It took a visit to the Brooklyn Navy Yard depot last night to learn that my rental car wasn’t stolen — it was towed. $138 bills if I pick it up before 2 pm today, and $276 if I miss the deadline. I tried paying the fine last night, of course, but since the Dollar guy let me have the car last Saturday afternoon without actually signing an agreement (he knows and trusts me and has my debit card and driver’s license info) I had no rental agreement to present as proof of temporary ownership, so they said “no dice.”

So I called the North Bergen Dollar guy this morning and told him to fax over a letter (written on letterhead stationery) stating that I’m authorized to take the car. Except he can’t fax it to the towing office because their fax machine isn’t working, and so far I haven’t been able to find anyone in my neighborhood who has a working fax. As soon as I locate one I’ll call the Dollar guy with a number.

Except I can’t drive the car out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard because it has a flat front-left tire. (That’s why I was towed in the first place, more or less — I parked it yesterday morning in the most acceptable spot I could find on short notice after spotting the flat, but I couldn’t drive all over the place.) So I have to arrange for a AAA truck to meet me at the BNY around noon or 1 pm so he can help with the tire-change. I don’t trust the flimsy car jack with all the ice and snow.

The long and the short is that this episode will eat up the next six or seven hours because after I’m out of the towing lot I’ll have to drive it over to a tire-repair guy in North Bergen — a friend of the Dollar guy — who’s relatively inexpensive. And then wait for the work to be done, etc. And then drive it back to Brooklyn and park the car on the same street where it got towed. I still have to drive down to see a dentist in New Jersey — the original plan — so I can’t return it until that’s done.

“Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland may be the worst film he’s made since Planet of the Apes or the second Batman film,” writes critic Marshall Fine. “He and screenwriter Linda Woolverton have taken the classic story and turned it into a modern action-fantasy film – minus the humor of Carroll, or the absurdity or the heart.”

“Burton isn’t adapting Lewis Carroll‘s stories. Instead, he’s appropriating Carroll’s characters and premise, then telling a different story completely. It’s the kind of fairy tale Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich might make. It’s a movie trapped in a morass of moments that are either meant to stun or to demonstrate how cute this all is.”

I would rather sit through ten viewings of Tim Burton‘s reportedly painful Alice in Wonderland than a single one of Norman Z. McLeod and William Cameron Menzies‘ 1933 Alice in Wonderland, which comes out today on DVD via Universal Home Video. I came to this conclusion after watching three YouTube chapters yesterday. I will never expose myself to this film ever again.

It’s closely based on Lewis Carroll‘s original works (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass), but to my ears the dialogue represents some kind of pinnacle of archness.

Alice in Wonderland is oddly repellent in ways that I’m not sure I can describe, but a terrible foreboding feeling began to build as I watched those episodes yesterday. The vibe it puts out is beyond creepy. The black-and-white images remind me on some level of a childhood nightmare I might have once had. Menzies’ sets are obviously inventive and curiously skewed, but everything else is theatrically leaden. The performances are all “acted” in the most artificial sense imaginable. For this aspect alone Alice may be the most oppressively coy and indigestible film I’ve ever (partly) endured.

Cary Grant‘s brief portrayal of the tearful Mock Turtle is probably the worst emoting he ever did in front of a camera in his life. It’s agonizing. You’re saying to yourself as you watch, “Cut…cut! Just stop it!” W.C. Fields‘ acting as Humpty Dumpty is…well, his usual-usual, but the egg makeup he’s wearing (or which was worn by a stand-in) is grotesque. All you want to do is escape. I haven’t sat through Gary Cooper‘s White Knight performance, and I think it’s better not to.

In his N.Y. Times review, DVD columnist Dave Kehr agrees that it’s “a profoundly creepy experience…not the proto-psychedelic playground of the 1951 Disney animated version, but a distorted, claustrophobic environment populated by menacing, bizarre figures.

“The Mad Hatter (Edward Everett Horton) and March Hare (Charles Ruggles) seem less like lovable eccentrics than recent escapees from Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island, fully capable of exotic, unspeakable acts. The transformation of the howling baby (played by the dwarf actor Billy Barty) into a squealing, squirming flesh-and-blood pig could be an outtake from Tod Browning‘s 1932 Freaks. And the croquet party hosted by the Red Queen (Edna May Oliver) turns into an Ubuesque scramble of authority run amok, in which the terrorized participants (‘Off with their heads!) flail around in violent desperation using actual flamingoes as mallets.”

