I’m pretty sure this Kevin Pollak bit — i.e., Albert Brooks telling the Aristocrats joke — wasn’t in The Aristocrats. Pollak is amazing. The voice isn’t exactly like Brooks’ but the vowels and inflections are just right. “Whatever, I’m fine..I’ll be in therapy. This is what we do…Helen, you couldn’t be more fired than you are now…I’d kill your family if I knew them…I got nothin’, I’m spent.”

Somebody in Criterion’s editorial department has published a q & a with producer Curtis Tsui, the subject being Tsui’s recent work on Criterion’s upcoming Paths of Glory Bluray. The project led Tsui to visit the rural English home of the late Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director. Tsui is “annoyingly coy” (his own words) when asked to physically describe the house and grounds, but by mentioning an annual three-day arts festival thrown on the estate by Kubrick’s widow Christiane, he provides the geographical location.

I’ve known for decades that Kubrick’s home was near the town of St. Albans, about 22 miles north of London. The website for the Childwickbury Arts Festival provides a map with an icon pinpointing the approximate spot. But when you paste the address — Childwickbury House, St. Albans, Hertfordshire, AL3 6JX, England — into Google Maps, you get a slightly different location to the south.

Tsui mentions a video clip of a November 1957 interview between Mike Wallace and Paths of Glory producer-star Kirk Douglas that he wanted to include on the disc. He couldn’t manage this (“the piece was impossible to land,” he says) but there’s a link to a University of Texas at Austin website that hosts the video. Tsui calls the interview kind of “mind-blowing,” explaining that “the types of questions that Wallace tosses out would catch almost anyone off guard and would never be allowed by a protective publicist today, and it’s really pretty stunning to see Douglas thinking on his feet and parrying those blows like a total pro.”

If you want mind-blowing, consider this quote from Wallace’s introduction: “Just the day before our interview, Mr. Douglas had completed shooting on The Vikings for which he had grown his hair long and he hadn’t yet had the chance to see his barber.” In other words Wallace is not only mindful of the regimented, bordering-on-military approach to men’s hair styles in 1957, but feels a need to actually prepare the audience for the shock of seeing Douglas’s coif, which is maybe a tiny bit longer and fuller than an average haircut worn by a typical Man in a Gray Flannel Suit. Lockstep conformity was the rule among urban male professionals of the ’50s, but Wallace’s remark borders on the absurd.

The other half-comical aspect is a pitch for Phillip Morris cigarettes that Wallace delivers before doing the Douglas interview:

You could call George Gallo‘s Middle Men a kind of crime comedy except it isn’t funny — Giovanni Ribisi‘s hyper performance kills any instinct you might have to laugh at anything in this film — so I don’t know what to call it. I know that after it was over it felt sublime not to be in the presence of actors shouting and sweating and doing lines and smoking and screaming at each other and waving guns around. God!

Middle Men is kinda like Goodfellas but with the emphasis lever turned all the way up, and despite agreeable performances from Luke Wilson, James Caan and Kevin Pollak, this is the central problem. It’s too cranked up. Which, in my book, means it’s all about the less well-known cast members (i.e., everyone who isn’t Wilson, Caan and Pollak) “acting” instead of being. Which gives you a headache after a while.

In all walks of life people of any intelligence usually dial themselves down. Whatever people are feeling or seeking or angry about or whatever, they’ll always turn their 9 or 10 feelings down to 4 or 5 or 6 at the highest. The only people who don’t understand that calm or restrained behavior will always work better than fierce emotionalism are idiots or druggies or people with thyroid issues, and who wants to spend 110 minutes with that kind?

What’s interesting, of course, is that while real-life people usually dial it down, the facts about who and what they are eventually leak out in little ways, and that’s what gives you the willies — those “tells,” those unintentional secretions of truth.

