To hear it from N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes, Vinny Bruzzese‘s Worldwide Motion Picture Group is either a proponent of the increasingly synthetic and cheese-whizzy nature of mainstream movies, or an outgrowth of this. Either way Bruzzese sounds to me like a slick and opportunistic type who would have gotten along just fine with Christopher Moltisanti while he was looking to refine and sell Cleaver.

Worldwide Motion Picture Group honcho Vinny Bruzzese conferring with Miriam Brin, WMPG’s head of script analysis.

Bruzzese is apparently less of a calculating, self-created fiend than an inevitable manifestation of a development and production community that has less and less of a clue with each passing year. Either way he’s basically selling feelings of safety by advising production execs to favor cookie-cutter banality. Irving Thalberg would have taken one look and had the “gravelly-voiced” Vinny thrown right off the lot.

“For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success.” WMPG “also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“’Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,’ Mr. Bruzzese said. ‘If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.’

“Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. ‘A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

“His recommendations, delivered in a 20- to 30-page report, might range from minor tightening to substantial rewrites: more people would relate to this character if she had a sympathetic sidekick, for instance.

“Script ‘doctors,” as Hollywood refers to writing consultants, have long worked quietly on movie assembly lines. But many top screenwriters — the kind who attain exalted status in the industry, even if they remain largely unknown to the multiplex masses — reject Mr. Bruzzese’s statistical intrusion into their craft.

“’This is my worst nightmare,’ said Ol Parker, a writer whose film credits include The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. ‘It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

“Mr. Parker drew a breath. ‘Look, I’d take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing,’ he said. ‘But this feels like the studio would listen to my grandmother before me, and that is terrifying.’”

The first Great Gatsby reviews began breaking a couple of hours ago, and the consensus so far is that no one except for The Hollywood Reporter‘s somewhat approving Todd McCarthy is feeling especially charmed or elevated. Most of the critics published so far are generally unenthusiastic about the excesses of Baz Luhrmann‘s 3D, CG-ified adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novel.

Declaring that “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling,” Variety‘s Scott Foundas says that Gatsby is “like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as staged by Liberace. Indeed, it comes as little surprise that the Aussie auteur behind the gaudy, more-is-more spectacles Moulin Rouge and Australia has delivered a Gatsby less in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel than in that of its eponymous antihero — a man who believes bejeweled excess will help him win the heart of the one thing his money can’t buy.”

“The Great Gatsby uses the unbridled excess of the Roaring Twenties as an excuse to unleash the unbridled excess of 21st century digital effects, but we’re left with nothing but roar,” writes TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde. “Baz Luhrmann sucks the life out of Fitzgerald’s immortal novel and replaces it with empty filigree and overbearing style.”

“As is inevitable with the Australian showman who’s never met a scene he didn’t think could be improved by more music, costumes, extras and camera tricks, this enormous production begins by being over-the-top and moves on from there,” writes THR‘s McCarthy. “But given the immoderate lifestyle of the title character, this approach is not exactly inappropriate, even if it is at sharp odds with the refined nature of the author’s prose.

“Although the dramatic challenges posed by the character of narrator Nick Carraway remain problematic, the cast is first-rate, the ambiance and story provide a measure of intoxication and, most importantly, the core thematic concerns pertaining to the American dream, self-reinvention and love lost, regained and lost again are tenaciously addressed.”

“To accuse Luhrmann of overkill is a bit like faulting a leopard for his spots,” Foundas adds. “Love it or hate it, take it or leave it, this is unmistakably his Gatsby through and through, and as with all such carte-blanche extravaganzas (increasingly rare in this cautious Hollywood age), it exudes an undeniable fascination — at least for a while.

“In the notes for his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald famously wrote, ‘action is character,’ but for Luhrmann action is production design, hairstyling, Prada gowns and sweeping, swirling, CGI-enhanced camera movements that offer more bird’s-eye views of Long Island (actually the Fox Studios in Sydney) than The Hobbit did of Middle-earth. Arguably, the movie reaches its orgiastic peak 30 minutes in, with the first full reveal of Gatsby himself (Leonardo DiCaprio), accompanied by an explosion of fireworks and the eruption of Gershwin on the soundtrack. Where, really, can one go from there?”

Here’s a chunk of David Denby’s review in The New Yorker:

In my book the best film critics aren’t just about smarts or perception or passion — they’re about gourmet personalities. Like any good friend or acquaintance or FM talk-show host, they’re people you enjoy for their attitudinal “brand” as well as their thinking-cap riffs, for their persistent attitudes and moody asides and occasional derisions. A particular flavor, a burn-through quality. As James Wolcott wrote in 2006 about legendary critic Dwight McDonald, “His verdicts would mean nothing to us now if he hadn’t invested them with a humming force of personality and humor that opened up daylight wherever his mind gusted.”

