The gist of yesterday’s A.O. Scott vs. Spike Lee contretemps, ignited by Scott’s Sunday N.Y. Times piece about the evolving gentrification of Brooklyn (“Whose Brooklyn Is It Anyway?”) , is as follows: (1) Scott suggested that Lee’s presence in Fort Greene had nudged along the gentrification of that now-thoroughly-yuppified Brooklyn nabe as much as anyone or anything else , if not more so, (2) he further implied Lee can’t really complain because he lives in a figurative “glass brownstone” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and then (3) Lee claimed in an open letter to Scott on whosay.com that Scott hasn’t thoroughly done his homework (i.e., a reference to the fact that Lee’s dad bought a brownstone home in Fort Greene in 1968 and still lives there) and that Brooklyn is a state of mind that you carry around and that, in his words, “I can live on The Moon and what I said is still TRUE.”

Lee’s letter is absolutely terrific in its straight from the shoulder resolve. Where Scott’s prose dances and glides and riffs around, Lee speaks with a blunt street patois about heritage and community and the residue of memory and family. The piece presents his no-pretense personality, vocabulary and way of thinking. He’s an American Original. I love it when he tells Scott that his argument is “OKEY DOKE,” and I love his sign-offs — “WAKE UP” and “WE BEEN HERE.”

“Why? Because it feels so goddam good.” But the notion of paying $57.97 for a Twilight Time Bluray of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia feels bad. Later, hombre. Drop that price down to $20something and we’ll talk.

I still can’t get over how good Jason Segel looks without the usual oppression. This is one of the most surprising physical transformations of the 21st Century. It would have been rough on audiences if he’d done these Sex Tape scenes with his This Is 40 / The Five Year Engagement / I Love You Man girth. Hats off, genuine respect, different fella. He’ll relapse, of course, but it’s nice to see a beefy guy do the hard cockatoo thing. I know I’m repeating myself.

How mystical is moviegoing? Vigorous marketing campaigns for bad or humdrum or otherwise misbegotten films never seem to matter all that much. They open and people just don’t go. Or they do. Why? Because they know. Because they can smell the hits and the tanks before they’ve read the aggregate review sites, and sometimes even before they see the trailers. A certain percentage will pay to see crap even though they know it’s crap. Why? Because wildebeests just want to see the crap that they want to see. Either way all marketers can do is fan the flames of embers that have already begun to glow on their own.

Question: Anyone can pick the big upcoming hits and misses, but which films in the 2014 Oscar Balloon will have to struggle to get off the ground?

When George Lucas passes on and his ashes are deposited in a plot with a tombstone, the epitaph should read “Inventor & Destroyer of the Star Wars series” but also “Inventor of the Light Sabre.” Even I, a Lucas hater going back to Return of the Jedi (i.e., for the last 31 years), will admit that the light sabre is perhaps the greatest weapon ever invented for a motion picture. The coolness of it (particularly the sound of it) will live on through the millenia. That said, the Darth Maul variation (i.e., two light sabres shooting out in opposite directions from a single handle or power generator) was a cheap movie whore’s idea for an improvement in the basic design. The essence of a light sabre is simple elegance — the Darth Maul sabre was comic-book bullshit.

One of the reasons everyone’s excited about Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (Universal, 12.25.14) is that the script was written by Joel and Ethan Coen (apparently after earlier versions had been penned by Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson). But there are no guarantees in life, even for the Coens. Remember that they wrote an allegedly above-average script for Gambit, a remake of a 1966 Michael Caine-Shirley Maclaine cat-and-mouse thriller, and it turned out horribly. It earned a 19% Rotten Tomatoes rating when it opened in England in the fall of 2012, and then disappeared stateside. To my knowledge you can’t even stream it on VOD. It’s purchasable as a PAL DVD/Bluray, but who cares? Just don’t count those Unbroken chickens before they’re hatched — that’s all I’m saying.

Not so long ago Colin Firth was on top of the world. At the very least he enjoyed a remarkable three-year hot streak between 2009 and 2011. His sad but dignified performance as a suicidal gay professor in Tom Ford‘s A Single Man (’09) resulted in critical huzzahs and award-season accolades. His stuttering King George VI in The King’s Speech (’10) led to several Best Actor prizes, including an Oscar. And his performance as the treacherous Bill Haydon in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (released in early ’12 but viewed at major festivals in late 2011) was seen as nearly equal to Gary Oldman‘s George Smiley and at least at par with Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Peter Guillam.

