Six months ago I saw Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost‘s Catfish (Rogue/Universal, 9.17) at Sundance. It’s “engrossing and certainly reflective of cyber-culture relationship intrigues, but I wasn’t exactly levitating out of my seat,” I wrote. “I also found it a bit curious — the film’s depiction of hinterland culture suggests echoes of American kookery unbound.”

SPOILER WARNING: “During the first 60% of Catfish Nev Schulman — a smart, confident and attractive 24 year old who’s the main protagonist — falls into an intriguing online flirtation with an attractive 20something lady who lives in Michigan. (Or so she says.) Their exchanges become more and more emotional and sensual. Then they become explicitly sexual. And then suddenly things change.”

“Once this sinks in it’s quite clear that Nev is fairly glum — you could even say forlorn. And for me this didn’t quite calculate.

“I asked myself why would a guy in the youthful prime of his life get so invested in a woman he’s never met, and whom he knows only through a gallery of online photos and a series of increasingly erotic e-mails? Who would be naive enough in this day and age to get emotionally caught up in a relationship of this sort?

“This seemed especially curious for a guy who’s clearly smart and good-looking and creative and whatnot, and living in a city like New York with all kinds of hook-up options. I could imagine Clem Kadiddlehopper falling for this. Or an overweight dweeby type with halitosis getting caught up in an online fantasy because he might not have much going on. But a guy like Nev…? Doesn’t figure.”

A trailer that refuses to show an image for 48 seconds is probably up to something good. The film is Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (Miramax, 1.21.11), and you can sense right away that it’s a cut or two above. The news of Guillermo del Toro having produced and co-written is like a five-star review from Consumer Reports. The director is Troy Nixey. The costars are Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison, Alan Dale, Eliza Taylor-Cotter, etc.

The best parts of William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist (’73), which is out on Bluray on 10.5 , don’t involve spinning heads or pea soup vomit. I’m talking about moments in which scary stuff is suggested rather than shown.

Such as (1) that prologue moment in Iraq when Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) is nearly run over by a galloping horse and carriage, and a glimpse of an older woman riding in the carriage suggests a demonic presence; (2) a moment three or four minutes later when Merrin watches two dogs snarling and fighting near an archeological dig; (3) that grandfatherly Washington, D.C. detective (Lee J. Cobb) telling Father Karras (Jason Miller) that the head of the recently deceased director Burke Dennings (Jack McGowran) “was turned completely around”; (4) Karras’s dream sequence about his mother calling for him, and then disappearing into a subway; (5) that moment when Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) mimics the voice and repeats the exact words of a bum that Karras has recently encountered — “Can you help an old altar boy, father?”

About five months ago I ran a positive research-screening review (based on a talk with a guy I know and trust) of Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs (20th Century Fox, 11.24). Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Big Pharma, Viagra, and early-stage Parkinson’s. On 7.28 another good review popped up, based on a recent Kansas City showing. I don’t know the author but he calls himself Shep and has a reasonably well-written blog called “What Is Wrong With The World Today?”

“Chick flick and romantic comedy. These are words that will make almost any man cringe when uttered by his girlfriend. I know I do. When my girlfriend mentioned an invite for an advance screening of a new romantic comedy I almost told her to take a friend. I’m glad I didn’t.

“Love and Other Drugs is by far the best romantic comedy I’ve seen,” he explains. “It’s smart, sexy, raunchy and hilarious. The chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Hathaway works very well, and their relationship is very believable. Josh Gad‘s character adds the raunchy Hangover-style guy comedy needed to keep the male half of a couple interested.

“Director-cowriter Ed Zwick’s interpretation of Jamie Reidy‘s novel Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagara Salesman translates extremely well to the big screen and made me want to read the book. (The screenplay is by Zwick, Marshall Herzkovitz and Charles Randolph.) I know — the movie is never as good.

“But overall the film works, the cast (including costars Oliver Platt and Hank Azaria) has been perfectly picked, and I would totally recommend it.

“Hopefully Love and Other Drugs will do well at the box-office and cause a trend toward romcoms that work for both members of the sexes. I’m giving it four and a half stars.”

A bit of a blather-on piece by The Guardian‘s Ryan Gibney comparing the decline of Tom Cruise, 48, to the ascendancy of Leonardo DiCaprio, 36.

I’ve read more than one description of The Expendables as a kind of ’80s action film. Director-cowriter-star Sylvester Stallone has not only paid tribute to his action-star heyday, but resuscitated the look and style of Reagan-era action flicks (including, to some extent, the calibre of special effects as they existed back then). But there’s a better, simpler shorthand: The Expendables is a 1986 or ’87 Cannon Film. It feels cut from the same cloth as Cobra and Over The Top.