This sort of thing is a lot more subtle, of course, than some hyper, bearded, drugged-out, cigarette-smoking monkey screaming and spraying saliva as he pokes the hero in the chest and blows smoke in his face and whatnot. But in the eyes of under-talented filmmakers, this kind of thing is more appealing from a cinematic standpoint than the dialed-down behavior I’ve just described. There’s a place for shouting and screaming, but if you do it too much the audience will shut down. And that’s what happens when you’re watching Middle Men. You start saying “lemme outta here.”

It’s mainly Ribisi’s fault. Giovanni effin’ Ribisi. He’s so over-the-top in this thing that I don’t think I want to see him in any kind of film for the next four or five years. Really. I’m going to start make a list of all the films he’s and start figuring out excuses for not seeing them.

(l. to r.) Middle Man costar Kelsey Grammer, director and co-wrter George Gallo, producer Christopher Mallick.

Ribisi’s performance is mainly Gallo’s fault, of course. It’s the job of a director to rein the actors in and guide them toward that sweet spot, and Gallo, clearly, hasn’t a clue about how much is enough or too much. I have to figure that Gallo, a somewhat older guy, didn’t want Middle Men to look like it was directed by some decrepit, over-the-hill dude who doesn’t understand the pace of 21st Century cinema and how to reach the ADD crowd by always keeping things cranked, so he decided to turn it on and turn it up and pile on the narration, etc. Some critic said the only thing Middle Men doesn’t have in this respect are pop-up ads.

Look at the above photo of Gallo (center) and Middle Men producer Christopher Mallick, whose actual history with an internet porn-billing service in the ’90s is the basis of the story. Do they not look like waste management guys from North Jersey? They could be sitting around Satriale’s and talking about loan-sharking with Paulie Walnuts. More to the point, they could be associates of Christopher Moltisanti during the making of Cleaver. One look and you know they’re not X-factor types on the level of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. Fuhgedaboutit.

Will Tony Scott‘s Unstoppable turn out better than The Taking of Pelham 123? It looks kick-ass to me, and hail to those that know how to really and truly deliver on these terms. As long as the reason(s) for the train being unstoppable seem logical and reasonable, all will be well. It’ll be total ice cream. You know Scott can do this kind of thing blindfolded with one hand tied.

Last fall I wrote that Pelham 123 should be considered as a Best Picture candidate. And it should have been. So maybe people will consider Unstoppable a bit more seriously in this light. 2010 is looking like a shitty year as we speak so who knows? Shouldn’t there be at least one high-end popcorn movie to round things out?

Will Unstoppable land with a thud? Will it be come to be regarded as the best train movie since Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train or Buster Keaton‘s The General or — the all-time greatest — John Frankenheimer‘s The Train, which used real trains and not a single frame of CGI? Or will it be thrown out with the trash?

When the words gets out that you’re toast and it’s just a matter of time, some people have a tendency to step back a few paces, or turn away and cut off contact. I’d like to think that I’m not one of them, but I’ve seen these responses time and again. One thing’s for sure: Christopher Hitchens is evading nothing in terms of analysis. He’s dealing with it like a man.

When my sister was on her way out with cancer, days or hours from liftoff, my brother (who’s now dead himself) told me he hadn’t visited her in the hospital because “I don’t want to sit in a room and watch her die.” You effing asshole, I thought to myself. It’s not about you, it’s about her.

Death is like walking across a rickety wooden bridge across a huge and deep chasm. It’s not the other side of the chasm that scares you, but grabbing hold of the railing and stepping out and making your way across. People about to do this want people with them, I think. It comforts them that they have people supporting them and telling them in a roundabout way that it’s okay to cross, and that it’s safe and pleasant on the other side.

The MPAA’s decisIon to give an R rating to Yael Hersonski‘s A Film Unfinished (Oscilloscope, 8.18), a respected Holocaust documentary, seems petty and lame. The board reportedly didn’t want minors exposed to two sequences containing frontal nude shots of Warsaw Jews being shoved around by Nazi soldiers. Brilliant!

“In a world where young people are bombarded with meaningless entertainment, it’s unfortunate that a film with real educational and historic value would be denied to them by an organization that is supposed to be working to help them,” Oscilloscope’s Adam Yauch said in a press release.

