Lewis Beale has posted a CNN.com piece about how the Star Wars franchise ruined the reputation of big-screen science fiction by dumbing it down and aiming at a younger, less thoughtful demographic. What he essentially means is that the huge popularity of Star Wars mde it easier for studio execs to nudge aside weightier, more thoughtful sci-fi projects.

“Science fiction is in fact one of the most creative literary genres around,” Beale reminds. “The best of sci-fi is filled with meditations on what’s out there, what makes us human, how technology is used and how it is changing us. It takes up issues of race, sexuality and quite literally everything else under the sun. It is essentially about ideas, not action, and that’s the problem, as far as Hollywood is concerned.

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Last night Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan filed a limited but interesting reaction to the first press screening of Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla (Warner Bros., 5.16), to wit: the beast is camera-shy and doesn’t really show himself until the very end. “[If] you throw everything you can at the screen, you’ve got nowhere else to go,” Edwards told Buchanan after the screening. The goal, he said, is “not to frustrate the audience, but to tease them. It’s kind of like cinematic foreplay. [We’re trying] to incrementally build and build. So hopefully, you get the big climax at the end and it has the maximum power possible — and then it’s the end credits.”

The Godzilla review embargo prevented Buchanan from saying any more. The embargo lifts on 5.10 at 10pm Pacific. In fact the first reviews will be out a few hours before that, or a couple of hours after the big public premiere screening in Paris on Saturday, May 10th, which yours truly will attend and review from. It’s quite possible (though far from certain) that I’ll be the only American lone wolf on the Godzilla beat in Paris that evening. Johnny on the spot, can’t wait, bated breath, etc.

Is there anyone in the entire world who didn’t immediately mutter “drug overdose” when they first heard of the sudden death of Peaches Geldof, 25? Anyone at all? And yet this likely scenario wasn’t even whispered when her death was announced early last month. “Oh, she just died” is what everyone (including her famous dad, Bob Geldof) more or less said. “How terribly, terribly sad.” The concurrent word was (a) don’t speculate irresponsibly, (b) don’t speak ill of the deceased, and (c) spare the feelings of the immediate family. Today the obvious was finally confirmed by official sources, to wit: Like her mother Paula Yates, Peaches more or less offed herself with heroin. With two young kids to care for…brilliant. She just had to make room for it. I say this as someone who dabbled as a young lad.

“We know that a dream can be real, but whoever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist of course, but how, in what way, as we believe, as flesh and blood human beings, or are we simply parts of someone’s feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it. And then ask yourself, ‘Do you live here in this country, in this world, or do you live instead in the Twilight Zone?'” — Rod Serling‘s epitaph for Shadow Play, originally aired on The Twilight Zone on 5.5.61.

The generally disliked Spider-Man 3 earned $490 million overseas and $356.5 million domestic for a grand total of $890,871,626. 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man (the first reboot with Andrew “Paycheck” Garfield in the lead role) earned $752 million worldwide but the domestic tally fell to $262 million, obviously a major drop. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is almost guaranteed a domestic box office tally south of $250 million, but the international figures will probably again make the franchise too profitable to discontinue. Some critics are bending themselves into pretzels to say nice things, but who really cares besides Sony stockholders?

A Bluray of Steven Spielberg‘s oppresively preachy and high-minded Amistad streets on May 6th. I’m not dismissing it altogether. I actually re-watched some of it about six months ago, and found some of it worthy. But the way John Williams music is turned up during Anthony Hopkins’ final summation before the Supreme Court…God! There’s a reason (and I’m trying to figure this out as we speak) why I can’t stand Spielberg’s depictions of slave suffering in this film and in fact any scene in which Djimon Honsou is front and center, and yet I was totally down with every scene and shot in Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave. DreamWorks expected to put Amistad over as a Best Picture contnender, but it didn’t happen. It was nominated for various awards but….ecch, ecch, I’m having a seizure. Seriously, it didn’t win much and nobody cared.

There’s a minor hoo-hah response to William Friedkin having done a George Lucas on the recently-released Sorcerer Bluray. Longtime HE reader Bobby Cooper explains: “Did you notice Friedkin added a little capgun pop to the final shot of the thugs entering the cantina looking for Roy Scheider at the very end? [This] seems to put too fine a point on the existential gloom and hopelessness of it all, as if David Chase had inserted a stock gunshot noise to the Sopranos finale before the cut-to-black. It goes against Friedkin’s whole ethos of embracing ambiguity, and yet who else would have okayed it? Not an egregious blunder but irritating all the same. Again, the IMDB comment thread.”

