I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve seen Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight (Paramount, 11.2) and they all agree that it holds the line and doesn’t mess around. But they also feel it’s a bit somber and even a downer because it’s just about a drunk (Denzel Washington) facing a situation from which there’s no good escape. That doesn’t mean the film doesn’t work or pay off on its own terms. It does. For what it is, the ending chosen by Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatins seems right. But people were still giving me these looks when I asked them about it.

“But what about Denzel?,” I said to some of them. “He’s a real drunk…he really sank into that.” Yeah, but…. “But what? You don’t think so? It’s one of the best roles he’s ever had.” And they said yeah, he’s really good, but they were feeling a little subdued. “He’s not a Best Actor nominee?,” I asked. Yeah, probably, you’re right.

Everyone knows by now that the first 25 minutes are about Denzel’s bombed, coked-up airline pilot — his name is Whip Whitaker — saving 96 out of 102 passengers from awful death when the tail flap on a jet he’s flying malfunctions and it looks like curtains until he manages to stabilize the jet into a glide by flipping it upside down. It may be that he decides to roll the jet because he’s half in the bag, or maybe he’s such a great pilot that being half in the bag doesn’t matter. But he’s a hero nonetheless. Or he is, rather, until the authorities test his blood.

All drunks have the same choice, and all movies about drunks tell roughly the same story, give or take a variation. Should they keep drinking and come sooner or later to a bad end, or do they man up and accept that they have a problem and do something about it? But Denzel’s alcoholic has three choices. Keep drinking and doing lines. Openly admit that he not only has a problem but was drunk and buzzed on cocaine when he saved all those lives. Or lie his way out of any possible fines, severance and prison time and then admit he has a problem and do something about it.

In other words, the only straight-up honest, totally uncompromised, true-blue thing he can do is to admit to a crime and go to jail. How many confessed drunks in your local AA meeting have ever faced such a choice, and how many of those would take the pure, true-blue option?

Flight is a clean, direct, assured. It’s driven by character, and is not about intrigue or thrills or surprises or wild stuff except in the very beginning. It didn’t diminish at all the second time I saw it. I knew what it would be, and it did that thing. It was the first time that a very slight feeling of disappointment happened because I was expecting a little more, juice-wise and surprise-wise, than just a dynamite opener. Because the remainder of Flight, boiled down, is about when and how Denzel is going to deal with his problem…or not. The third lying option is the one I’d choose if I was in his shoes. It’s the option that anybody with half a fucking brain would choose.

I wish more films like Flight would be made. Films that care about character and don’t throw in car chases or hot sex scenes or jazzy dialogue just because they might distract audiences or give them a good cheap time. It’s a respectable film, but I don’t know how Joe and Jane Popcorn are going to react. LIke I said, there’s no good way out for Whip, and most of the time people want their lead characters to do something that they themselves could live with, or at least could accept. We’ll see what happens.

Something about this Hurricane Sandy time-lapse video soothes me out. It was captured yesterday from the N.Y. Times site by Richard Shepherd. I hate the Times policy of refusing to provide easy embed codes so congrats to Shepherd for busting through that. Here‘s the camera. Update: Here’s another one, apparently taken from the Brooklyn side of the East River.

Producer Glenn Zoller has been riding my ass to post this “Fifty Ways to Hate Obama” video, which I frankly don’t agree with. I’ve told Glenn I really don’t think it’s reflective of the current mood or zeitgeist. Obama is not in a down cycle in which people are beating him up left and right. He was during the budget crisis but that was then. I just don’t agree with it.

On the other hand Glenn has been kind enough to give me free shelter at Telluride for the last two years. And the singing is pretty good with pro-level recording. And there are millions of assholes determined to hate Obama no matter what so whatever…fine.

I saw Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson‘s Samsara the night before last. It’s a kind of ohm movie…ohhhmmm! A fixed-tripod, tableau zone-out film without any dialogue or lip movement even, but a drop-dead beautiful 70mm forehead-smacker. It premiered over a year ago at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival. Fricke has become a Zen master of movies in this vein — he co-shot Koyaanisqatsi (’82), and directed Chronos (’85) and Baraka (’92). Oscilloscope opened Samsara in August, and it might become one of the Best Feature Doc Oscar nominees.

