I was fairly certain that today was Thursday. Somehow a day got lost or forgotten about. It’s not like I live in a cloud but since I’m always fighting the clock it feels easier on some level not to check it too much. I usually know what day it is but everything seems to be streaming along a lot faster. Months pass in two or three weeks. I’m leaving for Telluride in less than two weeks which means I’ve only got a few days. Obviously the sunlight tells me something and ditto the darkness, but otherwise I’ll check the time when I wake up and then I’ll start working and researching and calling around, and then I’ll check my watch while on the phone and I’ll be like “holy shit, it’s 5:30?” and then I’ll remember that a screening starts in 90 minutes, which means I need to take my spartan three-minute shower (long showers are for losers).

Movies have been a thriving industry for a little over a century now, and for most of this period romantic male leads were cut from a certain cloth. There were two categories, of course — studly, straight-arrow romantic leads (everyone from Cary Grant to Van Johnson to William Holden to Steve McQueen to Ben Stiller to Brenton Thwaites) to less studly, mostly pleasing but less-than-drop-dead sexy romantic male also-rans or “best friends” (i.e., Ralph Bellamy back in the ’30s, Wendell Corey in the ’50s).

Romantic male leads used to be guys whom (a) women can pleasurably imagine going to bed with and/or marrying, and (b) straight guys recognize as superior alpha males with excellent genes. But not so much lately.

What’s changed is not only the quality of the alphas but the romantic also-rans — i.e., the guys who never got the girl. Over the last decade or so the rise of cheap digital cinema and…whatever, the Sundance Film Festival aesthetic plus downswirling GenY-ish attitudes plus a couple of Judd Apatow-perpetrated scenarios have ushered in a politically correct notion that dweeby, dorky-looking guys or less-than-drop-dead-knockout girls (i.e., Lena Dunham being the standard-bearer) are just as acceptable in a romantic context as anyone else.

Twee-male Mark Webber (Laggies, Happy Crhistmas)

Put simply in a male context, guys who got the girl used to look like guys who got the girl…but no longer. Boiled down further, it’s become increasingly common these days for male romantic also-rans and even occasional romantic leads to fit the dreaded twee mold. The rule of twee means that any homely or marginal or bearded, overfed, gross-looking guy or girl can hook up with good-looking types and nobody bats an eyelash. Blubbery Seth Rogen married to and boinking Rose Byrne every which way in Neighbors…if you say so. Mark Duplass making sensitive-guy moves on Melissa McCarthy in Tammy…really? Anne Hathaway being sufficiently taken with Rafe Spall to move in with him in One Day…remarkable.

In my mind nothing illustrates this all-but-certified attitude more than the fact that Mark Webber, by any measure a dorky, balding, narrow-shouldered, knit-cap-wearing, carrot-haired, sensitive-dweeb beardo type who wouldn’t have been allowed with 100 feet of any hot leading lady during the ’70s or ’80s or even the ’90s, was cast as a romantic-lead opposite Anna Kendrick in Joe Swanberg‘s Happy Christmas and then as Keira Knightley‘s earnest-but-clueless fiance in Laggies.

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I understand and accept that the HE community, obviously including but in another sense above and beyond the comment-thread regulars, is here for…what, the history and the voice and the pizazzy atttiude and…what else, the derision? I realize that attention spans are shorter than ever. I’m just as moody and scattered and “otherwise engaged” as the next guy…I get it. But I’m asking again for loose change for my son’s Kickstarter campaign for Domino.fm, and this time I really mean it, dammit. This isn’t late 2008 or ’09 or ’10 — there’s a degree of comfort out there now. HE is obviously free and that’s the way I like it, but anyone who’s been visiting and having fun over the past decade (or 16 years if you count the previous incarnations) is hereby requested to sprinkle a little sugar. $10 or $20…whatever works.

