like to see things plain. I don’t think it’s all that attractive to live in the middle of an Egyptian mosquito swarm 24/7. And I don’t like that weird feeling of mosquitoes in my lungs every time I take a breath. How ’bout yourself?

PHYLLIS: You’re saying I have a choice?

NEFF: You bet you have a choice.

PHYLLIS: You can get rid of them entirely?

NEFF: No, not entirely. Mosquitoes are the basic molecules of grain, and grain is what we’re made of. It’s what keeps us together, gives us unity and cohesion. But it has to be kept in check. I’m not talking about killing all the mosquitoes but a significant percentage of them. So they wouldn’t feel so oppressive. So we could clear the air a bit.

PHYLLIS: How would it work?

NEFF: Three visits, $25 a shot. We come in here with our special vacuum cleaners and suck up the mosquitoes. And then two more times to make sure they’re gone. Or all but gone, I should say.

PHYLLIS: So $75 then?

NEFF: Except you’d get a discount, of course.

PHYLLIS: A discount?

NEFF: That’s right. (Two beats.) You know what I mean.

PHYLLIS: Then I’d say we have something to talk about, Mr. Neff.

She sits down again, in the same position as before.

NEFF: I wish you’d tell me what’s engraved on that anklet.

PHYLLIS: Just my name.

NEFF: As for instance?

PHYLLIS: Phyllis.

NEFF: Phyllis. I think I like that.

PHYLLIS: But you’re not sure?

NEFF: I’d have to drive it around the block a couple of times.

PHYLLIS: (Standing again) Mr. Neff, why don’t you drop by tomorrow evening about eight- thirty. He’ll be in then.

NEFF: Who?

PHYLLIS: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him weren’t you?

NEFF: Sure, only I’m getting over it a little. If you know what I mean.

PHYLLIS: There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

NEFF: How fast was I going, officer?

PHYLLIS: I’d say about ninety.

NEFF: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

PHYLLIS: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time?

NEFF: Suppose it doesn’t take?

PHYLLIS: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles?

NEFF: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder?

PHYLLIS: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder?

NEFF: That tears it.

This morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and I kicked it around. I talked about The Amazing Spider-Man, and Contrino talked about Spider-Man numbers. We talked about Beasts of the Southern Wild, and then we finished off with some Best Picture spitballing. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Yeah, I saw The Amazing Spider-Man at 3 pm yesterday afternoon at the AMC Century City plex…and what of it? What have I got to do with it? Isn’t it enough that I went? I didn’t hate it. I could’ve done without the lizard but it’s…well, it’s not too bad. Better than Sam Raimi‘s last two Spider-Mans. Certainly better than the last one. But c’mon…another origin story?

I really, really liked Andrew Garfield‘s performance as Peter Parker — deft, skilled, quietly charismatic. Emma Stone delivers her usual pluck, Rhys Ifans provides soulful anguish, Dennis Leary is a pain-in-the-ass flatfoot, Sally Field over-emotes, Martin Sheen looks out of breath, etc.

But it’s just another loud throbbing 3D tentpole, delivering the same atmospheric whomp, the same vibe, the same aural-visual gutslams that say “you’re watching a really expensive flick with the requisite heart beats and thematic uplift, and with a big loud CG lizard with a tail that whips around and smashes test-tube beakers…and what do you care? All you want is the same basic fundamental crap that you’ve always shown up for time after time, and that’s why you’ve once again paid $35 bills for two tickets plus another $15 for two popcorns and a Coke.”

I felt like such an asshole, such a chump, such a pathetic stooge as I walked in. Sony and Marc Webb got my money, all right. Close to $50 bucks so I could put on my 3D glasses and munch the popcorn and slurp the Diet Coke and sit in my seat and go “mmm-uhm-hmmm”….whatever.

I always stay to the right when I’m driving down a two-way residential street. One, because that’s the law and two, because I want people coming towards me to know they’ll have room to breathe when we pass each other. But day after day, time after time, the vast majority of people driving toward me have no such notion.

They’re driving right down the middle of the street, coming right for me…like it’s their street or like we’re on a narrow driveway and they have no choice. I see them coming and say to myself, “Uhh, guys?…two-way?…hello?” And they keep on coming. And then at the very last second they swerve to the right, leaving me just enough room to get by. Jerks.

The bottom line, it seems, is that they’re much more concerned about clipping a parked car (knocking off a sideview mirror, for example) than being polite to other drivers. Their attitude is “okay, don’t get worried…I’ll pull over a second or two before you get close…but until that happens, I’m gonna stay as far away from the parked cars as I can.” Assholes.

My loathing of Comic-Con (7.12 thru 7.15) means I’d never apply for press credentials, but I really want to attend the presentation of Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit at 48 frames-per-second. I want to see if the regulars like the 48 fps experience like I did or like the Cinemacon-ers did (i.e., 70% negative). So I asked my Warner Bros. pallies about snagging a special pass…nope, sorry. So that’s that.

But I’d like to see if the high-def video-like footage we saw in Vegas has been tweaked or slightly grained up to some extent. I heard from a couple Cinemacon sources that the Warner Bros. guys, smarting from the negative reaction, were talking about massaging the look of it.

It’s only fair to point out that In Contention‘s Kris Tapley wrote his own “Matthew McConaughey has turned his career around” article on 5.17.12, or six weeks before N.Y. Times contributor Dennis Lim wrote the same thing on 7.5.

Then again I said 16 months ago that McConaughey appeared to be on the right track, as indicated by his Lincoln Lawyer performance. But Tapley, it would seem (and unless somebody knows different), was the first name-brand columnist to say “olly, olly, in come free” and “stop beating up on McConaughey for making too many vapid romcoms.”

