“Badass” is basically an insincere concept. It has to be used ironically. To me the best definition of a “badass” personality is Jack Nicholson‘s Badass Budusky in The Last Detail — i.e., a timid and boastful man looking to prove how tough he is, and other times just a regular shmoe who wants to hide out and drink. Which is why I’m down with Badass Digest.com, the new Alamo Drafthouse site that Devin Faraci is now running, and chuckling at the same time.

Badass Digest intends to “put the fun back in being a nerd,” Faraci writes. And yet the site isn’t about an attitude or a mode of behavior but about “the badass generation.” He’s presumably referring to the under-40 comic-book-reading geeks who go to San Diego Comic-Con…right? In all fairness and without intending to slag anyone, if you roam around San Diego Comic-Con the term that most frequently comes to mind is not “bad ass” but frankly (and I mean no harm) “fat ass.” Guys like Josh Gad and that line of country. Am I wrong?

“A badass is someone who is unique, uncompromising and dedicated to following their vision,” Faraci continues. “Someone blazing their own path, someone setting the standard…fashion and fads come and go but badass is forever.”

It’s okay with me. All the best to Faraci and fellow badasses Roger Erik Tinch and Moises Chiullan.

Boiled down, Michael Cieply‘s 10.21 N.Y. Times article reports that a solution has been found regarding Michael Douglas‘s performances in Anchor Bay’s Solitary Man and 20th Century Fox’s Wall Street 2 being possibly competitive in the Oscar derby.

“After toying with the idea of promoting Mr. Douglas as a leading man for his work in Wall Street 2, Fox executives in the last few days have leaned toward putting him in contention as a supporting actor,” Cieply writes. “That would stave off a potential conflict with Solitary Man, in which Mr. Douglas is clearly the lead, and with Anchor Bay, an independent company that has not previously been a major player in the Oscar game but is serious about it now.”

And what will most likely happen is that Fox’s Best Supporting Actor campaign will dominate, in part because Wall Street 2 is a bigger attention-getter than Solitary Man, and in part because many feel a sentimental attachment to Douglas’s original Gordon Gekko performance in Oliver Stone‘s 1987 Wall Street.

Douglas’s longtime publicist Allen Burry tells Cieply that his client is “doing well” after going through “a grueling course of radiation and chemotherapy that lasted for eight weeks,” adding that he “underwent the last, and heaviest, of the chemotherapy sessions only last week.” The “residual effects will probably put him under wraps again until at least the end of November,” Cieply explains.

And yet Douglas hopes to be ready for the public again “by the time the awards galas are in full swing,” Burry says.

Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter isn’t just a critical bust. I think it’s his least satisfying film since Firefox (’82). Perhaps the biggest letdown aspect is that it doesn’t impart a sense of tranquility or acceptance about what’s to come, which is what most of us go to films about death to receive, and what the best of these always seem to convey in some way.

Terrence Stamp, John Hurt and Tim Roth in Stephen Frears’ The Hit.

They usually do this by selling the idea of structure and continuity. They persuade that despite the universe being run on cold chance and mathematical indifference, each life has a particular task or fulfillment that needs to happen, and that by satisfying this requirement some connection to a grand scheme is revealed.

You can call this a delusional wish-fulfillment scenario (and I won’t argue about that), but certain films have sold this idea in a way that simultaneously gives you the chills but also settles you down and makes you feel okay.

Here’s a list containing some top achievers in this realm. I’m not going to explain why they’re successful in conveying the above except to underline that it’s not just me talking here — these movies definitely impart a sense of benevolent order and a belief that the end of a life on the planet earth is but a passage into something else. I’ve listed them in order of preference, or by the standard of emotional persuasion.

1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ. 2. Stephen Frears‘ The Hit. 3. Brian Desmond Hurst‘s A Christmas Carol. 4. Warren Beatty and Buck Henry‘s Heaven Can Wait. 5. Henry King‘s Carousel (based on Ferenc Molnar‘s Lilliom). 6. Tim Burton‘s Beetlejuice. 6. Michael Powell‘s A Matter Of Life And Death, a.k.a. Stairway To Heaven. 7. Albert Brooks‘ Defending Your Life.

I’m also giving a pat on the back to that old Twilight Zone episode called “Nothing in the Dark,” in which Robert Redford played a kind of angel of death in the guise of a wounded policeman.

