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“I kept waiting for Jay Roach‘s Dinner for Schmucks to run out of steam or jokes — but it rarely did,” writes Marshall Fine. “Not that the laughs built to a big payoff. Nor did they evoke the kind of gasping-for-air quality that, say, The Hangover did. But director Roach, working from a script by David Guion and Michael Handelman, regularly jolts you with enough unexpected and wonderfully weird moments that you rarely grow impatient with this broad comedy.

“Indeed, I’d count this film as one of the rare — very rare — examples of a film adapted by Hollywood from one of those French farces that Francis Veber seems to toss off in his sleep that actually works (The Birdcage is one of the only other ones I can think of). Roach and his writers succeed because they turn the story into something uniquely their own, without losing the core of the original. Indeed, as I recall, the Veber original was one of his lamer efforts – which means that the Americans have improved upon it.”

I want to believe you, Marshall, but I can’t. I just can’t. Steve Carell‘s blonde goony-bird characterization just stops me in my tracks. It’s a character based on the desire of an actor to be funny in order to make people laugh in order to sell tickets in order to make money.

I feel moderately so-so about the 2010 Toronto Film Festival, based on the lineup announced so far. But I’m not, to be honest, feeling that old drooly-mouthed sensation. When I go to Toronto I want a nice ripe spotlight feeling — “this is it! right here! nowhere else!” — and all I’m getting from the current lineup is a kind of pretty-good, very-promising, B-plus (or possibly A-minus) response. All this means, I’m presuming, is that the light switch hasn’t been turned on yet.

I want to see William Monahan‘s London Boulevard there. I’ve said before that I want Terrence Malick to stop pissing around and show The Tree of Life there. I’d like Edward Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs to make an appearance, at least for Anne Hathaway ‘s sake. I’d like to see David O. Russell‘s The Fighter show up. And now that you mention it I wouldn’t mind seeing Doug Liman‘s slightly re-edited Fair Game.

In my view the current power-groove submissons are (1) Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator (the script for which I’ve read and voiced admiration for), (2) John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole, although I’m a bit nervous about that title, (3) Julian Schnabael‘s Miral (which a friend is seeing this week in LA, by the way), (4) Alejandro Gonz√°lez Inarritu ‘s Biutiful, (5) Tony Goldwyn‘s Conviction , (6) Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go, (7) Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, (8) Ben Affleck‘s The Town, (9) John Madden‘s The Debt, (10) Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech, (11) Susanne Bier‘s A Better World, and (12) George Huckenlooper‘s Casino Jack, which I saw an early cut of last year, and quite liked.

I don’t believe that David Fincher‘s remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo can amount to very much unless screenwriter Steven Zallian somehow incorporates some form of thematic or emotional resonance that amounts to something. Because the Danish-Swedish original is about nothing except (a) an angry hot tough cyber chick, and (b) an endless unfolding of plot-clue, plot-clue, plot-clue, plot-clue, plot-clue and more plot-clue.

The original trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson is not an interesting or intriguing work. At best it’s an airport lounge page-turner. It’s just “popular,” especially among younger women, which of course means nothing to the Movie Godz. Take a look at the most popular films of any given year going back to whenever. They’re mostly garbage.

So yesterday’s news from Deadline‘s Michael Fleming about Daniel Craig being cast in the Mikael Blomkvist role of the journalist with the damaged reputation who hooks up with Lisabeth Salander , blah blah is of limited interest.

The big news, of course, is which young actress will get the Salander role. Why is it taking so long to decide this? Fleming is re-reporting that top candidates include Ellen Page (too elfin, no sexual component), Mia Wasikowska (can’t remember how to spell her name, too opaque), Emily Browning (who?), Sara Snook (i.e., not Snooki from Jersey Shore), Rooney Mara (who?) and Sophie Lowe (who?).

Sony will release Fincher’s Girl on 12.12.11.

What did Oliver Stone say that was so inaccurate and/or offensive? He used a certain kind of Tea Party-associated anti-Semitic shorthand — “Jewish domination of the media” — that is considered a huge no-no in this country, for obvious reasons. That plus the wearing of a thin, sinister-looking moustache is what essentially prompted the dust-up, which began with a two-day-old interview in the London Sunday Times.

Stone is an old anti-corporate, antiwar-machine lefty from way back. I’ve come to know him fairly well through personal contact over the years and through mutual friends, and because it takes one to know one, I suppose. He’s very bright, engaged, inquisitive, insightful, and bold-strokey in his thinking. The heat Stone is now receiving seems to be about certain parties believing that he’s suddenly revealed his true anti-Semitic colors. I don’t believe that for a second.

I do believe, however, that Stone has a Showtime series coming up called “Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America,” and that he’s decided not to trot out the usual homilies and rote history-class statistics when being interviewed. He’s going to go outside the safe zone. That’s what Stone does time and again (except when he made World Trade Center).

The other statements Stone made about Hitler and his supporters don’t seem all that weird. “Hitler was a Frankenstein, but there was also a Dr. Frankenstein,” he said. “German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.” I’ve never read any books about the extent of Hitler’s support in these countries in the 1930s, but isn’t what Stone said more or less thought to be true?

Stone also said that Hitler “did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.” This statement is certainly not inaccurate.

According to a Wikipedia WWII death chart, the total number of Russan deaths, both military and civilian, during World War II came to 23,954,000 — a little more than 14% of the total Russan population. That’s a staggering figure. (The total number of U.S. military/civilian deaths during that conflict was 418,500, which represented 1/3 of 1% of the population at the time.) The total number of Jewish Holocaust deaths during World War II was 5,752,400.

And yet the Holocaust, according to U.S. media and history books, is the reigning horror of World War II, and not the fact that almost one in seven Russians were killed by Nazi Germany. This impression is due, of course, to the racial hatred behind the Holocaust and to the coldly methodical manner in which German officers and soldiers carried out the attempted extermination of European Jewry. But why is it that awareness of the scale of Russian WWII deaths barely registers alongside the Holocaust in this country?

Stone was essentially observing that the U.S. media (as well as the public school history books) have placed an understandable but disproportionate emphasis on the Holocaust in considering the totality of horrors caused by Nazi Germany, and that certain powerful figures in this country’s big media constellation have probably had a hand in this. That doesn’t seem like a hugely crazy thing to say. Not that awareness of the Holocaust isn’t an immensely important lesson for each and every citizen to learn and reflect upon. But where are the Russian death museums in this country? Where are all the Russan death documentaries that have either won or been nominated for Oscars?

“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret,” Stone said in response. “Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry.”

Is Stone also saying that Neal Gabler was fundamentally mistaken when he wrote a book called An Empire of Their Own? Is he saying that a belief that Jews were heavily involved and invested in the 20th Century “needle trade” is an anti-Semitic myth? Is he saying that the diamond district in midtown Manhattan is run by Swedes and Danes? If so, this proves if nothing else that Stone is first and foremost an independent thinker.

Recently posted by New York/”Vulture’s Edith Zimmerman.

Update: HE reader Jonathan Hartman reminds that Inception composer Hans Zimmer “already publicly talked about this at the SCL Screening in Los Angeles a week before the film opened. He and Inception‘s sound designer explained the musical concept, and particularly this specific link.

“Edith Piaf is all over the movie, in many scenes where the casual viewer wouldn’t even recognize it. For the record, Nolan has Edith Piaf in the script, but only played as the ‘wake up’ music. It was Zimmer’s manipulation of the material that gave them the idea to incorporate it everywhere.”

“He’s a monster, a sexual predator, and the most sensitive and civilized fellow you’d ever meet.” And “our disorientation [about these disparate qualities] is the strongest evidence of the filmmaker’s mastery.” So says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, very succinctly, in his Critics’ Pick essay about James Mason‘s Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (’62).

The Times web guys being who they are and always have been, they haven’t put this latest Critics’ Picks up on YouTube yet (although all of them end up on YouTube sooner or later). Nor do they allow embedding of Scott’s video essays off their own site. They do this deliberately to anger and frustrate people like myself.

One of my fondest Manhattan fantasies is that I meet up with one of these web guys at a party somewhere, and I get to unload all of my years of frustration — the countless times I’ve been excited and/or felt inspired by one of Scott’s essays but unable to post it on HE due to the Times‘ extremely annoying policies about timely YouTube sharing and embed codes. Almost the entire web world gets it these days — the number of sites that refuse to offer embed codes is less than miniscule now — and still the N.Y. Times techies won’t budge/re-think/adapt. They’re like Japanese soldiers refusing to come out of caves and surrender after the end of World War II.

This video took me back to the malicious things that kids sometimes do to each other under the guise of pranks. The nature of the relationship of John, the ice-water splasher, to Nikki, his victim, is unclear, but this is the kind of thing that ten year-old boys will sometimes do to their older teenaged sisters. What does Iceman John mean by “Merry Christmas”? Why do I find this amusing? Sometimes the cruelest jokes are the funniest.

I’ve never pranked anyone like this; if anything I tended to be the victim when I was a kid. During a group sleepover at a friend’s beach house I was given an old-fashioned hot foot (i.e., two kitchen matches put between my toes and then lit while I was sleeping). To this day I can still recall the sensation of my toes getting hotter and hotter, and then the sudden muscle spasm that led to my levitating six inches off the floor.

Later that night the same pranksters put 30 or 40 ice cubes into a guy’s sleeping bag as he slept; an hour later he awoke in a state of uncontrollable shivering.

