The most significant Sonoma Film Festival event last night (or so it seemed to me) was a Netflix-sponsored dinner, held under a large hospitality tent in the town square. The guests of honor were The Iceman costar Ray Liotta and director-cowriter Ariel Vromen. SIFF Exec Director and consummate host Kevin McNeely offered a hearty welcome. Thanks to SIFF p.r. rep Carol Marshall for inviting me up and seeing to the usual comforts.

Sonoma Film Festival exec director Kevin McNeely, The Iceman costar Ray Liotta during last night’s Netflix dinner.

McNeely, The Iceman director-writer Ariel Vromen.

SIFF programmer Steve Shor suggested the following films during my three-day stay here: Blackbird, You Will Be My Son, Monkey On My Shoulder, Terms and Conditions May Apply, The Deep, Souffle Chocolat, Lo Zucco: The Wine of the Son of the King of the French, Cover Story, The Teacher, Fierce Green Fire, Rebels With A Cause.

Mary Louise Parker and special HE friend Demian Bichir are also attending this weekend.

Netflix is now offering an ultra high-def service that’s as good if not slightly better than Bluray, a Netflix exec told me last night. The only problem is that Time Warner, my West Hollywood cable-internet provider, is one of the two companies who aren’t on board with this service. Netflix employs roughly 600 at its Los Gatos headquarters; the Beverly Hills office has about 100 staffers.

Sonoma’s flat typography is obviously bicycle-friendly. Temperatures in the 70s and low 80s, but the air cools down a bit in the evening.

Christopher Tookey‘s pan of Oblivion in the 4.11 Daily Mail is funny. He was clearly feeling his hate oats as he wrote it. I’ve been there. I know how it feels. A certain form of exhilaration.

But then I came upon this sentence: “[Tom Cruise‘s] performance here is even more robotic than in his last turkey, Jack Reacher, where he bravely attempted to play a tough guy 12 inches taller than himself.” That’s raw and intemperate. Jack Reacher was an absorbing, finely crafted exercise and an admirable throwback to old-fashioned, less-is-more action values. So right away I pulled back. He’s obviously not stupid but if he missed what was good about Jack Reacher what else has he missed?

Oblivion review excerpt: “As you would expect from a film of this magnitude, the scenery is spectacular. The trouble is that you’d find a good deal more excitement simply by staring into the Grand Canyon. The whole folie de grandeur is ponderous, humourless and derivative. Even the score is a rip-off of Hans Zimmer’s music for Inception.

“If you wish to see films based on similar premises, I would recommend Wall-E, the original Planet Of The Apes and particularly Moon. All are far superior to this.

“After more than two hours, I was surprised to discover that my cheeks were wet. I was, quite literally, crying with boredom.”

I was overseas when Rock of Ages opened last June and I never got around to seeing it on Bluray. But I happened to turn it on an hour ago and I have to admit something. I know the karaoke factor is a problem, but if you half-watch it and don’t concentrate too much on the particulars, it’s spirited and half-tolerable. Do we have a new category here? The kind that more or less irritates if you give it your complete attention but which succeeds as white noise?

Highway 121 heading east toward Sonoma — Thursday, 4.11, 3:55 pm.

Room #247, El Pueblo Inn, Sonoma.

$85 for four days.

A filmmaker friend told me a week or so ago that Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra would screen at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, or about a week before debuting on HBO. Now Deadline‘s Pete Hammond is dishing this also. No official confirmation but it’s happening.

Easily the coolest one-sheet for a film based on a William Shakespeare play ever designed. The Cosmo and the orange slice. You might assume that the first use of a color accent within a monochrome frame in a mainstream film happened in Schindler’s List. But the first time (or so I recall) was actually in Francis Coppola‘s Rumblefish.

Airport interiors are designed to convey a vague sense of serenity and security. Sometimes they do more than that. I’m sitting near a Starbucks alcove inside one of the San Francisco Int’l Airport terminals, and a few minutes ago I felt curiously soothed when I came upon this hanging angel sculpture. So I took a shot of it. And I’m virulently anti-religious. How’s that for a slice of essential 21st Century journalism?

Last week I said “sure, okay, fine” to a four-day visit to the 16th Sonoma International Film Festival. But now that it’s 8:48 am and I have to leave 40 minutes hence to catch an 11:30 am plane to San Francisco, I don’t feel so good. Part of me always rebels when it’s time to pack (and I haven’t even packed yet) and get going that says “God, why did I agree to this? It would be so much simpler and easier to just stay put.”

I was going to wake up at 5:30 am and write my review of Brian Helgeland‘s 42, which I saw last night. I started tapping out impressions late last night. And then I slept through the alarm and woke around 8 am.

I’ll say this much: 42 is okay if you like your entertainment simple and square and instructional, but it felt to me like a film aimed at 10 year-olds, like something the Disney people might have made in the 1950s between The Swamp Fox and The Life and Times of Elfego Baca. I was wondering if Helgeland intended 42 to evoke an old-time atmosphere (the story of Jackie Robinson‘s entry into big-league baseball happens between 1945 and ’47) by deliberately aping the style and mentality of mainstream ’40s and early ’50s films. I was thinking specifically of those three James Stewart-June Allyson flicks they made between ’49 and ’55 — The Stratton Story (another baseball yarn about overcoming adversity), The Glenn Miller Story and Strategic Air Command. Intentional or not, 42 is cut from the exact same cloth.

