Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty screened last Friday night for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the immediate word (based on responses from two HFPA members passed along second-hand) was “definitely Jessica Chastain for Best Lead Actress, Drama” but less enthusiasm for the film itself.

This, keep in mind, is from an organization composed of foreign-allied “journalists” who may not be as receptive to a film about a U.S. military operation as ooh-rah American journos, and who gave their Best Motion Picture, Drama award in 2010 to Avatar over The Hurt Locker.

Zero Dark Thirty clocks in around two hours and 40 minutes, or just under that. (The credit block is still being worked on.) For a film that appears to be largely an action procedural, to me this spells hard-core integrity and comprehensiveness. Bigelow and Boal arent stupid — they know it’s in their general interest to keep the running time closer to 120 minutes or a bit less, but the material told them the length had to be 160 minutes. This is what happens with every script, article, book and movie. The author is told what to do, and he/she obeys.

Late yesterday afternoon I attended an ioLA screening of Chris Kenneally and Keanu Reeves‘ Side By Side, which I’ve seen three times and have been praising for several months. The idea was to (a) show it to a friend and (b) take notes and pics during the post-screening q & a with, among others, Kenneally, Reeves, music-video guy Chris Robinson and Dark Knight Rises dp Wally Pfister.

Video streaming by Ustream

But there was a problem with the sound coming out of two large speakers. Side by Side sounded murky and bassy and echo-y. You couldn’t hear the consonants with any clarity. So I asked an ioLA guy who was standing off to the side if they could please turn up the treble and lower the murk. The guy did nothing for about three or four minutes. I went up to him again and asked if he could please adjust the sound. So he walked to the rear of the seating section and stepped into a glassed-in office or control room or whatever, and he told two or three people in charge. As I stood nearby waiting for assistance, they all began huddling and conferring with each other. I was watching the huddling and whispering and asking myself, “Why are these people not trying to fix the sound?”

Clearly they had no interest in doing anything in a constructive vein. Not for a second. What mainly concerned them, it seemed, was that I had asked for a sound adjustment.

This is what little people who don’t “get it” always do when someone has an issue. They stand around and huddle and look at the complainer and huddle some more and whisper urgently to each other and try and decide how to deal with the complainer rather than fix the problem.

A guy came out and said they don’t have the expertise to finesse the sound because they weren’t familiar with the complex sound board controlling the speakers. “You can’t just give it a shot?,” I said. “You know…just fiddle around with it? You just need to up the treble a little bit.” The guy was hostile and contentious. Nobody else had complained, he said. Then he asked me if I had paid to get into the screening. I said I’d been invited by Kenneally, but that I’d be happy to pay them if that is what it would take to fix the sound. Then he said “we’re not a theatre” and they don’t have the ability to deliver tip-top standards, etc. Things got testier and our conversation deteriorated from that point on. I finally gave up and went back to my seat. Two minutes later a security guy came over and said I had to leave. Fine, no problem, life is short.

The video of the q & a, copied from ioLA‘s live-stream, doesn’t get going until after the four-minute mark, but the video quality is obviously not that great and the sound is clearly awful in the early stages. The people who told the security guy to kick me out are (a) the dark-haired woman wearing the white jacket and (b) the guy who does the initial introductions.

HE to filmmaking community: Please support ioLA, the one place in Los Angeles to screen your film and do a q & a.

Just a reminder that bombs and death and destruction only become “real” (i.e., shift out of the realm of abstraction) when somebody you personally knows experiences the carnage first-hand, and more particularly when they flinch and go “whoa!” and look alarmed. It’s the quick grin and the slight “heh-heh” that tells you Anderson Cooper was truly jolted by the sonic iimpact.

Nothing is so serene as sitting at the desk in the early morning hours and surfing around and deciding what to write about. It’s like being in a womb. And there’s nothing quite so discomforting as the incrementally expanding sense of pressure as the hour of a flight approaches, and knowing you have six or seven things to attend to before you leave. Because I couldn’t make myself do them before (i.e., over the weekend). Because the womb is too soothing to step out of.

My flight to Honolulu departs this afternoon sometime around 4:30 pm, give or take. I can’t stand super-long flights so I broke up the LAX-to-Tokyo haul with 14 hours in Hawaii. The Honolulu-to-Tokyo flight leaves Tuesday at 1 pm (or 4 pm LA time). God knows when it arrives but roughly seven or eight hours later. And yet earlier in an hourly sense, not to mention a day “behind.” And there’s only an hour’s stopover in Tokyo before the Hanoi flight leaves, which means there’s a fair-to-decent chance I’ll miss it. Plus no onboard wifi above the Pacific– terrific.

I’m just going to have to follow the Oscar-season action from afar for nine or ten days, give or take. I’m going to miss next weekend’s big screenings of Les Miserables on Saturday and ones for Zero Dark Thirty on Sunday. I’ll catch everything fairly quickly when I return, and in the meantime I’ll have plenty to pass along in terms of exotic Asian absorptions and the shock of the first-time-ever. Vietnam, I mean. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to Vietnam in order to attend the Hanoi Film Festival. And there’s a part of me that just wants to stay put.

If the plane lands in shark-infested waters I’ll have lived a rich life, at least, and can reflect upon that during my final moments.

If you ask me the balcony-vomiting that happened last Wednesday night at the Cort theatre during a performance of Grace (and more particularly during a monologue performed by costar Paul Rudd) is a metaphor for the devolution of U.S. society and Broadway culture.

