…and I mean that with absolute, standing-at-attention respect and a somewhat firm conviction that Amour will be down to the wire for Best Foreign Language Film. But I stand by my initial reaction. I saw my father die in stages. It was perhaps the most dreadful deterioration I’d ever witnessed first-hand. He was a pretty sharp (and if truth be told, caustic) guy for several decades, but what nature did to him was sickening. He was fairly pissed off about it himself.

Sasha Stone knows that I love, admire and care for her like very few others, but this is the most odious and repellent collection of words conveying a stunningly inane and dissociative thought that I’ve seen online or in print this year, hands down.

If the makers of the Liz and Dick TV biopic with Lindsay Lohan and whatsisname as Richard Burton can just make an excuse to include footage of Lohan-as-Taylor walking out of the water in that white, nearly-transparent bathing suit in Suddenly Last Summer…which happened, yes, in ’58 or ’59, or a good two years before Burton came into her life during the filming of Cleopatra…if they just work that scene in somehow, the movie will be halfway home.

If I was a gambler I would bet the farm that they won’t do this. Why? Because many if not most people in this business lack that instinctual nose for what the public wants. In other words, many of the people who make movies should be doing something else.

Listen to The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth in this 6.6 introduction to this latest Peter Jackson/set of The Hobbit video: “Well, when we least heard from The Hobbit word was not good [for] at CinemaCon back in April, the director unveiled ten minutes of footage in the new fancy-pants 48fps format and attendees were mixed on the results to say the least.” Hah! Were you there, Kevin?

I have never felt so close to or supportive of Peter Jackson in my entire life. Between the 48 fps thing and his producing West of Memphis he’s the new HE Good Guy. And a brave guy and a tough hombre at that. And the people who put down what they saw in Las Vegas 45 or 50 days ago will not be feeling so proud about what they said five or ten or twenty years hence, believe me.

That Las Vegas screening of 48 fps Hobbit footage was the technological equivalent of the debut performance of Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris on 5.29.13. Or that infamous Montmartre screening of L’Age d’Or on 12.3.30. What happened that day in Vegas wasn’t “cinema,” for certain, and in fact it heralded the death of interest in cinema for the CG-fantasy-spectacle-ComicCon crowd…and so what? That crowd and that market hasn’t cared about cinema for decades.

24 fps (or, if you ask me, the preferred 30fps) cinema is for people who care about the real deal elements — story, style, character, theme, metaphor. There are tens of millions out there who live for this kind of movie, the kind that gets into your soul and excites your memory and your reflections and makes you glad you’re alive and kicking and attuned to the moment. That kind of film is eternal and will never go away.

But 48 fps will raise the impact and penetration levels for those who see movies as ADD thrill rides…which is what, 75% or 80% of the market out there? It’s a Godsend, trust me.

Yesterday the Philadelphia Weekly‘s Matt Prigge ran a piece about the last six “name” directors who are committed to shooting on film to the very last, women screaming, tortillas all over the floor, cannonballs smashing through the chapel walls, damn the Mexicans, “use your sabers!” Aren’t there more than six? Imagine, in any event, the clenched jaws and fevered sweat of Paul Thomas Anderson, young Fess Parker, Wes Anderson, Chris Nolan, Steven Spielberg, alive-again Buddy Ebsen, Rian Johnson, Hans Conreid, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Thomas Anderson…”fuck…fuck!…get the Panavision Panaflex…shoot…shoot to the last!”

Tonight I sat down with Jason Pirodsky, editor and film critic for Expats.cz, the dominant Prague publication for English-speaking visitors and newbie inhabitants, plus content manager Radka Peterova and content adminstrator/writer Jan Purkrabek. It’s great to meet sharp, friendly and highly educated people who know this town up, down, over and sideways and are a wellspring of anecdotes and advice, and are just plain nice besides.

(l. to .r) Expatz.cz editor and film critic Jason Pirodsky, content manager Radka Peterova, content administration.writer Jan Purkrabek

We’ll probably all get together again this weekend or next week or whenever.

In the online realm Expats.cz has out-paced and out-gunned the Prague Post, which became the town’s first major English-language publication in 1992. Expats.cz began as a chat room and went on from there. It was founded by Martin Howlings, a Brit.

Pirodsky, a Miami U. grad who hails from Syracuse, has been helping me with screening invites and publicist contacts. We met at a friendly, inexpensive little place on Sokolovska 67, Prague 8. I drank home-brewed lemonade. The waitress was cute and proportionally appealing (sorry) with nice shiny black hair.

