The New Yorker cover, the first photo of Andrew Garfield in Sony’s forthcoming Spider-Man film and the 1.13 announcement that Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was delaying its opening for the fifth time (the new debut is set for 3.15.11) all seemed to break at the same time.

Late last night Hot Blog commenter Scott Mendelson wrote that “Sony must be a little pissed at all the horrible press that Turn Off the Dark is getting. So no, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they released the official still this week, since they don’t want people exclusively talking about Spider-Man in the same breath as Springtime For Hitler.”

I truly and honestly shrugged when I read last night’s “bombshell” headline about former Golden Globe publicist Michael Russell charging the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with fraud and corupt practices as part a lawsuit seeking $2 million in lost salary and additional damages. Isn’t “whores R us” the HFPA’s lifelong mantra? Hasn’t the town been snickering about these clowns for years? Ricky Gervais will kick this around in his opening monologue and…what else? Nothing.

This just-announced dramatic feature ACE (American Cinema Editors) nominees are Black Swan (Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E.), The Fighter (Pamela Martin), Inception (Lee Smith, A.C.E.), The King’s Speech (Tariq Anwar) and The Social Network (Angus Wall, A.C.E. & Kirk Baxter).

The Best Edited Comedy or Musical noms went to Alice in Wonderland (Chris Lebenzon, A.C.E.), Easy A (Susan Littenberg), The Kids Are All Right (Jeffrey M. Werner), Made in Dagenham (Michael Parker), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss).

I’d really like to read a paragraph or two explaining how the cutting in Easy A, which I thought was perfectly fine, is so good that it deserves an ACE Award. I’m not disputing the reasoning behind this — I’d just like to hear it explained with precision and feeling.

The three nominees for Bst Edited Animated Film are Despicable Me (Gregory Perler & Pam Ziegenhagen), How To Train Your Dragon (Maryann Brandon, A.C.E. & Darren T. Holmes, A.C.E.) and Toy Story 3 (Ken Schretzmann & Lee Unkrich, A.C.E.).

This dramatic feature noms echo the DGA nominations to the extent that True Grit again didn’t make the dramatic feature film cut. It’s generally accepted that Best Picture nominees are looking at diminished odds if they haven’t been nominated by the major guilds. In this sense MCN’s David Poland (“True Grit is now the Best Picture frontrunner“) has some ‘splainin’ to do.

My Canadian-bought Ishtar Bluray arrived today. Watching it now, smiling, going with it, chuckling now and then. It’s a comedy, yes, but you have to forget about it being one. Laugh or don’t laugh, but either way it’s Ishtar — one of the best faintly funny farces ever made. About delusion, middle-aged failure, life without a net, the unbearable absence of talent, friendship, futility, pretty eyes, idiot shenanigans and dumb luck.

Ishtar is a bit like a biplane that lifts off a partly muddy runway, rises 30 or 40 feet, comes down again, splashes through puddles, lifts off again…over and over, trying and trying, and you have to love it for that. The fact that it doesn’t roll strike after strike is what’s so endearing. Every so often you want to reach out and give it a nice hug. This is a great comedy about losing. And the Marrakech cafe sing-along (“There’s No Business Like Show Business”) is one of the happiest scenes I’ve ever known.

Annapurna Pictures’ Megan Ellison, 24 year-old daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, will provide sole financing for Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s untitled next film, which Variety describes as “the true story of a U.S. military black ops mission.” Cameras will roll in early summer with Bigelow directing and Boal having written the script.

Their long-planned Triple Frontier project, a larger-budgeted, big-star action thriller for Paramount, will presumably go sometime in 2012.

Ellison’s investment in True Grit bought her an exec producer credit. Annapurna will also reportedly finance and produce John Hillcoat‘s The Wettest County. a prohibition-era pic to star Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf.

I don’t see how anyone can declare that the box-office performance of Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma will “deliver some clarity on the immediate future of the adult comedy,” as Deadline‘s Michael Fleming wrote this morning. He doesn’t mean that the film itself will sink or swim based on how good it is. He’s saying that Average Joe expectations about whether or not to give this Vince Vaughn-Kevin James comedy a shot will amount to a kind of zeitgeist referendum on the vitality of comedies aimed at over-30s.

In other words, Fleming apparently believes that tens of thousands of seminal conversations are happening right now among potential weekend moviegoers. Conversations starting with Movie Guy #1 saying, “Whaddaya wanna go see tomorrow night, Katey? The Dilemma or The Green Hornet?” and Movie Gal #2 replying, “I don’t know, Marty…I was thinking maybe The Dilemma because Vince Vaughn can be funny, but I’ve also been thinking about the state of adult comedy over the last 15 or 20 years, and how the last one I really liked was The Wedding Crashers and before that David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster and before that…I don’t know, Beetlejuice? So I’m starting to think that the culture has given up on adult comedy or maybe vice versa, and that the ghosts of Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch and all the great sophisticated-comedy maestros are lamenting this state of affairs, and so our best bet is probably to just give up and go to The Green Hornet so we can sit there with our 3D glasses on and slowly die in our seats.”

I’ll tell you right now that the people who’ve already decided to wait for The Dilemma on Netflix streaming will leap at the chance to see a half-decent adult comedy, should one come along. Quality is quality and people can smell it a mile off. And none of this has anything to do with The Dilemma tanking or not tanking this weekend. I suspect nonetheless that most have decided by now that The Dilemma is some kind of not-quite-crackling problem movie (“gay” electric cars, bizarre behavior by Vaughn’s character, no big laughs in the trailer) and that it’s probably destined to earn a so-so tally or perhaps under-perform. And I’m saying this without looking at any tracking whatsoever.

