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In my head, Farley Granger has always been and always will be “Guy Haines,” the anxious, darting-eyed, pinch-mannered tennis player in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Strangers on a Train (’51). The 85 year-old actor, also known for his performance as an anxious, darting-eyed, pinch-mannered gay murder accomplice in Hitchcock’s Rope, passed on 3.27, but for some reason the news is only just breaking now.

Granger copped a long time ago to being openly bisexual or mostly gay or what-have-you.

Here’s an amusing portion from his Wiki bio: “In Rope, Granger and John Dall portrayed two highly intelligent friends who commit a thrill killing simply to prove they can get away with it. The two characters and their former professor, played by Jimmy Stewart, were supposed to be homosexual, and Granger and Dall discussed the subtext of their scenes, but because The Hays Office was keeping close tabs on the project, the final script was so discreet that screenwriter Arthur Laurents remained uncertain of whether Stewart ever realized that his own character was gay.”

Until this moment I myself have never even flirted with the notion that Stewart’s character was supposed to be (or might have been) gay. I don’t think Stewart had it in him to play “gay.” He was too aww-shucksy for that.

Remember that ComicCon 2010 buzz about Tron: Legacy helmer Joseph Kosinski being “the new James Cameron“? After Tron made the rounds he began to look like the new Peter Hyams. And now Kosinki’s latest project, a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing called Oblivion, has been scuttled by Disney.

Kosinski, 36, will bounce back and may even make something good some day, but it’s entirely possible that he won’t. He’s one of the gamer/comic-book generation directors (Battle LA‘s Jonathan Liebesman, 35, is another) and I just don’t trust these guys. At all. Their heads are all about hard-drive visions and jizz-flash sensations, and they all seem to have some kind of cheap CG virus running through their veins.

The rap against the early ’70s whiz kids (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma, etc.) is that they weren’t bringing any real-life experience to their films — only love of other movies. But in retrospect their output seems quite fertile and meditative compared to that of Kosinski and Leibesman and their ilk — born in the 1970s and reared on the infantile fantasies brought about by Lucas and Spielberg, and nurtured by action figures, video games and computers, and destined to bring so much anguish to the likes of myself.

Everything that I love, admire and cherish about the Spanish and south-of-the-border fraternity (Inarritu, Del Toro, Cuaron, Lubezski, Amenabar, Bayona. etc.) is missing in sound-and-fury empties like Kosinski and Liebesman and their slick-operator elders Guy Ritchie and Michael Bay, et. al. They and the suits who support them at the studios are nothing less than a scourge, a pestilence…the spawn of Hollywood seed pods. And who pays to see their films? The ComicCon culture. This is why I’m not entirely kidding about F4 Phantoms strafing the faithful in San Diego, etc.

As God is my witness I never want to see a dystopian, post-apocalyptic graphic novelly action-quest thing ever again.

I don’t know what exhibitors and distributors felt about Terrence Malick‘s Badlands or Days of Heaven or The Thin Red Line or The New World when they first saw them, but I’ll guess they weren’t swooning. Exhibitor and distributor types are always bitching about art films, and that’s the only kind of movie Malick makes so he and they are natural-born adversaries. Industry guys have always hated ambitious cinema — Francis Coppola once told me about exhibitors complaining about how dark and gloomy The Godfather was — so their views need to be taken with a grain.

I was reminded of this mindset by a producer pal when I told him yesterday that a journalist friend, quoting a US distribution source, had told me that a group of foreign distributor-investors saw Malick’s The Tree of Life almost exactly a year ago (i.e., March 2010) and felt that it was commercially catastrophic — a movie ostensibly costarring Sean Penn and Brad Pitt “and they’re not even in it,” according to one complainer. (Possible translation: the source felt that Penn and Pitt aren’t in it enough.)

On top of which a second journalist friend told me two or three months ago that he happened to be sitting near a table of distributor types at last September’s Toronto Film Festival “and they had a furious, angry attitude about the movie,” my friend says. “It was really a sense they had that it was beyond repair…they didn’t want anything to do with it, and they couldn’t imagine what any legitimate distributor could do with it.”

Again — that’s par for the course when guys whose main goal in life is to sell popcorn are talking about an art film. It doesn’t mean The Tree of Life doesn’t have value in and of itself. Knowing Malick and his abilities and inclinations as I do, it seems unlikely if not inconceivable that he could create a film utterly lacking in artistic/spiritual value.

It was reported in May 2009 that The Tree of Life had been sold to a number of international distributors, including Europacorp in France, TriPictures in Spain, and Icon in the UK and Australia, but that it lacked a US distributor. In August 2009 it was announced that the film would be released in the US through Bob Berney and Bill Pohlad‘s Apparition. There had been speculation in Screen Daily and elsewhere that Tree might be ready for Oscar contention release in late 2009, but nope. Then came talk of its possible debut at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and the subsequent squashing of that dream due to “it’s not ready.” And yet it’s believed that Tree of Life was “absolutely finished” in the spring of 2010, and that it had been seen by European distribs who bought pre-sales rights, and they “were shocked and appalled and rejected it” after that alleged March 2010 screening.

Summit Entertainment sold distribution rights to EuropaCorp in France, Icon (UK and Australia), TeleMuenchen Group (Germany), Svensk (Scandinavia), O1 (Italy,) Belga (Benelux) and TriPictures (Spain). Journalist friend #1 “was told by two more people in the Euro biz” that the appalled or angered reactions about a supposed catastrophe “were absolutely true, but I was not told this by anyone with one of the rejecting companies. That’s where I got stuck. Three sources, but none direct.”

“This is like the 9/11 conspiracy theory,” journalist #1 concludes. “How could so many people be keeping this secret?”

Robert Aldrich‘s Kiss Me Deadly (Criterion Bluray, 6.21) is pure black-and-white splendor. You can can take or leave the plot/dialogue/theme, but you can’t ignore the magnificent visual capturings of mid ’50s Los Angeles. All those downtown locations that are gone now plus Ralph Meeker/Mike Hammer’s still-standing apartment building (10401 Wilshire Blvd, NW corner of Wilshire and Beverly Glen and the Hollywood Athletic Club (6525 W. Sunset Blvd.), where Hammer finds the black box with the bright light inside.

I’m not a coffee snob, but I’ve owned a couple of cappuccino machines and been to dozens of European cafes and have acquired a mature understanding, I believe, of what makes a really good cup. Imagine my surprise, then, when it hit me two or three weeks ago that this kind of instant coffee is really delightful — rich, rounded, full-bodied.

This is the raptor seen in one of the micro-squares on that one-sheet for Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Would it be out of line to ask for a poster for a screaming Sean Penn and Brad Pitt being chased by a raptor, Jurassic Park-style? If anyone has the Photoshop ability and the time….well, obviously many people do. But do they give enough of a damn to work on it and send it along?

U.S. forces are “stopping the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan”? Really? I hadn’t heard that.

I’m almost getting a supernatural, time-trippy Purple Rose of Cairo vibe from this Midnight in Paris trailer. Or maybe more like A Stop at Willoughby? That’s good, I think. Woody Allen hasn’t gone off the imaginative deep end in quite a while.

I know one thing for sure: I felt more than a little nauseous the second that Michael Sheen‘s character began talking about wine. So he plays (a) Tony Blair, (b) mad vampires kingpins with white hair and crazy glazed expressions, (c) soccer coaches and (d) assholes?

David Gordon Green‘s Your Highness (Universal, 4.8) was shown to select press last Friday, and I was waiting for hate tweets all weekend…and they never happened. The trailers have made it clear that this medieval stoner comedy is (a) unfunny, (b) loathsome even by stoner-improv standards, and (c) a blend of downmarket sloth and Danny McBride toenail shavings. I really can’t wait to get my hate on for this thing. So who saw it last weekend and suffered involuntary convulsions?

So once again, two years ago Natalie Portman decided on a strategy of making one good film (Black Swan) and then signing up for one contemptible piece-of-shit paycheck movie after another? Is she ever going to be in anything good ever again? Or is it all downhill from here on?

A month ago MCN’s Kim Voynar wrote about the Girls on Film clips in which famous scenes from great films starring guys are recreated with women. I paid no mind, and for whatever reason Girls on Film‘s Ashleigh Harrison waited a whole damn month to say to herself, “Let’s see, is there anyone else we haven’t gotten some attention from? Oh, yeah, this Jeff Wells guy…okay, let’s write him.” The No Country For Old Men caught my fancy most of all.

Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky has more or less dismissed claims by dance-double Sarah Lane that Natalie Portman performed only a small fraction of her ballet scenes in the film. Aronofsky’s official statement, released through Fox Searchlight, says Portman performed 80% of of the dancing seen in the film.”

“Here is the reality,” his statement reads. “I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that’s 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement.”

Lane claimed in a 3.28 Wall Street Journal “Speakeasy” story that Portman performed about 5% of the dancing in the film.

In other words, Lane has faux-pahhed herself out of Aronofsky, Portman, Benjamin Millipied‘s and Fox Searchlight’s good graces.

A distribution guy who knows everyone and has been around forever saw Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life a good while ago, and while discussing it with a friend several weeks ago said somewhat perfunctorily, “I’m a fan.” Now, you have to understand what it means when a distribution exec says “I’m a fan.” That’s like some dude who’s just gone out on a blind date saying the next morning that the girl has a nice personality. It means (a) the film has problems, (b) the distribution guy is being polite, and (c) he doesn’t want to say anything too strong for fear of being identified as a rapt admirer. (I almost said “raptor” admirer but that’s another thread.)