Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the D’ubervilles, which is a fairly dark and fatalistic piece. You’d never know that from the generally pleasant, almost festive tone of this trailer. Pic is about an ill-fated romance between Jay (Riz Ahmed), a well-born smoothie, and Trishna (Freida Pinto), who comes from near-poverty. Will Pinto achieve a performance breakthrough of some kind? She could use that.

It never fails. If you’ve read six or seven pans of a new movie before going to see it, it will never seem as bad as it would if you’d just seen it cold. That’s what happened yesterday when I caught Lone Scherfig‘s One Day. I had spent a good 15 or 20 minutes reading numerous Rotten Tomato slams, and so I went in expecting to despise it. And it wasn’t as awful as all that.

One Day isn’t very likable and is more irksome than not, and it’s certainly draggy and even numbing at times. But I didn’t experience mute nostril agony. I got through it.

That’s mainly because it doesn’t end with a wonderfully glorious hug and a long kiss. Well, it does, sort of…but not how you’d expect. And it’s very nicely filmed by Benoit Delhomme. And the date-announcement titles (which constantly appear due to the story taking 23 years to unfold, starting in ’88 and ending presently) are inventively used. And lovely Edinburgh, Scotland makes for nice scenery.

One Day is an occasionally passable time-killer about Emma (Anne Hathaway), a bright and attractive British lass who for 20-odd years is in love with Dexter (Jim Sturgess), a haphazardly boozy, vapidly charming, commitment-skirting flirtaholic who can’t grow up or commit and isn’t worth her attention, and certainly not ours. I hate good-time Charlies. I’d rather hang with a coke-snorting Latino gangbanger or a fat, Marlboro-smoking mafioso.

A feeling of dull horror settles in as you begin to grasp the scheme. “Oh, no,” you say to yourself. “The movie’s going to be about Hathaway’s impossible-to-suppress affection for a guy who resembles Bradford Dillman‘s character in The Way We Were?” Remember that asshole? Robert Redford‘s best friend who did nothing but drink highballs and act glib and deliver shallow quips all through the film?

The fact that Dex’s father (Ken Stott) primarily regards his son with contempt made him, in my eyes, the film’s most sympathetic and reasonable-minded character. (Stott, by the way, couldn’t possibly be Sturgess’s biological dad, to go by genetic resemblance. Nor could Patricia Clarkson, who plays Sturgess’s cancer-afflicted mom. They don’t even faintly resemble him.)

Sturgess may have given one of those career-killing performances I wrote about last weekend. Key sentence: “Every now and then an actor’s on-screen manner is so odious and unpleasant to settle into that even sophisticated filmgoers find themselves resenting the actor on some level, despite the obvious.” It’s immature and irrational to say this, but I don’t want to hang with Sturgess any more. Not after this and Peter Weir‘s Russian agony-hike movie plus Across The Universe and 21.

I love the way the makeup crew gives Sturgess moderately heavy sproutings of gray hair by the time he’s in his mid 30s. By 40 he looks like a fast-sinking cancer patient, or like a victim of Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion virus with his eyes all puffy and rimmed with redness.

I know I’m supposed to be bothered by Hathaway’s allegedly inauthentic British accent, but I wasn’t so sue me.

Rafe Spall (son of Mike Leigh mainstay Timothy Spall) plays a would-be comedian whom Emma lives with for a few years without being in love. Every time he was on-screen I said to myself, “Anne Hathaway is not only fucking this guy but likes him enough to move in with him?” But Spall has one good line at the very end. His shaggy-sheepdog looks and vaguely bothersome performance are worth enduring for this one remark.

This isn’t a spoiler as I’m not revealing anything. I just need to get something straight. If you’re riding a bicycle through a city in a cautious and responsible way (i.e., signalling turns with your arm and all that) and you’re riding down a kind of walk-street alley that leads to a main thoroughfare with heavy traffic, wouldn’t it be a natural thing to stop at the end of the alley and check for oncoming vehicles before emerging from the alley? It would be kind of stupid to just ignore common sense, right?

I still don’t understand why Ami Canaan Mann‘s forthcoming Texas Killing Fields (Anchor Bay Films, 10.7), which will play the Venice Film Festival later this month (or in very early September), doesn’t have a website up. Or why Anchor Bay doesn’t at least include basic information and promotional art for the film on its website. They need to get on the stick.

For whatever reason Texas Killing Fields won’t be playing the Toronto Film Festival or any other festival besides Venice. Don’t dark policiers of this sort need the critics to rally round?

I reported a while back that it’s about the Texas I-45 Murders, a series of unsolved killings of prostitutes and lonely girls in the ’80s, probably by more than one assailant, in a blighted area south of Houston near Interstate I-45, which runs from Dallas down to Galveston Bay.

Mann, director of an earlier feature called Morning, is the daughter of Michael Mann, who produced this Zodiac-resembling crime drama. Texas Killing Fields costars Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chloe Moretz, Stephen Graham, Jessica Chastain and Annabeth Gish.

Two years ago Danny Boyle was planning to direct it before he bailed in fall ’09 to make 127 Hours, but not before calling the script “almost too dark to get made.”

