Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar currently has a lousy 45% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and my guess is that this number isn’t going to rise very much between now and opening day (i.e., Wednesday). But a portion of the Friends-of-Clint Club (i.e., NY & LA elites who’ve generally stuck by him and have occasionally found ways to give even his lesser films a pass) are giving their approval. These include N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, The New Yorker‘s David Denby, MSN critic Glenn Kenny, etc. Richard Roeper is actually calling J. Edgar “one of the best films of 2011.”

“It’s not bad for what it is,” I wrote last weekend. “No, better than not bad. ‘Decent’ is a fair term to use. It’s Clint’s version of Brokeback Mountain, in a sense, and is finely performed and professionally assembled, etc. But for all the things it does right and despite that feeling of rock-bottom assurance that an Eastwood film always provides, J. Edgar is a moderately boring film, at times in an almost punishing way. Mostly because it’s a profound drag to spend time with such a sad, clenched and closeted tight-ass.”

Update: In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has just tweeted “kudos to the precious few willing to review just J. Edgar, [and] not Eastwood’s impressive directorial spryness at this stage of his career.”

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network) has written a short Vanity Fair piece about the personality and temperament of David Fincher, director of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and, of course, The Social Network. Here are the portions that I like the most, in my own order and with edits:

“For three months leading up to the Oscars we’d been going head-to-head with the eventual Best Picture winner, The King’s Speech, and six hours after David lost [the Best Director Oscar] to that film’s director, Tom Hooper, he sent me an e-mail with his unused acceptance speech attached. It began, “We’ve finally answered the question, ‘Apples or oranges?'”

“Off the top of my head I can think of 10 people who cared more than David did when his name wasn’t called. I don’t want to give Academy members the wrong idea — he respects the Academy and its highest honor — he just doesn’t cry over spilt milk. David doesn’t cry over anything. My guess is that his single biggest reason for wanting to win was to avoid having people offer condolences for not winning.”

“David Fincher in a bad mood isn’t easy to discern from David Fincher in a good mood. Fincher tired is the same as Fincher energized. There’s never anything about his demeanor that asks you to ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ This might be what people mean when they talk about strength. Also focus.

“David has great patience with people who aren’t as gifted as he is. What he can’t abide are people who don’t work as hard as he does. And he won’t work with people who don’t care as much as he does. Everyone who works in Hollywood has two personalities: their real one and the one assigned to them by rumor. The rumor about David is that he’s gruff, harsh, and difficult to work with. The truth about David is that he’s warm, honest, and an exceptionally generous collaborator. He’s fine with the rumor.”

Haywire proved again that Steven Sodberbergh kills every time he decides to do a crime-action movie. (Excluding the Ocean’s films, of course.) I realized this morning that the same incandescent mentalities who declared that Haywire is “not very good” (air agnes) or “meh…kind of dry and slow-moving” (Alex Billington) are cousins of those who complained that the warehouse shootout scene in Soderbergh’s The Limey (’99) sucked because it doesn’t show anything.

Yesterday a registered letter arrived from Rome’s Corpo di Poilizia, informing that I owe them 105 euros and change for a traffic violation that happened on 5.23.10. Except I was never pulled over and given any kind of ticket or verbal warning…nothing. I don’t know what I did wrong (the infraction number is 13101230071/10) but whatever my crime it must have been traffic-cammed. Before yesterday afternoon I’d never been handed a special delivery letter from any foreign city or nation informing me of a traffic violation, let alone one that allegedly occured 18 months ago.

I somehow got hold of this early-stab, never-used Sexy Beast poster after catching it at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2000. I brought it home in a plastic tube and had it mounted on foam core. It felt too extreme for framing or hanging on a wall, but it does reflect the horrific madman humor in Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan character.

Click here for larger version

“Retired? Fuck off, you’re revolting. Look at your suntan…it’s like leather, like leather man, your skin. We could make a fucking suitcase out of you. Like a crocodile, fat crocodile, fat bastard. You look like fucking Idi Amin, you know what I mean?”

An intriguing similarity between Glenn Close‘s Albert Nobbs and Damon Herriman‘s Bruno Richard Hauptmann in J. Edgar was mentioned earlier this morning by Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet.

