Francis Lawrence‘s Water for Elephants (20th Century Fox, 4.22) would be your mother’s or aunt’s idea of a nice circus movie with a love story…if it weren’t for Christoph Waltz, or what should probably be called the “Waltz effect.” I’m speaking of any character this 54 year-old actor plays that’s strongly reminiscent of his Oscar-winning turn as Col. Hans Landa, the grinningly sadistic Nazi “Jew hunter” in Inglorious Basterds.

Waltz plays August, a sadistic travelling-circus owner with a faint Austrian accent who likes to bully and threaten his economic dependents and also torture circus animals and feed them rotting food and order his henchmen to throw workers off a moving train at night when he can’t afford to pay them. That’s what audiences are paying to see these days, right? Movies with lush orchestral scores about guys getting pounded and bloodied and wives being threatened and psychologically brutalized and animals getting jabbed with sharp instruments and made to bleed?

Water for Elephants is the kind of emotional mood-trip film that could have been made in ’83 or ’71 or ’58 or ’51. It’s shaped like Titanic (i.e., bookended with a choked-up elderly person telling a story of his/her romantic past) and tries to invoke Days of Heaven in a couple of shots and is scored within an inch of its life, but it’s basically a handsomely mounted pageant for squares who smile and go “aahhh” as they watch elephants raise their trunks and stand on their hind legs. Because the elephant (called Rosie in the film) is definitely the best thing about it. That, at least, is what I said to a friend as we left last night’s screening.

Except if Water for Elephants had been made 60 or 53 or 40 or 28 years ago Robert Pattinson‘s character, Jacob Jankowski, would probably have acted in a semi-rational fashion at the beginning of the film. By which I mean he wouldn’t abandon Cornell University, where he’s studying to be a veterinarian, before graduating simply because his parents have died and his home has been sold. Life is hard but you have to hold on. Because bailing on an already-paid-for education in the middle of the 1930s Depression is something only a bone-dumb moron would do.

I quit Water for Elephants when this happened. I stayed in my seat and kept watching until the end, but I had basically resigned and was just marking time. Because I can’t and won’t abide idiots who refuse to act sensibly in the face of major threats.

You might think Water for Elephants is a love story given the ad images of hunky Pattinson and platinum-blonde Reese Witherspoon standing close together and touching and staring into each other’s eyes. But that’s not the movie…not really. Water for Elephants is basically about cruelty, brutality and stupidity. The lights go down, the curtains part and the film basically smiles and says, “Shake hands, Mr. and Mrs. America, with a truly cruel and venal sick fuck of a character — Waltz! — and prepare to wait and wait and wait through most of the film until he finally gets his just desserts. It’ll be moderately satisfying when this finally happens, of course, but he’s a one-note fellow who’s rather tedious company, trust us, during the first two acts. But he’s ‘the guy’, the narrative engine, the man with the bullwhip. And the task of watching Water For Elephhants means you’ll be stuck with this asshole, and at the end of the day you’ll be the worse for it.”

Otherwise Water for Elephants is prettified…make that laquered sentimental nostalgia and a boilerplate romantic-yesteryear bromide with two “lead” performances that don’t quite work. The good-looking but unemotive Pattinson smiles alot but spends a lot of time glaring and sulking and not looking especially bright. Witherspoon is supposed to be playing some kind of squawky-voiced, Jean Harlow-ish floozie type but can’t quite pull it off — she’s too nice and Reese-y for that. The film also has an odd-looking Hal Holbrook, who’s had some kind of work done to his much-wider face to the extent that he looks very different than he did in Into The Wild.

Anyway, this is what I meant when I brought up your mom or your aunt. They like soft-soap romanticism and weird plastic surgery and young leads who look pretty but don’t really connect, etc.

The film is based on Sara Gruen’s popular book, which I haven’t read. I’m guessing that Lawrence and screenwriter Richard LaGravanese have taken what was good and appealing and mulched it down into something else.

MSN’s James Rocchi, who recently shared some kind words about this film, needs to retire to the privacy of a bathroom and look at himself in the mirror and say, “Who am I? What have I done?” He also has to answer to the Movie Godz, who read his remarks the other day and have already gotten in touch and asked me, “What’s up with this guy? He’s supposed to be a tough brilliant critic and he calls this thing ‘a gorgeous romantic tale of life, love and beauty’? Which it is, we suppose, but only in the most superficial picture-postcard sense. Get in touch and ask him what the deal is.”

