“A call to a McDonald’s restaurant in Hinesville, Georgia in February 2003, [prompted] a female manager, who thought she was speaking with a police officer in the presence of [her boss], to lead a 19-year-old female employee who was, she was told, suspected of theft into the women’s bathroom, where she strip-searched her. She then brought in a 55 year-old male employee to perform a body cavity search of the girl to uncover hidden drugs.” — from a Wikipedia entry to a topic called “Strip Search Prank Call Scam.”

Craig Zobel‘s Compliance (Magnlia, 8.17) is based on the above-described incident. I saw it at Sundance 2012, and found it equal parts fascinating, amusing and mildly frustrating…not so much due to the way Zobel’s film unfolds, per se, as much as the incredibly clueless behavior of the principals, all but two of whom are so intimidated by the suggestion of “authority” from a stern male voice on the phone that it’s enough to compel them to treat a fellow employee like she’s an anti-social threat.

I kept thinking about the Milgram experiment of the early ’60s, in which people were told to ask questions of an unseen participant who was audible but located on the other side of a wall. When this participant answered a question incorrectly the person was directed to push a button that sent a jolt of electricity into the participant’s body, causing them to cry out. (The participants were actually acting and “in” on the experiment — the unwitting focus was the button-pusher.) As the cries got louder and louder, the button-pushers would tell the experiment organizers that they felt really badly about zapping the unseen guy and that they wanted to be excused from the experiment. But when they were told that they were obligated to complete the experiment and that they were absolved of all responsibility, 85% or 90% of them obliged and resumed with the button-pushing, unhappy and stressed-out but listening time and again to the screams.

It was asserted that the Milgram experiment proved that you could get almost any small-town resident to be a guard at a concentration camp, or something along those lines.

Ann Dowd is very good as the butch-boss manager of the fast-food restaurant, and Dreama Walker is the low-level employee who’s accused of theft and ordered to remove her clothing and submit to cavity probing, etc. The film pissed off a segment of the audience at Sundance screening, some of whom walked out and some of whom complained during the q & a. As I heard it, some felt that Compliance was basically a sexual exploitation film that was, in a sense, ogling Walker as much as the prank caller was in a non-visual way.

It is a kind of exploitation film on a certain level. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a certain odd (i.e., queasy, creepy, guilty) form of titillation when Walker starts undressing, but the basic point is that there are many small-town sheep out there who will do whatever they’re told if you scare them enough. The constantly flashing “message” of the film is “question authority, question authority, question authority…”

I don’t want to use a John Deere landfill compactor to crush a flea, but it hit me earlier today that Ashley Tisdale seems like the kind of self-absorbed, chirpy-voiced, me-me-me girl who would have been hunted down in Bobcait Goldthwait‘s God Bless America. I’m focusing on Tisdale because twelve months ago she made a huge obscene deal out of her 26th birthday (“Ooooh, my birthday….all my friends are going to come and pay attention to meeeeee!”) and her 27th birthday is today so let’s get out the noisemakers and roll out the birthday cake, etc.

Seriously, I just wanted to make the point that there are few things more appalling than beedle-y-bee girls who revel in the attention that a birthday brings, and who not only delight in the glorious celebration of the self but hunger for it, at least to the extent that they throw birthday parties for themselves and make YouTube videos about how excited they are that their birthday is only two or three days away and how much they love their friends so, so much…”every one of you!…mwah!” So if I’m semi-acquainted with and/or semi-aware of anyone who organizes their own birthday party and invites, like, 45 or 50 friends with a hint that it’s cool to bring gifts, they are totally, absolutely and permanently crossed off the list for life.

A woman of soul and serenity loves her friends and her pets and her parents as much as Ashley Tisdale, but she chills on the birthday hoo-hah…or at least doesn’t use birthdays to further her social/professional ambitions.

Tisdale would have been, like, totally ideal as one of the leads in For A Good Time, Call… (Focus Features, 8.31).

