Update: As the son of an alcoholic and one who had alcohol issues in the early to mid ’90s, I have an abhorrence for people who flirt with, invite and/or embrace destruction with alcohol. This was the basis of yesterday’s reaction to the ridiculous demise of Nicole John, the 17 year-old daughter of daughter of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Eric John.

Yes, it’s extremely “sad” when a 17 year-old girl kills herself through drug and alcohol abuse. I understand, rather, that saying “how sad” is the socially acceptable way of responding to such a thing. I for one find such stories (which do appear with some irregularity) infuriating. And I feel it would be far healthier all around if people were to agree that it’s a stupid and appalling waste to end your life at so young an age, however accidental, and to say so without reservation. Because it wasn’t “accidental” at all. She bought it.

I read Christina Boyle and Rich Schapiro‘s N.Y. Daily News account (dated 8.28) of Nicole’s blog statements, and I’m confident that it wasn’t made up. (The authors are staffers — they wouldn’t jeopardize their livelihoods by fabricating a blog of a deceased person.) She clearly had issues or at least serious concerns; she was clearly already on the road to drug-and-alcohol ruin. She had an ugly disease, and the disease ate her. So in this light her death shouldn’t be lamented, I feel, as much as condemned. It’s a cautionary tale.

It’s a sensitive issue for many, however, and I realized after an hour or so that I’d put too much of an edge on my initial statements. I could see from the responses that the thread was going downhill pretty quickly and not for the better. So even though I don’t think I felt or said “the wrong thing,” it seemed wiser to just drop it and move on.

Previous post: I could only roll my eyes as I read about the ridiculous demise of Nicole John, the 17 year-old daughter of daughter of U.S. ambassador to Thailand Eric John.

90 minutes before she fell 22 stories to her death, she posted a Facebook message saying she was totally bombed — “Losing track of the rounds…all a blur now.” 90 minutes later she took her shoes off and “stepped onto the ledge of a tony 25th-floor apartment on W. 34th Street,” a N.Y. Daily News story reports, and lost her balance and fell.

There’s a self-preservation instinct that even the dumbest alcoholics have when faced with obvious risks and threats. Even drunks with exceptionally low IQs know their motor skills are impaired, and that things like driving and tightrope-walking and using bows-and-arrows to shoot apples off the top of friends’ heads are stunningly stupid things to do when they’re wasted. What can you say about a party girl who couldn’t quite figure this out?

Stephen Frears‘ Tamara Drewe (Sony Classics, 10.8) was easily my most unpleasant viewing of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. So the trailer has done prospective viewers a favor, I feel, by explaining where the film is coming from. The narrator’s insinuating cornball tone should suffice. If not, the pissing cow will.

I described the film last May as “one of those satires of a form (i.e., romantic fiction) that doubles back and has it both ways by satirizing and playing it ‘straight,’ or straight enough so that romantic fiction fans can themselves double-track by enjoying the cliches at face-value while having a good laugh or snicker. Everybody wins…except people like me.

“Boiled down, Tamara Drewe is (a) a comedy by a hip director that’s aimed (whether its backers admit it or not) at older chump-level couples and intellectually-challenged women of whatever age who read fashion and gossip magazines, and (b) a glossy calling-card movie by a director who’s getting on and would like the producers of crap movies to know that he can do ‘obvious’ and ‘unsubtle” as well as the next guy.

“It’s important to absorb Tamara Drewe in the right ‘insincere’ context. It’s first and foremost an adaptation of Posy Simmonds‘ weekly comic-strip serial of the same name, which itself is a modernized, ‘insincere’ adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s “Far From The Madding Crowd.” (Simmonds’ complete work appeared in hardcover in 2007.)

“Hardy’s novel was about three fellows vying for the affections of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene (played by Julie Christie in John Schlesinger‘s 1967 film) — a brawny, whiskered man-of-the-soil type (Alan Bates), an older gentleman of property (Peter Finch), and a dashing mustachioed heartbreaker (Terence Stamp). A lot of horseshit happens, but she winds up with Farmer John at the end.

“Frears has the astonishingly empty and generally worthless Gemma Arterton playing Tamara Drewe, an updated Everdene who stirs the hearts and loins of three fellows when she arrives at a writers’ retreat in an English country village. (The film was shot in, around or near Dorset.) Tamara is a newspaper columnist who comes from the area, when she was mildly homely due to an enormous honker. Then she got a nose job, making herself into quite the beauty and yaddah yaddah.

“The Bates role is played by Luke Evans, the Finch role by Roger Allam, and the Stamp role by Dominic Cooper.

“All I could think as I watched was ‘what a piece of empty unfunny synthetic crap this is.’ The fact that it’s satirizing other works that are genuinely, sincerely and wholeheartedly crappy as opposed to being ironically crappy is of no interest to me. I only know that I was in pain.

“Frears is generally regarded as a first-rate director who lacks a particular visual or stylistic signature, and who goes where the material takes him. But I found it appalling nonetheless that the director of Bloody Kids, The Hit, High Fidelity, The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liasons and Prick Up Your Ears could make a film as icky and over-scored and postcard-vapid as Tamara Drewe, even with such values being rendered ‘in quotes.'”

