Obviously U.S.-market trailers have to make foreign-language films seem appealing to English-speaking viewers, but the narration of this trailer for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful, which Roadside will reportedly acquire, feels way off. Is that even Javier Bardem’s voice? Biutiful is a Spanish-language film — why try to obscure this? I thought we were past the age of catering to morons who prefer English-dubbed versions of foreign-language films.

As of 9:56 am on Thursday, 8.12, Eat Pray Love has a 26% Rotten Tomatoes rating while The Expendables is running at 47%. Now, that’s just bizarre. And it’s not right. You can’t give either of these films an enthusiastic thumbs-up, but there’s no way Expendables rates higher than Eat by any fair application of Movie Godz standards. No. Effin’. Way.

The best I can figure is that some critics have decided to ease up on the Stallone because it’s not entirely sincere about the ’80 machismo, and…I don’t know, are accustomed to hating on Julia Roberts and taking shots at the sense of entitlement and undercurrent of testy ego that she seems to bring to anything she does?

On a technical-expertise level at least, Eat Pray Love is miles above the Stallone flick. Eat is a take-a-bath-in-the-scenery movie with a watch-me-tearfully-emote performance within a story that feels too tidy and pruned-down. But The Expendables — make no mistake! — is a third-rate 1987 Cannon film. It’s bad fast food packaged in some neon joint on Western Avenue. Eat, at least, believes in high-end chefs and gourmet this and that. They’re in different realms, c’mon.

Eat Pray Love is less about the Elizabeth Gilbert book than about director Ryan Murphy being Julia Roberts‘ bitch and kissing her ass in ever shot and scene — okay, yes. But it’s a carefully crafted, nicely-made movie that at least aspires to some kind of character-based transcendence. It only works in spots, agreed, but the ambition alone contains a certain value. I’m giving it a C for overall delivery but an A- for effort.

Speaking as a former LSD Hindu, it’s impossible for me to condemn a movie that tries to convey spiritual matters on some level or in some fashion. It also deserves credit for its conveying the simple enjoyment of things, and its grappling with how difficult it can be to forgive yourself for stupid mistakes and to show vulnerability and openness when faced with the possibility of a bountiful new relationship, and all that jazz.

Does it feel nonetheless like a somewhat superficial Conde Naste Traveller thing, a taste of this and that spiritual hors d’oeuvre? Yeah, it pretty much does. But it’s reaching for more than what typical formulaic chick flicks provide. At least it’s making a stab.

I didn’t like a lot of Eat Pray Love, and I confess to checking my watch about six or seven times, but I at least respect what it tried to do, and I know that anyone who says it doesn’t handle at least some things fairly well is just not being fair.

You can make fun of the fact that EPL has the general look, aroma, sound and vibe of a first-class ride made by the Ryan Murphy’s and Amy Pascal‘s of the world — people who live high on the hog and who have enlightened liberal attitudes about self-discovery. You can say that’s not enough and that the film is actually selling a kind of elitist elixir, but the song choices are nice (Neil Young!) and some of the dissolves and transitions are exceptional, and it has at least one exquisite scene about the eating of a sublime dish of fresh tomato pasta. And it has a great line about how guys never complain that much if the naked lady they’re making love to has a bit of a paunch.

Eat Pray Love can be a bothersome thing to sit through in certain…okay, more than a few ways. It’s tidy, shallow and “pretty” when it needs to be darker and quirkier and more exposing in terms of the unsavory or unappealing qualities that we all share. But it’s well cut and luminous and even shimmering at times, and — even the haters have to admit this — very well performed for the most part.

Ss much as I dislike who Roberts seems to be and my problems over the years with her affected acting style, she isn’t half bad in the Gilbert role. This may be the most genuine and deeply felt performance of her life. God, it almost physically hurt to say that!

As Roberts’ settled-down romantic interest (i.e., once she arrives in Bali), Javier Bardem stands and shuffles around on rock-solid terra firma, and shows serious heart and vulnerability. In one fell stroke he’s completely counter-balanced his No Country for Old Men bad guy.

