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Joe Wright, Brad Pitt and Chanel No. 5 need to pull the current ad and put up an alternate version right away before it’s too late. People are chortling, reputations are suffering, etc. Just put the other version up. They must have shot four or five, right?

Whenever a fall movie presents semi-adult themes, attitudes and stylings, journalists and industry spokespersons always voice respect for the distributor having taken a huge risk. Let’s all give a hearty round of applause for this or that distributor having released a film that’s not aimed at the ADD-afflicted, raised-on-videogames generation! Because we’re living in a zip-zip dipshit digital culture that has trouble getting into films with any kind of meditative, slow-and-steady vibe, or those which focus on character or subtlety or anything low-keyish.

“Paramount was very courageous in making this movie,” Flight director Robert Zemeckis said during last night’s q & a from New York,” but they really did want to make it and they left us alone.”

“The Master is a very difficult film to sell,” Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap‘s Todd Cunningham. “It is very obtuse, and in almost every way, a dreary arthouse film. The fact that it went into wide release and [earned] what it has is a triumph in itself.”

Last week Not Fade Away exec producer and music supervisor Steve Van Zandt told me that due to test-screening responses, director David Chase had to insert narration that explained that the Beatles became popular in the U.S. only about three weeks after the JFK assassination, and explained that May to Labor Day 1967 became known as the “summer of love.” Because otherwise under-30s wouldn’t get it. Jesus.

If you want a snapshot that explains precisely how bone-dumb a good portion of the moviegoing public is, consider this excerpt from my review of Twilight: New Moon, which ran on 11.18.09:

“The thing that defines the badness of New Moon is an extended circular tracking sequence showing Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) sitting in her room, immobile and depressed after her vampire lover Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) has broken things off and moved away. Director Chris Weitz moves the camera around her three times, which gives the audience three views of her front lawn as it changes with the seasons — greenish brown during October, totally brown with leaves being raked in November, and finally snow-covered in December.

“Except someone decided that this visual information wasn’t explicit enough for some in the audience, and so little white titles have been inserted, appearing each time the camera moves around and behind Bella’s back, that say ‘October,’ ‘November’ and ‘December.'” Obviously because some test-screening viewers had said they couldn’t figure what was happening with the weather.

It’s an old lament but because of this idiot mentality very few of the great films of the ’70s (Dog Day Afternoon, All The President’s Men, All Night Long, The Outfit, etc.) would be green-lighted today if they were presented as fresh concepts. I know it sounds cranky but in some respects we really are living in a cultural ape hell. If Ben Hecht, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Honore de Balzac, John Reed, William Blake, H.L Mencken or Samuel Taylor Coleridge were to be time-travelled into present-day Los Angeles they would be dead by their own hand within 24 to 48 hours.

We all knew that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, a possible 2013 Oscar contender, would get picked up by someone, and now comes the news that Paramount, which released Scorsese’s Hugo, is that partner, supporter and sugar daddy.

There are three problems with TWOWS, which chronicles the rise and fall of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Wall Street trader whose success leads him down a path towards substance abuse and, eventually, jail time. One, we know that guys like Belfort are (or at least were) skunks and pirates…what else is new? Two, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, it’s bad karma for a lead actor in an expensive film to wear hideous gray double-breasted suits with peak lapels. And three, nobody wants to see Leo with dyed black hair any more than they wanted to see him with lumpy J. Edgar Hoover makeup.

This won’t matter much to Average Joes, but publicist Bumble Ward, whom I consider to be a great human being and a compassionate soul with palpable emotions and an engaging personality, has been zotzed at 20th Century Fox, and it just seems a shame. She was hired roughly a year ago as executive vp of publicity for film marketing, and had been a pleasure to work with all along.

There are certain kinds of people who survive if not flourish in a somewhat frosty, edgy, high-stakes corporate environment like Fox’s and others who seem better suited to Fox Searchlight and the indie-flavored p.r. realm, and Bumble, I suppose, is one of these.

The instant I heard the news I thought to myself, “Is this partly because of the handling of Life of Pi? Did the fact that I was allowed to see it out here concurrent with the N.Y. Film Festival debut and then I wrote a review in which I didn’t exactly go hog-wild…was this a factor to some degree?”

If so I feel guilty as hell. I’ve been told that there was friction about who got into that screening and who didn’t, and that this may have been one of the factors…who knows? I’ve also been told that my guilt is either misplaced or not worth wallowing in, but I feel badly all the same.

Best of luck to Bumble and to Life of Pi, a film that I respect and admire.

The New York Film Critics Circle has decided to junk last year’s 11.28 early-vote strategy (which caused too many problems) and will vote instead on Monday, December 3rd. Which means, presumably, that the all-but-worthless National Board of Review voting will now be announced before the NYFCC and Los Angeles Film Critic Association voting. Right?

The name of the game right now, presumably, is “stop Les Miserables” — that is the challenge that critics of vision and presumed backbone will have on their plates six weeks from now. Last year’s challenge was “stop The Artist.” I got down on my knees and begged them not to give it their Best Picture prize, and to their eternal discredit they ignored me. But I’m getting ahead of things.

I obviously haven’t seen Les Miserables, and it may well deserve to win at the end of the day. But you know what I mean. Everything else is getting marginally discredited for this and that reason and nothing else seems to “fit” the paradigm, and I’m starting to feel already that the fix is in. Obviously I don’t mean that in a Chicago Black Sox sense. I mean that people want a certain type of classy, carefully poised but lowest-common-denominator emotional-bath film to win, and guys like Tony Angelotti know that and it seems as if the scheme is slowly falling into place and it’s not even Halloween yet.