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80% of romantic films are about great beginnings — the first spark and how a guy and a gal gradually overcome obstacles to a relationship that’s clearly meant to be. 15% are about deeply-felt relationships that end tragically or on a sad, bittersweet note — Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, The Way We Were, Brief Encounter. But touching romantic films about a couple dealing with second-act bruisings and fresh discoveries and emotional rebirths are very, very rare, and all the more valuable for that. This is what The One I Love shoots for and pretty much nails and brings home. On top of being agreeably mind-fucky and Twilight Zone-ish.

On top of which the ending of The One I Love planted an earbug. The Mamas and the Papas’ version of “This Is Dedicated To The One I Love” is played over the closing credits, and I still can’t get it out of my head. Most earbugs last three or four days — a week at most — but this been dogging me for a couple of weeks.

Variety‘s Marc Graser is reporting that the Edge of Tomorrow Bluray (Warner Home Video, 10.7) has almost been retitled LIVE DIE REPEAT, which of course was the marketing slogan when the Doug Liman film opened last May/June. The Tom Cruise sci-fi actioner underperformed so they’re trying something new. But the old title is still hanging on. The title on the binder side actually says LIVE DIE REPEAT / Edge of Tomorrow. If the WHV guys had any real cojones, they would have junked Edge altogether. Whadja expect? Guys who work for corporations always hedge their bets.

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A scan of an Entertainment Weekly Fall preview photo of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice shows Joaquin Phoenix‘s stoner shamus (i.e., Larry “Doc” Sportello) talking to Josh Brolin‘s Detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. My first response to this pic is that the mutton-chopped Phoenix looks a bit like Kim Hunter in Planet of the Apes. Or Henry Hull in Werewolf of London. Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet has written that Phoenix “looks incredibly odd in the picture…I can’t tell if it’s the hair or if his face looks air brushed or what, but it looks damned weird to me.” Inherent Vice will debut on Saturday, 10.4 at the New York Film Festival. It will open commercially on 12.12.

(l.) Over-pixellated c.u. of Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice; (r.) Kim Hunter in Planet of the Apes.

I watched a high-def stream of Jamie Foley‘s At Close Range last night. It contains one of Chris Walken‘s all-time great performances — he owns every scene he’s in, and the film faintly slumbers when he’s absent. But I remember very clearly that I couldn’t understand half of what Walken was slurrin’ and drawlin’ when I attended a Westwood all-media screening in April 1986. Hip critics and industry types loved it and so did I. Patrick Leonard‘s musical score was one of the best of that decade, and the cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchía…forget it. It was even a good thing for Madonna. But Joe and Jane Popcorn said no. It cost $6.5 million to produce (not counting marketing), and it made a little less than $2.4 million domestic. That’s an embarassment!

Where were you 28 years and 4 months ago? I was single and living on Hightower Drive in Hollywood. I was banging around as a kind of independent publicist (New Line Cinema, M. Emmet Walsh) and living with a sense of vague frustration. The tolerable kind, I mean. Two years later I was married to Maggie and living on Franklin Avenue in the hills, and Jett’s birth was less than two months away.

With everyone swooning about the late Lauren Bacall‘s husky, purry voice (N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis calls it “low and flat, wildly insinuating, electric and lingering”), it’s time once again to plead with all the under-35 women out there who speak in sexy-baby voices. Please step back, ladies, and think things over…please. Because too many of you have decided that sultry, smoky voices — the kind that Bacall, Glenda Jackson, Anne Bancroft and Patricia Neal used to play like wind instruments — aren’t as appealing or are perhaps even unattractive, and that you need to adopt those perverse beepity-beep-beep voices that Lake Bell mentioned last year.

“The vocal trend that is infecting the female youth in this fine nation is the sexy baby vocal virus,” Bell told NPR’s Terry Gross. “[It’s] a huge problem for a myriad of reasons, one being…is that sexy? Because…I think [what’s] intended is this submissive ‘I’m a 12-year-old and you can tell me what to do’ [thing], which I think is pretty weird, for that to be considered sexually enticing.”

