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Take this with a grain, but an English HE reader named Patrick O’Brien told me today that he’s just caught an early London screening of Revolutionary Road. O’Brien writes well and thoughtfully and seems sincere as far as an e-mail allows, so here’s his generally positive reaction:

“I’ve never been much of a fan of Sam Mendes but I was very pleasantly surprised here. Revolutionary Road (DreamWorks, 12.26) is a tremendously impressive emotional drama, cleverly put together, beautifully composed, and nicely edited by Tariq Anwar.

“Only the ending felt a little unsure; otherwise, I feel Mendes has made serious progress as a director. A daring scene at the breakfast table is pulled off with virtuosity towards the end. I’ll say no more than this.

“Much is demanded of the leads. A lot of what is communicated — the charged, confused feelings dangling just below the surface — is done without words. We’re dealing with a lot of heightened emotion bordering on melodrama. But the actors cope well, although Kate Winslet, I feel, is more convincing than Leonardo DiCaprio.

“Revolutionary Road isn’t saying anything particularly revolutionary. I’ve seen people trapped in the suburbs, their dreams wilting, in cinema before — but it is portrayed this time with great eloquence and intelligence.”

I knew 20 minutes or so into last night’s Quantum of Solace screening that I’d never see it a second time. (Like I have with The Bourne Ultimatum.) I didn’t want to leave — it certainly holds you and never lets the engine idle — but I wasn’t feeling all that adrenalized. The fierce moves are in place but the high wouldn’t kick in. It’s the kind of film that keeps you alert and munching your popcorn, but it gives the term “brutal efficiency” a bad name.

Quantum of Solace is Bourne-y, all right. The makers — director Marc Forster, in particular — had no choice but to acknowledge the supremacy of that franchise and particularly the game-changer moves engineered by the great Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon. But the damn thing works you over like a machine and I just never fell in like with it. I’m fine with the old-school hallmarks having been jettisoned, but it’s overly brutal and just too much of a metal-hammer-to-the-forehead experience. And I say this having adored the last Bourne film.

If someone I trust had come up to me after the screening and offered me a quaalude, I would have popped it immediately. How many action movies have you seen lately that have put you in the mood for medication?

It’s not Daniel Craig‘s fault. He’s done what he’s been told to do, and quite well at that. But the film doesn’t let him do or be anything other than brusque and occasionally savage. And the action stuff he performs seems a little cyborgy at times.

Quantum of Solace is the tightest, most cynical and most coldly assaultive 007 film ever, but I’m not sure where that leaves us. I felt a slight distance from it early on. Not turned off or repelled or even alienated, per se, but if the projector had broken down and the screening cancelled I would have been no more than mildly disappointed. Action junkies will be fine with it, I guess, but what does that say? Action junkies are notoriously easy lays.

The last seven or eight minutes, however, are quite fine — solemn, thoughtful, restrained — and endings, as we all know, are half the game. So I’m recommending it for the finale, at least.

Drew Kerr has assembled a list of 20 Bond song favorites, worst to best. No Bond theme has ever been all that great, but Paul McCartney‘s “Live and Let Die” has always seemed the catchiest and most strikingly orchestrated, and I still think of Carly Simon‘s “Nobody Does It Better” as being the wittiest and most intimate.

I need to hear Jack White‘s Quantum of Solace number a couple of more times before deciding, but what are the odds I’ll give it another serious listen, knowing as I do that I’ll never see Quantum again, even on Blu-ray?.

Here’s to Mitch Mitchell, 62, the jazzy-styled drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience who was found dead yesterday in a Portland, Oregon, hotel room.

By any yardstick he was a truly magnificent mad-man drummer. People always mention his rousing interplay with Hendrix on “Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire” and “Third Stone From The Sun,” but the restraint and simplicity he brought to “Red House” has always struck me as somehow more profound. I’ve always adored the crack-like sound from his snare drum on that track, like the sound of a baseball bat slamming against the side of a wooden doghouse.

Here‘s an mp3 of “Red House.”

Mitchell was my landlord when I moved into the top half of a two-story house on Franklin Avenue in the hills in early ’87. He and his girlfriend lived downstairs. And then one day he was off to England (or so I recall) and I never saw him again. My immediate suspicion when I read about his passing this morning is that the age-old rock musician syndrome had played a part, but let’s not go there right now.

If the world is coming to a spectacular end, you can bet Roland Emmerich, the Irwin Allen of our time, is behind the curtain and working the gears. 2012 will be out next year, five years after The Day After Tomorrow. The intrigue for me is “how much better will the CG be?” Roland deserves credit, at the very least, for cranking out handsome, well-lit disaster films with tight scripts and reasonably professional performances, which is more than Allen ever managed.

The straight-paycheck cast includes John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover (as “President Wilson”), “Chewy” Ejiofor, Oliver Platt and Thomas McCarthy. We all need to pay the bills. There’s nothing wrong with going out there and bringing home the bacon.

I don’t mean to sound like a shallow Hollywood guy, but Harrison Ford should consider dying his hair dark gray. Because it’s light gray in the new Crossing Over trailer and approaching white, and it just bothers me that Han Solo is looking this long of tooth. He’s only 66 and he looks 74. I just want him to look like a semi-credible middle-aged brawny stud, like he did in Firewall. Hold back the tide!

