There’s something deflating about a Cannes Film Festival competition entry being offered as an Amazon DVD/Bluray pre-buy (with a French release date of 7.15) two weeks before its world premiere at Cannes. This obviously undercuts that elite hooplah, special-moment-in-time atmosphere that always accompanies a Cote d’Azur premiere.

Face it — Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life is feeling more and more like damaged goods, especially when you add the back-and-forth about Icon wanting to open Malick’s film in England on May 4th (now over and done with) plus the bothersome buzz about the film that’s been circulating for a year now.

There’s one upside: the pre-devaluation of The Tree of Life all but guarantees that we’ll be seeing a very impassioned celebration of this film by a certain coterie of Cannes critics. And I may be one of them…who knows?

The French DVD/Bluray will arrive just about two months after its 5.17 theatrical release. We’ve all been discussing the impact of 60-day VOD releases. If you were a Parisian film buff, how excited would you be about paying to see The Tree of LIfe in a pricey theatre on 5.17.11 when you know it’ll be on Bluray only eight weeks hence?

This film is not being treated with respect. It feels pre-trashed. Theatrical exhibs and DVD/Bluray distributors seem to be united in regarding Malick’s film as a loss-leader.

Here’s an IMDB undown of int’l Tree of Life openings.

Yesterday morning the great Peter O’Toole, 78, had a damp-cement moment in front of Grauman’s Chinese theatre. The ceremony was done in concert with the now-somewhat-devalued TCM Classic Film Festival, which I’ve come to see as a very pleasant, efficiently run but corporate-minded control-freak festival, run by people who regard serious press coverage as a mild problem, and which is primarily intended for over-50 tourists.

I interviewed O’Toole in London in December 1980, although with great difficulty. I had an interview scheduled for a GQ piece about his career resurgence due to his knockout performance in The Stunt Man, and flew to London with that deal supposedly in place. But when I got there I was told by one his reps, “What interview?” I obtained the address of O’Toole’s Hampstead Heath home, and began to leave daily, hand-written letters in his personal mailbox, begging him for a sit-down and stressing that I was a poor journalist who’d flown over from NYC, etc. His reps finally said okay.

O’Toole and I had about 30 or 40 minutes in a downstairs study at his home. It happened two or three days after John Lennon was killed. Not a great interview (O’Toole doesn’t talk to you — he stands upon a mountaintop and proclaims), and on top of which only half of it was recorded due to some glitch. I nonetheless managed to throw together a reasonably good article…whew.

I think it’s fair to say that the people running the TCM Classic Film Festival are a little too restrictive and traffic-coppy and dare-I-say obstructionist in their dealings with the press. Okay, with me. They’re running a very well-organized, very popular film festival here (all the screenings I’ve been to have been 80% or 90% sold) but today’s experience in trying to get into a q & a with Warren Beatty and Alec Baldwin at the Chinese sixplex following a screening of Reds was needlessly problematic.

I just wanted to cover the q & a but I dropped by the screening about 45 minutes before the film was due to end to get a seat and be ready. But I was told I couldn’t go in because they weren’t letting people in midway — I needed to be seated at the very beginning of the show — and they also couldn’t allow me to witness the q & a, again because I hadn’t been seated at the start.

“But I’m press and I just want to cover the q & a,” I said. “Isn’t the point of issuing press passes so press can cover? I’ve seen Reds six or seven times. Can’t you just let me slip in unobtrusively and take a seat?” No, the street-punk usher and then a female publicist said, because it’s a closed screening and there’s no room. “Have you looked to see if there are seats?,” I said. “I’ll give you $100 right now if there aren’t a few seats open…there are always a few empty seats.”

Two publicists later I was finally allowed to slip inside, but up to that point their resistance had been very dug-in and officious. And they were adamant about no photography or recording. I said “okay, sure, no problem, fine”…but I was thinking, “Why? Why restrict the press from covering in a relatively thorough way? Why don’t they just say no flashbulb photography? If they want to be this private about it why even hand out press credentials? What’s their hang-up?”

They really had a broomstick up their butts about this and that. It was like dealing with security people at some private corporate gathering in some Rocky Mountain retreat.

And then I got in there and Beatty and Baldwin took the stage, and there were suited and T-shirted goons hovering everywhere, giving everyone “looks” lest they might be tempted to pull out an iPhone camera and snap away. And then I was told to turn the sound down as I tweeted because the “sending” sound was bothersome. Sure, no problem….dicks. Then when it ended the crowd was kept inside the theatre like cattle in a stockyard pen so that Beatty and Baldwin could stroll out unbothered by pesky film fans and their grubby mitts and iPhone cameras and whatnot.

Overall the Classic Film Festival staffers feel too corporate and controlling. They’re nice and professional but they’re not “cool.” Their basic attitude is, “If we don’t control things really carefully and say no about this and that, the natural unruliness of human nature will overrun our festival and turn it into chaos.” I now have a bad taste in my mouth, and if anyone asks me privately about this festival henceforth I’m going to make a face and start bitching a bit and rolling my eyes.

