Across the globe geeks are warbling like tweety birds about the awesomeness of The Avengers, and they can have it. It’s 6:20 pm on a cool Friday, and I’m drinking in the incredibly beautiful, green and very flat German countryside flying past my first-class train compartment window at a much higher rate than 60 frames per second. Bad Bentheim, Rheine, Melle, Bunde.

I’ll be in Berlin a little after 9 pm this evening, but I love this ride and this train. Okay, no wifi but I’ve been without it since I flew out of JFK last night at 8:30 pm.

No wifi from British Airways. No time to even blink as I ran across much of Heathrow in order to make a London-to-Amsterdam flight that left at 9:40 am after my trans-Atlantic flight arrived at 8:30 am — a little more than six and a half hours. No wifi on the Dutch train, and no wifi on the German one. I’m tapping this out with my right thumb on the iPhone. Best I can do. I’ve taken some decent photos…later.

The weather was too damp and chilly this morning. Is this May or what? Let’s warm it up a little.

I slept in the train compartment for a couple of hours this afternoon. Very peacefully, I should add. Trains are great because the tracks go right by the most beautiful spots and right into the heart of most European towns and cities and you can really trip out on the pastoral and the sense of history and culture whereas highways are built outside and apart from everything — sterile, cleared-out ghetto land.

We just passed by the first hilly area I’ve seen since leaving Amsterdam. I’m sorry but eye-filling, heart-warming European scenery makes me emotional. And we’re now in Minden, an industrial, mid-sized city. Two-plus hours until Berlin, which I’ve never really visited before.

My ex and I honeymooned in East Berlin in late ’87 as part of a general Iron Curtain honeymoon tour, but that was too restricted as we couldn’t go into West Berlin. But we visited Checkpoint Charlie, and I got yelled at by a Soviet officer for trying to take a photo — “Nyet!”

Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Psychopaths (CBS Flms, 11.2.12), a dark comedy about a screenwriter (Colin Farrell), a dog-napping and a demimonde of wacko pals and associates, came to my attention during Cinemacon. Directed, written and co-produced by the guy who made In Bruges — how can it not be at least pretty good? Particularly with Chris Walken and Sam Rockwell costarring, and with Mickey Rourke having been cast and then quit after clashing with McDonaugh, whom he reportedly called “a jerk-off”?

The other cast members are Woody Harrelson (in the role Rourke would have played), Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko, Tom Waits, Kevin Corrigan and Gabourey Sidibe.

I’ve been a sucker all my life for Norman Mailer, the combative author, essayist, political figure, journalist and movie director. He was a huge influence in my teens and 20s. I got to know him a bit in ’87 when I wrote the Cannon press notes for Tough Guys Don’t Dance — in fact, he dictated editing and punctuation notes to me during a 90-minute phone call one afternoon.

So I’m susceptible to a two-year-old documentary portrait of the guy that’s coming out on DVD in a few days…that’s all. I’ll watch it on the plane tonight to London.

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One of Ashton Kutcher‘s cultural stereotype Popchips commercials (there were four) included a groovy Indian guy. “Offensive” by 2012 p.c. standards, for sure. But the bit isn’t that different from Peter Sellers‘ brownfaced, Nehru-jacketed character in The Party (’68) or even Alec Guiness‘s Professor Narayan Godbole in A Passage to India (’84). Kutcher just did it with broad humor.

I left last Monday night’s Avengers screening as the closing credits began, so I didn’t see any tacked-on sequences. Movieline‘s Jen Yamato has written that there may be two, one having something to do with the plot. But the other tail-end sequence (if there are in fact two) is totally unrelated to any plot element so it’s not spoiler material. Not in my book at least. A photo is sitting on a Tumblr page. If you’re a spoiler whiner, don’t click. Simple as that.

I thought at first that the recent daring escape from house arrest by blind Chinese civil-rights lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng in China’s rural Shandong Province might be the beginning of a good political thriller. Especially after Chen slipped into Beijing and was taken into the U.S. Embassy on humanitarian grounds. It’s at least an HBO film, I told myself. Every viewer would be rooting for Chen’s escape, and for the safety of his family. And Christian Bale could play himself in a cameo.

Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng and family.

But when Chen told U.S. officials he didn’t want political asylum in the U.S. and that he wanted to stay in China and grapple it out with Chinese authorities, he showed himself to be astonishingly naive if not stupid about what would likely happen to him and his family.

And then he changed his mind and said he wanted a haven in the U.S., but only after he’d been transferred to a Chinese-run Beijing hospital for treatment of a broken foot sustained during his escape, with Chinese goons surrounding him. And then he told The Daily Beast‘s Melinda Liu that he was scared and begged to be allowed to leave China on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s plane.

Heroes of political persecution thrillers are never naive about their situation or the mentality of their oppressors. They might ultimately win or lose their battle, but they never say in the middle of Act Two, “I don’t want asylum…I’ll tough it out and appeal to the humanity of the authorities and continue to fight the good fight in my native country” and blah blah. And they never cry about how scared they are after they’ve finally wised up.

