Excellent news about David Fincher‘s Se7en coming to Bluray on 9.14. I remember a couple of details about the Los Angeles all-media screening for this 1994 landmark film. I recall that it happened at the Mann Village, and that Don Murphy was there, and that after it ended a couple of guys on the street were imitating Brad Pitt yelling “what’s in the baahhx?”

The Weinstein Co. threw a rooftop party last night for Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine, the time-shifting relationship drama starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. It’s now seven minutes shorter than when it played Sundance 2010. Here’s a quote from my 1.26 Sundance Film Festival review: “[It’s] a pretty good film, or certainly one made by some undeniably talented folks who would rather shoot themselves than make another relationship movie in the same old way.”

Blue Valentine‘s Ryan Gosling and costar Faith Wladkya (who plays Gosling and Michelle Williams’ daughter) doing red-carpet routine at the post-midnight soiree on roof of Cannes’ Hotel Stephanie.

Last night The Wrap‘s Steve Pond posted an amusing summary about the recent Battle of Biutiful. “At the moment, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s film stands as the second most divisive in the short history of indieWIRE’s criticWIRE poll,” he reported, “trailing only Harmony Korine‘s Trash Humpers.

“Among the critics polled, Sasha Stone gave it an A+; Robert Koehler gave it an F. In between: an A, an A-, two C+s, two C-s, and a D+.

“And Anne Thompson, who liked the film quite a bit, was left wondering what its commercial prospects could be: ‘This movie will be lucky to land a micro-distributor, much less Sony Pictures Classics or Focus…a movie like this needs a tsunami of critical praise to draw any audience at all. It will be lucky to pass the $1 million mark in the U.S.’

“In other words, reaction was all over the map. And that’s when things got ugly.”

Meanwhile, the L.A. Times Stephen Zeitchik reported that the Weinstein Company will probably make a deal to distribute Inarritu’s film.

A nice breakfast and a lot of walking around pour moi before settling down with Olivier Assayas five-and-a-half-hour epic (including, I’ve heard, two intermissions) at noon. Backsides will be tested, but I’m told it’s the genuine shit.

Passing scooters cut into the commentary at times, but otherwise well said by L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan and Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips.

After throwing an anger fit over the inexplicable Biutiful hate vented over the last 28 or 30 hours, I’ve come to accept that the naysayers are just too numerous and persistent to push back against. Just a feeling that began to sink in about an hour ago.

I’m finally watching David Robert Mitchell‘s Myth of the American Sleepover — about a half-hour in — and it’s clearly as sharply cut and well-observed as SXSW reviews have claimed. Nothing feels written or faked. Each and every scene has a natural ease and honesty.

But if I was under fire and taking cover in Afghanistan, I’m wondering which of these kids, if they were also there, would have the cojones to shoot back like Val Kilmer did in Heat? They all seem so passive, so low-energy whatever. They’re all about whim and instinct and going with dreamy feelings. That’s the realm and the psychology, of course, but what is life at any age without tests of character in hairy (or at least semi-hairy) situations? You know, like with Richard Dreyfuss and the Pharoahs?

Fair Game director Doug Liman, who arrived in Cannes last night, did an American Pavillion q & a about two hours ago with USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican. In the clip below he talks about his reasons for casting Naomi Watts as outed CIA spy Valerie Plame, above and beyond physical resemblance.

Factual and emotional truths were the things he adhered to above all, he said. He decided firmly against using any Oliver Stone-like speculation or invention. And he didn’t try to emulate the tone or pacing or mood of any previous Washington, D.C.-based fact thriller (i.e., All The President’s Men) as he began filming, he said, although he acknowledged that stylistic influences have a way of seeping in regardless.

He mentioned to me before the interview began that a hush-hush earlybird screening of Fair Game (i.e., an opportunity to let numerous journalists who will have flown the coop by the time of Thursday morning’s press screening to see it) was out due to festival rules about competition films.

Fatigue and whatnot prevented my seeing Lucy Walker‘s Countdown Zero on my flu-recovery day (i.e., Sunday, 5.16) . I’d try again if there was a makeup screening. For some reason the premise didn’t kick in personally until a director friend mentioned a few weeks ago that it’s all but certain that terrorists will one day get hold of a nuclear device. And all of a sudden that feeling was there.

I did a ten-minute chat late this morning with Inside Job director Charles Ferguson. It happened at the semi-outdoor (i.e., ceilinged) atelier on the Majestic Beach. Weak sound, so-so photography, decent questions (especially the one about whether some of his rich-banker subjects may have agreed to speak to him because Ferguson himself is a rich guy). Here’s my original review.