An Oscar prognosticator generally agrees but says that “the only thing that Les Miserables seems to lack is the cool factor.” Les Miz is classic material, he means, that doesn’t seem to offering anything especially new that might synch with or provide commentary on the present-day zeitgeist. That’s an assumption, of course, and therefore a long spitball.

The 12.1 to 12.3 voting will give distributors of December openers like Les Miserables, Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty two or three more days of fine tuning…big deal.

This morning NYFCC chairman Joshua Rothkopf told Deadline‘s Michael Fleming that “our function as a group is to be as best informed as we can be, and we wanted to make sure we had every opportunity to see everything under consideration for the best in film. This is not as Machiavellian as people might think, but in order to fulfill that function to be as fully informed as possible, I made this decision and the group agreed with me.”

All hail Silver Linings Playbook — a modest movie in one sense but one that really and truly works (despite what the crabheads are saying), and in a way that gives a hug to blue-collar American family values and football fanaticism and Sunday dinners and all that extended-family stuff that I don’t even relate to or believe in. The point is that SLP believes in this stuff, and in healthy turnarounds and good music and throwing away old baggage and running and getting lucky with the right girl and hugs and happiness at the end.

They could have at least dropped the Lego Baumgartner from a height of three or four miles instead of….what, a half mile at most? They could have taken two LBs up in the balloon and given us the money shot of Lego Baumgartner dropping out and turning into a speck as he plummets toward earth and then dropped the other one out and shown the swirling velocity and the chute opening, etc.

Hi, Mom! (’70), Sisters (’73), Phantom of the Paradise (’74) and Carrie (’76) — these four films constituted the glory days of Brian DePalma. For me the Carrie finale with Amy Irving and the flowers and the hand was the absolute DePalma peak. It never got better than this.

On one level this poster for Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s Central Park Five conveys in a rather clunky way that the doc deals with race. On another it implies that the subject — the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case and the five Harlem youths who were wrongly found guilty of the crimes and imprisoned for years — will be treated in a stark and simplistic fashion. In a way that’s true. Here’s my Telluride Film Festival review.

The only part of this Joe Wright-directed Chanel No. 5 spot that doesn’t quite work is the line “dreams take over.” My dream of being a successful hotshot journalist came true, but for most people dreams die or shrivel up or never quite happen. Or they get sensibly downsized. Or gradually forgotten about.

It must have been tough for Pitt to say these lines just so. My understanding is that he was paid about $4 or $5 million for this.

Notice how quickly Felix Baumgartner drops and how his body turns into a little speck in roughly three or four seconds. And then compare that to the six-second drop that Daniel Craig takes off a bridge at the beginning of Skyfall. First Tony Scott and now Baumgartner — reality trumps the 007 bullshit.

Update: Yes, of course…a much thinner or lighter atmosphere 23 miles up means you’ll fall much faster. Heavier molecular density slows falls that happen only a few hundred feet off the ground. But there’s still a reality vibe from this video that kicks the shit out of that opening sequence in Skyfall. “Oh, go on…you’re too much of a realist!…the Bond films aren’t about realism” But they used to be, to some extent.

A few days ago a Tom O’Neil-fed notion about Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables becoming a “monster” Oscar sweeper crept into the conversation. Okay, maybe. But a couple of nights ago a counter-notion was implied (i.e., not firmly asserted) by a fellow who knows a Les Miz contributor. The notion is that it might be more of an acting vehicle thing (particularly benefitting Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway) than an overall Oscar fireworks thing. A solid, admirable, workmanlike job but that’s all.

This is joined in my mind with observations…reminders, I mean…from Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil as well as Glenn Kenny on yesterday’s Oscar Poker that the Les Miserables material is familiar and classic and not exactly thrilling in and of itself, and that the stage musical is over 25 years old and quite traditional and retro-defaulty by today’s standards, and Tom Hooper‘s innovation of having the actors sing live on the set is (this was a Kenny riff also) doesn’t necessarily mean that the film will work splendidly. Live singing may seem to some like an exciting new approach to shooting movie musicals, but what will finally matter is whether or not Les Miserables works altogether…whether the entire working mechanism harmonizes in a way that inspires “wow, that was truly exceptional!” or “that was an entirely respectable rendering of a classic musical that was all the rage in London and Broadway back in the ’80s.”

If the latter impression dominates and Les Miserables becomes merely one of the Best Picture contenders instead of (according to O’Neil’s maddeningly coy tipster) possibly the Best Picture contender, then you’ll have an uncertain and perhaps even mysterious Best Picture race on your hands — an egalitarian race without a frontrunner or heavyweight contender, a competition among jacks and knaves and outliers without a big gorilla (or gorillas) that everyone’s looking to beat.

I fully expect, mind, that many of your typical 62 year-old white male Academy members will default to Les Miserables because of its traditional, classical bones and humanist aspirations and because of its (presumed) showiness and those (expected) emotionally grandstanding performances, blah blah. But if it finally settles in as a highly respectable venture rather than a revolutionary knockout, the stage will be set for some kind of Best Picture street fight.

Les Miserables is the new favorite among the Gold Derby contributors….a sudden “massive shift,” in the words of Tom O’Neil.