Morgan Spurlock‘s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Sony Classics, 4.22) is a divided experience. 50% of it…make that 66% is a possibly audacious, mildly amusing, totally transparent hall-of-mirrors doc about Spurlock humorously “selling out,” which is to say trying to fund a doc about product placement (i.e., this one) entirely with product placement deals while — this is fundamental — winking at the audience and therefore not “really” selling out but commenting on it and delivering if you will the irony of it all.

The other 33% is about Spurlock and his film taking it up the ass for real, selling the shit out of every sponsor’s product (including Pom Wonderful), smiling like hell, turning on the charm and going “are you getting what we’re up to here? This is a kind of black comedy because the sell-out idea has been our intention from the get-go. You get that, right?” Yeah, I get it, I get it. But I wonder what it adds up to.

The fact is that The Greatest Movie Ever Sold isn’t angry or accusatory enough to mean anything in a conventional Michael Moore “this is bad and you should be mad!” sense, and it’s so friggin’ stuffed with ads and product lines and advertisements and marketing meetings and statistics that after a half-hour or so it makes you feel like it’s related on some genetic level to Don Siegel‘s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Hundreds of thousands of flat-bed trucks carryng large seed pods have been delivering for decades, and free-spirit types like Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter…well, how very quaint.

During one of the very few non-ironic “instructive” points in the doc Spurlock visits Sao Paolo, Brazil, and learns about the government’s policy to completely ban all outdoor ads. The reason, says one official, is that with ads blanketing everything “we were losing our city” (or something close to that). The Sao Paolo section was a good idea, but Spurlock doesn’t want to lecture so when he returns to the US he goes right back to hustling and winking and rolling around in cross-promotional opportunity.

It’s not a boring film and is a very intelligent and thoughtful exercise all in all, but it’s somewhat tiring to sit through — I must say that because it’s true. Spurlock’s is “saying” something here, and at the same time not really saying anything…and yet he is. His best film is still Super-Size Me.

I saw The Greatest Movie Ever Sold last night at Pete Hammond‘s KCET class at the TV Academy theatre in Burbank, and then stayed for a q & a between Hammond and Spurlock.

At 1 pm on Wednesday, 4.20, People‘s Liz McNeil posted the following: “Lindsay Lohan can fuggedabout playing Victoria Gotti on film. ‘We are not talking any further about Lindsay playing Victoria,’ says Marc Fiore, producer of Gotti: Three Generations. “She is no longer being considered. The talks have stopped. We are going to meet with other people [for the role].”

Two hours and 27 minutes later on the same day, Variety‘s Dave McNary posted the following: “Lindsay Lohan has signed to portray Kim Gotti opposite John Travolta in Fiore Films’ drama Gotti: Three Generations. Fiore Films announced the signing Wednesday as part of a two-picture deal with Lohan. The company also said Lohan has agreed to act in its upcoming production of Mob Street, based on a screenplay by Chazz Palminteri.”

The next morning (i.e., Thursday) at 10:56 am, CNN’s Marquee blog, quoting a Hollywood Reporter story, reported that Lohan “had originally auditioned for the role of the Dapper Don’s daughter, Victoria Gotti, but that deal fell through and she continued to lobby for a part in the project.”

There’s a brief segment in Woody Allen‘s Husbands and Wives in which Allen’s character reads a short story about a champagne-sipping womanizer envying the married guy who lives down the hallway, and vice versa. David Dobkin‘s The Change-Up is a feature-length riff on this idea, goaded by a supernatural premise.

I used to ask myself if Ryan Reynolds will ever topline a really well-made commercial mainstream movie. Not a pretty good one like The Proposal or an interesting but unsatisfying indie-exercise pic like Buried, but a sharp, snappy, laugh-out-loud exception on the level of Dobkin’s The Wedding Crashers. Will it ever happen?

Jason Bateman costars in The Change-Up along with Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde and Alan Arkin. The screenplay is by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore (The Hangover…ih-oh) and producer Neal Moritz (Fast & Furious, Click)….beware of Moritz! The film’s scheduled 8.5 opening could be another slight uh-oh…or not.