The trick or attitude with The Expendables (or at least one that I suspect was in Stallone’s head when he made it) is that it’s an ’80s action flick in quotes. The fighting and gun battles are staged with vigor and meant to be taken as semi-serious high-throttle diversion, but also with a self-referential nudge. Stallone and Willis and Lundgren and the rest doing the old half-chuckle and saying “remember this shit when it was fresh, or at least fresher?”

Cannon-produced action pics never winked. For all their relentless mediocrity, they all had a fairly solemn tone. But The Expendables summons the Cannon spirit by being fairly cheeseball. It seems to have been made with an assumption that its audience doesn’t want anything too shaded or subtle or deeply felt — that they would actually be unhappy if it went in those directions.

With the exception of Runaway Train, Cannon action flicks were always boilerplate and frequently awful. Anyone who’s ever seen Down Twisted (’87), directed by Albert Pyun, knows what I’m saying.

Cannon Films was a very curious culture with an exploitation film attitude (i.e., movies regarded as “product”), but Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus threw a lot of money around and a lot of serious people took it for this and that reason.

“I had my nose pressed against the glass for 20 years,” Norman Mailer once said about Tough Guys Don’t Dance. “It took Cannon Pictures to say they believed in me to the tune of $5 million. There were nights when Menahem Golan woke up and said, ‘I’m giving $5 million to a crazy man who’s never directed a movie? I must be crazy myself.'”

I worked as a Cannon press-kit writer (staff) for much of ’86, all of ’87 and into early ’88, so I know whereof I speak. I know all about that operation and the mentality behind it. There were quality exceptions here and there (which I was very grateful for), but the films were mainly schlock. Which fostered a certain atmosphere among Cannon employees. “Fatalism mixed with humiliation resulting in gallows humor” is one way to describe it.

I had a nice little office on the fourth floor. I had a desk, phone, window, chair, two filing cabinets and a styrofoam ceiling that I used to lob sharp pencils into when I was bored. But I also got to meet and work with Barbet Schroeder on Barfly, Mailer on Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Herbert Ross on Dancers, Tobe Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Godfrey Reggio on Powaqqatsi and Richard Franklin on Link.

I barely spoke to Golan and Globus, and that was okay.

But I was in the building when Schroeder stood in Golan’s office and threatened to cut off his finger with an electric chainsaw if Golan didn’t greenlight Barfly. And I talked to Mickey Rourke over the phone once and managed to piss him off (but that was par for the course back then). And I became slightly chummy with former SNL alumnus Charles Rocket (who killed himself about five years ago). And at Schroeder’s insistence I rewrote the Barfly press kit about ten or twelve times (to the point I couldn’t read the sentences any longer), but I learned that relentless re-writing, if you’re tough enough to handle it, does result in a bulletproof final draft.

I also had to write press kits for Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Assassination, The Barbarians, Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars, Masters of the Universe, Down Twisted, The Arrogant and others I’d rather not think about.

Here’s a great Cannon website with several funny quotes.

I’ve just clarified and expanded upon my problems with the color orange, which I began discussing late yesterday afternoon. I brought it up initially because orange rules like a dictator in a series of movie posters created Olly Moss for the Alamo Draft House’s Rolling Road Show. Striking, yes, but a little off-putting. Well, slightly.

In response to my contrarian comments HE reader bmcintire pointed out that “this Roadshow is being called the ‘We Are All Workers Rolling Roadshow,’ orange being shorthand for ‘construction’ or ‘working class‘. You even put the word ‘Work’ in your headline. Take a look at the cluster of posters on The Daily What and tell me the first thing you think of isn’t ‘Construction Zone.'”

Precisely.

Orange is a basic stand-out color used for plastic construction hats, street traffic cones, hunter jackets, prison jump suits, etc. Obviously. But this in itself makes it seem like a symbol for regimentation and social pigenholing. It’s a working-class color, yes, but with socially segregationist connotations. A kind of negative branding, if you will.

If you’re a certain kind of prole (or, not to link the two, a criminal), you’re going to have to make a place in your life for the most obnoxious color in the spectrum. No ifs, ands or buts — you’re just going to have to deal with it. But if you’re an X-factor or an upscale professional-class type or a naturalist, orange can be avoided or at least be segregated as an accent color (which is okay from time to time). The point is that professional class or X-factor types have a choice to keep orange in its place (and they all get this, of course), and many proles for the most part don’t.

