Last July I ranted against the wearing of silver-gray cross-training shoes, “especially ones with a kind of woven-stitch texture and a slight color accent, like pink or violet.” The other absolute-never-wear in my book is anything maroon, but especially maroon sweaters. I’m mentioning this because it just hit me today that John C. Reilly wears the bad shoes and the bad sweater in Roman Polanski‘s Carnage.

I once spoke briefly to Angelina Jolie on the set of Salt, and I remember having to fight these odd feelings of unworthiness that arose from her being stunningly beautiful and my being…well, what I am. This happened again yesterday for a minute or two when she walked into room #1414 at the Four Seasons hotel to chat about In The Land of Blood and Honey, her Serb-Muslim love story-war drama that opens on 12.23. But I eventually won the battle and was able to focus on her words.

Here‘s what she was asked and what she said during our 28-minute session.

Jolie is very sharp. She thinks and talks fast, knows the world, quickly assembles and associates and draws lines between the dots. Now and then she’ll express herself (at least in front of journalists) with haphazard, on-the-fly sentences and half-formed thoughts, but nobody speaks as clearly and calmly as they’d like then the digital recorders are turned on.

And she is an ordered and disciplined type. The film itself — easily the equal of Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart, and a much better thing, quality-wise, than most of her acting vehicles over the last ten years — makes that clear. I absolutely respect and admire In The Land of Blood and Honey as well as her efforts to make it as first-rate as possible. This is a very tight and well-executed drama — no shovelling, no exaggeration, no sensationalism. Just straight and true and real.

Set within the Serb-Muslim-Croat conflict of the early to mid ’90s, ITLOBAH isn’t a disparate-lovers story as much as a portrait of the very fine lines between a relationship that is lust one minute, safety and security the next, and always with a current of sadism and sadomasochism. The basic logline — “a Bosnian woman (Zana Marjanovic) submits to the tender passions of her Serbian captor (Goran Kostic)” — isn’t the half of it.

Jolie vision quote #1: “We want people to pay attention and want for timely intervention, some kind of dialogue, that if we could make people feel that in a visceral way…while they’re watching it, they’re angry and it’s coming, that would be the completion that they would walk away with. We tried to make a traditional film with characters and dialogue. [But] you can’t soften this kind of war, and the reality is that the four-and-a-half-hour cut was a lot worse [in the sense that] some people really could not handle it. If you’re watching a film about war, you should get a sense of what it’s really like.

Jolie, Jon Voight prior to Thursday’s In The Land of Blood and Honey premiere.

Jolie vision quote #2: “I remembered Bosnia-Herzogovina, it was my generation…I remember where I was at that time…it happened in Europe and I [asked myself] why do I not know very much about this? The more I researched it the more compelled I was to make it. People are still healing from this process, and it ‘s important not to [forget it]. Once the conflict is over the attention goes elsewhere, and proper healing is not done.

How the film came together: “I didn’t set out to be a director. I wrote it for myself because it was an experiment for me…to give myself this homework, and then [there was a story and] the cast came together and things started to happen and it somehow became real….but I wasn’t in the region and in many ways they directed me. In many ways they told me. I would ask ‘did we get this right? Did this sound right? Tell me how your neighbor’s baby died.’ I’ve had so many amazing directors in the past, and Clint [Eastwood] told me to have a good crew of people…a good creative family and no dramas. Talented but a nice person. We didn’t want not nice people [on the crew]. I wanted a family. And I learned from Michael Winterbottom [something].

On the differences between the English-language and Serb-Croatian version: “They’re two minutes off, actually. They’re the same movie but they feel different. I wrote it in English because I had to. We had it translated to make sure it was fair and balanced. They all spoke English, and those who didn’t [speak English] learned their lines pheonetically. We wanted it to be authentic, and yet….for us it’s not just about making a movie but about getting a message out. Maybe this theatre in this state say they won’t buy a foreign language film and we’ll say, okay, we have this [English-language] version also, can you take that? And then…the UK has bought the American, but maybe they’ll change their minds. The DVD [might] have both versions. I wish I could shout from the rooftops how good these [actors] are. I gave so much respect for them. I would like people to see this film just for that.

On the physical and logistical demands of shooting: “[The shoot was] very fast. We had 41 days and $12 million dollars, and we had three and a half years of war to cover and many, many different seasons. I learned a lot about how much snow costs. We used to joke about how ‘I want to snow this whole area’ and they’d say, ‘Well, that is $100,000 worth of snow’ and I’d say, ‘Well, what’s $20,000 dollars worth?’ And everything was doubled [because of the two versions]. Everything was doubled. We had to cut the script as we went. We had to invent things. But I kind of like working like that.

On directing: “I love being on the other side of the camera. I love watching an actor do an extraordinary job, and protecting her emotions and showing her talent, and working with the crew and living in this world inside the movie. It’s a different way or working, and I think I prefer it [to acting]. I wasn’t the center of attention. I was the buddy in the corner with a paper pad and a pencil, and it was lovely.”