And there’s no denying that Richard Jenkins‘ performance as an older Texas guy with an alcoholic history, a grizzly fellow who initially speaks in glib bumper-sticker slogans whom Roberts meets in an Indian ashram, is solid and true and deeply felt. Especially in a big confession scene that he shares with Roberts on the roof of their ashram. I could see Jenkins winding up as a Best Supporting Actor contender. He’s always good. Maybe this is his hour.

Also entirely fine and sturdy are costars Billy Crudup, James Franco and Viola Davis. Not to mention the Rome, Indian and Balinese supporting cast members. Everybody holds up their end.

And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Eat Pray Love is at the very least an expensively produced, technically assured, occasionally boring, Roberts-kowtowing, travel-folderish, middle-aged woman’s spiritual self-discovery flick that isn’t that great but doesn’t go down too badly either. In parts, at least.

I talked to a guy after last night’s screening who was furious and couldn’t get away from the theatre fast enough — he hated it! — but I know what this film is, and I know it’s not a total wash. It goes on too long (about 139 minutes), but the Rome section is awfully well done, I feel. I’ve been there three times, and I know what it can feel like at the right places and with the right people at the right times of day, and the movie gets that.

The only icky part was a section in which Roberts and a girlfriend visit Naples. I’ve been to Naples and it’s a total mafia shithole, trust me. So this part is a lie. Eat Pray Love also confirmed my prejudice about India as a land of dusty, trash-covered, over-crowded squalor with broken-down plumbing. I’m more determined now to never pay it a visit. Thank you, Ryan Murphy, for this if nothing else.

The MPAA’s decision to give Amir Bar Lev‘s The Tillman Story an R rating is not cool, but it’s not the end of the world either. Kids under 17 will be technically barred from seeing it, yes, but c’mon, guys — how many teens are ever interested in seeing any documentary about anything, even one as good as this?

The MPAA’s decision is nonetheless grotesque.

The Tillman Story is about an orchestrated governmental obscenity that tried to exploit the memory of former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004, for political ends. U.S. military and Bush administration officials initially floated a story that claimed Tillman was killed by Taliban troops, and that he died saving his fellow troops. Rah-rah, sis-boom-bah.

“Excessive language” is the MPAA’s reason for the R rating. They’re referring to three uses of the word “fuck.” It apparently matters not to the ratings board that each time the word is spoken with a sense of moral righteousness and/or outrage.

The first time Pat Tillman, Sr. quotes a letter he wrote to military investigators who’d bungled their inquiry into his son’s death. He ended it with this line: “In sum, fuck you…and yours.” The second time viewers are told the very last words of Pat Tillman, words he shouted just before being shot by fellow troops: “I’m Pat fucking Tillman!”

The third time Tillman’s younger brother is shown dismissing the notion that his brother is with God. That’s a nice idea, he says during a memorial serivce, but the truth is that “Pat is fucking dead.” Again — the “f” word used to express blunt despairing truth.

As always, context is everything. And sometimes the use of a vulgar word is absolutely the right thing. It’s appalling to consider that the MPAA is apparently too thick or obstinate to understand this.

“Of course there is excessive language,” said Tillman Story producer John Battsek in a statement. “This is a film that follows a truly exemplary family torn apart by the death of their loved one and the barrage of government deceit they encountered in their pursuit of the honest truth. We should be looking at this film as a way to show our younger generation the power of true family values and the sometimes unfortunate failings of our government.”

Bar Lev adds that “the language in this film is not gratuitous. I think this is how many people would react when faced with the unthinkable. Giving this film an R rating prevents young people from seeing this film; the very people who should be exposed to a great American like Pat Tillman.”

“This is one of the most important films I’ve distributed in my career,” says Tillman Story distributor Harvey Weinstein. “I want my teenage daughter and the nation’s young adults to be able to watch Pat’s story. We need to learn from this story and limiting who can see it is not the answer.”

Update: The R rating was yesterday upheld after an appeal.

The director of this Ben Quayle political spot is an amateur. It’s pathetic when Quayle walks off-screen toward the camera and to the left as he mutters, “And I approved this message.” The work of a rank amateur. A political candidate who can’t find better people to shoot his political spots isn’t that bright, trust me. I’m sure Quayle didn’t intend to indict himself with this shortcoming, but he has.

