In his 10.7 column, N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman has offered some of the most sensible thoughts I’ve heard from a boomer-aged pundit about the various Occupy happenings: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

“When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

“It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

“What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

“A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

“In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

“Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

“Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.”

Before reading Todd McCarthy‘s 10.6 review of Brian Kellow‘s “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark“, I’d never heard about the legendary New Yorker film critic having allegedly hastened the death of director Roberto Rossellini by inflicting stress on the poor man. During their mutual service on the 1977 Cannes Film Festival jury, McCarthy writes, Kael “argued so relentlessly with the aging and ailing Rossellini for two weeks that the uncharitable accused her of killing the revered director, who died the following week.”

New Yorker critic Pauline Kael during a 1982 interview, when she was 62 or 63.

On the other hand McCarthy recounts a passage in Kellow’s book in which Kael and director George Roy Hill, “both terribly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease, met by chance in a small-town Massachusetts restaurant. Their previous personal contact had been some 30 years earlier when the director, responding to her unkind and, in one respect, uninformed review of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had begun with the salutation, ‘Listen, you miserable bitch.’ Ignoring this, ‘Pauline clutched his hand warmly and gave him the name of her massage therapist, promising him that the therapy would do him a world of good.'”

McCarthy also notes that Kael “was always surprised when ‘friends’ she went on to attack in print — Woody Allen, for example — took offense at her criticism, as she somehow imagined they would understand it wasn’t personal, that she had to be completely honest in her reviews.”

Hah! From the filmmakers’ point of view, a critic or columnist they personally know is their friend and supporter no matter what, a writer who will always be generous or at least cut them a break whenever possible, or they’re some kind of enemy or betrayer or backbiter if they write something even moderately critical, especially if it strikes the filmmaker as dismissive.

The 1977 Cannes Film Festival jury (i.e., Kael is the shortest, fourth from right)

In 1840s Baltimore Edgar Allen Poe (John Cusack) joins forces with a stalwart detective (Luke Evans) to catch a serial killer who’s apparently been inspired by Poe’s writings, and whose next victim may be Emily (Alice Eve), whom Poe is in love with…Jesus! A movie can’t be funded until it’s ground down into genre mulch and made to closely resemble other films of its type (i.e. Sherlock Holmes, From Hell, Sleepy Hollow). 19th Century arterial splatter with lots of fog.

It’s called The Raven, and it comes out of 3.9.12. Here’s the Apple trailer.

The images in Pedro Almodovar‘s films are always luscious, sensuous, refined to perfection. Paying $200 to own 600 of them (including some never-before-published personal photos) to have and hold seems like a good deal to me. Taschen’s “The Pedro Almodovar Archives“, edited by Paul Duncan and Barbara Peiro, will hit stores on the same day that The Skin That I Live In (Sony Classics, 10.14) opens.

Yesterday media theorist and cultural pulse-taker Douglas Rushkoff posted a piece on CNN.com called “Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it.” He was subsequently interviewed by an obviously skeptical, not-getting-it CNN anchorperson.

Rushkoff’s points are that (a) mainstream media types are having a hard time understanding the groundbreaking nature of the protests because they’re thinking in 20th Century street-protest terms while Occupy Wall Street is a “patient” internet phenomenon and (b) the discussions heard in Liberty Park about the 1% vs. 99% economic inequities have been, he feels, “more profoundly intelligent” than anything heard on network talk shows or in the halls of Congress addressing same.

My decision to fly back to Los Angeles on Saturday morning now seems like a major miscalculation. Not only will I miss seeing My Week With Marilyn at the Sunday press screening, but the just-announced “work in progress from a master filmmaker” that will screen on Monday night at 7pm. “The film is due to be released in theaters this year,” says the official announcement.

Not the “scariest, snarliest bulldog in the pen” but “the most powerful man in the world”? When Clint Eastwood‘s Harry Callahan called the .357 Magnum “the most powerful handgun in the world”, I believed him. But the Hoover description seems grandiose.

Early last July ESPN’s Bill Simmons confided that he’d seen Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult (Paramount, 12.9), and that Charlize Theron ‘s lead performance was a career landmark for her. Trailers always lie but this one suggests, at least, what Theron’s performance might be. Is anyone getting a sense that Simmons may have been right?

“Remember when we said earlier about Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise and how he needed Jerry Maguire [to do that], and how you watched for two hours…?,” Simmons said. “And this is Tom Cruise throwing 98 miles an hour? Charlize Theron has never had a movie like that. Monster shoudn’t be her defining movie…she gained 35 pounds and made herself ugly [for that], and she’s beautiful. She’s never had a really good movie that she was really good in in which she was also beautiful.

“And it made me reevaluate her career…that’s how good I thought she was in [Young Adult]. She knows that you know that she knows she’s beautiful. I’m glad she made this movie. People will feel differently about her after they see it.”

No superhero movie can work if it appeals only to ComicCon fanboy types. It has do that deep-theme, double-intelligent, heavy-lifting thing (like Captain America did) to attract skeptics and haters like myself. I don’t see this happening with Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers (Disney/Marvel, 5.4.12) because Whedon is an unregenerate, comic-book-worshipping, fanboy-servicing journeyman — not an art-visionary director like Cameron or Fincher or Del Toro, strictly a fantasy-realm clock puncher.

And after all the X-Men movies, who wants to slog it out with another superhero ensemble piece?

The problem with Douglas Rain‘s HAL voice being Siri’ed, of course, is that he no longer has that voice. His 2001: A Space Odyssey dialogue was recorded 44 or 45 years ago, when Rain (born in ’28) was in his late 30s. He’s now 83, and his voice surely has that vaguely fluttering, higher-pitched old man timbre. Apple needs to find a Rain-sounding guy to pinch-hit. (Thanks to HE reader Mark Frenden.)