For me the four worst films about death — the shallowest and most phony-manipulative and least reassuring — are Ghost, Flatliners, What Dreams May Come and Death Becomes Her. These are movies that pull down their pants and play cheap little games for the enjoyment of those in the audience who are scared shitless of death and need to fantasize or joke about it in order to allay their fears.

And the single most terrifying film about death as envisioned by fundamentalist Christian wackos is Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture. One look at that film and you’ll be able to at least consider the idea that hardcore Christians have taken something naturally serene and peaceful and created a terrifying new-age mythology that would give Satan pause.

Update: I don’t know why I forgot to mention Wim Wenders ‘ Wings of Desire. Because it’s doesn’t fit the mold, I suppose. It’s not about passage from life to death as much as passage from death to life, being about an angel (Bruno Ganz) who falls in love with a circus girl (Solveig Dommartin) and wants to be mortal so he can experience love and pain and all the rest of it.

Sgt. Adam Sniffen from the 101st Airborne Division parachutes into Michigan Stadium just before the start of a Michigan vs. MSU game — 10.9.10. Posted 7 days ago.

Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs (20th Century Fox, 11.24), which I saw earlier this evening, is first and foremost a hit. It’s charming and affecting and likable in a “good Eloi” sort of way, or in the way that cultivated mainstream audiences tend to go for. It’s sharp and polished and beautifully shot and acted and cut, and just grooves right along with sass and wit and generous nudity and undercurrents that are Jerry Maguire-ish at times.

I’m not claiming that the overall tone matches the James L. Brooksian brand in the classic ’80s sense, but it certainly flirts with this and does in fact reach that pinnacle from time to time. For my money Love and Other Drugs is Zwick’s finest film yet — hell, it is his best. But how ironic that he’s hit the jackpot by putting aside his passion for heavy historical dramas.

It’s a very tight and assured romantic dramedy (or “emotional comedy,” as post-screening moderator Elvis Mitchell put it tonight) that delivers an intensely sexual, emotional hair-trigger relationship story about two avoider-dodgers (played with wonderful verve and assurance by Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, both delivering the most appealing performances of their careers).

I’d been told that Hathaway’s performance is the killer, and it is, I suppose, because you can read every emotional tick and tremor on her face, and because your heart goes out to any character coping with a debilitating disease (stage-one Parkinson’s) and who wants to keep herself aloof and in control. But Gyllenhaal gives his most winning performance ever — not the deepest or darkest or saddest, perhaps, but 100% likable with no audience-alienation issues except for emotional avoidance. They’re quite a pair, these two. All you want is to see them keep it together and somehow make it work.

Love and Other Drugs costars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway following tonight’s screening at the Regal E-Walk on 42nd Street.

LAOD is set in mid ’90s Pittsburgh and partly based on James Reidy‘s “Hard Sell: Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” and has been co-written by Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Randolph.

It’s about Jamie Randall (Gyllenhaal), a Phizer salesman on the make, and how he falls in with Maggie Murdock (Hathaway), an emotionally brittle and guarded (and yet openly sexual when so inclined) woman coping with the Big P, and how things brighten and then deepen for them and then get gnarly and strained and then fall apart, and…that’s all I’ll say. It’s set against the mid ’90s Viagra boom, which is introduced about 40 minutes into the narrative. Jamie has been selling Zoloft for Phizer with middling results, but when Viagra comes along it’s champagne-fizz time.

Oliver Platt plays Gyllenhaal’s mentor, and I wish he had more screen time because you can sense potential…but he isn’t quite allowed to bring anything home. Hank Azaria has a lightly layered, medium-sized role as a randy physician, and Judy Greer has a small part as Azaria’s sweet-tempered receptionist. George Segal and Jill Clayburgh play Gyllenhaal’s parents in one early scene and that’s all.

Josh Gad is Gyllenhaal’s Jonah Hill-ish younger brother — a boorish man-child fatso who reps the film’s only serious mistake. Gad is in another film entirely. His presence eventually got so bad that he turned me off just by being. He didn’t have to say a word.

Love and Other Drugs isn’t a deep-well soul film, but it plays its own game in a sharp and likable way, and sometimes quite movingly.

Or…whatever, it won’t qualify in that regard and will just please audiences and capture the admiration of most critics (apart from the Eric Kohn-Guy Lodge nitpick crowd) and make money hand over fist. And that’ll be enough. It’s not Alexander the Great. It just works, is all. LOAD has charm and pizazz and, okay, sometimes strained humor, and yet it never slows down or goes off the rails, or at least not to any worrisome degree.

