In an inwardly directed q & a, New York‘s Frank Rich has addressed conventional wisdom concerns that President Obama‘s history-making announcement that he supports gay marriage could hurt him in an election year when he needs to win swing states like North Carolina. “That’s always been the rationale for Obama’s dawdling,” he writes. “Don’t rock the boat in North Carolina — or Florida or Virginia or Colorado — by speaking out on gay marriage until after November 6 has passed.

“The counter-argument I’d make is that Obama looked like a phony and a coward each day he fudged this issue, and that his taking a strong and principled stand will have a halo effect on his leadership in general, including among voters who are ambivalent about gay marriage or opposed to it. Just look at Andrew Cuomo, whose approval rating remains high upstate and among Republicans, not just among liberals in New York City and its suburbs.

As for the threat that Mittens Romney will now an issue out of Obama’s conversion, Rich writes, “Just let him try. The real political issue for Romney as he tries to attract centrist voters in a general election is if he can avoid being tainted by the homophobes he pals around with.

“Last week, Romney let the religious right drive away his openly gay foreign-policy spokesman Richard Grenell before he even started the job. More embarrassing still, it wasn’t the once-powerful religious-right big guns, the Robertson-Falwell-Dobson types, who put Romney on the run, but Bryan Fischer, a crackpot bigot who hates Mormons as much as he does gays.

“Then again, Romney couldn’t stand up to Rush Limbaugh when he called Sandra Fluke a ‘slut’ or, this week, to that boisterous supporter at an Ohio rally who called for Obama to be tried for treason.”

With Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (Ali, Nixon) having rewritten Peter Morgan‘s screenplay of a long-discussed, long-developed Freddy Mercury biopic to which Sacha Baron Cohen is attached to star and co-produce, Cohen and producer Graham King are after Stephen Frears (The Queen) to direct.

That’s the gist of Jeff Sneider‘s 5.8 Variety story, as far as I can discern. He includes a statement that Baron Cohen’s deal to play Mercury “is expected to close in the coming weeks.” But the Frears aspect seems (a) a wee bit flaky as “negotiations have not yet begun” and (b) a wee bit underwhelming as Frears has been doing a fairly good job of convincing his admirers that he may not be the same guy who directed Prick Up Your Ears, The Hit, My Beautiful Laundrette and The Grifters any more, certainly after directing tripe like last year’s Tamara Drewe and the allegedly unexceptional Lay The Favorite (which I missed at last January’s Sundance Film Festival).

The story “focuses on Queen’s formative years and climaxes with the band’s heralded appearance at Live Aid in 1985,” Sneider writes. Translation: SBC’s Mercury won’t waste away and die of AIDS as the film “won’t focus on the singer’s last days.”

The Playlist has reported about Brian DePalma‘s Passion, a remake of the late Alain Corneau’s 2010 French thriller with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace respectively playing the Kristen Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier parts, being “repped” on the Croisette “as one of the myriad films on the block.” Does that mean it’ll be screened or…?

Apat from the intimations of eroticism between Rapace and McAdams, the most striking thing is that McAdams, born in ’78, has been cast in the role of an older, well-established head of a fast-track company which Thomas, born in ’60, played in the Corneau. As McAdams was pretty much a spring chicken when she broke through seven years ago in The Wedding Crashers and The Family Stone, it seems like a stretch to be playing a character inspired by someone like Anna Wintour. This indicates there are other things about DePalma’s version that may seem curious or miscalculated.

McAdams plays Ben Affleck‘s significant interest in Terrence Malick‘s The Burial, which seemed like a fairly likely inclusion at Cannes until Malick did his usual-usual and didn’t submit it.

I wrote the following last summer after seeing Corneau’s original at the 2011 L.A. Film Festival: “Love Crime is an icy, brittle thriller about a corporate power war between a 40something super-exec (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a 30something up-and-comer (Ludivine Sagnier). I’m not spilling details but I do find it strange that a perpetrator of a crime would decide to interrupt his/her career by going to prison, knowing full well that evidence has been planted that will eventually exonerate him/her. Why go through that?”

