I’m sorry if this annoys fans of the late, great Ken Russell, but he never made a better film than…you thought I was going to say Song of Summer, right? I mean Women in Love (’69), the last and only theatrical Russell film that got it more or less right — sensually crafted, high-toned, erotic, impassioned — without going over the top. I love his artist-bio wacko period (Mahler, Savage Messiah, The Music Lovers) and I’m a huge fan of Altered States, but Women in Love was/is the pinnacle.

My last encounter with the great Ken Russell happened on 7.30.10 at Manhattan’s Walter Reade theatre: “I regret to report that last night’s Film Society of Lincoln center showing of Ken Russell‘s The Devils — a kickoff of a seven day, nine-film Russell tribute — was a disappointment in some respects. Russell attended with Devils costar Vanessa Redgrave, and it was, of course, delightful to see them sitting together, and to share in the love.

Legendary director Ken Russell, Vanessa Redgrave following last night’s FSLC screening of The Devils — Friday, 7.30, 9:55 pm.

“But FSLC showed the wrong version of this 1971 classic, the print was less than mint, projection was substandard, and a befogged Russell offered no hard answers about the Devils controversy.

“I’m not faulting the 83 year-old Russell for not being a younger man, God knows. What matters is that he’s attending each and every FSLC screening and ‘making the effort’ and so on. But the fact of the matter is that Russell wasn’t very snap-crackle-pop when asked about this and that.

“The Devils print looked vaguely cruddy — poorly aligned, underlit, green scratches here and there — and was not the promised 111-minute ‘rape of Christ’ version but the 108-minute version that was originally released in the U.S. This was a massive letdown. FSLC had promised the notorious version, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in the room who felt burned.

“I asked series programmer (and Film Comment editor) Gavin Smith what had gone wrong, and he said it had something to do with Warner Bros. not ‘allowing’ the unrated print (which is sitting in England) into the country due to some legal blah-dee-blah. I’m still not clear on this. A FSLC screening sells tickets, of course, but isn’t a “commercial” screening as much as a museum-type showing. Will Warner Bros. ever stop messing with this film?

“In a post-screening q & a Russell offered no inside explanation as to why Warner Bros. has twice offered and then withdrawn The Devils from commercial release over the last two years. (I wasn’t persuaded that he knew the particulars about the DVD and the iTunes versions being yanked after being announced and/or offered.) All he said was that ‘they don’t want it shown,’ and something about their obstructions more or less constituting the same kind of political repression that is depicted in the film. The whole Warner Bros. thing is just infuriating, I swear.

“When I say ‘poorly aligned’ I mean that the image projected last night was too large for the screen — that the ‘throw’ was miscalculated — resulting in a significant amount of the film’s image being cropped by the projector’s aperture plate. Throw in the poor lighting and the green scratch marks and it was indisputably a substandard experience. I love film as much as the next guy, but the iTunes version of the The Devils that I rented for my iPhone? Perfect, brightly lit, immaculate.

“I asked Russell after the q & a why Song of Summer, the 1968 BBC film that he considers his all-time career best, wasn’t being shown in the series, and he just looked at the floor. (Maybe he didn’t hear me clearly.) When I asked Smith about this he didn’t seem aware that Russell once called Song of Summer ‘the best film I have ever done.’ My impression is that the FSLC never gave the idea of showing this film much thought.”

It began with In Contention‘s Kristopher Tapley triggering a major flabbergast by saying, “Speaking for myself, I think War Horse wins the lion’s share. Including pic/dir.” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone: “You think it’s going to WIN Best Picture???” Tapley: “I do, yes.” Wells insert: “Double whoa.”

And then MSN’s Glenn Kenny joined in: “I haven’t even seen War Horse (and may not!) but will bet real money right now it will not win Best Picture.” Tapley: “Why’s that?” Kenny: “Unlike Saving Private Ryan, its antiwar fervor doesn’t tap into a resonant zeitgeist theme (in Ryan’s case, ‘greatest generation’).” Tapley: “Hmmm, that’s debatable.” Kenny: “Making Academy members cry won’t suffice. It needs to be a massive pop cult phenom as well. I say it won’t.