Throughout the ’90s and into the early aughts I knew, liked and sat down a few times with Richard Sylbert, one of the finest production designers who ever lived. Thinking about Emma Watson ‘s haircut led me to clips of Rosemary ‘s Baby, and then a two-part piece (taken from the RB DVD) about its making, and five or six clips of Sylbert on it. And I was just taking a few moments to think about him. Here are links to part #1 and part #2.

Sylbert discusses this and that decision about Rosemary’s Baby — the New York locations, the writing of the script with Roman Polanski, his advising Polanski to use Charles Grodin to play Dr. Hill, and how this Paramount film, which came out in ’68, was the beginning of the ’70s, in a sense. Sylbert was a wise and perceptive and eloquent man — he knew everyone and everything about 20th Century filmmaking, and knew all the biggest people and their foibles and neuroses, and he always told the greatest tales, and with a great New York voice.

I feel the same way about Emma Watson‘s radical hair removal as John Cassevetes felt about Mia Farrow‘s Vidal Sassoon cut in Rosemary’s Baby — appalled. “The stylist just grabbed the back of my hair and took a whole ponytail of hair out,” Watson tells EW. “It felt amazing.” This is what happens when you let a hairdresser do whatever he wants and you don’t show authority. Those guys will always, always cut a client’s hair shorter, every time.

Elena Kagan has been approved by the U.S. Senate to serve on the Supreme Court, 63 to 37…hooray! Kagan’s sexuality is her own affair and no one’s else’s — it certainly didn’t belong in any discussions about her suitability for the court — but if Andrew Sullivan’s writings about this can be accepted it seems like a fairly significant day for gay people everywhere.

This is actually pretty good, this thing. The creators are Jeff Loveness, Kyle Helf, Luke Sommer, Scott Takeda, Jared Lagroue, Seth Allison. (Kyle Helf sounds like a mixture of kelp and Uriah Heep.) I’m not saying the Social Network team needs a new trailer. The most recent one is quite sharp and effective. But this parody trailer may be stepping out in front as we speak.

Hey, what about letting a few hand-picked, forward-thinking columnists see The Social Network later this month?

Six months ago I saw Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost‘s Catfish (Rogue/Universal, 9.17) at Sundance. It’s “engrossing and certainly reflective of cyber-culture relationship intrigues, but I wasn’t exactly levitating out of my seat,” I wrote. “I also found it a bit curious — the film’s depiction of hinterland culture suggests echoes of American kookery unbound.”

SPOILER WARNING: “During the first 60% of Catfish Nev Schulman — a smart, confident and attractive 24 year old who’s the main protagonist — falls into an intriguing online flirtation with an attractive 20something lady who lives in Michigan. (Or so she says.) Their exchanges become more and more emotional and sensual. Then they become explicitly sexual. And then suddenly things change.”

“Once this sinks in it’s quite clear that Nev is fairly glum — you could even say forlorn. And for me this didn’t quite calculate.

“I asked myself why would a guy in the youthful prime of his life get so invested in a woman he’s never met, and whom he knows only through a gallery of online photos and a series of increasingly erotic e-mails? Who would be naive enough in this day and age to get emotionally caught up in a relationship of this sort?

“This seemed especially curious for a guy who’s clearly smart and good-looking and creative and whatnot, and living in a city like New York with all kinds of hook-up options. I could imagine Clem Kadiddlehopper falling for this. Or an overweight dweeby type with halitosis getting caught up in an online fantasy because he might not have much going on. But a guy like Nev…? Doesn’t figure.”

A trailer that refuses to show an image for 48 seconds is probably up to something good. The film is Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (Miramax, 1.21.11), and you can sense right away that it’s a cut or two above. The news of Guillermo del Toro having produced and co-written is like a five-star review from Consumer Reports. The director is Troy Nixey. The costars are Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison, Alan Dale, Eliza Taylor-Cotter, etc.