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A note of personal sadness on the passing of politically connected Hollywood publicist Stephen Rivers, 55, who lost a prolonged battle with prostate cancer four days ago. He was a good egg who always dealt with me fairly and considerately. Rivers represented Oliver Stone, Kevin Costner, Jane Fonda and former CAA honcho Michael Ovitz among others, and he always had a line on whatever was going down (or coming up) within Hollywood’s liberal-activist family.

He was fast and energetic and, like any good publicist, extremely protective of his clients. After talking with Costner at a post-Oscar party 10 or 11 years ago I wrote that his head was as big as a buffalo’s, and Rivers responded right away — “Back off on that bison-head thing,” he wrote.

I’m presuming that the work on Warner Home Video’s forthcoming Bluray of the original King Kong (9.28.10) has already been completed so pleading for a de-graining of this film is, at this stage, three and a half months away from release, a moot point. But I’m going to anyway because at least I’ll be on the record as having done so, and because it may make a difference to the Movie Gods later on.

WHV’s Ned Price, George Feltenstein and their team of restorers, remasterers and Bluray transfer artists have repeatedly shown that that no one in the business is more knowledgable or exacting. Their exquisite (i.e., minimally grainy) Casablanca Bluray speaks for itself. For the most part their 2005 King Kong DVD (timed to capitalize on the Peter Jackson version) was a very welcome improvement/upgrade from previous masterings, so I’m not talking about overhauling old Kong too radically — just some digital touchups in this and that scene that will fix certain portions in which the grain smotherings are so intense that they flirt with absurdity.

Nonetheless, let’s hope that the WHV guys (a) haven’t recently succumbed to radical Criterion-style grain-monk theology (i.e., the home-video equivalent of Taliban fervor), (b) understand that certain portions of King Kong are simply too grainy for average eyeball consumption (particularly the scene when the freighter drops anchor off the coast of Skull Island in heavy fog), (c) further understand that Bluray only sharpens and intensifies the monochrome granules occupying a given frame, and (d) therefore came to the conclusion that they needed to hire John Lowry of Lowry Digital to de-granulate in a way that respects the integrity of the image but at the same time recognizes that a classic black-and-white film buried in an Iraqi grainstorm is a bad thing all around, and that the ghosts of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack are hovering over them like Bruno Ganz and whatsisname in Wings of Desire and quietly pleading that they do the right thing.

In response to yesterday’s story about about an alleged debate within Lionsgate about whether to release Sylvester Stallone‘s The Expendables with an R or a PG-13 rating, I was informed earlier today by a Lionsgate rep that the action pic “has always been conceived as an R-rated film, as Stallone himself has confirmed to other press outlets throughout the filmmaking process. There is not a PG-13 version of the film in the works, nor has there ever been. The MPAA R rating is official and final.”

Okay, fine…but it wasn’t always this cut and dried, at least as far as Expendables producer Avi Lerner has been concerned.

Last June Lerner told UGO reporter Rene Rosa that “there will be both PG-13 and R-rated cuts for The Expendables and they will test each to decide which to release. The Expendables is costing about $80 million dollars, thanks to so many real explosions, the star cast, and everything else that goes into making an action flick. The studio wants this film to be a big hit and Avi is hoping to turn it into a franchise — including whoever doesn’t die in the first film in subsequent films.”

In a 4.21.10 EW interview, it was stated that Stallone “promises a hard R. After all, just look at the cast, he says. ‘These guys are born hard R!'”

If you ask me Stallone’s quote indicated he was prevailing over a different point of view. He obviously won the argument, but Lerner was on the record about the PG-13 vs. R cuts, in part because of the experience of R-rated Kick Ass taking in only $47.5 million as of 5.30.10. Lerner wants the biggest possible opening for The Expendables, and so he naturally had thoughts about the R rating possibly interfering with this.

My eight-minute chat with John C. Reilly, a vulnerable and engaging lead in Cyrus, got whittled down to a 5 minute and 45 second one. I began by telling him I was sorry I’d never seen him play Stanley Kowalski in the 2005 Broadway production with the late Natasha Richardson. This led to the inevitable discussion about the dominance of Marlon Brando‘s Stanley, etc.

Enjoyable as they are, press junkets always seem to dominate everything else — everything you might want to write and think about sorta gets pushed aside. Which isn’t to say today’s Cyrus junket, held at the Grammercy Park hotel, wasn’t a complete pleasure. I just didn’t get much done. The day included intriguing chats with co-directors Mark and Jay Duplass, and costars John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei.

Cyrus co-directors Jay and Mark Duplass, top floor conference room, Grammercy Park hotel — 6.10, 1:10 pm.

Grammercy Park hotel.

Mark, Jay Duplass during round-table session.

To mark the 60th Anniversary of the start of the Korean War, Turner Classic Movies is running a 24-hour marathon of Korean War movies on 6.24 starting at 8 pm. So what’s the explanation for their not including Lewis Milestone‘s Pork Chop Hill, which is certainly one of the best about that conflict. You could argue that it’s the best.

The roster includes The Steel Helmet (1951), Men of the Fighting Lady (1954), Men in War (1957), Tank Battalion (1958), The Bamboo Prison (1954), All the Young Men (1960), Hell in Korea (1956), Take the High Ground! (1953), Time Limit (1957), and The Rack (1956).

