One of Ashton Kutcher‘s cultural stereotype Popchips commercials (there were four) included a groovy Indian guy. “Offensive” by 2012 p.c. standards, for sure. But the bit isn’t that different from Peter Sellers‘ brownfaced, Nehru-jacketed character in The Party (’68) or even Alec Guiness‘s Professor Narayan Godbole in A Passage to India (’84). Kutcher just did it with broad humor.

I left last Monday night’s Avengers screening as the closing credits began, so I didn’t see any tacked-on sequences. Movieline‘s Jen Yamato has written that there may be two, one having something to do with the plot. But the other tail-end sequence (if there are in fact two) is totally unrelated to any plot element so it’s not spoiler material. Not in my book at least. A photo is sitting on a Tumblr page. If you’re a spoiler whiner, don’t click. Simple as that.

I thought at first that the recent daring escape from house arrest by blind Chinese civil-rights lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng in China’s rural Shandong Province might be the beginning of a good political thriller. Especially after Chen slipped into Beijing and was taken into the U.S. Embassy on humanitarian grounds. It’s at least an HBO film, I told myself. Every viewer would be rooting for Chen’s escape, and for the safety of his family. And Christian Bale could play himself in a cameo.

Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng and family.

But when Chen told U.S. officials he didn’t want political asylum in the U.S. and that he wanted to stay in China and grapple it out with Chinese authorities, he showed himself to be astonishingly naive if not stupid about what would likely happen to him and his family.

And then he changed his mind and said he wanted a haven in the U.S., but only after he’d been transferred to a Chinese-run Beijing hospital for treatment of a broken foot sustained during his escape, with Chinese goons surrounding him. And then he told The Daily Beast‘s Melinda Liu that he was scared and begged to be allowed to leave China on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s plane.

Heroes of political persecution thrillers are never naive about their situation or the mentality of their oppressors. They might ultimately win or lose their battle, but they never say in the middle of Act Two, “I don’t want asylum…I’ll tough it out and appeal to the humanity of the authorities and continue to fight the good fight in my native country” and blah blah. And they never cry about how scared they are after they’ve finally wised up.

Remember Steve McQueen‘s Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles? He wasn’t educated, but he knew what the Chinese communists were about. He was no fool. Right now that’s exactly what Cheng seems to be — a fool, and a weepy one at that. He had a chance (or at least a shot at a chance) and he blew it.

There are also indications that U.S. diplomatic officials in Beijing, fearful of a major row with the Chinese government, might be willing to throw Chen under the bus. A 5.2 N.Y. Times report about his escape, temporary asylum and hospitalization says that “he was…spooked by the presence of plainclothes [Chinese] police officers at the hospital” and that “it did not help that United States officials had gone home for the evening.”

What kind of a supposed good-guy official in a political thriller goes home for the evening with a hot-potato political activist in a hospital under the control of the bad guys?

“Many Americans were with me while I checked into the hospital and doctors examined me…lots of them,” Chen told Liu from his hospital bed. “But when I was brought to the hospital room, they all left. I don’t know where they went.” Obviously they were told to stand down.

Liu writes that “U.S. officials…said they had reached an understanding with Chinese authorities that Chen would be allowed to pursue his education in a location away from his home province of Shandong, to follow up on his work as a self-taught ‘barefoot lawyer.'”

A 12.3 story by N.Y. Times reporter Jane Perlez says the United States has “recognized that the blind dissident lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, [has] changed his position and now [wants] to leave China, a senior Obama administration official said here Thursday.”

Yeah, but what are they going to do about it? It’ll be a very bad thing if the Obama administration allows Chen-the-lamb to be surrounded and nipped at and possibly eaten by the wolves. The symbolism of will give Romney and the right a potent issue.

Benh Zeitlin‘s Beast of the Southern Wild is “something to sink into and take a bath in on any number of dream-like, atmospheric levels, and a film you can smell and taste and feel like few others I can think of,” I wrote on 1.25.12. “The emphasis is on sensual naturalism-wallowing — lush, grassy, muddy, oozy, leafy, stinky, primeval, non-hygenic, slithery, watery, ants up your ass — with a few story shards linked together like paper clips.

“It’s a poetic, organic, at times ecstatic capturing of a hallucinatory Louisiana neverland called the Bathtub, down in the delta lowlands and swarming with all manner of life and aromas, and a community of scrappy, hand-to-mouth fringe-dwellers, hunters, jungle-tribe survivors, animal-eaters and relentless alcohol-guzzlers who live there.

“The narrative, as such, focuses on six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) and a third-act search for Hushpuppy’s mother.

“Wallis is a hugely appealing young actress — beautiful, spirited, wide-eyed — and she pretty much carries the human-soul portions of the film. But Henry’s dad, who cares for Hushpuppy in his own callous and bullying way, is a brute and a drunk and mostly a drag to be around, and after the fifth or sixth scene in which he’s raging and yelling and guzzling booze, there’s a voice inside that starts saying ‘I don’t know how much more of this asshole I can take.’

