Because I failed to check Twitter as last night’s 7:30 pm premiere screening of Cabin In The Woods began, I didn’t read breaking reports about Gary Ross decision to not direct Catching Fire, the Hunger Games sequel. I didn’t read the news, in fact, until 9:45 pm when I sat down at Sam Woo’s. My first reaction was “great!…so there’s a decent chance that Tom Stern‘s jiggly-ass, bob-and-weave close-ups won’t be used on Catching Fire? Whoo-hoo! I’ll have the vegetable dumplings!”

Diplomatic side-stepping always prevails when a significant person leaves a company or a project. Statements never allude to anyone being unhappy or frustrated or quitting or being canned. It’s always a calm mutual decision, never about emotion, always about practicalities. So you can bet the deed to the ranch that Ross’s departing statement — “I simply don’t have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would have wanted to make because of the fixed and tight production schedule” — is only one piece of the pie. Although it probably was a factor.

It is axiomatic that when a movie is a huge hit, the suits always want the sequel to be made and released quickly before the public mood changes and the zeitgeist turns another page. So whatever polite and supportive noises the Lionsgate guys were making during meetings, the subtitles read “Let’s not spend too much time twiddling our thumbs on Catching Fire…we need to make this sucker sooner rather than later so we can juice the guys we gotta juice, so we can make more money so we can juice the guys we gotta juice. We need to get the third and fourth film made right after the sequel so we can maximize the merchandising and ancillary revenues and generally go to town and fly to Paris and light cigars and dazzle our wives and girlfriends. We’re not artists — we’re Lionsgate executives. We see life in relatively simple terms.”

When Twillight director Catherine Hardwicke walked away from directing New Moon it was allegedly because she didn’t want to make the sequel under deadline and budget constraints that would have cramped her creative style, according to an Entertainment Weekly interview. Those constraints were at least partly imposed by Summit honcho Rob Friedman, who is now Lionsgate’s co-chairman. Do the math.

The Lionsgate guy who told Deadline‘s Nikki Finke and Michael Fleming last weekend that things were hopeful as far as Ross directing Catching Fire now says, “I am in shock.” The source and his colleagues “expected the deal to go down right after Easter weekend,” Finke reports. “And they even went so far as to privately deny an internet report that Ross had told the studio at the start of last week that he would not helm the sequel because he didn’t want to repeat himself.”

The line about needing to “juice the guys we gotta juice, so we can make more money so we can juice the guys we gotta juice” is from a mid ’70s film noir set in Los Angeles. Name the film, the director, the character who said the line and the actor who played him.

Three paragraphs in Guy Lodge‘s Variety review deliver all you need to know about the plotting and the human characteristics in Peter Berg‘s Battleship, which opens overseas in a couple of days. I’ve actually made the three graphs into five.

“Cut to Oahu, Hawaii, where jobless layabout Alex (Taylor Kitsch) is celebrating his 26th birthday in a dive bar with disapproving older brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), a straitlaced Navy recruit. After Alex commits a drunken infraction designed to impress leggy physiotherapist Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), Stone issues a final-straw demand: Alex is to join him in the Navy.

“In seemingly no time at all, Alex has graduated to lieutenant level despite equally feckless behavior in uniform, and is in a serious relationship with Samantha, whose stern dad (Liam Neeson) just happens to be commander of the Pacific fleet.

“All principals are conveniently involved, then, when Planet G’s alien spacecraft crashes into the Pacific and rises ominously from the depths near the naval base in Oahu. A reconnaissance mission led by Alex and scrappy female officer Raikes (Rihanna) aggravates the visitors into opening fire, setting the stage for a protracted series of back-and-forth pyrotechnic attacks of increasing sound and fury until an abruptly curtailed finale.

“‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ mutters Alex, a veritable Cassandra of the high seas — and that’s after two destroyer ships have already been blown to smithereens. Bright enough to quote Homer back at his commanding officer, but dim enough to think the Japanese wrote ‘The Art of War’, he’s too blandly inscrutable a hero to root for with much enthusiasm, which goes for most of the characters.

“The exception is Decker’s Samantha, who’s so unctuously inexpressive, we might actively root for her demise under one of the enemy’s flaming razor-balls.”

Let’s remember that the well-known shot in Jaws (starting at 3:35) of Roy Scheider peeking out at the water over the shoulder of some guy he’s talking to is a steal from Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess. I’m speaking of a shot of Karl Malden peeking over the shoulder of a guy he’s conferring with in order to check out Montgomery Clift, who’s standing on a sidewalk a few yards away.

