In an 11.13 N.Y. Times interview with Frank Bruni, The Descendants helmer Alexander Payne talks about a theory that all good directors have a magic decade. “They say you can do honest, sincere work for decades, but you’re given in general a 10-year period when what you do touches the zeitgeist — when you’re relevant,” he says. “And I’m aware of that, and I don’t want my time to go by.”

Alexander Payne

Let’s apply this to various directors. John Ford‘s charmed decade ran from My Darling Clementine (’46) to The Searchers (’56). Alfred Hitchcock‘s window of deep greatness was only nine years — Strangers on a Train (’51) to Psycho (’60). Billy Wilder‘s was an even ten — Sunset Boulevard (’50) to The Apartment (’60). Francis Coppola‘s window ran from The Godfather (’72) to One From The Heart (’82). Oliver Stone had a 13-year window — Salvador (’86) to Any Given Sunday (’99). So far Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has had a decade-long grace period — Amores perros (’00) to Biutiful (’10). David Fincher has enjoyed an eleven-year window so far — Fight Club (’99) to The Social Network (’10).

At the end of his article, Bruni asks if the seven years between Sideways and The Descendants ate up some of Payne’s charmed decade, or is that decade just beginning now? Payne is silent a few seconds. “I have no idea,” he says.

While I did pretty well as a journalist and a columnist in the ’90s and early aughts, I think my big decade began in ’06 when I took HE in to a several-posts-per-day bloggy-blog format. I honestly feel like things are crackling on all four burners right now.

Bella Swan “kisses abstinence and mortality goodbye in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 in which the vampire-loving teen gets hitched, knocked up and almost destroyed from within by her little bundle of joy.” But the film, in the view of Variety‘s Justin Chang, “is rich in surface pleasures but lacks any palpable sense of darkness or danger.

“Though filmed with the utmost soft-focus, duvet-wrapped tastefulness, the couple’s wedding night leaves Bella covered with bruises, the bed in tatters, and the audience, presumably, in a puddle of ecstasy. Surely this must be the first movie series so innately fearful of sex (and yet so dependent on its leads’ sex appeal) that even proper conjugal relations come with a note of caution

“Every time the film shifts away from Bella and Edward to address the larger group dynamics, the narrative goes flat and the ensemble’s line readings turn to wood, in large part because this style of dramatization is so at odds with the thrust of the source material.

“Like any commercial behemoth, The Twilight Saga by nature resists any attempt at transcendence, experimentation or risk; that’s especially unfortunate in the case of Breaking Dawn, which is by far the most out-there novel in the series and would have benefited from a dash of Cronenbergian body-horror and, commercial restraints notwithstanding, a willingness to push past a PG-13 rating.

Director Bill Condon “takes the reins capably enough here, though his approach suffers from a certain stylistic anonymity that seems endemic to the material.”

All the bullies and ignoramuses who tried to beat me up yesterday for using the satirical term “flying negro”, or more particularly “negro”, which they believe is and was a racist term…they all need to listen to this KPFK recording of a speech given to Berkeley film buffs in 1968 by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael.

Asked about the prospects for black filmmakers, she used the term “negro” three times in her response. Because that was the term to use back then. As it was during World War II.

If you have a place in your moviegoing heart for an empty synthetic entertainment that will delight your inner nine-year-old, Steven Spielberg‘s Tintin will rush in and twinkle your toes. A motion-capture adventure thriller in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the four Pirates of the Caribbean films, it showed last night at the Chinese, and I almost made it to the end. I just couldn’t stand all that technical skill and pizazz and exactitude in the service of absolutely nothing, you see. It was just too much of a rousing, highly disciplined, relentlessly energetic kids movie for me to take, given my personality and tolerance levels.

All I know is that I never, ever want to sit through Tintin again. Because, as I said last night, it is popcorn punishment. I felt like I was being whoopee-cushioned and thrill-ridden to death, or like a virus was being injected into my system. Such amazing filmmaking, and it was making me sick.

As with all Spielberg films, which are always superficially diverting without the slightest hint of subtext, Tintin is about nothing but light and colorful characters and swirling camera movement and high adrenaline and technology. It is about Spielberg wanting to excite easily excitable minds and sell tickets and popcorn and make himself and producing partner Peter Jackson a little bit richer.

Did I say it was utterly without context? That’s not entirely true. Tintin‘s second-billed character, after Jamie Bell‘s Tintin, is Andy Serkis‘s Captain Haddock, who is fond of spirits. This is a minor side issue, I realize, but the fact that Bell’s Tintin seems to regard Haddock’s boozing as a tolerable eccentricity is, of course, a reflection of Spielberg’s attitude about same, which strikes me as curiously divorced from our 2011 reality.