Marshall Fine has pissed all over Tim Burton and Johnny Depp‘s Dark Shadows, calling it a cousin of Wild Wild West and “as dreary a big-budget extravaganza as you’re likely to see this year. It’s also all the argument you need for staging some sort of couples’ intervention on Depp and Burton. Time to move on and stop enabling this kind of pop-culture junk.

“Big, loud, lavish and flat, Dark Shadows was written by Seth Grahame-Smith, who came up with the one-joke idea of mash-ups blending classic literature and history tales blended with horror-movie tropes, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. [Except] all of the jokes in Dark Shadows are DOA. They’re either trite or flat. And the horror? Forget it – too jokey. And the jokes aren’t jokey enough.

“Dark Shadows isn’t the worst movie ever made. It probably won’t even be the worst movie of the year. And that’s the best I can say about it. Watching it is like being told a weak joke that you already know.”

Dwight Garner‘s 5.8 N.Y. Times recap of the life of Maurice Sendak is the best I’ve read since his death was announced yesterday. There isn’t a date on the page that contains this Bill Moyers PBS interview with Sendak, but it looks like it might be roughly ten years old.

I’m not going to dignify Battleship with a review. I could call it stunningly idiotic alien-invader CG sludge for gamers but what’s the point? What it is, boiled down, is yet another metaphor for the decline of civilization as it was once known and nourished by the likes of Norman Mailer, Anne Bancroft, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Seberg, Gunter Grass, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, William S. Burroughs, Francis Coppola, Sting, Gary Cooper and Jerry Lewis, et. al. Damn the ComicCon-ers for movies like this. Damn them all to hell.

I paid money to see it yesterday afternoon at the Cinestar plex inside Berlin’s Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz.

If Battleship is a state-of-the-art 2012 Hollywood popcorn movie then kill me now. Stab me in the chest with a screwdriver.

If Berg and the Universal and Hasbro executives responsible had any dignity or humility they would take out trade ads apologizing to the industry and to the world for the sub-moronic calculation and creation that went into Battleship. Compared to this Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin‘s deeply loathed Godzilla is a masterpiece.

It is truly astounding and confounding that a team of intelligent, well-paid adults made this thing with an idea that thousands would say “yeah, pretty good garbage!” And here I am on my fifth paragraph when I said I wouldn’t be writing a review.

Taylor Kitsch (John Carter) is a low-rent, zero-charisma washout of a leading actor. He’s playing a variation of that age-old cliche, the rascally, authority-defying, seemingly doomed-to-fail rebel whom the pretty girl loves but who will prove himself when the chips are down and win the begrudging admiration of the rule-following mainstream. Jimmy Cagney played one of these guys in The Fighting 69th. Kitsch is one of those plodding, heavy-lidded actors who seem utterly incapable of suggesting the presence of even a wisp of intelligence hiding somewhere within the folds. He’s truly nothing — an incarnation of Mark Damon when he broke out in the early ’60s.

The other suffering cast members include Alexander Skarsgard (too tall and descended from the wrong king of genes to be believable as Kitsch’s brother or vice versa), Rihanna (ridiculous, shamed for life), Brooklyn Decker (hot) and Liam “Paycheck” Neeson.

Battleship opened in Japan on April 4th, in mid April in Europe, and will debut in the States on May 18th.

I saw William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe (LD Distribution, 7.27) at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It struck me as uninvolving and odorous and boderline repellent. I can’t work up much interest in the problems and posturings of stunningly stupid, criminally inclined trailer-trash types, you see. No offense to LD’s David Dinerstein, and hats off to his decision to go with an NC-17 version following an MPAA turndown.

Matthew McConaughey has the drawlin’ title role, and the dumb scurvy trashies are played by Emile Hirsch, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon and Juno Temple. Life’s hard, but it’s even harder if you’re a moron.

In her essay for a N.Y. Times Summer Movies piece, Seeking A Friend for the End of the World director-writer Lorene Scafaria writes that Amy Heckerling‘s Clueless (’95) “taught us phrases like ‘She’s a Monet,’ gave new meaning to the term ‘grassy knoll’ and offered the truism that ‘everywhere in L.A. takes 20 minutes.'”

Clueless was 17 years ago, and before you know it that number will be 20. Plus that “20 minutes” line was probably written a year or two earlier. Today everything in Los Angeles takes at least 40 to 45 minutes, and often closer to an hour.