So forget all that Bill McCuddy crap (passed along in this column on 9.7) about it being “a light romantic comedy” that is “mediocre” and “facing shaky prospects at the box-office.” The guy I spoke to last February about a Pasadena research screening was much closer to the mark.

And I’m not kidding about it having the potential to wangle its way into Best Picture contention. Unless, that is, certain people get pissy about it. A guy I talked to in the men’s room after the screening was going “eeew, it’s two different movies…eeew, it doesn’t blend…eeew, it veers too sharply between broad comedy and disease-anguish and hot sexuality and heartfelt love and heavy emotionalism.” So you can be Eric Kohn and go “no, no…I want something else! This doesn’t fit into my comfort-blanket idea of how movies like this are supposed to work.” And that’s fine, Eric. Go to town and send me a postcard,

LAOD isn’t any one thing, and that’s the fascination of it. It’s not dark enough to be The Apartment, it’s not easy and it’s not “farce” and it’s not just hah-hah funny, and it’s not dramedy as much as comedy with a thorny and guarded edge. The tone is farcical one minute, dry and glib the next, and then it devolves into Josh Gad-Jonah Hill-level humor, but thankfully not too often or for too long. And then it turns melancholy.

Love and Other Drugs director Ed Zwick, moderator Elvis Mitchell following tonight’s screening

Hathaway is so intense and hard-cased that she ups the movie’s overall game. We can spot her theme from the get-go. She doesn’t want a real love affair with anyone because she knows it’s not going to last because she’s doomed in the long run. We’re introduced to her as someone dealing with stage-one symptoms like intermittent jitters and losing the physical ability to use scissors and her taking drugs to control this, but her condition is never over-dramatized.

The film spends some time on the Parkinson’s effects. Maggie and Jamie go to a big drug fair in Chicago, and she discovers an alternative convention across the street focusing on organic Parkinson’s remedies, and goes over to this event. We see some real Parkinson’s people talking up their personal stuff the way the unemployed talked for Up In The Air, only on a stage with a mike. There are two or three scenes in which Maggie is shown taking senior citizens across the border to get cheaper drugs in Canada.

The core of the romance is Jake’s overcoming his shallow relationship history, and Anne overcoming her emotionally aloof thing. And both Hathaway and Gyllenhaal make their characters come vividly alive. It’s a pleasure to get to know them and share the time. I’m looking forward to catching this at least a couple more times.

It’s been nearly 50 years since Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her bedroom in August 1962. I’ve personally visited that home on Brentwood’s Fifth Helena Drive seven or eight times (I took my mother there once), but there’s something bizarre about her brand continuing to generate books and movies and magazine articles (like Sam Kashner‘s in the current Vanity Fair), and making money for people still hungry for a piece. Memorials a decade or 20 years later, okay, but to be turning heads almost half a century later?

The sad metaphor of Monroe’s life — that of a “poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes,” as Arthur Miller once described her — has never stopped resonating among people of suppressed hurt who feel ignored, under-valued or marginalized. I get that. We all do.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin‘s “Candle in the Wind” was written twelve years after her death, and then the following year — 1975 — came Norman Mailer‘s ‘Marilyn‘, and even then the feeling was “okay, we’ve stirred her ghost and put her on the stage again and again…now let her be.” And yet the band is still parading around some 35 years later.

Maureen Dowd‘s current N.Y. Times column compares the attitude of Marilyn’s day, when intellectual uplift and spiritual growth was something everyone wanted and in fact needed in order to feel whole, to the tea-bagger Palin notion that people of intellect deserve our suspicion and mistrust and that political leaders need that good old Walmart touch.

But it also anecdotally reminds that there’s “a hit novel in Britain narrated by the Maltese terrier Frank Sinatra gave Monroe, which she named ‘Maf‘, for Mafia, and three movies in the works about her. Three? Naomi Watts is reportedly planning to star in a biopic based on the novel, ‘Blonde,’ by Joyce Carol Oates; Michelle Williams is shooting My Week With Marilyn, and another movie being planned is based on an account by Lionel Grandison, a former deputy Los Angeles coroner who claims he was forced to change the star’s death certificate to read suicide instead of murder.”

I’m not at all persuaded that both the Watts and Williams movies, which are being made in order to cash in the 50th anniversary of Monroe’s death, are destined to attract huge interest.

If nothing else, Jeff Deutchman‘s 11.4.08 (10.20) — a doc about what various everyday people were doing, seeing, saying and feeling on the day Barack Obama was elected President — proves that timing really counts. I’m sorry to be a killjoy, but the idea of watching a film in October 2010 that celebrates the hope and highs of 11.4.08 feels like some kind of sick joke.

