Due respect to Michael R. Roskam and the Bullhead team, but I was fundamentally uncomfortable with the story of a primitive, inarticulate, bull-like Belgian guy with no balls. Literally. Having been more or less castrated as a youth by a neighborhood psychopath. I disengaged and in fact ran the other direction from this film so fast it wasn’t funny. Life is hard enough when you have a pair. And the Academy foreign branch preferred this to Miss Bala?

Is this another teaser-for-a-Superbowl-Dictator trailer or the actual Superbowl spot itself? The only original material is (a) “Hey, America, I bought NBC!” and (b) the track-race sequence. The “what am I, a Kardashian?”/”No, you’re much less hairy” exchange was in the original teaser.

TV ad guys trying to reach Joe Superbowl know that however attuned or even brilliant he might be about sports, when it comes to movies he’s half-bombed and/or half-retarded. His eyelids are at half-mast, he’s slow on the pickup and his pants are halfway down around his ankles. You have to keep it primitive, primitive, primitive. And repeat stuff. Think I’m being dismissive? Ask any marketing guy with any of the big studios.

This went up sometime late yesterday. Forgive me for taking one night off and going out to dinner at Genghis Cohen. Fifty lashes. The sense of peace and well-being that came with hooking up with a new, obviously together accountant was so enveloping that I went into a kind of bliss-out mode and forgot myself for a few hours.

“Side by Side, a new documentary produced by Keanu Reeves, takes an in-depth look at this revolution. Through interviews with directors, cinematographers, film students, producers, technologies, editors, and exhibitors, Side by Side examines all aspects of filmmaking — from capture to edit, visual effects to color correction, distribution to archive. At this moment when digital and photochemical filmmaking coexist, Side By Side explores what has been gained, what is lost, and what the future might bring.”

South by Southwest 2012 has announced what appears to be most of its slate. The crassly commercial 21 Jump Street will be the centerpiece and Big Easy Express, a doc by Emmett Mallory, will close things out. I’m going to have to beg and plead for tickets from publicists and take cabs and bicycle rickshaws and wait in long press lines and contend with James Rocchi singing karaoke, etc. SXSW is no duckwalk.

Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum in 21 Jump Street.

It’s been almost 45 years since the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 40 years since the Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach, about 31 or 32 years since the heyday of The Pretenders and 20 to 30 years since the peak days of The Police and Sting. And yet each and every Starbucks you walk into these days insists on playing little else besides classic Beatles, Pretenders, Police/Sting and Allman Brothers cuts, over and over and over and over.

The over-50 people who run companies and corporations just won’t play anything recorded within the last 20 or 25 years, certainly not the last 15. Unless it’s some kind of soft country-folkie-acoustic stuff from whomever. Okay, I’ve heard a couple of Beck cuts. Well, I guess I just mean “Loser.”

Will we still be hearing ’70s music in malls and cafes ten years from now? 20? 50? I like the old stuff as much as anyone else, but can you imagine walking into a cafe in 1972, say, and listening to little else except ’30s jazz and ’40s Glenn Miller music? When and/or how will the classic rock stranglehold on our communal music-groove consciousness come to an end?

I’ve just parked my car on a leafy residential street in Glendale, and I felt a sublime surge of calm and well-being when I realized there were no parking meters or residential sticker requirements. Okay, a sign said “No parking on Wednesday — 8 am to 10 am” but otherwise it was a place of peace. I felt like I’d parked my car on a shady cul de sac in Bedford Falls in 1946. It’s been the best thing that’s happened to me so far today. That plus my accountant being a nice guy and shrugging his shoulders and wishing me well when I told I’m going with a new CPA.

I drove down to Los Angeles yesterday afternoon to take care of some accounting matters. I’m looking at a full day of hitting banks, meeting with two accountants, driving around, etc. This won’t be a big posting day, or at least not until later this afternoon or this evening.

Last Sunday I wrote that facial stubble was mandatory for lead actors in Sundance 2012 films, and that “every single actor in every single film I saw in Park City complied.” The mandate also includes mainstream cinema, as this still from Skyfall, the latest 007 installment, makes clear. Daniel Craig‘s James Bond was absolutely clean-shaven in Casino Royale, but I can’t recall if he wore GQ stubble in Quantum of Solace.

Joss Wheedon‘s The Avengers opens in less than four months and Disney marketing chose to limit their Super Bowl spot…oh, I get it. This is a ten-second tease for a trailer that will debut during the game. I still maintain that Wheedon is a lightweight (i.e., moderately talented) clock-puncher and journeyman, and nowhere near the realm of James Cameron or Bryan Singer even. Here’s the most recent trailer.

Last Sunday I wrote that facial stubble was mandatory for lead actors in Sundance 2012 films, and that “every single actor in every single film I saw in Park City complied.” The mandate also includes mainstream cinema, as this still from Skyfall, the latest 007 installment, makes clear. Daniel Craig‘s James Bond was absolutely clean-shaven in Casino Royale, but I can’t recall if he wore GQ stubble in Quantum of Solace.

Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan is a four-CD package of many, many artists signing Bob Dylan songs. The revenue goes to Amnesty International, hence the copy line “this album saves lives.” But my reaction when I saw this poster was that music itself can do this. Regularly, I imagine.

All great art in fact — films, plays, paintings, novels — has the power to lift people out of the doldrums and turn them on and nourish their souls to some degree. Dylan’s music alone made a huge difference to hundreds of thousands in the ’60s, I’m sure. You could list any number of albums, films, books, TV shows, documentaries.

So what movie, if any, has saved anyone’s life out there? Or at least delivered some kind of spiritual bloom effect? You were in a kind of downish, despairing place when you went into the theatre or popped in the disc, and when it was over you felt significantly different — aroused, aflame and no longer fluondering. Jim Hoberman was recently quoted saying that Jules and Jim had this effect when he was 14 or 15. Costa Gavras‘s Z had this effect upon me, to some extent. I’d never felt politically engaged by a film until I saw it in my mid teens…wow. Second most arousing: Hearts and Minds.

What movie changed LexG‘s life? Or Glenn Kenny‘s?

Earlier today I was buying some regrettably expensive sunglasses at Macy’s at the Beverly Center, and I asked the sales girl to just let me wear them out and to forget the imitation leather case and the cleaning cloth and the plastic carrying bag and the receipt even. I just wanted the glasses.

“Are you sure?,” she said. “Because you’ll need the receipt if you want to return them.”

“I won’t. They’re just sunglasses.”

“You’d be surprised how many people come back and want to return or exchange,” she explained.

“What do they say when they do that?,” I asked. “What…’excuse me but these sunglasses that I bought yesterday don’t seem to be working out’?”

“I’m just saying, people change their minds,” she said.

“It’s like returning a handkerchief. ‘Excuse me but I bought this handkerchief yesterday and I blew my nose last night and it doesn’t seem to be functioning correctly so I need to return it.’ Or ‘excuse me but I bought this T-shirt yesterday and wore it during a date with this girl I just met and we went to a couple of bars and I don’t know…the T-shirt just isn’t working out. I’d like to exchange it for another.'”

People are so impulslve, compulsive, lame, scattered. Waddling around in their little fantasy-whim bubbles. They buy stuff without thinking and the next day they’re Marie Antoinette. “Eeeewww, Louis…this rack of lamb doesn’t taste right,” etc.