There’s nothing wrong with theft, mind. The greatest poets have done it, or so said T.S. Eliot.

..for a big new film (not Prometheus but something generically showy and splashy) that’s mostly about teasing and trailing in the creative wake of other films. A teaser for a trailer for a sham of a mockery of a mockery of a sham of a trailer for a teaser and a hand-job. Or, as this 4.10 Ben Fritz L.A. Times article states, “Movie trailers have become a main event…the internet and rabid fan culture have turned movie trailers, once seen only in theaters, into works that are promoted and analyzed as avidly as the films they advertise.”

Last night I left my wallet in the Clarity Screening Room after seeing God Bless America. All my life I’ve been a genius at losing things, so this was par for the course. I realized the wallet was gone about 15 minutes after I left. I immediately U-turned and headed back. The projectionist and a security guy helped me look around and it wasn’t there. Somebody had apparently taken it. “What media person would do that?,” I asked myself. It seemed nuts.

Anyway, KROQ deejay Rich Rubin got in touch a couple of hours ago and told me he had the wallet. He found it, picked it up and decided against giving it to the projectionist. And he decided against looking at the ID and trying to call or email me last night. (You’d have to figure that the owner of the wallet would be going nuts and most likely calling their credit card companies and cancelling their cards, right?) As it happened I called my bank and had them “de-link” my two cards but not cancel them. In any event it was a very welcome thing to hear from Rubin, and my sincere thanks for being a good guy and all.

Bobcat Goldthwait‘s God Bless America (Magnet, 5.11) will be getting a lot of space on this site for the next month or so. Not because it’s a first-rate social satire or even an especially well-made film. But it deserves to be seen and discussed because it says some dead-on things about all the revolting people out there. Goldthwait hates like I do, and so he’s a kind of brother in a sense. If you believe that “hell is other people”, you’re going to love this film. Or much of it.

I just wish Goldthwait had tried a little harder and assembled something that works on a dramatic-emotional level, and not just a rhetorical one.

But this is a very moral film. Goldthwait is really saying something about the increasing levels of rampant egotism among the mall mongrels and people failing to behave in a considerate, compassionate fashion, and that things would be much nicer all around if people showed more class and manners and maybe read an occasional book or…you know, tried harder not to be dicks and assholes. As such God Bless America is bold and ballsy and deserves attention.

As the trailer makes clear and all the South by Southwest reviews have said, God Bless America is a low-key thing about Frank (Joel Murray), a depressed, pissed-off, older divorced guy who’s been canned and dissed by his young daughter and been told he might be dying from a brain tumor…this guy succumbs to a kind of Howard Beale-like breakdown and decides to start offing the most appalling people in society. The ego pigs, the Tea Party haters, the materialist whiners, the vulgarians, the movie-theatre texters, the people who occupy two spaces when they park their cars, and especially the American Idol stars, staffers, fans…and one of the talent-less contestants.

Frank’s first victim is a braying teenage bitch (Maddie Hanson) who has her own reality show. He loses control when he sees footage of Maddie throwing a tantrum at her 16th birthday party because her dad has given her a car that isn’t cool enough. So Frank plugs her…yes! A young kindred spirit named Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr) witnesses the killing and finds Frank at a nearby motel and praises him profusely and says, “Don’t stop now…keep it up!”

I wasn’t laughing at this film as much as smiling and snickering, but I did guffaw when Roxy suggests that Twi-hards should be placed on Frank’s hit list.

But I didn’t laugh much when Diablo Cody was mentioned as a possible target because she coddled and romanticized and half-endorsed teenage pregnancy with Juno, or so Frank believes. And I totally and radically disagree with Goldthwait’s condemnation of Woody Allen for falling in love with Soon-Yi Previn. Most of the targets in this movie are Middle-American mall people and anti-Obama, anti-gay righties and Tea Party slime, but Frank also hates showbiz lefties in certain ways.

Make no mistake — a lot of the folks who eat lead in this film deserve it in a metaphorical sense. And it feels good and satisfying to see them “pay”, if you will. And at the same time it feels a bit creepy. Obviously we’re meant to see Frank’s rampage as a form of acting out and not actual murder, but the shootings begin to seem cruel and excessive after a while.

