After complaining about the murky image projected during last evening’s Sherlock Homes showing at the Regal Union Square Stadium 14, HE reader Gordon 27 replied that the RUSS “is the worst chain theater in NYC…everything they do nickel-and-dimes their customers, right down to the weak lamps in the projectors.” He acknowledged that “every chain does this to some extent” but claimed that the RUSS is far guiltier than most.

Does this plex deserve the ugly crown? Opinions, refutations, further indictments, etc.

The RUSS is probably the worst I’ve ever been to in my life — worse than the AMC Empire on 42nd Street. The projection and sound levels are substandard, to put it gently. The rows don’t allow for sufficient leg room. The seats are too small. And the people who attend are largely riff-raff. Partly retirement-age Jews, partly screaming kids, partly nice couples, partly street homies, partly middle-aged, sullen-faced X-factor types, and partly wild African dogs from the Serenghetti, shouting and roaming around and eyeballing and “hey yo”-ing each other and carrying massive buckets of popcorn and super-sized cokes sloshing over the rim and onto the carpet and plastic floors…and I’m paying money to experience this?

If my only choice was to watch films at the Regal Union Square Stadium 14 or wait three or four months for DVD, I wouldn’t even think about it. Going to a place like this is torture. As soon as you walk in you’re thinking, “I’ve gotta get outta here.”

Perhaps we could take this opportunity to list the other exceptionally awful theatres in NY, LA and other burghs. Maybe we can come up with a top ten list of some kind.

I still haven’t seen Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, even though it opened on 12.25 in NY and LA. I was invited to some LA press screenings in November but none at all in NYC. I guess I’ll just pay to see it sometime this week unless, of course, someone would like to send me a screener.

Johnny Depp and Jude Law, in any event, have released the following statements regarding their involvement the film (i.e., having been hired to complete Heath Ledger‘s role in the wake of his death in early ’08).

Deep: “Maestro Gilliam has made a sublime film. Wonderfully enchanting and beautiful, The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus is a uniquely ingenious and captivating creation; by turns wild, thrilling and hilarious in all its crazed, dilapidated majesty. Pure Gilliam magic!”

Who edits this stuff? It’s all well and good to say what you feel at a testimonial dinner, but when you’re on the page you need to do it with brevity and restraint, less being more, etc.

“It was an honor to represent Heath,” Depp continues. “He was the only player out there breathing heavy down the back of every established actors neck with a thundering and ungovernable talent that came up on you quick, hissing rather mischievously with that cheeky grin, ‘hey…get on out of my way boys, i’m coming through…” and does he ever! Heath is a marvel,

“And Christopher Plummer goes beyond anything he’s ever done, Waits as the Devil is a God, Lily Cole and Andrew Garfield, the very foundation, are spectacular, Verne Troyer simply kicks ass and as for my other cohorts, Colin Farrell and Jude Law, they most certainly did Master Ledger very proud, I salute them.

“Though the circumstances of my involvement are extremely heart-rending and unbelievably sad, I feel privileged to have been asked aboard to stand in on behalf of dear Heath.”

Law: “I have always loved Terry Gilliam’s films. Their heart, their soul, their mind…always inventive, touching, funny and relevant. When I got the call, it was a double tug. I liked Heath very much as a man and admired him as an actor. To help finish his final piece of work was a tribute I felt compelled to make. To help Terry finish his film was an honor paid to a man I adore. I had a great time on the job. Though we were all there in remembrance, Heath’s heart pushed us with great lightness to the finish.”

I’ve finally received a copy of Peter Biskind‘s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 1.12.10), and have spent a total of 20 minutes of dancing through it and dwelling here and there. It’s a pleasure to read just for the quality of the writing and editing. Well-shaped sentences that are no longer than they need to be, and paragraphs that hatch and develop a thought or a mood or a theme, sometimes all three at the same time.

And I can tell right away that it’s been written as a kind of tragedy, or rather that Beatty’s career (as opposed to his life) has ended up that way, certainly over the last ten years, and that Biskind, being a diligent reporter and a sage fellow, has gone down that path because that’s where this beastly endeavor has taken him. Biskind has been on it since at least ’04.

