I was wandering around Hollywood Ameoba last night when I was slightly jolted by the sight of a $35 price tag on the Criterion Godzilla Bluray. I always buy Amazon these days, but I go to Ameoba to wander and dream and meditate. How good could Godzilla, a 1954 black-and-white film, look and sound to be worth $35? Even by Criterion standards it should retail for $20, tops. The Amazon price is too much also — $27 and change. The superfluous Raymond Burr version is included, but still.

Why didn’t the friends of the late Bingham Ray arrange for a simultaneous New York and LA double-header memorial — one at Manhattan’s Paris theatre (which happened today) and the L.A. version happening at Busby’s (5364 Wilshire Blvd, between Cloverdale and Detroit), which is set for next Friday, 2.17? Probably due to an audio-visual presentation that can only play one place at a time. Indiewire‘s David D’Arcy has written a nice story about the New York event.

It’s funny, but during all the years I knew Ray we never compared notes about working for Sid Geffen in the late ’70s. Ray worked as a projectionist at the Geffen-run Bleecker Street Cinema in ’80 or thereabouts, or so I recall. This wasn’t long after I was toiling as the manager editor of Sid’s Thousand Eyes Cinema Guide. I’m sure we crossed paths but for whatever reason we never talked about it. That’s because neither of us really let our hair down and “talked” to each other, ever. We would spar and laugh but never share. Ray once called me “the Devil himself,” which I always thought was a bit harsh.

Nominees for the Best Animated Feature Oscar are almost always the same hip family ghoulash. Mostly Pixar or DreamWorks-produced, big distributor, voiced by big-name actors, big budget, aimed at kids and adults. Even when they’re from outside the U.S., like A Cat in Paris, they still feel like typical family-friendly fare. Which is why it’s pleasing that at least one of this year’s nominees — Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal‘s Chico and Rita — doesn’t do the usual usual.

It’s an adult Cuban jazz romance that spans decades and involves a love affair between a man and a woman who actually smooch and disrobe and have sex in the early stages (a huge commercial no-no in the animation realm). The animation is primitive on one level but refreshingly different on another — it’s drawn to a different drum. And it has a sweaty, sensuous soundtrack, composed by Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes with additional tunes by Freddy Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Cole Porter and Thelonious Monk.

I didn’t feel patronized by Chico and Rita. I felt i was watching…hell, I was watching something that actually dared to stand outside the family-friendly arena. But charmingly, winningly.

Chico and Rita can’t win the Oscar, of course. The winner has to be the amusing, financially successful Rango! Gore Verbinski‘s Rango! It’s a decently made thing, for one. And it’s got Johnny Depp as a lizard (kewl!) and it’s an hommage to Sergio Leone films and shit. It’s the hip thing to stand by if you want to be hip, and who doesn’t? Plus Verbinski and Depp are really loaded from their Pirates of the Caribbean profit-share payments and…well, it’s hard to not award a film made by a couple of really rich guys, y’know?

It’s all a rigged game, it always stays the same, the fix is in, the rich get richer, etc.

The only thing that threw me about Chico and Rita is that it’s been playing the festival circuit and commercially overseas since 2010, and yet it took the better part of two years to finally open in the States (i.e., today). The other thing is that it feels a little bit odd that an adult animated film is being distributed by GKIDS Luma Films, which has an association with kiddie movies. GKIDS president, Eric Beckman, runs the New York International Children’s Film Festival.

I spoke to Beckman about this a couple of days ago, and he said this is why he added the name “Luma” to the company title — it signals a separate interest and attitude.

“We didn’t pick up Chico and Rita until recently,” Beckman said. “We saw it at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival. We chased the damn thing for a year, talking mainly to Cinetic, holder of US rights, and getting nowhere. We finally just called producers of the film directly and we had a deal signed in two weeks. That occured last September, or five months ago.”

Chico and Rita opens today at the Angelika on Houston Street and then on March 9th in Los Angeles.

“I love films that take chances,” Beckman said, “and so far Chico and Rita seems to be playing really well with general audiences. It’s not a little kids’ film, and the music is amazing and it’s a big epic thing, spanning 60 years…it has a lot in common with The Artist and old MGM musicals.”

Let’s hear it for Cuban cartoon characters who play music and smoke cigarettes and get rousted by the cops and walk the sad streets and endure the loneliness and all that other classic adult stuff. Because it doesn’t happen often enough.