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On top of his TV comedy series being cancelled, being forced to do crap like Merry Friggin’ Christmas, the ever-present Black Dog affliction and a recent back-to-square-one visit to the Hazelden rehab facility in Minnesota, poor Robin Williams was also “in the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease at the time of his death,” according to his wife Susan Schneider in a statement. Wow…the poor guy. Oh, wait, what am I thinking? HE commenters have explained that career troubles or triumphs mean absolutely nothing to depression sufferers and that I should just shut the fuck up. I know next to nothing about current treatments for Parkinson’s but I gather that sufferers are not necessarily condemned to states of Katharine Hepburn-like trembling. At the very least it can modified to some extent. Schneider’s statement that “Robin’s sobriety was intact” might seem at odds with his recent rehab stint, but she probably meant that he was sober post-Hezelden.

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“In Hector and the Search for Happiness, Simon Pegg plays a London-based psychiatrist who has a mini nervous breakdown, puts his relationship with his girlfriend (Rosamund Pike) on hold and sets off round the world to find the secret to happiness,” Hollywood Reporter critic Leslie Felperin notes. “Along the way, he makes new friends, meets up with old ones and has various adventures, all the while writing down his aphoristic insights — for example, ‘Listening is loving’ — in a notebook. The film manages, impressively, to be both crushingly banal and offensive in its use of cultural stereotypes. Watching it is like being brutally violated by a greeting card.

Pic is an adaptation of Francois Lelord’s best-selling novel of the same name. Felperin calls it “an irritating mashup of faux-naif narration and self-help pop thought that arguably deserves to be made into a film as bad as this.” The adapting culprits are director and co-writer Peter Chelsom (Hear My Song, Funny Bones, Town and Country, Hannah Montana: The Movie), German writer-director Maria von Heland (Big Girls Don’t Cry) and Tinker Lindsay (creative consultant on Hannah Montana).

“There’s also no excuse for police using excessive force against peaceful protests, or to throw protestors in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United Sates of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people what they see on the ground. Let’s remember that we’re all part of one American family” — bullshit. “We are united in common values” — really? “And that includes belief in equality under the law” — nope. “Now’s the time for an open and transparent process to see that justice is done” — clearly.

Leaving aside the present ugliness, no one should misunderstand a simple fact about cops, which is that they deal with the worst aspects of human nature 24/7 and that the only way to deal with them when they’re angry and barking some kind of order is to chill and obey. Don’t run or argue or flip the bird. Just give in and show submission and that’ll be the end of it. The key is to make them feel placated so they’ll move on. You will always make it worse if you give them any kind of shit. You can’t improve the situation by going “why don’t you leave me the fuck alone?” Some people can’t seem to understand this.

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David Ayer‘s Fury will close the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, October 19th, or two days after it opens stateside. Two weeks ago Sony declared they consider Fury an award-season contender, but if they wanted a real-deal conversation starter they would have arranged for a surprise screening during the forthcoming 52nd New York Film Festival. Alas, the film wasn’t ready to be screened for the NYFF committee in time (or so I’ve been told). The London Film Festival slot is a promotional bounce for the 10.24 British opening plus a nod to the fact that Fury shot in England for three months last year. HE to Fury producers: You’re going to have to do better than this if you want the Oscar-blogging mafia to really sit up and go, “Yes!…definitely hot shit…looking forward and then some!” I obviously know nothing about the quality of Fury. For all I know it’s Saving Private Ryan meets Full Metal Jacket. But you have to roll it out in the right way or people will mutter to themselves, “Well, if their energy levels are only at a level 7 or 7.5, why should we raise ours any higher?”

I’m not trying to be an asshole here. Sony started the awards-contender chatter, not me. If they just wanted to position Fury as a commercial actioner (i.e., a rugged war flick aimed at guys) with an expectation of strong reviews, fine. But that Cieply article started something. When you say “okay, award-conversation starters…pay attention to this” and “let us in, wee-yoo,” you’re jumping into a game that has certain rules and regulations.