“Finishing this book was like recovering from a lingering illness, although admittedly one that I had brought in myself,” Biskind writes at the start of “Warrenology: An Introduction,” about ten pages before the narrative begins.

Is “tragedy” too harsh or dismissive a term to use about Beatty’s gradual withdrawal from the hey-hey since Town and Country? Would it be fairer or kinder to say his lack of productivity (i.e., acting career over, not having directed a film) and his failure to become another Clint Eastwood has been simply due to his having gradually scared more and more would-be collaborators away because he’s so cautious and guarded and slow-moving and fickle? Would it be wrong to say that the regrettable lesson of Beatty’s late career has been (take your pick) if you cruise you lose, time is shorter than you think, shake it when you can, and keep dancing until you’re dead?

In the final chapter, on page 547, Biskind writes the following: “It is shocking to imagine a star as bright as Beatty was, as famous and powerful, and as gifted, being virtually unemployable.

“There’s no shortage of reasons that explain why filmmakers go into decline. In America, at least, the movie business has always been a young man’s game. Directing is hard, as physically and mentally demanding as any job on the planet. Filmmakers grow old and get tired like everyone else, while their audience seems to remain perennially young. Once directors become successful, they too often enter a bubble of privelege and lose whatever instincts enabled them to touch their audiences in the first place. As Billy Friedkin once put it, ‘When you take your first tennis lesson, your career is over.’

“‘It’s very hard to keep productive,’ Toback continues. ‘It’s very hard to keep the level up for the game, for the big fight, for the World Series, for the Super Bowl, and still have a life. It’s that game that people always want to talk about when they talk about talent. And when you put it out there in the world of insults and acrimony and envy and lividity, it has trouble surviving.’

“Perhaps it’s not Beatty’s last decade that makes people wonder,” Biskind writes, “but the years he spent, so unproductively, chasing skirt. Perhaps it’s the fact that Beatty turned down so many roles, in so many films and missed so many opportunities…he seemed to do so much less than someone with his gifts could have done. Perhaps it’s that he always seemed so emotionally closed, so self-protective that, as Mab Goldman put it, he was unable to ‘stand naked in the storm of life.'”

There’s one aspect of Sherlock Holmes that deserves favor. Robert Downey, Jr. has assembled a Holmes personality apparently based on his own personal situation as he made the film — a bright and gifted fellow who’s “not there” in a kind of Dylanesque sense, and therefore has a certain something or other that holds the tiller steady. A certain fuck-all integrity? Determination? A willingness to succumb to corporate corruption?

The brightness levels in this shot of Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes weren’t evident at tonight’s 7 pm screening at the Regal Union Square Stadium 14. The image was much darker.

I only know that Downey has figured out a way of “being” in this godawful film that holds together on some level, and that in place of exuding anything real or substantial (and what actor would attempt this under these ridiculous circumstances?) Downey ambles through with a kind of rock-solid aloofitude that…well, kind of works.

Which is to say a kind of attitude dance in which he’s a 40ish fellow who goes “eewhh, eewhh” and “doop-poop-pee-doop” and “who, me?” no matter what happens or who says what or what deathly dull villain with brownish or missing teeth is threatening him. He’s playing dry, bent, whimsical, unperturbed. He’s never been more boring, and it was the only way he could have gone, given the stakes and the salary and the bullshit levels.

And Jude Law, as Holmes’ soul mate, minder and platonic lover Watson, is playing admonishing, dryly perturbed and always patient. And away they go down the muddy London lane. Enjoy their fey verbal ping-pong or not, but if you don’t (and I didn’t, not really) then you’re dead and so is the movie. Because there’s nothing else to hold onto. Well-dressed demonic evildoers…I’m sorry, did somebody say “well-dressed demonic evildoers”? The mucky 19th Century period atmosphere is all skank and slime and dust and splinters and squalor — I’m putting myself to sleep just remembering what it was like.

Sherlock Holmes is a corporate disease movie — a period put-on concept that reaches out from the screen like a grinning Irish banshee that surrounds you with frigid air and induces a gradual comatose state. I sat there like a mental patient, but a thinking one. Within 15 minutes I was considering an early bail-out. I finally manned up and left around the 70-minute mark.

