It’s obviously fine and proper for the Hollywood Reporter to run some articles about the cultural and political after-effects of the Aurora shooting. But somehow that illustration feels a bit wrong. Batman shedding a blood tear? And the title of Gregg Kilday‘s piece, “The Dark Knight Rises Is Still an Oscar Contender,” implies that it may not be a contender in the minds of those who feel the movie is now somewhat “tainted, however unfairly,” as Kilday puts it, due to the Aurora association. Why bring it up then?

It would be the height if venal industry-think to allow the deplorable deed of a single red-haired psychopath to influence anyone’s Best Picture judgment. That has to be one of the stupidest shorthand Academy riffs I’ve ever heard. If anything nominating TDKR for Best Picture would be a refutation of the association that Kilday refers to. On top of which everyone knows that the Academy owes director-writer Chris Nolan for ’09’s Dark Knight snub so anyone even referring to an Aurora association needs to shut up.

Who woulda thunk that Glenn Kenny is a bit of a choirboy when it comes to assessing or judging the turbulent realms of love, longing and heartbreaks? Don’t look now, but arduous and indiscriminate shagging without regard to peace treaties or boundaries or marriage licenses has been going on for thousands of years. Kenny would do well to read “Romantic Revolutionary,” a biography of John Reed. My God, the dinking that went on among the pre-World War I radical-socialist set!

Forget the Twitter captures — just go here and here and piece it together.

The problem with the world out there is that there are tens of millions of people like this, and there are only a few hundred thousand people like me (or…you know, people who sense complexity and who try, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to comprehend the whole equation, or are at least aware that there’s something called “the whole equation”). But no. The majority rules, and that’s why so much of what constitutes life on this planet (as least in terms of community consensus) is tiresome and sad and banal and hellish.

“I’ve been trying to figure something in my head, and maybe you can help me out, yeah? When a person is insane, as you clearly are, do you know that you’re insane? Maybe you’re just sitting around, reading Guns and Ammo, masturbating in your own feces, do you just stop and go, ‘Wow! It is amazing how fucking crazy I really am!’?” — Brad Pitt‘s David Mills to Kevin Spacey‘s John Doe in Se7en.

Spacey, of course, is completely rational, lucid, perceptive, insightful and even Zen-like in this scene, which happens in Pitt and Morgan Freeman‘s moving car as they drive towards a desert rendezvous near the end of Act Three. Spacey seems all-powerful, in fact — the antithesis of the guy Pitt has described. But James Holmes is a loon. He’s in, he’s out, he’s listening, he’s not listening, he’s talking to himself, he’s bobbing his head, he’s haunted, he’s widening his eyes, he’s half-closing his eyes. There’s definitely a discussion going on between Holmes and his demons.

If you were to take Holmes to the edge of a cliff that looks down upon a swamp pond filled with hungry alligators and tell him “okay, you’re going in, pal…any last words?,” I think he’d just bob his head again and blink his eyes and shrug his shoulders and go “alligators?”

Holmes’ jailhouse behavior has been erratic, according to TheWrap‘s Alexander C. Kaufman, citing reports by ABC News and the N.Y. Daily News.

“Authorities muzzled him with a spit guard after he would not stop spitting at guards,” Kaufman reports. “And when police put evidence bags over his hands to preserve traces of gunpowder residue, Holmes — who allegedly told police he was the Batman villain the Joker — pretended the bags were puppets.”

You can dismiss the “Kristen Stewart apparently cheated on Rob Pattinson with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders” story all you want, and I won’t argue with you. There are few things in this world more powerfully disgusting than the tabloid gossip industry. What a constant ordeal it must be to not have the freedom to make mistakes and/or fuck things up in a private (or at least a semi-private) way.

I’ve had that freedom all my life and I know one thing, and that’s if you’re going to play around on the side you have to follow Moscow Rules. You have to become a CIA double-agent in East Germany in the early ’60s. Cheating should never be embarked upon with the idea that you’re probably going to get caught…unless, of course, you’re cheating with that precise idea in mind. Women do this. I’ve seen it first-hand. They feel suffocated and their subconscious is screaming and so they secretly want to get busted so something will change. Or at the very least so they’ll be “heard.”

