I’m a fan of Whit Stillman‘s Barcelona and Metropolitan, but I was squirming in my seat as I watched Damsels in Distress at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. Many are okay with it, I realize, but to me it felt too mannered and self-conscious, and arch to a fare-thee-well. But I need to see it again now because Glenn Kenny has figured out a way for people like me to enjoy it — he’s cracked the code.

I just have to pretend that I’m watching an Eric Rohmer film, and the clouds will then part. At least partly. Okay, Kenny hasn’t precisely said “do this and you’ll find your way into the ‘off’ mood of Stillman’s film and maybe enjoy it a bit more,” but he’s certainly suggested it. To me anyway.

Kenny’s experiment would probably work even better, I’m thinking, if Stillman had shot a French-language version so it could be shown with English subtitles. 25 or 30 years ago Andrew Sarris described what he called the “Russian Tea Room syndrome.” It basically meant that sophisticated cineastes could enjoy material if presented in a foreign tongue with subtitles, but serve the same dish with American actors and accents and they’d have a problem with it.

I’ve seen Michael Crichton‘s Westworld (’73) seven or eight times if not more, and I’m ready to pop for the French Bluray (i.e., Mondwest) right now. It’s an agreeable but far-from-great scifi thriller that looks low-budgety and has no mind-blowing effects or breathtaking action scenes even. It’s just a lot of basic exposition and half-comedic scenes in a fake old-west town with Richard Benjamin, James Brolin and Yul Brynner.

Why, then, do I like Westworld so much? Because it’s first-rate comfort food with a cool concept, and because you can see the revolt of the robots coming from a mile away and it doesn’t matter because it’s fun to just chill and watch stuff happen. And because Brynner’s gunslinger is a trip, and on a certain level a sympathetic figure. You’re half-rooting for him and his fellow slave revolting robots at the end because they aren’t taking any more shit from rich assholes any more.

Brynner’s badass cyborg is a seminal Hollywood figure, of course — the stylistic and technological forerunner of Cameron and Schwarzenegger‘s Terminator.

The question is why hasn’t Westworld been remade? I would be there in a New York minute if they did. The hook could be that the tourists are metaphors for the most loathed and despised — the Goldman Sachs guys, one-percenters, Kardashians –and the robots are metaphors for the Occupy protestors. Or something like that.

Westworld is basically Jurassic Park with super-realistic robots and fleshbots. It was briefly a shitty TV show in the early ’80s but otherwise it’s been a dormant concept for 30 years, which means that GenY and even younger GenX haven’t a clue. I would love to see this again, and think of how much more more intense it could be with the right FX and a little restraint. It’s a piece about base impulses and repressed hungers, which is to say a piece about who and what we really are.

You don’t need to be a nerd-like authority about the Titanic disaster or even know a few random facts about it, but to not even know it happened for real requires a stunning level of ignorance. It follows that the same people are clueless about ten thousand other things. A democracy can’t successfully function with a donkey-brained electorate. This helps to explain why Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry had supporters. (Jim Romanesko posted this today.)

Because I live to some extent in a membrane of creative denial, it only hit me this morning that I have five working days — four and a half now — to do everything I need to do before leaving for New York and then France/Cannes on 4.27. That’s because next week is going to be all Vegas and all Cinemacon, and then a return to LA on Thursday night and the NYC flight departing on Friday morning. So I made a list of everything that needs doing, and it’s too long. I’m not going to be able to get to all this and do the column every day to the tune of six or seven posts.

The result is that my system and my brain are slowing down. Rather than man up and deal with this methodically, I’m a deer in the headlights. I just have to shake it off and get going, but this has happened before. If I have a managable list and a reasonable amount of time, I’m fine. But if the list is too long and the time is too short, I’ll quietly freak and then freeze over. It’s like being hit with a stroke.

LA to Vegas: 4.23 to 4.26. LA to NYC on 4.27, staying until 5.3. And then off to Berlin for a week before Cannes.

I really hate those clean-up guys with their gas-powered, putty-put air blowers on their backs, generating that awful roaring and thwacking noise on an otherwise pleasant day. I’m trying to write here, Manolo…eff off! It used to be that low-end gardeners and mild-mannered lowlifes were paid to quietly sweep and rake up and trim rose bushes and mow lawns with manual mowers Not just quietly but peacefully. When’s the last time anyone heard the sound of a nice manual lawnmower being pushed along? Or saw a gardener sitting on a law and sharpening the blades? Air blowers are but one of the cultural pollutants that rain down on a daily basis.

