I’ve been waiting in line to buy the iPhone 4.0 since 6:55 am this morning. Currently at 14th and Washington, or about 200 yards from the Apple store at 14th and Ninth Avenue. 200-plus people ahead of me. It’s 9:23 am right now and the line is nudging along. I’ll have the phone and be heading home by 12 or 12:30…maybe. Free Smart water bottles being passed out. The advance-reservation phone line is two to three times longer than the impulsive walk-in line, and the latter line is nudging along also. Is that fair? Doesn’t seem to be. I talked to a guy who got in line at 4 am. What is our life? I don’t know but this my life right at this instant — a T-shirt-wearing sidewalk monkey tapping out Twitter posts and now a column item. Thank God and nature for the breezes coming off the Hudson.

Some might know of a 1984 Steve Martin movie called The Lonely Guy. It was inspired by a nifty, morose little book by Bruce Jay Friedman called The Lonely Guy’s Guide to Life (1978). All those forlorn Hollywood Elsewhere guys out there need to be at least familiar with this thing. Because this book is the Holy Grail of that three-in-the-morning LexG thing.

In her review of Martin’s film, N.Y. Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that Friedman’s book “didn’t have any plot to speak of [and] the film version doesn’t either, though not for lack of trying. The Lonely Guy can certainly be funny; the idea of a New York in which bachelors bellow from the rooftops for their lost girlfriends or drop like flies off the Manhattan Bridge, has its bleak appeal. Unfortunately, the screenplay, which is by Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels from an adaptation by Neil Simon, doesn’t even begin to sustain this droll humor. It tries a little bit of everything, and winds up with an air of messy desperation.”

Silence continues to emanate from Warner Home Video about its weird suppression of Ken Russell‘s The Devils, which I reported about yesterday. Last Sunday I rented this 1971 film for iPhone viewing, a day or two before WHV withdrew it from iTunes, and it looked beautiful, obviously indicating that WHV put serious money into remastering it. But they’re now keeping this major film by a respected director from being seen. Okay, by a relatively small (but fanatical) nation of film buffs, but it’s the principal of the thing. Suppressing a film crosses ethical lines.

Presumably a certain Warner Bros. bigwig hates the film and has said “no way…Warner Home Video is not issuing this film…not on my watch.” (Or so the rumble goes.) Either he’s afraid of some sort of adverse reaction by the religious right or he just hates it himself, I’m guessing. In doing this he’s standing, of course, alongside a long line of uglies who’ve made similar calls in the name of governmental or political prohibition. Does he really want to be identified in this light?

This person is personalizing an issue that is of great interest and concern to tens of thousands. He may have the power to suppress circulation of The Devils but he doesn’t have the right to do this. His personal feelings don’t (or shouldn’t) matter. What matters is the right of film lovers to savor valuable films, and the right of filmmakers to see their work distributed as widely as possible. It’s morally wrong to stand in the way of this.

There’s an equitable solution, of course. Warner Bros. simply needs to sub-license the film to someone like Criterion or MPI or Acorn Media — one of those guys. It would be nice if WHV could at least say if discussions have happened along these lines, or if they’re open to same.

“I enjoyed and admired Angela Ismailos’ Great Directors when I saw it at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival,” I wrote on 4.8.10. “A concise and well-shot personal tribute doc about Bernardo Bertolucci, Agnes Varda, Stephen Frears, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach and John Sayles, it’s clearly an intelligent and nourishing tutorial — a Socratic inquiry about what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to making lasting films.”

Great Directors director-producer Angela Ismailos, Paladin Films chief Mark Urman at Tuesday night’s MOMA after-party. The doc opens in New York on 7.2, and in Los Angeles on 7.9.

Los Angelenos with an academic interest in Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence will be able to catch a pair of live q & a’s she’ll be doing this weekend. The first will be on Friday, 6.25, at the Landmark 12 following a 7:30 pm screening, and the second at Hollywood’s Arclight on Saturday, 6.26, after the 7:40 pm show.

Calls about who gets to see which early-peek screening of a major film have always led to grumbling. It was revealed today, for instance, that Warner Bros. flacks have already shown Inception to Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, and I know that another major critic was given a recent looksee in Los Angeles. I don’t know about any further screenings this week or next, but I know there’s one in Manhattan the following week for a relatively select group.