Peter Rainer has earned his stripes in this regard. A pantheon critic who’s been around since the ’70s and understands The Whole Equation and Knows Whereof He Speaks, Rainer is an erudite, smart-assy guy whose succinct and creamy prose has, over the last thirty-odd years of filings for the L.A. Herald Examiner, the L.A. Times, New York magazine and the Christian Science Monitor, conveyed a personality as distinct and recognizable as Jerry Lewis or Zach Galifianakis or Leo Durocher‘s.

Distilled to essence, Rainer is, in my mind at least, Mr. Cranky with smarts and class and cultivation. I don’t read Rainer for any F.X. Feeney-like exuberance and generosity of spirit — I read him for the ascerbic wit and the snoot.

Early this morning, being unable to sleep, I began reading Rainer’s new review and essay compilation book, “Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era” (Santa Monica Press, 5.15). It’s a good, rich, reflective read — a tangy if judiciously spotty journey through the last three-plus decades of film-savoring. Each essay took me back to this or that distinctive film as it seemed at first blush. I nodded, remembered, laughed, chuckled, smirked, pondered, time-tripped…all that stuff.

In Rainer’s words: “This book should not be mistaken for a comprehensive survey. The vagaries of the profession do not allow for that. It covers three decades of reviews and essays written during an especially turbulent and transformative film era, drawn from my years at big-city papers, city magazines and monthlies, alternative weeklies, and national newspapers.

“With the exception of a few trims and minor restorations, the reviews remain the same as when they were written. In a number of instances, especially in my writings over the years on Richard Pryor, Stanley Kubrick, Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy and film noir, I have retained a few repetitions, which seemed preferable to messing with the original constructs. Here and there I have added postscripts, but I have resisted the fetish, not to mention the impossibility, of bringing things ‘up to date.’ These pieces are best approached as snapshots in time, captured in the heat of the moment.”

Rainer’s book is good Hollywood Elsewhere food. I plan on dining out on the various chapters over the next week and a half or so. I’m especially planning on running a counter-punch piece on Rainer’s dismissive review of Alan Parker‘s Evita.

A former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 1998, Rainer arguably deserves to be ranked alongside Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Andre Bazin, David Denby, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, David Thomson, Anthony Lane, A.O. Scott and the afore-mentioned McDonald. I’ve only read about 25% of it, but “Rainer on Film” is worth the price and then some.

Berlin’s Holtzendorffstrasse, just south of Kantstrasse — Sunday, 7:15 to 7:40 am.

I’m briefly side-stepping Hollywood Elsewhere‘s blanket policy of ignoring Iron Man 3 by pointing to a spoiler piece by Entertainment Weekly‘s Anthony Breznican about Ben Kingsley‘s Mandarin villain. Eff this movie, eff Marvel, eff Downey, eff the fanboys who are keeping CG comic-book sludge in the pipeline 24-7. But the Mandarin scheme and backstory is at least an interesting spin on a tediously familiar cliche — I’ll give it that.

A Frankfurt-based rep for British Airways baggage told me a half-hour ago that my two bags are on their way to Berlin’s Tegel Airport and should be available by noon or thereabouts. No breathing easy until the chickens have hatched, of course, but this is somewhat comforting news. Fingers crossed.

If you’re determined to kill the serious bad guys, it’s inevitable that some not-so-bad and innocent guys (including women and children) are going to be cut down also. Ugly, sad stuff. How many innocent people died needlessly as a result of Julius Caesar‘s many military campaigns? How many kids were killed by the armies of Alexander the Great? Zeal will always overstep its bounds. Fatal mistakes will happen. Even the best war technology is imprecise. War is cruel, messy, heartless.

The best thing in Maureen Dowd‘s 5.5 N.Y. Times column about Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby is the title. The second best is the closing passage in which she quotes New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, to wit:

“[Wieseltier] “understands that we’re drawn back to Gatsby because we keep seeing modern buccaneers of banking and hedge funds, swathed in carelessness and opulence. ‘But what most people don’t understand is that the adjective ‘Great’ in the title was meant laconically,” he says. ‘There’s nothing genuinely great about Gatsby. He’s a poignant phony. Owing to the money-addled society we live in, people have lost the irony of Fitzgerald’s title. So the movies become complicit in the excessively materialistic culture that the novel set out to criticize.”

