I lived in a Soho tenement apartment on Sullivan Street from the summer of ’78 through late ’79. One day in late October near Prince and Greene streets I came upon an original Jean-Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti that read, “Which of the following institutions has the most political power? (a) The CIA, (b) the Catholic church, (c) McDonalds or (d) SAMO?”

Taken during an early morning walk through Rome in late May, 2007

Later that year (or was it early ’79?) I ran into Basquiat in a post office as I was sending a couple of postcards to some friends. Basquiat noticed that I had written one of his SAMO slogans (“Do I have to spell it out? SAMO!”) and said to me, “Hey, man….that’s my stuff! That’s my thing. I do all the SAMO graffiti.” I was a little surprised that he pronounced it SAME-O when I’d been saying SAMMO to all my friends, but I was nonetheless stunned and awestruck. I told Basquiat how cool the SAMO thing is/was. I apologized for quoting him on the postcards without using his name but I didn’t know who Jean-Michel Basquiat was until he introduced himself.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan has described in some detail what happened during that horrific sexual assault she suffered on Friday, 2.11 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. She’s given an interview on the subject to N.Y. Times reporter Brian Stelter, and will also speak about it on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

The word “rape” surfaced in some news reports about the attack, and to most of us that word means what it means. Logan tells Stelter that for 40 minutes 200 or 300 men “raped me with their hands” and that her clothes were “torn to pieces.” Good God.

Rape is rarely about sex but about the rapist asserting power over a victim and venting rage about some social or emotional issue. In their heads, the animals in Tahrir Square were showing a connected, well-heeled western woman with blonde hair that they deeply resent her elite-media position compared to their scraping-to-get-by lives and that they have the power to subjugate her and thereby make the statement that they’re just as good and not her social lessers.

That plus the fact that Middle-Eastern men are not exactly paragons of enlightened thought when it comes to women. As I wrote last February, “Most of us are under the impression, I think, that the patriarchal and sometimes brutish attitudes of many Middle Eastern men toward women make typical Mediterranean males — once the leading standard-bearers of sexist behavior — look like radical lesbians.”

I must admit that last December’s teaser trailer for Michael Bay’s Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (Paramount, 7.1) put the hook in, and coming from moi, a hater of the original who refused to even see Revenge of the Fallen, that meant something. Today the first major full-boat trailer arrived. It seems potentially less offensive that other CG actioners in the wings.

The paycheck standout is Frances McDormand in the Joan Allen-in-the last-two-Bourne-movies role. Costar John Turturro also pocketed a nice big fat one.

The 1979 six-part series that was John Irvin‘s Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy ran 290 minutes, or roughly 48 minutes per episode. Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) has directed a much shorter feature film version. An undated draft of Peter Morgan‘s script, which was rewritten by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, runs 111 pages. That’s a lot of cutting.

Alfredson’s feature, which finished shooting last December, will be distributed by Universal Pictures sometime in the fourth quarter. I’ll bet the execs who pushed along Fast Five and The Immortals are looking at this film with their heads cocked sideways and going “what the…?”

Everyone knows that Gary Oldman plays George Smiley in Alfredson’s film, and that he won’t be as good as Alec Guiness no matter what he does. Colin Firth is playing Bill Haydon. I’m not spilling anything, but Haydon meets an entirely different fate in the film that he did in the series and in John LeCarre‘s original 1974 book.

After a delay of several eons, Acorn Media finally released a DVD box set of Irvin’s six-part series in June 2004.

I’ve been presuming all along that Matthew Vaughn‘s X-Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3) is a prequel using a Cuban Missile Crisis backdrop because of the early ’60s chic mentality created by Mad Men and furthered by Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen…right? They’re basically following the stylistic lead of other films.

I’ve just re-watched JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis speech (part 1 and part 2). No mention of mutants, of course, but any chief executive would have kept this aspect under wraps.

I’ve been waiting for months to see Jennifer Lawrence‘s full-blue Mystique appearance in X-Men: First Class, which I’ve been presuming all along would bear some resemblance to Rebecca Romijn’s in the last X-Men series. And yet the Fox guys keep not including her in the trailers. Now it appears that Lawrence’s Mystique has a different, more modest sartorial idea in mind — i.e., a yellow-and-blue leather bomber jacket.

In other words, X-Men: First Class is starting to look like a LexG letdown.

