“You know, when I say impotent, I don’t mean merely limp. When I say impotent, I mean I’ve lost even my desire to work. That’s a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I’ve lost my reason for being…my purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved.” — George C. Scott‘s Herbert Bock in Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital, which was efficiently but incidentally directed by Arthur Hiller.

Chayefksy bust outside the TV Academy in North Hollywood — Thursday, 11.8, 8:45 pm.

Two or three days ago an Elle interview with Silver Linings Playbook star Jennifer Lawrence surfaced, and two colorful quotes kicked up some eight-month-old dust. “In Hollywood, I’m obese,” Lawrence told Elle‘s Maggie Bullock. “I’m considered a fat actress. I’m Val Kilmer in that one picture on the beach.”

Nobody has even hinted at that, least of all myself.

In my 3.20 review of The Hunger Games, I said that Lawrence “seems too big” for costar Josh Hutcherson, and that “she’s a fairly tall, big-boned lady.” At the time N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy and Variety critic Justin Chang passed along vaguely similar observations.

On 3.28 I explained as follows: “I never said that Lawrence being ‘fairly tall’ and ‘big-boned’ was a problem of any kind. I said that in a romantic context she ‘seems too big‘ for her pint-sized costar Josh Hutcherson. (Which she is, comparably-speaking.) Columnist Nell Minow suggested that instead of saying Lawrence is too big for Hutcherson, I should have said Hutcherson ‘is too small for her.’ So I said that also.

“And that was it. I have no problem with tall. I’ve always chuckled at the catcall line ‘tall…and that’s not all!’ On her own semi-statuesque terms Lawrence is totally fine.

“I think the line about Lawrence being ‘too big’ for Hutcherson came from a line in The Big Sleep when Humphrey Bogart‘s Phillip Marlowe tells Elisha Cook Jr.’s Harry Jones that his girlfriend Agnes, played by Sonia Darrin, is “too big for ya.” To which Jones replies, “That’s a dirty crack, mister.”

During AFI Fest I saw Drew Denny‘s The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With My Pants On — a title that suggests something energetic or spirit-lifting or rompy. Alas, the film doesn’t go there. It’s basically a meandering road-tripper about a couple of ladies (Denny, Sarah Hagan) cruising the scenic Southwest on a mission to scatter a father’s ashes. I wasn’t that much of a fan…sorry. But I fell for portions of Will Basanta‘s photography, which approaches the beauty of Vittorio Storaro‘s lensing of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Sheltering Sky.

Basanta, 28, became friendly with Denny while they attended the USC School of Cinema-Television (now called School of Cinematic Arts). He showed up sometime in mid-2011 at a gallery in Echo Park to watch her deliver a solo performance piece about the death of her dad. It was a “touching performance,” he says, that left a lot of damp eyes in its wake. He soon after agreed to shoot a film version with Denny, who had written (or would soon write) a 60-something-page script. They hooked up with Hagan, camera operator Carrie Schreck, producers Jason Michael Berman and Clay Jeter and two or three others. They left LA on 8.5.11 in a four-car caravan, and shot for a month.

“Drew and I and the editor, Isaac Hagy, talked about how we wanted the film to have a sun-kissed feeling,” Byanta says. But the film has more than just that. The lighting is so subtle it feels almost spooky at times. It’s all very carefully composed, particularly the magic-hour sequences. Painterly, haunting. It was shot almost entirely with a Red One Camera with a Mysterium-X sensor (preferred because it’s more sensitive to low light) and with Canon still-photo lenses, mainly because they’re cheaper.

Basanta names the late cinematographer Conrad Hall as one of his main heroes or influencers. He admires Storaro also, mostly for his work on The Last Emperor, he says. But he hasn’t seen The Sheltering Sky…hah!

Will Basanta during filming of The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With My Pants On.

I spoke last Monday afternoon to the great Oliver Stone, director and co-writer of the new ten-part Showtime series, The Untold History of the United States, which premieres Monday night (11.12). Stone is also the co-author (with Peter Kuznick) of a book version — a sturdily researched and well-written complement to the series — that I’ve read about 65% or 70% of. If you ask me it deserves the same respect and attention as Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States.

Oliver initially conveyed disappointment that I didn’t drop by the Aero last week for a screening of the first two or three episodes of his series. (I went instead to the opening night AFI Fest screening of Hitchcock.) But we got past that and enjoyed a spirited discussion.

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. The point of The Untold History of the United States is not to embrace or push along the usual homilies and rote history-class statistics that we all learne in high school and college. This is history outside the safety zone.

