My Three Days of the Condor Bluray arrived this morning. There’s a certain level of ’70s grain in Owen Roizman‘s cinematography. It’s a New York-based film, after all, and it wasn’t shot with the idea of looking “attractive.” But it sure looks nice all the same. Some shots are so pleasing (I’ve only seen about 30 minutes’ worth) they brought a smile to my face. This may be my last post before heading out to JFK.

I wrote publicist Phil Symes this morning about my keen interest in seeing Gaspar Noe‘s Into The Void in Cannes. I’m departing Cannes on Thursday, 5.21 and the first scheduled press screening is on Friday, 5.22, so I was hoping to catch a slightly earlier market showing. But Phil dashed my hopes.

A scene from Enter The Void that resembles a similar idyll-in-a-park scene at the end of Irreversible.

“There will be no screenings prior to the 14:40 screening on Friday 22nd,” he replied. “The film is expected only to be completed the previous day. So sorry, this is not going to be possible.

I wrote back the following: “So Gaspar’s pulling a Wong Kar Wai this year, eh? I understand the exactitude and perfectionism that drives directors, of course, but a plan to have the film completed only one day before a Cannes debut seems a bit extreme. Not two or three or four days before the Cannes screening, which would be cutting it close enough, but only 24 hours before? Something manic in that.

“If Gaspar manages to finish it a tad earlier, please advise. I respect Gaspar highly and was looking very much forward to seeing this during the festival.” Phil promised to keep me in the loop if something changes.

Its reputation as perhaps the best written, best acted mumblecore bromance flick of all time more or less intact/unchallenged, Lynn Shelton‘s Humpday (Magnolia, 7.10) could/should emerge as an indie summer punch-through — here’s hoping. But isn’t it a basic rule of movie marketing that your two stars (in this case Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard) should have the same stylistic appearance on the release poster that they have in the film?

Crop from a current Humpday release poster.

Mark Duplass (l.) and Joshua Leonard (r.) as they appear in Lynn Shelton’s Humpday

Here’s the HD trailer, which went up…what, three or four days ago?

Pretty much everyone seems impressed by Star Trek‘s $72.5 million haul on 7,400 screens. Dissings from various HE talkbackers aside, the word on the street is apparently pretty good so there’s a better than decent shot at tripling the $72 mil and cresting $200 mil. But poor Wolverine‘s Sunday night figures were 68% less than last weekend’s…all she wrote.

Kara Swisher of Boom Town/All Things Digital visits the Santa Monica home of Sharon Waxman, a.k.a. headquarters of The Wrap.

“I just saw Warwick Thornton‘s Samson and Delilah, an Australian film selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival,” says Down Under critic Joel Meares. “It’s a tough slog that takes you into remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory (basically the outback) and is relentlessly grim in some ways. But also extremely touching. It delivers emotionally like little else I’ve seen recently.

“This is definitely one to look out for. It’s probably the best and most profound thing to come out of this country for a few years at least. Two leads, untrained actors, perfectly natural, great perfs. I said to someone today it was like a good shot of Listerine washing away the bad taste of how ludicrously Aborigines were presented in Baz Luhrman‘s Australia.”

I just got back from a 7:45 pm show of Kirby Dick’s Outrage! at the Clearview Chelsea plex on 23rd Street. Two tickets cost me $25 bills, which I didn’t like at all. Why didn’t they charge $15 a pop? And then I noticed maybe 30 people in the theatre. Chelsea is a gay neighborhood and the locals can’t be bothered to patronize one of the strongest and toughest films about the Washington realpolitik and the denial of gay civil rights? What are they doing, sipping Chardonnay and looking for action?

And then the trailers start and they look like dogshit — washed-out, pixellated, pathetic. This is because they’re being projected off a DVD with some kind of low-rent DVD projection player. And then Outrage! starts and it looks just as bad. I’d seen it initially at a Tribeca Film Festival screening at the School of Visual Arts theatre on 23rd Street (i.e., about a block west of the Clearview) and it looked much sharper, crisper, cleaner.

This is bullshit, I tell myself. I paid $25 for two tickets and the best the Clearview can do is pop a screener into their P.C. Richards DVD projection player and make Outrage! look awful? I paid money to see this? I could have asked Jeff Hill for a screener and watched it on my 42″ plasma and it would have looked just fine. What a rip.

I’ve got a summer cold right now — sniffles, sneezing. It’s not a fever or a flu, but to knock it out I’ve been taking Emergen-C, my Chinese herbal pills, an antihistamine, nasal decongestant spray. In any case I’m standing at the SW corner of Prince and Broadway around 3 pm today, waiting to cross the street, and just as a family van passes in front of me I sneeze. Ah-choo!, moving van with open windows …perfect synch.

And a split second after I sneeze the guy driving the van yells out “thank you!” The guy is moving maybe 20 miles an hour, possibly 25. But he had the idea that my sneezing in the open air as he passed in front of me for maybe a quarter of a second might make him sick. If only I could have met this marvelous specimen inside Dean & Deluca so I could sneeze right in his face.

Two days ago L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein warned Judd Apatow that he needs to shorten the running time of Funny People (Universal, 7.21), currently around 150 minutes, or else.

“Two and a half hour comedies don’t work,” he wrote. “The form isn’t meant to carry that much weight. If you’re doing a comedy, especially one set in the world of stand-up comics, less is more. Always. Comedy is a form that rewards quick set-ups, sharp, fast editing and a rapid pace. They may share the first letter, but in comedy, languid, listless and lethargic scenes do not get the laughs. Victory goes to the hare, not to the turtle. The record on this is quite clear.”

Laughing at the wrong moments and then trying desperately to suppress this laughter can be, as we all know, excruciating. But why do I remember the most intense laughter-killing episodes of my life with such fondness? I smile every time I think of them. It all comes back.

Before I started trying to make it as a journalist I worked as a tree surgeon. Ropes, chain saws, pole saws, leather saddles, metal spikes, etc. In L.A. I worked for an eccentric guy who had a temper. He usually had a steady crew of two or three, and we all got barked at a lot. He never got violent but there was always that threat. I remember his face turning pink with rage.

One time he was spiked into a half-removed tulip tree, about 25 feet up. Myself and a guy named Gary Swafford were assisting from the ground, and at one point we were filling up a king-sized chain saw with gas. Except Swofford didn’t screw the gas cap on properly. The pissed-off boss hauled the chain saw up with a rope, turned it on and then raised it above his head to make a cut. And right away the cap popped off and at least a quart of gas spilled out onto his neck and chest and stomach.

And the boss lost it. Not by yelling but by crying. Except his weeping was a little too dramatic. He was bellowing like a wounded animal. And Swofford and I — God help us — were quaking with laughter, our chests aching with efforts to hide the truth. It was obviously the worst possible reaction we could’ve had, and there was no stopping it for the longest time.

Others have surely experienced such moments.