Hollywood Elsewhere will be catching an all-media showing on Tuesday, 7.13 — three days before the big nationwide opening. In a big Manhattan theatre although not, I’m told, in IMAX, which sounds to me like the only way to see this thing. I guess that means I’ll be seeing it in IMAX on opening day. I’ll need to see it twice anyway, given what Travers is saying about it being “too smart” for the schmoes and “turning your head six ways from Sunday.”

We all know, of course, that with all the buzz chasing Inception that those seeing it the week after next will be blogging and Twittering about it almost immediately, no matter what terms may be requested or demanded, and that the trades (along with Indiewire‘s Todd McCarthy) will definitely post reviews on the weekend before the big opening on Friday, 7.16. We know they’ll do this.

In short, those catching the 7.13 screening won’t be among the first wave of commenters. They’ll be part of the second wave. Not that big a deal, right? I guess not. But the yen to see the Next Hot Movie sooner rather than later can be intense.

Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers has seen Chris Nolan‘s Inception (Warner Bros., 7.16) and handed out a 3 and 1/2 star review, according to N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick. Wait…why 3 and 1/2? Why not four stars? What’s the issue or aspect that Travers — not exactly regarded as the world’s most blistering critic — isn’t fully delighted with?

“[Travers’] review isn’t on the magazine’s website yet,” Lumenick writes, “so I’m going to quote his first lengthy paragraph:

“The mind-blowing movie event of the summer arrives just in time to hold back the flow of Hollywood sputum that’s been sliming the multiplex,” Travers begins. “Inception…will be called many things, starting with James Bond Meets The Matrix. You can feel the vibe of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner in it, and Nolan’s own Memento and The Dark Knight. But Inception glows with a blue-flame intensity all its own.

“Nolan creates a dream world that he wants us to fill with our own secrets . I can’t think of a better goal for any filmmaker. Of course, trusting the intelligence of the audience can cost Nolan at the box office. We’re so used to being treated like idiots. How to cope with a grand-scale epic, shot in six countries at a reported cost of $160 million, that turns your head around six ways from Sunday? Dive in and drive yourself crazy, that’s how.”

In other words, some of us (i.e., the ones who used to get Bs and Cs in pop quizzes in high school, like myself) may have to see Inception twice — once to get the basics down, and a second time to fully figure it out.

Travers’ review seems to be “predicting this expensive movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon Levitt may play be too smart to rack up numbers anything like The Dark Knight ,” Lumenick writes. “But he sure makes it sound intriguing.”

Everybody’s got it wrong on the moving-up-the-Oscar-telecast story, I’ve just been told. The confusion stems from Nikki Finke‘s just-posted story (i.e., last night) about the proposed idea of moving the Oscar telecast back to January. But the proposal — hello? — applies to the 84th Oscar Awards , which will air in early 2012. The locked-in date for the 2010 Oscar telecast (i.e., the 83rd award ceremony) is 2.27.11 — period. Announced, consecrated, set in stone.

I was persuaded that Finke’s story is wrong — i.e., was wrongly interpreted — by L.A. Times columnist Pete Hammond, who just called me ten minutes ago. Backdating the telecast to late January 2011, he says, “would throw an already established and announced schedule — including foreign-language eligibility and everything else — would throw everything into utter chaos. The house of cards would totally crumble. If this was real it would look like the Academy has lost their minds. The Academy is too conservative to do things on a whim like this, especially with ABC television tied in to this. This change, if adopted, has to apply to 2012, not 2011.”

Between playing nutbag studio boss Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, a looney rogue agent in Knight and Day and now Les Grossman again in a forthcoming Ben Stiller film, Tom Cruise seems to have accepted his forceful-guy-with-a-bent-personality persona. Meaning that the public will probably never again accept him as a struggling everyman a la Jerry Maguire. In effect Cruise has become the new William Shatner, albeit in a higher pay bracket. I think this is okay for the most part. I think it works for him.

You should hear the MSNBC commentators and Capitol Hill legislators falling all over themselves in lockstep praise of President Obama‘s whacking of Gen. Stanley McCrystal and tapping General David Petraeus to take his place. One guy actually said that Petraeus “can do the job” and “turn it around.” What? Afghanistan is a swamp, a quagmire, the wrong wicket. Eight years there and we haven’t a prayer of suppressing the Taliban or achieving anything else for that matter. All Petraeus can do is manage an exit — Napoleon retreating from Russia.