A screenwriter-editor friend “got an email from the Consulate General of Brazil in Los Angeles promoting Brazilian-shot films,” he says, “and I noticed their version of the Fast Five poster includes a small image of that giant Christ the Redeemer statue that stands on a Rio de Janiero mountaintop. But in Fast billboards around LA the Jesus statue has been erased.

Crop of Brazilian Fast Five poster includes the famous Rio de Jainero Jesus -on-mountaintop statue.

Jesus statue has been painted over or otherwise removed in LA billboards

A good portion of Fast Five was shot in Brazil, so it makes sense that the Brazilian billboards would include the Jesus statue, etc. But it’s obviously a very small element in the poster photograph (I didn’t even see it the first time Iooked at it) so why would Universal marketing guys go to the trouble of painting it over? Who cares? Why would it be a negative to indicate to US audiences that it was shot in Rio?

Most of my life I’ve been somewhat interested in seeing Robert Frank‘s Cocksucker Blues (’72), a 93-minute doc about the Rolling Stones‘ Exile on Main Street tour in ’72. But it’s never been a burning obsession and I’ve never quite gotten around to it. This morning, however, I discovered that it’s on YouTube, and in what looks like fairly good quality.

My first aesthetic reaction? Franks’ camerawork is sloppy, scattershot and raggedy-assed. I hate it when photographers are always going for the jumpy-antsy closeup and seem indifferent to even trying to deliver formal, Eisenstein-like framings.

This, in any event, is a note of gratitude to Bill Wyman, whose 4.19 Slate article about unlimited access to music (“Lester Bangs’ Basement”), for tipping me off.

Restrepo co-director and Vanity Fair contributor Tim Hetherington, whom I met and questioned during a Lincoln Center q & a last June, has reportedly been killed in Misrata, Libya, while covering the fighting there. I suspect that if given an either-or choice, Hetherington would have opted for this while in his 60s or 70s rather than dying warm in his bed at age 87. He was a war junkie. But it’s a deeply sad thing, of course, and I’m very sorry. Sincere condolences to his friends and colleagues.

(l.) Tim Hetherington, Rachel Reid during 6.19.10 q & a at Manhattan’s Walter Reade theatre.

The initial report came from a Facebook posting by photographer Andre Liohn. Hetherington and three colleagues were hit by mortar fire.

4:29p pm Update: CNN has reported that Hetherington’s colleague Chris Hondros has died.

Previous Update: A NY Times story by C.J. Chivers reports that Hetherington’s colleague Chris Hondros, “an American working for the Getty photo agency, suffered a severe brain injury and was in extremely critical condition, according to Mr. Liohn. He had been revived and was clinging to life in the evening. A later update from Mr. Liohn said that Mr. Hondros was in a coma at the medical center, which is located near the front lines.”

Hetherington reportedly tweeted from Misrata shortly before he was killed, and described heavy fighting taking place outside the city, to wit: “In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO.”

(l.) (l.) Sebastian Junger, (r.) Tim Hetherington during filming of Restrepo.

What are the odds that a Texas skating-rink movie set in the ’80s called Skateland (Freestyle, 5.13) would open within three weeks of a somewhat well-regarded dystopian horror flm called Stake Land (IFC Films/Midnight, 4.22)? I’ve known about them both for weeks and have been marvelling at the idiocy of the timing. You can’t make this stuff up.

Producers of both films presumably eyeballed each other and figured it wouldn’t matter if they opened this close to each other…amazing. They actually decided that moviegoers wouldn’t feel the least bit confused or uncertain? Any idiot, you’d think, would calculate that one of these films should delay or move up their release date so they’d be six or nine months removed from the other.

Anthony Burns‘ Skateland wlll probably suffer a bit due to following Jim Mickle‘s Stake Land by three weeks, but maybe not. They’re obviously appealing to different demographics. Skateland is apparently the more nostalgic, wholesome and emotionally winning of the two, etc. But it still seems weird.

And what about those two African lion docs — Dereck Joubert‘s The Last Lions (National Geographic, 2.18) and African Cats (Disney, 4.22) — opening two months apart? How many African lion docs have opened theatrically over the last half-century? And suddenly two open within eight weeks of each other?

TheWrap‘s Brent Lang is reporting today that over twenty big-name directors and producers — including James Cameron, Michael Mann, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Gale Ann Hurd, Michael Bay, Brett Ratner and Hangover director Todd Phillips — have signed a letter urging studios to reverse their much-debated VOD plan that would release films on DirectTV 60 days after their theatrical release.