But if you get beyond form, it’s something else. A friend asked me what I really thought of it, and I wrote the following:

“It’s stunningly beautiful, and it’s a nice concept of getting everyone in the film to just pose and stare at the camera and not move. No moving mouths, no smiles, no overt feeling. So yes, it’s very beautiful but — I’m sorry but this has to be said — an extremely cold and emotionally remote film. It gradually envelops you with its coldness, like a ghost.

“It left me with the feeling that there are way, way too many struggling third-world people in the world. What a truly miserable existence for so many hundreds of millions. The world is just swarming with millions and millions of people….millions of swarming ants… and they’re all choking on their garbage and working in soulless factories with millions of dead pig carcasses and love dolls and slaughter houses in which small chickens are suffocated and tortured and killed and cut into pieces and their guts fall in heaps on the damp cement floor.

“I’m used to a realm of my own making…we’re ALL used to that realm…in which there is space that I have carved out and decorated, and that otherwise I live in a world of hygiene and open roads and large homes and nice shoes and Oriental carpets and colorful socks and black high-thread-count T-shirts with a sense of clarity and refinement and a certain degree of aesthetic attractiveness, and a certain amount of caring and compassion and serenity and stillness.

“Samsara shattered that feeling for me. It’s a spiritual journey film but more often a tour of a massive, overcrowded garbage dump filled with human ants. It really depresses me to think that I’m an ant, but that’s what I am, I guess. That’s what you are, what we all are…we’re all fucking ants, scampering here and there. How cold, how horrid, how truly miserable, how immensely and suffocatingly depressing.

“But it’s a very handsome film. Mesmerizing, transporting, fascinating. Technical kudos to all involved. Truly magnificent photography. Beautifully scored. And welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a world of SWARMING ANTS PRAYING DURING RAMADAN and SURROUNDED BY DEAD CHICKENS & MOUNTAINS OF STINKING GARBAGE AND LOVE DOLLS and ORANGE-OUTFIT PRISONERS DOING LONG SENTENCES DANCING IN PRISON YARDS. It took me hours to recover from the depression.

“The world that once was, the Lewis & Clark world of centuries past, a How The West Was Won world of cleanliness and mountain streams and open spaces and greenery and John Colter and Woody Guthrie and Fritz Weaver and Marthe Keller and reasonable amounts of people, seems to be a memory in Samsara. What a bummer.”

For the record, Fricke didn’t shoot the other two “qatsi” movies — Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi.

Samsara is Sanskrit term that roughly translates as “all I need now a cup of coffee and a blowjob.” Seriously, it means “continuous flow” and “cycles of life.”

If you were Joshua Jackson, wouldn’t you feel a tiny bit slighted by the art on this one-sheet for Stephen Frears‘ Lay The Favorite (Weinstein Co., 12.7)? The poster is clearly indicating that Jackson (lower right) is professionally known as Vince Vaughn. Vaughn is allegedly in the film but it’s hard to spot him in the trailer. Jackson is definitely a Favorite costar, but the poster is conflicted about that fact. At war with itself.

Vaughn is in our film, and…wait, who’s the guy on the bottom? You don’t care and neither do we, frankly. His name is…wait a minute…Jackson, Josh Jackson. Why did we put him on the poster if we don’t even know who the hell he is? You tell us. We don’t really know. It probably has something to do with Jackson playing a semi-prominent role in the film but this is not what marketing is about, giving credit to unknown guys. Why can’t we just put Vaughn’s face on the poster and be done with it? Trust us, we’re just as confused as you guys are.

After I-forget-how-many-years of announcing, shooting, editing and promotion (going back to least 2008 if not 1997, depending on shifting definitions of when it really began), episodes of Oliver Stone‘s Untold History of the United States will finally start airing on Showtime on Monday, November 12th, and will continue…what is it, eight or ten weeks? Ten, I think.