I’m listening to MSNBC out of the corner of my ear, and I just heard a political analyst refer to “low-information voters” and then define them as “people who…uhm, just aren’t paying attention? But you know? It’s often these people who tip an election.” Precisely — that’s how we got Dubya in ’00 and ’04. “Low information voters” is the p.c. TV term. “Gap-toothed tattooed dumbasses” is the term that pops out after a couple of beers. If I was on TV and the subject came up? I would call them “rurally challenged.”

My Virgin America plane arrived in Los Angeles at 8:20 pm Saturday. I crashed around 1 am, up at 5:30 am. Up until 3:30 pm when I took a nap, intending to rise again at 5:30 pm. I slept through two alarms and woke up groggy at 11:30 pm — now I’m flat cold alert. A normal sleep rhythm will kick in eventually. A nap here and there, catch as catch can, roll with it. It takes about a day per time zone.

Now begins the catch-up. Over the next week or two I need to try and see People Like Us, Seeking A Friend For The End of the World, To Rome With Love,The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Brave (which I’m not looking forward to), Men in Black 3 (wait for DVD?), Piranha 3D, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Bel Ami, Paul Williams Still Alive, Lola Versus, Dark Horse, El Gringo, My Way, Life Happens, The Lady, etc., etc. Plus Kirby Dick‘s just-opened The Invisible War, Oliver Stone‘s Savages on Thursday, etc.

I can buy “Tom Kpy3” in any number of roles — a sports agent cut loose, a profane studio chief, a MIssion: Impossible guy scaling a glass skyscraper in Dubai — but I don’t know about his playing a six-foot-five urban badass in Jack Reacher. This, at least, is how author Lee Childs has described Reacher in his best-selling series. The source novel, “One Shot,” is the ninth.

Yes, Cruise will “pull it off” with his usual command and hard-edge physicality, but he’s also on the short side. Everybody knows that. A bit of a speed bump.

I know this much — One Shot, the original title, sounds cooler than Jack Reacher. It makes me think of “reach-around.” And it sounds like an overly self-conscious effort to create a macho brand — they might as well have called it Jack Belt-Buckle or Jack Motorcycle Boot or Jack Hardcock. (Then again you don’t want anything too sexual sounding — Cruise doesn’t do that.)

Paramount will release the actioner, shot in Pittsburgh and directed and cowritten by Chris McQuarrie, on 12.21.12.

This is hilarious. And brilliant. Once the blowback against a film reaches this kind of meta-whatever, it’s finished. It took a little while to emerge but this, I predict, will be the ultimate Prometheus verdict. Ridley Scott is putting on the fishing hat and Raybans as we speak and heading out to the desert on the eastbound 10.

Magic Mike was looking at a weekend tally in the mid ’40s. But the Saturday income dropped 45% from Friday’s, and now the projection is for $38 million or thereabouts. Apparently Joe & Jane Popcorn, looking for an amusing male-stripper high, didn’t like the serious character stuff or…what, the orange sepia photography?

Universal’s Ted dropped 15% from Friday to Saturday but will still take in $52 million. So what happened apart from the usual U.S. boxoffice scenario of a not-as-good film (i.e., Ted) making more money than the clearly superior competition (i.e., Mike)?

There’s always been a huge aesthetic gap between Serious Film Catholics and casual ticket buyers. The former tend to view Average Joes as not just Adam Sandler-embracing “easy lays” whose tastes are stubbornly unsophisticated, but in some ways “stupid and ineducable,” to quote from “The Film Snob’s Dictionary.” A $5 million indie flick making $38 million over a single weekend is obviously a hugely successful thing, but negative buzz from the above-described sector prevented Mike from hitting the mid 40s. Philistines.

When I was coming out of Ted late Friday night at the Chelsea Clearview I heard three guys talking about Mike, which had also just ended. One guy was complaining that Mike “has no plot.” He apparently meant it had none of the contrivances and complications that constitute a “plot” according to 21st Century standards, but what happens in Mike is all driven by character. Mike has an arc, of course, and the four significant characters start at point A and end up and point J or K. What the hell was that Chelsea Clearview guy looking for? A third-act twist?

You could throw that “no plot” complaint at a lot of films, including Last Tango in Paris and Lawrence of Arabia and three or four hundred others.