Orange symbology in this sense is so burned into general public consciousness that it almost diminishes the natural attractiveness of orange in nature — the fruit, the occasional flower, the oriole, sunsets. Notice that nature is tasteful enough to use orange very sparingly. Nature knows what Frank Sinatra and Olly Moss didn’t recognize — that orange used with any kind of force or emphasis feels a bit oppressive. It’s a safety color when you’re hunting or working construction or standing on a busy traffic road in the evening, but it’s also a kind of control color — a symbol used to enforce rules and segregate prisoners and make people stay within boundaries. Orange doesn’t say “life can occasionally be beautiful or transporting.” It says “do this,” “watch out,” “don’t go there,” “slow down,” etc.

The notion that orange is a kind of aesthetic repellent if delivered in heavy doses is not exotic rocket science. I think everyone understands this deep down. Like aromas, colors matter much more than people seem to realize. They permeate and create moods, etc.

I know if I see a football team with orange jerseys, something in me will start rooting for them to lose. Neurotic as this sounds, I never liked the sound of Paul Verhoeven‘s Soldier of Orange because of this phobia. During the ’70s orange always seemed a bit odious by its association with Irish Protestants (I’ve always sided with the Catholics in that conflict). I always winced a bit when I visited Jett in Syracuse from ’06 to ’10 with orange being that university’s color — banners, jerseys, T-shirts, signs. (It used to be blue and orange, but then they dropped the blue.) I think I found a way to relax early on with Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange because it was clear from the get-go that it was just a name or sound that Anthony Burgess had selected at random and had nothing to do with a color scheme.

An 8.4 Guardian story by John Crace advances the notion that The Expendables is Sex and the City for guys. Think about that. It’s generally accepted that the Sex and the City films were awful but women paid to see them anyway. So one could conclude that Grace is saying that The Expendables more or less sucks, but that won’t deter the guys. Is that a selling point?

It has to be said that the dopey (and sometimes hilarious) splatter-gore spills that sold Stallone’s last Rambo film don’t pay off as well in The Expendables. Too much time and effort is spent on character embroidery and smart-ass macho camaraderie. It’s fun to see bad guys get blown apart (and for the most part they have no chance against “the boys,” and that feels good on some level). It’s mainly about the good guys just barrelling on through like it’s no one’s business — i.e., the Sex and the City cheer-on stuff — but The Expendables needs to be more than just a show for the home team.

A quality action movie always reaches out to skeptics and fence-sitters. Win that group over and your movie is home free. But director and co-writer Stallone doesn’t even try for this kind of approval. He seems content to operate from his safety zone, and to me that spells lazy-ass. Hell, it is lazy. Would that this film had been assembled by high-grade, top-talent people. I would have been down with The Expendables if it had been a ’90s Jerry Bruckheimer steak dinner. But it’s not — it’s tacos and cheese with chips.

Variety‘s Peter DeBruge said today that The Expendables is “a nearly incoherent all-stars-on-deck actioner that plays like Grown Ups on nitro or a brutish, blue-collar Ocean’s Eleven. The muddled execution falls far short of the talent involved” and “plausibility [doesn’t] seem to have been much of a concern. Basically, the plot serves to support the action sequences” although “the editors [haven’t] assembled the action footage footage in such a way that we can tell where characters are in relation to one another or what’s going on. [The film is] not so indispensable.”

The Alamo Draft House’s Rolling Road Show begins on 8.6 in Los Angeles with a screening of Jackie Brown, and concludes on 8.27 in New York City with a screening of The Godfather, Part II on — get this — “a Manhattan rooftop near Little Italy.” A week earlier (8.20) On The Waterfront will be shown on Hoboken’s Pier a Park. Thing is, there’s almost nothing left of the Hoboken that Elia Kazan shot in 1953 — it’s mostly been torn down, paved over and Starbucked. Even the echoes have disappeared. Or at least the meatheads have.

I don’t like guys who fall into their movie theatre seats like children. A guy did this in front of me a couple of nights ago. He just flopped backwards, his massive bulk collapsing into his rocking-chair seat and causing the hard-plastic backing to slam me in the knees. “Jerk!,” I muttered to myself. An elegant man always eases himself down onto the seat and gently leans back on his seat. If there’d been a scene in To Catch a Thief in which Cary Grant took Grace Kelly to a movie. you can bet he wouldn’t have pointed to two empty theatre chairs and said to Kelly, “Oh, look…watch me!” and then turned around and back-flopped into his chair like a kid splashing back-first into a pool.