On the reported Afghanistan project she’s working on and may (or may not) direct down the road: “Between me and Graham, it was this idea. As he writes, it was kind what do you have and I said I have this thing. No one has seen it. It’s just something I wrote and i have on my desk, and now it’s become something that I’m talking about it. But it stems from…I travelled to Pakistan first, two weeks before September 11th and I visited Aghan people there as they were being [evacuated] and on the buses in Kabul and over the last ten years I’ve tracked some families…and on the other side of it I visited a lot of soldiers, wounded solders in Ramstein and Walter Reade, and met a lot of female soldiers…and the question that frustrates me is that they say they’re not in combat and yet they’re dying in combat, and this level of respect for women in the field, and what a female solider goes through, relationships between men and women when women are at war, and what it is for a mother to leave her children…so it’s kind of a study in that, and that’s how I came at it, and I don’t know…I dont know if I’ll ever show it to anybody. But that’s [what it is].”

Here’s last Tuesday night’s Charlie Rose show with Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Bennett Miller talking Moneyball. Here’s Pitt: “I’m getting older, Charlie, and I’m longing to challenge myself [and do] something designy…something that is completely autonomous, and which I’m completely 100% responsible for….not writing [which] I don’t have the talent for….something, something else, something else in the arts.”

There was an older, somewhat heavyish, non-industry woman sitting behind me at last Wednesday night’s screening of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. And when an impressionistic 9/11 conveyance was shown she reacted very emotionally. She moaned, I mean. Then she moaned again when another 9/11 echo came up. And then she cheered and whooped wildly when the filmmakers came out at the end.

EL&IC is going to be a very moving film for a lot of people, I suspect, if this woman is at all representative. And that’s fine. But her presence divided my attention throughout the film. 75% of me watched and listened to EL&IC…cool. But the remaining 25% was dreading the possibility that this woman would make another noise.

People who moan or cry out or coo over dogs during films are anathema to me. I don’t want to know them or talk with them after the film is over, and I damn sure don’t want to sit near them. That also goes for people who laugh too loudly and go “uhm-hmm” when some plot turn or indication happens on-screen, as if to announce “ahh, I understand what’s going on now!” Anyone, in short, who can’t suck it in and keep it together without acting out what they’re feeling.

Unless you’re one of those types who lean forward in their seats and cover their face with their hands and moan very quietly when they’re watching a film they can’t stand — that’s a different thing and in my mind allowable.

People who can’t keep their emotions from spilling out in any arena are infants. I was on a New York-to-Paris flight about ten years ago, and a woman sitting near me moaned in fear when we hit a little turbulence. Two or three people sitting nearby immediately turned and gave her looks that said “for God’s sake…act like an adult!”

I was once driving to LAX with a woman friend just after 9/11, and she cried out when she saw armed U.S. soldiers standing on the approach ramps. Seeing guys standing around with guns is never comforting, but you need to eat that stuff and let it rumble around inside without acting like a two-year-old.

“I just hate people,” a frequent filmgoer complained the other day. “I’m still dealing with the woman next to me during Young Adult who audibly cooed whenever the fucking dog was onscreen, which was a LOT.”

During last March’s South by Southwest I wrote a highly positive appraisal of Cindy Meehl‘s wise and winning Buck. I called the piece “Horse Sense.” Next Tuesday the Sundance Selects team is having a screening and an after-party at a West Los Angeles venue so I thought I’d repost. It’s easily one of the year’s finest, most spiritually soothing docs so why not…right?

Buck “seems at first like a straightforward portrait of Buck Brannaman, a renowned horse-trainer who was the real-life inspiration for The Horse Whisperer (both the book and the film). But it gradually becomes more of a meditative heart-warmer about healing and parenting.

Like Brannaman himself, with whom I had an agreeable chat after yesterday’s screening, Buck has a spiritual, settled-down vibe.

At first I had a notion that Buck was just a nice emotional atmosphere film that didn’t have any wider echoes or implications, but I gradually began to see that it’s as much about healing humans as horses.

As it reveals more and more about Brannaman’s work and personal life, Buck passes along lessons about getting past childhood trauma and correcting parental errors and ways to heal…all that good stuff. The fact that youngish horses are the recipients of said therapy doesn’t obscure the fact that many if not most of Brannaman’s teachings apply to troubled kids and teens also, and for that matter (in theory at least) troubled adults.

Feeling unloved and ganged-up-upon and pressured isn’t a good thing for any man or beast. We all just need to chill and feel safe and unthreatened, and to not be so afraid of making a mistake that we can’t move. What I got from the film is that if all afraid, angry and unhappy people had someone like Brannaman to calm them down and steer them in healthier, more positive directions, the world would be a much calmer and better place.

The irony and ultimate lesson of Buck is that Brannaman was himself raised by a highly abusive and alcoholic dad. He and his older brother were adopted by foster parents when it became evident what they’d been going through, and that plus getting into horse training and discovering an exceptional empathy and communion with horses led to Buck’s becoming centered and secure and ending the abuse cycle. Brannaman is happily married and by all appearances a good dad.