“Is there a secret language school where they teach under-35 women to converse in mallspeak with the exact same reedy, mincing, me-me tones?” — tweeted from JFK before my Virgin America LA flight took off.

“I disliked Prometheus intensely,” writes “Subashini” in a 6.23 post on the Blog of Disquiet. “I do think that having acrimonious feelings towards the film is the actual point — the film seems to be a stand-in for a certain segment of humanity and its imperialist, ruinous ambitions, though like most films coming out of Hollywood this seems to coexist with its appreciation of capital, technology, and involuntary/reproductive labour.

“That in itself doesn’t make it inherently unlikeable, not at all. But as Susan Sontag wrote in ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ ‘Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence — a technological view,” and perhaps it’s the nihilist technological determinism of Prometheus that is inherently unsettling. Perhaps it’s this utter lack of meaning in the movie that is its meaning, and consequently the source of my loathing. Maybe a part of me just wants machines and people to get along? I’m not sure.”

I know this for sure: I will never, ever watch this movie again. They can send me a free Bluray and I’ll give it to someone who might appreciate it.

As I wrote on 6.1.12: “Prometheus is impressively composed and colder than a witch’s boob in Siberia — a forbidding gray film about howling winds and chilly people. It’s visually striking, spiritually frigid, emotionally unengaging, at times intriguing but never fascinating. It’s technically impressive, of course — what else would you expect from an expensive Scott sci-fier? And the scary stuff takes hold in the final third. But it delivers an unsatisfying story that leaves you…uhm, cold.”

Also: “What kind of space-voyage movie has on-board officers walking around in flip-flops and sandals? All space travellers in all the space-travel movies going back to George Melies‘ A Trip to the Moon have worn boots or lace-ups or anti-gravitational grip shoes or whatever. Sandals! My heart sank when Michael Fassbender made his entrance with his milky Irish man-toes…don’t get me started.”

I apologize for omitting Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions (i.e., formerly Six Sessions, and before that The Surrogate) in my initial posting of my best-of-2012 piece, which I called “Half-Time.” I’ve since corrected the error. Fox Searchlight will release this highly praised acquisition (for which they paid $6 million) on 10.26.12.

“I saw Ben Lewin‘s The Surrogate this morning,” I wrote on 1.24.12, “and yes, it’s a touching, thoughtful and comforting film about touching, needing, being open and the finding of fulfillment. It’s an emotional, erotic variation on the themes in My Left Foot, The Sea Inside and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with a little sprinkling of Who’s Life Is It Anyway?.

“And John Hawkes, as a quadriplegic invalid who hires a sex therapist to cure his virginity, will almost certainly get some awa

Tom Berenger has been jogging around the track for 35-plus years. He broke into features in the mid ’70s and had a great 16-year run — Looking for Mr. Goodbar (’77), In Praise of Older Women (’78), The Dogs of War (’81), The Big Chill (’84), Platoon (’86), Someone to Watch Over Me (’87), Major League (’89), Born on the Fourth of July (’89), The Field (’90), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (’91), Sliver (’93) and Gettysburg (’93). And then he seemed to slip into B-level genre stuff, but he came back two years ago with a significant role in Chris Nolan‘s Inception.

The man is a veteran who’s paid his dues several times over and is now into his seventh decade of life on the planet…and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has only just granted him membership? I understand that you have to apply and that you need a sponsor or two. Maybe Berenger never applied, but why wouldn’t he have? He knows this town and that membership couldn’t hurt and could possibly help his career, so what kind of moron do you have to be to say “naaahh, I don’t want to join”? So if he did apply before, why would Academy gate-keepers turn him down? It just seems weird. The overwhelming majority of those recently granted membership are people who broke through within the last ten years or less.

Wait…is it because he’s politically conservative or something? I don’t know anything but that kind of thing can be a stopper.

The odd thing about Berenger is that he’s allegedly declared that his favorite feature of those he’s starred in was Gettysburg, in which he played Gen. James Longstreet. That movie has stayed in my mind for one reason only — bad beards. I would say that the beards in that film were ludicrous — they looked woven out of yak hair.