What was the last significant film in which society’s sinners were killed for their venality? David Fincher‘s Se7en.

But because God Bless America is basically one long rant about how much of American society has sunk into a coarse and value-less pit of selfishness and snide attitudes and self-aggrandizement, it starts to lose its tension after the first 40 or 45 minutes, and then it just kind of treads water and hangs in there until the end.

There’s a shot of Frank and Roxy entering a movie theater, and we see a poster in the front for Man on Wire (’08), which apparently indicates Goldthwait was shooting this thing when George Bush was president. There’s an issue of possible sexual interest or tension between Frank and Roxy…dealt with and disposed of. There’s a curious absence of attention from the law as Frank and Roxy make their way around the country, starting in what appears to be their home town of Syracuse, New York, and then making their way south to Manhattan and New Jersey, and then across the country to Los Angeles. They’ve been captured on a security video camera and are driving around in a stolen yellow muscle car, and all Frank has done to evade capture is to switch the plates, once, and nobody “makes” them or finks them out? C’mon.

Rick Santorum was looking at a fairly poor performance in the 4.24 Republican Presidential primary in his home state of Pennsylvania. So rather than suffer humiliation and be more or less shamed out of the race, he chose the face-saving gesture of quitting now. Bye!

It was my decision not to attend South by Southwest 2012 and thereby not see The Cabin in the Woods (Lionsgate, 4.13) a little earlier than most, so there’s no one to blame. And yet somehow everyone has apparently seen this thing except for me, and I’m trying not to feel vaguely resentful about being the guy in the caboose with a burlap bag over my head. Tonight is finally the night — a screening waaaaay downtown at L.A. Live followed by an after-party I probably wont want to attend.

I know I was kept away from this thing because of my feelings about Cabin producer and co-writer Joss Whedon. That’s a blockage on my part, and I recognize that it’s my responsibility to get past that…or not.

Sunday used to be the Oscar Poker recording day, but competing weekend activities (i.e., family commitments) have been interfering lately. I can remember talking about…about….uhhm…oh, right, To Kill A Mockingbird. Sasha Stone and I definitely covered that topic. And the emotionally difficult feat of buying a car (and how women are the primary instigators of this painful process). And the constant beatings I’ve suffered for saying that “certain” parties were inclined to favor The Hunger Games.

Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino chimed in on the box-office situation, and the likelihood that The Three Stooges will fizzle. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Tom Hanks will probably play Walt Disney in a making-of-Mary Poppins pic called Saving Mr. Banks, with Emma Thompson expected to play Poppins author P.L. Travers. Variety‘s Marc Graser is reporting that the Disney-based project, to be directed by John Lee Hancock, is “based on the true story of how Disney spent 14 years courting Travers for the film rights to the character,” who was played by Julie Andrews in the classic family flick.

The name in the title refers to a character who was played in the 38 year-old film by David Tomlinson. I have no recollection of the Banks character, but he was the cold and snooty paterfamilias of the Banks clan, and Mary Poppins’ employer. I also can’t remember who Tomlinson-the-actor was. (I had to look him up, and his face didn’t register.) On top of which Hanks will obviously wear a moustache throughout this film. These things in themselves spell possible trouble.

But if the script can somehow work in a reference to cryogenic freezing, I’ll be at least semi-placated.

A guy I know who gets around has seen “almost all” of Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows. He reports the following: “While it has Beetlejuice elements, this is not a broad comedy. It’s a gothic romance with strong farcical elements, but the trailer makes it seem like Love at First Bite and it definitely is not.

“Johnny Depp‘s Barnabas Collins has a bit of a Chauncey Gardner quality as a fish out of water, and there are even elements of H.G. Wells from Time After Time as far as a cultured character trying to fit into a drastically changed society. The anachronism-based humor does work quite well. The film is funny, but it also has full-bodied horror elements. Barnabas does kill people in this and when he engages on a full-out war against Angelique (Eva Green), the evil witch who cursed him, they’re playing for keeps and it’s a bloody battle.

“In short there’s more of the Burton Sweeney Todd than the trailer implies. This is not Burton’s Addams Family, but a successful amalgamation of his comedic and gothic horror styles.”

Oh, and Michelle Pfeiffer‘s performance as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (the mother of Chloe Moretz‘s Carolyn, who reminds me in the trailer of Winona Ryder‘s character in Beetlejuice) is “her strongest work in years.”