In the view of critic Jim Emerson, Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Four Nights With Anna — theatrically unreleased and unavailable as a subtitled DVD, but playing this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image — is “a small-scale masterpiece about voyeurism” and also “a movie about movie-watching and movie-making.

“Leon (Artur Steranko), the conscience and consciousness of the film, is as smitten with the object of his desire (Kinga Preis) as can be, even though his drugged and slumbering beloved isn’t conscious of their trysts,” Emerson writes. “Unlike James Stewart in Rear Window” (but very much like Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr.) he daringly crosses the void that separates them and enters her world through that permeable rectangle…four times.”

And what if Artur was a 59 year-old gay man and the object of his desire was a 12 year-old boy, whom he has drugged into submission? What then? Would Emerson and his cineaste homies still be drooling over this companion piece to Rear Window and Peeping Tom? I’m asking.

To call someone a “dick” is a colloquial shortform way of saying they’ve acted in a snide or petty or selfish or brusque manner. MSNBC contributor Mark Halperin is a rightie, of course, and since the topic at hand was (apparently) the debt-ceiling negotiations, what he was saying was that his Republican pallies have told him that President Obama was playing a kind of snippy hardball with them.

To which I say, “Then he’s doing something right!”

You can’t be mean and tough and “Chicago gangsta” enough when it comes to the radical corporate-fellating right. Any pain and stress and discomfort and difficulty you can throw their way is a good thing. Obama’s big failing as far as lefties like myself are concerned is that he’s been far too obliging and gracious towards nutbag convervatives. You can’t treat them as you would a reasonable, fair-minded person who isn’t beholden to ideological purity. You have to push their faces into the cactus and kick them them in the ribcage, over and over and over and over. And then you need to really get mean.

Box Office Mojo‘s Brandon Gray is reporting that the $37.3 million earned yesterday by Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a technical shortfaller. Although it earned 2011’s biggest opening-day income, T3 nonetheless “pales compared to the opening day income of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and likely yielded fewer viewers than the first Transformers.”

There are three reasons for this. One, a large percentage of moviegoers are always slow on the pickup as far as advance internet buzz is concerned, and so they haven’t heard that the film has to be seen for the 45-minute attack-on-Chicago finale. Two, the crappy quality of Revenge of the Fallen has diminished general interest in the franchise. And three, people are feeling a little burned out right now about 3D franchise movies and so a certain percentage didn’t go yesterday because they’re taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Columbia Journalism Review reporter Joel Meares has written a reasonable, fair-minded, occasionally amusing profile of Hollywood Elsewhere (and myself, of course). I don’t know what else to say except I’m glad that it’s balanced and kind and accurate and respectful. And not caustic or snippy. Thanks much to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone for saying all those nice, perceptive things.

I asked Meares to make two minor changes and he refused. I asked him to list a couple of other big names who read HE and he said “naahh.” Then I said it sounds more natural and conversational when you say “over and over again” instead of “over again,” which is how he quotes me in the piece: “[ComicCon is] catering to fanboys who want the same stories told over again.” He replied that “while I agree ‘over and over’ reads better, it’s not what you said when we spoke.” To which I responded, “I only used one ‘over’ in that portion of our chat and that‘s why you’re sticking with it? Seriously? Okay.”

This is what some hardcore journalists are like. If you’re talking to an interviewer about Sarah Palin and you mistakenly call her Sarah Kalin, they’ll write in the piece “he called her Sarah Kalin, although he was obviously referring to the Alaskan rightwing celebrity-politician.”

Favorite passage: “The stories about bad WiFi service, split pants, and appropriate modulation may turn some off, but if you stick with him, Wells’s Hollywood Elsewhere is a brash, fun read. You might even come to like the man grinning at the top of the page. ‘I really think the personal stuff is what makes his blog so compelling,’ argues Stone. ‘He puts out a good picture of his world — he comes off as an imperfect person –his readers feel protective of him and can relate to him. When they click on the page they are stepping into his virtual world. No one else in our field really offers that.”

How do you make a movie about Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone series? That’s the intention of Bureau of Moving Pictures’ Andrew Meieran and screenwriter Stanley Weiser (W, Wall Street), according to Deadline’s Mike Fleming. But you can’t just make one of those “this happens and then that happens” biopics. You need a thematic through-line and a compelling psychological undercurrent.

I thought about the project this morning and wrote Weiser (whom I’ve gotten to know a little bit over the years) the following:

“It strikes me that the only way to write a movie about Rod Serling is to portray him in a sense as the odd guy who sees weirdness and fantasy and unsettling nightmares in real life. And a guy who, until he hits it big with The Twilight Zone in ’59, is regarded by many as a bit of oddball (and a very short oddball at that, at only 5′ 4′) who doesn’t have the skills or resolve to fit into the button-down culture of the 1940s and ’50s.

