Kim Cattrall‘s performance in Meet Monica Valour (limited, 4.8) has, I feel, broken her out of that MILFy blonde-sexpot Sex in the City persona and shown she can get down, dig deeply and go for broke. This on top of her less-than-large-scaled but respectable performance Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer, I mean. She’s forgiven, she’s cool…she’s earned entry into the serious-over-40-actress club.

Now, if only I could learn to shut up when an interview subject is talking and not go “hmm,” “uh-huh” and “yeah” all the time. I need to go to school to learn to stop doing this.

From my 2.18 Meet Monica Velour review: “Velour actually has a clear theme — a kid growing up by way of dispensing with illusion. And it offers a genuinely strong and ballsy performance from Kim Cattrall as an aging ex-erotic actress on the skids and heading further down — alcoholic, lumpy-bodied, living in a trailer park. And a relatively steady and affecting one from Dustin Ingram (Glee), who’s 20 or 21 now but plays 17 in the film. (Velour was shot in ’07, it appears.)

“The story is relatively well-shaped and believable as far as it goes, and you can tell right away that Bearden knows how to direct and cut as opposed to just adequately shoot a script. There’s a slight problem in his dialogue having a kind of ‘written’ quality, and some of the scenes feeling a little too ‘acted,’ but both are of a somewhat higher (or at least above-average) order so there’s not much interference

“Bearden persuading Cattrall to gain weight and look extra over-the-hill wasn’t, it turns out, such a bad idea. There’s always an impulse to applaud an attractive actress when she appears in a physically unflattering way, and I’m doing that here, but Cattrall goes the extra distance, I feel, in portraying what feels like despair but to actually be that, so to speak. She shows chops in this film that I’ve never seen before. I’m almost ready to forgive her for Sex and the City 2.”

Staring at a computer screen for seven or eight hours a day has been playing hell with my eyes over the last few months. My left eye, I mean — redness, puffiness, watering. And so I started wearing these IMAX 3-D glasses on top of my regular glasses to cut down on glare. They’re the only device I’ve found so far that doesn’t make everything look too dark and is fairly comfortable to wear.

I’m told the that the Gunnar people make good glare-reduction glasses. If anyone knows of other options, please inform.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has reported that a 4.27 Academy screening of a new digital restoration of Bye Bye Birdie, the 1963 musical comedy that was old-hat the day it opened, is sold out.

I wouldn’t go this screening with a gun at my back + a promise of free quaaludes. The movie is strictly squaresville — a take on the hype and inanity of the rock ‘n’ roll industry by people whose careers peaked in the ’40s and ’50s.

The original 1960 B’way show reflected a stodgy middle-class sensibility that was half-amused and half-appalled by the Elvis Presley phenomenon (hence the Charles Strouse and Lee Adams tune “Kids”). Gower Champion did the choreography, and it costars Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde and Ed Sullivan, for God’s sake.

Conrad Birdie, the idiotic name of the rock star being drafted, is a riff on Conway Twitty, the rockabilly recording star who was once a quasi-rival of Elvis’s on the charts.

And I really can’t stand Ann-Marget‘s singing of the title tune in the opening credits. I mean, it’s awful. This and her performance in Viva Las Vegas…please. In my mind she was finally saved by her performance in Mike Nichols‘ Carnal Knowledge.

Critic Stephen Farber will host the Bye Bye Birdie screening, followed by an onstage discussion with Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell.

Two days ago a fan-made, early ’60s-style main title sequence for the forthcoming X Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3) got 2000 hits. Yesterday it got 40,000 and today (as of 4:30 pm eastern) it’s at 50,000 and counting. The creator is Joe DiLeonardo (a.k.a. “Joe D”) of Trenton, New Jersey.

X-Men: First Class Title Sequence from Joe D! on Vimeo.

The sequence is a bit slow and lumpy here and there, but Joe (whom I spoke to a few minutes ago) threw it together very quickly, and at least he’s got the early ’60s style down. His only mistakes were including two or three stills that were probably taken in the mid to late ’60s, which of course violates the space-time continuum.

How will this compare to the actual Matthew Vaughn– and 20th Century Fox-approved main title sequence? They’ll be fairly or very similar, I would imagine. The forthcoming prequel is set during the time of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, so what Joe D. has done is actually a no-brainer. In fact, if I were running the show I’d tell the designers to somehow go beyond this and…I don’t know, just punch through all that shit without losing the period vibe. A kind of hybrid.

“This sequence was designed to give a very brief primer on the time period and the setting, as well as show the relationships of the characters in this film, as they are very different from the previous,” Joe explains. “Audiences shouldn’t be confused as to why Professor X and Magneto, enemies in the original trilogy, are the best of friends in this prequel.

