I’d post Michael Musto‘s second “Hollywood Kid” video report — a new weekly feature on Movieline‘s site — but the embed coding is ridiculous. No matter what proportional dimension you use it won’t post as a stand-alone screen, but as a horizontal split-screen thing. And I know what I’m doing with embed codes so don’t tell me. Here’s to Movieline‘s tech team!

What possesses a rich guy in his mid 40s to go around looking like Ol’ Man River all the time? Scraggly-ass grunge beard with gray skid-row hairs, which always add a good five or ten years. A dopey-looking gray-knit homie cap, stupid gold-rimmed K-Mart shades, dorky neck chain, etc. Like some would-be poet loser from Tenafly, New Jersey, on a break from his job as a radio taxi dispatcher. The idea is to not look like anyone or anything — I get that — but to make such horrendous choices! Wait — is he wearing sandals?

Whereas tracking scores for Kick-Ass and Death at a Funeral were neck-and-neck last week, Kick-Ass pulled ahead in today’s (4.5) report. Definite Kick-Ass interest is now 50 for under-25 males vs. 43 for the same demo’s view of Death at a Funeral. Over-25 males are 38 for Kick-Ass, 32 for Death. Definite interest in Kick-Ass for under-25 females is at 34 vs. 31 for Death, and over-25 females are at 24 for Death vs. 34 for Kick-Ass. The first choice numbers are flow for both — 8 for Kick-Ass, 5 for Death — but there’s a clear trend here.

Terrible hair is rare in feature films, but it happens. Mostly, it must be said, in films from Australia, where mullets have persisted despite every civilized culture dropping them 20 to 25 years ago. Mullets make me see red, in part because red-haired guys often wear them. I only know that if some mullet guy appears….bang, I want him dead. No, that’s raw. If a mullet guy dies I won’t be heartbroken — how about that?

I’m not saying mullets are the downfall of Nash Edgerton and Joel Edgerton‘s The Square (Apparition, 4.9), but they certainly don’t help matters.

Pic is a dirty-doings-in-suburbia thing by way of James M. Cain. A married boyfriend (David Roberts) of a married neighbor (Claire van der Boom) agrees to sub-contract an arsonist to burn her home down so she can steal her husband’s ill-gotten bag of money with no questions asked, and you know the rest. It’s nicely shot, decently cut, well acted, nimble and direct…but with problems.

I was initially intrigued, but then I found it alienating and almost repellent because of (a) the jaw-dropping stupidity propelling most of the key players and (b) the lack of intrigue or promise in same — I didn’t “like” anyone for any reason, no rooting factor, wrote them off, worms in a coffee can.

The basic problem is that The Square is not very well written. The art of writing good thrillers is to make the necessary (in terms of necessary plot turns) seem accidental. But it all seems deliberate in The Square — the Edgerton brothers saying “okay, let’s turn the screws and make things even worse for the perpetrators.”

Which, for me, eliminates any sense of real investment in the story. You don’t care what happens to anyone because the Edgertons are playing a game. They’re like a couple of kids torturing small animals.

Roberts may be a normal sort of guy with an aura of fair-minded morality about him, but his coolness and charisma levels are next to zero. What’s with all the gray hair? And those tiny fretful eyes? Roberts looks vulnerable and wimpy from the get-go. He certainly sounds like a sad candy-ass when Lady Macbeth (Van der Boom) begins talking about burnin’ down the house. “Carla, c’mon….Carla, no…this really wouldn’t be right, Carla,” etc. The man is gelatin. I bailed on him right then and there.

Robert has two expressions throughout the entire film — slightly stunned (even after sex in Carla’s car, his face seems to say “what just happened? Whoa…what was that?”) and clueless/concerned/oh-shit. Does he see anything coming at all? Is he stunned or surprised by everything that happens to him in life? Is he trying to prove to worldwide theatrical audiences that he’s the slowest and stupidest film noir anti-hero in the history of the genre?

