I’m briefly side-stepping Hollywood Elsewhere‘s blanket policy of ignoring Iron Man 3 by pointing to a spoiler piece by Entertainment Weekly‘s Anthony Breznican about Ben Kingsley‘s Mandarin villain. Eff this movie, eff Marvel, eff Downey, eff the fanboys who are keeping CG comic-book sludge in the pipeline 24-7. But the Mandarin scheme and backstory is at least an interesting spin on a tediously familiar cliche — I’ll give it that.

A Frankfurt-based rep for British Airways baggage told me a half-hour ago that my two bags are on their way to Berlin’s Tegel Airport and should be available by noon or thereabouts. No breathing easy until the chickens have hatched, of course, but this is somewhat comforting news. Fingers crossed.

If you’re determined to kill the serious bad guys, it’s inevitable that some not-so-bad and innocent guys (including women and children) are going to be cut down also. Ugly, sad stuff. How many innocent people died needlessly as a result of Julius Caesar‘s many military campaigns? How many kids were killed by the armies of Alexander the Great? Zeal will always overstep its bounds. Fatal mistakes will happen. Even the best war technology is imprecise. War is cruel, messy, heartless.

The best thing in Maureen Dowd‘s 5.5 N.Y. Times column about Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby is the title. The second best is the closing passage in which she quotes New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, to wit:

“[Wieseltier] “understands that we’re drawn back to Gatsby because we keep seeing modern buccaneers of banking and hedge funds, swathed in carelessness and opulence. ‘But what most people don’t understand is that the adjective ‘Great’ in the title was meant laconically,” he says. ‘There’s nothing genuinely great about Gatsby. He’s a poignant phony. Owing to the money-addled society we live in, people have lost the irony of Fitzgerald’s title. So the movies become complicit in the excessively materialistic culture that the novel set out to criticize.”

“He notes that Gatsby movies are usually just moving versions of Town and Country or The Times’s T magazine, and that filmmakers ‘get seduced by the seductions that the book itself is warning about.’

“A really great movie of the novel, he argues, would ‘show a dissenting streak of austerity.’ He thinks it’s time for a black Gatsby, noting that Jay-Z might be an inspirational starting point — ‘a young man of talents with an unsavory past consumed by status anxiety and ascending unstoppably through tireless self-promotion and increasingly conspicuous wealth.’

“The problem with the Gatsby movies, he said, ‘is that they look like they were made by Gatsby. The trick is to make a Gatsby movie that couldn’t have been made by Gatsby — an unglossy portrait of gloss.”

The irony, of course, is that if you explore any scientific fact through to its ultimate knowability, you’ll find yourself regarding an aspect of a grand cosmic design. All science leads to God…if you pull back from the Christian-idiot definition of the term. Needless to add I feel great rapport with this trailer, three months old and copied from Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily. Does the doc discuss the “God particle”? If so, The Unbelievers isn’t quite right as a title. Because all scientific thinkers are mystics at heart.

On 7.24.12 I wrote the following:

“The discovery of the Higgs boson or ‘God particle‘ — a subatomic element that informs the size and shape and contour of all physical matter, ‘the missing cornerstone of particle physics” — was announced yesterday. Don’t look now, but this is almost (I say ‘almost’) like the discovery of the black monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet it’s been there all along. The supreme scientific equation…proven.

“The ‘intelligent design’ crowd is celebrating this all across America, you bet. I despise what Christianity has become in this country, but I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.

“However you define the altogether, He/She/It has absolutely zero ‘interest’ in whether you or your great-uncle or next door neighbor are adhering to the Ten Commandments or having an abortion or helping a homeless person or what-have-you. The molecular perfection and mind-blowingly infinite implications of God are way, way beyond ground-level morality.

“People whose lives are, in their minds, basically about finding spiritual fulfillment and deliverance after they’re dead are ridiculous figures. They’re certainly appalling. The only reason religions are good for society is that they keep the nutters (i.e. those who would otherwise be seeking solace in alcohol or drugs or in the ravings of some antisocial cult leader) in line, and they instill a sense of moral order and temperance among people who lack the intelligence or drive or hunger to seek spiritual satori on their own.”

I travel with four bags — two carry-ons and two smallish suitcases on wheels. And the latter two are gone for the time being, thanks to the folks at British Airways. Their baggage handlers failed to put them on Friday night’s red-eye flight to Heathrow (BA #986), which I managed to get on after BA #186, due to leave at 10:55 pm, was cancelled. Right now the bags are either (b) somewhere in the bowels of Newark Airport due to not being stowed on BA #986 or (b) they’re being sent to London today on one of two British Airways flights — BA #1284 leaving at 6:25 pm, or about 55 minutes from now, or BA #986 which leaves at 9:25 pm.

Sunday morning update (5:51 am): Presumably my bags will be delivered to Berlin’s Tegel Airport sometime today, but if they don’t I’m screwed three different ways: (1) The second largest of the two contains all my power adapters, and it looks like it’ll be a problem buying an adapter because electronic stores aren’t open in Berlin on Sundays as a rule; (2) if I can’t find an adapter (I’m thinking of going to some swanky Berlin hotels and begging them to sell me one, pretty please) I’m not going to be able to file very much because my batteries in my two computers will be dead before long, and besides I have to drive this afternoon to the set of a certain film that I’ve been asked not to mention; and (3) if the bags are permanently lost I’ll be out three or four grand in jackets, shoes, suit pants, scarves, tutti-frutti socks, high thread count T-shirts, electronic parts, suit jackets, nice shoes and so on, and that’s a conservative estimate.

