Today marks the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death. An epitaph came to mind on the evening of 6.25.09 (i.e., the day that everyone in New York saw an all-media screening of Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies) that I didn’t post out of sensitivity to the fans. It was the same line that Gore Vidal spoke after the more-or-less-suicidal death of Truman Capote: “A wise career move.”

Hitfix’s Greg Ellwood reported today that during a Los Angeles Inception interview Leonard DiCaprio said (a) he’s definitely “hard at work” on a J. Edgar Hoover biopic with director Clint Eastwood, but that (b) he won’t wear a dress, in line with rumors that Hoover was a gay cross-dresser.

“Will I wear a dress? Not as of yet,” DiCaprio said in answer to a question on the subject. “No, we haven’t done the fitting for those. So, I don’t think so.”

On 4.3.10 I wrote that that I’d read “most of Lance Black‘s J. Edgar Hoover script, and I haven’t come upon a scene calling for DiCaprio to wear lace stockings and pumps and a cocktail dress, so we’re safe on that score.”

At first I thought the Twi-hard thing was just another dumb-squealy-girl phenomenon, but then I saw Catherine Hardwicke‘s original 2008 film and went, “Okay, I get it…there’s something happening here with the film, which is pretty good, but also with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and the whole I-love-you-so-much-we-can’t-have-sex thing — a very clever packaging of conservative values.

The abstinence thing wasn’t about Mormonism or conservatism per se, but about how the current between a couple can feel much more powerful and transporting before sex — not just to hesitant younger women but anyone of any age. As Carly Simon noted many years ago, anticipation is almost more erotic than the act itself.

“I think it’s fair to call Twilight the most effective covert-conservative-values movie to be released since Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” I wrote on 11.23.08. “Because it makes sexual abstinence seem like a fairly hot, pure-of-spirit state of being. And I say this as something of a lifelong libertine.”

But then Summit and Hardwicke parted ways, of course, and along came Chris Weitz‘s Twilight: New Moon a year later, and quality-wise the whole thing went into the crapper.

On 11.20.09 I wrote that “New Moon will obviously make financial history this weekend but it’s a total zombie franchise now — it walks and morphs and vacuums up revenue and makes teenage girls swoon, but it’s made of dead gray tissue and huge, stupid-looking, dinosaur-size cartoon wolves. It’s been smothered by Rob Friedman and Chris Weitz and all the other Summit bottom-liners who didn’t understand what they had. They’re be rolling in dough Monday morning, but they’ve totally killed the goose.”

Did the Twi-harders care about the franchise being degraded by hacks? Apparently not. Apparently they couldn’t tell the difference between Weitz’s film and Hardwicke’s.

And then it started to dawn on some observers that Pattinson isn’t that terrific an actor (especially after his work in New Moon, which he was stiff and lifeless in, and Remember Me ) and that the Twilight franchise was starting to droop along with him. Were Twi-harders in any way dissuaded? Did they think any less of him? Of course not.

Australian film journalist Sam Cleveland sent me a link to a few pages of what may be Jon Spaights‘ script for Ridley Scott‘s upcoming Alien prequel movie, otherwise known as Alien Harvest. I’ve no way of verifying if this is Spaights’ script, but it sure reads like a solid, grounded pro-level thing.

On 6.14 Coming Attractions Patrick Sauriol wrote that “sometime in early January 2010 the Alien Harvest PDF file was uploaded to the Scribd file-sharing website. (Except it isn’t there now.) The 122-page script is credited to Jon Spaights, the screenwriter hired to write the untitled Alien prequel that Ridley Scott was developing at Fox.”

On 4.26 Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet quoted Scott’s explanation of what the 3-D Alien Harvest (which may, according to reports, be a two-parter) will basically be:

“It’s set in 2085, about 30 years before Sigourney [Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley],” Scott said. “It’s fundamentally about going out to find out ‘Who the hell was that Space Jockey?’ The guy who was sitting in the chair in the alien vehicle — there was a giant fellow sitting in a seat on what looked to be either a piece of technology or an astronomer’s chair. Remember that?

