Two weekends ago (or was it three?) I made the mistake of renting four Blurays at Vidiots. I watched them within a couple of days, took them down to the car, threw them into the back seat and forgot about them. This morning a Vidiots clerk called and said I owe them $160. That seemed excessive. I told the clerk that my first reaction would be not to return the Blurays, but to build a fire outside and burn them. More emotionally satisfying, etc. He said fine, but if I keep them or burn them they’ll charge me $160 plus the cost of the Blurays. This is why I don’t rent, and why I’ll never go back to that store again.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire (Relativity, 1/20./12) will be shown tonight at the AFiFest under a “secret screening” heading at 9 pm. A brief q & a with Soderbergh and star Gina Carano and maybe a couple of others will follow.

The costars, as everyone knows by now, are Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Angarano, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas.

Haywire (originally called Knockout) was shot mostly in Ireland from early February 2010 to 3.25.10 at a cost of $25 million, give or take.

A full fight clip of Carano and Michael Fassbender was reportedly shown at Comic Con last July. “All the stunts in this movie are meant to be more realistic than your normal Hollywood action film. No wire work. No stunt double for Gina except for 2% of the film. No cutting away or shaky cam during the fights. Channing, Ewan, and Michael did most of their stunts also.”

Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo (Paramount. 11.23) screened this afternoon for press at the big Regal plex in downtown LA. It’s a fanciful, heavily CG-ed, 3D storybook film that plays like a “family entertainment” flick during the first two thirds to 75%, which is to say with much familiarity. But the final act, roughly the last 25 minutes, is another story.

For Hugo concludes with a great excursion into filmmaking history and the first dreammakers (particularly George Meiles, director of the 1902 A Trip To The Moon and dozens of other shorts) and film preservation and all that good movie-Catholic stuff.

This finale, aimed squarely at film dweebs and sure to sail right over the heads of most tykes and tweeners, is by far the best portion of the film, and easily worth the price of admission in itself.

Lamentably, the story of poor little Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an orphan living a hidden secret life in the guts of a Paris train station (apparently le Gare Montparnasse) in the late 1920s, occupies the bulk of the running time, and too much of this section feels rote and boilerplate. Or it did to me, at least.

I have an AFIFest event to go to in a few minutes, but here are slightly expanded versions of this afternoon’s tweets from the Regal.

Tweet #1: Too much of Hugo is done the cute way, the twee storybook way, the endearing childhood emotion way. To me the first 60% to 65% felt needlessly prolonged. Hugo runs 127 minutes, but it could and should have run 75 or 80 minutes. Okay, 90 minutes but no longer.

Tweet #2: The extended running time is due to a needlessly drawn-out relationship between an annoyingly secretive and quite inarticulate Hugo Cabret and the annoyingly secretive and inexplicably nihilistic Melies (Ben Kingsley). Melies is furious that his career has fizzled and therefore discourages any mention of his past glories — an absolutely nonsensical attitude if you know anything about what all filmmakers, failed or successful, are like.

Moderator Paul Thomas Anderson (far left) and the Hugo team (l. to r.) — director Martin Scorsese, dp Robert Richardson, composer Howard Shore, production designer Dante Ferretti, edtitor Thelma Schoonmaker, and visual effects supervisor Robert Legato.

Tweet #3: The other running-time extender is the tediously predatory pursuit of Hugo by Sasha Baron Cohen as a half doofusy, half-villainous train station cop.

Tweet #4: But once the film focuses on the legendary history of Melies and once the dawn of moviemaking in Paris in the early 1900s is recalled and recreated, Hugo is pure spirit-lifting pleasure. Finally the “cute big-eyed kid trying to survive in a Paris train station” story is more or less abandoned and the film lifts off the ground.

Tweet #5: What formerly successful filmmaker wants to hide his illustrious past? What wife of a formerly celebrated filmmaker (a woman who was the star of most of his films) wants her husband’s past success kept under wraps? After pride in craft and the respect of peers, all filmmakers live for recognition and adulation. I can’t imagine any filmmaker trying to suppress awareness of his/her past achievements, or being okay with being forgotten.

Tweet #6: I think I could have done without Sacha Baron Cohen and that Doberman altogether. And 20 or 25 fewer closeups of Butterfield’s big watery eyes and his looks of fear and hurt and bewilderment.

