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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter “constructs a fantasy scenario that relentlessly trivializes the Civil War, slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation and the cultural divide,” MSN’s Glenn Kenny notes.

“[It] posits, for instance, that slavery itself was not the creation of human beings just like you and me but the work of blood-drinking undead beings intent on world domination. And that the bloodshed at Gettysburg was at least in part the work of vampire Confederate soldiers who could make themselves invisible and pierce through the hearts of Union soldiers without them even knowing it. And that one of the most genuinely tormented and morally acute leaders the United States has ever known as an ax-wielding avenger and destroyer of supernatural beings.

“Well, that’s kind of a dicey proposition. And Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, written by Seth Grahame-Smith, adapting his own popular novel, and directed by Russian master of action excess Timur Bekmambetov, does not make good on it. It constitutes a moral sin, if not an outright moral crime, and commits a grave insult against history.”

Give it to ’em, Glenn!

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is currently running at 33% positive at Rotten Tomatoes. I would quote the Metacritic score but the shitty wifi in this cabin refuses to bring up the page.

My favorite AL:VH quote is from Village Voice critic Nick Pinkerton: “The logical outer limit of the whole horror-as-metaphor thing, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter shoehorns the entire personal history of the 16th president into mega-budget The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires chop-socky/grindhouse schlock, and casts the seditious South as a nation of slave-sucking undead. Possible resulting ‘fun’ is only slightly mitigated by contemplation of the wearisome decadence of American popular culture.”

Imagine walking out your front door every morning and seeing this, only in IMAX 3D on a 120-foot-wide and 90-foot-tall screen. It’s pretty close to impossible not to be in a fairly good mood with Staubbach Falls in front of you 24-7. But now we’re saying goodbye to this splendor and heading for Munich.

Thursday, 6.21, 9:45 am

Santa Monica’s Aero, my favorite Los Angeles theatre by a mile, has completed a major digital upgrade and will soon be screening mostly DCPs instead of celluloid. (There will be, no doubt, occasions when they choose to show a 35mm or 70mm film through their Norelco AAII film projectors.) To celebrate this new technological enablement, the Aero will show off their digital hardware with a “17-Night Series of Classics and Digital Restorations” from 7.12 through 8.4.

Be advised that the Casablanca screening on Friday 7.20 will almost certainly be the darker, distinctly grainier 70th anniversary version that constituted the last Bluray release. Get used to this, suck it in — grain-monk theology has won over the corporates along with masking ’50s films with 1.85 prison-cell croppings. If I was Absolute Bluray Dictator I’d order that two versions of all restored classics — “grainmonk” and “moderately shiny” — be issued simultaneously along with “headspace” and”1.85 fascist” versions. Then there wouldn’t be any fights.

Grover Crisp‘s M.I.A. restoration of From Here To Eternity will play on 8.2. The high-def restoration was first screened in the fall of ’09 and then in Cannes in May 2010, but it’s never turned up on Bluray.

Five years ago I wrote the following: “The restored Aero Theatre — the westside flagship for the American Cinematheque — is a single-screen venue on an affluent, relatively quiet Santa Monica boulevard. Nice people run it and nice people — a mostly older crowd — are always there. An Italian ice store is just down the the street, an antique furniture store that Mary Steenburgen is a co-proprietor of sits next to it. The whole quiet-community atmosphere is like a Valium. The vibe at the Arclight or the Bridge or the Monica Plex on Second Street is fine, but the Aero feels like yesteryear.

“Last night’s experience was very much like seeing a movie on a quiet summer night in a small town in the ’60s or ’70s. The Aero is a remnant of the modest- sized, personably-managed theatres that you could find in every last small town in America before the plexing boom of the ’80s. On top of which the sound and projection standards at the Aero are superb, and they’re always showing good films there.”

Yesterday afternoon’s hike happened in an elevated (about 9000 feet) region north of Grindelwald, which we got to via four-person cable cars. I forgot my walking stick so I used a fencepost that I found along the trail. Honestly? I hate 45 degree inclines that go on forever. I hate that feeling of your calf muscles screaming for dear life. And I don’t much care for getting rained on. But after it’s over, I always feel good. Depleted but good.

