Legendary screenwriter David Rayfiel, whom I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing about 15 years ago, died yesterday at 87. He was without question one of the greatest writers of adult romantic-emotional dialogue in film history, but he mostly worked as an uncredited pinch-hit guy for Sydney Pollack. Even in Pollack’s lesser films there are portions that have a gently eloquent seep-in quality, and Rayfiel had a hand in most if not all of these.

The Gene Hackman-Jeanne Tripplehorn scene at the Grand Caymans bar in The Firm. The finale of The Way We Were between Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, outside the Plaza hotel. The railroad farewell scene between Redford and Faye Dunaway in Three Days of the Condor. Those satisfying intimate moments between Redford and Jane Fonda in Electric Horseman . Those portions of Sabrina and Random Hearts, even, that deliver a wise, resigned, sadly touching quality.

Rayfiel was more of a colorist — a caster of mood spells — than a full-on screenwriter. And he always had a very delicate but precise touch. If you wanted him to write a love scene with shadings of mauve, Pollack once said, he would give you exactly that.

How many screenwriters today know or even care what mauve dialogue is?

Rayfiel also worked with Bertrand Tavernier (Round Midnight, Death Watch), Sidney Lumet (The Morning After) and Ingmar Bergman (The Serpent’s Egg).

A director-screenwriter pally wrote a few minutes ago to say “if you have time, check out Rayfiel’s war record. I believe he was a distinguished hard combat veteran in both WWII and Korea.” To which I replied: “It’s funny but Pollack never mentioned that to me (or so I recall) and Rayfiel himself never brought it up either when we spoke two or three times in the ’90s.

“That generation never talked about WWII….they never raised the subject unless you pressed them, and if you did they’d say as little as possible. Rayfiel was a great writer. Nobody around like him right now….or is there?”

I’ve longed all my life to be able to talk to highly desirable women with just a little bit of the “English” that Rayfiel’s dialogue had.

Rayfiel sample #1 (Three Days of the Condor):

Faye Dunaway: You…you have a lot of very fine qualities.

Robert Redford: What fine qualities?

Dunaway: You have good eyes. Not kind, but they don’t lie. And they don’t look away much, and they don’t miss anything. I could use eyes like that.

Redford: But you’re overdue in Vermont. Is he a tough guy?

Dunaway: He’s pretty tough.

Redford: What will he do?

Dunaway: Understand, probably.

Redford: Boy. That is tough.

Rayfiel sample #2 (Three Days of the Condor):

Cliff Robertson: Do you miss that kind of action, sir? [referring to joining and working for the CIA during World War II]

John Houseman: No, I miss that kind of clarity.

Rayfiel sample #3 (The Firm):

Gene Hackman: You know I have a very bad reputation.

Jeanne Tripplehorn: What do you do?

Hackman: I run around.

Tripplehorn: Why do you do that?

Hackman: I think it’s because….my wife understands me. Fact is I love my wife, but she…well, I guess she’s lost interest in me. I know I have. And I haven’t cared for anyone since. I’d like to though. I miss it.

Tripplehorn: My, you lay a lot on a girl for a first date.

Hackman: Is that what this is?

HE reader Phil Garcia had a somewhat annoying time watching The Tree of Life in Scottsdale, an affluent suburb of Phoenix, at the Harkins Camelview on East Highland. But not because of his own reaction to Terrence Malick‘s film. Here’s how he tells it:

Sign at Stamford’s Avon theatre, posted yesterday (6.23) by Movie City News‘ Ray Pride.

“I just finished listening to Oscar Poker # 36 where you comment that you cannot imagine anyone hating The Tree of Life,” he writes. “Well, I went to a 6 pm screening on opening day. The theater was jam-packed, mostly with a geriatric crowd. The movie started out okay, but once the ‘creation of life’ sequence started the crowd went south in a hurry. There were no less than 25 walk-outs.