The post-screening discussion, moderated by Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master, There Will Be Blood), featured Scorsese, dp Robert Richardson, production designer Dante Ferretti, longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker, visual effects supervisor Robert Legato and composer Howard Shore.

Here’s an assessment by Hitflix/In Contention’s Kris Tapley.

“Hey Jeff, thought you might be interested in these pics of Ryan Gosling, recently announced as the costar of an upcoming Terrence Malick film called Lawless, doing precisely what Christian Bale was doing with Malick in Austin last month. Only this time, it was a different music festival.” — from a friend this morning.

I’ve got three or four more stories I could write but it’s 11:30 am and I have stuff to do before driving downtown for a 2 pm screening of a film I’m not supposed to mention, which will be followed by a q & with a not-to-be-mentioned director. So that’s it. To be continued, etc.

Clint Eastwood is a signature filmmaker, an auteurist. His movies have a tone, a vibe and a stamp that say “take it or leave it, but this is a Clint film.” They’ve all delivered a feeling of wholeness and completion, certainly by Eastwood standards. The problem for some (many?) of us is that post-Million Dollar Baby and with the exception of Gran Torino his films have begun to feel a little too meditative, longish, labored and languid. And what’s with the frequently desaturated color?

Letters From Iwo Jima was eloquent and affecting, but Flags of Our Fathers was a slog, The Changeling became the basis for a drinking game, and Invictus and Hereafter were shortfallers. And now comes J. Edgar, which I saw last night.

It’s an Eastwood film, all right. And it’s not bad for what it is. No, better than not bad. “Decent” is a fair term to use. It’s Clint’s version of Brokeback Mountain, in a sense, and is finely performed and professionally assembled, etc. Dustin Lance Black‘s script certainly covers the bases, and J. Edgar is actually a fairly radical film for a guy of Eastwood’s age and history and conservative philosophy. If J. Edgar Hoover is still floating or swirling around on some ectoplasmic level and he has a chance to see Eastwood’s film when it opens, he’s going to be one pissed-off ghost.

But for all the things it does right and despite that feeling of rock-bottom assurance that an Eastwood film always provides, J. Edgar is a moderately boring film, at times in an almost punishing way.

Mostly because it’s a profound drag to spend time with such a sad, clenched and closeted tight-ass. Hoover, the founder and ruler of the FBI for 37 years, was such a guarded and snarly little shit, and truly reprehensible in his attitude toward and relations with Martin Luther King, and a coward to boot. And when you mesh this guy with that languid highly relaxed Eastwood pacing and that desaturated color scheme (again!) the film begins to feel like it’s slowly draining the life out of you. It desaturates your soul.

(l. to r.) Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Clint Eastwood at Thursday night’s AFIFest premiere of J. Edgar.

And after a half-hour or so I began to say to myself, “This isn’t a bad film…better than I thought it would be…Clint knows what he’s doing…and it’s true about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s performance being highly focused and exacting and possibly award-worthy (maybe), but…let’s see, 136 minutes long, another 100 to go…I have to be honest and admit that I’m not looking forward to sitting through the rest of this. Although I don’t want to miss Armie Hammer‘s big emotional blowout scene (i.e, seeing red after Leo mentions the possibility of his marrying Dorothy Lamour and then wrestling with him on the floor and kissing him) or the moment when a distraught Leo puts on his mother’s dress and pearls after she dies.”

J. Edgar is an earnestly conceived and well-made film, and one that delivers the goods by the end (i.e., making the case that Hoover’s life was all about acquiring and keeping power, and that this power was used for dubious motives in many instances, and that the man himself was a tragic if not a pathetic figure). But it’s a bit of an endurance test, and the under-40s, I suspect, are going to stay away in droves.

The old-age makeup looks like old-age makeup, but for whatever reason I got used to Leo’s old-Hoover appearance, and it wasn’t that much of a problem. But I couldn’t figure what his Hoover accent was about. I only know that I kept saying to myself, “He sounds like an actor using a strange accent.” And Hammer’s old-Tolson seems a bit too leathery and liver-spotted, like some ghostly figure out of a Roger Corman film. Judi Dench‘s performance as Ma Hoover and Naomi Watts‘ as Helen Gandy, the FBI director’s longtime secretary, are steady and true.