I began feeling more and more angry yesterday afternoon and evening as it became increasingly evident that a significant percentage of effete critics (i.e., not necessarily a majority) had come down negatively upon Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful, an immensely sad and highly poetic little film that needs all the intelligent support it can get. And yet certain dweeb types have, it seems, gotten together and decided to diminish it.

Last night the Indiewire team sent out an e-mail stating that the two critical favorites so far are Mike Leigh‘s Another Year (which I’ve managed not to see — sorry) and Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job (which I admire greatly), and in so doing obviously declared in blunt, Western Union-style fashion that Biutiful was not a favorite.

I interpreted this as an effort to intimidate the Cannes community into thinking that their hip film connoisseur status will be threatened if they put Biutiful at the top of their lists. The Indiewire guys e-polled a bunch of critics a few hours earlier, and had sized things up and concluded that relatively few critics had gotten behind Biutiful, or perhaps were on the fence about it or insufficiently ardent or whatever. However you want to slice it flatly declaring that a film as rich and strong as Biutiful is not critically favored on the very day that it has screened is basically an attempt by elite know-it-alls who live in a cloistered realm to prod or goad others into getting with the anti-Biutiful program.

I despise this kind of Stalinoid bullying. I despise it because I know that Biutiful is a landmark film, and that it’s easily one of the strongest I’ve seen in Cannes this year, and that people who go around tut-tutting and pooh-poohing it for the usual reasons that they flog Inarritu (i.e., his films are emotional wave experiences that are overly tricky, calculated or overly strategized, or are simply too much of a stacked deck and generally not believable) are, in my mind, coming from a kind of stifled and constipated place.

Last night I was called a “tragedy” and “pig-ignorant” and “sad” and “lame” and so on by Glenn Kenny and a small team of like-minded thugs for having dissed Abbas Kiarostami‘s Copie Conforme (a.k.a., Certified Copy). In their eyes I was guilty of two offenses. The primary was having said that while I appreciated the purity of mood and technique and mise en scene in Kiarostami’s latest, I found it to be essentially an entombed and lifeless exercise. The secondary was in having used terms that weren’t properly referenced or fully considered enough, or were deemed too hot-dog plain.

What Kenny and others on this thread meant is that there is a Code of Film Dweeb Thought & Behavior, and one of the boldfaced proclamations (found on page 39) states that respected directors from Middle Eastern nations who make highly refined “art for art’s sake” films must always be spoken of in hushed reverent terms and cannot be faulted for the sin of lifelessness, particularly during important cultural gatherings like the Cannes Film Festival.

If you defy this edict and talk about how cinema feels and plays in plain terms — the terms by which most people perceive and absorb movies — Film Dweebs will go Defcon 5 and use whatever withering retorts and diminishments they can think of. Same thing if you dare to speak bluntly and disapprovingly of Douglas Sirk, another Dweeb God.

Film Dweebs are invested in a culture that obviously flourishes online (obviously a great thing) and which holds roll calls at the main film festivals, which act as a kind of professional and cultural life raft, but it is an insular culture protected by a moat and attack dogs (i.e., uglies like Filmbrain) and thick castle walls, and that dreaded substance referred to in some quarters as “everyday hotdog-eating reality” is not permitted inside.

I fell deeply in love with Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys here a couple of years ago. That was okay with the Dweebs, of course, and I certainly wasn’t savagely attacked for this because, cutting to the chase, Ceylan belongs to the same elite fraternity as Kiarostami.

But the basic rule stands — i.e., Cannes is a major mecca for Dweebs because it not only focuses worldwide attention upon their passions and whimsies but is one of the few occasions or platforms from which they can really strut their stuff, toot their horns, beat their chests and go nuts for pure-exercise films like Copie Confirme.

One should never argue about religion or politics, it is commonly said, because they’re highly sensitive issues — tethered to primal, deeply cherished beliefs and extra-sensitive emotional nerve endings. You will always get into arguments that you regret, and speak more heatedly and hurtfully than you intended.

The ugliest brawls on this site have come from the words of ardent fanatics and true believers, and what are Film Dweebs if not an amalgam of politics (i.e., looking to fortify and sustain their ranks as long as members have demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Film Dweeb favorites and concepts) and religion and a kind of aesthetic fanaticism? It explains why these discussions are so rank with contempt and disdain and flying spittle.

Kenny can call me a tragedy if he wants. But I despise his despising and general lack of civility when such matters arise. It is genuinely unattractive.

I’ve said before that I’ve been onto Glenn and his cloistered kind for a long time, in part due to having suffered under Dweeb rule and their monk dictums, which is to say there was a period during my early struggling days in journalism when I had to grovel at their feet and speak very carefully in their presence in order to survive. I obviously relate to and feel more aligned in many if not most respects to Dweebs now than I do to the vulgarians at the other end of the scale, but calling a spade a spade as far as the Dweeb agenda is concerned feels awfully satisfying on this end.