I’ve been moaning about not being able to buy a DVD of Carol Reed‘s Outcast of the Islands (1951) off and on for the last four years, and now it’s finally available this month via Amazon UK.

The irony is that I saw it on the tube so many years ago that i can’t remember much of it, but I have a recolleciton of something exceptional. I remember Trevor Howard, of course, who plays the lead. The story mostly takes place in Malaysia. I don’t remember the particulars. I’ve never read the Conrad book, but I’ve been told it’s a bit grim. Ralph Richardson and Wendy Hiller costar. The striking black-and-white cinematography is by Ted Scaife and John Wilcox.

Pauline Kael called Outcast of the Islands “a marvellous film (drawn from Joseph Conrad’s work) that relatively few people have seen. It’s probably the only movie that has ever attempted to deal in a complex way with the subject of the civilized man’s ambivalence about the savage. It also contains some of the most remarkable sequences ever filmed by the English director Carol Reed; it’s an uneven movie, but with splendid moments throughout.

“Trevor Howard is superb as Willems, who makes himself an outcast first through contemptible irresponsibility and through betrayal of those who trust him, and finally and hopelessly when, against his will, he is attracted to the silent, primitive girl, the terrifying Aissa (played by Kerima). Willems is wrong in almost everything he does, but he represents a gesture toward life; his enemy, Almayer (Robert Morley), is so horribly, pathetically stuffy that his family unit (with Wendy Hiller as his wife and Annabel Morley as his child) is absurdly, painfully funny.

“With Ralph Richardson, whose role is possibly ill-conceived, and George Coulouris, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Frederick Valk. The screenplay is by William Fairchild.”

Regal Entertainment CEO Amy Miles became infamous yesterday for suggesting during a Cinemacon panel discussion that texting during a movie might be an okay thing, especially during films “that appeal to a younger demographic.”

Regal CEO Amy Miles

Panelists during yesterday’s Cinemacon discussion about satisfying “savvy” moviegoers, moderated by Anne Thompson (l.) Alamo Drafthouse CEO Tim League is second from left. Regal CEO Amy Miles is third from right.

A couple of hours later Miles showed up at the beginning of Sony’s product-reel show and riffed about how delightful it was that they had so many standard-issue tentpole attractions coming out in 2012 and blah blah.

Between her Sony exhilaration, her views about texting and her good-old-girl cracker accent, Miles become a poster lady for low-rent, anything-for-a-buck, to-hell with-refinement yeehaw attitudes among US. exhibitors. Miles’ “make the money at all costs” ethos combined with her lack of sympathy for decent movie-watching standards indicates that she‘s probably a Republican.

Miles said during a Cinemacon panel discussion about satisfying discerning moviegoers that Regal frowns upon cell phone use during films “but if we had a movie that appealed to a younger demographic” — like 21 Jump Street, she later said — “we could test some of these concepts…something you can offer in the theater that I would not find appealing but my 18-year-old son” might.

That statement didn’t go down well at all with Alamo Drafthouse CEO Tim League, who despises the idea of texting during films and totally forbids it in his theatres. “Over my dead body will I introduce texting into the movie theater,” he said yesterday. “I love the idea of playing around with a new concept, but [texting] is the scourge of our industry…it’s our job to understand that this is a sacred space and we have to teach manners.”

League said that it should be “magical” to come to the cinema. Miles replied that “one person’s opinion of magical isn’t the other’s,” and League replied, “But my opinion is correct.” He’s right, of course. People like Miles are the enemy.

N.Y. Times critic Ben Brantley has pointed out an interesting political current in The Columnist, David Auburn‘s “scrupulously assembled historical drama” about hard-hitting columnist Joseph Alsop (John Lithgow) that has just opened on Broadway.

“The political part presents Joe as a fearsome dinosaur,” Brantley notes, “a fierce advocate of the war in Vietnam whose power begins its inexorable decline with the assassination of Kennedy. The play ends with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, with Joe recoiling from the light like a vampire at sunrise.”

I had dinner with Lithgow in Cortina d’Ampezzo , Italy, almost exactly 20 years ago. I was doing a N.Y. Times interview with Sylvester Stallone during the filming of Cliffhanger, and it was suggested by the unit publicist that I should hang with Lithgow a bit. Lithgow didn’t say anything too specific, but the tone of his comments provided the first hint that Cliffhanger might be somewhat dismissable.

Entertainment Weekly has posted two stills from Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained (Weinstein Co., 12.25) along with a chit-chat between staffer Anthony Breznican and costar Jamie Foxx.

Pleae take note of the Entertainment Weekly logo in the upper left portion. That means they were given this photo as an exclusive.

Does Foxx think Django Unchained will be controversial?,” Breznican asks. “Naah,” says Foxx. “It’s going to be kind of a quirky but sorta mild-mannered, laid-back Monte Hellman-type film with nice long shots of pastoral western vistas and a kind of you-are-there historical verisimilitude with prairie dogs and snakes and coyotes howling in the night.”

I’m kidding…kidding! Foxx actually says, “Oh, hell yeah…you kidding me?”