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported on 2.7.10 that Don Ferrarone‘s script is “a true story of a pair of detectives investigating [the] murders in a stretch of bayous near the oil refineries in coastal Texas where as many as 70 bodies have turned up over the past 30 years.”

Could there be anything more desperate-sounding than a director announcing an intention to direct some kind of sequel or companion piece to a cult film he made decades earlier? The presumption is that Ridley Scott‘s Son of Blade Runner will probably get made because the money is there, and not because anyone has a super-brilliant idea for a sequel.

The story’s been told and there’s nowhere to go with it. Nobody cares about Decker or the unicorn or Roy or Douglas Trumbull‘s steamy been-there, done-that Los Angeles or Sean Young‘s replicant any more. All the various cuts of this film have so saturated film-bum fanboy culture that nobody has any room for a newbie. The past is the past. Leave it there.

I know — a rebellion of the replicants. A big gang of them get together and form ranks and get their hands on guns. We want to live and somehow we’re going to find the technology that will prolong our lives! And Deckard, having accepted who and what he is, is a mole inside the system, acting like a double agent, feeding information to the rebels, etc.

Magnolia is releasing Anne Sewitsky‘s Happy Happy in New York and Los Angeles on 9.16, and it’s now starting to be shown to journalists. But there’s no subtitled trailer to be found on YouTube, the film isn’t listed on ComingSoon.net, and it can’t be found on Wikipedia. So here’s the 2010 Norweigan trailer. It’s pretty easy to tell what the film’s about, and the tone of it.

Happy Happy is a sexual comedy of sorts, but not in the American sense. It’s a frank, plain-spoken, curiously skewed film. It’s “funny” but not silly or scatterbrained. It is not devoid of drama. It contains real people and hard confrontations, etc. It should be remembered that it won the Narrative World Cinema Jury Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

I saw and quite enjoyed Happy Happy at Sundance 2011. It’s not fluffy but it’s not too heavy either. It’s about a mad intoxicating affair (is there any other kind?) between a lovely, optimistic-minded housewife (Agnes Kittelsen) and a recently arrived married neighbor (Henrik Rafaelsen). There’s a certain humorous emphasis in the film, it must be said, on oral sex. A somewhat brazen emphasis, I should add. There’s no seeing this film and not remembering this aspect.

The affair is eventually found out, of course, as all affairs are. Particularly those taking place in a small town. The trick for any infidel is to be as covert and CIA-like as possible. I know — I was the other man in an extra-marital affair that lasted more than two and a half years. It was painful and glorious while it lasted. No regrets at all. The heart wants and needs what it wants and needs.

“Kittelsen’s performance is the linchpin of the film — her open, emotive face reveals as much about her thoughts as her poor impulse control,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter‘s Justin Lowe. “Whether cavorting with her new lover or probing her husband to share his emotions, her expressive performance easily draws the audience in.

“Sewitsky directs the performances and camera with confidence and flair, although the succession of Christmastime interiors is rather repetitive, in contrast to the exterior scenes, which breathe fresh dynamism into the pacing.”

Joachim Rafaelsen plays Kittelsen’s taciturn husband; Maibritt Saerens plays Rafaelsen’s attorney wife.

Happy Happy director Anne Sewitsky (l.), star Agnes Kittelsen (r.) at a January 2011 Park City party for Norweigan entries.

I’ve seen this film so many times I can say almost all the dialogue in synch with the actors, Rocky Horror-style. But nobody is more queer for high-end black-and-white Blurays than myself, and so I have no choice. None whatsover. I won’t even bitch if it’s grainy, which it probably will be to some extent. It’s the old thready textures of the 1950s clothing that I’m looking forward to. That and being able to study the sweat beads and beard follicles of the twelve-man cast.

Two days after the Depardieu plane-urination incident, a Bluray of the original “pee on the rug” movie is in video stores and purchasable on Amazon. Excellent timing. My copy is being messengered over as we speak. Word is that the bowling-alley scenes have that extra-shimmering Bluray pop-through quality, and that the rest of of the film…let’s wait.

Reports indicate that the suicide of Russell Armstrong was prompted by terrible financial despair. He apparently spent himself into debt in order to keep his Real Housewives of Beverly Hills wife Taylor Armstrong in clover (or the appearance of same), and eventually found himself in neck-deep quicksand and more or less said to himself, “I can’t stand this any more….I’m outta here.”

This sadly exposes the kind of pathetic relationships that are rife in this community — the wife is a total money-and-attention whore and the guy, usually older and not her physical-attraction equal, understands that the only way to keep her is to shower her with this and that luxury. There’s a rumor about a book that was going to float rumors about the guy being bi or whatever. He should have just gone gay and walked away and rented a nice little West Hollywood condo and chilled out. Life is very short. You have to choose happiness, but the “happy” you choose has to be grounded in something more nourishing than just having a lot of dough and thereby satisfying the shallow whims of a vacuous nobody.