“Super Punch held a contest redesigning the posters for the film, which played it safe by sticking very close to the correlation to the original trilogy, and winding up rather mundane compared to the slick trailer rife with espionage, red fear and early ’60s hair. Several people were quick to make posters in the mod/Saul Bass/James Bond style that I had in mind, so I decided to make a title sequence instead.”

Every time I use a big bath towel in a hotel or a rented home, it’s very natural-fibre feeling and nicely absorbent. I love it. And every time I try to buy a nice high-quality bath towel for myself at Nordstrom or Bed, Bath and Beyond, I come home with something that’s a little too soft and smoothly pampered — not natural feeling enough with that 100%, slightly rough cotton touch. It’s infuriating.

L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik is calling the currently-rolling Playing The Field, a Gerald Butler film directed by Gabriele Mucchino, “a dramedy about soccer, the suburbs and sexual attraction” and “a kind of Shampoo set amid American manicured lawns.”

It’s about a Beckham-like soccer star (Butler) who returns to his estranged American wife (Jessica Biel) and child to try to redeem himself after tom-catting around Europe for a long spell. He starts coaching youth soccer to show he means it, but various local women convey a certain moist receptivity, including characters played by Uma Thurman (the wife of Dennis Quaid‘s character), Catherine Zeta Jones (a local newscaster) and Judy Greer (a hot-to-trot housewife).

Zeitchik reports that The Kids Are All Right co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg has been brought in to punch up (or deepen or whatever) Rob Fox‘s script. The key, I think, to making the film connect is to make Butler’s character as honest and personal and even confessional as possible. In other words model his ways and attitudes on Butler himself, who is quite the hound himself. This self-reflecting quality is what made Warren Beatty‘s womanizing hairdresser character in Shampoo so interesting.

Zeitchik reports that the half-comedy “has distribution around the world and will be seeking a U.S. home.”

Three years ago the word went out among a rarified strata of film critics and feature writers that seriously praising House Bunny star Anna Faris was a hip thing to do. And now New Yorker writer Tad Friend is calling her “Hollywood’s most original comic actress” — sorta kinda Judy Holliday in a coarse-obvious-stoner vein.

Maybe, if you say so, but Faris, I swear to God, is never very funny. Puckish and animated but…huh? Always playing highly spirited, slow-on-the-pickup (okay, semi-stupid) women who are parked (or driving around in circles) in their own cul de sac. Honestly? The only thing she’s done that I’ve even half-liked is when she played herself in three Entourage episodes in 2997. Okay, I half-enjoyed her Cameron Diaz imitation in Lost in Translation but…well, let’s get down to it, shall we?

Faris isn’t bad and could perhaps someday be special, but so far she hasn’t worked with top-drawer directors and writers. She’s been more or less scrounging around with second-raters. Her next movie is Mark Mylod‘s What’s Your Number?, about a girl wondering if one of her 20 lovers was the one and she somehow missed that. Are you going to tell me this isn’t going to be another perky piece-of-shit girlie comedy? With a premise like that?

“Onscreen, Faris is fearless,” Friend writes in his article, “Funny Like A Guy.” “Her trademark is the power-through: after her character has done something incredibly stupid or embarrassing, she doubles down. Mentions Mark Mylod, Ryan Reynolds, Amy Pascal, Seth Rogan.

“The Bechdel Test is a way of examining movies for gender bias. The test poses three questions: Does a movie contain two or more female characters who have names? Do those characters talk to each other? And, if so, do they discuss something other than a man? An astonishing number of light entertainments fail the test. This points to a crucial imbalance in studio comedies: distinctive secondary roles for women barely exist. For men, these roles can be a stepping stone to stardom.

“On the other hand, relatively unraunchy female-driven comedies have all done well at the box office. So why haven’t more of them been made? The answer is that studios, as they release fewer films, are increasingly focused on trying to develop franchises. Female-driven movies aren’t usually blockbusters, and studio heads don’t see them as repeatable. Men predominate in Hollywood, and men just don’t write much for women.

“Relatability for female characters is seen as being based upon vulnerability, which creates likability. So funny women must not only be gorgeous; they must fall down and then sob, knowing it’s all their fault. Ideas for female-driven comedies are met with intense skepticism, and it’s even more intense because Faris isn’t aiming at the familiar Type A roles played by Jennifer Aniston and Katherine Heigl. She said, “I’d like to explore Type D, the sloppy ones.” Mentions The House Bunny and Observe and Report.”

Why do the N.Y. Times tech guys insist on using titles and reducing the video image and forcing it over to the left margin? Just offer the video in the style of YouTube or Vimeo and let it go at that.

David Gordon Green‘s Your Highness (Universal, 4.8) is so poorly written, so uninvested in genuine stoner humor (a la The Big Lebowski and Wonder Boys), and so appallingly unsuccessful that it’s a bit of a challenge to accurately describe it. But it’s definitely not funny — that you can take to the bank.

