Imagine yourself hanging out in a faintly smelly blue-collar saloon in Austin, Texas (i.e., in a less enlightened section of town), and one of the guys at the bar asks what you thought of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno, or rather the preview footage you’ve just seen at a South by Southwest event. And you say to him without skipping a beat that it’s “wildly, paralytically funny and brilliantly transgressive.”

The beer boys wouldn’t like that, trust me. If I was a chunky Austin guy who drove a forklift at a soft-drink company and some smartypants in horn-rim glasses said that a movie was “brilliantly transgressive,” right away I would be thinking about hitting him.

The above six-word description came from MSN Movies and AMCtv.com‘s James Rocchi, as passed along by Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez. I think all film critics have to keep the shitkicker readers in mind when they write. I’m not saying you can’t write what you want to write or be who you really are, but every so often you have to tone down the NYU Masters in Film Appreciation jargon.

The 7-11 way to say it is that Bruno “pushes the comedy limits in a really clever and wild-ass way. You know, like Borat only more gay this time.”

I’ve written the Twitter tech support guys twice over the past week about my password not being accepted on the iPhone despite changing it on the computer. Nothing back. Dicks.

Another sad aspect of Ron Silver‘s passing, as noted this morning by Hollywood & Fine’s Marshall Fine, is that he would have been a perfect choice to play Bernie Madoff if someone had managed to finance a feature or a made-for-HBO thing. Silver, 62 when he passed, would have been the right age. He could have easily been made up to resemble Madoff, he shares Madoff’s tribal heritage, and, of course, he was a first-rate actor.

Ron Silver (l.), Bernard Madoff (r.)

I think my Madoff Escapes and Cavorts With Hookers Around The World idea would make for a better HBO series than the true-life story of how he became a criminal. The flaunting of a lack of morality or accountability would be the point . Madoff would be the hidden person we’re all ashamed of harboring without ourselves — the irresponsible wastrel and profligate chaser of temporary satisfaction. Talk about your dramatization of a constant existential malady — society demands, the individual shirks and avoids and runs away.

In today’s “First Read” column on msnbc.com, it says that President Obama “has a late-night date with Jay Leno on Thursday when he travels to California. Just asking: when was the last time a sitting president did the Tonight Show?” There’s no mention of the drop-by on the show’s calendar.

Actor Ron Silver, whose immense talent and fine, irony-tinged performances (Reversal of Fortune, The West Wing, the original B’way production of Speed The Plow) were diminished and compromised in the public mind when he became a “9/11 Republican” and gave his earnest support to one of the most destructive and dysfunctional Presidents in U.S. history, died Sunday morning from esophegal cancer.

The 62 year-old actor had been fighting the disease for two years. Too soon, tragic news, sorry to hear it, condolences to his family and friends. I loved Silver’s acting and would like to forgive him for giving a speech in support of Bush-Cheney during the 2004 Republican National Convention — but that’s not going to happen. Silver shamed himself with his Bush allegiance, and history will not judge him kindly. But I greatly admired Silver before he became a right-wing Frankenstein hard-ass. Let’s try and remember him in a pre-9/11 light.

The prevailing character trait in Christine Jeffs‘ Sunshine Cleaning is a curious obsession on the part of Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) that she needs to look out for her wayward younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt). If you can relate to this on some level, the film might work for you. But it never did for me. It felt fake, or certainly strained.

I’ll always be ready to help my younger brother if he’s in a corner, but never to the point of a week-in, week-out constancy that would interfere with my own progress. I have my own struggles to overcome and demons to wrestle with; we all have to fend for ourselves. Life is hard enough when you’re strong and focused and organized and handling just the day-to-day (which for me includes the creative). Maybe women feel differently.

“Let me simply say, I feel like the old Alan Sillitoe short story ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’…and that’s what this is, by the way — a long-distance run.” — Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, speaking on 1.8.09.

Available on Amazon UK on 3.24.

The ruins of Detroit on Time‘s site and also the French reliques site: An HE reader called “x” asks, “Why not have Hollywood film all of its post-apocalyptic movies there? It would make money for Detroit, and it’s got to be even cheaper than filming in Canada. You don’t even have to build the sets before you burn them.”

Nobody has a softer spot for traditional Irish music than myself, so I think I know where I’ll be on Tuesday evening. Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Day parade has always been a must-to-avoid because of the thousands of drunken pigs who flock to Fifth Avenue; ditto most of the city’s Irish bars. But the Half King (where I had lunch last week) might be a different vibe. It’s an old-fashioned place with plain wooden tables and pub food. My sense is that it doesn’t cater to the ESPN crowd.

When I was married I visited Ireland in the fall of 1988. Myself, my now ex-wife Maggie and Jett, who was then four months old. We stayed at the 200 year-old home/farm of Chris Ryan in the town of Knocklong in County Limerick. Ryan runs a fabled riding-to-hounds business out of his home. Several horses and something like 40 black-and-tans live in the rear stables and kennels. There’s a limited edition book about the operation written by Michael MacEwan called “The Ryan Family and the Scarteen Hounds.”

With St. Patrick’s Day two days away, it seems like the right time to explain a phobia that I’ve been grappling with for years. I hate the name Danny. It’s a cruel and idiotic prejudice, obviously, but there it is. I just hate the damn sound of it. Anyone or anything called Danny is therefore diminished if not discredited. Sorry.

Dan and Daniel are cool, but Danny is a cheap 1950s Irish punk street name. I’ve always disliked the Irish ballad “Danny Boy” because of the odious aroma in the title. If Daniel Stern, Dan Futterman or Dan Aykroyd had begun their careers as Dannys they wouldn’t have done as well, I’m convinced, and might have even failed to break through. I further believe that Danny Moder, Julia Roberts‘ dp husband, will always have career troubles unless he changes course and goes strictly by Daniel or Dan. If I read a script with a character named Danny, I’ll stop reading and put it away. And I’ve always disliked the 1958 Elvis Presley flick King Creole because it’s based upon Harold Robbins‘ “A Stone for Danny Fisher.”

I’m not the only one on this boat. Ask Danny Huston, who has no doubt suffered in one way or another because of it.