A parent and a grown son get to know each other on a road trip and come to some kind of fulfillment or climax or finality for one or both. Is it okay if I state an upfront preference for Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, a black-and-white road film (Montana to Nebraska) with Bruce Dern as a cranky dad and Will Forte as his son with Stacey Keach and Bob Odenkirk costarring?

I hereby and henceforth refuse to run any stills from Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah. The snakes and a single alligator photo that others are running today is ridiculous. (“Find me a thousand snakes!”) It’s clear that Aronofsky and Matty Libatique are going off in all kinds of anything-goes Hobbit-y storybook directions, and that, for me, is the stuff of instant boredom. I’m sorry but I’m off the boat (and I’m a longtime Aronofsky fan). A big “no” to Noah.

I wouldn’t watch this movie with a gun at my back and a knife at my throat. It’s allegedly half-decent or better than that, but the reason it was made is because the American landscape is swarming with tens of millions of teenage Jabbas right now, and an idea has developed among sensitive filmmakers that fat kids are a downtrodden class, unfairly mocked and pushed around, and that they need special hugs and unqualified acceptance.

There’s only one effective response to morbidly obese kids, and that’s to go all R. Lee Ermey on their ass. Don’t hug them and pat them on the back and tell them they’re okay. Tell them to start working out and eating right or prepare for a miserable life and an early death. Because that’s the truth of it.

Toy Story 3 fans will recall the climactic scene when the toys are about to fall into the incinerator. Some guy named Justin Wallin turned to Final Cut Pro, made this scene the last shot in the film and showed it to his worldly mom, who was shocked and appalled. (What are the odds she’s an undecided voter?) I would have been worshipping Toy Story 3 on my knees if John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich and Michael Arndt had gone with this ending.

People who are putting down Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina for being stylistically outside the box and therefore not approval-worthy are pedestrian-minded philistines. They’re saying “whoa, this is different and audacious and so it sucks!” There’s no lamer response to artistic experimentation than this. These people need more than scolding, I’m afraid. They need to be taken outside, bent over the woodpile and — no offense — spanked.

At least MCN’s David Poland gets it: “I am not, generally, a Joe Wright fan,” he wrote yesterday. “I think he’s gotten some nice performances from actors in the past, but has lost me on efforts at big style. Here, it’s big style from start to finish and I bought into it. Not everyone will. But I think there are enough people who will be pleased that it could well find a Best Picture slot at year’s end.” Thank you!

Los Angeles is a great town to write this column from except for the time zone. Pacific people are the last to wake up to anything. LA at 6:30 am means the night before in Sydney, 9:30 am in New York, 2:30 pm in London and 3:30 pm in Paris/Berlin/Rome/Prague. You’re always the last to read and respond unless you bang stuff out between 11 pm and 1 am, which is somewhat easier, I’m happy to say, since I stopped drinking.

I wrote the following on 1.25.11 after catching Jacob Aron Estes‘ The Details at Sundance: “[The film] is about things going badly for a Seattle-residing doctor and family man (Tobey Maguire), in part due to his own poor decisions but also because of horrible pre-ordained luck — fate or God or some overpowering force simply being against him.

“A similar theme drove the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man — God doesn’t care, and He might even be messing with you because He’s a perverse mofo possessed of a sick sense of humor.

“Cosmic disfavor or annoyance is clearly indicated in the very first scene. Maguire is shown sitting alone in front of an office building when all of a sudden a large piano falls from above, flattening him. We all know what it means when anything falls from the sky in a movie (like the frogs in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Magnolia) — i.e., someone up there is in a bad or perverse mood or is in some way displeased.

“So during this morning’s q & a I asked Estes if he could express what his film is saying theologically, in 25 words or less. He said that God isn’t really in his film and that we all create our fate or destiny with our choices and our character. That struck me as blatantly dishonest given his use of the falling piano, but maybe I’m being too strict about this.”

Boilerplate synopsis: After ten years of marriage, Jeff and Nealy Lang (Maguire, Elizabeth Banks) have an idyllic suburban home…and a relationship on the skids. But, when a family of hungry raccoons ransacks their perfectly manicured backyard, Jeff becomes single-mindedly obsessed with eradicating the pests by any means necessary.

“Soon the relentless rodents aren’t merely uprooting the lawn, but also overturning the Langs’ entire bourgeois existence, as the man-versus-beast battle leads into an absurd mess of infidelity, extortion, organ donation and other assorted mayhem. Devilish throughout, The Details also stars Laura Linney, Ray Liotta, Dennis Haysbert and Kerry Washington.

The Details will be available on VOD on 10.5.12 and in theaters on 11.2.12.

Directed and Writtten by: Jacob Aaron Estes

Starring: Tobey Maquire, Elizabeth Banks, Laura Linney, Ray Liotta, Dennis Haysbert and Kerry Washington

This goal of this post is to marginally discredit the aspect-ratio theology of Bob Furmanek, who is (a) one of the leading advocates for the 1.85-ing of films shot and/or released starting in April or May of 1953 and (b) is perhaps chiefly responsible for persuading the powers-that-be to present the forthcoming Blurays of Warner Bros. Dial M for Murder and Sony’s On The Waterfront with a 1.85 aspect ratio.