In the view of Film Business Asia‘s Derek Elley, Jiang Wen‘s Let the Bullets Fly (Variance, 3.2) is “a richly entertaining Oriental Western anchored by a well-honed, ironic script and terrific performances.” The trailer tells me otherwise. It tells me it’ll be agony, and that the only way I’ll stay to the closing credits is if I’m strapped to a theatre seat with Clockwork Orange eyelid-clamps, etc.

Who would’ve suspected that a single shot from a rifle could not only derail a large train car being pulled by a team of horses along a train track, but cause it to flip over end to end? The script of Let The Bullets Fly reportedly went through 30 drafts before Jiang Wen was happy with it, and he goes with a ludicrous action gag like this?

This, in a nutshell, is why I despise Asian action cinema, and why I’m completely at peace with never watching any Asian action film ever again.

I’m also telling you that critics who do giddy cartwheels over this kind of flamboyant, self-satirizing, high-style Asian grindhouse fare cannot be trusted. I know a lot of these guys and have heard that many have taken part in a secret annual Asian Film Society ceremony and sworn obedience to the rule, ratified in the early ’90s, that almost all Asian action cinema gets a pass for its vitality and verve. If you aspire to be a member in good standing of the Brotherhood of Dweeb, you WILL give films like this a stamp of approval and you will DEFINITELY NOT say stuff like I’m saying here. If you don’t, you’ll have to deal with a lot of disapproval and God knows what else.

Let the Bullets Fly opened in in China in December 2010 “and grossed 730 million yuan ($111.1 million US) in box office, becoming the highest grossing domestic film in China’s cinematic history,” says the Wiki page.

“Set in China during the warring 1920s, the bandit ‘Pocky’ Zhang Mazi (Jiang Wen) and the other bandits ambush a con artist (Ge You) who is posing as the Governor Ma Bangde with his wife. Zhang then proceeds to Goosetown taking Tang’s place as the local governor. Tang becomes his counselor, while Tang’s wife poses as Zhang’s wife. Zhang’s aim at this position is opposed by local mobster Master Huang (Chow Yun Fat) who lives in his fortified citadel overlooking the town,” blah blah crap crap.

“Some films have certain scenes that need to be redone, but on This Means War the whole picture should have been sent back for a reshoot. This perfectly dreadful romantic action comedy manages to embarrass its three eminently attractive leading players in every scene, making this an automatic candidate for whatever raspberries or golden turkeys or other dubious awards may be given in future for the films of 2012. It’s an eye-roller from start to finish.” — from Todd McCarthy‘s 2.9 Hollywood Reporter review, posted at 7:09 pm.

Why would I want to see a Deep Impact relationship comedy? What’s funny about cops who still give tickets and particularly people who give a damn about cops giving tickets with a meteor about to smash into earth in three weeks’ time? What’s funny about a maid who gets offended when told she doesn’t have to return to clean? How can anyone be expected to invest anything whatsover in a relationship happening under the cloud of certain doom?

Focus Features is opening Seeking A Friend for the End of the World, which costars Steve Carell and Keira Knightley and was written by Lorene Scafaria, on 6.22.

Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky‘s Francine, a drama starring Melissa Leo as an ex-con sturggling to find fulfillment, will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday, 2.13. An Indiewire synopsis says that Leo’s character’s “failure with human connection leads her to seek support from animals, with tragic consequences.”

As a writing class experiment, HE readers are requested to take five minutes and explain how a middle-aged woman seeking support from “animals” — obviously a reference to a Calico cat — could lead to “tragic consequences.” Let’s see…the cat is a stray who comes by for food scraps at dinner, and Leo adopts him as her pet. One day she notices some kids tormenting the cat (swinging it around by its tail or something) so she takes revenge on the kids and their parents find out and a violent confrontation results.

Why is Leo pictured as being nude as she’s holding the cat? What that could mean?

The synopsis also says that “her path through life is much like an orbiting satellite: detached, lonely and ultimately destined to crash.”

Every couple of years I post a short clip from What’s Up Tiger Lily?. It’s a longstanding Hollywood Elsewhere tradition. There’s no clip of my favorite scene (the royal bearded guy pulls out a small map and says, “This is Shepherd Wong’s home,” and Phil Moskowitz asks, “He lives in that piece of paper?”) so I had to go with this.

Variety‘s Jeff Sneider is reporting that DreamWorks and Working Title Films have agreed to pool forces on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rebecca. The script will be written by Eastern Promises scribe Steven Knight, who “will go back to the original book” by Daphne DuMaurier. Has there ever been a trade story about a remake of a well-known Hollywood classic in which the principals didn’t say they’d base their script on the original book?