“Here comes the part of the review that the keepers of the precious Sundance flame are going to dislike. If you apply the classic Jim Hoberman ‘brief vacations’ concept of a great film not only being a kind of ‘sacred text’ but constituting a realm that a viewer would be happy to literally take up residence within, Beasts of the Southern Wild does not, for me, pass the test.”

I don’t just exist. Well, I do…but I feel like I’m doing a lot more. Creating, “painting,” stirring pots, leaving a mark of some kind. Everyone is terrified that they might be just existing and nothing but. The ultimate mark of a nothing mediocre life. Does anyone anywhere think of him or herself as being as just plugging along and marking time? Alcoholics, maybe.

In the view of Village Voice critic Nick Pinkerton, Richard Linklater‘s Bernie “is that rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film.

“Is it condescending to its small-town-life subject or sympathetic toward it? This hang-up precludes the possibility of a filmmaker holding two conflicting ideas in mind at the same time, just like we do. Such nonbinary thinking is necessary to approaching an oddity like Bernie, which, in its multiple perspectives, is all about irreconcilable facts and foggy motives, not least the contrary demands of forgiveness written in the Bible and the stern punishment written in the law books.

“In its ornery eccentricity, Bernie spits off more ideas than any American movie in many moons, and it’s not reassuringly conclusive about any of them. Cast and crew will be lucky to escape with their careers intact.”

The two-year-old Klown is about “two wildly inappropriate friends (Frank Hvam, Casper Christensen) animalistically running amok through the Danish countryside …awkward confrontations and unspeakable debaucheries…from exclusive brothels, hospitalizations, armed robberies and even prison, the three paddle downstream from one chaotic misadventure to the next culminating to a surprise sentimental portrait of friendship and a final shocking reveal, etc.
Theaters & VOD on 7.27.

“Maybe it’s the shock of the new, but the most exciting actor [in The Avengers] is Mark Ruffalo,” declares Village Voice critic Karina Longworth. “Ruffalo successfully refreshes the Hulk myth, playing Banner as an adorably bashful nerd-genius who, in contrast to the preening hunks on the team, knows better than to draw attention to himself.

“As a fellow top brainiac with dangerously repressed issues, Banner brings out a measure of complexity in Tony Stark that a tired-looking Robert Downey, Jr. — who was revelatory in the first Iron Man as someone forced to become part machine in order to realize his full human potential — can no longer muster on his own.”

So that’s Longworth, Boxoffice.com‘s Amy Nicholson and myself singling out Ruffalo as the coolest Avenger. Others?

I missed the Tribeca Film Festival screenings of Chris Kenneally and Keanu Reeves‘ Side By Side, a 98-minute documentary about the changeover from film to digital that premiered at last February’s Berliniale. Tribeca Film will open it sometime in August with screenings set for July, etc., but I’m trying to snag a screener today or tomorrow through a couple of publicist pals. If anyone knows anything, please reach out. I’m gone tomorrow night.

“Likely to prove utterly irresistible to geeks of all descriptions, but especially fest programmers, upscale broadcasters and anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, Side by Side examines the impact of digital technology on film,” wrote Variety‘s Leslie Felperin.

“Asking canny questions oncamera while also acting as one of pic’s producers, Keanu Reeves canvasses opinions from a truly impressive array of talents, including not just helmers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and Christopher Nolan, but also some of the industry’s finest lensers and below-the-liners.

“Although laid out with such clarity that any layperson could catch the gist of what’s being discussed, Side by Side is not afraid to get nitty-gritty about more technical matters, such as why the invention of Bell Labs’ CCD chip was so game-changing, how stereoscopy works or why a Red camera or a Sony F950 is so much better than a standard-definition rig (answer: It’s all in the pixels). Yet plenty of airtime is also given to those who prefer the aesthetic of photochemical stock, which, as helpful clips illustrate, still has a much wider dynamic range than digital.

“For other, less nerdy-minded auds, simply hearing great masters of the craft talk about their work with passion, specificity and acumen will be enough of a treat. Pic generously apportions roughly equal amounts of screen time to big names and lesser-known craftspeople such as ace editor Anne V. Coates, vfx legend Dennis Muren and top colorist Tim Stipan, who speak just as eloquently about the work as their more famous colleagues.

“Nevertheless, Joel Schumacher delivers possibly the pic’s funniest line when he sighs that the problem with instant playback via digital is that actors get obsessed not with their performances but with what their hair looks like.”

I realize that at 1:21 Sylvester Stallone is delivering a kind of tribute to a line spoken by William Holden‘s Pike Bishop in the opening minutes of The Wild Bunch: “If they move, kill ’em.” Except Stallone seems to be saying, “Jarapneem find ’em, kill ’em.” I’ve listened seven or eight times now, and that’s what it sounds like. I can’t crack it.

Whatever the plot, it’s an atrocious idea to have Arnold Schwarzenegger say “I’m back.” Ditto this Bruce Willis line: “You can’t let the contents of that safe fall into the wrong hands.”