Four or five days ago I did a phoner with Hit and Run producers Kim Waltrip and Jim Casey, who have a company called Kim & Jim Productions. They’re a bit formal and guarded, but nice. Hit and Run opens today with a Rotten Tomatoes hoi polloi rating of 67%. I was mixed on it myself, but I loved the writing. Here’s the mp3.

(l.) Kim Waltrip and (r.) Jim Casey, producers of Hit and Run, co-chairs of Kim & Jim Productions.

“Much of Hit and Run is a very cleverly written, refreshingly original, angular-attitude comedy that reminded me (in the early stages, at least, and in portions throughout) of David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96),” I wrote last week, “and that is high praise indeed. That classic comedy had inspired character flavor, unusual detours and flaky oddball dialogue, and so does Hit and Run. And while this stuff was happening during last night’s premiere screening, I was delighted.”

One of our topics was the fact that Kim is a moderate Republican — far from a crime but certainly a curiosity in this overwhelming liberal industry. In her defense she’s a “green” Republican who believes in conservation and gay marriage and is generally liberal-ish on social issues. I didn’t ask her if she supports Romney-Ryan — that would have been an antagpnistic question under the circumstances.

Nicole Kidman has appeared nude and semi-nude in movies and photo sessions before, and I guess this V magazine spread is some kind of nod to her white-trash character in Lee Daniels‘ The Paperboy. I just don’t get the hair. It’s part sheepdog, part floor mop, part Jane Fonda in Klute.

Monochrome is a good idea, but the crispness of the image is almost a little too Richard Avedon-ish. You know what I would have done? Have the photographer deliver a rustic photo of Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln in the old Matthew Brady style, like a daguerreotype taken in the 1860s.

The normal 21st Century thing is for major newspapers to fire their movie critics, so it feels almost surreal to hear that the Orange Country Register is looking to hire one. I could make several suggestions to editor Ken Brusic, but let’s keep it to one for now: former Arizona Daily Star critic, OK magazine critic, blogger and Twitter guy Phil Villarrreal. Do you have to be a Republican to be considered? Is it realistic to expect to even find more than one or two Republican film critics? Kyle Smith, Michael Medved and who else?

As Hitler videos go, this isn’t half bad. Except the Akin thing will go away within two or three days…okay, a week. And the brainiac who wrote the copy has misspelled “know” and “disappear.” And the Stalin reference makes no sense. But some of it is funny. “We never called Romney a felon…yeah, right.”

This morning I’m a tad more knowledgable about factors that may have led to Patrick Goldstein having taken a buyout from the L.A. Times and shut down his 12 year-old column, “The Big Picture.” A key thing for any working journalist to consider is to think about the amount of content you produced ten years ago, and then ask yourself “would that cut it in today’s media environment?” Ten years ago I was banging out two columns per week for Reel.com, and no, that would not cut it today.

This, I gather, is the crux of the Goldstein exit saga. He wouldn’t agree to grim up, eat more Wheaties and churn out more stuff. He wouldn’t get with the 2012 program.

You could assert that it was unrealistic for anyone who had Goldstein’s gig to run with the mindset of “I’m going to write one column a week and tap out a few blog posts in the margins.” It seemed that more than a few of his columns, boiled down, were basically “I just went to lunch with so and so” along with that “summer movie posse” thing (show kids some trailers) he’s been doing since forever. We all go dry or stale from time to time and need to re-charge, but it did seem as if Goldstein was out of ideas or running low on gas or something along those lines.

There’s also a view with although the L.A. Times is structurally unsound with creaking timbers and financial wolves circling (hence my remark yesterday that it’s “largely a gutted, dying organization”), Calendar, run by John Corrigan, is actually a fairly lively place to be. It’s now employing six movie writer-reporters in hopes of ramping up on that Oscar season ad income. The latest new staffers are Mark Olsen and Glenn Whipp, adding to Rebecca Keegan, Steven Zeitchik, Amy Kaufman and Nicole Sperling. So Goldstein is gone, okay, but new writers, new ideas and new innovations will quickly rush in and take his place.

Last night I saw A Liar’s Autobiography, a 3D animated film about the life of the late Monty Python headliner Graham Chapman (1941 — 1989), based on Chapman’s comedic memoir that was initially published in 1980. No reviews permitted until the beginning of the Toronto Film Festival, but here’s a clip from Chapman’s funeral that worked nicely as I slumped in my seat.

The film, a Bill and Ben Production, uses Chapman’s recording of his autobiography, made shortly before he died of throat (or tonsil) cancer. Produced and directed by London-based Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson, the film had several animation companies working on different chapters of varying lengths. ” John Cleese has recorded new dialogue which will be matched with Chapman’s voice, Michael Palin will voice Chapman’s father, Terry Jones will play his mother, Terry Gilliam plays Graham psychiatrist…and they all play various other roles,” says the Wiki page. Eric Idle was apparently the only Monty Python fellow who abstained.