It was announced today that the 2012 Golden Globe Awards telecast will happen on Sunday, 1.15.12, or six weeks before the Oscar telecast on Sunday, 2.26.12. (The 2011 GG telecast happened on 1.16, or a full seven weeks before the 3.6 Oscar telecast.) GG nominations for 2011 films will be announced on 12.15.11.

“The mood around the Tribeca Film Festival had been a bit quiet and uneventful, but on Wednesday night a small documentary — Semper Fi: Always Faithful — delivered a much-needed bang,” reports HE’s Jett Wells. “It’s this year’s Tillman Story meets Erin Brokovich — one man’s investigation into the most widespread tragedy of mass pollution in American history since Love Canal.

Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger in Rachel Libert and Tony Hardman’s Semper Fi: Always Faithful.

“Rachel Libert and Tony Hardman tell the story of Master Sergeant Jerry Ensminger‘s quest to find the truth behind his daughter’s death from leukemia and the U.S. Marine Corps’ complicity in covering up behind the likely cause of his daughter’s demise — water contamination adjacent to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

“Watching Ensminger combine forces with other cancer victims of Camp Lejuene’s polluted water is tragic and infuriating. We learn about a cover-up directly and indirectly affecting countless lives over the span of 30 years with personal accounts of several cancer victims seeking out answers, some that made it and others that didn’t.

“It’s amazing how Libert and Hardman covered the investigation into the military camp’s water supply from beginning to end through the moments when all hope seemed lost,

to when the victims couldn’t hang any longer, to the moment Ensminger stepped before Congress to give testimony. People may know the tragic story from a news perspective, but Semper Fi gets up close and personal. It’s powerful, powerful stuff.”

Wednesday, 4.27 — photo by Jett Wells.

Shortlist.com has posted a Quentin vs Coens art collection “celebrating both sides of the battle…collated and shown to warring film buffs. The pieces cover classics from both sides, including Pulp Fiction, The Big Lebowski, Kill Bill and Barton Fink.”

If I’d called Fast Five director Justin Lin yesterday and asked for a quick meeting at the Urth Caffe, he would have blown me off. Lin probably feels at this stage that he’s too much of a hot-shot to sit down with an online columnist. But let’s imagine for a second that he might have recalled our chats in ’06 about Better Luck Tomorrow and said “sure, fine…where and when?” Let’s also imagine that we both showed up on time, and we both ordered herbal tea.

HE: Good to see ya again, Justin.

JL: Yeah…four, five years. How ya been, Jeff?

JW: Good, good. It’s been five, I think.

JL: So let’s get into it. You don’t like the film, right? You hate it?

JW: I don’t hate it, no…not really. Well, kind of. It’s just that I really love that low-key Steve McQueen machismo thing. I love serious driving and fine-tuned machinery and high-speed chases. The kind I can really believe in, I mean. Love that stuff! And you…look, no offense, Justin, but your movie flat-out refuses to believe in any semblance of physical reality. You know, the stuff that’s out there when you drive on a real highway? Or a real two-lane blacktop in the desert? And so it locks me out of what’s happening on the screen. It keeps tromping on the accelerator and doubles-down and insists on an infantile and looney-tunes action-geek attitude. And I went into the theatre really wanting to have fun with this sucker…y’know? I wanted to laugh and clap my hands and kick back, and your movie kept pushing me away. So I have to believe you don’t really love fast-car movies like I do.

JL: The fuck…of course I do! Have you even seen the other ones?

JW: I’ve seen two of them. This one and Tokyo Drift, and they didn’t get me off, man. They’re not about the real thing. The first one, Rob Cohen‘s, was pretty good. But Fast Five is so cranked on CG cartoon steroids…it’s robotic, man. I’m almost sitting there in tears, begging to be let into the world of this movie so I can have some fun, and time and again it’s like you’re leaning over and saying to me, “Look, Jeff…I’d like to give you what you want to see, but it’s so much easier to make a bullshit CG Tom-and-Jerry action movie.”

JL: So you want to see another Bullitt?

JW: I want to believe in the action.

JL: McQueen was cool but you gotta move on. Y’know…embrace the now.

JW: I saw a YouTube video of a guy being chased by a cop car. Maybe two or three years old. He had video cameras mounted on the front and rear of his helmet. It was happening on a highway in what looked like cold, rainy weather, and the chase went on and on. Mostly the cop car was staying fairly close and sometimes the guy was pulling ahead. Really high speeds. And then the guy got off at an exit and cornered really hard to the left and the cop tried to do the same but his car couldn’t hold the pavement and he went sliding off the road and into some nearby brush and the motorcycle got away. I was into that video for thrills much more than any part of your film.