The first four chapters of the Showtime series focus on American history from World War II to the postwar Truman and Eisenhower years and the Cold War.

One of the more interesting points made is a debunking of the conventional belief that the United States and the Allies beat Nazi Germany. We triumphed, of course, but the war was really won by the damage brought by Nazi Germany’s war with the Soviet Union in ’41 and ’42. I first read this view in Albert Speer‘s “Inside The Third Reich” way back when.)

Stone’s doc is not very kind to Harry Truman, and in fact portrays Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s successor in much darker terms than David McCullough’s widely-referenced biography.

Stone and Kuznick also assert that if FDR had backed his third-term vice president, Henry Wallace, for his fourth term, President Wallace (who would have ascended after FDR’s death in early 1945) wouldn’t have dropped atomic bombs on Japan, the military-industrial complex would have been stymied or at least restrained, and the United States and the Soviet Union might have practically resolved differences and not been so adversarial in the late ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

I suspect that when Paula Broadwell told Jon Stewart that her book about Gen. David Patreaus contained “no dirty secrets,” she was also stating to herself that there was also nothing dirty in Patreaus’s life, which at the time included an ongoing sexual affair with Broadwell. And there was nothing dirty about it. I’m presuming that it was, like all impassioned affairs are in the early and middle stages, beautiful and glorious, at least within the bubble of their private time together.

You’re not supposed to say stuff like this, I realize. You’re supposed to frown and shake your head and wag your finger and go “tut, tut” and “what a tragedy.” Which it’s now become, of course. But it wasn’t then. I’m sure they cared for each other a great deal. I’m sure that the feeling seeped right down to the marrow. This is the exact same madness that willful go-getters and regular Joes alike have tasted and savored over the millenia. It’s in our bloodstreams.

“Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Mitt Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to condemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?

“Romney’s friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.” — from an 11.9 piece by Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books, called “What Romney Lost.”

Sincere apologies for not posting my phone interview with On The Road director Walter Salles, which happened five days ago, until today. The gentle-mannered Salles is a highly articulate and often eloquent fellow. Have a listen and you’ll understand this for yourself. We were supposed to speak for 15 minutes — we wound up going for 46 minutes and 42 seconds. I could have danced all night.

On The Road director Walter Salles.

On The Road, which mostly takes place from 1948 to 1950 or ’51, always feels genuine and real and vivid in the moment. In no way is it a yesteryear timepiece thing. Salles did everything he could to implant this immediacy and realism, and is naturally proud of this effort.

“We were shooting something that had a real live quality,” Salles said early in our chat. “There was no makeup during that New York party scene so the camera could register the heat and joy and exhiliration of that moment….we tried to do this throughout the whole shoot…there is no blue screen in this film…every time we show snow, it’s real snow…the actors lived under those circumstances from minus 25 to 120 degrees…that last scene when Sal and Dean part in New York, Garett Hedlund stayed outside for six hours with a T-shirt and a ragged, thin leather jacket under the cold, and he would not come in for a second because he wanted to feel the garshness of that situaton…everything was being lived.”

On The Road “is masterful and rich and lusty, meditative and sensual and adventurous and lamenting all at once,” I wrote on 5.23 12 from Cannes. “It has Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘nostalgia for the present’ except the present is 1949 to 1951 — it feels completely alive in that time. No hazy gauze, no bop nostalgia. Beautifully shot and cut, excitingly performed and deeply felt.

“It’s much, much better than I thought it would be given the long shoot and…I forget how long it’s been in post but it feels like ages. It’s so full of life and serene and mirthful in so many different ways. I was stirred and delighted and never less than fully engrossed as I watched it, and it’s great to finally run into a film that really hits it, and then hits it again and again.”

Many HE readers presumably saw Lincoln last night, and are champing at the very bit. But before posting you have to imagine yourself watching the History Channel on a Sunday evening, and at 9 pm a very Lincoln-like drama about the passing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution comes on. The aspect ratio is boxier, but it’s almost exactly the same thing as Spielberg’s film except it’s an hour shorter and Matthew Modine plays Lincoln instead of Daniel Day Lewis. It wouldn’t be that different of an experience, would it?

New Yorker illustration by Ricardo Martinez.

In the view of New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, Lincoln “is a curious beast. The title suggests a monolith, as if going to this movie were tantamount to visiting Mt. Rushmore, and the running time, of two and a half hours, prepares you for an epic. Yet the film is a cramped and ornery affair, with Spielberg going into lockdown mode even more thoroughly than he did in The Terminal. No one is happier in this fug than Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s cinematographer, who veils events in such a rarefied and sifted haze that they seem already poised halfway to myth.

