I wonder what time on 5.21.11? Because I’ll be in France. Presumably the American spiritualists who paid for the billboard (located on Hillhurst north of Hollywood ) expect the end to come during daylight or early evening hours in one of the four US time zones.

I was just thinking: Lars von Trier went into a somewhat similar dark forest with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg living in a cabin and found a bloody fox talking in a deep voice. And here’s another side…

If I was Jon Favreau, directing a super-broad ComicCon popcorn comic-book flick with an instant worldwide appeal, I would naturally be focusing on the basics (including, yes, refining the CG and sound design and making sure the alien space ships look extra cool) but I would mainly be working on the small stuff — honing the dialogue, pruning down the running time, and generally making sure that all those little connective-tissue moments and fine narrative fibres are blending just so.

I can almost guarantee you that right now Favreau, who revealed who and what he really is with that godawful Robert Downey, Jr. vs. Mickey Rourke mano e mano battle scene in Iron Man 2, is paying proper attention to the small connective-tissue stuff, but not to any great or obsessive degree. He’s got a surefire hit with guaranteed popcorn potential on his hands, and what matters to him the most, I sense, is delivering primitive popcorn-geek highs. Because he didn’t have the character to resist staging that malignant Monte Carlo race-track duke-out, and because he’s basically a beefy, T-shirted, comic-book-reading nice guy who loves getting standing ovations from the ComicCon-ers….yaaaay! Whoo-hoo!

He’s not Stanley Kubrick, he’s not Sergei Eisenstein, he’s not Billy Wilder, he’s not Budd Boetticher, he’s not David Fincher, he’s not Ridley Scott, he’s not Darren Aronofsky, he’s not Tony Scott and he’s not Jim Jarmusch.

Maggie Jones has written a 4.17 N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece about newish findings that you really do need 8 hours of sleep to perform at your best, and that people who sleep for 5 or 6 or even 7 hours are putting themselves behind the eight ball.

That’s me, all right. My sleeping hours, at best, are from 1 am to 7 am. It’s fairly unusual to flop at midnight, although it happens from time time. But forget about going to bed at 11 pm — that’s Bluray time, write-the-last-article time, Bill Maher or Charlie Rose time, do-tomorrow’s-research time, PDF script-reading time.

I don’t dispute for a second that getting 8 every night (11 pm to 7 am) would be good for my health and alertness and general creativity, but I just can’t do it. Something in me rebels. It might be tethered on some level to a vague childhood conviction that only fogies and dullards go to bed at 11pm. I hated being told to hit the hay at 9 or 10 pm when I was a kid. I remember being put to bed one summer night when it was still dusk out, and with several kids that I knew playing stickball outside in the street. I seethed big-time about that and vowed that when I got older and could run my own life I would stay up as late as I damn well pleased. And now I can, nyah-nyah.

Whatever the memory or motivation Hollywood Elsewhere is my 24-7 taskmaster. I work on the column about 10 or 11 hours during the day, and then sometimes another hour or two starting around 10:30 or 11 pm. There are no weekends or “days off”…a joke! And I don’t see any way around this. The whip is always cracking. Sometimes I feel like the foam-mouthed horse pulling Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes and Missy towards Tara.

TheWrap‘s Josh Weinstein is reporting that Ryan Gosling is in talks to costar with Johnny Depp in Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinkski‘s The Lone Ranger for Disney…which I presume is going to be some kind of big-budget western wank. What else could be expected from the guys who teamed on the first three Pirate pics?

I don’t want to get all cranky on a Friday afternoon but this strikes me as one of the most laughable and pathetic sell-out prostitute gigs by an exceptionally expressive and widely respected actor in Hollywood history. It’s not unlike Montgomery Clift agreeing to costar in a big-budget Roy Rogers musical directed by Mervyn LeRoy after making From Here to Eternity, or Marlon Brando agreeing to play Tarzan right after On The Waterfront.

Everybody takes paycheck money (including me), but “Ryan Gosling as the Lone Ranger” is truly ridiculous…an act of self-mockery.

The first thing I noticed this morning was that Janet Grillo‘s Fly Away, which I’d been planning to see sooner or later, has an 88% positive on Rotten Tomatoes — technically the highest rating of all the narrative films opening today. Only eight top-tier critics have posted reviews so take the rating in context, but I still felt excited and freshly enthused about seeing it.

Had I been invited to a screening or been sent a screener? Nope.

Fly Away is about a divorced mom (Beth Broderick) dealing with a daughter (Ashley Rickards) afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s inspired by Grlllo’s own life to a certain extent as she and ex-husband David O. Russell (The Fighter) have been co-raising an autistic son, Matthew, who’s now 15 and, she says, “emerging out of autism.”

She calls the film “personal but not autobiographical…not a soggy melodrama or movie-of-the-week” but “a love story between a parent and a child.”

N.Y. Times reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis more or less agrees, calling Fly Away “a defiantly unsentimental look at the complex codependency between a harried single mother and her severely autistic daughter.”

I’ve known Janet since my period of employment at New Line Cinema’s Manhattan office in the mid ’80s as a freelance publicist. She was a development and then a production executive at the company. In 1992 she married Russell, whom she came to know initially from working on developing Spanking The Monkey (’94); they divorced in ’07.