The 185-ing of Dial M and Waterfront is an interesting variation if you want to be comme ci comme ca about it, but a major aesthetic tragedy in the view of light, air and space advocates like myself.

Notice the 1.37 compositions in the above mini-summary of Them! (Warner Bros., 6.19.54). They are clearly meant for projection at 1.37, or at the very least 1.66 if you’re insisting on a widescreen simulation. But definitely not 1.85. The Warner Bros. film was shot in the fall of 1953, or a good four or five months after most of the big studios had decided to abandon 1.37 aspect ratios in favor of 1.85. But Warner Bros., which opened Dial M for Murder on 5.29.54 in first-run ttheatres in 1.85., didn’t open Them! with 1.85 but in 1.37. Just as anyone with a mind to could have.

Here’s an excerpt from Them!‘s Wiki page:

“When Them! began production in the fall of 1953, it was originally conceived to be in 3-D and WarnerColor. During pre-production, tests were to be shot in color and 3-D. A few color tests were shot of the large-scale ant models, but when it was time to shoot the 3-D test, WB’s ‘All Media’ 3-D camera rig malfunctioned and no footage could be filmed.

“The next day, a memo was sent out that the color and 3-D aspects of the film were to be scrapped, and that black and white and wide-screen would be the preferred format, trying to emulate the ‘effective shock treatment’ of Warners’ The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

“Ultimately the film was not shot in widescreen. Because of the preparation of certain shots, however, many of the camera set-ups for 3-D still remain, such as the opening titles and flame-throwers that are shot at the camera.

“Although WB was dissatisfied with the color results, the opening titles were printed in color against a black and white background to give the opening of the film a ‘punch’. This effect was achieved by an EastmanColor section spliced into each print.”

L.A. Times reporter Ben Fritz reported earlier today that with Ron Burkle and Avenue Capital out of the running, Jay Penske, the owner of Deadline, is the “leading bidder” for Variety and is likely to buy the longstanding trade paper for about $30 million within the next three weeks.

Penske, 33, “plans to keep the Variety and Deadline brands distinct, according to a person familiar with his thinking,” Fritz wrote, “but it’s otherwise unclear how the outlets would be integrated.”

Let me explain something. Rationality, sensibleness and practicality usually prevail to some extent when a takeover happens, but they’re always mixed in with basic law-of-the-jungle rules and impulses. Never trust anyone who ignores the jungle element or says it doesn’t exist.

Variety is staffed with a lot of smart, crafty professionals — Steven Gaydos, Jeff Sneider, Justin Chang, Peter Debruges — but it’s an older, weaker lion in this equation, and Deadline is the younger, stronger, hungrier lion.

We all know what’s likely to happen. The first thing the younger lion does when he takes over is kill the older, weaker lion, and then he goes around and kills all the cubs, and then he goes to the lionesses and mates and produces cubs of his own. I’m not saying all the Variety cubs are goners, but it would be Pollyanic to presume that everything will stay intact and hunky-dory once Penske takes over. Forget it. One way or another there will be a lot of roaring and growling and bared fangs and more roaring and blood on the grass. It’s going to be traumatic. Just watch any documentary about lions.

The clarity of mind that comes to a man standing on the gallows is wonderful.

“Should the deal with Penske go through, it would mark a shift in power in the world of showbiz insider news,” Fritz wrote. “Founded in 2006 as a blog spinoff of editor in chief Nikki Finke’s industry column for L.A. Weekly, Deadline is a direct rival to Variety and its longtime rival the Hollywood Reporter and has become a dominant force in breaking and delivering online entertainment news.”

“If the deal goes through, it could be a little bit awkward for Variety and Deadline to work under the same roof,” wrote The Atlantic Wire‘s Adam Clark Estes. “The six-year-old Deadline is likely somewhat responsible with the 107-year-old Variety’s downfall. Not only did Deadline offer up industry scoops for free after Variety went behind a paywall, but [Deadline‘s Nikki] Finke also made a habit of hiring away Variety‘s reporters to work for her site.”

In speaking to MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz about the two upcoming Hitchcock films, The Girl and Hitchcock, Brian DePalma — once described in the late ’70s as a guy who “every other year picks the bones of a dead director and gives his wife a job” — says it seems unfair to tarnish Hitch’s reputation. He’s referring to The Girl, of course — the HBO pic about Hitch’s icky obsession for Tippi Hedren — and not Hitchcock.

I’m moderately impressed by the new poster for Tom Hooper‘s Les Miserables (Universal, 12.25), and more specifically by the casting of Isabelle Allen as young Cosette, who grows up to be Amanda Seyfried. In the choosing of younger versions of established actors, filmmakers are often blase or careless as the kids they pick don’t even faintly resemble the grown-ups. For whatever strange reason Allen actually looks like Seyfried. A lot.