Eight weeks ago I paid a secret visit to the set of George Clooney‘s Monuments Men in Germany’s Harz mountains. It wasn’t on the level of Henry Kissinger‘s secret visit to China to arrange for Richard Nixon‘s 1972 state visit, but when Sony publicity told me to keep mum until after shooting wrapped on 6.26, I gave them my word. Yes, I’d previously told HE readers I was doing it, but then I clammed up and pretended I’d never posted such a thing. My mother called from Connecticut to ask where I was. “I can’t say, mom,” I replied, “but I can tell you this much — I’m definitely not visiting a movie set.”

On the set of Monuments Men in Bad Grund Germany on 5.6.13: Producer & co-writer Grant Heslov, star-director-producer & cowriter George Clooney.

The outdoor mine-shaft set that was Ground Zero on the day I arrived.

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Deadline‘s Nancy Tartaglione has been “told” that Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color, the epic-length lesbo love story with the hot sex scenes that won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, will not be submitted as France’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Feature, and is therefore out of the race before it begins.

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If someone told me that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me is some kind of dry put-on doc about a fictional ’70s band that never quite made it, I would have said “okay, fine.” They were 100% real, of course, but I’ve never effing heard of these guys. I didn’t hear one or two of their songs and go “meh.” I didn’t like one of their singles but then kind of forgot about them. I’ve flat-out never heard of them. So they were definitely doing something wrong in some way. I would have at least picked up on a fragment of their lore, their sound…something would have registered.

The Lone Ranger, currently earning a 25% Rotten Tomatoes rating, “is a catastrophe of tone, a truly tortured screenplay that seems embarrassed by its central character, and at two-and-a-half hours, it may be the single most punishing experience I’ve had in a theater so far this year,” writes HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny. “This is a terrible film by any standards. Overlong, with a script that reads like a notes session no one ever organized into something coherent, and totally confused about what audience it supposedly plays to, The Lone Ranger is grim, ugly, and deeply unpleasant.”

Which means, of course, that The Lone Ranger will (a) probably win the weekend’s box-office crown and (b) Disney will soon announce the green-lighting of a sequel.

“At one point in the film, William Fichtner‘s villain cuts a man’s heart out of his chest and, in front of the immobilized Lone Ranger, eats it,” McWeeny says. “I repeat. He cuts the man’s heart out. And then he eats it. And this is a big summer Disney movie? Really?”

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When was the last time a big-budget or indie-level action-thriller (or cop-vs.-bad-guy film) was made with even semi-realistic brushstrokes? You know…you’re watching this or that activity and your sense of reality and plausibility don’t feel rudely violated? Remember how it felt to watch No Country For Old Men for the first time? A bad guy, cops, chases, attack dogs, metal slugs in forehead, blood on the floor, life-of-death coin tosses, all that good stuff…and it all happened within a realm that you could easily accept as rooted in (cough) “reality”…you know, that combination of occasionally drab naturalism and shifting weather patterns and laws of physics and cosmic fatalism that guys like Julius Caesar and King Henry II (played twice by Peter O’Toole) and Woody Guthrie and Steve McQueen lived by?

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It wasn’t just the raptor hate directed at the Gandolfini funeral piece that slowed me down. Okay, that was half of it but there’s another reason. I haven’t been banging out six or seven pieces per day because I’m feeling kinda serene and dreamy and…oh, fuck it, I feel happy. Because of a lady, all right? One of those once-in-a-decade things. Connection, trust, touch, comfort, serenity…when the right combination kicks in you’re finished. Then again finishing or anticipating each other’s sentences is pretty great. Yeah, the feeling is mutual and all that. This morning I said to her, “I guess this is what being happy is like. You don’t feel like working that much.” All I know is that I have to push pieces out now, and before it was mostly a matter of opening the door and they would run out on their own steam.

It’s bad form to linger. I think we all know this. Keep moving, don’t look back. And so you and Noah Baumbach have this film in the can called Untitled Public School Project, described as “another New York-set film co-written with Gerwig, reportedly ‘looser and wonkier‘ than Frances Ha…costarring yourself and Lola Kirke and comparable on some level to The Great Gatsby and Something Wild (or so Baumbach has indicated) and slated for release in 2014.

But I took the A train up to the IFC Center last night, you see, and I saw Frances Ha again. My first viewing was at Telluride last September. We spoke there at that Film Society of Lincoln Center party with guys like Scott Foundas and Ed Lachman hanging around. (You also spoke to my son Jett.) Anyway I just want to tell you how unusually radiant and wide-open you are in Frances Ha given your character’s faint depression and uncertainty about almost everything. Such a vulnerable, excited state of being and aliveness…live-wire, super-exposed, open-nerve stuff. People say “award-calibre” too often, but this is award-calibre. I just wanted to share this.

There’s an under-undiscussed aspect to the talk about Blue Jasmine (Sony Classic, 7.26) being Woody Allen‘s take on A Streetcar Named Desire.

