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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.

I always feel a wee bit intimidated by exceptionally beautiful women of any age. Especially if they have strong, piercing eyes that seem to see past your facade and into the Welch’s grape jelly sitting in your chest. I managed to avoid choking during this morning’s interview with Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence (which ended about 35 minutes ago in a 36th-floor Waldorf Astoria suite), but it was touch-and-go at times. She’s got it.

Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence — Wednesday, 6.9, 11:25 am.

Here‘s my 2010 Sundance Film Festival of Jay and Mark Duplass‘s Cyrus (Fox Searchlight, 6.18), posted on 1.26: “Most of Cyrus — the vast majority of it, I mean — is a mature, somewhat comedic and satisfying handling of an unusual romantic triangle situation — 40ish love-starved guy (John C. Reilly), 40ish mom (Marisa Tomei) and quietly psychotic fat-ass son (Jonah Hill).

John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill in Cyrus (6.18).

“It’s ‘funny’ here and there but mostly it’s just believable, buyable and emotionally even-steven. A truly welcome surprise.

“In the hands of Adam McKay or Shawn Levy or one of the other big-studio whores, Cyrus would have been a Joe Popcorn torture-chamber movie like Stepbrothers, in which Reilly costarred with Will Ferrell. But it’s something else with the Duplass brothers running the show. It’s quietly absorbing and occasionally hilarious, and made all the better by superb acting.

“But those first 20 or so minutes are very weird. For during this period Cyrus plays like it was directed by McKay or Levy. Reilly behaves so over-the-top needy and neurotic and boorish and lacking in social skills that I was ready to leave. ‘I really don’t want to hang with this asshole,’ I was saying to myself. I was just about to bolt when all of a sudden Reilly hooked up with Tomei, went home with her, fell in love and turned into a different person.

“It plays as if the Duplass brothers suddenly changed their minds about Reilly’s character and decided to go with a much calmer and more emotionally secure vibe. It’s almost as if they sat down and said ‘we need to get the animals to see this so let’s make an animal comedy straight out of the Will Ferrell loser file so the Fox Searchlight trailer guys can sell this portion, and then turn around and make Cyrus into a whole ‘nother bird — a movie aimed at a smarter, more emotionally mature crowd — about 20 or so minutes into the running time.”

“In Jay and Mark Duplass‘s Cyrus, Jonah Hill is “as clean-shaven as a deacon, and his hair is tightly cropped. The change has the effect of making his eyes seem more pronounced, his bulk larger, his personality more aggressive. As Cyrus, a twenty-one-year-old living with his single mother, Molly (Marisa Tomei), Hill makes his lugubrious body work for him as a shield against experience. Cyrus has no interest in attracting girls; he’s a nonsexual boy, cloistered with the woman who raised him and whom he adores.

“At home with her, he composes New Agey music on a flotilla of synthesizers. This possessive recluse is often unlikable but never stupid. Molly, a generous-souled woman, takes up with a forlorn, long-divorced fellow, John (John C. Reilly), and Cyrus, who sees his hold over her threatened, tries to break up the affair with lies, guilt trips, and mock breakdowns. Our sympathies, of course, lie with the lover. Reilly, who has curly brown hair and rubbery features, shreds his usual baffled sexlessness; his John begins to fight, while Molly just tries to make everyone happy.

“Cyrus was written and directed by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, who started out working in what’s loosely called the mumblecore movement, with no-budget pictures like The Puffy Chair (an absurdist road movie that turns serious, about the end of a love affair) and Baghead (a kind of Blair Witch Project homage). This is their first film made with established actors and a decent budget, yet they keep to their earlier aesthetic.

“They avoid the flash and the speed of commercial movies, moving in close with a handheld camera, and staying close as characters try to work out their confusion. The steady embrace of the actors produces intimate character details and awkward moments that land lightly, with a touch of off-kilter humor.

“But the Duplasses have put themselves in a paradoxical situation: the story of a sexually hungry boyfriend struggling against his lover’s creepy son has the built-in volatility of a commercial-movie premise. When Cyrus and John square off, the Duplass brothers might have turned in one of two directions: toward wild comedy or toward anguish and rage. There’s a dose of the latter, but the rage is quickly smothered in niceness, and the movie becomes tame.

“Avoiding commercial formulas and whipped-up moods isn’t enough to make a work of art. The Duplasses’ sensitivity, which is genuine, yields too much tepid relationship-speak, and Marisa Tomei, one of the most appealing actresses in Hollywood, is left with little to play. The characterization of Molly as a sexy Earth Mother who can’t speak her own mind is vapid and condescending, as if she weren’t as real to the filmmakers as the two men are. The Duplass brothers’ rebellion might really take off if they put women at the center of it.” — New Yorker critic David Denby in the current issue.

Tony Goldwyn‘s Betty Anne Waters, a Hilary Swank-starring Oscar-bait drama opening on 10.15, will henceforth be known as Conviction. The Fox Searchlight release, based on a true story, is about a high school dropout/single mom (Swank) who puts herself through law school in order to free her wrongfully-convicted brother (Sam Rockwell) from serving time for a murder rap. Sounds like a fall movie, all right; it also sounds like a stacked deck of Erin Brockovich cards.

The differences between Jennifer Lawrence‘s tough teenaged Ozark girl in Winter’s Bone (Roadside, 6.11) and the scampy sweaty thing she’s projecting in her Esquire spread are considerable.

