Anyone with a drinking history who’s been to bars knows that sooner or later you’re going to be seized by the call as you’re walking home late at night, and when that happens it’s a matter of finding a nice alleyway or a hidden area next to a shady tree or a bush or whatever. It happens. I was seized in Munich one night last June and I took care of things in a dark garden area adjacent to a museum, and I don’t even drink. It’s just a matter of staying out of people’s sightline.

This is where the Penske brothers screwed up. They were too drunk or too arrogant to bother to find a nice dark place. On the other hand, what kind of woman goes over to a drunk taking a nocturnal leak and says, “Hey, dude…were you born in a barn? Hold still, I need to take your picture so I can report you to the police.” That’s just being confrontational and aggressive. If I see some guy taking a leak in the shadows I just look away. And if he’s relieving himself out in the open I just look away and mutter to myself, “Jesus Christ, what an asshole.” But I would NEVER get in his face and take a photo. A person who does that is just looking to get pissed on.

I would, however, report the drunk if he was dropping a deuce, but I don’t think the Penske brothers were doing that.

Incidentally: Jay Penske‘s ownership of Deadline stirs thoughts of Nikki Finke, of course. Here’s an 8.9 Columbia Journalism review piece about the fake Finke tweeter, and the real Finke’s response to same.

Obviously Russell Crowe‘s Noah has to look old-world rugged so he can see to the construction of that huge Ark and round up all the animals besides, and he sure as shit can’t be a stooped-over old man with a white beard. But what he looks like here more than anything else, largely due to the medieval garment he’s wearing, is an older Robin Hood with longer hair and a slightly grayer beard

Dear Valentine: “The other day my girlfriend (let’s call her Sandy) and I were sitting in this nothing-special restaurant, and after the food came and we talked a bit I got out the Macbook Pro to answer some mail. And after about ten minutes I noticed this weird inertia, this anti-matter vibe from across the table. Because while I was working and concentrating, Sandy was just sitting there doing nothing. Really….absolutely dead fucking nothing. I’m a live-and-let-live type, but it started to bother me on some level. Who sits in a chair like a piece of cheese and just plotzes? You have to check emails or write notes to yourself or read a newspaper article or a book or take pictures or talk to the waitress or something…right? You can’t just fucking sit there. Anyway, I started thinking about breaking up with her after I noticed that. Is it me?” — Mark Bledsoe, Akron, Ohio.

Valentine to Mark: We park our cars in the same garage. You can’t just sit in a chair and do nothing, ever. It’s okay, I guess, if you’re sitting on the beach, let’s say, or on a hillside overlooking the north of London…that’s different because you’ve got something to look at. But not in a restaurant. The two golden rules are (a) life is short and then you die, and (b) he who is not busy being born is busy dying. And what Sandy was doing while you were answering emails, to hear it from you, was waiting to die. She might have been thinking serene thoughts but that’s not enough, not in the tap-tap-tap world of 2012. But let’s turn the other cheek and be open-minded and hypothesize that she wasn’t just sitting in her chair and that she was maybe…meditating? Was she doing some kind of breathing thing while she sat there? Were her eyes closed? If she wasn’t meditating then I think your instinct was right. I would dump her.

Since Aurora the National Rifle Association has been looking around for something that will get the public back into a gun-toting mood. Dan Bradley‘s Red Dawn (MGM, 11.21), a remake of John Milius‘s 1984 original, might be just what they need. If you can get past the North Koreans being brain-dead enough to attempt a Jack Webb-styled invasion of the US, it’ll remind that we all need to be armed just in case, and not just with pistols and laser-scoped deer rifles but AK-47s….yeah!

Anecdote #1: Red Dawn was slated for release on 11.24.10, but was shelved due to MGM’s financial woes. Anecdote #2: The elegant Tony Gilroy, of all people, has a co-screenwriting credit on this puppy. Tony Gilroy contributing to a right-wing movie!

Does the fact that Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom is (a) the best Anderson film since The Royal Tenenbaums, (b) an agreeably tidy, very handsomely composed, Jacques Tati-like thing and (c) a box-office success with $40 millon in the till mean it’s a Best Picture contender? Apparently so. Or it is, at least, if you buy what Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote on 8.8 and TheWrap‘s Todd Cunningham wrote on August 9th.

Guys, it’s okay with me. Go to town. I don’t think Moonrise Kingdom works on the level of Rushmore, my all-time Anderson favorite, or first-runner-up Bottle Rocket, so I can’t quite get behind the Best Picture thing. Not at this stage. But it’s a fine, above-average film about young love, and one I wouldn’t mind seeing again on Bluray. Anderson is, of course, perhaps the leading GenX auteur of our time, and respect should be paid, etc.

Co-written by Anderson and Roman Coppola and set late in the summer of 1965 on a small New England island called Penzance, Moonrise Kingdom is about two 12-year-olds, Sam and Suzy, who fall in love and take off together.

My only problem with Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson’s refusal to use any tracks from Rubber Soul, which would have been a perfect choice, time-wise.