I’ve read the script but here’s the EW synopsis: “After being sent to a chain gang after rebelling against his owners, Django is recruited by a German bounty hunter (Inglorious Basterd‘s Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz) to help him settle an old score. Django has information that Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz needs, so the German mercenary liberates the slave and promises that if he helps him kill the Brittle Brothers, Django’s old owners, he’ll make it worth his while.”

“He says, ‘I’ll kill ’em, and you’ll get some money and be on your way as a free man,'” Foxx tells Breznican.

The Brittle brothers? Is that like the Vega brothers only 150 years earlier?

“Along the way, the duo end up crossing paths with Leonardo DiCaprio‘s hammer-wielding character, a deranged plantation owner named Calvin Candie, who likes to make his toughest slaves fight to the death in gladiatorial combat. ‘Candie is a business man who owns a plantation called Candie Land, and that’s where my wife ends up being,’ Foxx says. To find her, ‘we have to get in good with Candy, by me playing a valet for Christoph’s character.’

Leonardo DiCaprio as the hammer-wielding Calvin Candie — a mixture of Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York mixed with Simon Legree.

“Candie Land”? Like an amusement park? How many employees? Is there a big “Candie Land” sign illuminated by candles at night? Did DiCaprio’s character get that name from a relative of P.T. Barnum? Does Mr. Candie sell hot dogs and popcorn and hard candy on the side?

“There’s a beautiful way [Tarantino] found for the characters to talk to each other,” Foxx explains. “It’s mindblowing. You’ve never heard it this way. You’ve seen movies deal with slavery or westerns that never dealt with slavery. Do it the safe way. This way is like…wow.”

Ultimately, Breznican writes, Django Unchained “is a story about the heart, and the way cruelty can destroy the things we love most.” Sorry but I kinda doubt that. I suspect that Django Unchained is ultimately about the movie references and spaghetti western memory threads in Tarantino’s head. All QT does (and all he ever will do) is riff on genre movies that he loved back in the ’70s and ’80s.

“All Django wants to do is get his wife,” Foxx concludes. “He’s not trying to cure or solve slavery. He just wants to get his life back.” So he and his wife can return to their home in a trailer park near Orlando and kick back with the brewskis and ESPN on the flat screen and the barbecue in the back yard and play with the kids and their pet alligator?

In April 2007 Tarantino told the Telegraph‘s John Hiscock that Django Unchained would be “a southern,” or a kind of spaghetti western set in America’s Deep South. He said he wanted “to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”

So while Inglourious Basterds was a revenge-payback movie about making Nazis suffer for being anti-Semitic swine, Django Unchained is some kind of payback-revenge movie about American racism and slavery.

“I just can’t do that”? Meryl Streep‘s character, a baby-boomer woman in her early to mid 60s, a veteran of the hippie era and the Me Generation ’70s, has never performed oral lah-lah on her husband, played by Tommy Lee Jones?

Sony Pictures presented its 2012 slate at Cinemacon five or six hours ago. I don’t want to go out on a limb, but apart from Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, which wasn’t even mentioned, the Sony guys don’t seem very interested in adult-appeal, review-driven films this year. Or they’re persuaded that idiot fare makes exhibitors feel soothed and taken care of because it sells more popcorn or whatever. Either way the reels shown on the Collisseum screen inside Ceasar’s Palace made it seem as if they’re aiming low and predictable.

So for me the Sony product reels didn’t cut it except for two semi-goodies — Marc Webb‘s The Amazing Spider-Man and Sam Mendes‘ Skyfall, the latest 007 film. Otherwise they mostly showed ultra-primitive, power-slam, bass-thump CG stuff for the under-educated simians, schmoes, ESPNers, what-the-fuckers, gamers and others whose taste buds have been systematically coarsened and lowered over the last 20 or 25 years, which is roughly when theme-park movies began to be embraced big-time by the major studios.

Aside from Hope Springs, a light-hearted septugenarian sexual therapy comedy by way of a marital relationship flick with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, all I saw, felt and heard today was THUMP, whuh-DUMP!, whoossshhh, bluh-BOOM! BOOM! Buh-buh-BOOM! CANK-CANK-CANK!….bah-dah-bupp-pop, bah-dup-dup, baddah-bup…screeshhhhhh!!…ROWRRLLL and a WHUMP and a WHOOM! with about 18 shots of guys falling from very high buildings and never once slamming into the pavement and instantly becoming a splattered Big Mac because anyone can fall from any height in a big-studio movie these days and escape injury….c’mon, you know that!

They’re flying! They’re flying! Men and women who sail like spiders and seagulls over steel towers and concrete jungles!

A couple of exhibitors or conventioneers or whatever sitting behind me were delighted with all this. At one point a younger, dark-haired guy in a white Eurotrash shirt exclaimed “wow!” and then “whoa!” I immediately turned around and scowled at him and said, “What are you, an asshole?” All right, I didn’t say that but I turned around and scowled. At one point I said out loud to no one in particular, “Are they fucking kidding?”