I had a longish chat with Jackson Browne at a party in either ’94 or ’95. Me, him and a couple of ladies, I mean. (It was a post-Oscar soiree at the Mondrian on the Sunset Strip, I think.) The point is that I liked how he thought in long sentences, and how he stayed with a thought (his or someone else’s) and how he tried to develop it and push it along, and how he really seemed to listen and engage and make an effort to stay away from the usual chit-crap.

For years I’d been a fan of Browne’s songs like everyone else, but after that night I knew first-hand that he was genuine and grounded as far as it went, and that he really disliked being glib or skirting or going “yeah, yeah, uh-huh” without really listening.

So that memory plus my having, oh, six or seven of his songs on my iPhone opened a little door to an interview with Browne (q & a plus two video clips) that TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman posted yesterday evening. The press-shy Browne spoke with Waxman to help publicize a 6.9 benefit concert at downtown L.A.’s Orpheum Theater for Success Through the Arts Foundation. Browne will be sharing the bill with Wayne Shorter and Lizz Wright.

Waxman: “Are you involved in the presidential campaign?”

Browne: “No, I’m not. Actually I sort of turned a corner and decided that one of the problems in our political system is the money. However, I’m involved politically, and I’m very interested in the Occupy (Wall Street) movement.

“I’m very interested in what people do individually and in groups, and it wouldn’t and shouldn’t be a fucking surprise to anybody that I’m going to vote for Obama — but honestly Obama once again has joined the ranks of the lesser of two evils. The great parade of people that the progressives get to vote for who are the lesser of two evils and who don’t really represent what I believe in any overwhelming balance.

“Look, Obama told me in a personal conversation that he wasn’t up for any new (nuclear) plants. Obviously, he changed his mind at some point. But what a surprise that one of his main supporters is the energy company, Exelon — which has nuclear plants — and that he would suddenly change his policy.

“I don’t know what we would expect. He’s just as a beholden to the people who put him in office as any of the Republicans would be. But what’s a mystery to me is how he installed pretty much the exact same infrastructure in his administration that deals with finances as the administration that we thought we voted out. That’s really a shocker.”

We’ve all become so used to Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s alabaster, doughy, gone-to-seed features and the sly, precise brilliance of his various performances that it’s jolting to consider that he was once but a fair lad. I don’t care what anyone says now — Martin Brest‘s Scent of a Woman (’93) is a damn near perfect film for what it is, slow pacing and all. I just can’t buy the Ferrari-driving sequence — that’s my only beef.

If it’s a Mr. Mudd production (Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Russell Smith), you know it’s okay and perhaps better than that. Directed and written by Stephen Chbosky, and based on Chbosky’s 1999 novel. Set in Pittsburgh and possibly a little precious but let’s give it a break for now. Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ezra “warlock-eyed demon from Hell” Miller, Paul Rudd, Melanie Lynskey, etc.

Mad Men‘s Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) is no more, and as I write these words I can hear the shriekings of 10,000 spoiler whiners. Pryce’s blotchy neck and bluish tongue have been written about all over the place. Harris even gave an interview to TV journos on Monday morning to talk it over. I read about it myself before catching the episode in question (“Commissions and Fees”, which I’m now watching for the third time) — do you think I cared?

Roger Sterling (chuckling after hanging up the phone): “25 year-old coat check girl from Long Island. Or Rhode Island. She’d never had room service before. Too easy.”

Don Draper: ‘Why do we do this?”

Sterling: “For the sex. But it’s always disappointing. For me, anyway.”

I also loved it when Draper’s 12 (13?) year-old daughter told her platonic boyfriend that she can’t walk across Central Park with him (i.e., east to west) because “we don’t go across the park — there are bums on the other side.” Which of course there were in the mid ’60s. On the Upper West Side, I mean. Particularly Columbus Ave. It never ceases to amaze that the area adjacent to the 72nd and Columbus IRT station was “Needle Park” (i.e., where you would go to cop smack) as recently as the early ’70s.

I have to post this scene every two or three years. It cleans out the blood. That actor interviewing Brooks owns this scene — it’s totally about him. Watch his eye flickerings and hand gestures as he listens to Brooks explain his professional background — astonishing performance. A lifetime of penal servitude in a New Mexico backwater comes gushing out with a few choice remarks. Brooks is a complete straight man here. His only funny bit is in the way he says he knows who Rodney Dangerfield is, etc.