Once again, my Cannes Moonlight Kingdom tweets:

Tweet #1: “Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is a typical Anderson thing — an exactingly composed, super-dollhouse movie about perfect compositions.”

Tweet #2: “It’s a Little Romance about Sam and Suzy, each 12 years old with eyes only for each other. But cavorting behind a quirky, ultra-dry filter.”

Tweet #3: “But the real Moonrise romance is between Wes and his ultra-exacting, needle-precise compositions — sets, costumes & shots refined to a T.”

Tweet #4: “Very fairy-tale-ish, very precisely composed, kind of masterful. And emotional as far as it goes. But all within a vacuum.”

Tweet #5: “Are there genuine emotional currents running through (or under) Moonrise? Yeah…but mainly in the last third.”

Tweet #6: “Wes is kinda Jacques Tati, whose films are also about Tati and his style and mood strokes. Enjoy the film & story but mainly ‘look at me.'”

These “forever” one-sheets for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 (Lionsgate, 11.16) began appearing in theatres sometime in mid-May…fine. But two or three nights ago I noticed the KStew version hanging in the upstairs Arclight lobby. Of all the words in the English language to put on a Breaking Dawn poster right now, “forever” is either (a) the dumbest (certainly on the part of Lionsgate ad buyers), (b) the most mock-ironic or (c) the biggest imaginable “fuck you” to the clueless-girlie fan base.

I’ve seen Tay Garnett‘s version of The Postman Always Rings Twice (46) two or three times, and I’ve never believed that Lana Turner‘s Nora would have married a flabby old dog like Cecil Kellaway‘s Nick. She was trash, but a woman with her looks could’ve done better. That was a problem. And I was never all that taken with the Bob Rafelson’s 1981 version. Jack Nicholson was too old and bulky looking, and the sex scenes he performed with Jessica Lange…meh.

“In its surface aspects, The Postman Always Rings Twice appears no more than a melodramatic tale, another involved demonstration (two hours in length) that crime does not pay. But the artistry of writers and actors have made it much more than that; it is, indeed, a sincere comprehension of an American tragedy. For the yearning of weak and clumsy people for something better than the stagnant lives they live is revealed as the core of the dilemma, and sin is shown to be no way to happiness.” — from Bosley Crowther‘s 5.3.46 review in The New York Times.

11 years and three months ago ago I attended the Honolulu press junket for Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor, and right after that I visited the Hawaiian island of Molokai. I was struck by the sandy, reddish-brown, Mars-like soil there, and I took a sample with me. I’ve kept it ever since. Last week I took another soil sample from Monument Valley — very fine clay, half-powdery, half-sandy. A lighter, more reddish color than Molokai soil. Both visually attractive, agriculturally worthless.

(l.) Monument Valley soil; (r.) from island of Molokai.

For a comedy to be funny, it has to reflect real recognizable life. There has to be at least an attempt to represent the world as most of us perceive it, and the behavior of humans as most of us understand that. Most of us know that if you pick up a bucket filled with horse urine and dog feces and throw it in the face of a Catholic priest, he will not smile and say, “Aahh, thanks…I needed that!” If you make a comedy in which this happens, people are going to wonder why and go “wuh-wuh-wuh.”

Jay Roach‘s The Campaign (Warner Bros., 8.10) has a tough row to hoe. It has to jump on a trampoline and leap madly beyond the typical lying, insincerity and general horseshit that constitutes a political campaign these days, and make it “funny” in a clowning, lampoonish, rube-level way. But in so doing Roach and his screenwriters, Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell, apparently said to themselves “Okay, we have to create a comedic political realm that only slightly resembles the one outside the multiplex — vaguely, superficially, faintly — but also one in which characters throw 550 or 600 paper cups of horse urine and dog feces into each other’s faces and have them go ‘aaah, thanks…I needed that!'”

That’s why The Campaign is not funny. Because it aims low, by which I mean it’s aimed at idiots or rather a simple boob’s understanding of the world of politics. I sat there like a granite tombstone, staring at the screen, waiting for it to be over and wiping off drops of horse urine as they came flying off the screen.

The Campaign is about a North Carolina Congressional race between Will Ferrell’s Cam Brady, a randy Blue Dog Democrat asshole, and Zach Galifianakis‘s Marty Huggins, a nerd-dweeb type with a terrible moustache. At the halfway point Brady decides he wants to humiliate Huggins, and so he goes over to his house and puts the moves on Marty’s shrewish little Munchkin wife (Sarah Baker). And because Marty hasn’t been paying attention to their marriage in the heat of the campaign, she succumbs to Cam’s overtures. In front of his recording iPhone camera. And she takes it up the ass.

This scene isn’t the least bit funny because not even a donkey or a sheep would do that. They would have more sense. A sheep would realize that Cam’s attentions are politically motivated, and she would say no. But Marty’s little wife doesn’t, and we’re supposed to laugh. I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was impossible. Most of the film’s jokes are on this level.