Unless you’re on a scooter, that is, in which case it can still take 20 minutes…or even less. A month ago my scooter and I made it from West WeHo to the Arclight in — no lie — nine minutes. 7:15 to 7:24 pm. Okay, 10 or 11 minutes if you count entering the parking structure and finding a spot and locking up, etc. And okay, yes — I dart in and out of lanes and drive like a hyper 17 year-old. But when you’re pressed for time, a scooter is the only way to go in that town.

I scootered all over Berlin yesterday afternoon, and nobody was enjoying more speed or easy access or easy parking. Scooters or public transportation, man. To hell with cars, and to hell with women who won’t give you the time of day unless you drive slick wheels.

“I was 17 in the summer of ’76, when Lifeguard opened,” Hope Springs director David Frankel wrote in a 5.4 N.Y. Times summer movies article. “If you weren’t 17 yourself then and bored and oversexed, you probably didn’t see it, and I can’t tell you to go running to iTunes now to download it. It’s there, but barely. Not even one customer review.

For whatever reason Amazon is charging ridiculous prices for the Lifeguard DVD, only two of which are left in stock

“Surprisingly it’s PG, because if you asked me, I’d say it was all about sex,” Frankel says. “About growing up and accepting adulthood too, but mostly about sex. There’s a scene on iTunes that features the stars, a rakish Sam Elliott seducing the busting-out-of-her-bikini Kathleen Quinlan, and it’s barely watchable.”
(Here’s the scene in which Elliott and Quinlan first meet.)

“But still I remember Lifeguard all these years later, and that counts for something, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what art is, really? A work that makes you see the world differently, that answers questions you didn’t know you had, that perfectly captures a time and a place, that inspires you?

“It was America’s bicentennial that summer. New York, where I went to high school, was invaded by tall ships and paralyzing heat. My buddy Eric and I were traveling the junior tennis circuit in his father’s Buick, passing through towns like Poughkeepsie and Albany. We lost early most weeks and filled the time until the next tournament with bowling and movies.

“Lifeguard was one of those movies. Elliott plays Rick Carlson, an aging (30!) lifeguard in Los Angeles who knows there’s more to life than beach parties and one-night stands with teenage girls and stewardesses but can’t bring himself to take a real job at a Porsche dealer even if that’s the only way to win the heart of his old high school flame, the very, very, very pretty Anne Archer.

“So where was the sex? Well, Sam Elliott was so damn good-looking in that sleazy, ’70s bathing-trunks-and-mustache way (predating Baywatch and Magnum, P.I.) that he could pretty much charm the bra and panties off of anybody.

“But there was also something wildly sexy about Los Angeles, the city. Somehow I knew it held the key to my future, and Lifeguard was the sales pitch: sunsets and muscle cars and beach houses and lazy sex on unmade beds.

“Talk about inspiration. Six years later I was living out there in a roach-infested, sun-drenched apartment on Pico, driving a ’69 Plymouth Satellite to the beach on weekends, hoping to meet girls, dreaming of a Hollywood career. The only thing I didn’t have was the mustache.

“The shambling style of the movie was typical ’70s: rough around the edges. The director, Daniel Petrie, won an Emmy that year for his elegant TV movie Eleanor and Franklin, but Lifeguard had a relaxed, unpolished quality that made it feel very real, a peek at adulthood if you didn’t follow all the rules.

“The screenplay by Ron Koslow is full of clunkers but also gems like the opening line: ‘The only place jogging is going to get you is right back where you started,’ which seemed profound to my unformed teenage brain.

“Most important, Lifeguard is about making choices. That’s what the best movies are always about, and that’s what I remember most: the horror of realizing at 30 that your best years may be behind you, and that only drudgery and self-hatred lie ahead.

“Sitting there in my tennis shorts in a multiplex in Poughkeepsie, that sure motivated me. In a strange, popcorny, cliche-ridden, summer-movie kind of way you could say that Lifeguard saved my life.”

I’ve thought and thought about it, and can’t think of a single “summer movie” that has really touched me or transformed or lifted me up, over and out. For me the best movies have always been and always will be fall or holiday movies. To hell with rote escapism by way of leisurely yoks and pleasure cones and suntan oil and brainlessness.