Attention must be paid to the just-posted words of HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny: “The ugly truth is that the industry is chasing a fanboy audience that perhaps they need to stop chasing. I spent so many years at AICN complaining that no one was making films that catered to my interests, and now I find myself thinking that perhaps I don’t need to be catered to in quite so naked and craven a fashion.” Bravo! Especially coming from McWeeny, who, let’s not forget, wet himself over Sherlock Holmes.

“I would happily give up the non-stop barrage of superhero films and fanboy ‘favorites’ if it meant there was room for real innovation and a wider array of voices in studio filmmaking. There is a fine line between serving an audience and shamelessly pandering to them, and when the studios decide to go whole-hog and pander without hesitation, and the result is box-office failure after box-office failure, the message seems clear: chasing the fanboys isn’t working. They are unreliable, they are ungrateful, and they aren’t turning out for the ‘sure things’ that have been greenlit specifically for them.”

He shouldn’t have taken the bloody wig and earings off. He should have hung in there and toughed it out.

As everyone knows, Tony Curtis played at least 65% of Some Like It Hot in drag and speaking in a woman’s voice. What’s less widely known is that on a special edition DVD interview Curtis admitted he couldn’t quite make his Josephine voice sound right so another guy dubbed him. The guy, according to co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, was actor-singer Paul Frees. You’d think that this very significant information would would be in Taschen’s SLIH coffee-table book, but it’s not.

Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty recently traded online fisticuffs with Kevin Smith…heard this one? Whitty drew first blood by noting “how angry Smith seemed lately,” he recapped today, “and how he’s been far too willing to immediately take to Twitter to lambaste any perceived attackers. Which prompted Smith to rip into Whitty on Twitter, calling him “old [and] out-of-touch” and faling to get what he’s trying to do with his self-distributed release of Red State.

(l.) Kevin Smith; (r.) Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty

“But I didn’t say Smith’s idea was a bad distribution model,” Whitty explains. “Nor did I attack him personally — at least, not by my standards. What I did say is that I thought he’s [seemed] to be in a terrible, touchy mood for a while now. Certainly he seemed to be taking himself way too seriously and lashing out at criticism far too quickly. I’d written about some of this behavior before, but it seemed to be getting worse recently. Someone who’d always appeared to be an easy-going, self-deprecating Jersey guy was getting awfully thin-skinned and long-winded — and far too quick to combine the two in endless, two-thumbed monologues.

“Smith says he’s not angry. He says he’s happier and more in control that he’s ever been,” Whitty wrotes. “‘I’m sorry I’m not that Kevin Smith character you created for the Ledger,’ Smith fired off in one of his increasingly heated missives.

“If he’s talking about the fellow I met back before Jersey Girl came out, I guess I am too. Not that I ever thought I created that persona – not that I ever thought it was a persona — but I kind of liked that guy. I hope we see him again sometime.”

I’m going to say it again for the seventeenth time. Now that he’s been married a while and is getting in touch with his angry side, Smith needs to write a Who’s Afraid of Viriginia Woolf-type stage play about two GenX couples. Four people of Smith’s age getting drunker and drunker as they sit around in their pullover hockey shirts and Converse sneakers and backwards baseball caps and start ripping each other to pieces.

My brand-new Time Warner internet began delivering 1997-level DSL service after six days on the job, and it took me over two hours to arrange for a tech guy to come by tomorrow to fix the problem. I had to fart around with billings and payments and figure out stories to write, and I needed to talk with friends and family. I had to find a trustworthy cat sitter to come in and feed the guys while I’m in Austin for South by Southwest (for which I leave on Thursday, returning about eight days later). And it just went on and on like that….awful.

Warner Bros.’ decision to formally whack and totally fire Charlie Sheen from Two and a Half Men was, from a corporate perspective, unavoidable. Maybe they figured he’d destroyed his credibility as a semi-relatable human being. He’d gone too “tiger” and gone over the waterfalls. Sic semper shark-jumpers. Or the suits just thought about it long and hard and decided there was more downside than upside in Sheen staying on.

If it had been my call I would have given Sheen another go. I would have said, “Okay, no more insane coke rants, no more Tiger Blood…none of that. You’ve gotta calm the hell down and be mellow and serene and self-effacing, and then we’ll just do this. Because, as you and I know, the ratings will be great at first and they might continue that way and we, like you, just want the dough. Fuck it, right? But you have to fire those hangers-on and suck-uppers that we’ve seen on Sheen’s Korner. We hate those guys. And if you don’t get rid of them, the deal’s off. But if you do, we’re good.”

