Last Wednesday I did a phoner with Paramount’s Ron Smith, the restoration guy who quarterbacked the work on the Ten Commandments Bluray. (And on the theatrical version.) A ten-minute portion of our chat is on the video. The film is best appreciated as “a Cecil B. DeMille proscenium arch experience,” as I put it. It’s immaculate old-world fakery, shot almost entirely on a sound stage. The 44 days spent shooting location footage in Egypt mean nothing to me. The Exodus scene could have been shot in the Mojave desert.

Here are the DVD Beaver and Bluray.com reviews.

“Digital processes have made it cheaper and easier to assemble such multitudes in films like Gladiator and 300, but pixels are pixels, no matter how artfully deployed. Only DeMille and his army of assistants could have captured the spectacle of The Ten Commandments, a human spectacle, with weight, warmth and life.” — from Dave Kehr‘s 4.1 N.Y. Times appreciation.

Sunday night update: TMZ is reporting that during tonight’s Torpedo of Truth show in Chicago, Sheen said “he’d go back to Two and Half Men, but that the people who run it are bloodsuckers. He [also] called Jon Cryer a ‘rock star.'”

Earlier today: “The word is from one of Charlie Sheen‘s friends is that he’s in talks to return to Two & A Half Men, but along with traditional rehab he will have to write formal letters of apology to CBS, Warner Brothers and producer Chuck Lorre as well as make public statements to the same. There will be provisions in place that will ensure this doesn’t happen again during production.”

Serious rehab and apologies and accepting provisions would obviously be the best solution for Sheen, but they’ll never happen…no way. Not from the guy who played Detroit last night. Sheen is way too cranked on his own juice to eat humble pie.

25 minutes at Gallery 825 on La Cienega and then a drop-by at Bergamot Station where a swarm of bicycle night-riders poured into the main parking lot (like a scene from Fellini’s Roma or Blow-Up) as a thrash-rock band started playing [see video below]. Quite a moment. And then finally down to Culver City for some food. We passed on Harrison Ford‘s…I’m sorry, his son Ben‘s Montana food joint (i.e., Ford’s Filling Station).

The night before I spent some time at a mini-street festival on Abbot Kinney Blvd. In the late ’80s and ’90s this arts-and-crafty, non-corporate Venice neighborhood was one of the toniest in Los Angeles. Three to five years ago it was still cool in a festive but mostly low-key way. Now it’s swamped with “whoo-hoo!” under-30 eager beaver beardos in T-shirts, sandals and pork-pie hats — i.e., the night-life equivalent of crabgrass. The only thing missing is a karaoke bar.

This is really “beat up on poor Charlie Sheen” day, isn’t it? First Mark Ebner‘s 1998 Details piece about the old poontang days, and now an account of Sheen’s disastrous debut show (“boos…walkouts..unmitigated disaster”) in Detroit by Entertainment Weekly‘s James Hibberd.

Update: Here‘s the first YouTube clip I could find. Posted six or seven hours ago. Tiger blood. Cranked. A man on a mission to…what? Prove to the world that he still matters commercially despite the loss of his TV series? To spread the gospel of an egoistic theology called “winning”? I’m guessing it starts near the beginning of Charlie’s set. 8 likes, 18 dislikes. But the girl who recorded this from somewhere in the balcony (or her friend) was obviously charmed.

As I’ve heard it (but take this with a grain), the problem with The Hangover 2 is that it primarily feels like The Hangover transposed to Thailand. No deepening intrigue. “Here we go again!” in spades. What do I actually know? Nothing.

“Your suspicions about Your Highness (Universal, 4.8) were correct — it’s pretty lousy,” says a trusted reader. “It’s one of the laziest films I’ve ever seen. I suspect the geeks will attempt to explain this as a kind of purposeful charm but I’d just call it shitty. It has some great lines but they gave most of them away in the first red-band trailer. It’s essentially 30 iterations of Danny McBride saying stuff with an olde English accent with an f-bomb tossed in.”

I for one would have loved to see Memphis, the Paul Greengrass-Scott Rudin project about Martin Luther King that Universal has just scuttled, possibly over “factual liberties” taken by Greengrass’s script but more likely about the MLK estate having sided with a competing MLK DreamWorks project that has a script by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). Rudin and Greengrass are presumably shopping Memphis around so here’s hoping.

Taken by yours truly on 2.5.09.

I’ve written that Greengrass’s shakycam shooting style has run its course, but something tells me it might work very well on a script that focuses on the hours before and after King’s assassination on 4.4.68. I’m presuming, incidentally, that the “factual liberties” and “controversial directions” that the MLK estate reportedly has issues with in Greengrass’ script involves King’s legendary tomcatting…but maybe not. Anyone who can toss me PDFs of either the Greengrass or the Harwood would have my sincere gratitude.