I love it when well-made action sequences deliver adrenaline surges you can really trust. By which I mean action and adrenaline so alarmingly palpable that it almost feels surfable. For me, the last time I felt this thing the way it was meant to be felt was in Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men — a landmark dystopian epic that raised the bar on action sequences by adhering to a strict you-are-there POV (i.e., a single perspective with no cheap-ass cutting from 117 different angles) and shooting with long unbroken takes.

For me, Joe Carnahan‘s The A-Team (20th Century Fox, 6.11) delivers the exact opposite effect as Children of Men. No actual excitement, no honest thrills, no trustworthy adrenaline, no conviction, and edited so frantically and mindlessly that you can’t tell what the hell is going on (and after ten or fifteen minutes of this you don’t want to know).

The A-Team is the machismo equal of the Sex and the City 2 — it tarnishes the reputation of guy films the way SATC2 blackened the term “chick flick” for years if not decades to come.

The A-Team delivered waves of intense loathing mixed with that familiar sensation (which I initially tried to describe after seeing Sherlock Holmes last December) of literally being poisoned with a clear plastic tube snaking out from the screen and jabbed into a vein in my arm.

The A-Team is pure cartoon-fizz bullshit — as scuzzy and value-less as this kind of testosterone pornography can possibly get. There’s nothing quite as boorish and deadly as a movie that believes it’s putting out the good stuff — giddy hilarity, wow-level excitement, popcorn razzle-dazzle — when it’s actually doing nothing of the kind. It’s like a rabid dog that needs to be tasered and sent to the pound and put down.

Carnahan, the once-admired Narc guy who’s thoroughly finished in my book, is, of course, the obnoxious force behind it all. I’m not saying he needs to be put down also, but Carnahan does need to be arrested and constrained and flown to a remote prison compound in Kampuchea. He’ll be given a decent home with wifi and a 52″ plasma flatscreen and all the other comforts, but he doesn’t leave for a minimum of five years. No coming back to the States, and definitely no more gigs as a director until 2015. I’m serious. Because movies like The A-Team are like factories pouring polluted smoke into the air and turning the water table rancid.

I need to get myself over to a Cyrus junket in Manhattan. I’ll finish this later. But the woman who wrote this review is a kiss-ass.

I love Tom Cruise‘s Les Grossman character as much as the next guy, but I wouldn’t want to hang with him all through the day and night. Les is comic relief — a guy you cut away to when you want to chuckle at some bespectacled, bald-headed rage monkey bellowing, howling and threatening to cut off the heads of other guys on the phone. You don’t want to get too close to a guy like this. He’s not Jerry Maguire. You want to laugh at his blitzkreig animal fury for four or five minutes and duck out of the room and go somewhere else.

So I really don’t see how Les carries a film, which is what the big news was today — i.e., an all-Les, all-the-time Les Grossman movie produced by Paramount and MTV Films, co-produced by Cruise and Red Hour Films’ Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld with Michael Bacall (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) writing the screenplay.

“Les Grossman’s life story is an inspiring tale of the classic human struggle to achieve greatness against all odds,” Stiller said in an official announcement. No, that’s not his story. Les Grossman’s story is a fitfully funny tale of the classic urge to rape, pillage, murder and destroy your enemies in life, and to murder their children and wives and friends and mistresses and neighbors in the bargain — to slice open their stomachs with Bowie knives and splatters their intestines on the floor.

Logical scheduling strategy led IFC Films and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy to throw an elegant journalist luncheon at Michael‘s for Daniele Thompson‘s Change of Plans, which won’t open until 8.27. I need to pick up a screener and watch the film before writing something about it, and it’s best to delay a few weeks anyway. I was among the many fans of Thompson’s Avenue Montaigne (’06), which ought to count for something.

Change of Plan director-writer Daniele Thompson, FSLC senior programmer Scott Foundas (right-rear) — Wednesday, 6.9, 1:55 pm.

Attending today’s event were Thompson, critic/essayist John Anderson, Film Society of Lincoln Center senior programmer Scott Foundas, Village Voice critic Amy Dawes, N.Y. Press critic Armond White, IFC Film’s Ryan Werner, French Embassy rep Sandrine Butteau, myself and a few others.

“The reason for that recent Expendables trailer selling cast and nothing else,” a guy tells me, “is the studio and Sylvester Stallone are still grappling with whether to go with an R-rated or PG-13 version. Obviously there would be very different tones in the campaign if it’s the former. I hope they go with the R-rated version, but apparently there’s pressure in the marketplace not to.”

If Lionsgate and Stallone are even toying with the possibility of going with a PG-13 version of The Expendables, then I don’t know what to say to them. It would be stunningly, breathtakingly stupid of them to put out a version that tones down the violence and the gore. It’s such a pathetic notion that I’m not going to sully this website by discussing it further.

For what it’s worth, the guy says he’s hearing that “the film works and is fun…and that Stallone and Stratham have wonderful chemistry.” I don’t buy a word of that! Not a word!

Immediately following this morning’s Jennifer Lawrence interview, and en route to the IFC luncheon for Daniele Thompson and her new film, Change of Plans (8.27), at Michael’s on West 55th Street.