Actually, forget the banshee. I felt as if I was strapped to a gurney with a plastic tube snaking out from the screen with poison slowly feeding into my arm from an IV drip. I was sinking, dying…going under. I hated the film, yes, but mainly myself for having paid money to see it at the godawful Hell Pit known as the Regal Union Square Stadium 14. Myself and my son Dylan, scrunched into the rear row of the front section with an older couple to my left and two women to their left who were sick and tired of my coming and going (especially the final time). And I didn’t blame them.

I can’t remember any reviews that have commented on Philippe Rousselot‘s desaturated-color cinematography. It’s awfully murky and dark — seriously underlit, I mean — and quite oppressive for that. Maybe the brightness levels (i.e., foot lamberts) in the Regal projector showing the film had been deliberately turned down. Theatre chains do this, I know. All I know is that I was muttering to myself, “This godawful thing doesn’t even look good…I can’t even cruise along on the craft of it, for God’s sake.”

This isn’t Wild Wild West, but it’s a similar kind of travesty.

What kind of animals throw loose trash on the street? People don’t do this in Santa Monica or Brentwood or Silver Lake. Or in North Bergen, for that matter. Or in Astoria or Spaha (i.e., Spanish Harlem). And East Williamsburg is thought to be a neighborhood on the upswing.

Near corner of Montrose and Bushwick — Sunday, 12.27, 4:05 pm.

Poor Nine came in eighth place this weekend, beaten by The Princess and the Frog but ahead of Did You Hear About The Morgans? It made $5,544,000, or an average of $3926 at 1412 situations. And this just doesn’t seem right. It feels like an overly harsh verdict.

a Criterion Bluray frame-grab of Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Felllini’s 8 1/2

Nine is a reasonably decent, sometimes better-than-decent musical with its own scheme and attitude and (for me) a pair of ace performances from Daniel Day Lewis and Marion Cotillard. It’s not Cabaret, Sweet Charity or Chicago, but the terms “not half bad” and “moderately appealing” could definitely be applied. And yet it’s been clubbed right out of the gate. My heart goes out.

I know, I know — that’s the world we live in. There’s no such thing as a decently made, moderately appealing film making decent or moderate coin. For the most part movies are either instant superhits or they die like dogs — damn few seem to manage a middle road to success. It wasn’t “right” that Steven Soderbergh‘s Che died either. Scores of films obviously fail to cut it theatrically every year. Theatrical is a very costly, very tough sudden-death game.

One of my initial reactions to Nine is that it was ballsy of Harvey Weinstein to produce it in the first place, as he had to realize from the get-go that a film about Federico Fellini‘s “beautiful confusion” (i.e., the initial title of 8 1/2) wouldn’t play with the older Eloi mom-and-pop mall crowd in the same way that Chicago did. That elite mid ’60s Euro-vibe with black shades and cigarettes and coastal Italian villages isn’t a place they call home.

I missed Steven Mikulan‘s 12.23 Wrap story that claimed the evil Polish dwarf is almost out of the woods regarding that 31 year-old unlawful sexual conduct beef. So much anti-Polanski hate and vitriol was expended on this site last September by the pitchforkers that it seems appropriate to address it again before the year concludes. Nothing is over until it’s over, of course, but if I were a pitchforker…

“The most important news about Roman Polanski has been nearly lost in the swirl of stories this week about the state appellate court’s rejection of his motion to dismiss the 32-year-old rape charges against him,” Miklulan wrote.

“It’s almost all over. Polanski is nearly home free.

“In rejecting the case, the court of appeal also strongly suggested that the Superior Court release the auteur on the basis of the time he’s already served behind bars.

“As TheWrap reported Monday, the court suggested that he can remedy his plight by formally requesting L.A. Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza to hand down his sentence in absentia. That would then allow Espinoza to sentence Polanski to the time he’s already served in two jails – the 42-day stretch in Chino back in 1977, and the recent 70-day staycation in a jail near Zurich.

“Bingo: get out of jail, and out from under a three-decade-long cloud of scandal.

“What’s not been measured yet is how foolish District Attorney Steve Cooley will look before all the winking and nodding is over in this messy, sordid case.

“Had he not forced the issue by re-issuing a warrant for Polanski’s arrest, none of this would have happened. And Cooley probably made that move because, as legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote in the New Yorker, Cooley only moved to have Polanski arrested by Swiss authorities last September “because [Polanski] seemed to have a real possibility of winning in the courts.”