She’s playing strong, determined and unafraid in the film — you feel admiration for her almost immediately. What you mainly get from the Esquire shoot is that she’s tall and leggy and ambitious.

I’m getting 10 or 12 minutes with her tomorrow morning so we’ll see where that goes.

Her Winter’s Bone character is 17 and named Ree Dolly. Her goal in the pic is to find her no-good ayehole dad who put the family’s backwood home up for his bail bond and then skipped. If he stays gone Ree and her family will be living under the stars. The film is basically about Ree asking questions of several grungy Ozarkians, smokers all. They lie, threaten, stare her down, evade and dance around the truth, but she hangs in and won’t back off.

Winter’s Bone is straight, sturdy, “real.” But my primary thought as I left my viewing is that I’m glad I wasn’t born to poor folk in the Ozarks, and that I’d be accepting if not grateful if the Emperor of the Universe told me I’ll never visit this region ever again for the rest of my life.

The Weinstein Co. has acquired Julian Schnabel’s Miral, which won’t stay in my head some reason. There’s something…I don’t know, vague and indistinct about the name “Miral,” which is the name of the the main character, played by Freida Pinto. The film is obviously being positioned as an Oscar contender — Best Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actress, etc. The whole shmear.

Julian Schnabel and Miral screenwriter Rula Jebreal — pic is based on her book of the same name.

Based on a book by Rula Jebreal, pic is about a real-life orphanage established in Jerusalem by a Palestinian lady named Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) following the 1948 creation of Israel by Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo and Paul Newman. A fictional storyline shows Miral being sent to the orphanage in 1978, and then going on to teach at a refugee camp and falling for an activist.” An anti-Isareli or pro-Isareli activist?

“[This] is the first film I am involved in that shows the ‘other side’ of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Harvey Weinstein said in a statement “As a staunch supporter of Israel, I thought this would be a movie I would have a hard time wrapping my head around. However, meeting Rula moved me to open my heart and mind and I hope we can do that same with audiences worldwide.”

Schnabel told me some weeks back that he would unveil Miral in Venice and Toronto. (But not Telluride, he added — too much running around in a too-short time frame.)

The second an actor of any age turns up in a film wearing sandals or flip-flops, he’s dead to me. And the film has cast a shadow upon itself. I don’t want to know from men’s feet, especially if they’re somewhat older with a bad pedicure. In movies or real life, I mean. I could do, in fact, with a lot of women who wear sandals not wearing them. Bare feet are generally a problem all around. My grandmother used to tell me this when I was seven or eight.

The only way the sandal/flip-flop rule doesn’t apply is if the film is set in ancient times.

I remember a scene in Backdraft when Billy Baldwin showed up in flip-flops, and I went, “All right, that’s it, he’s done….and not just in this film. His entire career might be in jeopardy.” That’s all it took! There’s a scene in Miami Vice in which Colin Farrell is wearing sandals while sitting at a kitchen table, and while I was down with the fumes in this film (along with Gong Li) the sight of Farrell’s digits gave me the shudders.

I’ll tolerate bare feet around pools and beaches for short periods, but sandals of just about any kind are killers. This is one of my biggest problems with 30-something and 20-something guys in the summer. They love their damn sandals. I’m already thinking of my worst nightmare — four heavy-set 20something guys sitting next to me at a cafe as I try to file, and howling with laughter at each other’s jokes.

I’m assuming that I’ve tapped into something universal here.

This two-month-old Salt trailer is highly engaging, well-cut, an expert sell. But what’s the pitch exactly? I understand about Angelina Jolie‘s Evelyn being a spy who’s been wrongly-fingered as a Russian mole and has to go on the lam, etc. And I love the acrobatics and the CG (it looks much less “animated” now) and her sexy black-haired wig. And I can feel a certain authority between the frames.

But boil it down to basics and Salt, it seems to me, is gourmet comfort food — a high-class, high-impact, super-costly, skillfully made action thriller that does that cool thing we’ve all seen before, only differently this time.

The questions are (a) “how differently?” and (b) is it strong enough in terms of general wow-ness and holy shit-ness to compete with Chris Nolan‘s Inception, which will open only a week before Salt‘s 7.23 debut?

The marketing problem that Sony faces is that the smart audience has already decided that Inception is some kind of imaginative game-changer, and that Salt has to somehow position itself so that it’s not seen as chasing Inception‘s tail. It has to show everyone that it has its own muscle and panache and energy field and dance moves.

How do you get that idea across? I don’t know, but one obvious option at this stage is to start showing it to certain conversation-starters and taste-makers. It may not seem fair or fitting, but the fact is that Salt and Inception are major adrenaline-drivers with big-name directors (Phillip Noyce, Chris Nolan) and highly talented star casts (Jolie, Liev Schreiber, “Chewy” Ejiofor, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, etc.) and which have cost their respective studios (Sony and Warner Bros.) huge amounts of money to produce and sell, and which are opening with seven days of each other.

That’s close enough to feel each other’s body heat, to smell each other’s breath.

That’s no small concern on either side of the equation, but the current reality is that Inception seems to have managed a better job of pre-selling itself to ubers and early adopters. My sense of things right now is that Inception is regarded as something people have to see, and that Salt is something that might be pretty good. The ball is now in Sony’s court. They need to somehow punch up the pizazz and raise the anticipation.

I threw this montage video in because it summarizes that high-end action current that I was trying to describe earlier. We all enjoy this kind of thing when done well. The yea-nay decisions come down to “what’s different?,” “what’s special?” and “what’s unusually cool about this latest one?”