I’ll tell you what it’ll mean to “go back” to the DuMaurier book. Maxim De Winter (played by Laurence Olivier in the Hitchcock original) won’t confess to having “struck” Rebecca, causing her to accidentally hit her head and die — he’ll admit that he flat-out shot her. That’s all it will specifically mean as the Hitchcock version stuck close to the novel save for letting Maxim off the hook.

What also will happen, of course, is that the new film will leave less to the imagination and be more explicit in various ways so as to meet the expectations of today’s less educated and sophisticated girly-girl audience. The lesbian current between Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers (whether verbally suggested or dramatized in flashback) will almost certainly be more explicit. The nameless lead character (played by Joan Fontaine in the 1940 original) will probably be given a name. The dead Rebecca will become a literal ectoplasmic ghost, I’m guessing, and will also be played by an actress in flashbacks. Will the DreamWorks-Working Title version keep the story in period, setting it in the late 1930s, or will they bring it into the 21st Century so as make it more familiar and inviting to the none-too-brights?

There’s nothing in Daniel Espinosa‘s Safe House (Universal, 2.10) that you haven’t seen many times before. Set in South Africa, it’s a cookie-cutter Bournedoggle about a CIA rogue-on-the-run (Denzel Washington) and a safe-house operative (Ryan Reynolds) who’s trying to keep him in cuffs. It’s shot like the Bourne series (hand-held, grainy photography, jazzy cutting), and Washington-Reynolds do a decent job with all the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay and car madness.

But…BUT!…I never felt bored or burned because the Swedish-born Espinosa, 34, really knows how to shoot and stage action like Tony Scott or Paul Greengrass. Or at least he knows how to work well with cinematographer Oliver Wood, who shot all three Bourne films. Espinosa seems to get the rules of this realm and understand a thing or two about thrillers (his 2010 film Easy Money was a huge Swedish hit), and he earns points for keeping the Bourne shakey-cam aesthetic on a leash.

And there’s certainly a comfort factor in watching a film that’s been made by someone who’s obviously more skilled than your average DGA clock-puncher. The very beginning, for instance, focuses on domestic small-talk dialogue between Reynolds and his French live-in girlfriend (Nora Arnezeder). It’s just a typical set-up scene, but Espinosa shoots in such a way that keeps you attuned and intrigued. He doesn’t frame or cut anything in rote fashion.

So even though it’s the usual razmatazz, you could do worse than see Safe House this weekend. I’ve seen the same chops and plot points used 18 or 89 times before (I’ve lost count) and the script delivers almost nothing original but I’m a sucker for well-engineered shooting and cutting. Go ahead, call me shallow. Guilty.

Due respect for the ad-poster guys but out of politeness one should never run a photo of an older man in profile as this always accentuates the neck waddle and the paunch.

No comment implied about Von Sydow’s performance in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, of course, which is fine for what it is. He’s been working like a champ since the mid ’50s, and is obviously one of our greatest older actors. My favorite MVS perfs are contained in The Virgin Spring, Shame, Three Days of the Condor and Hannah and Her Sisters,

I’ll bet all the ad money I’ve earned during Phase One and Phase Two that 95% of the Academy members who love The Artist (or at least are giving it their Best Picture vote) have never heard of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (’06) or OSS 117: Lost in Rio (’09), much less seen them.

They should at least be aware of them and what they are. Because these two clever comedies — 007 spoofs released in ’06 and ’09, directed by Michael Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin and costarring (in the Cairo film) Berenice Bejo — are cut from the same cloth as The Artist. In fact they’re the same basic shtick.

All three are driven by a reflective tribute-to-the-past mentality, and are extremely scrupulous in replicating the particulars. The difference with The Artist, of course, is that it invests in pathos and tragedy in act three instead of deadpan comedy start to finish. But the depth factor is pretty much the same. All three are about cinema style and recombining elements and turning old-time genres and forms into refreshments.

If Academy chiefs were to insist that AMPAS members attend special screenings of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio this week, many planning to vote for The Artist would change their minds for two reasons. One, they’d realize that Hazanavicus, Dujardin and Bejo have been working this routine for five or six years and that The Artist isn’t quite as inspired as they’d thought. And two, many would realize that the spy spoofs are just as exacting and dead-on in recreating early 007 films as The Artist is in reviving the silent black-and-white era of the 1920s, and that the OSS films are funnier and more pleasing.

That’s how I feel, at least. The OSS films are a kick. And purchasable through Amazon.

Statement by Michel Hazanavicius in the 2011 Cannes Film Festival program notes.