Most of Grillo’s time and energy was devoted, once Matthew’s autistic condition surfaced, to raising her son in the late ’90s and over the last decade. But she gradually got back into film by exec producing Autism, The Musical and directing two shorts — At The Beach with Lucinda Jenney (’07) and Flying Lessons (’08), which starred Dana Delany.

(l.) Janet Grillo and (r.) costar Beth Broderick during filming of Fly Away.

Fly Away is the feature that grew out of Flying Lessons.

Fly Away was shot it in June and July of 2010. Grillo finished cutting it last November, and the film premiered at SXSW last month. (Where I missed it…naturally.) I’m planning on seeing it tonight or sometime tomorrow or Sunday at the Laemmle Muisc Hall on Wilshire.

“There’s been a 53% increase over the past decade in diagnosing autism,” Grillo states. “That’s why it’s important to tell this story. 500,00 kids with autism are now reaching adulthood, and most of them will never live independently.”

Her son has been “emerging” out of autism largely due to a therapeutic boarding school (i.e., the Glenholme School in Washington, Connecticut) that he’s been attending in recent years. The effect has been “transformative,” she says, and yet it’s “just one place…we need 1000 Glenholmes in this country.”

Does anyone have PDFs of George Clooney and Grant Heslov‘s Ides of March script, Will Beall‘s Gangster Squad or Richard Curtis and Lee Hall‘s script for Spielberg’s War Horse? Because a script pally is offering to swap these for copies of Eric Roth‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Andrew Niccol‘s Now (i.e., formerly I’m.mortal), Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants, and Steven Knight‘s chef project, among others

There’s been a certain disparity of opinion so far about Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids (Universal, 5.13). SXSW geek critics found it brilliant, hilarious and innovative, but Variety‘s Joe Leydon trashed it. Universal won’t show this Judd Apatow-produced pic to critics and online columnists until early May, but they’re been screening it for editors and feature writers.

Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids is about feuding bridesmaids played by Wiig and Rose Byrne (Damages). Maya Rudolph plays the bride. Melissa McCarthy, Jon Hamm, Matt Lucas, Ellie Kemper, Dianne Wiestand, the late Jill Clayburgh and Chris O’Dowd costar.

“Wiig delivers a career-best performance that proves she can do much more [than] sketch comedy and funny characters,” wrote /Film‘s Peter Sciretta . “I’d be shocked if Wiig isn’t nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical at next year’s Golden Globes (a la Emma Stone/Easy A). McCarthy also kills in every scene she’s in.”

Bridesmaids “takes the Apatow formula and applies it to a film populated by funny women,” Sciretta notes. “I’m sure it will be criticized for being misogynistic, even though it is much less so than his other films, on top of being much, much less misandristic than most romantic comedies.”

The LA junket is allegedly happening later this month.

A Houston-based critic informs that Universal’s field office is having four screenings of Bridesmaids in that city between 4.20 and 5.10, and critics, according to one source, have been invited to these so you’ve basically got Houston critics being given a looksee before NY and LA critics…or so it appears.

What a pleasure to hear President Obama talk about blunt realpolitik conversations with reps of John Boehner and Paul Ryan without the usual measured, turn-the-other-cheek tonality that he always puts out during press conferences and official announcements. Eat it, suckah!

During last year’s Cannes Film Festival I brilliantly managed to avoid seeing the winner of the Semaine de Critiques Grand Prix prize winner — Janus Metz‘s Armadillo, a Danish-produced Afghanistan war doc which Kino Lorber is opening today in New York. The trailer suggests something riveting and impressionistic , and the doc’s Rotten Tomatoes rating (88%) is tied for the highest of any film opening today.

The other 4.15 opener with an 88% rating is Janet Grillo‘s Fly Away.

I’m expecting an Armadillo screener to arrive tomorrow. I asked the Kino Lorber rep when Metz’s film might open in Los Angeles and other cities, but that’s apparently still being determined.

I half-admired and half-hated Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s Restrepo, the last significant Afghanistan-war doc. Here’s my 6.20.10 slam piece in which I explained how Restrepo advances its pro-troops, pro-war-effort agenda by lying through omission. Here’s hoping that Armadillo provides a counter-balance.

With its 1.33 cropping and squawky Japanese-transistor-radio sound, this YouTube clip of the main-title sequence from Clive Donner‘s What’s New, Pussycat? feels a bit underwhelming. But it’s still one of the liveliest, bounciest and most vigorously designed main-title sequences ever thrown together for a ’60s film.

More to the point, for an anarchic, occasionally amusing but not-especially-good ’60s comedy. Because that’s the category we’re dealing with here — great opening credits followed by a letdown movie.

The only other two examples I can think of are the ’60s montage “The Times They Are A’Changin'” credits for Watchmen and Saul Bass’s legendary black-cat credit sequence for Walk on The Wild Side.

The 2006 Koch Lorber DVD of Lina Wertmuller‘s Seven Beauties looks fine, but this 1975 Italian-made classic should be upgraded to Bluray. I was ripped the first time I saw it, and I remember laughing helplessly during the opening credits…oh, yeah.