“He notes that Gatsby movies are usually just moving versions of Town and Country or The Times’s T magazine, and that filmmakers ‘get seduced by the seductions that the book itself is warning about.’

“A really great movie of the novel, he argues, would ‘show a dissenting streak of austerity.’ He thinks it’s time for a black Gatsby, noting that Jay-Z might be an inspirational starting point — ‘a young man of talents with an unsavory past consumed by status anxiety and ascending unstoppably through tireless self-promotion and increasingly conspicuous wealth.’

“The problem with the Gatsby movies, he said, ‘is that they look like they were made by Gatsby. The trick is to make a Gatsby movie that couldn’t have been made by Gatsby — an unglossy portrait of gloss.”

The irony, of course, is that if you explore any scientific fact through to its ultimate knowability, you’ll find yourself regarding an aspect of a grand cosmic design. All science leads to God…if you pull back from the Christian-idiot definition of the term. Needless to add I feel great rapport with this trailer, three months old and copied from Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily. Does the doc discuss the “God particle”? If so, The Unbelievers isn’t quite right as a title. Because all scientific thinkers are mystics at heart.

On 7.24.12 I wrote the following:

“The discovery of the Higgs boson or ‘God particle‘ — a subatomic element that informs the size and shape and contour of all physical matter, ‘the missing cornerstone of particle physics” — was announced yesterday. Don’t look now, but this is almost (I say ‘almost’) like the discovery of the black monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet it’s been there all along. The supreme scientific equation…proven.

“The ‘intelligent design’ crowd is celebrating this all across America, you bet. I despise what Christianity has become in this country, but I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.

“However you define the altogether, He/She/It has absolutely zero ‘interest’ in whether you or your great-uncle or next door neighbor are adhering to the Ten Commandments or having an abortion or helping a homeless person or what-have-you. The molecular perfection and mind-blowingly infinite implications of God are way, way beyond ground-level morality.

“People whose lives are, in their minds, basically about finding spiritual fulfillment and deliverance after they’re dead are ridiculous figures. They’re certainly appalling. The only reason religions are good for society is that they keep the nutters (i.e. those who would otherwise be seeking solace in alcohol or drugs or in the ravings of some antisocial cult leader) in line, and they instill a sense of moral order and temperance among people who lack the intelligence or drive or hunger to seek spiritual satori on their own.”

I travel with four bags — two carry-ons and two smallish suitcases on wheels. And the latter two are gone for the time being, thanks to the folks at British Airways. Their baggage handlers failed to put them on Friday night’s red-eye flight to Heathrow (BA #986), which I managed to get on after BA #186, due to leave at 10:55 pm, was cancelled. Right now the bags are either (b) somewhere in the bowels of Newark Airport due to not being stowed on BA #986 or (b) they’re being sent to London today on one of two British Airways flights — BA #1284 leaving at 6:25 pm, or about 55 minutes from now, or BA #986 which leaves at 9:25 pm.

Sunday morning update (5:51 am): Presumably my bags will be delivered to Berlin’s Tegel Airport sometime today, but if they don’t I’m screwed three different ways: (1) The second largest of the two contains all my power adapters, and it looks like it’ll be a problem buying an adapter because electronic stores aren’t open in Berlin on Sundays as a rule; (2) if I can’t find an adapter (I’m thinking of going to some swanky Berlin hotels and begging them to sell me one, pretty please) I’m not going to be able to file very much because my batteries in my two computers will be dead before long, and besides I have to drive this afternoon to the set of a certain film that I’ve been asked not to mention; and (3) if the bags are permanently lost I’ll be out three or four grand in jackets, shoes, suit pants, scarves, tutti-frutti socks, high thread count T-shirts, electronic parts, suit jackets, nice shoes and so on, and that’s a conservative estimate.

It’s just before midnight in Berlin. I’m tired, I quit, I’m going to bed.

I could go on and on about how terrible it feels to fly overnight and get maybe two hours of sleep (if that) in a tourist-class seat and how you’re feeling a bit skanky and in need of a shower when you’re sitting around Heathrow but why complain? I’m happy to be here. The Berlin plane leaves in an hour. Later…

Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 — Saturday, 5.4, 11:45 am.

This video broke yesterday so what the hell — one last reflection. I’ve witnessed angry people mouthing off at cops two or three times, and Reese Witherspoon‘s version isn’t that bad. Her sense of entitlement is obviously offensive. When RW says “I am an American citizen” she means “I am way rich, way famous and probably the most connected American you’ll ever meet, and how dare you?” What was her initial point anyway? That her husband was too substantial and too nice a guy to be tested for DUI?