How can anyone watch this film without thinking that that good old “yes, we did it!” vibe is absolutely dead and gone? That feeling was over three or four months after the January ’09 inauguaration. I’m disoriented and angry and pissed off, and if Jeff Deutchman is still fluttering around on a November ’08 nostalgia high then he needs to find the right medication and comes down to earth and deal with the here-and-now.

How are things not awful now? Obama has done well in a limited, modified, lily-livered Jimmy Carter-like way, but he’s disappointed even the faithful. The crazy-ass looney-tunes righties are going to beat the shit out of Democrats in several House races (though perhaps fewer than we were presuming a few weeks ago). Obama has the same corrupt guys who not only rubber-stamped but profited by the system that led to the ’08 economic collapse running his economic policies. He’s spending billions of dollars every week in Afghanistan.

Are we idiots? The hope days are over, for heaven’s sake. Who wants to celebrate how great everything felt two years ago when snarling, salivating wolves are prowling around and biting everyone on the leg, and the hunter with the gun is going “is there some way these wolves can be persuaded to act rationally and constructively?”

I was a fairly literal-minded kid, which is why the first time I ever heard Bob Dylan‘s line about how “sometimes the President of the U.S. must have to stand naked,” I thought of Lyndon B. Johnson standing buck naked in a rainstorm on the south lawn of the White House. Not a pleasant image. I thought of this about 30 minutes ago when I came upon the following Johnson quote: “Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.”

The chances of IFC Films releasing James Gunn‘s Super sometime later this year are, I realize, remote or off the table. (It’s…what, a late winter or spring release?) The chances of the full-length feature sustaining the humor in this violent teaser clip are also not high. I really laughed at this. And then he seriously hurts the guy and it was like…what? Oh, I see. Doofus asshole. Fine.The movie-line analogy, of course, is that scene in Woody Allen‘s Annie Hall in which Allen squared off against that irritating academic guy talking about Federico Fellini and Marshall McLuhan.

I get the point of Super. (I think.) It’s a roundabout commentary on the ridiculous notion of superheroes as well as dark situation comedy about a lonely, deeply angry schlub who lacks the moves and the control and the soul to be a true-blue hero. But the difference between the above scene and the one in Annie Hall is what people mean they talk about social and political devolution. Both scenes are about the protagonist feeling great surges of hostility, and they both involve fantasy solutions. But they’re very different birds.

I saw about 40 minutes’ worth of Jake Scott‘s Welcome to the Rileys (Samuel Goldwyn, 10.29 — NY, LA, Boston) at Sundance 2010. It seemed slowish and doleful but at the same time straight and unpretentious. Pudgy James Gandolfini is excellent in his usual unforced way, and Kristen Stewart matches him move for move. I don’t want to get overheated about the portion that I saw, but it seemed like a decent effort.

I’d love to see the rest of it. For whatever reason the Manhattan p.r. agency repping it chose not to invite me to any of their screenings, or to the recent junket. Thanks.

Two or three days ago I was sitting at the counter of the Cosmic Diner (Eighth Ave. at 52nd Street) with my computer, and this overweight guy who looked and sounded like a reasonably bright New York City employee sat down two stools away and started telling the counter guy that his friend really loves The Town, and that he’ll definitely be seeing it soon. I flinched ever so slightly, glanced over and said nothing. I was witnessing word-of-mouth in action. This is how it happens. I felt like Margaret Mead.

Counter guy: “Really good, huh?” Fat guy: “What he said, yeah. One of the best he’s seen this year. And the guy…the director, whatsisname.” Counter guy: “Uhhm, yeah.” Fat guy: “Tobey…?” Counter guy: Ben Affleck?” Fat guy: “Affleck, yeah. He’s good.”

Affleck is a good director — the new Sydney Pollack! — but I kept biting my tongue and telling myself “don’t fucking say anything…just shut up. Just let ’em have their moment and shut the fuck up. If you tell them what you think — that it’s got decent action and is reasonably handled in most respects but it doesn’t begin to compete with other Boston crime flicks like The Departed, Mystic River, Affleck’s own Gone Baby Gone or The Friends of Eddie Coyle — they’ll look at you funny and weird because you’ll sound like a know-it-all.”

But after a couple of minutes I couldn’t help it.