I want to see Larry Cohen‘s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover again.

Here’s a brutal, flame-throwing takedown of Eastwood’s film by Boxoffice critic James Rocchi.

Andy Rooney, the scintillating, bluntly honest 60 Minutes commentator with the moderately cranky manner, has died “of complications following a minor surgery.” He led a rich and storied and distinguished life, and 92 years is a long run by anyone’s standard. Most people depart a few years earlier on average so Rooney was doing something right, or he had good genes or whatever.

But it’s interesting, I think, that he died only 33 days after his final 60 Minutes commentary was broadcast.

For some people (like myself) work is the engine and the sustenance of life, and when that stops the body senses this absence — no more wood being thrown onto the fire — and it starts looking around for an excuse, any excuse, to shut down. Stanley Kubrick dying only a short while after finishing Eyes Wide Shut was another example of this syndrome. This is one of the reasons why the word “retirement” was banished from my vocabulary years ago.

My favorite Rooney commentary (which he was slammed for) was about the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain. “A lot of people would like to have the years left that he threw away,” Rooney said. “What’s all this nonsense about how terrible life is?” he asked, adding rhetorically to a young woman who had wept at the suicide, “I’d love to relieve the pain you’re going through by switching my age for yours.”

Late this morning Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley discussed their reaction to Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar, which they saw last night at the AFIFest, on Oscar Talk. I have a chance to see it tonight, and I may do that rather than wait for Monday’s “caboose” screening.

Tapley also talks about last Tuesday’s screening of Young Adult (“I think it plays to a niche crowd”), which Thompson missed.

Here’s Tapley’s J. Edgar review on Hitfix/In Contention.

“I think DiCaprio could win [the Best Actor Oscar],” says Tapley, and Thompson agrees. Neither of them think it’s a Best Picture contender. Thompson says she wasn’t sure about Armie Hammer after his Social Network performance, but after seeing him play Clyde Tolson in J. Edgar she feels “he’s a keeper now.”

Thompson: “I liked it a lot more than I expected…a lotta flashbacks…an old guy looking back…the casting is really good and the actors are really great…I feel a great deal of affection for Leo [giving] a great movie-star performance….one of those movie-star alchemy things happen in which you’re looking at J. Edgar and you’re looking at Leo…there’s a lot of resemblance to Brokeback Mountain…tragic love story…..I was surprised by how much I was pulled in to the narrative and pulled into caring. Not a perfect movie, not a great movie…but Clint does it again.”

Tapley: “The greatest hits biopic approach…oddly clunky, abitrary structure, zipping around in time…..unmotivated…didn’t seem to have a reason to go back and forth…but probably my favorite Clint pic since Letters From Iwo Jima….Mystic River is a lot more boring that I recall…I just think that…uhm, I like the movie on one hand [but] I don’t like latter-day Eastwood.”

Eastwood “peaked with Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby,” says Thompson, “and mostly the later ones don’t measure up.”

From a NY critic friend: “You can cross this one off the Oscar-contender list. Not sure who anyone thinks the audience is. The movie it most reminded me of was that Jack Nicholson‘s Hoffa. Unfocused movie built around strong central performance or performances. Armie Hammer is pretty great, though. Very even-handed and Leo is also strong. The problem is the script, which can’t seem to figure out what it’s about. Addresses the gay issue obliquely by suggesting that Hoover was a closet case who wouldn’t admit to himself what was going on with Tolson.”

I was somewhat excited about attending Summit Entertainment’s shindig last night at the Bel-Air Hotel because I wanted to see what the $100 million renovation looks like. It was a nice party but the makeover is a letdown. At least in terms of those 12 newly built canyon-view suites up on the hillside. The exteriors and staircases, I mean, which have an uncultivated, hard-edged, nouveau-riche appearance, like something you might find in Riyadh or Qatar or Cancun.

The hard sharp lines that define the Hotel Bel Air hillside exteriors are icky. What person with taste decorates a stairway with little white porthole lights?

And the chandeliers in the Vegas-styled ballroom where the Summit party took place have “a Long Island bar mitzvah quality,” as a publicist friend put it.

I haven’t inspected the entire hotel. A lot of sections seemed very nice. The gardens and the restaurant-bar are still beautiful. So I’m not putting the whole place down, just some of it.