“There is physical conflict [in Lincoln], but it seems perfunctory: first, a murderous opening scrap between black and Confederate regiments, invested by Kaminski with the staccato desperation that he brought to Saving Private Ryan, and then, much later, a corpse-littered battlescape. The true tussle of the movie, however, is between the Spielberg who, like a cinematic Carl Sandburg, is drawn aloft toward legend — hardly an uncommon impulse when dealing with Lincoln — and the Spielberg who is tugged down by Tony Kushner‘s intricate screenplay toward documentary grit. You can never tell which of the two tendencies, the visionary or the revisionist, will come out on top.”

10:50 am Update: A producer friend wrote a few minutes ago and said “you could not be more correct about Lincoln. This is the Emperor’s Clothes film of the year. The thing is glacially-paced…and not 2012 climate-change glaciers, but, say, 1962 glaciers.

“Daniel Day-Lewis is very good, and I suppose he deserves credit for having gotten the ‘real’ Lincoln down rather well (he even gets the Lincoln walk correct). But, really, in the end the performance is a bit of a bore due to the script. Day Lewis plods from room to room, person to person, giving big speeches, small speeches, anecdotes and educating us on Euclid.

“I would have walked out, but it was too packed at the Arclight and there was an African-American next to me weeping throughout and so it seemed unseemly to me to do that.

“I think that there eventually will be a backlash against the film and, in the end, Denzel wins the Oscar.”

Weeping African-American Guy: “Ohh-hoh-hoh…heeeeshh-hee-hee…hee-hee-heesh….weep…weep.” Producer: “Excuse me there, fella. Gotta get by.” Weeping African-American Guy: “I, uh….wait, you’re leaving? I don’t even know you but you’re leaving? What are you made of? You’re walking out on a movie about Abraham Lincoln? Did you vote for Romney? Producer: “It’s a free country, pal…okay? You can weep and moan and make all the noise you want, but this is a slow turgid thing and it’s not doing it for me. And I voted for Obama, if you want to know.”

As expected, Skyfall is stomping at the box-office with a likely $85 to $88 million by Sunday night. I’ve seen it twice because of Roger Deakins‘ exhilarating cinematography, for the teasing perversity in Javier Bardem‘s Silva, for the way director Sam Mendes delivers in a carefully honed and upmarket fashion, like it’s all being shot for Vanity Fair, and because Skyfall avoids and in fact seems to despise many of the stylistic flourishes and indulgences that have come to represent the Bond franchise over the last 50 years.

And yet it delivers with high finesse. While being a dark and solemn thing at heart. The opening credit sequence, a dreamscape of death if I ever saw one, is but one taste.

As David Denby puts it in his New Yorker review, Skyfall has been fashioned “in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, [and] is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place.” Exactly! Yes! Thank you!

Denby, in short, is lamenting the passing of that bottled and bonded 20th Century attitude, or perhaps the passing of the 20th Century, and once again seems to be pushing an ongoing argument against the inevitable, even though what he’s observed in recent reviews — a certain cultural diminishment, innumerable crude tendencies, a downwash — is arguably happening. Denby has essentially been saying in his reviews what Tony Soprano told Jennifer Melfi in the very first episode of the first Sopranos season, way back in ’99: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

And yet I enjoyed this Denby riff about the first and possibly best Bond of all: “Connery was shrewd and piratical — he let us in on the fun of being wicked. An ironist, he knew that the role was absurd but that the desire for fantasy wasn’t. He was the gentleman-rogue hero — aristocratic in disdain, yet classless — of every man’s dream of himself, and women could enjoy him as the adroit cad who arrives at night, delivers the goods, and leaves in the morning. Connery took his time. His drawling pauses as he calculated his advantage were a prime comic device, the manner of a brute swathed in sophistication, so sure of success that he never needed to rush.

“Roger Moore, of course, was more Brut than brute. He gave off the aura of a luxury product in an airline magazine — an expensive leather case, perhaps, rubbed rather too often with oil. He was neither shaken nor stirred; he was smooth, unmarked by experience in any way. George Lazenby and the gracious Timothy Dalton never really took control of the role, but Pierce Brosnan, with his big, handsome head atop a slender body, could be flinty. He had an interesting mean streak and the habits of cold indifference. He was lithe and quick, yet not really a menace, like the big-bodied Connery or the steel-springed Craig.

“The earlier Bonds were superlative lovers of food, spirits, and women. As box-office has become truly internationalized, however, the producers may have feared that a too knowing Bond might not please everyone. Such a connoisseur could turn off moviegoers who object to the notion of being outclassed. The Bond franchise will continue, though I doubt we shall ever again hear Bond say, as Connery did in Goldfinger, that a certain brandy was a ‘thirty-year-old fins indifferently blended, sir, with an overdose of bons bois.’ I don’t know what bons bois is, but I enjoyed the astringent flavor of Connery’s judgment.”