This morning a friend asked for an observation about Safe‘s Jason Statham, and here’s what I sent back: “At his best, Staham has that studly, minimalist Steve McQeen vibe going on — the steely hard guy with the code of honor who doesn’t say much and blah blah. Every generation has two or three tough hombres of this sort, and right now he’s filling that requirement.

“McQueen made shit from to time, but he also worked with A-level directors on A-level films — The Great Escape‘s John Sturges, Bullitt‘s Peter Yates, Papillon‘s Franklin Schaffner, The Sand Pebbles‘ Robert Wise, The Getaway and Junior Bonner‘s Sam Peckinpah.

“Statham, on the other hand, has almost exclusively made B-level programmers.

“Since breaking out 14 years ago in Guy Ritchie‘s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch (’00), Statham has starred in exactly one classy, high-pedigree film — Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job. He also did a 45-second walk-on in Michael Mann‘s Collateral, but you can hardly count that.

“Statham is a working-class Brit with a sports background (diving) and not much education, and one result is that he seems to lack not only good taste but any kind of longing to acquire it, and therefore a semblance of class. He seems to regard action-movie acting as a ticket to wealth and power, but he doesn’t seem to understand what true aesthetic coolness is.

“If Statham makes too many crap movies, he’ll eventually lose his lustre and magnestism. He’ll be bruised fruit.”

Enough with that “bolt the doors and look after each other while we prepare to shoot it out with the bad guys” stuff…we need to take a break and deliver a nice little musical interlude for the folks. You know, like those 1940s Abbott & Costello comedies would do when they’d stop the narrative in its tracks so the Andrew Sisters could sing a tune. Same concept.

The melody of the first tune is one of the dominant themes heard in Howard Hawks‘ Red River, which he directed some 12 or 13 years before Rio Bravo. More often than not you’ll find a lot of sentimentality under the hides of supposed tough guys, especially when they get older.

There are few things that are less meaningful or interesting than news stories about mediocre films making tons of money. It really, really doesn’t matter to anyone of any depth or consequence. Obviously windfalls matter to certain people, of course, but they’re not the stuff of headlines. Or they shouldn’t be. They should be listed like stock prices and that’s all.

If anything, the massive success of The Hunger Games is a confirmation of a kind of cultural vapidity or failure. It says “look how malnourished and under-developed we are…look at the spiritual junk food we’re eating!”

Monster revenues can matter only to those directly benefitting in terms of payments and dividends, and even for them wealth isn’t all that interesting because they’ve been used to it for a long time, and if they’re young and new to having money (like Jennifer Lawrence) they have to learn how to keep themselves fresh and attuned despite the anesthetizing effect of being on easy street, and that’s more of a challenge than you might think.

In a July 2007 HE piece that explained how and why High Noon is a far greater film that Rio Bravo (one of the best essays I’ve ever posted on this site), I included a Jean-Luc Godard quote that argued against my viewpoint, but which I’ve always enjoyed on its own terms:

“The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game,” Godard said. “Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”

In 100 words or less, please name any 21st century filmmaker who has made such a film over the last decade or so — a film that works as unpretentious genre entertainment on one level but also offers a meaningful metaphoric journey of whatever kind if you want to dig deeper and look behind the curtain. A film in other words that doesn’t announce or insist upon its deeper, weightier content but which definitely has the “horses” if you do a little probing.

If you ask me Michael Clayton is such a film. Readers are advised that they’re not allowed to mention anything by Peter Jackson in this thread.

Last night I saw a TCM Classic Film Festival screening of Marathon Man at the Chinese. The first two-thirds are excellent and close to great…okay, I’ll go further and call it one of the best thrillers of the ’70s except for the last 10% to 15%. A lot of films are like this — superb in the opening phases, delightful applications of intrigue and curiosity…and then the payoff disappoints.

I only know that the more William Goldman‘s plot unfolds and the more we learn about the smallmindedness and the old-man desperation of Laurence Olivier‘s Dr. Christian Szell, the less intriguing it all becomes. Suggestions are more powerful than specifics.

I love the old Jew vs. old German road rage scene in midtown Manhattan. And the spooky Parisian sequences with Roy Scheider, culminating in that superb hotel room fight with the Asian guy with the creepy eyeball. Dustin Hoffman‘s grubby apartment and the Latinos across the street who taunt him and the anguish that he feels over his dead father are fine flavorings. And Olivier’s line about Americans: “They were always so confident that God was on their side. Now I think they are not so sure.”

Even hard-hearted Spielberg haters (there are others besides myself) must have felt a slight softening during the airing of this skit last night. Let no one say henceforth that Spielberg isn’t at least a good sport.