“Now an appeals court has drawn the director a map out of the legal maze he’s been in.

“To be fair, Cooley has only been working with the disastrous case that was left to him by the late Judge Laurence Rittenband, a publicity-seeking jurist who, in 1977 and 1978, attempted to stage-manage the public actions of Polanski’s attorney and prosecutor as though they were actors in a dinner-theater production.”

Remember all that ugliness three months ago? “There seems to be something almost fetishistic about this case for some people,” I wrote at the time. “A weirdly lopsided and enduring sense of vengeance that the haters feel a need to pursue. There’s something oddly primal going on here. Some kind of metaphor they’re reading into it.”

I’m not trying to tweak the haters but Mikulan did report what he reported and things do seem to have gone Polanski’s way. What are they feeling about this? All that pent-up rage stretching back three-plus-decades and hater justice coming so close, and then phfffft…what happened?

I wonder what Polanski getting a get-out-of-jail card and avoiding extradition (if and when this finally happens) will do to Marina Zenovich‘s Polanski-doc sequel? She was in Switzerland and on the case just after the arrest happened three months ago. It would have been much more dramatic for the film’s purposes if RP had been flown back to the States and had faced whatever awaited.

“Hugely expensive, extravagant, lavish and a clear statement of what’s possible when great vision is united with the means to deliver the unprecedented, Avatar would never exist without capitalism. James Cameron has not merely innovated or improved — he invents to create something wonderful and new. In other words, he has done exactly what the high priests of capitalism — from Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton to Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan — have always preached: allow daring, vision and capital to find one other and the extraordinary can emerge” — AbilTo CEO (and non-film critic) Michael B. Laskoff writing for the Huffington Post.

Soft non-conclusive reading — that’s what you’d have to call Peter Wilson‘s profile of artist and Nowhere Boy director Sam Wood in The Australian. All of the basic story points, and no hint about how Nowhere Boy has actually settled in thus far. I have no idea what Wilson means when he calls it “a well told, conventional treatment of a story that has an important part to play in Western popular culture,” but I can put it more bluntly, if you care to read.

Sam Taylor Wood

Nowhere Boy, I wrote on 10.29.29, is “a marginally effective, vaguely muffled chick-flick account of John Lennon‘s teenage years in Liverpool, circa 1956 to ’60. I’m not calling it dull, but ‘somewhat underwhelming’ is a fair way to put it, I think. I respond best to films about transcendent, climb-out-of-it responses to problems rather than ones that mainly portray the muck and the glue and the grief of things. And Nowhere Boy‘s somewhat feminized, all-he-needs-is-love story just didn’t turn me on.”

Wilson indicates why Wood’s movie more or less de-balls Lennon and turns him into a looking-for-love girlyman. Like Lennon, Wood also had a vanished mom who turned out to be living not far from the home she was raised in. Wilson also reports that she once exhibited a collection of photos called “Crying Men,” showing an assortment of Hollywood guys getting all sniffly.

But he doesn’t even glance at Wood’s decision to cast Thomas Brodie Sangster — a pint-sized, pencil-necked, chipmunk-faced actor — to play Paul McCartney. This, trust me, is one of the most appallingly “off” casting decisions in motion picture history.

Mainly Wilson’s piece is about bing, bing, binga-binga, bing. Wood has done this, and formerly did that. Highly regarded gallery artist, blah, blah. Married to that rich guy, divorced, and now engaged to this younger one. Been there, now here. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Give me a day and I could tap out an imaginary profile piece of anyone in this vein. I could write a profile of Lee Harvey Oswald without gussing anything up — I would just omit reportings about his alleged activities on 11.22.63 and his murder on 11.25, and it would be more or less the same kind of article as the one Wilson has written.

With Nowhere Boy playing Sundance 2010, Wood and her star-fiance Aaron Johnson will presumably attend.

In a piece that summarizes James Cameron‘s Project 880, the 113-page scriptment that eventually became Avatar, CHUD’s Devin Faraci points out a difference in a certain scene that really got me. I’d skimmed through an ADD version of the scriptment two or three years ago, but I’d forgotten this.