I understand that noirs usually paint a fatalistic portrait of doomed characters. They’re not stories about heroes and admirable maneuvers and brilliant solutions. But this is a movie, dammit, and if the lead characters (even if you don’t like them much) are going to commit a serious crime you have to at least engage the audience with a notion that the crime might turn out — that the ne’er-do-wells at least have a shot at pulling it off.

Typical Aussie mullet

Except you know it’s a doomed enterprise from the get-go when Roberts meets with Joel Edgerton (playing the arsonist) in a cafe with…hello?…Edgerton’s younger sister sitting there. Does Roberts know the sister, or have any reason to trust her or be confident that she won’t blab what she’s overheard to her best friend or whomever? Obviously not. So he’s a total idiot, and the whole thing is ridiculous.

How much money was in Claire’s husband’s gym bag? It couldn’t have been that much….what, $15 or $20 thousand? $30 thousand? Two characters are going to risk everything they have in life for $20 or $30 thousand, which they’ll easily burn through within a year or eighteen months after going on the lam?

And what criminal enterprise was the husband involved in? Why didn’t we get to see what it was, what risks were involved, etc.? And why did she get married to him in the first place? She’s a fairly appealing blonde with good genes, and hubby is a thick-bodied, blue-collared, red-haired “yeah, mate” type with a fucking mullet. What about the old birds-of-a-feather rule? She’s morally reckless, but is obviously better than him.

I’m told that Breaking Upwards, the $15 thousand Manhattan relationship flick that I saw and wrote about last week, earned $15,250 last weekend at the IFC Film Center. That was “the highest per-theatre average of any speciality film.” In the country or in the New York area?

So rather than give Elaine May‘s Ishtar — a $55 million debacle, okay, but one of the best “no laugh funny” films ever made — a decent DVD release, the Sony guys have handed it over to Hulu? “We want nothing to do with it,” they seem to be saying. “Nobody saw it in ’87, even fewer people want to see it now, this is all we can do, we’re washing our hands…that’s it!”

Will you look at this odious operator? I’m sorry, that came out wrong. What I meant was, will you look at the face of Jordan Yospe, a wheeler-dealing Manatt-Phelps attorney who brings home the bacon for his partners and his family by aggressively scheming to put products into movies “before the movie is cast or the script is fully shaped,” according to a 4.4. N.Y. Times story by Stephanie Clifford. Product placement is nothing new, she notes, but Yospe is hustling in a more aggressive and inside-ish way, inserting products into scripts at seminal stages.

Manat Phelps product-placement guy Jordan Yospe

All I know is that in their day, directors like Sam Fuller, Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, the ’70s version of Francis Coppola, Howard Hawks, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Bresson and the 1950s incarnation of Nicholas Ray might perhaps meet with an operator like Yospe, just to be civil, but it wouldn’t be long before they’d leap up from their chairs, grab him by the lapels, bitch-slap him and toss him out of the conference room.

The point of Clifford’s story about men like Yospe and the syndrome they represent is that those days are over, and it’s time to deal with guys who, if they had their druthers, would make every brand seem a bit more conspicuous than it should be. These are the Hollow Men, and they more than have their foot in the door these days, which means, of course, that a process of slight but persistent polluting of the atmospheric aura of films is increasing. Which means in a roundabout way that thematic and spiritual elements in films are being subtly affected also.

“Now, having Campbell’s Soup or Chrysler associated with your project can be nearly as important to your pitch as signing Tom Cruise,” Clifford writes.

A contemporary urban flick without occasional recognizable brands flashing in and out of frame always feels slightly off, but you know with a guy like Yospe pulling strings there’s a decent chance that the brands will probably seem a bit too noticable.

As I wrote last September in response to a Hollywood Reporter piece about product placement by way of Brett Ratner Brands, “The attitude of the camera should always be, ‘Yeah, okay, a medium-sized Starbucks coffee is being sipped by the star of the film, but so what? Pay it no mind and listen to the dialogue.’ It should be, at most, a tiny bit more than subliminal.

