Thomas Schultze of the Munich-based G + J Media Entertainment was kind enough to take me around Munich this evening, giving me the grand tour, etc. Three hours worth, scratched the surface, took some notes, etc. I was last here in ’92 — it’s a much richer, brighter and more gentrified city now and yet with pockets that are quiet, leafy and serene. Far more beautiful, historic and captivating than Berlin. The vibe feels more like Italy than Germany.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived on the second or third floor.

An hour ago I checked into the Acanthus hotel in Munich, and was thinking about taking a nap. Then this came in — a smart, well-honed 45-minute doc about 2001: A Space Odyssey with James Cameron, Keir Dullea, Douglas Trumbull, Dan Richter (the mime who played Moonwatcher), Elvis Mitchell, Camille Paglia, the late Arthur C. Clarke, etc. I found it here. Good stuff. I didn’t take the nap.

Here‘s a piece containing scans of my 1993 L.A. Times interview with Richter.

I’ll be in Munich by 7:15 pm. The plan is to hang with a German film industry guy who knows me from the column, and with whom I amiably chatted at Cinemacon two months ago. He asked where I’ll be staying, and I mentioned a hotel near Sendlinger Tor. “Excellent — right in the center then,” he answered.

“So what do you feel like doing?,” he asked. “Culture? Nazi history**? The Fassbinder tour (right around the corner of your hotel)? Dinner? Drinking? Shall I pick you up at 8?”

“Yeah, 8 is good,” I answered. “I don’t drink. Pretty girls?”

“Mick Jagger said Munich has the prettiest girls in the world so who’s to argue?,” he replied. “We can always go to a beer garden (they serve soft drinks and juices as well, no worries), but we don’t have to. The weather will be nice for the first time in days. The whole town will be on its feet and out and about. Should be a pretty fabulous evening.”

** HE to p.c. brownshirts: I leave it to the best among you to swat this guy down for suggesting you-know-what. You know what to do. Let him have it with both barrels.

“Woody Allen scored artistically and commercially on his European tour stops in London, Barcelona and Paris but gets a face full of linguini for his efforts on To Rome With Love,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy. “At its worst squirm- and grimace-inducing, this is an ultra-upscale touristy spin through the Eternal City as if arranged by the concierge at the Excelsior Hotel.

“Rehashing gags and motifs familiar from various previous Allen films, all of them better done the first time around, the Sony Pictures Classics release might benefit initially from the good will generated by last year’s Midnight in Paris, Allen’s biggest hit ever, but word-of-mouth will nip hopeful expectations in the bud. Having opened in Italy on April 20 only in Italian-dubbed prints, the film had its English-language version world premiere Thursday at the Los Angeles Film Festival, with limited release to begin June 22.

“All things considered, it’s a relief to learn that Allen’s next production will be set in New York and San Francisco, as he would seem to have played out his string in Europe for the moment. Although the character he portrays here is a reluctantly retired opera director who discovers a brilliant tenor, Allen the writer-director has gone tone-deaf this time around, somehow not realizing that the nonstop prattling of the less than scintillating characters almost never rings true.”

15 hours ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Goldderby.com‘s Tom O’Neil and I kicked the 2012 Oscar ball around. Our consensus: Les Miserables, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Lincoln in the Best Picture lead. And yet Tom and Sasha delivered some Lincoln pushback based on two factors: (a) Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln might be too quirky or extreme in some way, and (b) director Steven Spielberg might Spielberg-ize it — he might not be able to muster the discipline to “get out of the way” and just let the material play on its own terms. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

I wasn’t over the moon about Lynn Shelton‘s Your Sister’s Sister (IFC Films, 6.15, theatres only) but I was moderately intrigued. It’s not bad. I thought it would get a Rotten Tomatoes rating between 70% and 80%, frankly, but it’s now at 89%. Obviously a sign of approval, but also, I think, of a “go easy” largesse that critics extend to earnest, low-key indie cheapies, especially those with a kind of John Cassevetes improvisational thing going on.

Your Sister’s Sister is one of those acting-class movies that are largely about a small cast (Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt) finding their way into emotional exposures and vulnerabilities and all-around discoveries that aren’t necessarily expressed or even explored in the script. It’s about “okay, this is the situation and here’s the basic plot…well, unless something else happens…and we all have a handle on our characters, of course, so let’s do this thing and see where it goes.”

And I was cruising along with this. Shelton and the cast are obviously trying to do “good” here, and I was rooting for them…yeah! But I ran into a character issue early on, and I couldn’t quite make it go away.

The film starts with a wake for the dead-and-buried brother of Jack (Mark Duplass ), who’s an unfocused, somewhat immature guy in his mid 30s. Various friends share gentle memories of the brother, who died a year earlier from his own hand, but Jack is pissed and unsettled about…well, a lot of things. But not about his best friend Iris (Emily Blunt). The movie tells us that (a) the closeness and trust they share is clearly based on their being strictly pals, and (b) Iris is one of the few solids in Jack’s life.

Note: the following has been divulged by critics all over so it’s not a spoiler, but there are whiners out there who will get upset anyway if I don’t say “spoiler” at this stage.