The Last Exorcism (which I may see today, having heard it was worth it) is the weekend honcho, and yet down 22% from Friday and looking at a mere $22 million for the weekend — not much of a win. Second-place Takers went up 2% from Friday, looking at $20.5 million by this evening, or perhaps even $21 million. And the third-place Expendables is looking at a $9.5 weekend tally and an $82 million cume.

Fourth-place Eat Pray Love expects 6.8 to $7 million by tonight, and a cume of $60 million, but will probably hang in there with Machete and Resident Evil 4 being the only new films with any expected heat over the next 2 weeks. And The Other Guyss is fifth with an expected $6.5 million for the weekend and an overall $99.2 million haul.

Avatar: Special Edition only did $1.5 million yesterday (up 28% from Friday) for a likely $3.8 cume. (I decided to shine it after learning of the 16- or 17-minute longer version coming out in November on DVD/Bluray.)

This is an old routine but here we go. On 8.25 Christian Lorentzen, essayist for nplusonemag, ripped Judd Apatow a new one for his usual failings. But after reading it I had an impulse to write Apatow and ask if he wanted to respond, and lo and behold he did. So stay tuned.

Apatow’s films, Lorentzen said, “have come to be perceived as the deluxe version of the current Hollywood comedy — the sort it’s acceptable for smart people to like. They come with self-consciousness, a running time of more than two hours, and the implication of an Important Social Message.

“Thus they have earned the adulation of critics who have variously claimed that Apatow has reinvented comedy, rendering obsolete everything from Lubitsch to the Farrelly Brothers; that his films are actually deep meditations on aging; that he has made movies in line with Stanley Cavell‘s ideas about the American comedy of remarriage that thrived in the ’30s and ’40s; and, perhaps most perniciously, that they constitute an antidote to a pervasive culture of quirk in American cinema, which had for too long been under the siege of hipsters like Wes Anderson.

“It is hard to read encomiums to Apatow without the sense that his champions are desperate to bear witness to a comic filmmaker who is both popular and worthy of their attention during an age of dreck. They strain to wring relevance out of Apatow’s pro-family message. (Who in America is against families and children?) They strain to argue for his place in a tradition. They use him as a cudgel against flawed filmmakers who are both smarter and more ambitious than he is.

“All the while they miss the simple moving force behind the gratuitous cameos, the accumulating in-jokes, the repeated casting of the director’s wife, children, and friends, and the constant carping about aging in Apatow’s films; they miss all the vanity. He is allowed this vanity because he delivers a message Americans crave to hear. As long as you behave yourself, take on a modicum of responsibility, and wear the yoke of commitment, it is entirely acceptable — even preferable and profitable — to be stupid.”

Apatow’s retort: “Maybe I’m just dense, but I can’t tell if he likes the movies or not. Maybe because when I was reading his article I was watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Go Danielle!

“There certainly are a lot of dick jokes in Funny People but there is no way to portray comedians without having them tell a lot of those types of jokes. If I was a hundred percent accurate I would have doubled the dick joke count. The only thing more troubling than making jokes about the male penis would be to be serious and honor the male penis.

“I am sure I do have all sorts of problems and shortcomings he can read into the work, but that is the fun in making it. I don’t know what it all adds up to. I just express myself. Maybe one day I will be able to judge it myself but I am too in the middle of it to do it now.

“Now can I get back to my show? Danielle is very mad at Theresa and I don’t want to miss any of it.”

First a bum Eloi trailer and now this — a Fair Game one-sheet that says nothing. What is Naomi Watts doing or thinking? What does her expression or stance imply? What is Sean Penn grinning about? This movie does something very icy and cool, trust me, and this poster doesn’t have the first clue what that thing is. (Poster swiped from Awards Daily.)

David Koepp‘s Premium Rush, a bicycle-messenger movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon and Dania Ramirez, was shooting earlier today near the corner of Sixth Avenue and 28th Street. JGL, of course, is the main two-wheeled protagonist. The plot is driven by an envelope he picks up from Columbia University, which a dirty cop (Shannon) is anxious get his hands on.

Premium Rush star Joseph Gordon-Levitt (right, red T-shirt) about to film a scene. Director-writer David Koepp (olive shirt, red baseball hat) at extreme left. That may be Dania Ramirez in light aquamarine top. Shannon (light blue shirt, tie) stands in middle.

Gordon-Levitt, Koepp, Ramirez, Shannon.

The Wiki page says Columbia will release Premium Rush on 1.13.12. Wait…16 and 1/2 months from now? Thanks to HE reader Eran Evron for sending the pics.

The similarity was noted by Flavorwire several weeks ago. Same director, same basic concept. Although otherwise, having read Aaron Sorkin‘s Social Network script, it’s difficult to imagine two films more unalike.

Consider the snappy playful commercial tone of the Ridley Scott/Kevin McDonald “Life in a Day” trailer, and ask yourself if it’s likely to feel as bracingly alive as this three-minute Everynone piece, which was directed by Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante. Be sure and watch the 720p version.