“Because once the appearance of a product registers a little too much, even for a second or two, the spell of the film is faintly disturbed because someone, you sense right away, has cut a deal.

“When did conspicuous product placement start appearing in films? I haven’t done the research but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was proven to have mainly begun in the ’80s, when TV executives began to migrate into producing features and running studios. Or in the ’90s, when the mentality of bottom-line corporate-think began to manifest more and more in films. I know that it was fairly unusual to spot a noticable brand of anything in movies of the ’70s.”

Yospe “cut his teeth wedging brands into shows like Survivor and The Apprentice while he was general counsel at Mark Burnett Productions,” Clifford writes.

A 4.5 Sydney Morning Herald story has re-reported that Steven Soderbergh has shot and assembled The Last Time I Saw Michael Gregg, “an entertaining comedy — laugh-out-loud funny at times — about a theatre company staging Chekhov’s Three Sisters.” He did it as a side project while directing the Sydney Theatre Company play Tot Mom. The first report was posted on 1.6.10.

That Red Letter Media guy with the growly, lazy-tongue, consonant-swallowing voice who posted that Phantom Menace-destroying video critique on 12.10.09 has posted a new one — this time eviscerating Attack of the Clones. You’re not a man if you don’t hate George Lucas.

Chris Nolan‘s Inception (Warner Bros., 7.16) “may be Hollywood’s first existential heist movie,” reports L.A. Times profiler Geoff Boucher in a 4.4 set-visit piece. “And though that may not sound like typical fare for the air-conditioning months, Warners and Legendary Pictures are banking on the movie catching on as a brainy Mission: Impossible by way of The Matrix.

“The globe-trotting movie may have had its subconscious baggage packed by Sigmund Freud, in other words, but it also carries a passport stamped by Ian Fleming. DiCaprio says Nolan is the perfect director to turn that unlikely combination into a July hit.

“‘Complex and ambiguous are the perfect way to describe the story,’ DiCaprio said in a recent phone interview. ‘And it’s going to be a challenge to ultimately pull it off. But that is what Chris Nolan specializes in. He has been able to convey really complex narratives that work on a multitude of different layers simultaneously to an audience and make it entertaining and engaging throughout.

“You look at Insomnia or Memento, these movies are working on so many different levels. That’s his expertise; it’s what he does best, as a matter of fact.”

As I said a few weeks ago, if Inception pays off even half as well as people are hoping it might it’s an automatic Best Picture contender, in part as a make-up for the Dark Knight snub.

“Not since Clark Kent changed in a phone booth has there been an instant image makeover to match Barack Obama‘s in the aftermath of his health care victory,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich. “‘He went from Jimmy Carter to F.D.R. in just a fortnight,’ said one of the Game Change authors, Mark Halperin, on MSNBC. ‘Look at the steam in the man’s stride!’ exclaimed Chris Matthews. ‘Is it just me, or does Barack Obama seem different since health care passed?’ wrote Peter Beinart in The Daily Beast, which, like The Financial Times, ran an illustration portraying the gangly president as a newly bulked-up Superman.

“What a difference winning makes — especially in America. Whatever did (or didn’t) get into Obama’s Wheaties, this much is certain: No one is talking about the clout of Scott Brown or Rahm Emanuel any more.

“But has the man really changed — or is it just us? Fifteen months after arriving at the White House, Obama remains by far the most popular national politician in the country, even with a sub-50 percent approval rating. And yet he’s also the most enigmatic. While he is in our face more than any other figure in the world, we still aren’t entirely sure what to make of him.

“Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press.

“He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Funny how few people compared George W. Bush to anyone but Hitler and his parents.)

“No wonder that eight major new Obama books are arriving in the coming months, as Howard Kurtz reported in The Washington Post last week. And that’s just counting those by real authors, like Bob Woodward and Jonathan Alter, not the countless anti-Obama diatribes. There’s a bottomless market for these volumes not just because their protagonist remains popular but also because we keep hoping that the Obama puzzle might be cracked once and for all, like the Da Vinci Code.”