In 1998 Details magazine hired Mark Ebner to track down and interview Charlie Sheen‘s ex-girlfriends. It was an assignment “as simple as walking out my front door,” Ebner writes on Hollywood Interrupted. Ebner says he “found no shortage of women willing to get honest about their experiences with a shell of a man who has proven incapable of being honest about himself.” But the Details article only mentions three.

A line in Steve Pond‘s 4.1 Wrap interview with Win Win producer Michael London made me wince a little. The topic is Win Win‘s modest expansion this weekend to 149 theatres, and then 200 next weekend. Pond says London “always figured” that Tom McCarthy‘s small-town dramedy, which is easily the best film out there right now, “would be a tough sell to mainstream audiences…with the film shifting tone from drama to comedy” and back again.

Win Win costars Paul Giamatti (l.) and Amy Ryan (far r.).

That’s not entirely true. Win Win is mostly about sly humor, wise observations, community values and comme ci comme ca we’re-doing-okay moods. “One of the things that really helps is that it plays as a comedy,” London says. “If a movie makes you laugh, you don’t care if it’s an indie movie or a studio movie — you just laugh, and some of those rules go out the window.”

Nonetheless there’s clearly a suspicion among hinterland moviegoers about any film that doesn’t deliver in a strong one-note fashion — i.e., comedy-comedy or drama-drama. HE to Joe and Jane: Movies that insist on a tonally uniform approach are frequently unsatisfying or problematic because they feel as if they’re painting their material (story, theme, emotional undercurrents) with one overall color, and that is not life-like — not the way God’s good humor tends to occur or unfold. Mixtures of drama and comedy are the day-to-day norm, not the exception.

One other thing: Win Win does, in a sense, have one overall color, and that is the color of perceptive intelligence provided by director-writer Tom McCarthy. The film has wit, warmth, peculiarity, simplicity, honesty — it’s a “movie” that entertains and engages, and but you never feel you’re missing out on something true or necessary in a story or character sense, or that some kind of comedic or dramatic agenda is being force-fed. Win Win is mostly populated by likable but sharp small-town characters, and it just kinda happens in its own way.

McCarthy, Pond reports, has been touring with the film across the country (18 cities and counting) “and reporting back that the movie connected in a way that his previous films (both critical favorites) had not. ‘I don’t know if it’s the wrestling or the fact that it’s the only movie out there to deal with how hard it is to make ends meet these days,” London says, “but audiences are responding.”

Earlier today Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams linked to a 4.1 reel3.com story by Jason Haggstrom that has a clip of the original sexual metaphor finale from Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (i.e., the train going into the tunnel). The best part is an “excerpt” from Hitchcock/Truffaut that explains it.

This is the last one of the day…promise.

I’m not one of those literalists who demands practical, reasonable answers for everything he sees in a film, but how exactly does a vampire attain stiffitude? Don’t you need warm blood rushing to the loins, etc.? I’m not arguing with the notion of Edward and Bella doing it — it’s fine, and thank God the series is almost over — but did Stephanie Meyer ever try to explain how Edward manages the act? Not criticizing — just asking.

Every now and then…well, actually on very rare occasions Criterion decides to lower itself into the vaguely disreputable, ball-scratching realm of popcorn cinema (Armageddon, The Rock) as a way of sloughing off their elitist, butt-plugged, too-cool-for-school reputation. Their latest release in this realm will be Douglas Cheek‘s CHUD (1984), which Criterion will street on July 12th. One question: why?

True fact: In 1983 I sat one evening at a table in a West 72nd bar with CHUD star John Heard and at least one other CHUD costar (Daniel Stern?) plus a couple of other actor friends including Keith Szarabajka. I distinctly remember Heard explaining to someone at the table that CHUD would be (and I’m writing this from memory) “kind of a subversive, side-pocket, slider-ball type of thing….it’ll be what it’ll be when it opens, and then it’ll be something else in ten or twenty years.” Not a big moneymaker and nothing close to an Oscar-type deal, but possibly destined for coolness and significantly above the level of a Troma Film.

Criterion’s jacket copy: “A rash of bizarre murders in New York City seems to point to a group of grotesquely deformed vagrants living in the sewers. With its surprisingly gritty depiction of urban life, noirish cinematography by Peter Stein (Ernest Goes to Jail), and groundbreaking makeup effects, this Reagan-era chiller remains one of the truest depictions of Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers yet put on film.”