What’s your first reaction to this shot of legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who’s been a regular contributor to the New Yorker since the ’90s? Mine was an immediate assumption that if you took a similar shot of an equally hard-working younger journalist — certainly anyone from the GenX or GenY pool — you wouldn’t see them talking on a corded handset.

Three Blu-rays of interest on the not-too-distant horizon: (a) a Criterion Bluray of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (due 7.28.09), which is especially welcome since only kick-around DVDs of this 1965 psycho-suspenser have been obtainable in recent years; (b) an MGM Home Video Bluray of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, due on 6.2.09; and (c) a Disney Bluray of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, due 10.6.09.

Am I hallucinating, or has N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply written a Hollywood Elsewhere-styled observation piece about how more and more leading actors are looking heavier and heavier? Do I not own this topic? Have I not staked out once-thin-but-now-overweight actors and filed a claim? Cieply even mentions the tendency of movie stars to have big heads, which I’ve also been riffing on for years.

“Based on a close look at trailers, still photos and some films already released, at least a dozen male stars in some of the year’s most prominent movies have been adding on the pounds of late,” Cieply says.

He mentions the girthy Denzel Washington, 54, and John Travolta, 55, in The Taking of Pelham 123. The wider-faced Hugh Grant in Did You Hear About the Morgans? The “better padded” Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island. Plus Tom Hanks, Jason Segel and Vince Vaughan.

Let’s see — that’s seven. Didn’t Cieply say twelve? He mentions Seth Rogen but Rogen, of course, has lost weight recently. He could have mentioned upcoming comedy star Jonah Hill, I suppose, although Hill has always been fat. There’s certainly a striking difference in Kevin Costner of today vs. the one who starred in Field of Dreams and Bull Durham, but who doesn’t thicken as they age?

11 days ago Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel reported that Sony has bought all int’l media rights (excluding U.K. TV) plus domestic home entertainment rights to Edward Norton, Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. It will open in U.S. theatres via HBO Documentary Films, Siegel wrote, although she didn’t include a projected release date. In fact, she didn’t even spitball about a possible ’09 release.

That suggested to me that the doc would probably come out in ’10, which “will feel too late in the game,” I wrote. Well, scratch that. I don’t know why Siegel wasn’t told but By The People will come out this year (sometime in the mid to late fall, or possibly December), and in fact is right now in a finished-enough state that certain parties have seen it and raved. Which means it could qualify for ’09’s Best Feature Documentary Oscar. (Maybe.) Which means it could play at the Venice or Toronto Film Festivals…maybe. But it’ll definitely be in theatres before 12.31.09, to be followed by HBO cable playdates.

Norton’s Class 5 Films produced By The People; Rice and Sams directed.

I love how kneejerk righties are using this photo to sell the idea that President Obama is being somehow intemperate and/or naive in extending a limited form of friendship towards Cuba and Venezuela (and that country’s president Hugo Chavez) based on future cooperation. Anti-Americanism is always made, never born. Caribbean and South American leaders who’ve called out American politicians for acting with arrogance and authoritarianism and looking no further into any situation other than to determine what’s best for corporate interests aren’t necessarily wrong.

Late last month the History Channel began airing a show on Predator X, the aquatic superbeast that swam the seas and ate everything and everybody some 147 million years ago. 50 feet long, 99,000 pounds, foot-long teeth, four flippers, etc.

I would pay to see a movie about this guy, seriously, but I wouldn’t want to see it made by McG or Stephen Sommers or Roland Emmerich. I’d probably want something more in the vein of John Sayles‘ Alligator, which is to say adult and knowing but with a slight wink. And yet real. If I were Tom Rothman I would give orders to shoot it in black and white 3D, which would obviously proclaim an ironic attitude. But then I’d flip this around by making the special effects as good as they possibly can be. And I’d somehow work in a scene in which Predator X eats a boatload of Somali pirates.

Yesterday was warm and fair and almost summery. It was easily 2009’s best walking-around weather so far, and a declaration from nature that the horrid cold has pretty much come to an end. The whole city, it seemed, was on the streets; nobody was indoors; everyone you ran into seemed to be in at least a fairly good mood. (All photos taken with iPhone.)

Prince Street near Thompson — 4.17.09, 6:45 pm.

Just after picking up a copy, standing in 42nd and 7th Avenue subway — 4.17.09, 2:25 pm.

Hanging under the marquee for 33 Variations, the Jane Fonda play.

It appears as if 19 year-old Emma Watson, like her Harry Potter costar Daniel Radcliffe, is unusually short. As is Macaulay Culkin, another former child star. Not to mention Mickey Rooney. I’m sorry, but it seems a curious irony in their having become rich and famous for having played children while children, but their genetic inheritance, curiously, doesn’t hand them an opportunity to physically grow out of that phase and move on. I know I’m not supposed to say this and that the HE scolds will jump on me for doing so, but it does seem a bit odd.

I tapped out some stories, lunched with a journalist friend, visited the Apple store in Soho, picked up my Tribeca Film Festival pass, etc. A friend and I walked around the meat-packing district last night, which seemed to me (being a recent arrival) to have transformed itself into the garden district of New Orleans or the Left Bank/Sorbonne area in Paris.

