A teaser for a forthcoming American Masters special, Mel Brooks: Make a Noise (PBS, 5.20), arrived this morning. A Shout! Factory DVD is available the next day, but no VOD/online rentals? The clips indicate that Matthew Broderick, Richard Lewis, Nathan Lane and Carl Reiner see Brooks as an egoistic handful and no day at the beach. Like every driven artist-performer who’s ever lived. What else is new?

May I be blunt? In an 11.13 N.Y. Times interview with Frank Bruni, Alexander Payne remarked that all good directors have a magic decade. “They say you can do honest, sincere work for decades, but you’re given in general a 10-year period when what you do touches the zeitgeist — when you’re relevant,” he said. Due respect but Brooks’ movie-lightning period lasted only six years — The Producers (’68), The Twelve Chairs (’70), Blazing Saddles (’74) and Young Frankenstein (’74).

But if you count Brooks’ peak years as writer-performer on TV in the ’50s and ’60s (with Sid Ceasar on Your Show of Shows/Ceasar’s Hour and later Get Smart) and his 2000 Year-Old Man recordings with Carl Reiner, his hot-and-relevant period lasted a little over 20 years. Which is fairly extraordinary.

Silent Movie (’76) wasn’t all that amusing when you get right down to it. (I saw it exactly once, and I tittered but never laughed.) High Anxiety (’78)…Hitchcock tribute stuff, in and out. The Spanish Inquisition musical number in History of the World, Part I (’81) was hilarious and provocative, but otherwise the film was just mezzo-mezzo. Spaceballs (’87) was a downturn, I felt — a wallow. Life Stinks (’91) was actually a kind of resurgence — a character-driven movie that wasn’t a genre spoof. Robin Hood: Men in Tights (’93) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (’95) were weak tea.

In November ’11 I applied Alexander Payne‘s ten-years-of-special-relevance theory to other directors. Andrew Sarris‘s remark about artists having only so much psychic essence also applies. Two things have to happen for a director to enjoy a special zeitgeist-tapping run. One, the director has to be firing on all cylinders. And two, the culture has to embrace and celebrate his/her output during this run of inspiration. Just being good or gifted doesn’t cut it in itself — the public (or at the very least the critics and the award-bestowing fraternity) also has to agree.

David Lean had a high-quality ten-year run run from Brief Encounter (’45) through Summertime (’55), but his prime-zeitgeist period lasted only eight years — The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57) to Dr. Zhivago (’65). The poorly received Ryan’s Daughter nearly finished him off, but then he came back in ’84 with A Passage to India.

John Ford‘s zeitgeist decade ran from The Informer to My Darling Clementine (’46), then he began to caricature himself with his Monument Valley films of the late ’40s and ’50s. Ford resurged with The Horse Soldiers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Alfred Hitchcock did superb work in the ’30s and ’40s, but his window of mythic greatness was only nine years — Strangers on a Train (’51) to Psycho (’60).

Billy Wilder‘s grace period ran an even ten years — Sunset Boulevard (’50) to The Apartment (’60). Francis Coppola‘s window ran from The Godfather (’72) to One From The Heart (’82). Oliver Stone had a 13-year window — Salvador (’86) to Any Given Sunday (’99). So far Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has had a decade-long grace period — Amores perros (’00) to Biutiful (’10). David Fincher has enjoyed an eleven-year window so far — Fight Club (’99) to The Social Network (’10).

Other assessments about other directors in this context?

While I did pretty well as a journalist and a columnist in the ’90s and early aughts, my big decade began in ’06 when I took HE in to a several-posts-per-day bloggy-blog format. I honestly feel like things are crackling on all four burners right now.

Cristian Mungiu‘s Beyond The Hills has been playing in three theatres since Friday. Presumably a few HE readers have seen it by now; it would be nice to run some reactions. It’s got a very respectable 83% Rotten Tomato rating. I’ve been praising it up and down since catching it 10 months ago in Cannes. Time‘s Mary Pols said it “may be the best movie no one will want to see in 2013” I get that. But HE readers are different.

Okay, it’s a little long and perhaps too slowly paced, but that’s partly…perhaps entirely the point. Mungiu knows exactly what he’s doing, and I have to bluntly explain something. This movie is on you, man. You have to man up and sink in and study those nuns and that bearded, none-too-bright priest and those static situations and the stuff going in the background. Sometimes that’s the thing and not what’s happening in the foreground. Mungiu’s every-so-often decision not to have violent action occur front and center isn’t just brilliant — it’s historic.

You have to feel the chill wind and smell the goat’s milk and the burning wood and surrender to the grayness and the occasional snowfalls. And you definitely have to savor that final shot inside the police van. Either you get Romanian cinema or you don’t. BTH is a little bit dull at times, okay, but a major art film.

I saw Emperor two or three weeks ago. I forget when. Actually I haven’t forgotten. I saw at on Wednesday, 2.20 at the Post Group screening room on Cahuenga. And I tried to tap out a review three or four times, and every time my forearms felt like concrete and my six typing fingers felt like iron — they weighed 10 pounds each. The mere thought of reviewing Emperor made me get out the vacuum and then wash the dishes and then drive down to Gelson’s.

It’s a conservative…make that a stodgy period film. Blah blah blah blah blah. With a half-interesting…make that rote performance by Tommy Lee Jones as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, doing the old lazy bark and smoking the corncob pipe. The best summary I’ve read came from Newark Star Ledger critic Stephen Whitty, to wit: “This is just a dull procedural, with the bland Matthew Fox driving around in a jeep in post-World War II Tokyo and asking questions of various government figures and not having them answered (when he’s not having perfectly cliched flashbacks to a fictionalized romance with a rich Japanese girl).”