You need to start with Jasmine‘s basic plot — i.e., a fanciful, vodka-slurping, self-absorbed lady who’s fallen on hard times (Cate Blanchett) comes to live in San Francisco with her less fanciful, working-class sister (Sally Hawkins). In so doing she encounters what you might call a “party of apes” — Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay and (maybe) Louis C.K. There is conflict in particular with Cannavale, who thinks Blanchett is full of shit, but Hawkins begs him to cut Blanchett some slack as she’s so fragile and unstable.

And then there’s Blanchett’s telling the Wall Street Journal‘s Charles McGrath that her part in Jasmine is “[a] kind of opportunity [that] doesn’t come along all the time. The character’s like a combination of Ibsen, Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare. There’s such electricity in the gap between her knowing and not knowing.”

Blanchett, of course, played Blanche Dubois in a BAM stage presentation of Streetcar, directed by Liv Ullman, in late 2009. (Which Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling took me to see — thanks, Roger!) I don’t know that Allen caught Blanchett’s performance, but it would have been extremely remiss not to have done so. At the very least you have to figure Allen caught wind of the hugely positive responses to the Ullman-Blanchett collaboration, and given his ties with Ullman through his ardent, lifelong admiration of the films of Ingmar Bergman, you can guess how it all came together in his head. Tell me I’m reaching. I don’t think so.

Nobody remembers Gore Verbinski‘s The Mexican (’01) with much affection. It wasn’t bad but it didn’t work. Cynically sold as a Brad Pitt-Julia Roberts romantic thing, but the most intriguing relationship in the film was between Robert and James Gandolfini‘s gay hit man.

Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine (Sony Classics, 7.26) starts screening next week, and in concert with this is an exquisitely written Charles McGrath interview piece with Allen in the Wall Street Journal. Choice information: “[Jasmine is] based on a story Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi, told him about a woman she knew whose lifestyle became suddenly downsized after a financial disaster. Cate Blanchett plays a pill-popping, vodka-swigging East Side sophisticate married to a Waspy version of Bernie Madoff (Alec Baldwin). When he’s found out, she loses everything and has to move into the San Francisco apartment of her adoptive sister — a bagger at a grocery store — and her two mouth-breathing sons.

“The story is more serious than comic, and though it’s hard to take your eyes off her, the Blanchett character isn’t always likable. Will it work at the box office? Allen can’t stop to worry about that. He’s already at work on the next one.”

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N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes and script doctor Jordan Roberts came up with a fairly ridiculous pitch for a Washington, D.C.-based Hollywood blockbuster — deliberately bad, but only a step or two beyond the $150 million films that are getting made these days — and showed it to producer Lynda Obst and other Hollywood sharpies. To call their responses deeply depressing isn’t the half of it. Q: What do you call 500 production execs who subscribe to this insane megacorporate mentality about gambling big on elephantine, CG-driven bullshit movies…what do you call these guys at the bottom of the Philippine trench? A: A good start.

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“Because [big fat-ass blockbusters] need to attract the biggest global audience possible, they are increasingly manufactured by committees who tug this way and pull that way,” Barnes writes. “Marketing needs this, international distribution needs that. The all-too-common result is a Frankenfilm, a lumbering behemoth composed of misfit parts.

“When they work, there is a box office bonanza. Studios this year have rejoiced over The Hangover Part III, World War Z and Iron Man 3. When they don’t — well, it’s After Earth or John Carter. (The next big-budget movies to face judgment are The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp and Pacific Rim, a robots-versus-monsters movie from Guillermo del Toro.)”

You’re reading A.O. Scott‘s review of The Heat, and he states early on that the film, directed by Bridesmaid‘s Paul Feig, has broken a sexism barrier by being the first cop-boddy comedy without guys. It “wears its feminism lightly and proudly, though not always comfortably,” he says. And yet it’s “a fairly standard summertime R-rated comedy, which I guess could be described as a kind of progress.” In other words, it’s bad but not altogether bad given the feminist breakthrough this film has achieved…if you want to be generous about it.

“A simpler, and probably more relevant, way to describe this movie would be to say that it’s around two hours of Melissa McCarthy spewing profanity while Sandra Bullock cringes, flutters her arms and sighs in exasperation. If you need another reason to see it, I can’t in good conscience supply one, since the story is sloppy and thin, many of the jokes are strained or tired, and the level of violence is a bit jarring. But the volatile chemistry between Ms. McCarthy and Ms. Bullock is something to behold, and carries The Heat through its lazy conception and slapdash execution.

The Heat “is not a very good movie,” he says in paragraph #8. “Its script is a rehash of the obvious and the pointless, without the knowing self-mockery of 21 Jump Street. And it suffers from the familiar, crippling desire to be naughty without risking offense. So there are jokes at the expense of albinos and people with Boston accents and halfhearted race- and class-based gags.”

I ought to just man up and pay the ticket price and see this, but I honestly don’t know if I can take it. Honestly.