Here’s a whipsmart, spot-on interview between Huffpost’s Ricky Camilleri and brilliant, tart-tongued producer and author Lynda Obst, whose new book is “Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From The New Abnormal in the Movie business.” Really superb stuff. Essential viewing…really.

With Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring opening stateside on Friday, 2.14, I’m re-posting my Cannes Film Festival review from roughly three weeks ago: “There’s a self reflecting, shallow pool, empty-hall-of-mirrors vibe delivered by Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring. I don’t know what could’ve resulted from a film about fame-worship and malignant materialism, but don’t we know about the yield of shallowness going in? Aren’t the urban GenY kids who live for some kind of nocturnal proximity to the vapidly famous…aren’t they self-parodying to begin with? Weren’t the actual Bling Ring kids extremely self-mocking before they were even caught?

I’ll be seeing Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel at a Prague press screening on Thursday morning, 6.13, and will therefore be able to bang out a review before it opens Stateside the following day. So I’ll get into it soon enough, but for the time being I’m discounting all of the rave reviews from all of the geek-friendly critics and columnists who grew up in the ’80s…anyone who’s ever declared even a vague allegiance to the manipulations of superhero flicks. Just as I discounted last summer’s over-the-top Avengers huzzahs along with the South by Southwest raves for Cabin in the Woods. You can only listen to non-vested hard guys.

Steel is basically a dark Nolanesque take on the Supie legend — last night somebody called it “The Clark Knight.” A majority of reviewers are calling Man of Steel good or mostly satisfying but not great. Remove the geek-love deference factor and what this really means is that it’s probably not bad or fairly decent but not all that nutritional when you get right down to it. If you listen to Variety‘s Scott Foundas Steel is defined by a “humorless tone and relentlessly noisy (visually and sonically) aesthetics [that] leave much to be desired.” In the view of Indiewire critic Eric Kohn, it “takes a more self-serious approach, constructing a sullen tale [with a] dreary atmosphere [and a] brooding storyline.” And if you listen to David Poland, it more or less blows.

I was searching around for a choice clip of Key Largo costar Harry Lewis, who died last weekend at age 93. I always thought that Lewis (whose Largo character was called “Toots”) was playing Richard Widmark‘s “Tommy Udo” in Kiss of Death. Anyway, no clip but I found this alternate ending to John Huston‘s 1948 melodrama. It’s been sitting on YouTube since early ’08, not that I noticed.

A Bluray of Joe Dante‘s The Howling (’81) streets on 6.18. I’ve always had a soft spot for this film, probably because it doesn’t embrace werewolf tropes as much as satirically comment on them while slipping in social satire. On top of of which it’s tartly written (by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless), performed just right, tightly edited and just an all-around pleasure. And short — only 91 minutes.

I’ve always gathered that President John Kennedy had his head in the right place about civil rights, but he was a bit soft in the gut when it came to pushing for change in ways that really mattered. But on this, the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s 6.11.63 civil rights speech, N.Y. Times op-ed contributor Peniel E. Joseph claims that his influence was more significant than generally understood, especially from the standpoint of complacent white America and the Eisenhower mindset that most lived by at the time.

Is it fair to refer to Deadline‘s Nikki Finke and TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman as “traders in gossip”? Whether or not N.Y. Times reporter David Carr created this headline or not, he’s written the following about Finke is a piece that went up last night (6.9): “A spectral figure rarely seen in public, [Finke] makes up for it on the phone and in print. She sees herself as a Jeremiah, a scold and a truth-teller in a business that trades in illusion and lies.

Jada Yuan‘s Vulture profile of Stevie Nicks reminded me that my ex-wife and I lived next to her in ’87 and early ’88. Our homes were way up in the hills on Franklin Avenue, and I presume this was during one of her coke periods because I remember she used to sing late at night, and with a heavily amplified system that was loud enough to disturb our slumber. One night it was so loud that I said “eff it” and walked over and knocked on her door. It was something like 1:30 am, and as I approached her home I was thinking of a phrase that some rock journalist had used to describe Nicks: “The epitome of the pampered hippie princess.”

There are two statements in Richard Brody‘s short appreciation of the recently released Cleopatra Bluray that I more or less agree with. One, that it offers “a nearly microscopic revelation of the fanatically crafted sets and costumes.” (Due, naturally, to Leon Shamroy‘s cinematography.) And two, that “the ear-tickling clarity of the hyper-literate text” is a pleasure. (Cleopatra: “I’ve rubbed you the wrong way.” Ceasar: “I’m not sure that I want to be rubbed by you at all, young lady.”) Otherwise I find it mystifying that Brody would fail to point out that by today’s pacing standards Cleopatra is very slow-moving, not to mention oppressively talky. That’s not an opinion — it’s fact. Another is that the two-hour making of Cleopatra doc is far more dramatic and involving than the film itself.

An imagined but likely conversation from Vanity Fair‘s Josh Duboff:

For the most part feminist-minded artists and critics of whatever persuasion agree that guys, however intelligent or supportive of feminist consciousness, can’t and don’t really get it. You need to have lived as a woman and endured sexism in all its male-generated forms to really understand and embrace what feminist-minded artists and critics are on about. (Which is mostly true.) That especially includes any basic understanding of what it means for a woman to love another woman. Guys can appreciate lesbians from their their side of the fence, fine, but any films they might want to make about lesbian lovers will be frowned upon to some extent, and that goes double when it comes to hot lesbian sex scenes. In fact, don’t even go there.