Me: “I saw it.” Fat guy: “Yeah?” Me: “Your friend’s not wrong. It’s a good film. Good bank-robbing, good car chases. But I don’t believe in Affleck’s nice-guy bank robber. I think that’s a bullshit Hollywood conceit. And I don’t believe that Rebecca Hall‘s character…you know her?…I don’t believe that an ambitious woman, a Donna Karan-wearing bank officer, would accept an amiable, blue-collar Charlestown schlub as a boyfriend, particularly after he confesses that he’s a bank robber. If she herself was a Charlestown native, maybe. But otherwise, no way.”

What I really wanted to say was “what is it about this film that makes it so good in so many people’s eyes? It verges on bizarre. I mean, if I talk to a serious sports writer about the Yankees, I’m going to listen to what he says and give it a certain weight. I know what The Town is and I know it’s not as good as everyone is saying. It’s fine, it’s okay but calm the fuck down, will ya? It’s high-end functionalism, which is a hoity-toity term for high-end hack work. It’s basically a whaddaya whaddaya okay fine whatever. Affleck cuts his character way too much of a break. He’s basically a dirty guy who doesn’t deserve to escape. But the dictates of a big-studio crime film say otherwise.

A month ago I reported about a “dark and murky-looking” screening of The Social Network for Boston-area critics at the notorious AMC Boston Common plex. This resulted in a Sony rep calling it “a projectionist error” and a pledge to set “a new screening as soon as possible for those who attended.” Naturally, nothing has changed. The Boston tipster who told me about the 9.20 TSN incident says that recent press screenings of Hereafter, Fair Game and 127 Hours have also been degraded at the same theatre by cruddy AMC (i.e., “All Movies Compromised”) technology.

“Hereafter was screened for Boston press on Monday evening — screen #18 at the AMC Boston Common plex — from the very same Sony 4K projector that caused the problems during that 9.20 screening of The Social Network,” he writes. “The 3-D lens was still in place and, once again, it appeared as though we were watching a bootleg copy instead of a real movie. Simply atrocious.

“Likewise, the same projector/house combination afflicted the Never Let Me Go afternoon press screening on 9.13.

“It gets worse. Both Fair Game (which screened on the afternoon of 10.12) and 127 Hours (screened on the morning of 10.6) were projected from a Christie 2K in theatre #8 at the theater. Yes, the Christie is regarded as a superior projector. However, the Christie used in this room is one of the very first digital projectors the AMC plex installed, and the image it currently outputs is broken.

“Reds and greens constantly separate, vertical streaks (complete with mottling toward the center) appear through the image and, in the case of 127 Hours, there was visible red/green artifacting cropping up (colored blocks within those vertical lines).

“Now, given that 127 Hours director Danny Boyle and dp Anthony Dod Mantle were using their standard variety of digital cameras, I wasn’t entirely sure that some of the imagery wasn’t intended to appear distressed (especially the consumer-grade — circa 2003 — handycam footage shot by James Franco‘s character). However, a subsequent screening at a different Boston theater — the Regal Fenway 13, with Boyle on hand for a post-movie q & a session — featuring supremely clear imagery erased these doubts.

The source adds that “we lucked out, as the Fenway theater has also had its share of technical problems.”

“With Fair Game the periodically-appearing subtitles, which should have been white, had a bizarre series of — yes — red and green diagonal hatch marks running through them, in addition to the same red/green separation issues mentioned above. In one late-inning scene Sean Penn is dressed in a brown pin-striped suit jacket, except the pin stripes broke up into a moire pattern, the likes of which you haven’t seen since people appeared in pin-stripes on old CRT televisions.

“If you bought a new TV and witnessed these kinds of abnormalities on screen, you’d return the TV and demand either a replacement or a refund. And yet, consumers regularly view movies under these conditions, accepting the terrible image as the way it should be. What’s wrong with this picture?”

Wells to Boston tipster: What’s wrong is that AMC management has apparently decided that it’s just too costly to project films correctly. The exhibition business is not booming. They’d like to upgrade their standards but they just don’t want to pay for it.

Why do people sit meekly through poorly-projected theatre showings but turn around and demand complete satisfaction from their TVs? Primarily because the size of the investment in their home entertainment systems is much higher than the price of two movie tickets, and because problems with their TV will obviously plague their viewings on a day-to-day basis whereas they’ll accept single-incident screwings (even if they’re endlessly repeated) at crap plexes like the AMC Boston Common 19. People are basically sheep when it comes to bad theatrical projection — they’ll sit through anything. And theatre owners know this.