And then Mr. Beaks (i.e., Jeremy Smith) chimed in: “Hi! I’ve not seen War Horse yet! Care to shut up about it?” Wells to Beaks: “Tough titty. Nobody shuts up about anything on Twitter…nobody.”

That same densely forested Bourne Wood, Surrey location that we’ve all seen in Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator (that big fireball battle sequence between the Romans and those hairy Germanic guys), Scott’s Robin Hood (castle-attack scene with Russell Crowe‘s troops advancing) and Children of Men (attack on the van) makes yet another appearance in War Horse.

The instant I saw that big muddy field bordered by those telltale pine trees in War Horse, I went “c’mon…this place again?” Tim Burton‘s forthcoming Dark Shadows uses it also; it was also seen in Captain America.

During this afternoon’s MSN live chat between War Horse director Steven Spielberg and Grantland‘s Mark Harris, “War Horse has no deliberate homages to any director — not to John Ford, not even Gone With The Wind with the red sky.” (Not a precise quote but close enough.)

I’ve never understood odds or point spreads (i.e., kind of but not really), but Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that War Horse has dropped in terms of Best Picture racetrack odds, obviously because of reactions to WH screenings over the past two or three days. On 11.1 the top predicted favorites were The Descendants (36%), War Horse (20%) and The Artist (17%) and now it’s The Artist (37%), The Descendants (35%) and War Horse (13%). For what it’s worth. O’Neil says he’ll be running a piece tomorrow about “how far War Horse has fallen since we’ve [all] seen it.”

The first two thirds of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23), which had a nationwide sneak last night, tries too hard to be endearing, or so it seemed to me. For 80 minutes or so it’s a not too bad family-type movie that works here and there. In and out, at times okay and other times oddly artificial. And then it kicks into gear during the last third and delivers some genuinely affecting sink-in moments and a truly excellent finale.

Matt Damon, imprisoned Bengal tiger in We Bought A Zoo.

The smarty-pants Twitter community was generally thumbs-up about Zoo following the sneak so I guess my mixed sourpuss feelings represent a minority view.

Matt Damon is better-than-decent in the lead role of Benjamin Mee, a nice guy who for complex emotional reasons decides to buy a zoo in the Thousand Oaks area. Scarlett Johansson is believably forceful as the head zoo keeper (or whatever the correct title is), and Thomas Haden Church is under-utilized as Damon’s advice-giving older brother. The stand-out performance comes from 14 year-old Colin Ford, I feel. There’s also a surprisingly inconsequential, poorly written one given by Elle Fanning, who by the way wears too much eye makeup.

The first two thirds are better at delivering family-friendly studio schmaltz than War Horse, but that’s not saying much. It suffers from on-the-nose dialogue and a bad case of the cutes, which is what happens when Crowe’s magical realism vibe doesn’t quite lift off the ground because the exact right notes haven’t been found or hit. The movie never really transforms into a suspension-of-disbelief thing. You’re constantly aware that you’re sitting in a theatre seat watching actors speak that tangy, semi-natural-sounding, spiritually upbeat Crowe dialogue and listening to the usual nifty Crowe-selected rock tunes (“Cinnamon Girl”, “Bucket of Rain”, etc.).

But the last third kicks in with better-than-decent emotional conflict and payoff scenes, and the heart element finally settles in from time to time, and there’s a great diatribe against the use of the word “whatever” and an exceptional father-son argument scene and nice use of refrain (“Why not?”). Endings are half the game, and by that rule or standard We Bought A Zoo saves itself. It won’t kill you to see it, and you might like the first two-thirds more than I did. Whatever.

Johansson gets to do a lot of arguing and shouting in this thing, and at some point I began saying to myself, “Jesus, I wouldn’t ever want to be in an argument with her…she’s really angry and adamant and unyielding.” And I began to think that I might be sensing, maybe, how her marriage to Ryan Reynolds came apart.

Damon, Johansson, Cameron Crowe during filming of We Bought A Zoo

The film is based on Benjamin Mee‘s true-life, this is what really happened book of the same title, but it’s been personalized by Crowe to some extent and is basically about recovering from loss, grief, trauma. Crowe’s marriage fell apart in 2008 and his career hit a land mine in 2005 with Elizabethtown and then stalled again with mysterious shutdown of Deep Tiki in late ’08/early ’09 so Zoo is actually his story on one level or another, I suspect.

