Why am I having difficulty even flirting with the idea of seeing Marc Webb‘s The Amazing SpiderMan 2? If there was only some kind of implied metaphor, undercurrent, something. But it’s just another cash-grab. I should have become blase about the corporate-tentpole-based-on-a-graphic-novel syndrome (and the mutants who greenlight and pay to see this shite) years ago. Will exhibition eventually just give up on quality films or will the longing to experience the good stuff in theatres persist despite all the increasing pressures against this? Thank God for cable longforms like True Detective and House of Cards and whatever else may be coming along between now and Labor Day. We’re in the late winter-early spring doldrums.

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My complimentary copy of Matt Zoller Seitz‘s “The Wes Anderson Collection” finally arrived today and…wait, what? There’s no chapter on The Grand Budapest Hotel. I know that books take a while to prepare but Seitz and his publishers couldn’t wedge in, say, three or four pages of on-set Budapest stills, hundreds of which were no doubt taken during filming last winter and spring? How many months in advance do book publishers need?

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The most withering female put-down moment of my life happened on Santa Monica Blvd. back in the mid ’80s. I was tooling along in my moderately depressing downmarket Mazda when I saw a fetching blonde driving a really snazzy, powder-blue Mustang convertible with a “4 SALE” sign taped to the back window. I was so taken by the double-barrelled beauty of the girl and the car, which was freshly washed and gleaming in the magic-hour light, that when we pulled up to a stop light I rolled my window down, smiled at the blonde and said “How much?” She took one look and said, “Too much.”

The second most withering moment happened last July. I was texting with the lady I’d fallen in love with (i.e., the affair that ran from early May through late October) and in the middle of a discussion about something fairly basic she texted (and I mean right out of the fucking blue), “I’m expensive.” Whoa. The last time I’d heard that line was when Marilyn Maxwell said it to Kirk Douglas in Champion (’49). We all know what she meant, of course. Obviously not just “I’m high maintenance” but “I might be too high maintenance for you, given your apparent income and frugal tendencies. I’m not saying I definitely am but…well, you tell me.”

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You wash, I’ll dry. Here’s a True Detective scene that didn’t make the final cut, i.e. — a philosophically-rooted marital breakup moment between Mathew McConaughey (i.e, Detective Rust Cohle) and Elizabeth Reaser (his wife Lori/Laurie). “Aahh…I guess I just cain’t roll with having kids, no offense…not with you or anyone”…destructive philosophy, dead shark. Embed code lifted from Variety.

I found it impossible to roll with Roger Michel‘s Le Week-End (Music Box, 3.14), which I saw early last September at the Toronto Film Festival. Mainly because I don’t want to know about a doddering, bespectacled and bewhiskered Jim Broadbent, playing a 60ish academic type, rekindling romantic fires with his wife of many decades (Lindsay Duncan). And I don’t mean the emotional aspect. Duncan is quietly attractive in a getting-on sort of way. I can imagine her having some kind of love life in some other situation, but I never want to even think about Broadbent in any kind of husband/lover/sexual context, ever.

Pokey, comfort-shoe-wearing men of Broadbent’s age are free to show love, write poetry, play guitar in a garage band, run for Congress, compete in marathons, go to cooking school in Italy and pursue happiness any way they can, but I don’t want to watch them in any sort of aroused or tumescent state, okay? Just leave me out of it. Thank you.

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Today I wrote Noah director Darren Aronofsky, whom I’ve long considered to be something of an industry pally. Okay, an acquaintance. He and his editor peruse the column, he told me during the Black Swan days. I told him about my plan to drive down to old Tijuana to see Noah on Friday, 3.21 (i.e., the day it opens in Mexico, which is five days sooner than the L.A. all-media on 3.26), and asked him for a phone interview if he’s so inclined. He’ll probably defer to Paramount p.r.’s decision to blow me off because of my anti-Christian rants. The Noah marketing drill is probably something along the lines of “sell the awe and the spectacle and the Aronfsky integrity factor, and don’t alienate the nutter Christian right.”

Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta and Noah director Darren Aronofsky sometime before or after last night’s premiere screening in Mexico City.

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This is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker cartoons. I just re-upped my subscription and saw it online only a day or two ago. It’s lame to just post a cartoon without comment or counterpoint but this has been one of those days.

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Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys (Warner Bros., 6.20), a film version of the hit Broadway jukebox musical, is being research-screened this evening in the San Fernando Valley. I’m not going to say where and I’m not going to post or discuss reactions, but I would like to hear, privately, what people think. I don’t have a lot of faith or interest in a movie musical about the Four Seasons, but Eastwood knows what he’s doing and the respected John Logan wrote the screenplay so no pre-judgments. I’m just curious.

“This sounds like a weird thing to say, but I remember thinking Robert Redford wasn’t that great an actor, but that he’d had an unbelievable career because he knew how to use himself well. He has incredible taste, a literary development. Is he one of the greatest actors of his generation? No. But he’s certainly one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation. Butch Cassidy, The Sting, The Candidate, Downhill Racer, Ordinary People, The Natural, Out of Africa. He had a great ability to use whatever modicum of talent he had to its absolute uttermost.” — Boyhood‘s Ethan Hawke speaking to Indiewire’s Nigel M. Smith during a just-posted SXSW interview.

Isn’t this what all successful actors do? Or all successful people for that matter? It’s not how gifted or brainy you are as much as how you use what you have. The trick is to find your voice and your style, then work it within the range that you’ve been given or have been able to develop to its utmost, or the realm in which you feel the most planted and comfortable.

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Very few people come off well when they’re being hammered by a contentious interrogator, but the way a person responds to this kind of duress always tells you a little something about them. On one level I feel sorry for Justin Beiber during this hours-long deposition, and on another level he seems like an entitled little dick. The footage also vaguely reminds me of the deposition scenes in The Social Network.

Everyone loves to see bullies slapped down. It’s a perfect, wonderful thing…God smiles and the universe hums with song. On the other hand it’s a tough thing to acknowledge that Peter Weir‘s Witness is on the verge of being 30 years old. (It was shot in the summer of 1984 and released in February 1985…obviously an era in which a February release wasn’t necessarily regarded as a throwaway.) Whatever happened to thematically interesting action films with upscale stars and good scripts? Today Witness would be a Jason Statham film, and nowhere near as good. There’s a region-free Witness Bluray available in France and another coming out in Germany in early April, but a high-def/HDX version (which vary in quality but are often just as robust and detailed as Blurays) is available right now on Vudu so why wait and what’s the point anyway?

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I’m sorry but I feel completely blocked and gunked up and tormented by stomach acid whenever I think about Divergent (Summit/Lionsgate, 3.21), a futuristic sci-fi adventure milkshake that’s trying to ape the success of The Hunger Games and Twilight. I’m throughly sick of dystopian post-apocalyptic anything. I hate the young-adult-fiction poster (i.e., Shailene Woodley and Theo James atop a Chicago skyscraper with dawn breaking over the horizon). And it just smells like another corporate hustle. I’ve been calling it Detergent. Obviously another greedy attempt to launch a youth-market franchise (or at least a trilogy that follows Veronica Roth’s three Divergent novels) so everyone can get rich. Maybe it’s just me but the metaphor within the basic hook, a futuristic society divided into five distinct personality groups, feels a bit underwhelming. I understand how it could resonate with under-30s (in the same way that The Hunger Games obviously has and is) but it looks like fucking torture to sit through.

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