The news broke yesterday that the Paris transport authority, RATP, has transformed itself into a kind of bureaucracy of the absurd by removing the trademark pipe of Jacques Tati, the legendary absurdist French director and actor, from a poster advertising a Tati retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise over concerns that an image of a pipe violates laws preventing the advertising of tobacco products.

The poster image is a famous shot of Tati/Hulot riding a bike in his classic 1958 film Mon Oncle. The pipe is Hulot’s trademark as much as the bowler hat and cane are trademarks of Charlie Chaplin, but p.c. dictums have erased it as far as the retropsective is concerned. In it place the Paris censors have inserted a yellow children’s windmill.

Tati played Monsieur Hulot in four classic films, each time with the exact same manner and accessories — M. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Play Time and Traffic. (There’s a fifth Hulot film, Evening Classes, that I’ve never seen or even heard of until I checked today.)

Metrobus, the publicity wing of the Paris public transport network, told reporters that “allowing Monsieur Hulot to smoke on buses and underground metro platforms would be an infraction of the law banning advertising of alcohol or tobacco.”

Director Costa Gavras, president of the Cinematheque Francaise, told Le Parisien that the ruling “is absurd and risible…I think it would have made [Tati] die of laughter.”

Criterion’s high-definition DVD remastering of Stephen Frears‘ The Hit (1984), available on 4.28, is worth buying for several reasons. The cincher for me is John Hurt‘s legendary portrayal of Braddock, a British assassin sent to Spain to capture and bring to Paris an ex-gangster (Terrence Stamp) who needs to pay for ratting on the London mob. It’s one of Hurt’s two or three finest performances, no question, and certainly one of the most pleasurable ever delivered in a crusty, hard-boiled vein.

Hurt wears jet-black shades for at least half the film and has very few lines, but he teems with repressed feeling in every scene. There’s never a moment when you can’t tell exactly what he’s thinking or feeling. His Braddock is half-moving, half-amusing (and sometimes hilarious) and altogether unforgettable for all the things he’s clearly afraid to speak of, much less think about. He’s a walking dead man in many respects, but Hurt lets you see and feel everything churning inside — the fears, longings, trepidations. And all with a deadpan expression and next to no facial movement.

This got me to thinking about other great hard-boiled performances. I’m not speaking of actors who play their parts with a minimum of expressiveness — hard and frosty, wearing sunglasses, smoking cigarettes, etc. Anyone can do that. I’m speaking of performances, like Hurt’s, that use that terse, tough-guy thing but make it all feel like opera.

Jean Servais asTony le St√©phanois in Jules Dassin‘s Rififi — that’s another classic of this type. Lee Marvin‘s Walker in Point Blank isn’t quite on Hurt’s level (the part isn’t written that way), but he slips in and out of a lost-and-melancholy mode. Who else? Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven?

Francis Coppola‘s publicist Kathleen Talbert has sent out the following message about Tetro, Coppola’s latest film, and the Cannes Film Festival: “Since there has been much speculation in the press about the Cannes line-up,” she staites, “we want you to be aware that Francis Coppola has declined to bring his new film Tetro, starring Vincent Gallo, to Cannes.

“Below is his statement. If you choose to use it, I would ask that you use it in its entirety. Oh, and just to correct another misconception — Tetro [has been] shot in black and white and color.” Todd McCarthy‘s Cannes lineup piece that ran in Variety yesterday mentioned that Tetro (a) is a prospective Cannes attraction and (b) has been shot in black and white.

“While I very much appreciate the invitation,” Coppola’s statement reads, “this is an independent film, self-financed and self-released, and I felt that being invited for a non-competition gala screening wasn’t true to the personal and independent nature of this film. More important than Cannes, our team can focus all our time, energy and resources into the U.S. release this June 11th.”

HE translation #1: “As some of you have gathered since the release of Youth Without Youth, the words ‘independent film,’ ‘self-financed’ and ‘self-released’ as they concern yours truly are euphemisms for confounding, difficult to stay engrossed in, draggy, mind-numbing, etc.” HE translation #2: “If we take our film to Cannes we’ll get killed by the critics and the word will go out everywhere so why do it? We can only lose.”

Tetro will open on 6.11 in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Miami, and Washington, D.C.

I spoke a couple of days ago with Il Divo director Paolo Sorrentino at the Standard Hotel. The interview went well and speaks for itself. We talked about the film (obviously), Tony Servillo ‘s portrayal of former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (which the film is about), Bluray players, Rome, the world economy, etc.

Il Divo director Paolo Sorrentino at Manhattan’s Standard Hotel, a metallic, super-cool high-tech palace located in the meat-packing district.

I told Sorrentino that he reminded me of a somewhat thinner-faced pre-plastic surgery Michael Cimino (i.e., as Cimino looked in the late ’70s).

Il Divo (MPI, 4.24) has no website, but it is, as I said a few days ago, an immaculate, highly stylized film about Andreotti and his political career, particularly the events that led to revelations about his ties to the Italian mafia and his reported complicity in the murder of a journalist.

I saw it last year in Cannes, and my immediate reaction was basically (a) “a first-rate political drama but probably too Italian to play in the U.S.” (about which I was obviously wrong) and (b) “a brilliant performance by Servillo.”

“The old guard has passed and the new guard is here. And the new guard likes to ding dong ditch people just for fun.” — Ashton Kutcher after beating CNN (yes, CNN) to the million-follower mark yesterday afternoon. But what does it mean to be ding dong ditched?