But my basic feeling about We Bought A Zoo is similar to a line that former Secretary of State James Baker once said about a senior Iraqi official during the 1991 Gulf War: “A good diplomat with a bad brief.”

We Bought A Zoo is harmlessly decent family pap, but it rests upon a fundamentally rancid notion that zoos are cool. Zoos are emphatically not cool. I’ve been to zoos three or four times in my life and I like checking out the giraffes and lions and orangutans as much as the next guy, but they’re built on the conceit that animals living sullen and diminished lives inside cages are entertaining, and that looking at these creatures from the safe side of a cage and chuckling at their behavior and smelling their scent somehow enhances our lives by connecting us (or our kids) to nature. Which is, of course, horseshit.

Outside of the makers of this film and zoo owners and clueless lower-middle-class Walmart types, I don’t think there are any intelligent and compassionate people on the planet who believe zoos are a good idea. At best they’re an unfortunate idea. A message during the end credits informs that Mee’s zoo in England (i.e., Dartmoor Zoological Park) is a highly respected one, but it’s still a zoo.

Last month’s exotic animal slaughter in Ohio reminded a lot of us that it’s fundamentally wrong to keep exotic animals in cages to satisfy some bizarre emotional longing to bond with them, which, outside of respectably maintained zoos, is some kind of low-rent, Middle-American scumbag thing. Remember how Tony Montana kept a Bengal tiger chained up on the grounds of his mansion?

Zoos are prisons, and it’s dead wrong to sentence animals to life terms in them, however spacious and well-maintained their cages or how loving and caring and compassionate their keepers may be. Zoo animals don’t live in “enclosures,” as zoo-keepers prefer to call them these days. They live in effing jail cells just like Jimmy Cagney and George Raft did in Each Dawn I Die, or Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock.

Crowe is renowned for using great rock-music tracks in his film, but I doubt if he ever considered using Presley’s “I Want To Be Free” for We Bought A Zoo. I thought of it last night when I was driving home from the screening, I can tell you.

“There’s no joy in my heart, only sorrow

And I’m sad as an animal can be

I sit alone in my fake-love enclosure

And this enclosure is a prison to me

“I look out my window

And what do I see?

I see a bird

Up in a tree

(Chorus)

“I want to free! (oh, yeah)

Free! (oh, yeah)

Free-hee-hee…I want to be free

Like a bird in a tree (wanna be free)”

A nice-guy widower dad named Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) decides he needs to uproot and refresh his life, partly for himself but especially for his kids, Dylan and Rosie (Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth), who are half-coping and half-shell-shocked by the recent death of their mom. They all need a sense of renewal and adventure, a feeling that they’re moving on. So Benjamin uses an inheritance from his dad to buy a rundown, privately-managed penal institution in Missouri that’s been threatened with foreclosure.

“We can make this jail into a better, happier place, and make ourselves better for it,” Benjamin tells his kids. “We can clean it up and apply fresh coats of paints and change — or at least try to change — the outlooks and attitudes of dozens of common felons and murderers and white-collar criminals. We can start group-therapy sessions and make them attend classes in painting and pottery and yoga, and introduce them to great literature and great theatre and cinema, and the blessings of the Bhagavad Gita and Taoism and the teachings of Baba Ram Dass and Alan Watts.

“Okay, some of the guards are a little weird and some have old-fashioned attitudes…one guy thinks he’s costarring in a 1930s Warner Bros. George Raft prison movie… but we can change that too,” he says. “And there’s this really cute guard manager lady (Scarlett Johansson) who’s tough-minded but hot, and we might wanna…you know, ahem…once the jail has been turned into a happier, healthier place and is running smoothly and profitably again.

“The bottom line is that if we make the prisoners into better, more spiritually open people they’ll eventually become more productive workers,” Benjamin concludes, “and our prisoners-for-hire program will become more profitable…and we’ll have a new extended family and a fresh start. It’ll be a good thing all around, trust me.”