A Dutch film critic named Robert Nijman has seen Anton Corbin‘s The American, the George Clooney assassin-in-Italy movie that opens next Wednesday, and has posted an IMDB review, having first written it for LiveforFilms.com. I wrote Nijman this morning, and he replied right away. “I saw it last Tuesday in Amsterdam, at a press screening hosted by Benelux Film Distributors,” he said. “I write Dutch movie reviews for movie2movie.nl and occasionally Engish-language reviews also, for my friend Phil over at Liveforfilms.com.”

Nijman’s English is a little rough here and there, requiring a few minor edits, but it’s basically a positive response as far as it goes. He’s saying that The American is a cool little atmospheric art movie in which not a whole lot happens. He almost makes it sound Antonioni-esque. I for one would be delighted with anything along these lines. A faux-Antonioni coffee-table movie, a drifting atmospheric meditation, an upscale wank for cool kidz.

“With his new and intriguing drama The American, [director] Anton Corbijn adapts the style [that he first unveiled with Control] to bring us a film that is attractive and interesting throughout, even though most of the time very little actually happens and the plot laps very quietly.

“The film tells the story about Jack (George Clooney), a mysterious refugee or runaway criminal particularly adept at furnishing and using weapons. There is something that has caused him, sometime, somewhere, to get into trouble, leaving him running for shelter in the periphery of central Italy. Which is all you have to know, because we start following the protagonist — very understatedly but intensely played by Clooney — as the film begins, and are experiencing what he experiences without a lot of exposition.

“As you care less and less about that obscure and unknown beginning (which resulted in the ongoing complications) and become more interested in the end (or the final fate of the protagonist), you realize that this is the type of film that just begins halfway through and doesn’t make excuses to explain what you’ve missed — as in all developments, meetings and stories in everyday life, there is no clear beginning.

“As Jack is approached via his contact by a new customer (Thekla Reuten) who is in need of his services, becomes friends with an Italian priest (Paolo BonaCelli), and rolls haphazardly into a relationship with a local prostitute (Violante Placido), we follow his confluence of circumstances into a new and intriguing direction.

“The American is a film that seems to place style over substance, and walks away with it very, very well. The story is not always smart, fascinating or — given the clear influence in genre and style — surprising, but these issues are expertly moved to the background by the special cinematography, and the striking eye of Corbijn. Close-ups of the actors, distance shots that are more about the environment than the cast, beautiful images of the Italian scenery (near L’Aquila, an area that shortly before suffered a natural disaster) and striking visual discoveries shown to us by the director, who appears to tell us something in each focus or movement of his camera.

“Some scenes are more moving pictures and less video, and the viewer — soothed by an immersive soundtrack — is very slowly treated to the details on screen. The expression in Clooney’s face. A butterfly fluttering by. The TV in the background, showing Once Upon A Time In The West by Sergio Leone — a masterful and obvious source of inspiration when it comes to telling by showing. An empty room, and the mood conveyed by the only person within it. Or by the craftsmanship of Anton Corbijn.”

So it doesn’t seem all that bad. Nijman seems to be saying it’s sorta kinda “good” on its own terms. Not an Eloi flick, obviously, but perhaps satisfying enough for cineaste types like Glenn Kenny and Scott Foundas and Jonathan Rosenbaum, etc. But what will Armond White say?

Over here there has been, of course, no buzz and no early screenings…nothing. No Clooney interviews, no press events, no Corbijn interviews with NYC or LA writers…zip. The first accessible Manhattan press screening happens on Monday evening, and, it’s fair to say, at a moderately dumpy theatre — the AMC 19th Street. (It’s also showing the same night in Los Angeles at the Harmony Gold screening room.) L.A. Times feature writer John Horn has seen it, I’m told. Other long-lead types may have had a looksee, but none I’ve heard about or spoken to.

Focus Features, the distributor, is selling it as a thriller (i.e., that poster image of Clooney running with a gun) on the gamble that they’ll get a bigger first-weekend gross that way. Then why open it on a Wednesday, which will allow the word-of-mouth to fly around for two days before the weekend begins? I can just see the Twitter messages now: “Oh, my God, it’s…it’s…it’s an art movie! It’s beautiful to look at. A moody atmosphere thing that shows rather than tells…aaaagggh!”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson have posted their first Oscar Talk of the season (although Tapley calls it Episode 29). Best & biggest summer flicks, the upcoming festivals, potential awards contenders, documentary feature race, etc. Thompson’s Tree of Life quips: (a) It “may not” come out this year, and (b) “It might be Sundance.” She also lowers expectations on Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter.

Facade of Thompson’s Rome apartment building.

Thompson is leaving today for Italy and eventually the Venice Film Festival, which starts on Wednesday, September 1st. The early departure allows for a three-day stopover in Rome — her first visit. I’m envious, of course. I introduced Thompson to a Roman apartment-provider named Giuseppe Amorosi Golisciani. He’ll be renting her a very nice one-bedroom apartment in the ancient section for a mere 75 euros per night.