“And our man [Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas] climbs up and says “There’s been an explosion in his chest from the inside out — what was that?” I’m basically explaining who that Space Jockey — we call him the Space Jockey — I’m explaining who the space jockeys were.

“[The] main character [in the prequel] will be a woman, yeah.” [The woman in the script excerpt is called Debbie.] “We’re thinking it could go down that route, yeah. When I started the original Alien, Ripley wasn’t a woman, it was a guy. During casting, we thought, ‘Why don’t we make it a woman?

“Scott adds he will need to design ‘or redesign’ the appearance of the alien creatures saying, ‘I don’t want to repeat it. The alien in a sense, as a shape, is worn out.” He also says he will again consult with original Alien designer H.R. Giger.

“Scott was also quoted…saying he’s looking to make two new Alien prequel films referring to them as ‘prequel one and two,’ but right now the focus is on the first film only.

Sauriol’s 6.14 descriptions of Alien Harvest is more thorough and more particular than Brevet’s.

Proportionately-speaking, Thursday’s box-office figures were almost the exactly the same as Wednesday’s. Toy Story 3, in its seventh day of commercial release, did more than triple the business of Knight and Day, which was in its second day of release — $13,056,000 vs. $3,477,879. (Wednesday’s figures had TS3 pulling down $13.458,000 vs. K & D‘s $3,810,649.)

I don’t know what to expect from the James Mangold-Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz action cartoon on Friday, but a weekend figure of less than $15 million looks like a possibility. Or will it do a bit more?

Fandango has sent out a release saying that advance ticket sales for Adam Sandler‘s Grown-Ups (which opens today) are over twice as large as those for Knight and Day — 12% vs. 5%. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is the biggest, of course, with 51% with Toy Story 3 capturing 23% of advance sales.

Knight and Day cost about $125 million to produce and God knows how much to market — $50 or $60 million? I don’t want to jump the gun and call it a flop, or say that this is further evidence that the Cruise brand is a shadow of its former self, but if it was your $185 million that had been invested, how would you feel about K & D earning a guesstimate of less than $25 million after five days?

I for one believe that however people may feel about Cruise personally, they know he’s almost always shown good taste in choosing his projects ( The Last Samurai, Lions for Lambs and Knight and Day excepted), and that they respect the results of his “hard-case guy with a bent personality” approach. I’m guessing that the trailers persuaded them that Knight and Day was some kind of loose-shoe, high-style throwaway, and they decided to let it go. Nothing more than that.

The mark of a truly funny joke or a bit or situation in a comedy isn’t “I laughed so hard I was in pain.” The mark of a really great world-class joke is when it comes back to you five or ten minutes later and it makes you laugh (or at least chuckle) all over again. Or it comes back to you on the way home, or a month or a year later. Or it makes you laugh ten years later.

I don’t “laugh” at the “nobody’s perfect” line at the end of Some Like It Hot, but every time I watch that film (roughly once a year) I always guffaw a little bit, or smile extra broadly.

Anyone who laughs so hard that their eyes water up and appear to be choking as they experience rib pain is experiencing a cathartic emotional geyser — an explosive release of a repressed feeling, memory or hang-up. There’s also regular-ass no-big-deal laughter (i.e., laughing at some joke on Cheers or some smart crack from Bill Maher) and all the other levels and gradations. But laughter is always about some recognition of truth — “Hah! I’ve been there myself and you can say that again!”

Stupid people think that people laugh when something is “funny” — thoughtful people know that all laughter is a form of recognition therapy. Whatever it is that the joke has released is some kind of buried guilt or anguish or regret or vision-recognition. This is why psychologists tell people that laughter is such a physically and emotionally healthy thing. Laughter is essentially about feelings breaking out of jail.