Screenings of the first three episodes at the 2011 NY Film Festival were cancelled because they weren’t quite ready. So they screened instead at the 2012 NY Film Festival, or about three and half weeks ago. A 120-minute segment is screening at the Aero on Thursday night followed by Stone doing a q & a. I can’t attend due to the AFI Fest prmiere and the first showing anywhere of Hitchcock.

Stone is an entrenched anti-corporate, antiwar-machine lefty from way back. I’ve come to know him fairly well through personal contact over the years and through mutual friends, and he’s always been extremely bright, engaged, inquisitive, insightful, and bold-strokey in his thinking. It gioes without saying that Untold History of the United States will not contain the usual homilies and rote history-class statistics. History outside the safe zone. That’s what Stone does time and again (except when he made World Trade Center).

Example: Two and a half years ago Stone noted that Adolf Hitler “did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.” This statement is certainly not inaccurate.

According to a Wikipedia WWII death chart, the total number of Russan deaths, both military and civilian, during World War II came to 23,954,000 — a little more than 14% of the total Russan population. That’s a staggering figure. (The total number of U.S. military/civilian deaths during that conflict was 418,500, which represented 1/3 of 1% of the population at the time.) The total number of Jewish Holocaust deaths during World War II was 5,752,400.

And yet the Holocaust, according to U.S. media and history books, is the reigning horror of World War II, and not the fact that almost one in seven Russians were killed by Nazi Germany. This impression is due, of course, to the racial hatred behind the Holocaust and to the coldly methodical manner in which German officers and soldiers carried out the attempted extermination of European Jewry. But why is it that awareness of the scale of Russian WWII deaths barely registers alongside the Holocaust in this country?

Stone was essentially observing that the most historical authorities have placed an understandable but disproportionate emphasis on the Holocaust in considering the totality of horrors caused by Nazi Germany, and that certain powerful figures in this country’s big media constellation have probably had a hand in this. That doesn’t seem like a hugely crazy thing to say. Not that awareness of the Holocaust isn’t an immensely important lesson for each and every citizen to learn and reflect upon. But where are the Russian death museums in this country? Where are all the Russan death documentaries that have either won or been nominated for Oscars?

Lucasfilm will always be a respected name for post-production services, but it means relatively little if you’re talking about audience-attracting brands or franchises outside of the Star Wars films, and you have to a strenuously unhip person to be excited about seeing another Star Wars flick in this day and age. The series creatively peaked 32 years ago with The Empire Strikes Back, for God’s sake. So can somebody please explain Disney paying $4.05 billion for the company and pledging to make another Star Wars flick by 2015? “Lucasfilm” generated real excitement in the ’80s, but this is now.

I’ve accepted a generous invitation to visit and cover the 2012 Hanoi Film Festival (11.25 through 11.29). I’ll leave a few days before Thanksgiving to visit Danang and Hue before returning to Hanoi for four days of moviegoing, interviewing and event-covering. I’m figuring there will have to be at least four or five Asian-produced films worth savoring. It’ll be a chance to learn, open up and breathe in fresh aromas.

“This is one of those movies that depend on your not thinking much about it; for as soon as you reflect on what’s happening rather than being swept up in the narrative flow, there doesn’t seem much to it aside from the skill with which suspense is maintained despite the fact that you know in advance how it’s going to turn out.

“Nothing hangs on the way it turns out. Once the deed is successfully done, there’s really nothing much to say, and anything that is said seems contrived. That is the virtue of an entertainment like this; it doesn’t linger in the memory and provoke afterthoughts. One need not, and should not, pause for an instant while consuming it. It is a confection — perhaps that’s the message; everything is confection; movies, diplomacy, what’s the difference? — and it goes down well, leaving no aftertaste whatsoever.” — from a 10.29 N.Y. Times “Opinionator” piece by Stanley Fish, author and professor of humanities and law at Miami’s Florida International University.

Fish’s comments echo my own to some extent.