Yesterday CNN’s Anderson Cooper got the giggles at the end of a segment about the Gerard Depardieu peeing-on-a-plane incident. It starts around the 2:40 mark. It’s funny and infectious but (a) the reason Cooper is laughing this hard is not really about Depardieu but something cathartic that only Cooper understands, (b) his laughter has this fluttery falsetto (amost eunuch-y) sound, and (c) the last syllable of Depardieu’s name is pronounced “dyeuh,” not “doo.”

Cooper’s breakdown reminded me, of course, of a similar scene in Michael Ritchie ‘s The Candididate (’72). I prefer Redford’s laugh to Cooper’s — no offense.

Truly primal laughter is never about any one event or mishap or whatever. It’s usually about the release of tension and frustration, and it’s completely unsuppressable if you feel you’re exposing some careless, thoughtless or callous part of yourself by laughing. I once wrote about a tree-surgeon boss I didn’t like and how he broke down in tears after a gas cap popped off a huge chain saw he had lifted above his head, and gas splashed all over his chest and stomach and lower flank. He was so angry and frustrated that he openly wept — literally going “whoa-hoo-hoo!” — and I started giggling at the whole spectacle. I had to suppress it, of course, or he would have killed me. But I couldn’t stop.

The mileage estimate websites claim that the drive from Albuquerque to Telluride is 207 miles. Yeah…as the crow flies. But if you’re driving it’s more like 310 or 320 miles. The more scenic eastern route (Albuqerque, Santa Fe, Chama, Durango, Dolores, Telluride) is 309 miles; the western route (Albuquerque, Gallup, Dolores, Telluride) is 320, but the roads are a bit flatter and faster.

Scenic route (heading to Telluride Film Festival, beginning on 8.31): Albuquerque to Santa Fe: 54 miles. Santa Fe to Chama: 92 miles. TOTAL: 146 miles (or 2 1/2 hrs.). Chama to Durango, CO: 76 miles. Durango to Dolores: 37 miles. Dolores to Telluride: 50 miles

TOTAL: 163 miles (or 3.5 hours). Grand Total: 309 miles = 6 hours.

GOING THERE: Lap #1 — Wednesday, 8.31, starting at 6 pm. Albuquerque to Santa Fe = 54 miles, or maybe 60 minutes. Take 25 east from ALB to Santa Fe. Go NORTH on 84 to Chama. Lap #2: Santa Fe to Chama = 92 miles, or maybe 90 minutes. North on 84, then take 17 north to Chama.

Lap #3 — Thursday, 9.1, starting at 9 am: Chama to Durango, CO = 76 miles or about 75 to 90 minutes. West on 84/64, then due north on 84 to Pagosa Springs, CO, then West on 160 to Durango (47 miles from Pagosa Springs). Lap #4: Durango to Dolores = 37 miles. West on 160 to Mancos (about 24 miles), then NORTH on 184 to Dolores (about 15 miles from Mancos). Then NE on 145. Lap #5: Dolores to Telluride, or 50 miles. NE on 145, maybe an hour.

RETURNING: Lap #1 — Monday, 9.1., starting around noon: Telluride to Dolores, or 50 miles. SW on 145, maybe an hour. Lap #2: Dolores to Gallup, or about 129 miles or two hours. Due south on 491. Lap #3: Gallup to Albuquerque, or about 140 miles east on Interstate 40. Or roughly another two hours. TOTAL: 320 miles, or about 5 hours. Averaging 70 mph would make it a four and 1/2 hour trip…we’ll see.

I was half-watching a DVD last week of Alan Parker‘s Evita (1996), and it looks like hell on a 50-inch screen. For its upcoming 15th anniversary, Hollywood’s best all-singing musical opera (yes, better than Sweeney Todd) needs to be Bluray-ed. For me Darius Khondji‘s widescreen cinematography is compositional heaven — each and every frame has an exquisite painterly balance, and is lighted to perfection. And Gerry Hambling‘s lively cutting is a perfect compliment to the musical rhythms and rhymes.

And it’s a very fine film for what it is, and the music is entirely catchy and hummable and pizazzy. The kids and I used to sing the songs together when they were seven and eight. “So what happens now? / where am I going to? / you’ll get by, you always have before.”

I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that Evita may be Alan Parker ‘s best film ever.

No, Madonna’s performance isn’t triple or even double grade-A because she’s not a gifted actress, no argument, acknowledged, but it’s certainly the best thing she’s ever done or will do acting-wise, and I truly respect her work here because Parker got her to do nothing except sing (and I think she fully honors Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s score) and emphasize feelings and needs with her face and body and wear great clothes and look dazzling and forceful. She’s playing a grasping, conniving operator, but yet there’s something common and shared in her eyes and voice. She gives it hell and brings it home.

Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Pryce are exactly right in their phrasings and flavorings and emotings. Honestly? I can’t think of another American-made film in which I’ve enjoyed either actor more. Banderas was better in his early Almodovar turns in the late ’80s, but that’s another realm.

Evita is probably my all-time favorite Hollywood musical — yes, more so that Singin’ in the Rain or Cabaret or you-name-it. It just gets the snap and brio and excitement of being a unified opera that sings and breathes with one voice, one truly Latin spirit. And it’s just too beautiful-looking not to upgrade it to Bluray. Okay, I’ve said it.

“I want to be a part of BA, Buenos Aires, Big Apple…”