Dennis Dugan‘s Grown Ups (Columbia, 6,25) “is like Jason Miller‘s That Championship Season, except with douchebags who think they’re funny,” writes Marshall Fine. “Rather than offer actual punchlines, the film seems to consist of ad-lib wisecracks and insults to which Dugan and the cast repeatedly said, ‘That’s good enough.’ Not by half.

“The story, such as it is, focuses on five friends, one-time teammates on a championship middle-school basketball squad, who went their separate ways. But they reunite for the funeral of the coach who guided them to that championship when they were adolescents, gathering at a church in ‘New England.’

“Yes, that’s what it says on the screen: ‘New England.’ In other words, this is a movie so lazy that the title card can’t even be bothered to specify a single state for its location, let alone a city. Why say ‘New England’? Why not ‘The Northeast’? Or perhaps: ‘The East Coast’? You don’t want to have to think too much, right?

What’s alarming is that there is an entire generation that considers these guys — Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, David Spade — the comedy touchstones of their era. This is why Generation X is doomed.

“Grown Ups is a scam on the audience — a paid vacation for its stars masquerading as a movie that people will actually pay to watch. There are more laughs in any ten minutes of Toy Story 3 than in this entire flimsy piece of garbage.”

For me, the problem with Knight and Day (20th Century Fox, opening today) isn’t that it’s absurd, excessive, preposterous — a largely incoherent, romper room Coyote-vs.-Roadrunner travelogue cartoon. The problem is that it doesn’t go far enough in this regard.

Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz in James Mangold’s Knight and Day

The Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz film adheres to what has become a standard summer-movie formula — the anarchic, exotic-location bullshit action comedy with a soupcon of romance. The difference here is that director James Mangold and screenwriter Patrick O’Neill have (a) cranked up the craziness to a bolder, loonier level than anything seen before, and (b) thrown out most of the connective plot-and-plausibility tissue that other films in this realm make…well, at least some use of.

The problem is that Mangold and O’Neill have inserted strands of reality here and there — little touch-and-go acknowledgments that aspects of the actual world are part of the story. What they should have done, I feel, was throw the book out and jump off the proverbial cliff and really cut loose. You know, turn it into some kind of fuck-all action fantasia.

I’m just thinking out loud, but I’m imagining Cruise and Diaz and the various costars (including Dale Dye!) embracing the fanciful mindsets of escaped mental patients running nude down an English country road. A movie that pops the cork, gulps down the champagne and goes sailing over the waterfalls saying “nothing matters any more….we don’t care and neither should you!…we’re free, you’re free! We can turn into animals! We can spend the whole film driving souped-up stock cars in Utah! We can take over the White House. We can get jobs as bartenders in Cancun!”

And at the same time (illogical as this sounds) have it be, you know, about something. Like Theodore Flicker‘s The President’s Analyst. That 1967 James Coburn film was a silly, slip-shod satire in some respects, but it had a giddy, curiously liberating tone that ended with a shoot-out between the good guys and the phone company. It started out as a vaguely spooky comedy about a shrink having sessions with President Johnson, and ended up as an invasion-of-privacy thing — a Paul Revere rallying cry about the need for free men and women to fight the corporate goons trying to invade our lives.

But of course, Mangold and O’Neill and their bosses at 20th Century Fox didn’t have the balls to venture into the wild blue. They felt obliged to protect the interests of Newscorp stockholders by keeping at least one foot on the ground, or one foot, rather, tromping down on an accelerator as Cruise roars down a freeway with five or six guys shooting at him with automatic weapons.

It’s all crap, really. The movie realm of 2010, I mean, in the sense that now more than ever, Big Budgets mean Iron-Clad Conventionality. The corporate rule book is always followed, always looming. Pinkberry: The Movie isn’t all that funny because it’s a fairly accurate reflection of what’s going on today.

Knight and Day kicks out every so often. I’ll give it that. It’s not hamburger but expensive, well-prepared marbled steak. It looks great most of the time. Every so often Cruise and Diaz have these little mood moments that kind of click into place. But it mostly feels like time — an eternity, in a sense — spent in the recreation yard of a large and lavishly outfitted minimum security penitentiary.

I love the closing line in A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review. In an early scene Cruise says to Diaz, “Sometimes things happen for a reason.” Scott calls this “a statement — perhaps generally true — that applies to absolutely nothing about Knight and Day, including the making of the movie itself.”