I never wrote much about Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna (IFC Films, 7.13 theatrical, 7.20 On Demand) during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, where I first saw it. But I saw it again last night at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center, and I’m telling you it’s an expert, beautifully composed and highly atmospheric re-telling of Thomas Hardy‘s “Tess of the d’Ubervilles,” and the latest addition to my Best of 2012 list, which now numbers 19.

Trishna star Frieda Pinto during last night’s post-screening q & a at the Pacific Design Center.

If you ask me Trishna is just as high-calibre as Roman Polanski‘s Tess, his 1979 adaptation. Winterbottom’s version is set in modern-day India, and is subtly shaped and almost oblique in a traditional “dramatic” sense with only one confrontation scene. It’s a social drama — a tragedy — in which all the potent stuff is suppressed and for the most part unspoken, but no less noticably for that.

Frieda Pinto gives the finest performance of her career, hands down, as Trishna/Tess — quiet and subdued but highly focused and curiously intense. She has no big scenes except at the very end, but she’s never less than genuine or convincing or, I feel, heartbreaking.

Pinto did a post-screening q & a with L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen. I snapped about 40 shots of her, looking for a perfect four or five.

And as a side-dish immersion in 21st Century Indian culture. Trishna is a sensual feast that just keeps turning you on with delicate lighting and aromas and fleet cutting. It’s the first film set in India that, unlike Slumdog Millionaire, made me think about actually going there. It’s like walking by a great Indian restaurant, this film. It almost feels like something projected in Aroma-rama or Smellovision.

Pinto, L.A. Times contributor/moderator Mark Olsen during last night’s q & a.

There’s no question that the great Ernest Borgnine, who died today at age 95, peaked in the mid ’50s. His Oscar-winning role as Marty the homely butcher in Marty (’55), was the pinnacle, closely followed by the sadistic Fatso Judson (“I’m gonna cut this wop’s heart out…anybody steps in I give it to ’em first!”) in From Here to Eternity (’53).

Ernest Borgnine at Fatso Judson in Fred Zinneman’s From Here To Eternity (’53)

Borgnine also cashed in with McHales’s Navy, the TV series that ran four years (’62 to ’66), and two or three years later he got lucky with the best western role of his career — Dutch Engstrom in The Wild Bunch (’69). “Lucky” is the sense that Sam Peckinpah cast him, I mean — not in the delivery of the character, which was all about skill and finesse.

Borgnine’s third-best ’50s role was Ragnar in The Vikings (’58), particularly the scene in which he jumps into the wolf pit with a sword in hand (“Odaaahhhnn!”). Followed by his villains in Bad Day at Black Rock, Johnny Guitar and (yes) Demetrius and the Gladiators. He was also half-decent as Lucius, a Roman tribune/whip-cracker/something-or-other in Barabbas.

He was also pretty…make that very good in Robert Aldrich‘s The Flight of the Phoenix (’65) and The Dirty Dozen (’67), and he was direct and vulgar as a Hollywood something-or-other in The Oscar. I forget what kind of Hollywood guy he played in Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (’68), but he was oppressively grotesque in that also. Not Borgnine’s fault — the film was painful to sit through, and horribly written — because he gave it all he had. He always did. But Borgnine was best when he was told to hold back.

He was also good as a brutal train conudctor with a nightstick in Aldrich’s Emperor of the North Pole (’73)

The Poseidon Adventure (’72), The Black Hole (’79), When Time Ran Out (’80), Escape From New York (’81)…words fail.

And let’s not forget Airwolf, the early-to-mid ’80s TV series in which he costarred with Jan Michael Vincent and Alex Cord. Actually, I had forgotten Airwolf — it took a friend to remind me.

Borgnine made a ton of crap, of course, but he kept working, kept on plugging, kept on being Borgnine. We should all live so long, or enjoy lives as memorable, interesting, joyful, etc.

Here’s a rememberance by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg.

N.Y. Times guy Dennis Lim has written what amounts to an officially sanctioned acknowledgement that Matthew McConaughey has turned a significant career corner, and that he’s been doing the right thing over the last two years with intriguing, flavorful performances in Magic Mike, Mud, The Paperboy, Killer Joe, Bernie and The Lincoln Lawyer.

Matthew McConaughey

I’ve been feeling this way about McConaughey for over a year now. Sometime in 2009 or ’10 he must have told his agent, “I know I went along with these shitty romcoms before but it has to stop…you’re fucking killing me, man…will you get me out of this?…enough of the quarter-inch-deep, pretty-boy Kate Hudson flicks…that way lies death.”

My first acknowledgement that McConaughey had changed course was in a 5.3.11 review of The Lincoln Lawyer, to wit: “For nearly 20 years McConaughey has under-achieved. The few good films he’s been in have been mostly ensembles (Dazed and Confused, U-571, We Are Marshall, Tropic Thunder) while many of his top-billed or costarring vehicles have been romantic dogshit, especially over the last decade. Now comes The Lincoln Lawyer, the first completely decent, above-average film McConaughey has carried all on his own. By his standards that’s close to a triumph.”

I should now state that I no longer regard McConaughey as a Beelzebub-like figure, which is how I described him in a 4.21.09 piece called “The Devil Probably.” And that I no longer think of him as “King of the Empties,” which is how I put it on 7.16.06. He’s wised up, done the work, redeemed himself…no more condemnation.

I’ve been ducking The Amazing Spider-Man for four days now, and now it’s Sunday and time to suck it in and buy a ticket. I so don’t want to do this. I’m so against paying to see a reboot of a spent franchise. That’s the “wrong attitude”, of course. A critic friend told me a while back that director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) has tapped into something here. I doubt that, given what some of the Rotten Tomatoes naysayers have written. Either way I’m stuck — I can’t not go.