In Avatar, the paraplegic Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) isn’t just excited by having the use of his legs again when he first awakens inside his new ten-foot-tall blue Avatar body — he’s exalted and blissed out, and impulsively bolts the laboratory so he can run outside and feel the new muscles. The reigning emotion is “whoo-hoo testosterone!”

But in Project 880, says Faraci, Jake — Josh in the scriptment — “can barely stand, and his motor skills are weak. But when he gets on his feet and begins walking he has a very different reaction than Jake Sully — he cries. It’s a beautiful character revelation. Jake acts like a kid who had finally been let out of a car after a long ride; Josh acts like someone who never thought he would walk again.”

I was impatient and almost irritated with the Avatar version when I first saw it in San Diego, and while I understand Jake’s feelings of exuberance I doubted that he would act so rashly, like some 16 year-old kid driving a muscle car for the first time. But I would have bought his weeping with joy and relief if Cameron had chosen to dramatize this instead. I’m sorry that he didn’t.

The plot of Project 880 is much denser than Avatar‘s, with many more characters and tangents and a fair amount of back-story. As Faraci acknowledges, if Cameron had filmed all of the extra material Avatar would have probably run five hours — and would have probably cost $450 or $500 million to make instead of $300 million or whatever Avatar actually cost.

Faraci’s summary of the Project 880 plot points are as follows:

* Earth and its environmental problems are explored

* There is no unobtainium beneath Hometree. The military just wants to wipe out the local Na’vi to send a message to all the tribes that they must be obeyed.

* We see Josh Sully’s Avatar being born

* It’s revealed the Avatar program exists to train Na’vi to be an indigenous workforce for the corporation, as it’s so expensive to send human workers

* There are more humans, including a bioethics officer on the take, a video journalist, a head of the Avatar program and a second military dickwad

* There is an Avatar controller who is burnt out because his Avatar died with him in it. He committed Avatar suicide because he had fallen in love with a Na’vi girl who had been killed by the military

* The Avatars have a Na’vi guide named N’Deh, who’s slipping the high hard one to Grace.

* Grace survives the soul transfer

* Sully gains the Na’vi trust by being a member of the community. He also excels in a major hunt

* Sully shows his leadership not by taming a dragon but by leading a raid on Hell’s Gate to rescue Na’vi prisoners

* Sully isn’t the only Na’vi to ride a big dragon

* Pandora is a conscious entity that sees the humans as a virus, and which has been mobilizing the plants and animals to attack all along because it wanted to force the humans to leave.

“I would liked to have seen a movie version of Project 880,” Faraci writes. I too would have enjoyed more of what the scriptment has, but not too much more. I mean, I wouldn’t want to sit through a futuristic, ass-punishing Lord of The Rings: Return of the Avatar running four or five hours.

You have to understand where scifi-fantasy geeks like Faraci are coming from. One of the reasons they went hog-wild for Peter Jackson‘s Rings trilogy was its expansiveness. These guys live for length, texture, details, exposition and subcurrents in exotic imaginary worlds. They love layered and dense…yum! The more characters and extra subplots and backstory, the better. Throw it all in there, pile it on, explore the tangents, etc.

“I can’t say for sure why Cameron so severely streamlined his own story, but 880 feels like a Cameron film,” he writes, “while Avatar feels like the footnotes of that.

“Many of the problems I had with Avatar‘s story are addressed in Project 880‘s scriptment. I like Josh Sully better than Jake, although I suspect my biggest problem with the character lies in Sam Worthington. But other characters have more flesh, and the story unfolds at a pace that feels interesting and not like it’s on rails.

“Obviously this scriptment would have made a five-hour movie. Things needed to be cut. I just wish Cameron had been able to keep the decent story and rounded characters along with his deeply designed world. But when you’re spending that much money, it’s the story and characters that get canned before the FX.”

Because a team of airport screeners failed to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from carrying an explosive substance called PETN (i.e., pentaerythritol) aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, the Transportation Security Administration is determined to make worldwide travellers suffer delays worse than ever before. TSA officials are reactive bureaucratic ninnies whose jobs are not precisely dependent on keeping terrorists off airplanes as much as putting on a show of attempting to do same. It’s all theatre and all tedium. I can honestly say this evening that I fear the TSA more than I do Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.