An HE reader attended a research screening last night at Manhattan’s AMC Lincoln Square for Simon Curtis‘s My Week With Marilyn. The British-made drama, highlighted by a knockout performance by Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier, is based on two books by the late Colin Clark about Clark’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) during the making of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956.

Kenneth Branagh in some period film and not as Laurence Oliver in Simon Curtis’s My Week With Marilyn…although he’ll probably look vaguely similar to this in Curtis’s film, minus the moustache.

It sounds at first glance like an opportunity for a tour de force performance by Williams, but in the view of our correspondent it’s Branagh who stops the show .

“Branagh is the surprise of the film. He’s wonderful as Laurence Olivier — just brilliant. Like Williams, he doesn’t look much like his real-life character but unlike her, he’s aided by superior writing. He also perfectly mimics Olivier’s facial mannerisms and voice and hamminess to the extent that you forget you’re looking at Branagh. He steals every scene he’s in and is the reason to see this movie.”

Otherwise, she says that My Week With Marilyn “reminded me a little of Richard Linklater‘s Me and Orson Welles — same type of yesteryear feeling except that film was semi-fictionalized while My Week with Marilyn is more or less true. The problem, for me, is that last night’s film seemed to be missing the punchline. For me there was no ‘dramatic’ thread.

“Colin (Eddie Redmayne) gets his first job working on a movie, courtesy of family friend Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), otherwise known as Lady Olivier, costarring her husband and Marilyn Monroe. Aside from briefly romancing the wardrobe girl, Colin is soon befriended by Monroe. There are a few scenes of him showing Monroe various tourist attractions and then watching her skinny dip in some river somewhere but other than that, the story falls flat.

Laurence Oliver, Marilyn Monroe during filming of The Prince and the Showgirl.

“Colin doesn’t sleep with her. He really doesn’t form any type of real friendship with her other than a superficial camaraderie that takes place over the course of a few days. This is the plot of a movie?

“Williams is an excellent actress but she’s miscast as Marilyn. Although lovely and luminous, she doesn’t have the right bombshell charisma, the traffic-stopping star wattage that made Monroe a celluloid icon. Not only that, the writing for Marilyn is trite and weak — she never comes across as anything but a cipher.”

My Week With Marilyn shot from 10.4.10 to late November at Pinewood Studios and in various London locales. It will probably be released later this year.

I thought and thought and thought about it, and decided it was better, no disrespect, to get the sleep rather than wake up at 2:30 or 3 am Pacific to catch Prince William and Kate Middleton’s marriage ceremony. Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple.

On their own terms and in the minds and hearts of the principals, all weddings are joyous and hopeful events that everyone feels very good about, myself included. I was married in Paris at a small Catholic church called St. Julien le Pauvre in October 1987, and it was quite perfect all around. But this one, from a public standpoint, is of course a matter of some tabloid conjecture and fantasy.

From my 4.19 assessment: “The wedding will be a celebration of an exceptionally lame fantasy that tens of millions of under-educated, Sex and the City-worshipping, Star magazine-reading women the world over hold extremely dear, which is that they might one day luck into marrying an exceptionally rich guy from a rich and powerful family and live a life of fabulous, mostly thoughtless leisure for the rest of their lives. And have kids who will enjoy the same luxuries and get to to do the same thing as adults-with-their-own-kids when they come of age.”

“At one point during the preordained throwdown between the two colossi who stride through Fast Five, Dwayne Johnson rips off his bulletproof vest with the practiced economy of a 17th-century courtesan flinging off her corset,” writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. “His character, a professional tough guy bluntly named Hobbs, has just found his fugitive bad twin, Dom, the gnomic guru of the Fast and Furious franchise, played by Vin Diesel.

“They are the fast and, yes, the furious. Yet as these giants grasp each other’s bulging muscles, their bald heads rearing in the frame with tumescent vigor, it’s easy to imagine that they’d like some alone time. They don’t get it, largely because the earth might spin off its axis if they did, though also because the director Justin Lin, having come of cinematic age in the maximalist era of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, cleaves to the principle of more.

“About the only silence you hear in this movie, amid the crunch of metal and the hard rain of shattering glass, is the one between Dom’s ears.”

Deborah Chow‘s The High Cost of Living (“a dark love story about two people who meet after a car accident”) played at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and I didn’t hear a thing about it from anyone. Now it’s available on demand via Tribeca Film. You’d think that Zach Braff‘s name would attract more attention.

The cost of “Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made,” a serious film buff coffee-table book that started out costing many hundreds of dollars, is now down to $40.47 on Amazon. I think this might be the poor man’s abridged version and not the first-edition, velvet-bound 35-pound version. Still, the markdown indicates that it didn’t sell like Taschen was hoping it would.