In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, supporting characters with alcohol problems (Walter Brennan‘s seagoing rummy in To Have and Have Not, Arthur O’Connell‘s boozy attorney in Anatomy of a Murder, Edmond O’Brien‘s alcoholic Senator in Seven Days in May) were often portrayed as marginally charming and, oddly, men of character. They needed to cut down on the drinking, of course, but they were loyal and colorful and fun to have around. In today’s social context this would be a misguided or pathetic attitude, to put it mildly, which is why the last truly entertaining drunk — Dudley Moore‘s Arthur — came along 30 years ago. But Spielberg is oblivious to this.

Why am I even talking about alcohol issues? Spielbergland is Neverland. I’m wasting my time.

I don’t have the time now to write anything about my talk earlier this afternoon with Another Happy Day star-producer Ellen Barkin and director-screenwriter Sam Levinson, or even to post an mp3…later. But the time just flew. The conversation was mostly on-point but digressions happened from time to time. Barkin and I reminisced about early ’80s Manhattan, sharing anecdotes in particular about the Hellfire Club and the old Edlich Pharmacy on 1st Avenue. Don’t ask.

Another Happy Day star-producer Ellen Barkin, director-writer Sam Levinson — Thursday, 11.10, 2:55 pm, Sunset Tower hotel.

What if Michael Fassbender‘s sex-addict character in Steve McQueen‘s Shame was called “Shame”? And if everyone called him that — all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, “I’m ashamed of you, Shame!”

The Turin Horse director Bela Tarr, director Gus Van Sant at yesterday afternoon’s gathering (organized by MPRM) for Tarr and his film at The Grill on Hollywood Blvd. — Wednesday, 11.9, 4:50 pm.

Chateau Marmont lounge, waiting on a 6 pm Pedro Almodovar interview — Thursday, 11.10, 4:25 pm.

Shining-like bathroom in the cellar of the Chinese.

I was interviewing Another Happy Day star Ellen Barkin and director-writer Sam Levinson at the Sunset Tower from 1:15 pm to 3 pm or thereabouts, and then we said our goodbyes and I was walking down to my car and I pulled out the phone and learned that Billy Crystal will be hosting the Oscars…wham.

My first thought was “okay, I get it…safe choice.” Producer Brian Grazer had to land an experienced pro who knew the lay of the land and who would hit the ground running. My second thought was “what happened to reaching out to younger Genx and GenY?” Crystal is a boomer whose movie career peaked in the late ’80s and ’90s. But he’ll be funny and rascally. I guess the youth reach-out will have to wait until the 2013 show.

The only concern I have is that Crystal has gained a little…actually more than a little weight over the last decade or so. All movie stars have big heads, but Crystal’s is the size of a medicine…I mean, a basketball.

Besides acknowledging that Occupy Wall Street has obviously tapped into something, Brad Pitt, speaking a day or two ago in Japan, said that specifics are the thing. Occupy-ers need to hammer the points that Matt Taibbi‘s 10.12 Rolling Stone article spelled out: “Break up the monopolies. Pay for your own bailouts. No public money for private lobbying. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. Change the way bankers get paid.”

More computer-generated World War II flying-negro, orange-flameball, video-game poison from Darth Lucas. “Top Gun with black pilots” — Terrence Howard quoted in an 8.9.11 article. Directed by Anthony Hemingway, and opening on 1.20.12.

This is an agreeably low-key, on-target poster. It doesn’t quite erase my memory of that saccharine trailer (which I just re-watched) or that nightmarish association I have in my head with last month’s Ohio wild-animal massacre or that subsequent PETA letter urging director Cameron Crowe to post a warning on the closing credits about the danger of keeping exotic animals as pets. But the poster works — it’s the first positive spin that We Bought A Zoo has had in a long while.

“If only he’d prepared!,” N.Y. Times columnist Gail Collins wrote this morning. “I can see him now, jogging in the morning, his coyote-killing pistol tucked precariously into his sweatpants, chanting: ‘President Perry knocks off three: Commerce! Education! Energy!’ all the way down the trail. Really, it would have made all the difference. Rick Perry, we hardly knew ye. Farewell.”

Memo to Brian Grazer: Nearly six years years ago I suggested a moderately nervy Oscar-hosting idea. “What offbeat comic team has performed the most consistently funny and inventive bits on previous Oscar telecasts and generally been the most out-there and in-front-of-the-crowd? Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Now let’s go one better…make the Oscars into a three-way gig between Stiller, Wilson and Wilson’s Wedding Crashers partner Vince Vaughn. Are you kidding me? These guys would kill, and again they’d get the younger viewers. Think of the level of the writing! Think of the nerve element!” Think of Stiller’s Na’vi bit, the ’09 Joaquin Phoenix parody, that great bit he did years ago with Wilson…he gets it, he’s cool, they all do.