“I’ve been in movies where a few people have walked out of the theater, but I’ve never seen such a mass exodus in a movie. There were people talking all through it. ‘I don’t get this.’ ‘Do you understand what’s going on?’ ‘This is terrible.’ This went on and on. People were still walking out when there was only ten minutes left.

“And it’s not as if the ‘creation of life’ sequence is that esoteric or incomprehensible, right? Perhaps it’s a matter of context. If the same images were a part of some IMAX documentary about the origins of the universe people would not care. Plop the same images in what is suppose to be narrative cinema and people lose their minds.”

I’m sure I’ll eventually read how they digitally pasted Chris Evans to the face of a ten year-old kid but if anyone has the lowdown, please inform. I presume it’s the same technology that allowed Brad Pitt to become a dwarf-sized codger in Benjamin Button and Armie Hammer‘s face to replace a stand-in’s in The Social Network.

Four days ago I reported on an LA Film Festival screenwriter seminar in which Diablo Cody said that her dream project would be a biopic of Brian Wilson. (Which seemed like a cool idea.) And today River Road Entertainment announced it has secured the Wilson’s “life rights” (as well as those of his wife Melinda Wilson) and is actively developing a feature film about the legendary singer, songwriter and leader of The Beach Boys with Oren Moverman (director and co-writer of The Messenger) handling the script.

What’s done is done…fine. But I could feel the passion in Cody’s words and eyes when she said she’d love to write a Wilson biopic, and I’ve read Young Adult since last Sunday and I’d say her writing is a bit sassier and more layered and more believably angst-ridden than the writing in The Messenger (even though, yes, Moverman got an Oscar nomination for it). If I was Pohlad I’d definitely try to bring her in to polish or punch up Moverman, to lend a little spritz or spunkitude or marquee-power.

The Messenger told me that Moverman basically does gloom and need and hurt, but Wilson’s life story is drenched in that stuff from the get-go. A movie about Wilson needs someone who can inject some wiggy flavor and attitude that would make it play a little nuts in a way that mirrors Wilson’s head. I’ve met Wilson and I’ve heard the stories. He’ll never be sane, and that’s a good thing.

If you were Bill Pohlad, head of River Road, and you had an either-or choice between Moverman and Cody, would you honestly choose Moverman? Okay, maybe you’d want someone to lay down the framework and the architecture, but the story of a guy losing his grip and getting obese and succumbing to a downward-swirl syndrome needs a touch of wackitude and surrealism, a sense of the absurd…or maybe a sense of the ever-present balance between nutbaggery and genius. You can’t just glumly and dolefully “tell the story”…this happens and that happens and blah blah.

Cody had to know about the River Road/Moverman deal when she mentioned her interest last weekend right?

You can agree with Movieline‘s Christopher Rosen and suggest that Transformers 3 star Shia LaBeouf is shilling insincerely by saying that “the last hour of this movie is the greatest action sequence of Michael Bay’s career, which would put it on the same level as the greatest action ever made.

“You don’t breathe for the last hour. There’s just no letup, but it’s also not completely overwhelming and disconnected, as the second movie was. You didn’t know what was fighting what or where you were geography-wise. There was no way to be able to tell a story, whereas this is very Black Hawk Down action. The geography is very clear. There’s only four or five dudes you need to be following. The enemy is very clear. The second movie was so…complicated. The best movies are simple.”

So I asked a friend who’s seen it, and he says LaBeouf isn’t wrong.

The last 40-plus minutes of Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon amount to “the mother of all battle sequences,” he says. “It’s truly a Battle Royale. Nonstop mayhem battle….and your mouth is open that he did this. It’s really noticably epic…a big selling point.

“Except it’s a Transformers movie, you know, and it’s 2 and 1/2 hours or maybe even a bit longer. They had told me it was 2 hours and 20 minutes when I walked in but I don’t know [about that].