The usual concerns and distractions kept me from attending the TCM Classic Film Festival until 8:50 pm last night. I arrived at the big Chinese (a.k.a. “the Samaha-Kushner club“) to see how Spartacus would look on the big screen. Answer: okay to so-so, and definitely not great.

I don’t know if the projection was film or digital but the lamp wasn’t that bright, the focus was soft, there was no extraordinary detail, the image felt a little too dark and shadowy and the sound was okay but unexceptional.

Honestly? What I saw last night was nowhere near as satisfying as watching the bad “shiny” Spartacus Bluray (i.e., the one we’re not supposed to like) on my 50″ plasma.

I then ran upstairs to the Chinese 6 to see portions of William Wyler‘s Dodsworth (’36) and Stanley Donen‘s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (’54). Both looked good to decent, and it was great to see that both played to nearly sold-out houses. But content-wise…whew.

Walter Huston and Mary Astor give strong, stand-up performances in Dodsworth and Michael Kidd‘s legendary Seven Brides choreography still delights and amazes, but otherwise I felt as if I was watching plays or operas written in the 18th Century. Those worlds are completely gone from the social-political current of today. Well, all but.

Today I’m seeing The Man With The Golden Arm, Citizen Kane, Reds (and the Alec Baldwin-Warren Beatty inteview), Niagara, La Dolce Vita, One, Two, Three and The Mummy at midnight.

I try to isolate myself from the Kardashian gas chamber as much as possible, but every now and then it flanks and surrounds. Yesterday I ran into two Kim posters — one on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, another in a Hollywood Blvd. parking garage near the Chinese. Nobody blames KK, of course, for pushing her brand and hustling around. I’d pocket the dough if I were her.

But what can be said for under-educated women who even half-believe that a Kim Kardashian endorsement = coolness and intrigue? Could there be a more unmistakable manifestation of 21st Century worthlessness? No striving, no singing, no intelligence to speak of, no acting, no book-writing, no athletic glory, no journalism, no filmmaking, no political passion, no charity, no oceanic exploring, no children…nothing. And yet she holds sway over millions of girly-girls.

Maybe the wacko Christians are right. Maybe we are living in end times.

Earlier this evening on Twitter: “In the latest chapter of Quentin Tarantino‘s lifelong effort to make movies about other movies or books, but NEVER, EVER about life as he’s lived it, thought it, felt it or dreamed it ALL BY HIMSELF & based on his own personal ‘walk the earth’ journey…

“…he’s decided to direct a remake or re-imagine or re-stylize or amplify upon a 1966 ultra-violent Franco Nero spaghetti western called Django, which he’ll be re-titling Django Unchained. Brilliant. Crawling even further up his own ass.”

I meant to say it took me three tweets to say this.

There’s a 4.29 Wrap story about how former hotshot Hollywood journalist Anita Busch is still pushing her civil lawsuit against Michael Ovitz and AT&T for damages stemming from the Anthony Pellicano wire-tapping scandal, which will always be linked, of course, to that June 10, 2002 episode with the dead fish on Busch’s windshield and the note that said “stop!,” etc. Almost nine years ago and counting.

I understand why it’s taken so long, and I definitely understand and respect tenacity and staying the course and snagging the dough if you can get it, but man…nine years of this? And how many yet to go? You gotta get what you can get — I get that — but you’ve also gotta let things go when you reach a certain degree of “fucking Christ enough already.”

Pellicano wire-tapped my ass in ’93 (or was it early ’94?) and bragged about it to me in a phone conversation, and instead of getting even by hurting him in some way I asked him for a favor seven or eight years later and he obliged because he knew he owed me one. And it was a pretty good favor. So it all worked out fine. I let it go and it came back to me like the tide.

I never liked Anita Busch, and I don’t like not liking people. Seven years ago I wrote that Busch was “like Old Faithful” in that “every time I saw her at a screening or a party, she always gave me a vaguely dirty look…Every. Damn. Time.” So I wish her well as long as I don’t have to see her again.

One of the reasons that hustlers like Elie Samaha and Don Kushner believe they can get away with what they’re apparently planning to do with the legendary cathedral that is Grauman’s Chinese is that they know that most Movie Catholics are caught up in their own stuff and will pay closer attention to Transformers 3 trailers than to Samaha and Kushner’s maneuverings.

HE is supposedly read and followed by a vocal and highly aware readership, and so far there are four lousy comments on the story about the Chinese-Studio 54 conversion (which was posted at 9 this morning)? if you’re not going to say something about a true temple of cinema being turned into a part-time temple of Charlie Sheen-style pleasuring, who and what are you?

What a drag that it all ended with Eyes Wide Shut — obviously engrossing and very carefully assembled but altogether the most lifeless and embalmed Stanley Kubrick film ever made. (Yet another hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)

Why go with this kind of photograph and particularly one with this angle if you’re going to apply subtle Photoshopping to a part of the anatomy that would be otherwise visible? I don’t really care and it’s obviously not a huge deal, but the absence makes it noteworthy. (Hat tip to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams.)