The only cruel prank I pulled was on a high-school acquaintance named Rick Callahan. He was in a bathing suit and lying sideways on a beach towel on an elevated sundeck next to a large community pool. He was leaning on his left arm, talking to a girl. In the area of the towel where Callahan would sooner or later lie down, three or four inches from his back, a friend and I stealthily placed a burning Marlboro cigarette on top of a matchbook. Then we scampered away and down some nearby stairs to ground level and waited. We were maybe 25 feet away. A minute or so later we heard Callahan’s howl.

In recognition of last weekend’s Comic-Con pen-stabbing, ranker.com‘s Brian Gilmore has compiled a list of the Top 10 Most Violent Movie Theatre Attacks.

As seen at Comic-Con and reported by The Pursuitist, the HD trailer for Zack Snyder‘s Sucker Punch, a fanboy-friendly action fantasy about “a young girl whose dream world provides the ultimate escape from her darker reality,” blah blah.

The costars are Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, Carla Gugino, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn and Oscar Isaac.

The previous headline may not ring a bell for some. It’s taken from a scene in Ken Russell‘s Altered States. Brainy psychotherapist Blair Brown says to brainy but eccentric psychotherapist Bill Hurt that their careers are in alignment, they’re both moving to Boston, love is obviously there, sex is great or at least impassioned, and all the pieces are in place so “I think we should get married.”

A mildly surprised, faintly amused Hurt says, “You know of course that I’m supposed to be at least a little bit nuts?”

Blair’s reply: “A little bit? You’re an unmitigated madman. You don’t have to tell me how weird you are. I know how weird you are. I’ve been in your bed for the last two months, and even sex is a mystical experience to you. You carry on like a flagellant which would be very nice, but I sometimes wonder if it’s me who’s being made love to. Sometimes I feel like I’m being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God.”

Ever since seeing this 1980 film I’ve wanted a girlfriend to tell me that I “carry on like a flagellant.” Thirty years later and it’s never happened.

Two others dialogue snips, courtesy of the IMDB:

Bob Balaban: “The way I feel, I don’t expect to go to sleep for a year. I’m on fucking fire!”

Bill Hurt: “Memory is energy! It doesn’t disappear. It’s still in there. There’s a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses. There has to be; and I’m telling you it’s in the goddamned limbic system.” A colleague tells him he’s “wacko,” and Hurt replies: “What’s whacko about it? I’m a man in search of his true self. How archetypically American can you get? We’re all trying to fulfill ourselves, understand ourselves, get in touch with ourselves, face the reality of ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever since we dispensed with God we’ve got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life.”

The programming of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s seven day, nine-film Ken Russell tribute, which begins on Friday, 7.30, with a showing of The Devils, is more than a bit curious. I’m very glad for the opportunity to finally see the long and extra-brazen British cut of The Devils and the chance to see, if I so choose, Russell conducting a q & a each and every day of the series, but the film selections are wanting if not perplexing.

The FCLS programmers have included two lesser Russell films — the garish Tommy (’75) and the mediocre Valentino (’77) — while omitting Altered States (’80), one of Russell’s daffiest and most verbose brilliant-nutter pics, and particularly Song of Summer, a 1968 portrait of the last years of composer Frederic Delius that Russell has called “the best film I have ever done.”

Russell is 83 and obviously deserving of a serious, full-on retrospective, but the omission of Song of Summer (as well as his other BBC films including Elgar, The Debussy Film, Always on Sunday and Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World) makes the FSLC tribute seem sketchy and middlebrow. Oliver Reed is quietly touching as Claude Debussy in The Debussy Film (’65), which I saw and quite liked on PBS in the mid ’70s. It was reportedly screened at the National Film Theatre in ’07; it’s a real shame that the FSLC is waving it off.

What could the rationale be for omitting Russell’s BBC work? Rights? Cost? It just doesn’t seem fitting that an esteemed org like the FSLC would tribute Russell with the same kind of greatest-hits approach as, say, a Turner Classic Movies retrospective hosted by Robert Osborne.

Sidenote: The version of The Devils being shown on Friday (as well as on Saturday, 7.31, Sunday, 8.1 and Thursday, 8.5) is the extra-unexpurgated UK version — the longest and most graphic ever assembled at 111 minutes. The US version (which Warner Home Video put on iTunes for roughly 48 hours before withdrawing it) runs either about 108 minutes, give or take. The 111-minute version includes two controversial scenes — a so-called “Rape of Christ” that involves some kind of frenzied orgy, and a bit near the end of the film in which Vanessa Redgrave ‘s Sister Jeanne masturbates with a charred bone from the remains of Oliver Reed‘s Father Grandier.

I suffered last night on a Continental red-eye from LAX to Newark. 275-minute flight, 90 minutes to two hours of sleep, if that. Bulkhead seating, no legroom to speak of, wedged between two women…awful. On top of which they played The Last Song, a Miley Cyrus stinker (based on a Nicholas Sparks book) that opened last March to a 17% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I was at least able to decide on my own whether or not Cyrus has a “trout pout.” She does indeed.

Miley Cyrus in Disney’s lamentable The Last Song.