Sydney Pollack, whom I knew and interviewed from time to time over a 26-year period, died nearly four years ago. He was always a fretting, hard-working, impassioned director-producer who never took his work lightly, and who was determined every time to make his films as intelligent and full-bodied and emotionally whole as humanly possible. I liked him personally and respected him tremendously. He was a straight shooter and an affable, fair-minded guy.

On top of which Pollack was probably the greatest commentator and raconteur that mainstream Hollywood ever known or worked with — a guy you could talk and listen to for hours.

I’m reminded of this gift of gab by Simon Abrams‘ 5.4 Movieline review of the recently released Jeremiah Johnson Bluray.

“Pollack’s stories about the making of Jeremiah Johnson are easily the highlight of the film’s audio commentary track,” Abrams says, “including such tales as when he had to lay down chain-link fence in the snow to help the film’s trained horses cross treacherously snowy, mountainous terrain, or when he got a live grizzly to chase Redford, saying that the bear had to be teased as if it were a domesticated dog.

“Pollack was such a gifted raconteur that many of the minor details he relates on the audio commentary prove how effortless his total recollection of shooting Jeremiah Johnson was, like when he anticipates the moment in a scene where Redford trips while wading around in freezing water. Redford’s fall that isn’t particularly impressive, but the breezy way that Pollack anticipates the minor event certainly is.”

Here’s my Pollack obit, written the day his death was announced on 5.27.0.8.

And here’s how I described Pollack’s DVD commentary tracks, imagining how Pollack himself might have put it : “Look, I don’t know everything but I do know this much, and I’ve been around enough to understand what tends to work and what doesn’t, and I tried to make this particular aspect work. I don’t know if I succeeded or not but people have told me I did so okay, maybe. But what I really love is the process — the shaping and refining — even though it gives me gray hairs. And I believe in having a sense of humor, or at least a sense of irony.”

You can’t trust Amazon for aspect ratios, but the Jeremiah Johnson Bluray page says it’s 1.77 to 1, which is unusual. What will the 1.85 aspect ratio fascists make of this, if true?

“But the one thing that has haunted me my entire life is finding the truth about my parents.” Honestly — how could Amazing Spider-Man screenwriters James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and/or Steve Kloves have written a line this groan-inducing and on-the-nose? They’re not stupid. They know what they’re doing. There are obviously more skillful and subtle ways of conveying Peter Parker‘s angst. And yet they wrote it.

Directive from a dictator: “From this point on no one will be allowed to compose a shot in which a character drops off the side of a super-tall skyscraper and falls 40 or 50 or 60 stories before stopping the fall and swooping back, blah blah. All directors and screenwriters of all superhero movies will henceforth have to make do without them.”

I love Berlin. I only got around a little last night (i.e., Friday) but much of it feels quiet and uncluttered and laid-back. Very little traffic of any kind. No real crowds anywhere. Everywhere you look there are soothing, almost whispery little dark streets. And cool-looking cafes and restaurants, and none overly crowded. Areas like Potsdamer Platz, where the Berlin Film Festival happens, are glitzy and brightly lit and tourist-afflicted, but this seems more the exception than the rule. Or so it seemed last night.

Adjacent to Amtsgerichtsplatz, a small park on Holtzendorffstrasse in southwest Berlin.

This is a town for people of taste and refinement. The cultural atmosphere feels cool and right and unhurried. In Paris there’s often the roar or at least the hum of traffic, and certainly the sound of scooters everywhere, buzzing around like hornets. Not so much here. Or at the very least, much less so. Huge sycamore trees with titanic leaders line the street where I’m staying. Big trees and abundant shade in a big city always instill a sense of calm. If someone had told me last night that I couldn’t stay indoors and I had to pitch a tent in Amtsgerichtsplatz, a small park across the street from where I’m staying, I would have been okay with that.

Last night at an Italian place I accidentally knocked over a bottle of black vinegar on the table, and it hit the floor and broke open. The black vinegar began to spread across the brick floor like blood in Francis Coppola‘s Dracula. A table of four people nearby were staring at it also. I was struck by how much we all were on the same wavelength, how we were more taken by the curious visual look of this black substance spreading across the floor than by any unsettled feelings about something being broken or a sense of “oh, what an asshole that guy is, knocking over a bottle of vinegar,” etc.