I’m not exaggerating in calling this a landmark in the annals of crapitude and dick jokes and the fine corporate art of farting in the audience’s face. It’s easily one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life. But I stayed to the end! And I’m almost proud of this because everything in my mind was saying “go…escape…free yourself!”

Your Highness is a mixture of a kind of 12th Century, Lord of the Rings/Robin Hood-y backdrop atmosphere, showoff CG and action scenes with eye-filling cinematography and a full-blast orchestral score, a completely moronic and non-cohesive genre-spoof story with — this is the core marketing element — unregenerate pig-slob-lameass-burp-stoner dialogue and attitudes as performed by Danny McBride, whose dirtbag prince character, Thadeous, can be seen as a kind of time-travelling emissary from degraded 21st Century culture.

Thadeous is a boorish, unrefined, masturbating, overweight slob forced by his king father (Charles Dance) to accompany his heroic, big-hearted brother Fabious (James Franco) on a quest to save Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), fiancee of Fabious, from the clutches of Leezar (Justin Theroux), a standard-issue demonic wizard who’s kidnapped her and who poses a general threat, etc. Natalie Portman is some kind of wandering samurai bow-and-arrow girl who jumps into the story in Act Two.

It’s one of those inert exercises in ironic distance — another SNL skit stretched to feature length and amplified, wide-screened and CG’ed to a fare-thee-well. “We’re just kidding, nobody’s in this stupid thing, we’re all getting paid,” etc. At best the crowd at last night’s Arclight screening was smirking and tittering now and then. There were no laughs to speak of and for damn sure no belly laughs.

Take out the oppressive action scenes and nudity titillation and production values that Universal execs probably insisted upon — the CG, costumes, eye-filling landscapes, sweeping score, etc. — and you’re left with a dopey story that’s basically about a selfish low-life swearing and dick-joking his way through a series of unconnected sketches about supernatural threats that aren’t even fake-real, and nothing that anyone (in the film or the audience) really cares about.

Question: If Theroux and his three old-witch allies have the power to throw electric flash-bolts at their adversaries and throw them against walls and knock them cold, why don’t they have the power to slice their heads off? Or change them into farm animals? Or wound them so badly so they’re left unconscious, or can’t do anything except lie on the ground and groan? We all know the answer, and I think we’re all sick of these rules.

There’s one bit — one! — that I half-smirked at. It’s performed by Theroux and involves the fate of a tiny Tinkerbell-like fairy. That’s all I’m going to say.

I was 90% delighted with Green’s Pineapple Express, but this thing is a disaster. Green is a longtime pally of McBride’s, who wrote the script with Ben Best, and their friendship (along with the stunning cluelessness of Universal executives) is apparently the key reason why audiences will be grappling with Your Highness this weekend.

Has there ever been a more radical transformation…corruption, I mean, in the style and tone of a once-respected director than what has happened with Green? Some day the New Beverly Cinema will show a double bill of Your Highness and George Washington, Green’s small-scale 2000 film that struck almost everyone as being Terrence Malick-y. And the people that experience that double-bill are going to come out staggering and saying, “What kind of sell-out kool-aid did Green drink?”

Michael Fleming‘s 4.4 interview with civil-rights activist and Martin Luther King confidante Andrew Young, posted last night, is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on Deadline.com — a thoughtful, highly revealing discussion with a respected, well-meaning historical figure who’s nonetheless an apparent obstructionist-in-denial when it comes to two proposed MLK biopics — Scott Rudin and Paul Greengrass‘s Memphis and Lee Daniels’ Selma.

Fleming reported last Friday that Universal Pictures had scuttled Memphis after Young and “the King estate” applied pressure. Young confirmed to Fleming in the interview that he did indeed contact Universal and objected to a Memphis script draft that, among other things, depicted marital infidelity in Dr. King’s final days. Fleming also learned that Young was told by Universal that “it would not move forward with Memphis in response to his claims of factual inaccuracies.” A studio spokesperson told Fleming that Universal’s decision was “based on scheduling.”

“Young is admittedly protective of the reputation of his close friend,” Fleming writes, “and said he pines for someone to do for King what Richard Attenborough did for Gandhi.” Young tells Fleming that when he read the script for Memphis, “I thought it was fiction.” As for the depiction of infidelity, Young says: “There is testimony in congressional hearings that a lot of that information was manufactured by the FBI and wasn’t true. The FBI testified to that.”

Listen to what Young is saying here — “a lot” of the FBI information about King’s extra-marital trysts is possibly bogus, but not all of it.

“My only concern here is honoring the message of Martin Luther King’s life, and how you can change the world without killing anybody,” Young explains. “You’ve seen glimpses of that in the fall of the Berlin Wall, in Poland, South Africa, in a movement in Egypt that began with prayers, where even mercenaries and the most brutal soldiers have trouble shooting someone on their knees. These regimes crumbled before non-violent demonstrations, and that is a message the world needs.”