It’s not that some guy got so stinking that he threw up, and not even that it happened while attending a play (although that’s pretty bad). What gets me is that the guy couldn’t even manage to throw up in a waste basket or at least somewhere near his seat. No, he had to lean over and hurl over the balcony and splatter about a dozen people sitting in the orchestra below. That is the mark of an absolute animal. I know what it is to be shitfaced and convulsing (the stuff I did when I was 15 and 16 was ridiculous), but I never spewed on somebody’s lap or head. We’re speaking about an appalling lack of couth and control. The guy should have been taken out behind the building and severely dealt with. Actions have consequences.

The Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence discussion of lesbo-action scene in Silver Linings was filmed at Llanerch Diner in Upper Darby, which is southwest of Philadelphia and two or three townships to the northeast of Ridley Park, which is where most of the film was shot.

Once again, another “cold open” SNL skit that’s very knowing and sharp and news-following, and yet not in the least bit funny. Flat bordering on dead. And yet my ratio of enjoyment to mezzo mezzo was/is about 70-30. Gov. Chris Christie (on the jump page) was too obviously reading his lines, but he was somewhat better nonetheless.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil: “I ran into Anne Thompson and Sasha Stone the other day, and as I walked up to them they were were talking about Lincoln and saying the Best Picture race is already over…it’s won…and I said…oh, come on!” Me: “Aggh! Completely off the beam. Do you think they really believe that or…?” O’Neil: “No, they really meant it.” Here’s the key portion and here’s the whole conversation.

Me: “People don’t really feel turned on by this thing, I’m tellin’ ya. I trust my instincts, I trust the invisible insect antennae coming out of the back of my head and I’m not talking about ‘feel-good’ but something that turns you on and really gets you going, and that’s not happening with Lincoln…not really, not chemically.”

Before all the poison-enzyme, Alien acid-blood assholes start complaining about my bringing up Lincoln again, it was O’Neil who raised it, not I. He was being persistent and I just responded to his questions, and then I decided during editing that I kinda liked how this this part of the conversation turned out so I’ve highlighted it…big deal. Nick Filliponi is banned, but I hope he’s reading this, the dick.

This is Oscar Poker #102, incidentally.

Can you believe those fluttery, 14-year-old-female fangasms the geeks were having last April and May after catching The Avengers? One of the proudest moments of my life happened (or happened to me, as I’m only a conduit for expression and not truly and finally “the author”) when I called it “corporate CG piss in a gleaming silver bucket.”

Second proudest Avengers assessment: “The problem is that Joss Whedon and the Marvel honchos and the other corporate whores who made The Avengers are too tied to corrupt, pre-realized geek-faith ‘reality’ jails and way too invested in maintaining and fortifying revenue streams. If they were truly free of heart and spirit they might…just pull out all the stops and go full whacko.”

Third proudest Avengers assessment: “No comic-book fanboy has ever explained to me the appeal of watching superheroes duke it out as such battles ALWAYS deliver the same back-and-forth. One superhero will assert temporary superiority by pounding the other and then throwing him/her backwards through a wall or a plate of glass or whatever, and then this briefly humbled combatant will recover, shake it off and pound his/her opponent and then throw him/her through a wall or a plate of glass or whatever. Repeat ad infinitum. This is all that ever happens. Have the people who write and make these films descended to the level of dumb beasts?

Tim Goodman‘s Hollywood Reporter review of Lindsay Lohan‘s Liz and Dick, posted Friday morning and ignored by HE for roughly 30 hours, is an exuberant piece of writing. And I guess you have to hand it to LIfetime because now I really want to see this piece of shit. The only problem is that I don’t drink.

“It should come as no great surprise that Lifetime’s Liz & Dick movie starring Lindsay Lohan is spectacularly bad…Lohan is woeful as Taylor from start to finish,” Goodman states.

“But, whatever you do, don’t miss Liz & Dick. It’s an instant classic of unintentional hilarity. Drinking games were made for movies like this. And the best part is that it gets worse as it goes on, so in the right company with the right beverages, Liz & Dick could be unbearably hilarious toward the tail end of the 90-minute running time.

“By the time Lohan is playing mid-’80s Taylor and it looks like a lost Saturday Night Live skit, your body may be cramped by convulsions.”

“For a short film on two long lives, Liz & Dick truly drags. Luckily, you can’t take your eyes off of Lohan playing Taylor, which the producers clearly thought would work because they share similar backstories. Except for the part about Taylor being a gigantic movie star and Lohan not being one. Not even a star bright enough to transport you at least halfway to believing she’s Elizabeth Taylor. There is not one minute in this film where Lohan is believable.

“The film gets into Taylor’s weight issues without really bloating Lohan up that much. There’s a ‘Cleo-Fat-Ra’ headline that makes her cry. Richard Burton (Grant Bowler) says, ‘I will love you even if you get as fat as a hippo.’ Seriously, he says that.

“The best moment, apparently, happens after “Burton dies and the late-era Taylor is unveiled for the first time. The moment Lohan appears in this get-up, it’s impossible not to laugh. It really does look like SNL. She can’t really pull off the young, sexy Liz with much believability, so the mid-’80s look is awkward squared. She gets the news of Burton’s death and faints — a straight drop to the floor — that also somehow seems inadvertently hysterical.

“Stunt casting rarely works. But in Liz & Dick it works by accident or for all the wrong reasons. Lohan as Taylor was a bad idea in the dramatic sense, but it’s pure genius both for marketing and for belly laughs and drinking games.”