It follows that the darker the feelings and more intense the repression, the greater the geyser . There really isn’t that much difference between screaming with laughter like a raging banshee and a can of unopened baked beans exploding after being put on top of a campfire. Whatever it is that the joke has unleashed has been seriously bottled up for a long time, and so it triggers a kind of mad eruption. Which suggests that the laughing-in-pain person hasn’t dealt with whatever the issue may be, which indicates that he/she is probably lacking in terms of maturity and/or character.

Short version: if you laugh too loudly — if you scream and double over and slap your thighs and act like a howling monkey after having drunk a pint of bourbon — you may be a bit of a repressed putz. Not absolutely but probably. It means that you’re living or have lived under very tough rules (self-imposed or imposed by a tough spouse or parent) and you’re probably not all that thoughtful about your hang-ups and constipations.

My father had a drinking problem that he finally dealt with in the mid ’70s by joining AA. He wasn’t an emotionally expressive guy, to say the least, but one of my most vivid childhood memories of him is when he convulsed and howled at Lee Marvin‘s drunken antics in Cat Ballou. I mean, he really lost it when Marvin dropped a pint bottle of whiskey and saw it break upon a rock. I remember turning in my seat and glancing at him and going, “Jesus…what was that about?”

Even shorter version: If you laugh too loud you’ve got problems. You’re not dealing with your shit, or you’re a commoner of some kind, or you’re some kind of cultural or political conservative.

The people who go really wild at parties after they’ve had a few drinks — the ones who put lampshades on their heads (figuratively speaking) and who dance on table-tops and sing drunkenly at karaoke bars — are often (i.e., not each and every time but frequently) the more straight-laced types during business hours. Do you think Mahatma Gandhi ever howled like a drunken monkey having an epileptic fit while watching a Charlie Chaplin comedy in New Delhi or Bombay?

I know that if I notice someone who’s laughing too uproariously, I’ll make a mental note to keep my distance from him/her. And the people who in a very few minutes are going to angrily react to this article — not “disagree” but get pissy and insulting and trying to put me down any way they can — are probably cut from the same cloth.

A third one? Sure, whatever. I have this residual feeling that the last Fockers film (six years ago!) watered the brand down a bit. I do recall that Dustin Hoffman, as Greg Focker/Ben Stiller‘s dad, got the warmest notices in that film. And yet Hoffman is absent from Little Fockers. And yet the reportedly under-used Barbra Streisand (Hoffman’s wife/Stiller’s mom in Meet The Fockers) gets a clip and a name card.

Imagine the reaction if this time, just to add a little curveball element, director Paul Weicz and writers John Hamburg and Larry Stuckey had decided to throw one more character into this depraved, middle-class demimonde — Greg Focker’s cousin Roger Greenberg. A Los Angeles-based carpenter trying to work his way back into music industry, Roger is having relationship issues with his live-in girlfriend Florence (Greta Gerwig) and has impulsively decided to fly to Chicago and visit Greg to talk things out. The best bit? Nobody (not even Owen Wilson!) says a word throughout the entire film that Greg and Roger appear to be identical twins.

Meet The Fockers was basically a war-of-the-parents thing. Now, it appears, we’re back to the basic Stiller vs. DeNiro dynamic from Meet The Parents. With a new erection drug to vulgar things up a bit. (And by the way, nobody — least of all a professional nurse — stabs anyone with a hypodermic needle. The needle could easily break, of course, and you’d want to be especially gentle if you’re injecting into someone’s stand-up schtufenhauffer. I thought the original hypodermic needle-stabbing scene in Pulp Fiction was idiotic also.)

Here’s a JoBlo review of a New Jersey research-screening of Little Fockers. The guy called it “unnecessary” (how many films that come out are thought to be actually “necessary”?) but “frequently hilarious.” He says it “worked,” “had the theatre in stitches” and…well, here’s a quote: “There were at least two instances where I was in pain from laughing so hard.”

“The test of wills between Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and Greg Focker escalates to new heights of comedy in the third installment of the blockbuster series,” says the studio-supplied copy. “Laura Dern, Jessica Alba and Harvey Keitel join the returning all-star cast for a new chapter of the worldwide hit franchise.

