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I’ve been hearing for years about technology that can break down the sound of a person’s voice into an array of vowels and consonants and digitally assemble them and make that “voice” say anything. I was hearing about this 15 or 20 years ago. Roger Ebert’s talking “Alex” is cool for what it is, but he needs to sound like himself. There are thousands of hours of tape of him talking. It can’t be that hard.

Since buying an iLIVE sound bar for $130-something and hooking it up to the 50″ Vizio, I’ve been very pleased by the added volume and the increased bass and treble tones. Then it suddenly hit me last week that the Bluray sound is ever-so-slightly out of synch. The sound arrives just a tiny bit late. People’s lips move a split second before you hear them speak, and it’s terrible.

Once you’re attuned to this tendency it becomes impossible to watch a film. All you can do is study lip movement.

So I unplugged the soundbar and it appears that without it the problem has reversed itself. The TV-speaker sound, generated by a Samsing Bluray 5700, is now arriving a split-second early — you hear the word and a half-instant later the lips move. Am I losing my mind? Maybe I am. I know for sure that this problem is pushing me in that direction.

I called the Samsung tech people and was promised that some guy would call back to help with a download that might fix things. Then I called a freelance tech guy and he said it’s probably the the fault of the soundbar and the cords connecting the soundbar to the TV output jacks. And that the cost of fixing things would be about $350 or so, and that’s just equipment.

The cords are probably analog, he said, and that slows down the sound transfer by just a bit. He said I need to use a fibre optic cable made by Toslink. And I’m going to have to get a Vizio soundbar with a wireless woofer, which will understand the impulse from the Vizio TV much better than that piece-of-shit iLIVE model.

Thank you, God. Thank you, life-in-2011. Thank you, iLIVE and the Radio Shack guy who sold it to me. Thank you all and fuck you all.

Variety‘s Richard Kuipers, filing from Sydney, has given Kenneth Branagh‘s Thor a half-pass, at least in terms of satisfying primitive action-flick criteria. I’m sure I’ll find reasons to hate it — where there’s a will there’s a way — but the possibility has been raised that Thor may be at least semi-tolerable.

The Paramount release is “neither the star pupil nor the dunce of the Marvel superhero-to-screen class,” Kuipers writes. “[It] delivers the goods so long as butt is being kicked and family conflict is playing out in celestial dimensions, but is less thrilling during the Norse warrior god’s rather brief banishment on Earth,” and will therefore “face a tougher time attracting viewers for whom this type of fare is the exception rather than the rule.

“With Aussie hunk Chris Hemsworth impressive in the lead and Branagh investing the dramatic passages with a weighty yet never overbearing Shakespearean dimension, pic [will] face a tougher time attracting viewers for whom this type of fare is the exception rather than the rule.

“As the living actor and director most closely associated with Shakespeare, Branagh may seem a surprise choice for such material. A childhood reader of the comics, he brings a fan’s enthusiasm and his skill as an actor’s director to the table here. Fitting Hemsworth out with a classical but never pompous British accent and shooting emotionally charged sequences with elegant simplicity, Branagh succeeds in rendering his mythological characters deeply human.

“While no fatal missteps are taken along Thor’s path to redemption, pic has a slightly choppy feel, as if it’s trying to squeeze an origin tale and at least part of its sequel into a single entity. Most of the material motors along just fine, though the editing occasionally seems a bit too hurried in moving from one dimension to the next. An extra reel of Earth-bound story might not have gone astray.”

The 3D pic runs 113 minutes.

Thanks to all those who sent along PDFs of George Clooney and Grant Heslov‘s The Ides of March, Eric Roth‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants and Steven Knight‘s Unitled Chef Project.

As long as I’m on a roll and people are in a giving/trading mood, I’m also looking for the following: Memphis by Paul Greengrass, Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, Seeking A Friend For The End of the World by Lorene Scarfia, The Little Things by John Lee Hancock, Raw Knuckles by S. Craig Zahler, Inherit The Earth by JT Petty, Hypoxia by Daniel Silk, Gangster Squad by Will Beal, The Rite by Michael Petroni, and Goliath by John D. Payne & Patrick McKay.

“There is a specific kind of narcissism that the social web engenders,” writes N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr in a 4.17 piece about hand-held etiquette called “Keep Your Thumbs Still When I’m Talking to You“. “By grooming and updating your various avatars, you are making sure you remain at the popular kid’s table. One of the more seductive data points in real-time media is what people think of you. The metrics of followers and retweets beget a kind of always-on day trading in the unstable currency of the self.”

if Hangover 2 director Todd Phillips is even 25% serious (which I doubt), the issue isn’t the film’s star monkey getting addicted to cigarettes during filming. It’s allowable, I feel, for an animal to develop a nicotine craving if it happens in the service of art. The issue is enablers (people on the crew of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo?) feeding the monkey’s habit by supplying him with smokes.

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.”