I’ve been “the other guy” in two long-term cheating relationships — one with a fellow journalist who was married, another with a woman who was living with a guy — and both times les femme infideles handled themselves like Kim Philby, and I’m saying that with respect. You can’t be a casual cheater. You really, really have to watch your back and cover your tracks. You have to be brilliant.

How could Stewart have met up with Sanders without knowing deep down that she stood an excellent chance of being busted by the paparazzi? That’s what I think is fascinating here. This isn’t just a messy emotional drama, but one containing a metaphor about the hungry, sometimes unruly heart. It’s about how unfulfilled, frustrated artists (however gifted or un-gifted they may actually be) are like kindling ready to ignite at the drop of a hat. It’s about how some people can’t cope with those vague feelings of imprisonment that simmer beneath almost all healthy relationships. And it’s obviously about Stewart (and cheers to her for this) expressing a flash of intense anger and/or revulsion for the Twilight franchise. She got a taste of what being in a real movie was like when she took a supporting role in Walter Salles‘ On The Road and then she looked at her own creations and said “what the fuck am I doing?” and started to go crazy.

Maybe she realized b.f. Rob Pattinson has nowhere to go but down after seeing him in David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis. It’s possible she said to herself as she sat in that screening room and said, “I love Rob but he’s going to need more and more support as things gradually start to collapse for him over the years, and I don’t want to be Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester…I want to be Isadora Duncan!”

I don’t believe her apology statement, which her publicist sent to People today. Okay, she probably is feeling “sorry,” but who wouldn’t be after they’ve been totally busted? It’s what you say or do on your own before you’ve been caught that counts. I think she was pushed into apologizing by her handlers. She shouldn’t have to say “I’m sorry” to anyone except RPatz.

A couple of months ago Stewart told Elle‘s Holly Millea that “you can learn so much from bad things. I feel boring. I feel like, Why is everything so easy for me? I can’t wait for something crazy to fucking happen to me. Just life. I want someone to fuck me over! Do you know what I mean?”

Fuck the Twihards and their dipshit fantasies. Grow up, little girls. The world is a much richer and stranger place than you have so far imagined in your philosophies.

So laugh or sneer all you want, but Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing) or the late Harold Pinter (Betrayal) could take this

“But here’s the difference between the rest of the world and us: We have two Auroras that take place every single day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8 to 9,000 a year) are killed by people with guns — and that doesn’t count the ones accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count them and you can triple that number to over 25,000.

“That means the United States is responsible for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest countries combined. Considering that the people of those countries, as human beings, are no better or worse than any of us, well, then, why us?” — Michael Moore speaking tonight on Piers Morgan’s CNN show.

During my lost and floundering period in the mid ’70s I worked for a New Canaan landscaper named John Calitri, whom I used to call “Big John.” He was a big Italian guy — tough, white-haired, kind-hearted, laughed a lot. But what I remember best about him is based on a memory of a single hot day during the summer of ’76, and how he and his son (whose name I forget) introduced me to the idea of subconsciously muttering a brand mantra.

(l.) Molson Golden Ale label; (r.) Robert Vaughn as Sen. Walter Chalmers in Peter Yates’ Bullitt.

John Calitri & Son both did this on that July or August day, and for whatever reason I’ve never, ever forgotten it.

What exactly is “subconscious brand mantra muttering”? I don’t know if I can describe it in the right way, but it’s the kind of thing you do when you’re feeling tired and bored and in a daydream state, and it just kind of slips out. You’re lugging garden rocks or big bags of fertilizer or unloading fence posts or shovelling sand, and every now and then you find yourself lost in thought and you’re suddenly muttering a brand or a phrase from a film or the name of a TV character or some fast food dish or whatever.

What I’m specifically recalling is that on that particular summer day in ’76 Big John would occasionally (not always but often) finish his sentences (be they orders or urgings or wry commentaries about this or that) with the words “Molson’s Golden Ale.” And on the same day his son was occasionally finishing his sentences with “Walter Chalmers,” the politican character played by Robert Vaughn in Bullitt.

So Big John would say, “Jeff and Dave, you guys stay here and finish up spreading the chips around…you should be done by 4…and we’ll take the truck and get some gas and start on the next job and see you over there…Molson’s Golden Ale.”