Total Recall and Men in Black 3 felt to me like the biggest drags with Loopers, a Joseph Gordon Levitt-meets-Bruce Willis time-travel thriller, close behind. Everything about this action-fantasy trio felt rote and primitive and simplistic. Sony also promo-reeled an Adam Sandler-meets-Andy Samberg comedy called That’s My Boy, an obviously shallow African-American pop soul musical called Sparkle with American Idol‘s Jordin Sparks and the the late Whitney Houston, and David Koepp‘s long-delayed Manhattan bike-messenger movie called Premium Rush.

To repeat, Hope Springs appears to be the one film besides Zero Dark Thirty that’s aimed at over-35s.

The point is that nothing looked all that great. Nothing really turned me on. It all felt like franchise gruel and formula deck-shufflings.

Even Spider-Man and Skyfall felt like the same old basic prime rib (or meat loaf), mashed potatoes, green beans and gravy on the side. How fresh can either be? Mendes is a class-act helmer and Andrew Garfield looks like he does a fine job as Peter Parker but a franchise film is a franchise film.

In fact, I think we were actually being shown pieces of one big long CG-idiot action film, lasting 12 or 13 hours, called Son Of The Amazing Total Skyfall Rush With Aliens.

This is the studio that produced and distributed Moneyball last year, but boy, you’d never know it. The Sony voices that said “let’s make as much money as we can by investing big-time in tentpoles and appealing to the under-25 morons and shovelling out the same old action-fantasy slop, using the same beats and the same CG and the same old bullshit comic-book dynamic” obviously ruled.

Here’s a pretty good description of the Skyfall reel or trailer or whatever from Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas.

Martin Scorsese has said this many times before, and so have others who care about preserving our cinematic history as best we can. But it was great to be sitting in a cavernous ballroom (two or three football fields wide) inside Caesar’s Place an hour ago and hear Scorsese say it once more: “We have an obligation to our culture to preserve it.” By “it” he meant all those films that have found a certain exalted or venerated status which need to be preserved and restored.

The corporate guys running Hollywood talk a nice slick game, but many of them don’t care too much about preserving anything. Most care about their earnings and assets. Most of them are wolves in the forest, and not much more than that. Okay, some corporates care and are standing up and doing the right thing as best they can. But would Brad Grey have committed the Paramount funds to restore and preserve the Godfather films if Steven Spielberg hadn’t urged (i.e., pressured) him to do so? Why di dit take Paramnount so long to commit to a Shane restoration for a Bluray? Why is Sony Home Video still stalling on releasing that From Here to Eternity Bliuray that they prepared in 2009?

A fund-raising email from the irrepressible James Carville just arrived, and reads as follows: “After Mitt tried to steal my line, you know I have to call him out. In Romney’s speech bashing President Obama last night, he said, ‘It’s still about the economy, and we’re not stupid.’ Yeah, it still is about the economy, stupid. It’s about how hucksters like Mitt crashed it, the middle class paid the price, and the top 1% got more tax cuts. It’s also about Republicans going to war on women, trying to cut seniors off their Medicare and all the rest. Let’s beat these guys.” Yeah!

During a just-concluded Cinemacon panel called “Frankly Speaking: The Ever-Changing World Filmmaking Today, Tomorrow and Beyond,” moderator Todd McCarthy asked Martin Scorsese what his learning process was on shooting Hugo in 3D, and part of his answer was that Alfred Hitchcock‘s Dial M for Murder offered inspiration about “how to go” with 3D. Director Ang Lee also particpated.

As regulars know, the fascinating “Ira Parks” has been doing an HE commenting routine in which he becomes (i.e., enters, takes possession of) significant HE commenters and voices their thoughts and ruminations. Ironic, layered, meta on meta stuff. Yesterday and for whatever reason he ran a little fictitious riff about MSN’s James Rocchi having been arrested in Las Vegas…WHICH DIDN’T HAPPEN, IN LARGE PART BECAUSE MR. ROCCHI ISN’T EVEN HERE.

Then Parks posted a “Jeffrey Wells says” follow-up about Rocchi considering legal action against the Las Vegas police department as well as myself. In response to this Rocchi got in touch this morning to castigate me for writing this. He saw my name and didn’t realize it was Parks. C’mon!

I didn’t write anything or know anything. I quickly skimmed the comments last night and frankly wondered if Rocchi, a mild-mannered, business-suited diplomat if I ever met one, might have actually been popped for something, but then I crashed around 1 am and then got up this morning and went to my first Cinemacom event.

But let’s put a stopper on this right now. The Rocchi thing was fanciful fiction — dry humor taken to a new bizarre-pretend level — and Rocchi’s anger and threatened libel action has become a kind of online version of people panicking in 1938 when they heard Orson Welles‘ “War of the Worlds radio show. None of it is real, I swear. We’ve gotten lost in the bonfire of our online vanities.

I hereby apologize to James Rocchi and want everyone to completely & fully understand that he’s in Los Angeles and was never in Las Vegas and has NEVER BEEN POPPED BY THE LVPD for anything, ever. It was a joke…please.