I’m not saying Ford needs to do a Walter Matthau or a Ronald Reagan. I just don’t want him to look like a guy who’s two or three moves away from a senior citizens home. Is that such a empty and rancid sentiment?

I took this on the corner of Broadway and 49th right after catching a noon showing of Paul Schrader‘s Adam Resurrected, a kind of Nazis-and-Jews Marat/Sade cinema-of-the-absurd concoction, based on a respected book by Yoram Kaniuk, about a man’s gradual recovery from the horrors of World War II.

I needed a moment to collect myself and for some reason locked in on Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow as a way back into my pre-Adam headspace.

Adam Resurrected played at Telluride but doesn’t open until late December, so there’s plenty of time to get into it. There’s no question about Jeff Goldblum having given one of those exceptional, out-there, once-in-a-career performances that too few actors in their autumnal years get a chance to rock out and kick ass with. But after you’ve acknowledged this (and many have thus far), the question is “to what end?”

The line I was saying to myself as I walked out of the Brill Building was, “I sink there iss maybe a little too much dog-barking in this film….no?”

This news is several hours old, but a liberal-wet-dream spoof edition of the New York Times was sold this morning at subway stations all over Manhattan. Maybe I can still snag a copy — it’s only 4:17 pm right now. If anyone has an extra copy I’ll meet them somewhere in Manhattan and pay good money.

The guys behind it are The Yes Men, about whom a 2003 doc was made. Here’s the press release that went out announcing it.

Dated July 4, 2009, the publication imagines a utopian, Obama-ized reality with the Iraq War over and done with, national health care established, a flush economy, taxation of the fat and loaded, the oil companies financing a study of climate change, and…wait, Thomas Friedman‘s resignation?

A portrait of London by a Red Bull-chugging, Guiness-slurping youngish guy who aimed his video camera solely at conventional tourist sites (Picadilly, Regent Street, Soho, the Underground) and felt only the juice, velocity and hoo-hah. A faux Michael Bay sensibility if I ever saw one.

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Off to a noon screening of Adam Resurrected, some filing and walk-around time for three or four hours, and then Quantum of Solace at 7 pm.

“I saw Quantum of Solace last weekend,” says Jett in an e-mail this morning from London. “Great action movie. I liked it better than Casino Royale, although the plot wasn’t fantastic. I was stirred by seeing a hint of Bond’s personal struggle over that girl from Royale. Inner anguish makes Bond more human in this movie. Plus, I saw it with digital projection and great sound, and it kind of leaves you with a wow feeling at the end.”

In an 11.12 L.A. Times piece, John Horn speaks with I’ve Loved You So Long star Kristin Scott Thomas and observes that “if the audience detects that Scott Thomas doesn’t fully believe in the character, the whole thing could unravel in a maudlin mess.” And KST says, “I was terrified of that. If there was one thing that I am terrified of, it’s sentimentality.

“And I really didn’t want people to see an actress forgiving a character, saying, ‘I am going to show you this person but I am actually really nice.’ I wanted it to be raw.” Which is one reason, perhaps the reason, why her performance, for me, is the stuff of legend.

Last night The Envelope‘s Scott Feinberg managed to get on the phone with Australia director Baz Luhrman to discuss various reports about the troubled film, and in particular last Sunday night’s report from Australia’s Herald Sun that Luhrman — spoiler-averse, beware! — has been pressured to go with a “live Hugh” happy ending.

They spoke just before Luhrman boarded a flight from New York (where he and the cast had taken part in an 11.10 Oprah special on the film) back to Sydney, where he’s now completing post-production work on the film, which is set to open nationwide on Wednesday, 11.26.

I’ve read Luhrman’s answer about the live-dead ending twice and I’m still not entirely what he’s saying, but he seems to saying that in the struggle to finish the film in just the right way he found a theme that he believed in. And that somebody (not necessarily H.J., apparently) That’s how I’m reading it, at least.

“What’s interesting is [that] I wrote, I think, six endings in all the drafts I did, shot three, and I ended up concluding the film in a way in which I — probably more than anyone — least expected,” Luhrman begins. “And there is a death in the ending of the film, by the way — it’s a bit of a twist and I won’t give it away.

“And, incidentally, the two endings, by the way, tested completely the same essentially, you know? They really did in the numbers. But I came up with a third ending, and the ending that I’ve created about the film came from a place of a response, actually, to the thing that I wanted the movie to be — the important, big idea of the movie — how to amplify that big idea. And, essentially, that’s, as the little boy says, ‘The rain will fall. The grass grows green. And life begins again.’

“And that idea — that in a world that is so full of fear, and things are falling down, and people are somewhat concerned — sending a movie out there that can leave people with a sense that, despite it all, you can go back to Faraway Downs, or that you can go on, and a sense of hope, is something I really felt personally I wanted the movie to give out.”

“But I think the big story is how the actual ending I came up with — which is quite unusual, it’s not easy to say it’s ‘the happy one’ or ‘the death one’ — it’s something quite surprising. And it found itself, really.”

“You can go back to Faraway Downs” sounds like a little bit of a push-back on “you can’t go home again.” Which I know from life experience to be absolutely true. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding.