My first reaction to this Movieline clip from Justin Kurzel‘s The Snowtown Murders was “why don’t they just call it Shoot The Dog?” That suggestion (i.e., command) seems to encapsulate the sociopathic essence of Daniel Henshaw‘s John Bunting character, and it’s certainly easy to remember.

My second reaction: Lucas Pittaway‘s response to Henshaw’s intimidation is the exact same expression that young James Frecheville used throughout David Michod‘s Animal Kingdom, which Snowtown Murders was clearly made in alignment with. As I said on 2.19.10, my only problem with Animal Kingdom is Frecheville’s “too-subdued performance as the young lead, [which] to me suggests either retardation or a lithium overdose.”

The Snowtown Murders has a very decent 89% Rotten Tomatoes ranking, although the reactions of Lou Lumenick and Karina Longworth have given me pause.

Initially screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival as Snowtown, The Snowtown Murders opens today on IFC Midnight VOD and at Manhattan’s IFC Center. It will play at 9:30 pm on 3.15 at the Spielberg theatre inside LA’s Egyptian.

A few weeks ago I downloaded Apple’s OS X Lion for my three-year-old iMac, and yesterday I bought myself a new Lion-equipped Macbook Pro just to be safe. (The other Macbook Pro, purchased in 2010, is having start-up problems and in the shop for a diagnostic.) And I’m really missing Snow Leopard, I must say.

The primary irritant is that Lion is devoted to eliminating scroll bars, which I’ve been happily using for years and years, and forcing you to mostly use the touch pad like it’s an iPad. Two fingers, three fingers, etc. A scroll bar appears on the side of a given panel every so often, but it disappears just as often. They could at least give you the option of choosing to work with scroll bars or going Full Lion, but no. You must suit up and get with their program.

I haven’t wanted to get into a fist fight this much since the heyday of my hate-on for the N.Y. Times tech guys for refusing to provide embed codes for Tony Scott‘s Critics Picks pieces.

The five-year anniversary of the initial airing of the final Sopranos episode, called “Made In America,” will occur on June 10th, or roughly 100 days hence. And for some reason Grantland‘s Steve Hyden has chosen now, March 1st, to get into it again.

I own the final Sopranos season on Bluray, and I happened to re-watch “Made in America” a month or so ago, and it’s kind of amazing, looking back, that so many people got so effing angry and feigned so much confusion and uncertainty (myself among them, at least for the first few hours) about the meaning of the Big Blackout.

It boiled down to this: nobody had a problem with Tony getting hit, but they wanted to see it dramatized in some sprawling nutritious fashion. They wanted the pop of muffled gunfire, they wanted blood on the onion rings, they wanted Carmela and the kids to lose it, they wanted the “Members Only” shooter to be identified and hunted down and killed. After seven-plus years of following the series they felt they’d earned more than a sudden, silent “eff you.”

Plus the idea of death being subjectively portrayed as a state of absolute nothingness…no tunnel, no bright light, no family members, no sense of finality or completion…that didn’t go down too well either.

Hyden runs a quote from series creator David Chase: “The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice.’ They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly.”

“Chase denied that the cut to black was a ‘fuck you’ move,” Hyden writes, “but his resentment of the audience’s expectations in this quote belies that. While calling the end of ‘Made in America’ an act of hostility goes a little too far, this much seems obvious: Chase managed to end The Sopranos on a note that would satisfy no one more than himself.”

“Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there,” Chase said in a morning-after interview with TV critic Alan Sepinwall.

“[But] for millions of viewers, this idea was so perverse that it almost seemed criminal, a sentiment summed up by the very New York Post-sounding New York Post headline ‘Tony and Gang Whack Fans.'”

Here’s how HE commenter Jamie Stuart explained it on 6.11.07:

“I’ve never sat through an entire episode of The Sopranos, but in watching the final four minutes of last night’s episode or so on YouTube, Tony was hit. Period. Based on pure filmic language, that’s how it reads.”

Those three words were met with considerable disagreement and denial on this site. It went on and on and on and on and on.

“You have a character at the bar who keeps looking over, then he walks to the bathroom and the camera dollies to reveal the bathroom is just off to Tony’s side, providing the geography and the logistics. And there’s your answer. This show always had a very formal aesthetic, and this dolly was motivated.

“The abrupt cut to black was it. That’s how it happens in the mob, as per Goodfellas — no yelling, no nothing, it just happens.”

“Just how closely did people who call themselves fans pay attention last night?,” wrote HE commenter Roy Batty. “The writing is not only on the wall — it’s on the floor, the ceiling and fluttering from a banner over the entrance: Tony and probably the family got hit.

“The single biggest signpost that is a virtual headstone is the flashback to Bobby and Tony in the boat talking about what it’s like to be killed. Bobby says you don’t see it coming and it’s just over. The show then ends with a ‘smash cut’ to black. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

“I think too many people are pissed that Chase didn’t end it the way they had written in their minds or hate the idea that Tony, et. al. are gone. I don’t know if it was brilliant, but not seen through glasses of denial it’s pretty clear.”

A release from Open Road Films announces that David Ayer‘s End of Watch, a young-LA-cops drama costarring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena, Anna Kendrick, Frank Grillo and America Ferrera, will open on 9.28.12. Here’s the “ooh, wow” avant-garde element: “Giving the story a gripping, first-person immediacy, the action unfolds entirely through footage from the handheld HD cameras of the police officers, gang members, surveillance cameras, and citizens caught in the line of fire.”

If I was casting Fox Searchlight’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, I would never choose the buxom, thick-lipped Scarlet Johansson to play the thin-lipped, somewhat rigid-mannered Janet Leigh, as announced earlier today in a Variety story.

There’s a reason Leigh was a star from the early ’50s to early ’60s — it was a generally uptight, conformist, buttoned-down era, and Leigh’s cautious look and vibe fit right into that. She wasn’t Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren or Gloria Grahame. She was large-boobed, but she was basically Miss (or Mrs.) White Picket Fence. Her face didn’t move a muscle in The Vikings.

And if Johansson had been time-machined back to the early ’50s she would have never made it as a big-league actress. At best she would have been the tart, the cigarette girl — Barbara Nichols in Sweet Smell of Success. Conversely Leigh probably wouldn’t have found much success if she’d begun in the mid to late ’90s. Correct and cautious wouldn’t have made it in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky blowjob era.

In Sam Kashner‘s Vanity Fair piece about The Sopranos (“The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos“), he reports that David Chase‘s first feature, about a rock band in ’60s New Jersey, is called Not Fade Away. A month ago Variety‘s Dave McNary reported that the film, costarring James Gandolfini and John Magaro, was being called The Twylight Zones — an awful title. I’m presuming Kashner’s is the correct one. Paramount Vantage will release the film sometime next fall.

David Chase, James Gandolfini.

On page 156 and 157 of Vanity Fair‘s current issue portrait photos of the Dark Shadows cast — Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter — appear. Warner Bros. will open Tim Burton ‘s vampire film on 5.11.

Wiki synopsis: “In 1752, the Collins family sails from Liverpool, England to North America. The son, Barnabas (Depp), grows up to be a wealthy playboy in Collinsport, Maine and is the master of Collinwood Manor. He breaks the heart of a witch, Angelique Bouchard Green), who turns him into a vampire and buries him alive. In 1972, Barnabas is accidentally freed from his coffin and returns to find his once-magnificent manor in ruin. It is occupied by dysfunctional Collins descendants (Pfeiffer playing Elizabeth Collins0 and other residents, all of whom have secrets.”

Jonny Lee Miller costars as Roger Collins, Elizabeth’s brother. Chloe Moretz as Carolyn Stoddard, Elizabeth’s rebellious teenage daughter. And Helena Bonham Carter plays Dr. Julia Hoffman, Elizabeth’s hired live-in psychiatrist.

I finally saw Chris Kentis and Laura Lau‘s Silent House (Open Road, 3.9) last night, having missed it at Sundance 2011. I also managed to miss Gustavo Hernandez‘s Uruguyan original, which the Kentis-Lau version is a remake of, at the Director’s Fortnight section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

My son Dylan didn’t care for the final third and I, too, had issues with this portion, which wanders into Johnny Favorite territory. But the single-take “real time” aspect — it gives the impression of being one continual 88-minute hand-held shot — won me over as an exercise alone. On top of which Kentis-Lau are trying to revive the creepy-scary Repulsion vibe — showing very little, relying mainly on sounds, forcing the imagination to do the work. This alone puts Silent House heads and shoulders above most horror pics. So at the very least I applaud the effort even if I found some of the action and payoff material bothersome and misleading.