Remember Steve McQueen‘s Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles? He wasn’t educated, but he knew what the Chinese communists were about. He was no fool. Right now that’s exactly what Cheng seems to be — a fool, and a weepy one at that. He had a chance (or at least a shot at a chance) and he blew it.

There are also indications that U.S. diplomatic officials in Beijing, fearful of a major row with the Chinese government, might be willing to throw Chen under the bus. A 5.2 N.Y. Times report about his escape, temporary asylum and hospitalization says that “he was…spooked by the presence of plainclothes [Chinese] police officers at the hospital” and that “it did not help that United States officials had gone home for the evening.”

What kind of a supposed good-guy official in a political thriller goes home for the evening with a hot-potato political activist in a hospital under the control of the bad guys?

“Many Americans were with me while I checked into the hospital and doctors examined me…lots of them,” Chen told Liu from his hospital bed. “But when I was brought to the hospital room, they all left. I don’t know where they went.” Obviously they were told to stand down.

Liu writes that “U.S. officials…said they had reached an understanding with Chinese authorities that Chen would be allowed to pursue his education in a location away from his home province of Shandong, to follow up on his work as a self-taught ‘barefoot lawyer.'”

A 12.3 story by N.Y. Times reporter Jane Perlez says the United States has “recognized that the blind dissident lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, [has] changed his position and now [wants] to leave China, a senior Obama administration official said here Thursday.”

Yeah, but what are they going to do about it? It’ll be a very bad thing if the Obama administration allows Chen-the-lamb to be surrounded and nipped at and possibly eaten by the wolves. The symbolism of will give Romney and the right a potent issue.

Benh Zeitlin‘s Beast of the Southern Wild is “something to sink into and take a bath in on any number of dream-like, atmospheric levels, and a film you can smell and taste and feel like few others I can think of,” I wrote on 1.25.12. “The emphasis is on sensual naturalism-wallowing — lush, grassy, muddy, oozy, leafy, stinky, primeval, non-hygenic, slithery, watery, ants up your ass — with a few story shards linked together like paper clips.

“It’s a poetic, organic, at times ecstatic capturing of a hallucinatory Louisiana neverland called the Bathtub, down in the delta lowlands and swarming with all manner of life and aromas, and a community of scrappy, hand-to-mouth fringe-dwellers, hunters, jungle-tribe survivors, animal-eaters and relentless alcohol-guzzlers who live there.

“The narrative, as such, focuses on six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) and a third-act search for Hushpuppy’s mother.

“Wallis is a hugely appealing young actress — beautiful, spirited, wide-eyed — and she pretty much carries the human-soul portions of the film. But Henry’s dad, who cares for Hushpuppy in his own callous and bullying way, is a brute and a drunk and mostly a drag to be around, and after the fifth or sixth scene in which he’s raging and yelling and guzzling booze, there’s a voice inside that starts saying ‘I don’t know how much more of this asshole I can take.’

“Here comes the part of the review that the keepers of the precious Sundance flame are going to dislike. If you apply the classic Jim Hoberman ‘brief vacations’ concept of a great film not only being a kind of ‘sacred text’ but constituting a realm that a viewer would be happy to literally take up residence within, Beasts of the Southern Wild does not, for me, pass the test.”

The subway defacers are starting to make themselves heard as far as Men in Black 3 is concerned. Does that mean something? No, of course not…but on another level, maybe. I see a poster defacement and a voice whispers in my ear, “A little something is happening here.”

Joey — Wednesday,5.2, 5:45 pm.

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I don’t just exist. Well, I do…but I feel like I’m doing a lot more. Creating, “painting,” stirring pots, leaving a mark of some kind. Everyone is terrified that they might be just existing and nothing but. The ultimate mark of a nothing mediocre life. Does anyone anywhere think of him or herself as being as just plugging along and marking time? Alcoholics, maybe.

In the view of Village Voice critic Nick Pinkerton, Richard Linklater‘s Bernie “is that rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film.

“Is it condescending to its small-town-life subject or sympathetic toward it? This hang-up precludes the possibility of a filmmaker holding two conflicting ideas in mind at the same time, just like we do. Such nonbinary thinking is necessary to approaching an oddity like Bernie, which, in its multiple perspectives, is all about irreconcilable facts and foggy motives, not least the contrary demands of forgiveness written in the Bible and the stern punishment written in the law books.

“In its ornery eccentricity, Bernie spits off more ideas than any American movie in many moons, and it’s not reassuringly conclusive about any of them. Cast and crew will be lucky to escape with their careers intact.”

The two-year-old Klown is about “two wildly inappropriate friends (Frank Hvam, Casper Christensen) animalistically running amok through the Danish countryside …awkward confrontations and unspeakable debaucheries…from exclusive brothels, hospitalizations, armed robberies and even prison, the three paddle downstream from one chaotic misadventure to the next culminating to a surprise sentimental portrait of friendship and a final shocking reveal, etc.
Theaters & VOD on 7.27.