Kehr then goes into tribute mode over Menzies and his distinctive visual imprint.

“Although Alice in Wonderland originated with McLeod (an unobtrusive studio functionary best remembered for his Marx Brothers vehicles, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers), the dominant creative force appears to have been the brilliant, unclassifiable art director, William Cameron Menzies,” he writes.

“By 1933 Menzies had become known as Hollywood’s leading production designer (a title he is sometimes said to have invented for himself) for his work on elegantly stylized films like Raoul Walsh‘s Thief of Bagdad (1924), starring Douglas Fairbanks, and The Bat (1926), an early dark-old-house mystery directed by Roland West. His work on Gone With the Wind earned him an honorary award at the 1940 Oscars that cited his ‘use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood.”

“But he was also a gifted director in his own right, with a particular interest in the fantastic. His sparse but consistently inventive body of work includes Things to Come, the 1936 British production that was among the first post-apocalyptic science-fiction epics, and the nightmarish Invaders From Mars (1953), in which a young boy discovers that his parents are actually zombies controlled by a Martian spaceship buried in a sandpit near his suburban home.

“As dazzling as today’s digital effects can be (and Mr. Burton’s Cheshire Cat is sure to be memorable), we remain all too aware of how they are accomplished (computers!) for them to possess the seductive sense of mystification that Menzies and McLeod achieve here, using practical techniques derived from Victorian stage magic.

“Menzies’s hand seems evident in almost every frame of Alice in Wonderland, yet his only credit on the film is as the co-author, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, of the screenplay. In those days credits were not union mandated, and it is likely that Menzies, on loan from Fox, would have played down his role in the production so as not to offend his home studio. (According to the AFI Catalog, a Hollywood Reporter item from 1933 stated that Menzies was ‘loaned by Fox to co-direct the ‘trick sequences,’ and an article in The Times from October 1933 notes that “Mr. Menzies made careful scale drawings of each scene in the proposed picture, while Mr. McLeod prepared footnotes showing how Mr. Menzies’s pictorial conceptions could be photographed.”)

“But Menzies might also have relished his role as an authorial eminence grise, exercising his creative power in indirect, elusive ways. It was a part he would play in any number of pictures, including Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. A bit of a Cheshire Cat himself, Menzies fades away, leaving movies as distinctive and mysterious as this Alice behind.”

I’m on my way over to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, hoping against hope that my missing Dollar rental wasn’t stolen but towed. I parked it around 2 pm alongside a snow-covered curb on Montrose Ave. It may have been parked a bit too close to a bus stop. If it hasn’t been towed I’ll have to call 911 and report it stolen. What do rental car companies do when this happens? Do they slap you with stiff penalties? I rented it with a debit card.

I spoke this morning with Greenberg star Ben Stiller inside a semi-quiet restaurant (i.e., not really quiet enough) adjacent to the Waldorf Astoria’s main lobby. It went well, perhaps of my certainty that Stiller delivers the performance of his career in Noah Baumbach‘s intensely granular film about midlife stagnation and L.A. loneliness. No ambiguity in your head means calm and clarity.

Greenberg (Focus Features, 3.19 limited) is easily the most intriguing film of the new year, and more than worth a tumble. It doesn’t exactly “entertain,” and yet it does — it’s just operating in a low-key way that’s almost entirely about observation, and without a single false note. If your girlfriend doesn’t like it (and she may not), you may want to think about dumping her. Seriously. Because Greenberg is about what a lot of 30ish and 40ish people who haven’t achieved fame and fortune are going through, or will go through. It’s dryly amusing at times, but it’s not kidding around.

Greenberg is a fascinating character-driven drama about Roger Greenberg (Stiller), a neurotic 41 year-old who’s caretaking his younger brother’s Los Angeles home while the brother and his family are on a vacation in Vietnam. It’s mainly about a curious attract-repel relationship between Greenberg and the brother’s gangly, emotionally vulnerable assistant (Greta Gerwig), and an amiable ex-musician friend (Rhys Ifans) with whom Greenberg shares various confessions/reflections.

Things don’t “happen” as much as we learn more and more about Greenberg’s internals. The basic drill is that he’s become stuck in a moderately unhappy fall-back position in his life, and is close to astonished that things haven’t turned out as well as he thought they might when he was younger. He blew a shot at being in a successful rock band in his 20s, we’re told, and is now working as a carpenter in Brooklyn. Not miserable but neurotic and fickle, and certainly not content.