Elizabeth Olsen totally carries the film as Sara, the terrorized lead. Her costars (Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer Stevens, Julia Taylor Ross, Haley Murphy) aren’t given a chance to do anything that might stick in your mind, at least from a performance standpoint.

The most noteworthy “real time” films in my book are Rope (’48), The Set-Up (’49), High Noon (’52), 12 Angry Men (’57), Nick of Time (’95), Run Lola Run (’98), Phone Booth (’03), Before Sunset (’04), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (’05) and United 93 (’06). Wait, didn’t United 93 go in for a little compression here and there?

The new Universal Pictures’ animated earth-logo intro is a vast improvement over the yellowish earth lesion version they’ve been running with for the last ten or twelve years. (I was actually disinvited from Universal screenings three or four years ago for complaining about this.) The darker, bluer tones in the Centennial celebration version are extremely handsome and clean.

Tiny Furniture sprawled…writ large. Drop 30 pounds and 75% of the series loses its narrative propellant. I agree that Lena Dunham is essential to the conversation and to 2012 hip film culture, but she needs to do a Jonah Hill and see where she stands without the weight.

Obviously there’s a reason why Andrew Breitbart, the youngish, often steamed-up conservative commentator-blogger with three websites and four kids, died just after midnight this morning at age 43. Guys his age just don’t keel over, and so “natural causes” — the explanation given — doesn’t cut it. Update: Probably a heart attack.

I immediately wrote longtime investigative journo Mark Ebner, who co-wrote “Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon — the Case Against Celebrity.”” (2004) with Brietbart, and asked what the hell happened.

“Andrew left four beautiful children, a beautiful wife and extended family,” Ebner replied. “He didn’t smoke or do drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was generous with his family, his friends and, of course, the media. Was he not? He had a big heart, and I guess his heart was just too big for this world.”

“C’mon, Mark…what happened?”

“That’s my statement Jeff,” Ebner replied. “Use it or not. ”

The Guardian‘s Karen McVeigh has reported that Breitbart “was walking near his house in the Brentwood neighborhood shortly after midnight Thursday when he collapsed, his father-in-law Orson Bean said. Someone saw him fall and called paramedics, who tried to revive him. They rushed him to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, Bean said.

“Breitbart had suffered heart problems a year earlier, but Bean said he could not pinpoint what happened.”

A loather of all things leftie, a rabid despiser of the Occupy movement and a Tea Party cheerleader, Breitbart was irksome — okay, infuriating — but never boring. He had a hearty laugh and a beaming smile, and he had one of those swaggering, life-gulping attitudes or personalities that you sometimes run into or read about in novels.

I knew of Brietbart for years as Matt Drudge‘s guy, my relationship with Drudge reaching back to ’97 (or was it ’96?). I first ran into him at an LA party for “Hollywood Interrupted.” I next spoke with him at a Laurel Canyon party around the time that the Huffington Post was being assembled. Breitbart helped in the launching of that site. (Arianna Huffington was at that party also.)

Breitbart launched Breitbart.com in 2005, and then three “subsites,” including BigHollywood.com and BigGovernment.com.

The following statement was posted on Breitbart’s website today: “With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart. We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior. Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love. ”

Breitbart stepped into it two years ago when Shirley Sherrod filed a defamation suit against him, alleging that a hair-trigger assessment had caused her firing from the Agriculture Department by the Obama administration.

According to a 2010 L.A. Times profile by Robin Abcarian, Breitbart “lived in Westwood with his wife, Susie, and their four young children. He was adopted by moderately conservative Jewish parents and attended two of L.A.’s most exclusive private schools — Carlthorp and Brentwood. He had a n office on Sawtelle Blvd.

“His father, Gerald, owned Fox and Hounds, a landmark Tudor-style Santa Monica restaurant that later became the punk rock club Madame Wong’s West. His mother, Arlene, was an executive for Bank of America in Beverly Hills and downtown L.A.”

43 year-old guys with a wife, four kids and a thriving business don’t just collapse and die. Not even ones with heart conditions, in my experience. 43 is way too young, doesn’t add up.

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.

Remember the days when travelling actually interfered with the ability of a reporter to call around and write stories and self-publish them?