“Of course people like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson are engaging in a rational exercise to maximize their wealth. Their contributions will come back manifold in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and exclusive franchises. The primary purpose of the GOP these days is to provide tax breaks and other financial advantages (such as not regulating pollution and other socially costly externalities) to their wealthy donor base. All the rest of their platform, all the culture wars stuff, is simply rube bait.

“One cannot get a majority of voters who are decidedly non-rich to knowingly pull the lever for a party that nakedly says ‘our platform is further enrichment of the wealthy, and, oh, by the way, we’re also going to make your retirement benefits take a hit.’ That’s where deep psychological insight comes into play. Most people, even when they have a sneaking suspicion that they are being shafted economically, are not well attuned to the complexities of credit default swaps, the London Interbank Offered Rate, or quantitative easing. And the media are definitely not interested in wising them up, especially when they can instead supply celebrity interviews, singing contests, or commercialized orgies like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

“Since the GOP is loath to tell the public in straightforward terms what their economic agenda is, and the media are not exactly forcing the GOP’s hand, and, finally, the people are operating in a knowledge deficit, Republicans respond by sleight of hand: ‘We’re more American than that Kenyan socialist in the White House!’ Or ‘The Obama administration is riddled with Muslim extremists.’ Or ‘Planned Parenthood is taxpayer-subsidized murder.’ Or ‘Obama wants to take away your guns.’ Even ‘Obama raised your taxes” when in fact he lowered them.

“Stuff, in other words, that is not terribly persuasive to well-informed people, but a lot of people are surprisingly ill-informed, and very few institutions — the corporate media least of all — have any interest in their being well-informed.” — “The Party Is Over” author Mike Lofgren in am 8.3 Truthout interview.

In a 7.13 piece called “Telluride, Toronto, NYFF Spitball,” or almost four weeks ago, I wrote that if I were New York Film Festival honcho Scott Foundas, “I would…try to land Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight (Paramount, 11.2), a ‘commercial’ drama with a great trailer (which is all anyone knows at this point) with Denzel Washington on top.” I repeated that suggestion in a 7.24 post called “Sprawling Ambition.”

I guess certain minds think alike because the NYFF has booked Flight (Paramount, 11.2) as its closing-night attraction. Feels like a good call. But is seeing Flight at a NYFF press screening which might happen three weeks before the commercial opening worth flying to NYC after Toronto and hanging around and paying hotel bills and waiting for that screening in late September or early October just so I can see it before the usual LA press screenings, which’ll probably happen a week or two later?

Washington plays a pilot who saves a commercial flight from catastrophe with a daring mid-air maneuver, but then he gets into trouble when it’s discovered he’d had a few the night before or was possibly half in the bag during the flight…or something like that. The Zemeckis-directed thriller costars Kelly Reilly, Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Melissa Leo and Bruce Greenwood.

If I was to get in touch with my Paramount pallies, here’s what I’d say: “I love New York and the NYFF, always have, but right now I’ve no reason to fly to NYC for the NY Film Festival except to catch the press screening for their closing-night selection of Flight. which will probably happen sometime in late September or possibly very easily October. It will publicly screen, as everyone knows, at the close of the festival on 10.14.

“To save myself the expenditure of $1400 or $1500 bucks minimum and probably a bit more, what are the chances of Paramount publicity allowing certain press persons to see Flight in LA concurrently with the NYFF press screening, or at least concurrent with the 10.14 screening so these press persons don’t have to fly all the way back to NYC to catch it? Let me know & thanks mucho.”

Incidentally: Back in the bad old Forrest Gump days of the ’90s I got it into my head that Zemeckis might be a Republican. I presumed as much because, as I wrote in 2008, “I have a still-lingering resentment of Forrest Gump, which I and many others disliked from the get-go for the way it kept saying ‘keep your head down’, for its celebration of clueless serendipity and simpleton-ism, and particularly for the propagandistic way it portrayed ’60s-era counter-culture types and in fact that whole convulsive period.

“Every secondary hippie or protestor character in that film was a selfish loutish asshole, and every man and woman in the military was portrayed as modest, decent and considerate. These and other aspects convinced me that the film was basically reactionary Republican horseshit, and led me to write an L.A. Times Syndicate piece called ‘Gump vs. Grumps,’ about the Forrest Gump backlash.”

And yet Zemeckis, to go by this Newsmeat accounting of political donations, is some kind of indie-minded left-liberal type. I figured I should clear this up.

Dale Olson, a veteran Hollywood publicist who started as a journalist in the mid ’50s and who knew everyone and swaggered around for 40-odd years as a top-dog, friend-of-the-stars p.r. guy with the Mirisch Company and then Rogers & Cowan and as the head of his own firm, Dale C. Olson & Assoc., has died. I don’t know how old Olson was, but I think he was born around 1930. I’m searching around as we speak.

Olson’s clients included Steve McQueen, Rock Hudson. Laurence Olivier, Gene Kelly and Clint Eastwood and I forget who else, but he was totally plugged in and worked with everyone. A good, decent fellow who lived a rich life. Condolences to family, friends and former colleagues.