I thought for sure with jet lag and my screwed-up sleep clock that I would wake up at 3 or 4 this morning, but I crashed around midnight and slept right through to 6 am.

Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby offering readers special timeshare rates for vacation homes and year-round residences in Wellswood Park in Torquay, England — just south of Exeter, 20 minutes northeast of Plymouth. Not really. Somebody sent me this photo yesterday.

Beware of new brick walls

The waves of geek delight and ecstasy over The Avengers are detectable even to me, even in Berlin. I can feel it on Twitter…everywhere. Deadline‘s Nikki Finke reports that last night’s tally (it’s 7:39 am Saturday in Berlin now) is “thought to be $70 million (including $18.1 million from midnight) and $160 million-plus through Sunday.”

I don’t begrudge anyone their fun or their profit. It’s always a good or at least a passable thing when a film is hugely popular. Infectious vitality and all that. But at the same time I feel a bit lonely, cut off…surely there are HE readers who were only “shruggingly okay” with it? People who just sat there and went “okay, whatever, fine…I don’t hate it or anything….I guess doesn’t suck”? Who agreed with MCN’s David Poland that “it’s not actually a really good, memorable summer Movie Movie”? Or with Peter Keough‘s Boston Pheonix view that “what the Avengers really need is something to avenge, some compelling emotion or commitment; rallying the troops with blood-stained collectible trading cards doesn’t cut it.”

Or who even agreed with my view that “it’s corporate CG piss in a gleaming silver bucket”?

How high would be the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic numbers be if critics didn’t feel an instinct to go easy and go along with the mob? We all know this mentality sometimes takes hold. Better to join ’em and give it a shoulder-shrugging pass than buck the tide…right?

“Of the star-studded cast, only Mark Ruffalo (playing Bruce Banner) and Robert Downey Jr. (as Iron Man) bring any personality to the place-holder dialogue,” writes Chicago Reader critic Ben Sachs. “Overlong, monotonous, violent, and simple-minded, this is like one of those ‘World’s Biggest Gang Bang’ videos, except that no one onscreen appears to be enjoying himself.”

Across the globe geeks are warbling like tweety birds about the awesomeness of The Avengers, and they can have it. It’s 6:20 pm on a cool Friday, and I’m drinking in the incredibly beautiful, green and very flat German countryside flying past my first-class train compartment window at a much higher rate than 60 frames per second. Bad Bentheim, Rheine, Melle, Bunde.

I’ll be in Berlin a little after 9 pm this evening, but I love this ride and this train. Okay, no wifi but I’ve been without it since I flew out of JFK last night at 8:30 pm.

No wifi from British Airways. No time to even blink as I ran across much of Heathrow in order to make a London-to-Amsterdam flight that left at 9:40 am after my trans-Atlantic flight arrived at 8:30 am — a little more than six and a half hours. No wifi on the Dutch train, and no wifi on the German one. I’m tapping this out with my right thumb on the iPhone. Best I can do. I’ve taken some decent photos…later.

The weather was too damp and chilly this morning. Is this May or what? Let’s warm it up a little.

I slept in the train compartment for a couple of hours this afternoon. Very peacefully, I should add. Trains are great because the tracks go right by the most beautiful spots and right into the heart of most European towns and cities and you can really trip out on the pastoral and the sense of history and culture whereas highways are built outside and apart from everything — sterile, cleared-out ghetto land.

We just passed by the first hilly area I’ve seen since leaving Amsterdam. I’m sorry but eye-filling, heart-warming European scenery makes me emotional. And we’re now in Minden, an industrial, mid-sized city. Two-plus hours until Berlin, which I’ve never really visited before.

My ex and I honeymooned in East Berlin in late ’87 as part of a general Iron Curtain honeymoon tour, but that was too restricted as we couldn’t go into West Berlin. But we visited Checkpoint Charlie, and I got yelled at by a Soviet officer for trying to take a photo — “Nyet!”

Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Psychopaths (CBS Flms, 11.2.12), a dark comedy about a screenwriter (Colin Farrell), a dog-napping and a demimonde of wacko pals and associates, came to my attention during Cinemacon. Directed, written and co-produced by the guy who made In Bruges — how can it not be at least pretty good? Particularly with Chris Walken and Sam Rockwell costarring, and with Mickey Rourke having been cast and then quit after clashing with McDonaugh, whom he reportedly called “a jerk-off”?