The argument for the plan is that anyone with a pulse is going to catch any new film worth seeing in a theatre within three to four weeks, or more likely within one to three weeks, and what does it matter if it hits VOD after eight weeks? Most films are completely over at the box-office after five or six weeks. The argument against is that moviegoers outside the hardcore urban areas will now be more likely to skip theatrical exhibition altogether, knowing it will only be two months before a given film will be available on demand.

People in the hinterlands have long argued that smaller, highly recommended films never even show up at their local theatre, and that early VOD windows would therefore be very welcome and a life-saver of sorts. I can understand that. I’ve heard this complaint over and over among HE readers.

Discouraging moviegoers from patronizing films at theatres could indeed by disastrous for exhibitors. The filmmakers are probably right when it comes to major-league, well-reviewed, high-interest features like the ones that Mann and Del Toro and Cameron make — they shouldn’t be VOD’ed 60 days after release. But what about the not-so-great mezzo-mezzo films?

Theatre owners have arguably done much to already discourage attendance by failing to compete with the high-quality viewing experience available to anyone with a 50″ high-def screen, a Blurayplayer and a sound system of some kind. It seems to me that if smaller, cooler, more interesting films like Super are available day-and-date (or close to that) by IFC Films and Magnolia and others, it might not be fatal for lower-rated movies that most of us wouldn’t see in theatres anyway to be viewable on home screens after 60 days.

Lang summarizes that studios “have privately maintained that premium VOD is the best way to stabilize the home entertainment market and reestablish a price point that’s been depressed by dollar rental kiosks and subscription rental services such as Netflix.”

The filmmakers’ letter reads in part, “As a crucial part of a business that last year grossed close to $32 billion in worldwide theatrical ticket sales, we in the creative community feel that now is the time for studios and cable companies to acknowledge that a release pattern for premium video-on-demand that invades the current theatrical window could irrevocably harm the financial model of our film industry.”

As Lang reports, “The premium VOD platform kicks off on Thursday with the release of Just Go With It. For $30, DirecTV customers can rent the title for 48 hours. Four studios — Fox, Sony, Warner Brothers, and Universal — are making their films available through the new windows.”

Yesterday The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth reported about Sacha Gervasi‘s My Dinner With Herve, a drama about a 1993 interview Gervasi did with Herve Villechaize (“The plane! the plane!”) days before the dwarf-sized Fantasy Island actor killed himself. The director of Anvil! The Story of Anvil is looking to snag James McAvoy as the journalist; Peter Dinklage will play Villechaize.

This story gives me an excuse to post a clip of Villechaize’s gay cowboy scene in Robert Downey, Sr.‘s Greaser’s Palace (’72). I saw this film in its entirety once sometime in the early ’80s, and I’ve never forgotten the silly sexual current in this scene. Stanley Gottlieb‘s performance as Villechaize’s cabin-partner “Spitunia” is a classic. Villechaize was 28 or 29 when this scene was shot; he killed himself at age 51.

Sidenote: The Greaser’s Palace Wiki page claims that Robert Downey, Jr., “the son of the writer-director of the film, has an uncredited role as a Quasimodo-like child.”

So what’s the actual down-and-dirty motive for Mark Cuban having put Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures up for sale? What’s the real “real” reason, I mean? And what’s the connection between this and TheWrap‘s Steve Pond having written about the difficult task of Film Independent replacing the Academy-bound Dawn Hudson without throwing in names of possible candidates? I’ll tell you the connection. Neither of these stories has nutritional value.

Before reading about his death earlier today, the last time I’d even thought about actor Michael Sarrazin was when I ran into him at Barney’s Beanery ten or eleven years ago. He was a very friendly guy with a nice easy laugh, but I couldn’t help feeling badly that he was hanging out at a joint that’s only a couple steps up from a dive.

Sarrazin had a strong jaw and gentle eyes and a face that exuded vulnerability and a slight but persistent sadness. His two strongest performances were in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and The Flim-Flam Man. Okay, you can add Sometimes a Great Notion. He and Jacqueline Bisset were lovers for some 14 years (’68 to ’82), and that ain’t hay — any relationship that makes it past five or six years is something to point to with some pride. Sarrazin’s final appearance will be in Walter Salles‘ On The Road. My condolences to family and friends.