A seasoned and sardonic Industry Guy who agrees with my 11.15 review of Lincoln has written the following: “You get so much guff for being tough on Steven Spielberg that I thought you should know this time, with your Lincoln review, you’ve mysteriously pulled your punches.

“And there’s a lot to punch. AO Scott and Kenny Turan seem to be so dazzled by the names on this project that they’re looking past the film’s giant weaknesses, especially Tony Kushner‘s script. For every human expression there are (at least) a hundred lines of history lesson dialogue. The ratio of stock characters to compelling ones is worse.

“Daniel Day Lewis is brilliant, so I’m dazzled too on that count. But he’s in another dimension. It’s like Marlon Brando in a Disney afterschool special. People need to watch Advise and Consent to see how the making of laws can be handled dramatically. Preminger did it, because he had a POV about people. SS and Kushner appear to have none. So you get a movie about laws, and not people. Deadly mistake.

“Oscar for DDL? Sure why not. He delivered.”

Although the anti-Silver Linings Playbook cabal is fairly microscopic, it has a way of seeming more influential than it probably is as far as the guilds, Academy members and general audiences are concerned. In addition to the frowners mentioned in today’s “Hang On To Your Argo” post (principally In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg), the others are Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci (although he also has positive things to say about it, oddly), UGO’s Jordan Hoffman and First Showing‘s Alex Billington.

Last night Magic Mike costar (and, if you ask me, serious Best Supporting Actor contender) Matthew McConaughey sat for a q & a at North Hollywood’s TV Academy theatre with Pete Hammond. The chat followed a screening of Magic Mike, and before an audience that was largely female. McConaughey, who struck me as earnest, articulate, no dummy, charming and down to earth, made quite the impression.

Magic Mike costar and Dallas Buyer’s Club star Matthew McConaughey — Thursday, 11.8, 9:10 pm.

McConaughey is a genuine award-season contender, I feel, for two reasons. One, he “hits a solid triple as Dallas, the owner-manager of the strip club Xquisite, nailing every line and delivering the requisite hoots and cock-of-the-walk sleaze,” as I said in my 6.26 review. And two, because he turned his career around a couple of years ago by dropping the shallow romcom vein he’d been mining for years, and he deserves applause for that.

The odd thing was that McConaughey looked so thin that he seemed unhealthy, and he had dark hair and a dark moustache that made him look like John Wilkes Booth. But the unhealthy look is intentional, it turns out, for a film called The Dallas Buyer’s Club.

McConaughey has lost 38 pounds, he said, in order to play the late Ron Woodruff. Club is “loosely based” on the life of Woodruff, “a drug taking, women loving, homophobic man who, in 1986 was diagnosed with full blown HIV/AIDS and given thirty days to live,” a synopsis says. “Other AIDS patients sought out his medications, and with the help of his doctor and a fellow patient, Ron unintentionally created the Dallas Buyers Club, the first of dozens which would form around the country, providing its paying members with alternative treatments.”

On 7.18.12 I wrote that I’d been noticing the fruits of McConaughey’s career-change strategy for a year or so. “Sometime in 2009 or ’10 he must have told his agent, ‘I know I went along with these shitty romcoms before but it has to stop…you’re fucking killing me, man…will you get me out of this?…enough of the quarter-inch-deep, pretty-boy Kate Hudson flicks…that way lies death.’

“My first acknowledgement that McConaughey had changed course was in a 5.3.11 review of The Lincoln Lawyer, to wit: ‘For nearly 20 years McConaughey has under-achieved. The few good films he’s been in have been mostly ensembles (Dazed and Confused, U-571, We Are Marshall, Tropic Thunder) while many of his top-billed or costarring vehicles have been romantic dogshit, especially over the last decade. Now comes The Lincoln Lawyer, the first completely decent, above-average film McConaughey has carried all on his own. By his standards that’s close to a triumph.”

“I should now state that I no longer regard McConaughey as a Beelzebub-like figure, which is how I described him in a 4.21.09 piece called ‘The Devil Probably.’ And that I no longer think of him as ‘King of the Empties,’ which is how I put it on 7.16.06. He’s wised up, done the work, redeemed himself…no more condemnation.”

McConaughey has been exceptionally good in Bernie, Killer Joe and Mud. His upcoming projects include True Detectives, Thunder Run and The Wolf of Wall Street.