This morning a friend who lives in West Los Angeles (north of Barrington/Wilshire) begged off attending a screening later this week at the Writers Guild theatre (100 yards south of Wilshire/Doheny) because “it’s not in my neighborhood.” What? “From your house to the WGA is a hop, skip and a jump,” I replied. “20 or 25 minutes. Okay, a half-hour.” Nope. After 5 pm and until 7:30 or 8 pm that drive takes an hour, he said. “I know that traffic has probably gotten worse since I left in ’08,” I admitted, “but I can’t believe it takes that long…c’mon.” It really does, he claimed. Especially with everyone texting in their cars all the time. They take that much longer to respond to traffic surges, and if you multiply each distracted texter by 1000 or 3000 or 5000 in a given mile-stretch, it really slows things down.

Every week there are movies I need to see that I know (forget “strongly suspect”) will be deflating to sit through. Especially during the March-April doldrums. Because this is a time in which films seem to take things from you rather than give. They sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Which is why it’s a good time for Blurays and DVDs of oldies and obscura and films like…say, Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row or Blurays of Buster Keaton‘s The General or Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Battle: LA represents one kind of ordeal (i.e., unrelenting shakycam + CG assault) and Carey Fukanaga‘s Jane Eyre surely represents the other end of the spectrum. (One glance at Mia Wasikowska in costume and I feel instantly weakened.) And then there’s the brownish-bleachy color in Dana Adam Shapiro‘s Monogamy, that sense of slowly bleeding to death while watching Abbas Kiarostami‘s Certified Copy and the casting issue (yet to be discussed) that gets in the way of Jonathan Hensleigh‘s Kill The Irishman. I don’t even want to think about even glancing at Red Riding Hood or Mars Needs Moms or Electra Luxx…forget it.

You know what isn’t half bad, even though it’s opening this Friday only in New York? Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, about the writing, performing and filming of Mart Crowley‘s The Boys In The Band. It seems to overemphasize here and there and could stand a little tightening, but it’s a very decent, above-average capturing of early to late ’60s gay culture and showbiz culture in New York and Los Angeles. It conveys what an enormous struggle it was for Crowley to write the play, and what a huge strike it was for everyone involved in the play and the film (or both), and how quickly it all evaporated after the Stonewall rebellion of ’69, and yet how Boys lives today in a historical sense and also a tragic one, given the fate of most of the original cast members.

I saw Rango tonight and the ravers aren’t wrong. It’s too subtle and referenced and movie-savvy for kids, but it’s great for tweeners and and any adult who knows from Sergio Leone and Chinatown and Apocalypse Now and yaddah-yaddah. It’s the smartest and most enjoyable mainstream animated feature since Toy Story 3, and an agreeably hip western that’s satiric and yet “sincere.”

Sunday, 3.7, 9:40 pm

Well, semi-sincere. You’re supposed to smirk and chortle, and to be honest I didn’t really chortle all that much. But I was smiling now and then and generally glad I was seeing it, and pleased with the fact that Rango knows about holding back until the very end and then paying off — always the mark of a good film.

I despise the exaggeration that most animated films traffic in, but Rango is, for an animated film, restrained and relatively dry, and I very much respect director and cowriter Gore Verbinski, co-screenwriter John Logan and lead voice-star Johnny Depp and everyone else for having prepared and shaped and honed it just so. Rango will probably be nominated for a Best Feature Animation Oscar in early ’12. You could even…yes, you can call it the best film of 2012 so far.

Rango is all about water (or the lack of), hence the Chinatown parallels. Honestly? I didn’t think it was making a great deal of sense at first, or really going anywhere to the extent that I felt engaged in the narrative. But it definitely comes together during final third.

The best moment in the whole film is a discreet little kissing scene that’s all about deft, gently acknowledged emotion.

Cheers for Depp (who voices Rango, the lead lizard) and Isla Fisher (lead female lizard, although I frankly couldn’t understand her half the time), and good old Ned Beatty (an old turtle by way of John Huston‘s Noah Cross), Bill Nighy (a rattlesnake gunslinger by way of Lee Van Cleef), and Alfred Molina (as a grungy, bearded, Spanish-accented armadillo named Roadkill).

It’s all about the present and the future now — no more looking back. Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino and I talked this morning about Rango, that American Idol idea for the Oscars, Matthew McConaughey and The Lincoln Lawyer, Battle: LA, Charlie Sheen and I forget what else. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

“Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

“Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

“Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’etat, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

“And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.”

I’ll be seeing Gore Verbinski‘s Rango in an hour or two. Partly because Phil Contrino mentioned earlier today that it has several Chinatown echoes. David Poland has written that “it’s a western homage ranging from High Noon to Star Wars with plenty of Budd Boetticher in the mix…[it] freely steals from every corner of film and culture.” And yet, according to Contrino and others, it’s gotten a lousy C-plus grade from CinemaScore audiences. Adults, in particular, didn’t enjoy the ride, with 25-and-overs giving it a C. What’s going on here?

The naysayers, I’m guessing, are parents who brought their kids expecting something a little less referenced and more kid-friendly. I’ll know more in a few hours.