“And there was a guy who got up at the beginning of the screening and said they were trying to show a new brighter 3D process…there’s a highlight aspect, a brighter image in mind…the whole goal is to show it brighter so the glasses don’t darken the image. They’re going to show this in theatres that are equipped to do this, this special version. If they want to save 3D at all they need to do this.

A recent Variety story said that Paramount and Bay “have gone beyond simply asking exhibs to turn their lamps up to proper brightness [for Transformers 3]…Par is taking the unprecedented step of releasing a special digital print aimed at delivering almost twice the brightness of standard 3D projection — even more than the dual-projector IMAX Digital theaters.”

Jake Kasdan‘s Bad Teacher (Sony, 6.24) isn’t funny. It’s horrible, in fact. I’m sorry to be judgmental but any film critic who’s given this catastrophe a pass or called it…you know, amusing or enjoyably raucous (and there are plenty who have) really does have to be sent to detention and regarded askance. Some people can’t be trusted with comedies, and anyone who looks at this film and says “yeah, has some funny bits, not bad” has truly questionable values, not just as a cineaste but as a human being.

Because the first 44 minutes of this movie really and truly stink. The remainder of it, mind, might be the greatest second half of a motion picture ever made. In fact, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and say that again, loudly. For all I know the second half of Bad Teacher might be absolutely miraculous. Please see it because of this very realistic potential. For all I know Jake Kasdan, the 37 year-old director, might be an astounding comic wizard and Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg might be amazing screenwriters….of films that suddenly become good after the first 44 minutes.

It. Doesn’t. Make. You. Laugh. Ever.

Cameron Diaz plays a bone-dumb, past-her-prime, ferociously empty ding-dong who couldn’t wangle an interview to be a junior-high-school teacher if she handed out brown bags filled with $25,000 in used bills to each and every person on the educational food chain, plus blowjobs to all the guys. She gets away with stuff that no teacher could begin to get away with, but that’s what funny about this thing, right? She guns her car in reverse on the school grounds, going 40 or 45 mph like Steve McQueen in Bullitt and risking hitting some kid. Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

I haven’t seen Friends With Benefits but Justin Timberlake, who plays a hot guy teacher whom Diaz wants to hook up with, has totally blown the good will he acquired by playing Sean Parker in The Social Network. Jason Segel plays a gym teacher who likes to get high….forget it. I don’t want to discuss him any further because all I could think about was how heavy he is and will be down the road.

The fundamental comic idea in Bad Teacher is that everyone on the junior-high teaching staff is either dippy or slow-on-the-pickup or a contemptible idiot or emotionally retarded, and all the students are relatively sensible and adult-minded and matter-of-fact. The other basic idea is that the motivations of the teachers are almost entirely transparent. If they’re thinking fiendish thoughts, they walk around with a ten-foot-square illuminated sign on the top of their heads that says ‘THINKING FIENDISH THOUGHTS.”

Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher.

All I know is that during the first 44 minutes I sat there with my mouth open, aghast. I watched and watched and waited and waited. Nothing in this film is funny, I kept muttering to myself. I mean, it has a teacher character named Miss Squirrel (Lucy Punch), and when she’s introducing herself to Diaz she actually pretends to be a little squirrel, holding her paws up and chewing on an acorn and going “chuck, chuck, chuck.” C’mon!

Some comedies just know how to turn the key in the lock and click…it all just kicks into gear. Don’t ask me how to explain it but the first 44 minutes of Bad Teacher are pretty close to sickening. It doesn’t have the first clue about turning a key or even about the existence of keys or locks or tumblers or anything in that realm. It asks you to believe in relentlessly stupid motivations and shovels shite dialogue and idiotic occurences, and I finally just couldn’t take it. Really.

So I bolted, and on my way up the escalator I met a Sony publicist. “Jeff…you’re leaving so soon?” Yes, I’m sorry but it’s just not funny and I can’t take it any more. “Oh…well, I’m sorry.” I’m sorry too, I said, but on the other hand I’m on my way out of the theatre so I’m starting to feel better!