We all understand from a business perspective why Liam “paycheck” Neeson is committed to making this shite until the string runs out. Striking the iron while hot, etc. Plus the brawny machismo thing led to his wolf-hunter role in The Grey. What I don’t get is why Neeson seems to have abandoned playing vulnerable emotional guys. If he could just play one Husbands and Wives-type role for every four or five bullshit actioners, all would be forgiven.

I’m not saying Travyon Martin assailant George Zimmerman is telling the truth in this video, but my gut reaction is not to dismisss his story out of hand. I’ve read that he’s a dicey fellow in a couple of respects, but he might be telling it straight here…maybe. I have no dog in this. Just looking for reactions.

Ever since seeing my first image of the Matterhorn when I was eight or nine I’ve wanted to stand in its shadow and just go “whoa.” So yesterday the guys and I drove the wrong way (i.e., four hours over winding mountain roads) from Lauterbrunnen to Zermatt, the affluent ski town that lies at the base of it. The trip turned out to be mostly a disaster. Because of an innocent mistake I almost got slammed with a 350 Swiss franc traffic ticket — thank God I was able to talk my way out of it.

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“People have wanted me and Jeff Wells to get into it on some form of media. And I have always refused the notion, primarily because I know his weak spots and would crush Jeff in an intense argument, not necessarily rhetorically but personally. I would find it hard not to stick in the knife. No matter how severe his opinions, I would look like a mean, cruel person. And I would be, for a moment, a mean, cruel person. I don’t want to be that.” — David Poland in his 6.20 Hot Blog piece about the passing of Andrew Sarris.

Due respect to director Bill Condon, but it’s a relief to know that Breaking Dawn Part 2, finally, is the last of the effing Twilight movies. I can watch this trailer, of course, but the content skirts across. My heart sank when I realized the film goes back to Volterra and the Council of the Volturi. I understood Twihards after seeing and respecting Catherine Hardwicke‘s opener, but then along came Taylor Lautner and the werewolves, and the franchise turned to shit.

During the Cannes Film Festival press conference for On The Road, Kristen Stewart spoke about how elated and grateful she was to be working with Walter Salles and Sam Riley and the gang. She had missed making a real movie.

In a brief but eloquent obit for the late Andrew Sarris, Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy recalls the long-running battle between Sarris and Pauline Kael, which re-ignited to some extent when McCarthy chaired a New York Film Festival panel discussion about Kael last fall. He explains here why he decided early on to side with Sarris:

“Andrew Sarris was the man who taught me how to do what I do,” McCarthy begins. “Without him, I would never have experienced the cinema in the way that I have or been provided with such an inspiring road map to pursue what, for all of us in the critical and historical film world, is the endless quest for discovery of little-known works and artists.

“Certainly, Pauline could be the more dynamic crusader both for and against a film. Sarris was often dizzyingly eloquent and quite funny, but, especially as he got older, had a tendency to ramble. What it came down to, in the end, was that, with Kael, what you’re left with is all opinion — brilliantly and eloquently expressed opinion, to be sure, but subjective impressions nonetheless. By contrast, Sarris’s initially controversial method of creating a hierarchy of talent [in “The American Cinema“] had the automatic effect of establishing priorities and, in a broader sense, inspiring a deeper plunge into film history.

One of Sarris’s categories in ‘The American Cinema‘ was ‘Subjects for Further Research,’ and that seems to apply to nearly everything I’ve done professionally since that time. Once you’ve gotten a handle on the personalities and artistic tendencies of certain directors, you begin more carefully tracking the careers of writers, cinematographers and other contributors to a film’s accomplishment.

“My first book, ‘Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System,” which I embarked upon directly out of college, was conceived entirely as an extension of ‘The American Cinema’, having been inspired by Sarris’s phrase, ‘Eventually we must speak of everything if there is enough time and space and printer’s ink.’ From my point of view, Sarris’s perspectives opened many windows and doors, while Kael’s work had the feel of a judge’s gavel.