I also have another riff about To The Wonder in mind, but that’ll have to keep. I leave in 20 minutes. Nah, can’t happen. I’m shooting for a 9:45 am departure.

9:35 am update: I leave in ten. As I was packing the cats were giving me that hurt look — “You’re abandoning us?”

The second trailer for Louis Leterrier‘s trickster-caper-what-have-you. Here’s a 3.24 HE riff. Summit/Lionsgate is releasing Now You See Me on 5.31.

The interest that GenY and developmentally-stunted GenXers have in period westerns (along the semi-scrupulous lines of, say, The Wild Bunch, The Grey Fox, Days of Heaven, Heaven’s Gate and McCabe and Mrs. Miller) is apparently zilch. They don’t want to commune with bygone eras in any kind of realistic way — they only want digitally spritzed-up fantasies that all feel and look like the same 21st Century bullshit video game. Same formula, same attitude, same pacing and cutting.

Yes, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski‘s The Lone Ranger (Disney, 7.3) is a popcorn goof and hardly about “history.” But shouldn’t some form of believable yesteryear atmosphere be woven into it? If you ask me the to-hell-with-historical-realism aesthetic began 14 years ago with Barry Sonnenfeld‘s Wild Wild West (high-throttle FX and wowser technology in a steampunk style) and gained strength with the japey style of the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks.

Hollywood has always phonied up history in this and that way by kowtowing to contemporary fashions and mores. Errol Flynn‘s 1938 Robin Hood was pure fantasy-driven pop. William Holden‘s anti-war attitudes in The Bridge on the River Kwai were those of a mid ’50s sophisticate, and were unrealistically imposed upon the World War II setting. Biblical epics of the ’50s and ’60s were, of course, resplendently phony in various ways. So ignoring the way things were is not new. But will we ever see actual period films again, at least on an intermittent basis? The kind of period we saw in the two Godfather films, in Reds, in Ken Russell‘s Women in Love (which is to say not Mahler or Lisztomania), in Michael Mann‘s Last of the Mohicans, etc. John Sturges‘ The Magnificent Seven was very much of its time (i.e, 1960), but at least it was half-loyal to the trappings of the Old West. Even the Sergio Leone Almeria films of the ’60s were at least semi-credible. Is that kind of thing gone with the wind?

Seriously, how infantile and neurotic is it to say “I don’t want to know from historical realities — I just want my own kind of CG realm imposed upon everything that ever was. I want all of history revised so it feels like something I’d recognize and could slip right into with my hand-held devices”?

This “re-imagining of all creation in CG terms” aesthetic has migrated over to African-wildlife docs even. I’ve actually seen docs that use CG enhancements to zass things up so lions and tigers and crocs and wild dogs look even fiercer than they do in actuality.

I attended last night’s Los Angeles premiere of To The Wonder, and I had exactly the same reaction as I did last September in Toronto. It’s a beautifully shot object d’art, but it helps to know what it doesn’t do going in. Terrence Malick‘s decision to shoot a drama about things not working out between a couple with next to no dialogue certainly has integrity. I don’t know how many times Olga Kurylenko (who plays Ben Affleck‘s French wife who winds up stranded and gasping for air in Bartlesville, Oklahoma) twirls around in this film, but she does it a lot.

To The Wonder costars Olga Kurylenko, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams.

(l. tor.) McAdams, Affleck, Green, Kurylenko, Gonda.

Affleck (who’s put on a few pounds since the Oscar telecast) offered some pre-screening remarks alogn with producers Sarah Green and Nicholas Gonda, and got a laugh when he noted that what he’d just said amounted to more dialogue that he has in the film.

The screening and the after-party were held inside the Pacific Design Center. I said hello to James Woods, who’s crafty and convincing in Phillip Noyce‘s Mary and Martha, an HBO drama debuting on 4.20, and to Killing Them Softly director-writer Andrew Dominik.

On the way out I asked Green if the Malick film formerly known as Lawless has a new title. Not yet, she said. I told her I’d read a riff about Knight of Cups possibly going to Cannes based on an understanding that it’s closer to being completed than the film formerly known as Lawless. Green said she didn’t know and that the ball is in Terry’s court, etc. I’m presuming that sections of both will be shown to buyers, at least.

Most of To The Wonder was shot in Bartlesville, and I noticed for the first time last night that it contains two shots of a large, second-story-balcony home that looks a lot like the one bought and used for the forthcoming adaptation of August: Osage County, which was also shot in Bartlesville and nearby Pawhuska. For all I know the Bartlesville area has five or ten homes that look like this.

The event sponsors were Disaronno ( an Italian liqueur) and Fiji Water.

“Although Universal’s publicity department has asked that journalists refrain from spilling the secrets of Oblivion (Universal, 4.19), the major revelations, once they arrive, will hardly surprise anyone familiar with Total Recall, The Matrix and the countless other sci-fi touchstones hovering over this striking, visually resplendent adventure,” writes Variety‘s Justin Chang.

“Pitting the latest action-hero incarnation of Tom Cruise against an army of alien marauders, director Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to Tron: Legacy is a moderately clever dystopian mindbender with a gratifying human pulse, despite some questionable narrative developments along the way.”

This plus Todd McCarthy’s half-approving review leaves you with an idea that while Oblivion may not be great or legendary, it isn’t half bad.

A.O. Scott, Dana Stevens and Werner Herzog talking about the departed Roger Ebert on Charlie Rose (Monday 4.8):