Is Greenberg funny? In a LQTM sense, yeah, but to most people LQTM isn’t what they go to movies for. I do, however. I was quietly smirking at Greenberg the whole time, having a quiet little blast with it. And then it grew on me the second time. I didn’t realize how sublime the ending is until I saw it again. That’s my fault.

What is clear from the start is that for Stiller’s Greenberg, carpentry won’t do. He’s too much of an artist-searcher complainer, and it’s not enough to anesthetize the demons. The film reminds that when you have a hungry visionary Bengal tiger inside you, you’d best express it or the tiger will eat you up from within. That or you’ll start collapsing bit by bit.

I know that tune myself. My main job in my early to mid 20s was trimming trees, which didn’t work for me either. At all. I was fucking around on the margins as a party-hound and a rock-band drummer and a chaser of skirt. And the Bengal tiger began to growl more and more loudly — let me out! — and I began to see myself as a failure because I wasn’t trying hard enough to make that happen.

I’d told Stiller earlier that I was impressed with how deeply Greenberg just settles in with the manner and psychology of Stiller’s character without feeling the need to go all “story” on the audience. A genuinely ballsy move on Noah’s part. The humor is so subdued and embedded within situation and milieu that it’s not humor — it’s John Cassevetes-like introspection. I’m obviously saying that with respect.

Stiller’s performance, in any event, seems to me like a landmark-type thing — a seriously ego-free inhabiting of antsy-quirk neuroticism. Being, not acting, and certainly with any audience comfort-winks. A breakthrough of some kind.

If there’s a rowdy commercial horse laugh in Greenberg, I missed it — and bravo to that. I didn’t “laugh” when I saw it, but I was constantly LQTM-ing by way of surprisingly intimate recognition. I felt that I was communing in part with my late brother, Tony. Greenberg is nothing if not relentlessly itself, and never seems to go for schtick of any kind. Personal recognition laughter, as most of us know, is never “hah-hah-hah.” As Michael O’Donoghue once said, making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.

“I think you connected in the same way with the movie that we all did while making it,” Stiller replied in an e-mail — eloquently, I thought. “I too recognize Greenberg, and I have to say I’ve never had an experience like this, where a character was so specifically written, and I ended up feeling a connection with that aspect of myself. I actually feel protective of him — or maybe that aspect of people I love who have not had the good fortune to have outward success or acknowledgement in this world. It can be very painful, just to get through the days. To get past your own self imposed barriers, that are all very real.

“I feel very fortunate to have had this experience, and I love Noah for it. He is a truly good person, who as you said did something brave in movies now — allowing the character’s real, incremental growth, to be the story. I learned a lot from him.”

During last Saturday’s panel discussion of the withered state of film criticism following a screening of Gerald Peary‘s For The Love of Movies, notoriously snarly critic Richard Schickel (formerly of Time) was asked if he ever reads criticism online. “Why would you do that?,” he replied. “I don’t actually read many reviews. I never did. But I’m not going to go around looking for Harry Knowles. I mean, look at that person! Why would anybody…pay the slightest attention to anything he said? He’s a gross human being.”

Critic/documentarian Richard Schickel; AICN’s Harry Knowles

Besides Schickel the panel included Vogue‘s John Powers, former L.A. Weekly and current NPR critic Ella Taylor, former Christian Science Monitor critic David Sterritt and Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer. The talk was moderated by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson. It happened at the Billy Wilder theatre inside Westwood’s Armand Hammer Museum.

“Watching all these kind of earnest people discussing the art or whatever the hell it is of criticism, all that, it just made me so sad,” Schickel remarked. “You mean they have nothing else to do? I don’t know honestly the function of reviewing anything.

“I remember talking to Paul Schrader once about how when he came into movies, he thought he entered what was the natural state of movies, which is you got to make Taxi Driver,” he recalled. “You got to make all these weird, interesting movies and Hollywood wanted you to do it and it was only when it began to stop he realized he was living in the historical aberration.

“And for a lot of film critics, we are living in the historical aberration probably in the history of the arts where you got to make a lot of money, write about an art form at its peak and actually not only have it at its peak, but the public in general was going to that art form for ways of understanding the world. It’s not that way now.”

I’d love to attend Friday night’s Spirit Awards presentation at L.A. Live in Los Angeles, but, as I noted on 2.17, it seems excessive to throw down $600 or $700 bills (plane fare, car rental, incidentals) to that end. Plus I never get invited to any of those pre-Oscar agent parties in the hills. Plus I just watch the show on Sundays and live-blog, which I could do from Prague or Santiago if I had to.