Fleming suggests that “when films canonize subjects, audiences can sense it, and that is why good biopics mix reverence with warts-and-all treatment.” Young replies: “It’s not wrong if the warts are there. But we had the most powerful and understanding wives in history, Coretta, my wife Jean, and Ralph Abernathy‘s wife Juanita. These women were more dedicated and enthusiastic in pushing us into these struggles than anybody, and the inference Coretta might have been upset about Martin being gone so much or them having marital troubles, it’s just not true.”

Listen again — Young isn’t addressing the accuracy of the allegations about King’s poon appetites, or asserting that King’s wife was or wasn’t aware of same. But to suggest that the late Coretta Scott King might not have been upset if (I say “if”) she was aware of her husband’s alleged extra-marital activities, or that she may have been “understanding” in this regard, is flat-out absurd.

Young tells Fleming “he offered input” on Memphis but hasn’t heard back. “I said I would pay my own way to LA to sit with the writers, tell what really went on, and give them names, but nobody took me up on it,'” he says. It would a respectful gesture for any MLK biopic filmmaker to consult with Young, but given the levels of Young’s denial about King and his commitment to hagiography in defiance of reported fact, what self-respecting creative would want to go there?

“Great screen comedies that feature a severed Minotaur’s penis as a key prop are, sadly, few and far between,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt (who attended the same screening earlier this evening that I did). “Your Highness aspires to such greatness but falls instead into a deep chasm of such comic lowness after less than five minutes that it’s unable to extricate itself. Things get so bad you half expect a cameo by Nicolas Cage.

“The surprises here are twofold: One is that David Gordon Green, whose early films such as George Washington and All the Real Girls showed genuine promise, agreed to direct. The other is that Green and producer Scott Stuber assembled such a talented cast for such a feeble script. The result is like watching an All-Star basketball game where everyone throws up bricks. Box office should be an air ball.

“Mel Brooks used to do things like this in his sleep — you know, a spoof of a genre movie, in this case, of a medieval fantasy-adventure — and, of course, the Monty Python comedy troupe mastered the art form. But Green is tone-deaf to comedy, so he is seriously misled by longtime buddy and collaborator Danny McBride, who co-wrote and co-produced this ‘twisted tale’ in which he himself would star. There is little worse in the movie world than a spoof that falls flat on its over-costumed butt, but that’s what you get with Your Highness.

“In a fantasy world strikingly well imaged by rugged Northern Irish landscapes, a savvy set design and overabundance of digital effects, the movie’s human characters meander in an indifferent quest that devolves into a contest to see who can be the worst potty-mouth. So for every f–k, a– and b–v-r uttered, the movie spends a fortune in miniatures, sets, creatures, costumes and razzle-dazzle. Wouldn’t you know the only visual effect most male viewers are likely to remember are the semi-naked women with sandy paint all over their eye-catching bodies. It would appear no digital effects were involved.

“It’s hard to locate the joke the filmmakers even think they’re telling. McBride’s character is a dope-smoking masturbator wandering through an absurd world making lame, anachronistic wisecracks, but nothing here is the least bit funny. Or rather it earns laughs only in the pathetic sense. The only excuse for the film’s existence is a misguided act of friendship in the case of Green and McBride and for everyone else a paycheck.”

The new Film Society of Lincoln Center movie theatre on West 65th that nobody will ever remember the name of is opening on June 17th. With presumably state-of-the-art digital sound and projection, and a very fine doc — Andrew Rossi‘s Page One: Inside the N.Y. Times — kicking things off. The smallish twin cinema is being called the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (presumably because Elinor Bunin Munroe made a big contribution to the construction fund). It should be called Film65 or something like that…c’mon.

Rose Kuo, executive director, and Richard Pena, program director, in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s new theatre.

Noting that the theatre’s only competition is the nearby Lincoln Plaza Cinemas complex, on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets, N.Y. Times reporter Larry Talbot quotes film society staff members as saying that “their new venture would complement, rather than compete with, Lincoln Plaza.” Film Society of Lincoln Center program director Richard Pena also claims that “we are not looking to upstage what Dan Talbot does, and in a sense we are building on that….there are many worthy films Dan simply can’t get to even with six screens, films for which we might be able to provide the difference.”

Well, maybe…but I’ve always avoided the Lincoln Plaza and its stuffy, bowling alley-like theatres with too many seats and barely audible sound like the plague. I saw The Ghost Writer at a screening room and loved it, and then dragged Jett to see it at the Lincoln Plaza…and the overall experience was at least 30% or 40% diminished. So if I’m in the area some rainy day and it’s a coin toss about which theatre to attend because they’re both showing good films…no contest.