In response to prohibitive security conditions announced by Summit Entertainment concerning its 11.16 Manhattan all-media screening of Breaking Dawn, critic Marshall Fine has declared the following: “As a critic who takes pride in his professionalism, I object to the forced surrender of my telephone or any other device at a screening to which I have been invited in a professional capacity. I therefore will not be attending this screening or reviewing this film.”

Most all-media screening publicists give special reserved tickets to journalists they know and trust so they won’t have to show ID or surrender their phones or submit to wandings or any of the other tedious procedures that security goons put people through at these events.

Will Fine make the same declaration if these same conditions are imposed for all-media screenings of War Horse or The Iron Lady or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? That is the question.

Journalist Mark Harris has joined Awards Daily’s Sasha Stone in declaring that in the wake of Brett Ratner’s “fags” comment last Friday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should ask for his resignation as producer of the forthcoming Oscar show.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil seems to be in the Harris-Stone camp also, as indicated by his soliciting responses for a poll about whether Ratner should be canned.

Update: At 7:20 pm this evening Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported that “the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not take action after Brett Ratner made and then apologized for making an insensitive comment during a Q&A for his film Tower Heist. AMPAS president Tom Sherak told Deadline he is standing behind Ratner after the filmmaker apologized for saying that ‘rehearsal is for fags.’ But Sherak made it crystal clear that another indiscreet comment will not be tolerated.”

As the Oscar telecast is “a show that is supposed to represent the best the industry has to offer, there’s not really a long, nuanced debate to be had about this,” Harris writes. “If [Ratner] had used an equivalent racial or religious slur, the discussion would go something like, ‘You’re fired.’ Apology or not. The same rule applies here. You don’t get a mulligan on homophobia. Not in 2011.”

Motion Picture Academy CEO Dawn Hudson faced a similar situation three years ago when, as the head of Film Independent, she was faced with gay community outrage after LA Film Festival director Rich Raddon was revealed to have contributed to the Mormon-led “Proposition Hate” initiative. Raddon submitted his resignation.

The above YouTube clip is an audio capture from Ratner’s appearance on today’s Howard Stern show. He spoke about he loves giving oral sex to women, about the Olivia Munn situation (he denied “banging” her), and spoke about having sex with Lindsay Lohan, and how a lot of his older Hollywood pallies don’t use condoms while sleeping with random women. Here are part 2 and part 3.

Robert B. Weide‘s Woody Allen: A Documentary will air in two parts as a PBS American Masters presentation on 11.20 and 11.21. The measure of it, for me, will be whether it accepts and explores the things in his life that were not wonderful, that didn’t go so well, that were somehow banal or involved discord or shortfalls. The less-than-triumphant stuff. Because relentless ass-kissing is not interesting.

I never said this when it was timely, but Allen’s decision to abandon Bop Decameron in favor of Nero Fiddles as the title of his latest film is one of the worst calls in his career. I loved the sound of Bop Decameron.

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!” — Woody Allen.

I finally received my Mutiny on the Bounty Bluray today, and I have to tell the truth about it, which is more than what DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze and Bluray.com‘s Jeffrey Kauffman conveyed in their reviews. It looks better than the 2006 DVD, but not as good as it could have, given that this 1962 film was shot in 65mm Ultra Panavision.

I don’t mean to bite the hands that feeds, but the Mutiny Bluray simply doesn’t have the needle-sharp detail that you’ll find on the Ben-Hur or Ten Commandments Blurays. It’s pleasing enough, but it looks like it was derived from 35mm elements. I’ve read it’s from the same scan and transfer that constituted the 2006 HD-DVD disc.

The large-format sharpness and detail have never looked better on home video, yes. It’s better to have the Bluray version than the five-year-old DVD, of course. It’s just that the Bluray doesn’t convey how beautiful this film was when it was shown in 70mm roadshow engagements 49 years ago. I guess none of us will ever see a rendering on this level during our time on this planet.

The bottom line is that it would have been too expensive for Warner Home Video to do it really right, and I suppose, given the economic realities of the day, they had no choice. A digital scan of a 65mm film that lasts 178 minutes would have probably cost over $300,000, and perhaps a lot more. It just wouldn’t have made economic sense.