Colin Firth in the duddish, faint-pulse romantic drama Arthur Newman

But right after Firth won his King’s Speech Oscar in February 2011, his luck changed. Or perhaps he was infected with a slumber virus. Or he decided to snag a few paychecks while the getting was good. I only know that his last four films over the past three years — Gambit, Arthur Newman, The Railway Man and Devil’s Knot — have been critically panned as inept or lackluster sleepathons. Suddenly Firth became renowned for going into his “repressed British clod mode,” as Empire Kim Newman put it a couple of years ago, regardless of the role or the film. It now appears that Firth’s next film — a Rowan Joffe-directed thriller called Before I Go To Sleep, costarring Nicole Kidman and Mark Strong — is a B-level distraction, at best.

In this “Trailers From Hell” tribute to Sudden Impact, Alan Spencer decides to omit that the most legendary Clint Eastwood line of all time — “Go ahead, make my day” — was written by the great John Milius. This is more or less common knowledge, of course, but it can’t hurt to underline. Note: if you’re any good at doing Eastwood imitations, the best way to say this line is to imagine you’ve been forced to say it over and over for hours on end, and that you’re sick of the sound of it. If you have to say it one more time you’ll vomit on the sidewalk. But you say it anyway.

The definitive scene from Ken Russell‘s Savage Messiah (’72) was highlighted by the one-sheet. It was more of a brief sequence than a scene, not lasting more than 10 or 12 seconds…a snippet. Wielding a jackhammer on a London street, sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brezka (Scott Anthony) completes a pavement etching as a crowd of passersby cheer and applaud. I’ve seen Messiah only once (and many moons ago), but this moment never left my head. That’s filmmaking — the art of penetration and lifelong embedding.

“Y’know a scary thing about ‘um? They dohn need powuh…” Which male, raspy-voiced costar of Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 7.11) is saying this line? I’ll tell you this much — the actor (or the character he’s playing) wasn’t reared by upscale, well-educated parents, and he damn sure didn’t attend a Connecticut prep school or an Ivy League university. If Reeves had hired me to play a guy somewhat like myself and I had the same line, here’s how I’d say it (after a rewrite session): “You know what’s threatening about all this? They don’t need electricity or warmth or grande cappucinos or Gap stretch T-shirts or any of the usual comforts. They’re animals. They’re fucking animals.”

When I first heard about Grindhouse Releasing’s Bluray of The Swimmer, I had an inkling that Chris Innis‘s 150-minute “Story of The Swimmer” doc might be the most interesting aspect. Well, I watched it last night and can say without hesitation that it definitely is. (I’m not a huge fan of the film itself.) Innis has assembled a genuinely interesting account of the conflicted shooting and re-shooting of this 1968 effort. It’s the story of an intelligent, obviously ambitious project that was probably doomed to be a commercial failure from the get-go, and which still doesn’t work all that well. But in today’s context, it’s at least a respectable attempt to capture that spiritually corroded aura of the John Cheever realm (alcohol, affluence, New York-area suburbia) of the ’50s and ’60s.

Innis, winner of an Oscar (with Bob Murawski) for her cutting of The Hurt Locker, has not made a masterwork here. In some ways it’s a little bit splotchy and piecemeal but it’s basically a solid, stand-up effort, no stone unturned. Especially considering that all the creative principals (Burt Lancaster, Frank and Eleanor Perry, Sam Spiegel, Janice Rule, Kim Hunter, Barbara Loden, Sydney Pollack, Elia Kazan, Marvin Hamlisch) are dead and gone.

Until this morning I had seen this scene from Go Tell The Spartans just once. It was during a Manhattan press screening of Ted Post‘s 1978 film, sometime in May of that year or nearly 36 years ago. But I never forgot the fellatio-in-the-gazebo story told by Burt Lancaster‘s Major Barker — a gem. After ducking the Vietnam War for almost 15 years (except for John Wayne‘s 1968 fantasy film called The Green Berets), Hollywood finally began to make films about that misbegotten conflict starting in ’76 (which is when Apocalypse Now began shooting) and release the first wave in ’78 — Spartans, The Boys From Company C, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter. Apocalypse Now opened in August ’79.