“It has taken 10 years, two little Fockers with wife Pam (Teri Polo) and countless hurdles for Greg to finally get ‘in’ with his tightly wound father-in-law, Jack. After the cash-strapped dad takes a job moonlighting for a drug company, however, Jack’s suspicions about his favorite male nurse come roaring back. When Greg and Pam’s entire clan — including Pam’s lovelorn ex, Kevin (Wilson) — descends for the twins’ birthday party, Greg must prove to the skeptical Jack that he’s fully capable as the man of the house.

“With all the misunderstandings, spying and covert missions, will Greg pass Jack’s final test and become the new patriarch…or will the circle of trust be broken for good?”

Jesus.

I chose not to see Joel Schumacher‘s Twelve at Sundance 2010 for what I felt was a pretty good reason. As much as I’d like to see Schumacher proverbially bounce back with another Tigerland, which I thought was better than decent, I’m very suspicious of moral-crisis-leading-to-moral-wakeup dramas about jaded rich kids doing the old Less Than Zero, or an approximation of same.

I’m not saying Twelve is one thing or another, not having seen it, but the milieu, which I feel I’ve come to know from previous films mining the same turf, is fairly repugnant. Plus I’ve developed an aversion to any films starring any Culkins. Plus I’m a a little afraid these days of Ellen Barkin. (And this was before I’d seen Shit Year, of course.)

In a piece called “Is Joel Schumacher’s Twelve Worse Than Batman and Robin?”, Cinematical‘s Eric Davis wrote that “you know something is off when [a] gritty, drug-fueled ensemble drama premieres at the Sundance Film Festival to a crowd full of critics who can’t stop laughing. I happened to be one of the folks in that first press screening for Twelve, and I can tell you straight up that this flick is a mess. Not only are there too many characters and too many random storylines, but you don’t care about any of it.”

A 6.24 CNET report by Erica Ogg about the dropped-call complaints dogging the iPhone 4 explains the basic beef — i.e., touching the metal antenna band that runs around the iPhone 4, especially if you’re holding the iPhone 4 in your left hand, “interrupts reception, slowly causing the phone to lose its signal.”

There’s a solution, apparently, in the rubber bumper (which costs about $30 bills) that fits around the phone. I was given one and I haven’t had any dropped-call issues…yet. But it is rather sickening to consider that a highly touted device like this would actually drop calls due to touching the lower left part of the metal band with your naked skin. I mean, I spent most of the day in line to buy this device and a development of this kind is appalling. The Apple guys should be brought up on charges.

I have a complaint about the iPhone 4.0 that nobody’s mentioned yet. It won’t synch with your computer unless you use the new white cord that connects the phone to a USB plug (which also fits into a square wall-socket plug) that comes in the 4.0 box. In other words you can’t synch the new iPhone to your computer, or so I’ve discovered (and have been told by Apple techies), with the identical white USB cord that worked just fine with the previous iPhone models (3GS, 3G, etc.).

So the four USB cords I’ve bought over the last couple of years — I like to have extras just in case — are worthless with the new model. Thanks, guys!

Fox News anchorperson Jane Skinner, famed worldwide for that hilarious 2006 Freudian slip, is leaving her job to become a traditional wife and mom. That’s nice, but imagine if a male newscaster had said that his life “over the last twelve years has changed significantly in wonderful ways…I added a wife who’s become [a serious big shot], and who has a job even busier than mine. I have twin daughters, so to do justice to this new life I’ve decided to take a break from the business.”

You’re not supposed to say this, but professional women in pretty much any realm have this great escape clause they can turn to if they’re so inclined. And it seems a little weird that these drop-out decisions are completely accepted some 40 years after the launch of the women’s movement. Society is totally cool with highly competitive, generously compensated, top-of-their-field female professionals doing a sudden 180 and becoming June Cleaver at the drop of a hat. I mean, nobody blinks an eye.