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District 9 pulling down $37 million last weekend is good balancing news for those who’ve been tempted to think in recent weeks (i.e., like me) that the moviegoing public is divided into mindless Elois who will only pay to see crap and discriminating fans who prefer films like The Hurt Locker and David Twohy‘s The Perfect Getaway and The Baader Meinhof Complex. District 9 was a bridge attraction — a high-octane Joe Popcorn movie with better-than-respectable chops.

Despite (500) Days of Summer essentially being a film about how to make yourself miserable by living in your own romantic bubble and ignoring obvious warning signs about the character of your beloved, which makes it a partly intriguing but partly tedious thing to sit through because it’s obvious early on that the relationship between Joseph Gordon-Levittt and Zooey Deschanel can’t work because “she’s not there,” the film has caught on with 20somethings and that’s the bottom line.

I’m okay with that. Everyone is. Marc Webb‘s film has some mildly arresting aspects. Gordon-Levitt’s looks are still too Japanese dweeby for my tastes, but his performance is more tolerable in this film than anything he’s previously done. The Graduate allusions are well realized. The musical fantasy sequence is very nicely done. There’s a class of guys out there who regard Deschanel as hot stuff (Jett among them) so why not leave well enough alone? Because I can’t. If I was 25 and ran into her in a bar (and if she wasn’t “Zooey Deschanel”) I wouldn’t even turn my head.

President Obama’s reported decision to bail on pushing public option health insurance — a government-subsidized alternative to private health care that would obviously push prices down — is, for me, a heartbreaker. I confess to knowing zip about whether insurance co-ops, which the Obama administration is now floating as an alternative, would have as strong and decisive an effect on keeping costs down…but I strongly doubt that they would.

I do know that there’s no honor in compromising in order to save face. By my sights the public-option tent-fold is a wimp move. A bad day for the Obama brand. The greedy insurance-company bastards are having their way.

N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman, whom I trust, says in an 8.16 column that Obamacare (as it was understood before the public-option capitulation) is basically “a plan to Swissify America, using regulation and subsidies to ensure universal coverage.”

But “if we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route,” he adds. “‘True ‘socialized medicine’ would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.”

Howard Dean said this morning on talk shows that “you can’t really do health reform without” a public-option program. He called a direct government role “the entirety of health care reform. It isn’t the entirety of insurance reform…we shouldn’t spend $60 billion a year subsidizing the insurance industry.”

Did I believe disgraced football player Michael Vick‘s pre-scripted apology on 60 Minutes last night for running a sadistic dog-fight operation that landed him in jail and all but destroyed his career? Nobody did. The guy can’t act. Plus he never talked about his deep-down attitudes and feelings about dogs and how he could see them not as super-loyal friends to love and care for but as snarling gladiators good at killing and being killed. On top of which 60 Minutes interviewer James Brown was too scared to touch on the real cultural “why.”

Dog-fight culture is an ugly thing that stems, I believe, from a predatory, inner-city, watch-your-back vibe that its fans initially encountered in their growing-up neighborhoods. But Vick and Brown never even glanced at, much less alluded to, this. Because that would take them into the machismo thing that has obviously influenced African-American and Hispanic guys of a certain economic strata and their seeming preference (based on years of my own first-hand observation) for fearsome attack dogs. Too close to the bone so they dodged it entirely.

Vick revealed his true self with three lines. The first came when he began one his unconvincing run-on apologies with “whatever the reasons I did this.” (translation: “I probably know why but I sure as shit ain’t gettin’ into it on nationwide TV”). The second came when he said “I don’t know how many times I gotta say [I’m sorry].” (translation: “I’m gettin’ a little sick of apologizin’ over and over for this shit”). The third was his admission that “the first day I walked into that prison and he slammed that door…I knew the magnitude [and] the poor judgment that I allowed to happen to those animals” (translation: “Damn…gettin’ caught and being punished sucks!”)

“It’s wrong, man, ” Vick said. “I don’t know how many times I gotta say it. I feel tremendous hurt about what happened. I deserve to lose the $135 million [contract]. I feel disgusted because of what I allowed to happen to those animals. The first day I walked into that prison and he slammed that door…I knew the magnitude and the poor judgment that I allowed to happen to those animals…I cried over what I did, being away from my family, letting so many people down, letting myself down….being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk…that wasn’t my life, that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be…[and all] because of the so-called culture I thought was right and cool…I thought it was fun and exciting at the time.”

I was grouching and grumbling about Quentin Tarantino‘s choices for the best films of the last 16 years (i.e., since ’93). Lost in Translation, for example. Then he explained why The Matrix no longer holds the second-place slot on his list due to the what-happened? effect of Reloaded and Revolutions. And I began to smile like I haven’t smiled in several days.

Whoever cut this Werner Herzog interview about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has as much editing expertise as yours truly, which is to say next to none. Movie City Indie‘s Ray Pride posted it this morning. Sorry for the Vimeo. If John Cusack and other occasionally mercenary actors do a straight paycheck movie now and then, so can Werner Herzog.

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS – Werner Herzog Interview from Millennium Films on Vimeo.

Where is the transcendent theme or “lift” element in George Hickenlooper‘s Casino Jack, a drama about oily wheeler-dealer Jack Abramoff (Kevin Spacey)? What I mean is that a film about a scumbag has to do more than say “what a scumbag!” I could answer my own question since I have a copy of Norman Snider’s script, but I’ve been too much of a lazy-ass to read it.