With getting specific or even geographical I’m hearing Ben Affleck‘s Argo, Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, Robert Lorenz and Clint Eastwood‘s…wait, not Trouble With The Curve? I thought that sounded right, made sense. Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone, Ken Burns‘ Central Park Five and what else? What about a little wackadoodle Terrence Malick action?

Patrick Goldstein‘s “The Big Picture” column, which began 12 years ago, has breathed its last. Goldstein explained nothing in his final installment except “this is my last.” No, he wasn’t whacked. Rather, he’s taken a buyout. But was he asked to take it or did he go up to his editors and say, “Can you guys give me an effing buyout so I can blow this pop stand?” Had they leaned on him to change his game (file more often, become chattier) and he said “naaah”?

Patrick Goldstein

I wrote Patrick and asked what’s up, what happened, what he’ll be doing. A new online column? Radio silence. Nikki Finke is reporting that part of his deal is that he’s agreed not to trash the L.A. Times. In other words, he’s not allowed to speak candidly.

Whatever happened, the L.A. Times has been swirling around and down for a long time. It’s largely a gutted, dying organization, and no longer the kind of place, apparently, that understands and fully supports the kind of in-depth, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” film-industry column Goldstein has been writing all these years.

I gather Patrick came in one day, looked around at the L.A. Times newsroom, figured the jig was up and why prolong the agony?, made a face like he’s John Wayne looking at Dean Martin in the opening minutes of Rio Bravo, hocked a loogie and spit into the spitoon, took the check, said “adios” and got on his horse and rode into the hills like Shane. He’ll take a few weeks off and start writing again, I mean.

A friend says “it has been known for several weeks that the new editors at the Times had laid down the law to Goldstein, insisting [that] he write much more frequently in return for the big check he was getting. It was no more ‘one column a week’ and occasional internet pieces, which he kept resisting. The guy would rather go to his kid’s little league games and in reality write about baseball instead of showbiz.”

A friend was asking why The Sapphires, which I half-loved after seeing it in Cannes, isn’t in my Oscar Balloon “best of the year” list. I said it’s because it only really works for the first 40% or 50%, and that the second half doesn’t have the same snap-crackle-pop. Now I’m wondering what other films fit this description. Nominations? A friend says “is it any good?’ and you go “yeah…well, it is for about an hour and then it runs out of gas.”

“I saw John Hilcoat‘s Lawless this morning — a bootlegging movie about backwoods macho bludgeoning, stabbing, gouging, shooting, throat-slitting, shotgunning and all that good exploitation yeehaw crap,” I wrote on 5.19 from the Cannes Film Festival. “It’s a better acted, more finely photographed and much more violent upgrade of an early ’70s Roger Corman film. So why did they screen it here? It’s a drive-in movie for rednecks, and I’m sitting in Grand Palais on the Cote d’Azur watching this flotsam?

“It’s set in 1931, the height of the Depression, and I guess I wanted something classy and fabled like Phillip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox…no such luck with Hillcoat.

“Tom Hardy plays a time-travelling robot with a hick accent who can’t be killed with a throat-slashing or with two or three shots to the chest…he jes keeps on a’comin.

“As far as I’m concerned Hillcoat is no longer someone to watch. He’s a thick-fingered plebe. The Proposition, for me, was crude, sadistic, high-style hash about amber lighting and grubbily dressed actors whose faces were smeared with chicken grease. The Road, his post-apocalyptic father-son movie, was half-decent but was mostly about compositions filled with grayness and ash and waste of one kind or another. And now this sludge.

“‘Two good things about Lawless,’ I tweeted. ‘(1) Guy Pearce‘s ultra-venal, almost Dracula-like villain, and (2) a nice nude scene featuring Jessica Chastain.'”

I can’t think of another commercial theatre that I like more than the Aero. The fact that it’s a tastefully programmed rep house with first-rate projection standards is only the half of of it. The other half is that it’s a living, commercially solvent remnant of what theatres in every small and mid-sized town in this country used to be. It’s what John Travolta said of Jackrabbit Slims in Pulp Fiction — “a museum with a pulse.”

Except movies look and sound a lot better at the heavily refurbished Aero than they ever did in single-screen houses in the ’60s and ’70s.

Plus the Aero is on a nice quiet street (Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue) with two yogurt shops nearby and nice, settled-down people walking around and no coarse, squealing low-lifes laughing too loudly over glasses of wine. Everybody who hangs out on Montana “gets it.” Okay, it may feel a little too sedate at times. I’ll admit to having said to myself once or twice, “This has to be one of whitest streets in Los Angeles.” I prefer a bit more uptown hurly burly, but it’s awfully nice to hang on Montana Ave. and know that representatives of the devolution of American culture will not appear.