It’s just before midnight in Berlin. I’m tired, I quit, I’m going to bed.

I could go on and on about how terrible it feels to fly overnight and get maybe two hours of sleep (if that) in a tourist-class seat and how you’re feeling a bit skanky and in need of a shower when you’re sitting around Heathrow but why complain? I’m happy to be here. The Berlin plane leaves in an hour. Later…

Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 — Saturday, 5.4, 11:45 am.

This video broke yesterday so what the hell — one last reflection. I’ve witnessed angry people mouthing off at cops two or three times, and Reese Witherspoon‘s version isn’t that bad. Her sense of entitlement is obviously offensive. When RW says “I am an American citizen” she means “I am way rich, way famous and probably the most connected American you’ll ever meet, and how dare you?” What was her initial point anyway? That her husband was too substantial and too nice a guy to be tested for DUI?

Scott McGehee and David Siegel‘s What Maisie Knew (Millenium, opening today in New York and a bit later in Los Angeles) is an adaptation of Henry James’s 1897 novel about selfish, thoughtless, bickering parents who’d much rather fight each other than be decent and kind and nurturing to their young daughter. In the present-day version Maisie (Onata Aprile) is stuck watching her detestable rock-star mom (Julianne Moore) and aloof art-dealer dad (Steve Coogan) battle each other over custody rights and then take up with younger lovers (Alexander Skarsgard, Joanna Vanderham) and generally yak on about themselves and their careers and latest moves.

The problem, for me, is that Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright‘s script hits the same note over and over again. Moore and Coogan are monsters, Moore and Coogan are monsters, Moore and Coogan are monsters. Maisie is a thoughtful and respectable film, yes, but is more about a precise but passive exploration of a malignant parenting situation than about telling a half-gripping) story that might engage or provoke. Moore and Coogan are metaphors for the corruption or inane self-absorption or cluelessness of today’s professional elite…except that James’ parents were metaphors for the corruption or inane self-absorption or cluelessness of yesterday’s elite. So there’s obviously something classic and eternal about this situation.

Except Moore and Coogan are so repulsive you become sick of them soon enough, and you just want to avoid them altogether but you can’t if you’re determined to stick with the film. (Which I absolutely was because it’s clearly been made with intelligence and a form of restraint.) And it becomes a tiny bit taxing that Maisie (a nicely understated performances by Aprile) offers no opinions and makes no judgments about either of them for the longest time. What is she supposed to be, five or six? She has opinons at that age, trust me. She knows what’s going on. So you’re feeling exasperated after a while. And there’s no one to turn to allegiance- or affection-wise except toward Skarsgard and Vanderham, and thank God for the humanity and compassion that they provide.

Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson believes that The Great Gatsby will either tank or open flat or underwhelmingly next weekend. Not because the film is a problem in and of itself (although the consensus among those who attended Thursday night’s Gatsby premiere is not encouraging), but because the the release date of May 10th (or the 2nd weekend in May) exudes some kind of spooky mood pocket vibe that kills or wounds big Warner Bros. movies.

“The proverbial ‘second weekend of summer’ has been a pit stop for one high profile Warner Bros. disaster after another,” Mendelson writes. “It has given them almost nothing but pain for 15 years.” And yet, he adds, the second weekend of summer “isn’t completely cursed. There have been any number of smaller-scale pictures that had flourished, mostly because they didn’t need to be blockbusters to succeed.

The Great Gatsby “isn’t traditional counter-programming,” he notes. ‘Yes it’s a literary period piece drama in a summer of fantasy adventures, but it’s also a $120 million 3D spectacle. Correlation isn’t causation, but history is not on the side of Baz Luhrmann’s latest adaptation. Obviously the film may very well under-perform in the states only to flourish overseas. But purely from a domestic point of view, it seems beyond odd that Warner Bros. seems to keep tempting fate by attempting to open expensive summer movies during a period where audiences have rejected their pictures in favor of the summer kick-off film again and again.

“If the pattern holds, The Great Gatsby is doomed.”

A.O. Scott‘s observation that the second films in a franchise (The Dark Knight, The Empire Strikes Back, Spiderman 2) tend to be the best ones is true, I think. David Carr: “Is there any chance that Hangover 3 will by any good?” Otherwise they’re performing a kind of superficial forced joviality in quotes. What else are they gonna do? Let it all out and just hate on the whole corporate summer avalanche? No — lighthearted chuckles.

I was sufficiently impressed with Scott McGehee and David Siegel‘s What Maisie Knew to want to attend yesterday’s junket gathering at the Tribeca Grand hotel. I spoke to the directors plus Julianne Moore (who gives a brave but dislikable performance as a sociopathic ego-monster Mother From Hell), Alexander Skarsgård (who plays a good guy — a low-key, zero-ambition bartender whose parenting skills for outshine Moore’s or those of her estranged husband, played by Steve Coogan), young Onata Aprile (strikingly low-key but magnetic as the film’s titular character) and Joanna Vanderham.

Alexander Skarsgard, Onata Aprile during yesterday’s What Maisie Knew round=table discussion.

I told Onata that I once saw another actress draw on a pad during a round-table interview — Cate Blanchett. It was for The Good German. I was drawn to Blanchett’s method of concentratig or hiding or whatever, but it was touching.