I lived in a Soho tenement apartment on Sullivan Street from the summer of ’78 through late ’79. One day in late October near Prince and Greene streets I came upon an original Jean-Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti that read, “Which of the following institutions has the most political power? (a) The CIA, (b) the Catholic church, (c) McDonalds or (d) SAMO?”

Taken during an early morning walk through Rome in late May, 2007

Later that year (or was it early ’79?) I ran into Basquiat in a post office as I was sending a couple of postcards to some friends. Basquiat noticed that I had written one of his SAMO slogans (“Do I have to spell it out? SAMO!”) and said to me, “Hey, man….that’s my stuff! That’s my thing. I do all the SAMO graffiti.” I was a little surprised that he pronounced it SAME-O when I’d been saying SAMMO to all my friends, but I was nonetheless stunned and awestruck. I told Basquiat how cool the SAMO thing is/was. I apologized for quoting him on the postcards without using his name but I didn’t know who Jean-Michel Basquiat was until he introduced himself.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan has described in some detail what happened during that horrific sexual assault she suffered on Friday, 2.11 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. She’s given an interview on the subject to N.Y. Times reporter Brian Stelter, and will also speak about it on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

The word “rape” surfaced in some news reports about the attack, and to most of us that word means what it means. Logan tells Stelter that for 40 minutes 200 or 300 men “raped me with their hands” and that her clothes were “torn to pieces.” Good God.

Rape is rarely about sex but about the rapist asserting power over a victim and venting rage about some social or emotional issue. In their heads, the animals in Tahrir Square were showing a connected, well-heeled western woman with blonde hair that they deeply resent her elite-media position compared to their scraping-to-get-by lives and that they have the power to subjugate her and thereby make the statement that they’re just as good and not her social lessers.

That plus the fact that Middle-Eastern men are not exactly paragons of enlightened thought when it comes to women. As I wrote last February, “Most of us are under the impression, I think, that the patriarchal and sometimes brutish attitudes of many Middle Eastern men toward women make typical Mediterranean males — once the leading standard-bearers of sexist behavior — look like radical lesbians.”

I must admit that last December’s teaser trailer for Michael Bay’s Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (Paramount, 7.1) put the hook in, and coming from moi, a hater of the original who refused to even see Revenge of the Fallen, that meant something. Today the first major full-boat trailer arrived. It seems potentially less offensive that other CG actioners in the wings.

The paycheck standout is Frances McDormand in the Joan Allen-in-the last-two-Bourne-movies role. Costar John Turturro also pocketed a nice big fat one.

The 1979 six-part series that was John Irvin‘s Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy ran 290 minutes, or roughly 48 minutes per episode. Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) has directed a much shorter feature film version. An undated draft of Peter Morgan‘s script, which was rewritten by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, runs 111 pages. That’s a lot of cutting.

Alfredson’s feature, which finished shooting last December, will be distributed by Universal Pictures sometime in the fourth quarter. I’ll bet the execs who pushed along Fast Five and The Immortals are looking at this film with their heads cocked sideways and going “what the…?”

Everyone knows that Gary Oldman plays George Smiley in Alfredson’s film, and that he won’t be as good as Alec Guiness no matter what he does. Colin Firth is playing Bill Haydon. I’m not spilling anything, but Haydon meets an entirely different fate in the film that he did in the series and in John LeCarre‘s original 1974 book.

After a delay of several eons, Acorn Media finally released a DVD box set of Irvin’s six-part series in June 2004.

I’ve been presuming all along that Matthew Vaughn‘s X-Men: First Class (20th Century Fox, 6.3) is a prequel using a Cuban Missile Crisis backdrop because of the early ’60s chic mentality created by Mad Men and furthered by Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen…right? They’re basically following the stylistic lead of other films.

I’ve just re-watched JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis speech (part 1 and part 2). No mention of mutants, of course, but any chief executive would have kept this aspect under wraps.

I’ve been waiting for months to see Jennifer Lawrence‘s full-blue Mystique appearance in X-Men: First Class, which I’ve been presuming all along would bear some resemblance to Rebecca Romijn’s in the last X-Men series. And yet the Fox guys keep not including her in the trailers. Now it appears that Lawrence’s Mystique has a different, more modest sartorial idea in mind — i.e., a yellow-and-blue leather bomber jacket.

In other words, X-Men: First Class is starting to look like a LexG letdown.

It was announced today that the 2012 Golden Globe Awards telecast will happen on Sunday, 1.15.12, or six weeks before the Oscar telecast on Sunday, 2.26.12. (The 2011 GG telecast happened on 1.16, or a full seven weeks before the 3.6 Oscar telecast.) GG nominations for 2011 films will be announced on 12.15.11.