Some light has been shed by George Rush & Joanna Molloy, who’ve read the script. But all they’re saying is that “some of its real-life characters” — George Bush, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, former U.S. Congressman Bob Ney — “have cause for concern.” In other words, scumbag plural.

What I want and expect from this film — especially with the sardonic Spacey in the lead — is perverse black comedy.

“I’m of the persuasion that budget constraints are very, very good for creativity,” Mad Men auteur Matthew Weiner tells Vanity Fair‘s Bruce Handy. “I think people having unlimited amounts of money makes you really lazy. And I will be quoted on that, believe it or not.”

Mad Men‘s creative honcho Matthew Weiner

I’ve been saying this for years. The more money spent on a film, the more needlessly grandiose and overbearing it tends to be. Obviously not always. That Gone With the Wind shot of the dead and dying in Atlanta surely cost a load of dough, but it was worth every penny. Ditto the mothership arrival in Close Encounters, the chariot race sequence in Ben-Hur, and hundreds of others in this vein. Big money has been creatively well spent in the past, and will be again.

But having less of the stuff to throw around does tend to inspire better films. Case in point: Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (a classic made on the cheap) vs. Marty’s Gangs of New York (problems galore despite — or because of? — a massive budget). If I was a studio chief I’d have a framed motto on the wall behind my desk saying “Do it for less or take a hike.”

The problem with Weiner’s less-is-more approach is that it doesn’t necessarily work in a dollars-and-sense way outside of the cable TV realm. Because the Eloi don’t respond to creativity per se. They want dumb-ass CG, high-concept spectacle, monsters and robots, stuff blown up, pants pulled down, guys vomiting in Vegas, etc. They really don’t seem interested in responding to much else. So you can’t make profitable Eloi movies with less money — you need more. And there’s the leak in the boat.

In this morning’s Mad Men vs. Woodstock piece, N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich quotes Vanity Fair‘s Bruce Handy: “As in Hitchcock, the Mad Men characters are unaware of shocks that the audience knows all too well lie ahead, whether they be the Kennedy assassination and women’s lib or long sideburns and the lasting influence of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s witty, self-deprecating ‘lemon’ ad for Volkswagen.”

“What we don’t know,” Rich comments, “is how the characters will be rocked by these changes. But we’re reasonably certain it won’t be pretty. That’s where the drama is, and it’s tense.

“In the world of television, Mad Men is notorious for drawing great press and modest audiences. This could be the season when the viewers catch up, in part because the show is catching up to the level of anxiety we feel in 2009. In the first two seasons, the series was promoted with the slogan ‘Where the Truth Lies.’ This year, it’s ‘The World’s Gone Mad.’ The ad hyping the season premiere depicts the impeccably dressed Don Draper, the agency executive played by Jon Hamm, sitting in his office calmly smoking a Lucky Strike as floodwater rises to his waist.

“To be underwater — well, many Americans know what that’s like right now. But we are also at that 1963-like pivot point of our history, with a new young president unlike any we’ve seen before, and with the promise of a new frontier whose boundaries are a mystery. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan framed this mood the last time around, but you don’t know what it is. We feel Don Draper’s disorientation as his once rock-solid ’50s America starts to be swept away. We recognize his fear that the world could go mad.”

I don’t know much about Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Okay, I know a couple things. I know that I’ve faintly disliked the title from the get-go because it sounds too pat and cliched. I know the film is coming out in the late fall through Apparition, the new distribution company. And that it’s about an anxious and disturbed middle-aged guy named Jack (Sean Penn) trying to get past a long-simmering resentment of his father (Brad Pitt). And that one way or another Malick’s narrative takes a detour into a dinosaur realm of some kind.

My understanding is that Brad Pitt plays Sean Penn’s dad in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life.

I was talking about the dino aspect with a journalist friend a couple of weeks ago, and we were both shaking our heads and acknowledging what a bizarre mind-fuck it sounds like. On paper at least. And it’s not like I’m blowing the dino thing out of proportion because there’s some kind of Tree of Life-related IMAX dinosaur movie due in early 2010 that will augment or expand on some theme that’s expressed within the parameters of the Penn-Pitt story. Right? I’m just trying to sound like I have a clue.

All I know is that it’s one hell of a transition to go from a story of angry, frustrated people in the 1950s as well as the present and then to somehow disengage the spacecraft and travel into another realm entirely (like Keir Dullea did in 2001: A Space Odyssey when he soared through Jupiter space), and somehow float into a world that is pre-historical and pre-human, and have this time-trip somehow add to our understanding and feeling for the sad/angry/bitter people in the Pitt-Penn realm.

And I just think it’s time for a little taste. A little marketing hors d’eouvre. Some kind of meet-and-see immersion. You can’t just open a movie like this and go, “Okay, guys…. Penn, Pitt, angst, dinosaurs! Line forms to the right.” You have to set things up and prepare people, get them in the mood, warm up the sauce pan, put out a trailer or a short reel…something.

I mean, if someone like me is scratching his head and going “what the fuck…?” over the unusualness of a ’50s domestic drama mixed with footage of prehistoric beasts, imagine what Joe Popcorn is going to think or say. Don’t even talk about the Eloi. Tree of Life is going to be out in.,..what, three and a half months? Four? Time for a little hubba-hubba.