If Bilge Ebiri is correct about self-loathing being a fundamental aspect of the Adam Sandler persona (i.e., his style of humor as manifested in his films), does it follow that self-loathing is also a psychological cornerstone of his fans, many if not most of whom are middle-aged, sandal-wearing, ball-scratching lonely guys who embrace if not revel in a certain yawhaw anti-intellectual guy-guy mentality? I see these guys all the time at the multiplex and can only shake my head. I don’t want to generalize but the words “incurious ESPN-watching lowlifes” is what comes to mind. They all wear the same duds during the warmer months (oversize T-shirts, baggy shorts, awful-looking flannel shirts)…the worst-dressed sub-culture in the history of western civilization.

Abridged Ebiri: (a) “Watching Sandler’s films again recently, I was struck by the profound sense of self-loathing at the heart of all his work. It peeks through in small moments, in brief lines of dialogue. But it’s always there. Sandler isn’t self-deprecating; there’s actually an angry edge to his jokes and his asides that speaks to the fuck-up, the malcontent, the disappointment, the guy who used to be a sweet kid and then somehow threw it all away. Haven’t we all been that guy at some point in our lives? When you least expect it, this self-loathing peers through. This] simmering, nuclear self-hate has also informed the more serious-minded films that he’s done. It’s what fuels P.T. Anderson’s absurdist, aggressively brilliant Punch-Drunk Love — the paralyzing anxiety of a man for whom everything in the world feels like a transgression, an insult. It’s also there in Funny People (directed by Sandler’s old roommate, Judd Apatow), in which he plays lonely, successful, soulless comedian George Simmons, who selfishly lies about a terminal disease to try to find love.”

One thing I don’t have on the schedule upon my arrival tomorrow in NYC is catching a showing of Gambit, the Joel and Ethan Coen-authored caper comedy that’s finally opened stateside after a dud-level opening in England 18 months ago. It’s now playing at City Cinema’s Village East. N.Y. Times reviewer Nicholas Rapold is claiming that Gambit is not so much “a shameful mess or even an auteurist curiosity” as much as “almost serenely boring.” I’m not getting the slightest whiff of serenity from this trailer. Here’s a related piece I ran last March (“Coen Brothers-Authored Dud…Gone, Drowned…The Movie That Wasn’t There“).

If Glenn Kenny is reading this I’ve got $50 I owe you. I’m staying in the Park Slope area. Tell me where and when.

There was a Manhattan buyer’s screening yesterday for David O. Russell‘s abandoned Nailed, the financially-plagued political comedy, based on a screenplay co-written by novelist Kristin Gore (i.e., the second daughter of Al Gore) and Russell, that was haphazardly shot and never quite completed in ’08. Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tracy Morgan, Catherine Keener, Paul Reubens, Josh Brolin and Kirstie Alley costarred. Production was delayed or shut down four times due to the crew not getting paid. Blame was attributed to financial insuffficiency on the part of producers Ronald Tutor and David Bergstein of Capitol Films.

Jessica Beil, Jake Gyllenhaal in David O. Russell’s Nailed.

Yesterday’s screening (which was attended by reps for Magnolia among others) was presumably arranged by producer Kia Jam, who, according to a 2.5.14 story by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, “cobbled together a cut that was test-screened in 2011 and submitted to the MPAA in November 2013.” Jam didn’t return Kit’s call asking for comment, and he didn’t return mine this morning either. I wrote Russell about the screening…zip. Magnolia wouldn’t say anything either.

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TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider reported earlier today that Baz Luhrmann is negotiating to direct an Elvis Presley biopic based on a script by Kelly Marcel (Saving Mr. Banks, Fifty Shades of Grey). Yes, I agree that Jared Leto would be a good choice to play Presley…or is he be too old to play him young? Because I’m guessing that Marcel’s script will be about the thin, 20something Elvis of the mid ’50s rather than the bloated, grotesque, drug-taking, peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich-consuming, on-the-verge-of-death Elvis of the mid ’70s. (Banks showed that Marcel is not a fan of sprawling, multi-decade biopics.) If I were her I’d concentrate on ’54 (i.e, when Presley made his first Sun Records recording) to ’58, when he went into the Army and more or less “died” (in the view of John Lennon) as far as his sideburned, hip-shaking, rock ‘n’ roll sexual-dynamo persona was concerned. Who wants to see a fat Elvis movie? What is there to say about another rock star self-destructing? It’s an old, predictable story we’ve seen a hundred times.

(l.) Elvis Presley sometime around 1957 or ’58; (r.) during his bloated downfall period, probably sometimes around ’75 or ’76.