John wasn’t saying this “subconciously,” in the precise sense of that term. He was saying it mock-ironically, which is to say he was half submitting to the brand-mantra impulse and half making fun of himself for doing so. He was just in a good-natured Molson’s mood that day or succumbing to a kind of TV commercial ear bug syndrome…whatever.

Is this a very specific form of insanity that I experienced with Big John and his son and a couple of other guys on a single day in Connecticut some 36 years ago, or have others done this or noticed this in other situations?

TV actor Chad Everett has died of lung cancer at age 76, and I’m sorry. On the other hand he was a Republican who supported Richard Nixon in 1972, and therefore someone that I decided a long time ago was some kind of bad egg. But he seemed like a nice enough guy during that “Falling in Love” interview with his wife, the late Shelby Grant, and he did get sober after a struggle with alcohol, which I respect.

So let’s call it water under the bridge and offer condolences to friends, family and fans of Medical Center.

From his Wiki bio: “A Republican, Everett had a much publicized argument with feminist actress Lily Tomlin during the taping of the March 31, 1972, episode of The Dick Cavett Show. Tomlin became so enraged when Everett referred to his wife as ‘my property‘ that she stormed off the set and refused to return.”

“Distinguishing itself from the rash of post-American Beauty Suburbs Suck flicks with Wes Andersonian title cards, The Oranges — taking its name from the affluent New Jersey neighbourhood in which the film is set — finds two close families rended asunder…it’s the Sundance version of Blame It on Rio, which is to say direly lacking in scenery and titties.” — FilmFreakCentral‘s “Bill C.”

The basic action is propelled along by an inappropriate affair between an older married guy (Hugh Laurie) and the much-younger daughter (Leighton Meester) of neighborhood chums (Alison Janney, Oliver Platt).

Everybody likes a little same-sex girlie action. It’s like a dish or a dessert — like soft yogurt. With her mannish haircut and outsider vibe, Riley Keogh‘s “Jack” seems to be the butchier of the two and Juno Temple‘s “Diane”, one presumes, is the swoony and moldable girly-girl. There’s a werewolf metaphor somewhere in the midst of this, but we’ll let that slide.

This afternoon The Dark Knight Rises star Christian Bale visited a hospital in Auroroa, Colorado to console and cheer recovering victims of last Thursday night’s shooting attack. Nice gesture. Curiously, a Warner Bros. spokesperson reportedly told TMZ that Bale “is there as himself, not representing Warner Brothers.”

Christian Bale visiting shooing victim Carey Rottman earlier this afternoon in Aurora, Colorado.

Warner Bros. Publicist #1: “You guys see this? About Christian?”

Warner Bros. Publicist #2: “What?”

Warner Bros. Publicist #1: “He’s in a hospital in Aurora. Visiting the gunshot victims.”

Warner Bros. Publicist #3: “No! Right now?”

Warner Bros. Publicist #1 : “Yes, really.” (Holds up laptop) “Look.”

Warner Bros. Publicist #2: “Wow, that’s so cool! Such a good guy.”

Warner Bros. Publicist #1: “So what do we say when somebody calls?”

Warner Bros. Publicist #3: “Tell them we had nothing to do with it.”

Warner Bros. Publicist #1: “What?”

Warner Bros. Publicist #3: “Warner Bros, is giving the victims a substantial sum to help alleviate their suffering. That’s our end of it. Christian is in Colorado on his own, representing himself. We need to make that clear.”

Warner Bros. Publicist #1: “I just…well…okay”

Warner Bros. Publicist #3: “You don’t agree?”

Warner Bros. Publicist #2: “I think we should give him a little support, y’know? Show a little heart. Tell people how much we admire him for doing this.”

Warner Bros. Publicist #3: “And what, God forbid, if he says something about the NRA while there? What if…you know, he gets into an argument or an altercation of some kind? It’s happened before.”

Warner Bros. Publicist #1: “What could happen?”

Warner Bros. Publicist #1: “Come on…he’s a sweetheart!”

Warner Bros. Publicist #3: “He’s an actor. An adult, a professional and a parent, yes, but an actor all the same. He’s not corporate. He’s there on his own. That’s what we have to say. Why take chances?”