Rosie is tickled and turned on. “We bought a jail!,” she exclaims from time to time. But it’s going to be a harder job that they realize at first, and the cost of turning the jail around will lead Benjamin to the precipice of financial ruin. But what’s life without a little struggle and uncertainty?

Substitute exotic animals for human prisoners and you’ve basically got Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo. Because We Bought A Jail and We Bought A Zoo are about finding personal self-renewal and spiritual rebirth through the caring and feeding of inmates.

The difference is one of social necessity vs. childlike curiosity and ethical cluelessness. Human prisons are necessary to protect society from the predatory-criminal element and to attempt some kind of rehabilitation — they serve an unfortunate but legitimate function. Zoos serve no legitimate function at all. They’re almost entirely about satisfying pre-tweener curiosity about exotic beasts. There may be adults who visit zoos for whatever reason, but you’d have to be pretty clueless to buy a seasonal zoo pass.

One other distinction: zoo inmates are all doing life terms while most human prisoners are in for shorter stretches and are eligible for parole at regular intervals.

Speaking of miserable, I was at one of my lowest ebbs in the early fall of ’78. Living in a Soho tenement and writing reviews for free, pitching freelance articles to people who thought I was marginally competent as a writer (if that), working at restaurants as a host for chump change, barely able to pay the rent at times, borrowing money from my father when it got really awful, occasionally taking a train to Connecticut to work as a tree surgeon on the weekends. Feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, futility and despair.

But one fairly warm day I was walking near West Broadway and Prince and noticed some people clustered in front of an art gallery with generator trucks and cables leading upstairs. So without asking questions or making eye contact with anyone I walked right in and bounded up the staircase. Upstairs was a large, high-ceilinged art gallery with many people milling about. A casual vibe. Nobody said “excuse me, can I help you?” I just walked over to craft services like I was part of the crew and helped myself to an apple and a cup of coffee. I figured I’d spot a recognizable someone — a director, an actor — and figure out what the “show” was from that.

And then I walked into the main gallery room and there, sitting in a canvas chair and reading something intently, was young Woody Allen. He was being left alone, nobody hovering. Glasses, dark brownish-red hair, flannel shirt…and sitting absolutely still, like a Duane Hanson sculpture. He might have had a bit of makeup on, or so I recall. But it was Woody, all right, and right away I said to myself, “I’m gonna get busted if I stand here and just stare at him.” So I walked around a bit more with a guarded expression and then went downstairs and asked somebody what the movie was called. “It’s a Woody Allen film….that’s all I know,” some guy said.

I’m not sure anyone knew the title at the time, but the following April, or about seven or eight months later, the movie opened with a title — Manhattan.

My emotional and financial states were so precarious and I was so close to depression at the time of the Allen sighting that just glimpsing him sitting there gave me a real lift. For a minute or two I was part of a very elite and highly charged environment, if only as a secret visitor, and I felt good about myself for momentarily slipping inside and smelling the air of that set. The experience lasted for maybe three minutes, tops, but I’ve never forgotten it.

From Manhattan: “He was given to fits of rage, Jewish liberal paranoia, male chauvinism, self-righteous misanthropy and nihilistic moods of despair. He had complaints about life but never any solutions. He longed to be an artist but balked at the necessary sacrifices. In his most private moments he spoke of his fear of death, which he elevated to tragic heights when in fact it was mere narcissism.”

A Manhattan Bluray is apparently slated for release in January 2012.

The combination of this video being of such bad quality plus the temporary titles indicates that this might be a genuinely early cut of a teaser for Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus (20th Century Fox, 6.8.12), which is some kind of Alien prequel. We all remember the Alien scene when three Nostromo crew members enter the huge, horseshoe-shaped ship and come upon a dead giant with big shoulders and a big head and an elephant trunk. I’ve watched this trailer twice and haven’t spotted any of those elephant-trunk guys walking around.

Prometheus stars Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Kate Dickie and Ben Foster.

Notice that the biggest…well, the only laugh comes when Allen says the words “grim, nightmarish, meaningless.” The riff is somehow better and funnier now, on YouTube, than it was during the live Cannes Film Festival press conference, which I attended, in May 2010. This is good also.