I’m sorry but that’s it for Kasdan. I didn’t like Orange County or Walk Hard all that much, and now he’s in Hollywood Elsewhere movie jail and will stay there until he finagles a “get out of jail card” by making something half-decent. Plus he’s only 5’6″ tall. He’s done. And that’s it for Stupnitsky and Eisenberg too. They’ll probably become huge successes in this town over the coming years and live like sultans and buy expensive motorcycles and have great-looking girlfriends, and they’ll just be living out another chapter of “When Good Things Happen to Bad People.”

I told several people (including publicists and agents) at the Better Life party later that night that I’d just seen Bad Teacher and hated it, and to a man they all said, “Yeah, I heard it doesn’t work” or words to that effect.

Jason Staham has starred in exactly one good movie — The Bank Job. (He co-starred in Lock Stock, etc.) I guess that’ll never happen again . Memo to Clive Owen (plus his agent and manager): Don’t ever wear a moustache in a film ever again.

If I was all bloody and tied down to a chair, I’m fairly sure I could manage to do an aerial back flip and then land just so. Did I say “fairly sure”? I know I could!

“In modern American politics, Michelle Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.” — from Matt Taibbi‘s “Michelle Bachmann’s Holy War” (Rolling Stone, posted 6.22).

So Monday’s guess/presumption was right: Warren Beatty‘s just-announced Paramount film, which Deadline‘s Michael Fleming said would be a comedy, will be about Howard Hughes. The 74 year-old Beatty will play the withered mogul with “part of the plot involving an affair he had with a young woman in the later years of his life,” says Fleming. The woman might be played by Evan Rachel Wood or Rooney Mara. Other possible costars include Andrew Garfield, Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Shia La Beouf and Jack Nicholson.

Boston Herald critic Jim Verniere picked up this poster at Intemporel, a Paris shop at 22, rue Saint-Martin. He paid about 320 euros, or about 30 euros off the official price.

I had a persistent thought while watching Chris Weitz‘s A Better Life (Summit, 6.24) that Damian Bichir has given the best male lead performance I’ve seen this year. Yes, better than Brad Pitt‘s permanently-pissed-off dad in The Tree of Life and as strong and winning as Paul Giamatti‘s small-town wrestling coach in Win Win. Most of the award-worthy performances will emerge after Labor Day, of course, but Bichir is a contender right now.

He portrays a Los Angeles-based illegal alien who works as a tree surgeon and has a son (Jose Julian ) who pities and half-despises his father for living such a marginal, hunched-over life, and who’s dealing with the theft of a pickup truck he’s just bought with borrowed money.

I knew Bichir, whose performance as Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh‘s two Che films I also admired, had dug into the heart of this sad but dignified character. And that he certainly looked the part with his tattered work duds and slightly beefy physique and half-bearded face and baseball cap and look of exhaustion. But what really convinced me was Bichir’s appearance as he entered the J restaurant and lounge on South Olive last night. He looked much lighter (having gained about 15 pounds for the role) and was wearing a perfectly tailored all-black tuxedo, and basically looked like an Italian GQ model.

We did about a six- or seven-minute interview on the outdoor patio while the party raged inside.

(l.) A Better Life star Damian Bichir at last night’s after-party (6.21.11); (r.) in A Better Life.

“Life keeps jabbing and slugging Bichir’s character — bitchslapping him, kicking him in the shins and delivering one form or another of trial and humiliation,” I wrote on 6.8, “but he keeps on plugging and holds onto his dignity and humanity. In the end he wins your respect and affection.

“He also manages to win the respect and love of his son, who’s regarded him with mostly pity and contempt throughout most of the film. This achievement is pretty much what the film is about. Like Vittorio De Sica‘s The Bicycle Thieves, A Better Life is not about winning or beating the system or lucking out.

“Bichir and Julian’s performances are as solid and open-pored as it gets. They share an emotional confession scene near the very end that pretty much ties the whole film together.”