Movies that open at South by Southwest tend to be boilerplate fanboy flicks (Kickass, anything from Robert Rodriguez, etc.) looking for an exuberant reception from a baseball- and cowboy-hatted throng that’s ready and willing to cheer any film with any kind of heat, if for no other reason than to celebrate Austin’s center-of-the-worldness. Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver is a different kind of deal (i.e., a mildly creepy oddball comedy) but it’ll still benefit from being exuberantly greeted, etc.

Following the 3.16 SXSW centerpiece premiere, Summit will open the Mel Gibson dramedy limited on 3.23 and wide on April 8th. In a statement festival director Janet Pierson has said that The Beaver shows “an actress/filmmaker carefully and beautifully tackling a heartbreaking subject in her finest work yet.” Duncan Jones‘ Source Code will open SXSW on 3.11.11. Greg Mottola‘s Paul — an almost whore-ishly typical SXSW-type entertainment — will also be shown.

The cinematographer is Josh Owens. The left-to-right (and vice versa) tracking is what makes it work. Remove the caption copy and Vimeo’s new embed codes (which play on iPhone and iPad) are incredibly compact — less than two lines.

Chicago Tribune‘s Mark Caro has gathered quotes about the much-derided Golden Globes telecast, which will air this coming Sunday. “Rarely do meaninglessness and relevance, sham and suspense, smash up against one another with such flair as at the Golden Globe Awards,” he begins. “They’re a joke, truly — the result of fewer than 100 international junketeers rewarding films and the studios that have plied them with freebies and celebrity access during the last year.”

Quote #1: “As an influencer, no one can deny that the Globes is one of the truly big guns — not just because 17 million people tuned in to their show last year, but because the media pays so much attention to their choices to gauge what films are picking up momentum in the Oscar race” — Sony senior vp media relations Steve Elzer.

Quote #2: “They’re not respected, but they do provide a really big TV show for talent to show themselves and to get themselves into the bloodstream.” — myself.

Quote #3: “I think they’re actually less influential now than they’ve ever been. Winning at the Globes or being in the thick of the argument at the Globes is significant only in that you’re not left out of the party.” — MCN’s David Poland.

Here’s a chart that Caro assembled that shows that while the Globes are a decent indicator as to which films may be Oscar-nominated, in four of the last five years they’ve handed out best picture awards to films other than the Best Picture Oscar winner. (Did I rephrase that correctly?)

I still maintain that Vikram Jayanti‘s 2003 doc, The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret, is one of the funniest and most revealing examinations of the HFPA ever assembled.

I’m secure enough to admit that before this morning I’d never laid eyes on Thomas Hart Benton‘s “Hollywood,” which he painted in 1937. I’m fairly ignorant about the history of 20th Century art in this country. I’m a peon, really. The only thing I’ve read that’s really stayed in my head is Tom Wolfe‘s The Painted Word, a brilliant dissection of the modern art movement from the 1920s to roughly 1974.

From Benton’s Wiki page: “Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, would go on to found the Abstract Expressionist movement — wildly different from Benton’s own style.

“Pollock often said that Benton’s traditional teachings gave him something to rebel against. However, art scholars have recognized the Pollock’s organizational principles continued to follow Benton’s teachings even after his move away from realism, with forms composed around a central vertical pole with each form counterbalanced by an equal and opposite form.

“Benton’s students in New York and Kansas City included many painters who would make significant contributions to American art. Benton also taught the photographer and filmmaker Dennis Hopper briefly at the Kansas City Art Institute.

“In 1941, Benton was dismissed from the Art Institute after calling the typical art museum ‘a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait’ with further disparaging references to, as he claimed, the excessive influence of homosexuals in the art world.”

There’s nothing “oh, wow”-ish about Criterion’s Broadcast News Bluray (1.25), and that’s perfectly fine. It makes James L. Brooks‘ 1987 classic look like it did in the best L.A. or N.Y. screening room prior to opening, or like a sharply focused, slightly grainy, scratch-free print. Needless to say it’s a far better rendering than the 1999 Fox Home Video DVD.

There’s just one problem. The effing firmware on my Sony Bluray player hasn’t been updated since I bought the damn thing in the fall of ’08, and so I can’t watch the Broadcast News Bluray at home. The Criterion public relations guy just told me about the firmware issue. So it’s not a Criterion problem. It’s me — a Jeffrey Wells-isn’t-smart-enough-to-figure-out-how-to-download-firmware thing.

I’ve received two Broadcast News Blurays from the Criterion guy, and both denied me access beyond the opening menu. No feature, no extras, no nothing. But when I popped one of the discs into a friend’s just-purchased Sony Bluray player, the feature and the extras came right on.

My Bluray player plays everything else, mind. Every damn Bluray and DVD that I own. Except for two others, that is. Blurays of Terminator 2 and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 that I’ve bought within the last six months also won’t play.

Firmware!

I have to admit I’m a little ticked off. When I bought the Bluray player two years ago the salesman didn’t say, “Now, don’t be alarmed but there’s a chance that a couple of years down the road certain Blurays won’t play unless you have the latest firmware update.” If he had I would have said, “Bluray players have wifi capabilities? They can go online and download stuff? News to me.”

Here it is two years later and it’s still an exotic concept. This is where my dumb-guy orientation really kicks in. I have great wifi in my apartment, but I’m not aware of any Bluray player having the capability to download diddly squat. Bluray manufacturer whippersnappers! I guess “update the firmware” is a euphemism for “guess who needs to shell out $150 for a new player?”