Jennifer Lawrence will play the feisty and combative Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games! Which will be directed by Gary Ross! Every last site, it seems, has been reporting, repeating and re-phrasing this announcement as if it…meant something. Why is always left to me to call a spade a spade with these things, or least throw in some perspective?

Hunger Games: The Movie will almost certainly be an acceptably mid-level romantic dystopian Rollerball action melodrama by way of Death Race 2000, Logan’s Run, The Running Man, Battle Royale and The Long Walk. It’ll be the same ritualistic, hazily-motivated crap, tailor-made for young sensation junkies and the don’t-know-any-betters. It’ll be nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing…nothing.

Yes, it’ll probably make good money and might even become a three-picture franchise, but when have those things ever mattered in the great scheme? It shoots in the spring and comes out on 3.23.12.

I recently ordered a DVD of a flagrantly bad film — Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row (’71) — just so I could check out a brief, nothing-special nude scene with Angie Dickinson, who’ll turn 80 later this year. Dickinson au natural is why I also own Big Bad Mama (’74) — another stinker. Dickinson was never much of an actress. And she only made two good films in her life, Rio Bravo and Point Blank.

The guy with Dickinson in this scene from Pretty Maids All In A Row is the late John David Carson. She was 40 when this film came out, and looked, at the oldest, like she was 32 or 33.

I’m not proud of this but at least I’m being honest. It feels a little bit weird that I’m confessing to the same Dickinson longing that Dominic Chianese‘s Corrado Soprano spoke of two or three times on The Sopranos, but I might as well cop to it.

West Hollywood skies are overcast tonight, completely obscuring the supermoon.

The Van Gogh sky plus Owen Wilson strolling along the Seine in this Midnight in Paris poster is a pleasant thing. But shouldn’t it suggest that Woody Allen‘s latest (which will debut at Cannes in May) is an ensemble piece of some kind, or at the very least a somewhat-troubled-relationship-at-a-crossroads story between Wilson and Rachel McAdams?

“Early Sunday, the sound of anti-aircraft fire and screaming fighter jets echoed across Tripoli, punctuated by heavy explosions,” reads David Kirkpatrick, Steven Erlanger and Elisabeth Bumiller‘s 3.19 N.Y. Times story about the combined American, British and French air strikes against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “unleashing warplanes and missiles in a military intervention on a scale not seen in the Arab world since the Iraq war.”

There are some who moan and frown and condemn when hostilities of this sort break out (like Michael Moore), and others, like myself, who strangely love the greenish flashing nightlight and the sonic kaboom and the coordinated splendor of expensive technological aggression. Plus the target is a genuine scumbag. Plus it’s Barack Obama‘s first big main-street shootout of his own and, I would argue, America’s first right-minded, semi-supportable military maneuver since…when? Plus it’s not the start of another land war but some kind of strategic rock ‘n’ rumble.

“I love it…God help me but I love it so.” — George S. Patton.

This is bad. This is really bad. Variety‘s Jeff Sneider has reported what Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s role will be in The Dark Knight Rises as if the world gives a shit. All villains, quasi-villains and sons-of-villains in superhero franchise films are essentially the same — broad, perverse, self-amused or self-hating, corrupted, flamboyant, diseased. And it doesn’t matter what their names or backstories are. It’s all the same corporate crap. For what it’s worth, Levitt will play “Alberto Falcone, the son of Mafia chieftain Carmine Falcone, the character Tom Wilkinson played in Batman Begins.”

With The Lincoln Lawyer opening today, here’s my initial two-week-old response: “Lawyer is basically a high-intrigue investigation-and-trial drama with an unusual lead character — Matthew McConaughey‘s Mickey Haller, a bottom-feeding LA criminal attorney who operates out of his gas-guzzler. The story is about Haller being hired by an arrogant big-money client (Ryan Phillippe) and soon after finding himself in a difficult ethical spot.

“Lawyer doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s not quite as grave or surprising or jolting as Primal Fear, the 1996 Richard Gere-Edward Norton courtroom thriller that it resembles somewhat. So don’t go expecting a double-A powerhouse thing. But it moves along with good pace and purpose, and never bores and satisfies with the usual twists and turns and fake-outs and sharp dialogue.

“It almost feels like a two-hour pilot for an HBO series about Haller. Which I would watch, by the way.

For nearly 20 years McConaughey has under-achieved. The few good films he’s been in have been mostly ensembles (Dazed and Confused, U-571, We Are Marshall, Tropic Thunder) while many of his top-billed or costarring vehicles have been romantic dogshit, especially over the last decade. Lawyer is the first completely decent, above-average film McConaughey has carried all on his own. By his standards that’s close to a triumph.

The Lincoln Lawyer has been very ably directed by Brad Furman from a script by John Romano, based on Michael Connelly‘s novel of the same name. The costarring roles are well-written, and very persuasively performed by Marisa Tomei, William H. Macy, Michaela Conlin, Josh Lucas, Laurence Mason, Frances Fisher, John Leguizamo and Michael Pena.

I’m waiting on my 3:20 pm flight in a US Air/Continental cafe at Austin airport, and so far I’m the only person who hasn’t walked up and dropped money into the plastic tip jar for the guitar guy. He’s crooning country standards, of course, and I’m marvelling at the ironclad rule that states that all lounge/cafe performers have to use the same country-twangy singing voice with that little vowel cry from time to time. I don’t know enough about country music to cite an influence, but every one of these guys sounds the same.

And that’s why I have tipped yet, I suppose. And probably won’t when I leave for the gate. Because I vaguely hate this shit. He seems like a nice enough hombre, but sorry…no.

With my Austin-to-LA flight leaving today at 3 pm, yesterday was my only shot at enjoying one of those “bail on the film festival in order to absorb rural atmosphere and smell the grass” days. So I rented a Mazda and drove west on 290 out to the Texas hill country.

The True Grit courthouse in Blanco, Texas — Thursday, 3.17, 7:05 pm.

I first visited Johnson City, and then the Lyndon B. Johnson ranch, just east of Stonewall, for 90 minutes or so. (Those who haven’t yet seen David Grubin‘s LBJ, a 1991 American Experience doc, need to do so.) I then visited and got the hell out of Fredericksburg — a grotesque, tourist-choked Disneyland town — as fast as I could. And finally I checked into a nice little motel in Blanco, where Joel and Ethan Coen shot a portion of True Grit.

Snapped in one of about 200 tourist shops lining Main Street in Fredericksburg.

A five-day-old Hereford calf on the LBJ ranch. Wow, here I am, gaining two pounds a day. And when I get big and heavy enough they’ll take me and my pallies off to the slaughterhouse!

Gravestone of Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States and one of the great tragic figures of American history.

Before I took this the guy sitting at the table had apparently never even looked at the menu painting.

LBJ ranch main residence — Thursday, 3.17, 3:05 pm.