“I’m not saying Serling literally resembled, let’s say, the perspiring and hysterical William Shatner character in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, but he was partly that guy along with every other character on that series who saw past the tidy veneer and into the inner weirdness and oddness of things as they actually are. But that tension of being the oddball in a world of straight-arrows led to stress and anxiety and the relentless smoking of cigarettes, and finally an early death from cancer at age 50.

“I remember Serling saying that you’re initially delighted and over-the-moon from making $10,000 a week as a hotshot producer-screenwriter, and then you get used to it, and then you start living in terror that they’re going to take that away from you.”

I honestly this kind of biopic will work better as a made-for-cable drama. It sounds very intriguing but it’s not big-screen material.

Serling’s widow Carol Serling will be a producer along with Meieran, Fleming reports.

From the director of Let The Right One In, an adaptation of John LeCarre‘s slow-burn adult suspense tale (this time set in the ’70s) about uncovering the identity of a Russian mole within the British Secret Service. Pure candy and ice cream for someone like myself, but for the under-30 Eloi crowd….? And for Joe Popcorn living in Dubuque and Trenton and Tucumcari?

Shot by the great Hoyte van Hotema (The Fighter) and costarring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong and Ciaran Hinds. And “opening” only two and half months from now at Telluride/Toronto/Venice (although the U.S. debut via Focus Features isn’t until November).

The question for me is how long will it run? How thorough will the plotting be? The original British-produced miniseries adaptation with Alec Guinnness ran for six hour-long episodes (although Acorn Media’s DVD box set runs 290 minutes).

An Amazon poster wrote the following about the miniseries: “I found it enormously refreshing to have to work hard at understanding [the goings-on]. This difficulty, of course, is not superfluous, but central to the mood of the story. The complexity mirrors the moral complexity of the situation the characters find themselves in. The makers of the series could have simplified the plot, could have made everything that was happening clear from the outset, but it would have thereby distorted the story.

“The opening credits begin with a shot of those Russian dolls that open to reveal a still smaller doll inside. The story is one of layers beneath layers, like unpeeling an onion. The complexity of the narrative enhances this.”

Tonight I finally watched the pilot for Tilda, the might-have-been cable series about a Nikki Finke-like online columnist (very nicely played by Diane Keaton) that HBO declined to pick up last February. Too bad because Hollywood Elsewhere has a brief insert-shot appearance near the beginning when Ellen Page, playing a studio employee who feeds dirt to Keaton, glances at a list of Hollywood websites before settling on Tilda’s The Daily Circus.

You know what’s funny? The “H” logo that sits to the left of Hollywood Elsewhere’s URL in actuality is sitting to the left of the URL for New York‘s “Vulture.”

‘Friends With Benefits meets No Strings Attached. Received today from Ben Churchill, the Blind Film Critic

Terrence Malick‘s 10.1.96 draft of The Thin Red Line was tight and true and straight to the point, and it had no alligators sinking into swamps or shots of tree branches or pretty leaves or that South Sea native AWOL section or any of that languid and meditative “why is there such strife in our hearts?” stuff. During the junket round-tables I got Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, Mike Medavoy and Ben Chaplin to autograph my copy.

“Larry Crowne makes no bones about its attempt to tell an upbeat story,” writes Marshall Fine. “Undoubtedly, at a time when unemployment is soaring and lives are collapsing as a result, some may fault it for taking a sour subject – losing a job in a down economy – and turning it into a feel-good story. But Hanks’ script – cowritten with Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame – is about a guy with a positive attitude, with the will and resources to move forward.

“No doubt Larry Crowne will be criticized for all of the things it doesn’t do. It doesn’t address the economic tragedy that Larry’s situation means for so many people. It doesn’t build to a life-and-death climax. It is, instead, a stealth comedy, low-key but consistently satisfying, a movie that focuses on the power of positivity without getting melodramatic about it.”

This is an amazing video. It was posted five or six days ago, and I’ve watched it four times today. It isn’t simulated. A seagull really did scoop up a tiny lightweight video camera and fly away with it. It happened in Cannes. (Initially posted by Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams on 6.27.)

“Chicago is the great American city. New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.” — from “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968” by Norman Mailer.

I’m trying to find online the entire opening passage of the Chicago section of Mailer’s book. I don’t mind buying the book again but I’d like to re-read right now the section in which he describes in great detail the killing of steers in the Chicago stockyards and how the aroma from this slaughter used to rise up and make its way up into the city and to some extent affect the town’s psychology. Or something like that. It was out of date when he wrote it (more reflective of the way things were done in the ’50s and before than in 1968) but it’s still lovely writing, and I was looking to read it once again. Alas…