That’s it. That’s all it is. Emperor is so dull it’s not even an airplane movie. It’s not a what-the-hell-there’s-nothing-else to watch Netflix or Amazon or Hulu movie for a Monday or a Tuesday evening. Uh-oh, I’m starting to feel sleepy again. My fingers are getting heavier and heavier. Okay, that’s all.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/emperor_2012/

At the end of her report about Oz The Great and Powerful‘s big box office debut ($80.3 million domestic, 25% Friday-to-Saturday increase, $69.9 million overseas, $150.2 million total), Deadline‘s Nikki Finke writes that this impressive haul “cements director Sam Raimi as the real deal when it comes to helming blockbusters.”

That‘s the take-away? Everyone is saying “whoa, that Raimi…he da man”? You’d have to be a cretin to say that with a straight face. I have to figure Finke was just being…you know, “polite” in a political sense.

Remove the black-and-white opener and Oz is a meandering and synthetic CG-mural show. It has (as that Slate subhead read) no heart, no brains and no courage. And c’mon…we all know that family audiences are simpletons who have no taste. They’ll pay to see almost anything that looks splashy and good-natured and vaguely engaging. (For whatever reason they drew the line at Jack The Giant Slayer.) How does making a relatively soul-less film that most of the smart critics hate …how does this make Raimi the champ?

I laughed at “I believe that hors d’oeuvres is pronounced orr-du-vorrays”…and that’s it. Otherwise the energy in this skit was so low (Paul Simon was sleepwalking) that it reached out of the screen and just vacuumed my soul and cleaned me out. I couldn’t move after it was over. I was forced to sit on my couch for 20 minutes after it ended, waiting for my system to recharge.

Clouds, rain, long lines, Drinking Buddies, hills, Danny Boyle and a portion of Trance (it opens April 5th and Boyle doesn’t want to show the whole thing? What’s up with that?), Al Gore, Mud, parties, Before Midnight (which everyone loves), beefalos, woolly-bully, more lines, Spring Breakers (which I’ll finally see in LA on Tuesday) and yaddah yaddah.

The Zero Dark Thirty Bluray (Sony Home Video, 3.19) “is about as faultless as the movie,” writes Bluray.com’s Martin Liebman. “The transfer reveals very crisp details; every square inch of the frame is perfectly defined, whether under bright desert sun or through night vision goggles. Complex aerial city shots are handled just as well as intimate close-ups; the former reveals every texture sharply and with incredible ease, the latter showing details as fine — finer, maybe — than the naked eye might perceive in real life.

“Every worn piece of concrete, each grain of sand, strand of clothing, bead of sweat, and drop of blood are revealed with no effort and the utmost clarity. Colors are equally impressive. The palette is naturally vibrant, again under all lighting conditions. No hue is betrayed by the transfer, none appear washed out or overly processed; each is beautifully displayed in every frame. Black levels are true but still revealing of critical information in the nighttime raid at film’s end. Flesh tones are never problematic. Very light banding — an inconsequential amount — may be seen in one or two moments, but it’s not quite enough to knock an otherwise perfect transfer from Sony.”

My copy will arrive Tuesday, no later than Wednesday.

Three weeks ago N.Y. Times reporter Trip Gabriel reported that the liberal-minded Ashley Judd is probably going to run against Mitch McConnell, the blustery, Obama-hating Senate Minority Leader, for U.S. Senator from Kentucky. Now the well-sourced Howard Fineman is reporting that the 44 year-old Judd “has told key advisers and political figures that she is planning to announce her candidacy for U.S. Senate this spring.”

Fineman hears that Judd “has told one close ally that she plans to announce her run for the Democratic nomination for the 2014 race ‘around Derby’ — meaning in early May when the Kentucky Derby brings national attention to Louisville and the Bluegrass State.”

Judd is an ardent Obama-supporting progressive on most social issues, which doesn’t exactly make her a natural among Kentucky’s conservative-leaning voters. “But [she] was born to campaign,” writes Fineman. “A fighter by nature, she has a quick wit and the ability to raise far more money — not to mention engender more free national and local media — than all of McConnell’s past Democratic foes put together. She is fearless, and would not necessarily lose a bar fight if she got into one, which she is about to do.”

In other words, Fineman knows and likes her as far as it goes.

The Cpt. James T. Kirk created by Chris Pine, director JJ Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman in Star Trek (’09) is obviously back in Star Trek Into Darkness (Paamount, 5.17). Basically the same cocky, rule-defying guy played by Taylor Kitsch in Battleship, Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor, James Cagney in The Fighting 69th — brash and brave, resists authority, always waits until the last second to save the day.

Wait…”punch it”? That’s what Han Solo said 32 and 1/2 years ago before throwing the switch for sending the Millenium Falcon into light speed. Who wrote that line? Orci or Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof? Or is it an improv? Oh, and tipping the ship sideways in order to speed through a narrow crevasse? That’s another Han Solo maneuver.

Kevin Hart standing before a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden and being adored like God…they love me! Hart’s narration says Let Me Explain is about the joy of making people laugh. The footage, on the other hand, shows how deeply insecure he is, and how much he needs to fortify his ego. The cheers, the crowds, the adulation…Ceasar!

A press release announces that Hart’s 2012 “Let Me Explain” concert tour made $32 million. Leapin’ lizards…that’s a lot of money! I’ll bet Kevin can afford to buy a shitload of stuff now, right? Nice clothes and shit? Let Me Explain must therefore be really funny. After watching this trailer I wouldn’t see Let Me Explain if Hart personally paid me $100 to do so.