Buck will open theatrically in June via Sundance Selects, and then become available via on Demand and cable and DVD/Bluray.

Last August Press Play‘s Matthias Stork posted a landmark two-part essay called “Chaos Cinema,” which, as I wrote on 8.22, “articulates and clarifies a lot of things that many of us have been feeling for a long while.”

Today a third “Chaos Cinema” essay was posted, primarily intended to answer a few onliners who criticized the original two essays. (I would post the video but the embed code is ridiculous.)

“Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action films, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload,” Stork wrote/narrated last summer. “[It’s] a film style marked by excess, exaggeration, over-indulgence, a never-ending crescendo with no spacial clarity…chaos cinema. The new action films are fast, forward, volatile, an audio-visual war zone.”

The only art in this form, Stork declared, “is the art of confusion.”

I was going to write that no one with a sliver of taste would pay $12 or $14 to see Garry Marshall‘s New Year’s Eve….brrnnng! It’s an absolute certified stinker with a 5% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and it’s being projected by Nikki Finke to end up as #1 this weekend with $19 million at 3505 theatres for a per-situation average of $5420.

I wrote Marshall off about ten years ago, but he used to be okay. The Flamingo Kid (’84) wasn’t too bad. I loved his cameo in Lost in America. I found ways to tolerate Beaches (’88), Pretty Woman (’90) and Frankie and Johnny (’91), and I genuinely enjoyed Runaway Bride (’99).

What nudie-hound with a decent-sized PDA (or just a simple iPhone) would shell out for the Lindsay Lohan pics in Playboy? They appeared all over the net today — free. Hugh Hefner‘s publication paid Lohan something close to $1 million to pose for a nude photo spread, which was shot as a tribute to the original 1949 Marilyn Monroe calendar photos.

The photos, for which Monroe was paid $50 some 62 years ago, later turned up in Playboy’s 1953 debut issue.

Hefner announced today “that the leak had prompted him to rush the issue to newsstands this week,” TMZ reports. The issue was originally intended to go on sale next week.

In a 12.9 Oscar-race article focusing on producer Scott Rudin (Extremely Loud & Extremely Close, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes writes that “the buzz from the few people who have seen Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close so far? Superb, but emotionally harrowing — one box of Kleenex might not suffice.”

Barnes also quotes a high-ranking studio executive as saying that Rudin “knows exactly what he has” in Stephen Daldry‘s 9/11 drama, “and it’s a jewel.”

And then a friend who’s seen Extremely Loud said something today that others may agree with: “It’s a better film than War Horse.” Meaning that it’s more or less the same kind of tear-soaked experience but that it uses a tad more restraint and is less emotionally scattershot than Steven Spielberg‘s film.

And then I remembered hearing from a person who’s witnessed reactions to screenings of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and how “they’ve been through the roof” on an “emotional gut level.”

Two seconds later a lightbulb went on and a little chime went “ding!”

Now, it may be that The Artist will eventually take the Best Picture Oscar, and if that happens…whatever. But if that black-and-white film loses steam and the choice comes down to War Horse vs. Extremely Loud…well! People like me will understand which side of the bread has the butter. So if — I say “if” — it comes down to an either/or, those with War Horse issues will, as Gen. Patton once said, “know what to do.” Just sayin’.

I have to leave in a few for round-table interviews at the Four Seasons for Angelina Jolie‘s In The Land of Blood and Honey. Everyone is looking to get what they want from these things, but whenever an object of tabloid fascination like Jolie sits down at the table, it’s highly likely that some ninny is going to go “off-topic” and ask some idiotic, inane, downmarket question. This is always cause for major eye-rolling, and is one reason why I hate these occasions. Hell, sometimes, is other journalists.

1:25 pm Update: Then again surprises happen from time to time. I’ve just returned from the Blood and Honey junket, and the q & a with Jolie was perfectly fine. In room #1414, at least. Nobody asked any inane tabloid questions. One person asked if handling a brood of seven children was analogous to directing a film, but that was allowable, I felt.

John Williams‘ War Horse soundtrack is about calculated symphonic dictation. It’s one of those scores that goads you, like an overbearing, baton-waving music teacher, into feeling this or that emotion on cue. Williams + Spielberg have been pushing the same buttons and working the same levers since Jaws. I once listened to an orchestra perform a summation of Williams’ best known movie themes at the Hollywood Bowl (with Williams conducting, of course). Well plowed and well trod, to put it mildly.

Mychael Danna‘s Moneyball score is more of a subtle, half-spooky weaver of spells. It’s hardly lacking in the activation of feeling or the use of compositional complexity, but it goes much easier and always seems to be slipping into your inner reservoir, creating spot-on ripples and currents but never trying to overwhelm or wash over. Danna, clearly, is trying to augment what you’re already feeling. As Jonah Hill put it in a recent HE interview, Danna’s score “watches the movie with you.”