Yesterday morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I riffed on Hugo, J. Edgar and Young Adult. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Why was I, a non-fan of sadistic kick-ass actioners in the Jason Statham-Steven Seagal mode and a rabid hater of most Asian martial-arts flicks, so delighted with Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire (Relativity, 1.20.12), and the fight sequences in particular? Answer: because they’re 100% believable, and because Gina Carano, an MMA champ, is the first completely credible female kick-butt star, ever.

Thirty seconds into her first duke-out and there isn’t the slightest doubt that Carano can whip any guy out there, no matter how big or snarly. If she could time-travel back to ’62 she could probably whip Sean Connery. Seriously. And she can act well enough. And she’s attractive.

There’s something almost stunning about the straight-up realism in Haywire‘s fight scenes. Or nostalgic, I should say. For as I mentioned last night, and as Soderbergh himself noted during last night’s post-screening q & a, the fight-scene realism is a kind of tribute to the train-compartment battle between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love (’63).

With their phony, fetishy, high-flying action-ballet bullshit, most Asian martial-arts films (efforts like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon excepted) get it so completely wrong, for whatever reason not understanding or unable to deliver Haywire‘s simple aesthetic.

Soderbergh’s shooting and editing of the Haywire fight scenes is exquisite. Haywire is faster and more furious than Drive, but Soderbergh is clearly coming from the same “tone it down, think it through and make it real” school of action cinema. At no time do Haywire‘s action scenes give you that awful feeling of being artificially adrenalized and jacked-up for the sake of coherence-defying Michael Bay-o sensation.

(l. to r.) Haywire director Steven Soderbergh, costars Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Gina Carano during last night’s post-screening discussion at the Chinese.

In a late August piece called Chaos Cinema, critic Mathias Stork lamented how modern action films “have become faster, volatile, over-stuffed, hyperactive…bipolar and promiscuous camera movement…a never-ending crescendo with no spacial clarity.” It is soothing to report that Haywire is pretty much the antithesis of this.

If you delight in chaos cinema (probably a fair description of the tastes of most filmgoers out there) then you might feel that Haywire doesn’t quite get it. But if you do feel this way, and if you tell your friends that it’s not as hot-shit as it ought to be, then you need to face the fact that you’re an idiot — that you have the moviegoing mentality (if not the physical proportions) of an Hispanic Party Elephant.

Haywire is a little hard to follow at first, but I presume that screenwriter Lem Dobbs wanted it that way. All I know is that I can’t wait to hear Dobbs and Soderbergh get into another commentary-track dispute (anything will do) when the Haywire Bluray comes out.

Carano’s Mallory Kane is an ex-Marine and independent contractor who’s on the run from several men who have some interest in or relation to an operation in Barcelona involving a Chinese defector or protestor of some kind. Mallory naturally has to elude or otherwise survive all the attacks upon her, or, as Soderbergh put it last night, she “beats her way through the cast.”

The able-bodied fellows who get the piss and the tar whipped out of them include Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor and Antonio Banderas.

Gina Carano.

Michael Angarano, Bill Paxton and Michael Douglas also costar.

I don’t know that I buy the “Gina Carano is the new Pam Grier” line that some critics and columnists have used. I didn’t really buy Pam Grier as a serious toughie in her day; I believed that she played a serous toughie with great style.

There’s a great car-chase gag that happens at the midway point, involving an unfortunate non-human. That’s all I’m going to say.

I saw Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg before last night’s earlier screening of My Week With Marilyn (which I’ll write about tomorrow or the next day, especially focusing on Michelle Williams‘ bulls-eye performance as Marilyn Monroe). I asked if he’d be seeing Haywire at 9:30 pm, and he said, “Well, it’s not an Oscar film and that’s my beat so no, not tonight. I’ll see it eventually but…” What a shame. For serious Oscar-beaters, the simple pleasure of buying a small popcorn and a drink and watching a thrilling, well-made film and going “whoo-whoo!” is on hold until after Oscar telecast, it seems. Well, not this horse.

I get into arguments with Sasha Stone about this. “Just saw a good one, it’s really great and you’ve gotta see it,” I’ll say to her. And she’ll say, “Yeah, okay, someday…but it doesn’t have much of a shot at getting nominated in any of the major categories and we’re right in the middle of Oscar season and this is what I do for a living so…” God!