The Bel-Air hotel, which was originally built in 1946, has never been a bastion of Spanish architectural tradition, certainly not along the lines of the Four Seasons Biltmore hotel, which does it exactly right. But there’s no way to go if you’re renovating a 1940s-or-older Southern California hotel except to honor Spanish-style architecture. You need to restore (and if necessary, recreate) this atmosphere as best you can. Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves-style architecture is frightful in this context.

The Bel-Air hotel used to be half-Spanish and half-California comfortable with a kind of soothing, ladies-who-do-lunch Nancy Reagan vibe. Now the place feels half-Spanish and vaguely Middle Eastern.

Oh, wait….there’s a reason for that. The nouveau-riche types who’ve come into money since the flush times of the ’90s and early aughts have no taste to speak of so they love anything brash and sparkly and showoffy — they eat that shit up. So if you want to attract this crowd, you don’t want to generate an atmospheric vibe that’s too classy or reserved.

Plus the Bel-Air hotel is owned by the Sultan of Brunei. It is never a good thing when some loaded big-shot from India or Asia or the Middle East buys an old-WASPy-establishment hotel because one way or the other he will always chintz it up. For whatever reason genuine taste is hard to come by if you’re from the entrepenurial or inherited-wealth classes within those regions.

One of the areas in the new Bel-Air hotel that I found to my liking.

The architect behind the Bel-Air renovation is Alexandra Champalimaud of the Rockwell Group. She also renovated Manhattan’s Pierre hotel, and if you ask me she made that one feel a little too Middle-Eastern also…too bright and sparkly, too much gold paint.

This isn’t the first time I’ve complained of Middle-Eastern architecture influences upon old white-people establishments. Last year I complained about the design styles of Isaac Tshuva, the Israeli billionaire who bought and re-designed the Plaza seven years ago.

“The Plaza used to be a haven of old-world Anglo-Saxon class,” I wrote. “Now it reeks of Middle-Eastern cluelessness. The only thing missing are bellmen standing around with pointy-toed Ali Baba shoes.”

In 2007 I reported the shock that I felt when I realized that Boston’s former Ritz Carlton — the Plaza Hotel of Boston, operating since the mid 1920s — is now called The Taj, and “has been transformed with a name and a design scheme that’s right out of Las Vegas or Cancun.” The Ritz Carlton waa sold in ’06 to Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, a swanky hotel chain based in Mumbai, India.

Eighteen months after abruptly departing Apparition, Bob and Jeanne Berney are abruptly leaving FilmDistrict, the GK-partnered company that was launched 13 or 14 months ago. The stated reason is that the company wants to abandon its New York City offices and move the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle to Los Angeles, and the Berneys are hardcore New Yorkers and don’t want to relocate.

According to math provided by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming, the company has generated about $163 million in revenues from five Film District releases — Insidious, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Soul Surfer, Drive and Rum Diary. I don’t know what FD’s cut of this amount boils down to, but it sounds like they had a fairly decent year. But it apparently wasn’t enough because the basic idea behind any consolidation is to cut costs.

The Berneys will keep the New York office running for another months, or roughly until 3.1.12, largely to attend to the release of Angelina Jolie‘s In The Land Of Blood and Honey.

This morning I placed a call to a New York-based company (never mind the particulars) called Reprise something-or-other. I got the usual voice message explaining the usual options. The speaker had what sounded to me like a somewhat educated New York borough or northern New Jersey accent. What got me was his pronunciaton of Reprise, which he called RE-prize — a variation on the standard football-game prounciation of the word “defense” as DE-fense.

The second I heard RE-prize I thought of those hillbillies in Deliverance telling Jon Voight and Ned Beatty that “well, we, uh, RE-quire that you both get your asses into them woods.” I was once again channeling Jose Ferrer ‘s Turkish Bey in Lawrence of Arabia: “I am surrounded by cattle.”

Frank Sinatra‘s old record label was called Reprise, but it was pronounced the elegant way — reh-PREEZ. Commoners, I remember, would say reh-PRIZE and others would correct them by saying, “Uhm, I think you’re supposed to say reh-PREEZ.” But now we’ve sunk even further. Now we have guys who sound like Port Authority bus drivers greeting callers with “thank you for calling RE-prize.” Welcome to Jersey Shore.