So I’m thinking instead about attending Movieline‘s Oscar-viewing soiree at 92YTribeca. Maybe. If I can be assured there won’t be too much yappity-yap from the hosts (Michelle Collins, Sarah Benincase, Sara Schaefer), and if there’s a good spot to live-blog from (table, semi-comfortable stool or chair, nearby wall outlet). Otherwise screw it — I’ll just watch it from home with the cats.

Two or three recent articles in which military vets have challenged The Hurt Locker‘s accuracy have been counter-balanced to some extent by a 2.28 ABC News article — co-authored by Martha Raddatz, Richard Coolidge and Joel Siegel — that quotes two former bomb-deactivation specialists. Their view is that certain events depicted in the film are actually fairly dead-on.

Marine Tim Colomer, who de-activated “more than 150 bombs in Iraq” as a Marine explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) technician in 2006 and ’07, says that The Hurt Locker “took me back to Iraq almost immediately…it was tantamount to being there.” And Marine Staff Sgt. Gabriel Burkman, wounded twice during his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that a scene criticized by some vets — i.e., Jeremy Renner‘s Sgt. James removing his bomb suit before a defusing — is grounded in reality. “Sometimes the bomb suit is not applicable,” he says, “and some team leaders won’t use it.”

Colomer “says the movie takes some ‘artistic license,’ but he calls the bomb scenes realistic — and acknowledges that he took off his bomb suit once in a while, just like Renner’s character. ‘You are so slowed down in that bomb suit, especially if you’re getting shot at or there’s indirect fire — you can’t afford to be that slow,’ he says.”

Earlier Hurt Locker military-critique articles have struck some observers as curiously timed and most likely indicative of a take-down strategy on someone’s part.

And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg reported yesterday that “over the past few days, several L.A.-based rabbis — either on their own initiative or at someone else’s urging — have written articles in which they describe Inglourious Basterds as a modern-day retelling of the story of Purim, the Jewish holiday which began Sunday and continues through today, and urging people to vote for it on their Oscar ballots (which are due on Tuesday — i.e., tomorrow).

Remember the excitement that accompanied Robert Harris and James Katz‘s 1991 restoration of Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus? Called the “most extensive film restoration in history, painstakingly reconstructed from decades-old negative and color separation prints, at a cost of nearly $1 million,” etc.? The sumptuous detail of a large costume epic (set in Biblical times but not the least bit Biblical in story or theme) shot in Super Technirama 70 and all that?

It’s now nearly 20 years later and guess what? The 2001 Criterion DVD version of this restored epic, which I happened to buy at Barnes and Noble yesterday, doesn’t look very good when you play it on a Bluray player and watch it on a 42″ HDTV plasma (i.e., my own). It looks okay at times, and at other times vaguely shitty — weak, not sharp enough, second-tierish.

And yet the same disc looked fine when I played it on my old 36″ Sony flatscreen. The problem, I’m told, is the Bluray player, which tends to bring out weaknesses on standard DVDs that don’t show up when you play them on a regular DVD player. So basically I’ve pissed away the dough that I bought the Criterion DVD with, and I’m not happy.

And I’m not sure I’ll be all that happy either when the Spartacus Bluray from Universal Home Video comes out on 5.25. If it’s anything like their 1998 DVD, which looks pathetic — i.e., washed-out color and a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio framing for a film intended to be shown at a 2.2 to 1 — it’ll obviously be a problem.

What needs to happen, of course, is for Criterion to produce its own Spartacus Bluray. But this can’t occur because Criterion doesn’t have the Spartacus home-video rights any more. Universal owns them, and they’re not about to let Criterion show them how the film should really look (corporate egos and all that) so forget it. Which means that all that incredibly difficult and super-costly work on the ’91 Spartacus restoration is basically a thing of memory. It would be nice if the full lustre of that restoration is revealed by the Universal Bluray, but it’s not very likely.

Who doesn’t despise President Obama‘s stated dreamscape belief in the notion of bipartisan support for health care reform, or more particularly the fantasy of Republicans having the slightest interest in allowing the less-well-offs to receive comprehensive health care at more affordable rates?

Apart from the general venality of Republican positions on this matter, there’s nothing quite as contemptible as the inability of Democrats to achieve what they claim they want to achieve by whatever means necessary. Everyone loathes ineffectualness and flaccidity.