JL: I believe in Fast Five.

JW: You believe…what, in the money you’re making?

JL: I believe in doing it well, getting it done, people liking it, making movies that guys like James Rocchi are going to favorably review. And I believe in working with Universal and…you know, the marketing guys. And Fast Five is the kind of movie they want to sell.

JW: I was sitting there like a zombie, Justin….c’mon!

JL: You don’t understand what’s going on, Jeff.

JW: What’s going on?

JL: As a big-studio action director, I live in a kind of jail cell. Well, at least I do in my head. I mean, I can’t be Paul Greengrass…you know? I gotta be Justin Lin. And most big-studio action movies are about one thing — doing it louder, faster, cooler and more excitingly than the last action film. That’s all it’s about — the last movie made by the last guy. And if I can’t top the last guy, I’m dead. They’ll get somebody else to direct the next one.

JW: I liked that silent stare-down moment between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson. It’s a very gay film. All the guys are really bulked up with lots of torn tissue and nobody really pays attention to the women. I mean, the women are “there” but it’s the male bodies and the eye-ball-to-eyeball male attitudes that dominate the film.

JL: Did you like their fight scene?

JW: No.

JL: Why?

JW: Because every time somebody hits or gets hit, they go “auggghh!” Or “whoooff!!” Or “ahhwwrrrll!” I hate that. People never groan when they hit each other in real fights. Ever. And fights are always over really quickly. Usually win a minute or two. Okay, I believed that long fight between Matt Damon and that North African agency guy. That went on for three or four minutes. But you’re…you said you’re not Greengrass. Not in your quiver. I only know that I was bored by the fight scenes. And the driving scenes. And the scene when they drag the vault through the streets of Rio.

As I said last month, if Will Smith wasn’t such a sad little status-quo money whore (i.e., playing only “safe” cool-guy roles that pay his whopping salary), he’d agree to portray Barack Obama in Jay Roach and Danny Strong‘s Game Change. No one has been cast as Obama yet…right? Ed Harris is playing John McCain.

(l.) Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in HBO’s Game Change; (r.) caption unnecessary.

Apologies for failing yesterday to post Jett Wells‘ review of Massy Tadjedin‘s Last Night, which screened Monday night at the Tribeca Film Festival: “My first Tribeca Film Festival got off to a slow start last weekend due to my dog throwing up in the car before dropping him off at my mom’s apartment, and then my shuttling down to D.C. to see a friend,” Jett begins.

“Directed and written by Massy Tadjedin, Last Night is about the age-old question on whether to cheat or not to cheat. The film portrays a struggling, newly married couple (Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington) having doubts about whether they got married too soon or not. Heard this one before?

“You don’t really get a feel for the couple nor find them likable before they get into their first fight. Even though I’m blinking slowly and wondering why writing about this is more boring than the plot, you do stick around to see who’ll cheat first.

“The film jumps back and forth between Eva Mendes acting annoyingly, somewhat ridiculously and almost sadistically flirty with Worthington despite knowing he’s married, and Knightley bumping into an old flame, played by French actor-director Guillame Canet. I’m not going to spoil the third-act finish, but let’s just say you usually know where these kinds of movies are going to go depending on the gender of the director. And I’ll also say this: the abrupt, somewhat mysterious ending is, for me, pretty satisfying.

“Since Mr. HE himself has unique views on cheating, I’m sure he’d have more disdain for the banal storyline. But for me it boils down to this: it’s never good to cheat, and one should never keep it a secret because chances are it’s going to happen over and over again until the truth becomes a ticking time bomb in the form of a lie (to yourself).

“Neither Knightley or Worthington are bad people — that’s not the point. And it’s obvious neither is going to lie about what they did and didn’t do.”

Jeffrey Wells interjection: Jett chose not to explain my views about cheating so here they are: (a) infidelity is pain — a terrible and hurtful thing to inflict upon your partner — and therefore you should never go there; (b) If you do you should keep it to two or three episodes because extended affairs are always discovered sooner or later; and (c) if you’re questioned by a partner always lie and deny, lie and deny and lie and deny. As Lenny Bruce once said. “Deny it even if she’s got pictures.”