The other cast members are Woody Harrelson (in the role Rourke would have played), Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko, Tom Waits, Kevin Corrigan and Gabourey Sidibe.

I’ve been a sucker all my life for Norman Mailer, the combative author, essayist, political figure, journalist and movie director. He was a huge influence in my teens and 20s. I got to know him a bit in ’87 when I wrote the Cannon press notes for Tough Guys Don’t Dance — in fact, he dictated editing and punctuation notes to me during a 90-minute phone call one afternoon.

So I’m susceptible to a two-year-old documentary portrait of the guy that’s coming out on DVD in a few days…that’s all. I’ll watch it on the plane tonight to London.

One of Ashton Kutcher‘s cultural stereotype Popchips commercials (there were four) included a groovy Indian guy. “Offensive” by 2012 p.c. standards, for sure. But the bit isn’t that different from Peter Sellers‘ brownfaced, Nehru-jacketed character in The Party (’68) or even Alec Guiness‘s Professor Narayan Godbole in A Passage to India (’84). Kutcher just did it with broad humor.

I left last Monday night’s Avengers screening as the closing credits began, so I didn’t see any tacked-on sequences. Movieline‘s Jen Yamato has written that there may be two, one having something to do with the plot. But the other tail-end sequence (if there are in fact two) is totally unrelated to any plot element so it’s not spoiler material. Not in my book at least. A photo is sitting on a Tumblr page. If you’re a spoiler whiner, don’t click. Simple as that.

I thought at first that the recent daring escape from house arrest by blind Chinese civil-rights lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng in China’s rural Shandong Province might be the beginning of a good political thriller. Especially after Chen slipped into Beijing and was taken into the U.S. Embassy on humanitarian grounds. It’s at least an HBO film, I told myself. Every viewer would be rooting for Chen’s escape, and for the safety of his family. And Christian Bale could play himself in a cameo.

Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng and family.

But when Chen told U.S. officials he didn’t want political asylum in the U.S. and that he wanted to stay in China and grapple it out with Chinese authorities, he showed himself to be astonishingly naive if not stupid about what would likely happen to him and his family.

And then he changed his mind and said he wanted a haven in the U.S., but only after he’d been transferred to a Chinese-run Beijing hospital for treatment of a broken foot sustained during his escape, with Chinese goons surrounding him. And then he told The Daily Beast‘s Melinda Liu that he was scared and begged to be allowed to leave China on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s plane.

Heroes of political persecution thrillers are never naive about their situation or the mentality of their oppressors. They might ultimately win or lose their battle, but they never say in the middle of Act Two, “I don’t want asylum…I’ll tough it out and appeal to the humanity of the authorities and continue to fight the good fight in my native country” and blah blah. And they never cry about how scared they are after they’ve finally wised up.

Remember Steve McQueen‘s Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles? He wasn’t educated, but he knew what the Chinese communists were about. He was no fool. Right now that’s exactly what Cheng seems to be — a fool, and a weepy one at that. He had a chance (or at least a shot at a chance) and he blew it.

There are also indications that U.S. diplomatic officials in Beijing, fearful of a major row with the Chinese government, might be willing to throw Chen under the bus. A 5.2 N.Y. Times report about his escape, temporary asylum and hospitalization says that “he was…spooked by the presence of plainclothes [Chinese] police officers at the hospital” and that “it did not help that United States officials had gone home for the evening.”

What kind of a supposed good-guy official in a political thriller goes home for the evening with a hot-potato political activist in a hospital under the control of the bad guys?

“Many Americans were with me while I checked into the hospital and doctors examined me…lots of them,” Chen told Liu from his hospital bed. “But when I was brought to the hospital room, they all left. I don’t know where they went.” Obviously they were told to stand down.

Liu writes that “U.S. officials…said they had reached an understanding with Chinese authorities that Chen would be allowed to pursue his education in a location away from his home province of Shandong, to follow up on his work as a self-taught ‘barefoot lawyer.'”

A 12.3 story by N.Y. Times reporter Jane Perlez says the United States has “recognized that the blind dissident lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, [has] changed his position and now [wants] to leave China, a senior Obama administration official said here Thursday.”

Yeah, but what are they going to do about it? It’ll be a very bad thing if the Obama administration allows Chen-the-lamb to be surrounded and nipped at and possibly eaten by the wolves. The symbolism of will give Romney and the right a potent issue.