The image on the left — i.e, a red-haired Monica Vitti mildly intrigued by the idea of physical congress with a certain someone as she pauses at a bedroom door — is what comes to mind when I think of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (’64). The cover of the upcoming Criterion Bluray, by contrast, is the monk version of same. Monks are averse to sex; they wear brown robes and sandals, pray a lot and tend to the goats in the barn. They respect Vitti, of course, but they also fear her.

(l.) the 2008 British Red Desert Bluray vs. (r.) the forthcoming Criterion Bluray version, out on 6.22.

So a 48-inch tall Anakin Skywalker-type kid with a shaved head — not with the hang-ups but the special powers — is the Nickelodeon-sired hero of M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender (Paramount, 7.2)? Consider this excerpt from Brad Brevet ‘s two-day-old report about crowd reactions to the Airbender trailer: “[Started out excited] but quickly turned to impatience and a few boos when writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan’s name popped up.”

What has happened to the brilliant M. Night? I thought he was God after seeing Signs, which boldly made use of creepy silences that I thought was a landmark style thing. He alone seemed to understand that less could be a lot more. I even allowed myself to imagine that he might be made of the same genetic code that informed Hitchcock and Kubrick. And now he’s made a feature for the Nickleodeon crowd?

We all know what took him down, of course. It was the debacle of Lady in the Water plus Mark Wahlberg talking to the plants in The Happening and the whole Andy Samberg Wahlberg-parody thing that followed.

“Air, Water, Earth, Fire. Four nations tied by destiny when the Fire Nation launches a brutal war against the others. A century has passed with no hope in sight to change the path of this destruction. Caught between combat and courage, Aang (Noah Ringer) discovers he is the lone Avatar with the power to manipulate all four elements. Aang teams with Katara (Nicola Peltz), a Waterbender, and her brother, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), to restore balance to their war-torn world,” blah blah.

I hate to admit this, but it looks as if The A-Team (a) might have its act together, (b) might know what it’s doing, and (b) might be mildly amusing. What scares me is that director Joe Carnahan started out eight years ago with the lean-and-mean Narc (’02) and then went totally insane four years later with Smokin’ Aces (’06), which indicates that his inner madman runs the show (as opposed to his inner film Catholic).

I realized upon seeing these teabagger bumper stickers early this afternoon on 81 South (“I want you to fight socialism,” etc.) that I’d never been within actual spitting distance of a live teabagger. A minority voice wanted to roll down the window and flip this guy off and scream “eff you!” The majority sentiment ruled, of course, so I slowed down, waited for him to pass on the right, got behind him and took a photo…except my Canon digital was dead so I hastily used the iPhone.

There are probably thousands of exceptionally bright kids attending Syracuse University, but the important thing in life isn’t innate brains or an elegant education — it’s curiosity. Curiosity is perhaps the most attractive human trait, and there seems to be a whole lot less of it now than before. Basic logic, it seems, is also on the ropes.

Example: Four minutes ago I ordered some breakfast at a local Syracuse U. bagel joint. I then asked the girls at the counter — one blonde, pigtailed and zaftig, the other fat and brown-haired with slightly blemished skin — if they knew of a local copy joint. “Copies?” the brown-haired girl said. Yeah, you know…a place that prints computer files on paper or make copies or whatever. “I’m not sure that they have that here,” she said. No copy place in a major college town? “I don’t go to college here,” she said.

This, I submit, is a blade of grass that indicates where a lot of kids are at today. If they’re not getting paid for it, and if it doesn’t feed into their immediate interest or friend-sphere or family environment or is otherwise right in front of their face, they don’t know about it and they don’t care to know. How many brain cells does it take to surmise that a college town will definitely have two or three copy places?

That said, I sympathize with anyone who isn’t the least bit curious about higher math. I hugely resent being put through years and years of torture in math and algebra and geometry classes in junior and senior high school because they’ve had any practical application in real life. If I have a math issue, I use my calculator — end of story. The educators who put me through my pre-pubescent and teenaged math classes were sadists, pure and simple.

A 5.7 N.Y. Times story by Patrick McGeehan reports that Verizon, the dominant local phone company in New York State, “asked regulators on Friday to allow it to end the annual delivery of millions of White Pages to all of its customers in New York. The company estimates that it would save nearly 5,000 tons of paper by ending the automatic distribution of the books.

Which means that those “those inches-thick tomes of fine-print telephone listings that may be most useful as doorstops, could stop landing with a thud on doorsteps across New York later this year,” McGeehan reports.

I haven’t skimmed through a paper phone book in well over a decade, but now they’re really history. McGeehan’s story signifies that the above joke in Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966) — one of the funniest lines I’d heard when I first saw Allen’s film on the tube in the early ’70s — is about to become extinct. It will no longer have even a fragmentary sense of relevancy or meaning in the physical world. It’ll be like a joke about hoop skirts or Model Ts or straight razors or bathtub gin.

“Only about one of every nine households uses the hard-copy listings anymore, according to Verizon, which cited a 2008 Gallup survey. Most have switched to looking up numbers online or calling directory assistance. The phone book for many people, it seems, has gone from indispensable tool to unavoidable nuisance.”

Here’s an alleged link to a new Inception trailer. The wifi is awfully weak up here in Glenn Beck country (45 minutes north of Scranton) so I haven’t been able to watch it. I’m writing this in a truck-stop diner. Three large-bellied T-shirt guys are eating at the counter, Fox News is on the tube, and three friendly waitresses (two in their 50s, one jail-bait-aged) are keeping everyone happy. Two cooks in the kitchen, eight gas pumps outside, showers for rent.

Both these guys should retreat a bit so their faces don’t look so…I don’t know what the word is. Invasive? Intimidating? Not so much Anthony Breznican (l.), the USA Today guy who doesn’t like The Conspirator sight unseen, as MCN’s David Poland (r.), who could almost be the Cloverfield giant — he also looks a little squinty. The unseen baby (i.e., Poland’s son Cameron) saves it.

Are there any other summer films besides Chris Nolan‘s Inception and James Mangold‘s Day and Knight that anyone is genuinely looking forward to? People should be looking forward to The Tillman Story (due in August) but as I said last week, there are many people out there who’d rather be shot and thrown into a muddy pit rather than watch a great documentary.

I take that back about Day and Knight. I’m not eagerly awaiting that Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz action-comedy, although I am sensing I’ll be able to more than tolerate it, or in other words be more or less down with it, which is more than one can reasonably or realistically expect from most of the summer films. I mean, it’s horrific when you review the list.

I agree, in short, with most of what Marshall Fine says in this bitch-and-moan piece, but why does he not even mention Inception — the one summer flick that all the good folks want to see, and which might actually be more than decent?

My final, final dental appointment in New Jersey happens this morning so I’ll be out of commission for a few hours. I then have to drive to Syracuse to pick up some of Jett’s stuff (he graduates a week hence) and haul it back to a storage facility in Newark. But as long as we’re on the subject…

The above is Jett’s debut entry as a regular contributor to the Huffington Post‘s College page — a video essay about Syracuse U. resistance to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recent engagement as the 2010 graduation commencement speaker.