Reognizing Jack is off-balance, Iris urges him to take a break at her family’s vacation cottage on an island somewhere off the coast of Oregon or Washington, and he goes, “Yeah, okay, I guess so, whatever.” So he arrives at the cabin with his bicycle and backpack, and runs snack into Iris’s lesbian sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), or knocks on the door, rather, as she’s stepping out of the shower. She’s just broken up with her girlfriend of several years and has decided to use the cabin for a little meditation time. Ah-hah, awkward moment, okay…well, here we are.

Then they decide to relax and be friendly and enjoy a little tequila. Actually, they start slamming down shots. And then a randy vibe somehow creeps in and Hannah decides to forget about being gay and tumbles into bed with Jack. Just a little one-nighter so where’s the harm, right?

This isn’t the problem I spoke of. That occurs when Iris shows up at the cabin the next day and Jack gets all nervous — panicky, almost hyperventaliting — and starts lying his ass off so she won’t know what happened with Hannah. My question was “why?” As noted there’s not a hint of even the slightest erotic wannabe current between Jack and Iris, so if their friendship is truly solid and deep-rooted and telepathic then what’s the problem with Jack telling Iris, “This is going to sound weird but your sister and I got bombed last night and…uhm, we did it.”

Only a fundamentally dishonest and out-of-touch-with-himself guy with secret designs and/or longings for his “best friend” would go into lying and dodging spasms like Jack does. It seems to me that if Iris has been secretly in love with Jack all along and would therefore be devastated if she knew he’d slept with her sister, the movie should somehow convey this to us before Jack and Hannah do the nasty, etc. And it just struck me as phony. That’s all I have to say.

Postcript: Here’s an Indiewire-hosed chat about Your Sister’s Sister between Marshall Fine and Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has stated that no unauthorized information was provided to Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal for Zero Dark Thirty, their killing-of-Osama bin Laden that comes out on 12.19. Panetta told a Senate panel Wednesday that no one in Defense gave up any confidential material.

Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow, producer-screenwiter Mark Boal during recent (or fairly recent) filming in Chandigarh, India.

Republican Rep. Peter King of New York, a rightwing attack dog, long ago charged that the CIA and Pentagon jeopardized national security by cooperating too closely with Boal and Bigelow, claiming that they received “extremely close, unprecedented and potentially dangerous collaboration” from the Obama administration.

King’s motive was to push Zero‘s release date, originally set for October 2012, until after the November election. He succeeded. Sony has changed the release date to 12.19. Big deal.

Not to dispute Panetta, but so what if Biggy-Boal theoretically did receive inside info? Why is it incorrect or unethical to provide accurate information to people whose portrayal of an historic event will be watched for decades or centuries hence? ZDT‘s release date has been bumped, the operation is long over, Osama sleeps with the fishes…who cares?

Zero Dark Thirty costars Joel Edgerton, Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Edgar Ramirez, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Chris Pratt and Nina Arianda.

Sometimes I don’t quite understand what “important” means, but Joni Mitchell is the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century, and a poet of the highest order. So I don’t mind that “Be Cool”, a track from 2002’s “Travelogue,” is today’s ear bug.

It’s mildly drizzly in Prague today. I’ve been here for just about three weeks now, and it’s rained almost every day. Briefly, I mean. One or two days have been totally shower-free. Plus it’s been cloudy and cool. And the apartment, nice as it is, doesn’t seem to want to generate any heat. It’s almost summer and I’m trying to turn the radiator on! I could do with a little Romanesque warmth right now…a little T-shirt action. Anyway I’m outta here tomorrow. Train to Munich, and then a week or so in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

After opening in Italy nearly two months ago and drawing mostly lukewarm reviews, Woody Allen‘s To Rome With Love finally faces the American music at tonight’s opening at the L.A. Film Festival. Expect the first tweets around 9:30 pm LA time, or 6:30 am Prague time — right when I get up.

Sony Pictures Classics is opening it on 6.22. You’d think that the marketing guys would have put out a different trailer by now, one that’s a little more oblique and flavory and not so on-the-nose.

I still say Allen should have stuck with the original title, The Bop Decameron.

“The movie is a magnificent postcard of the eternal city,” wrote NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli, “a carefree romp along cobblestone streets nestled between ancient ruins and Renaissance palaces. A soft yellow glow pervades every scene. It projects an image of the sweet life with all the charms under the Italian sun, set to the tune of old standbys like ‘Volare’ and ‘Arrivederci Roma.’

“Allen has said he grew up watching Italian cinema and was influenced by its grand masters. While there’s nothing neorealist in his latest movie, it has an echo of Federico Fellini‘s The White Sheik, and Penelope Cruz‘s performance in one segment calls to mind Sophia Loren‘s high-end call girl in Vittorio de Sica‘s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

“The movie is made up of four separate vignettes about love swaps, mistaken identities and the cult of celebrity. One features Allen himself playing a retired, neurotic opera director who tries to make a star out of a man who can sing Pavarotti-quality opera, but only in his shower.

“In another episode, Alec Baldwin plays a famous architect vacationing in Rome, reminiscing about his youth in the city. Along the way, he meets a young American student, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who is love-struck by Ellen Page, playing a narcissistic young actress.”