I’ve just spoken to an exceptionally bright female industry professional who’s an Eat Pray Love-hard. She saw the big Ryan Murphy-Julia Roberts film last night at the Grove in L.A., and her basic reaction is (a) she was a wee bit disappointed that the pic didn’t tap into the spiritual and metaphysical currents that the book uncovered but (b) she wasn’t that disappointed and was more or less happy with it.

“I was sitting next to a woman who hadn’t read the book and she thought it was great,” my source says, “but if you’ve read the book, and I’m a superfan…I think it’s hard to live up to great expectations. So it was good, not great, but perfectly enjoyable.

“I totally didn’t buy the Billy Crudup-is-a-problem-husband thing…not a bit. He and Julia didn’t look like they fit together. In the book this breakup section went on a long time, and it ended with her curled up on the bathroom floor, and there’s really no question that she has to leave this guy. But they don’t explain it much in the film. In the movie she’s lying in bed next to Crudup and saying ‘I don’t want to be married.’ He’s kind of a wanderer, and seems to be in love with her. He’s said he doesn’t want to go to Arruba, but that’s no reason to get divorced! She’s doing okay and has a book deal so what’s her problem? She’s like some some whiny chick.

“The Italy section was fine, the India section is fine, the Bali section is fine. The Richard Jenkins character was very prominent in the book and he’s very good here. The Javier Bardem character, whom she got married to in real life, is great. The James Franco character is good and believable. It matched what I remember from the book, which I read twice.

“The bottom line is, when you have a book that has resonated so much with readers on a spiritual basis, its very hard to translate that into a film. I know in order to reach a movie audience, you have to sacrifice the in-depth spiritual metaphysical stuff because that doesn’t translate well in [filmic] terms. But in the book, I underlined passages. It’s a very enjoyable movie, but I didn’t cry once. Reading the book, I was sobbing.”

The Time Warner “wideband” service is still screwed up. A new cable guy is here now — this makes the third TW visit today. The last guy tried to do it twice, but, as Howard Hawks would say, “he just wasn’t good enough.” I’ve been tooling around with my backup Toshiba and the AT&T air card in the kitchen, but there have been other issues besides. I have to leave for a 6:30 pm Eat Pray Love screening in about 90 minutes so the whole day has been a wash. Update: The third guy finally fixed it. (I think.) He went outside and re-wired something — that did the trick.

My entire morning was destroyed by the geniuses at Time Warner cable. A guy came by to install TW’s new wideband service (“speeds up to 50 mbps”), and it took him well over 90 minutes to figure things out with the TW brainiacs back at TW command central. And then he couldn’t type in the right password, and we spent nearly a half-hour trying to decipher that mystery.

And then we discovered than only two computers could use the wireless service at the same time, and not three. (Which I have.) Then I couldn’t access Gmail, either through the online platform or via Thunderbird. And then that eventually resolved itself but only after much arguing and exasperation and trying to understand certain nouns and verbs as spoken by tech support guys with New York Hispanic accents.

And then a tech support guy from Metropolitan Cable named Juan (whom I later learned is actually a member of SPECTRE — special executive for counter-intelligence, terrorism, revenge and extortion) called to explain that I actually hadn’t had TW’s wideband service installed, but something less fast. He called it “torrbough.” What? “Torrbough.” What’s torrbough? I don’t know what youre sayin’, man. “Torrbough,” he repeated. Could you please spell it? “T-U-R-B-O,” he said. Oh, turbo….fine! So you’re saying I have turbo and not wideband? “That’s what it says on my computer.”

The service guy came back an hour later and explained that Juan is some kind of mental defective impostor (like that guy Tony Curtis played in The Great Impostor) and that he’d taken flight about 20 minutes earlier and that he’s now being hunted down by Time Warner agents. The service guy said I was cool, that I had wideband, and that I really didn’t need to worry or even think about turbo or “turrbough” or anything along those lines.

Early last May Sunset Gun‘s Kim Morgan spoke with Lindsay Lohan during a Burbank photo shoot that would produce images to promote Inferno, the Linda Lovelace film. Tyler Shields took the photographs; director Matthew Wilder was there. But who mixed this just-posted video? Too much music, muddy dialogue…yeesh!

“The dramatic pictures [were] based on an especially sad moment in Lovelace’s life,” Morgan writes. “It was fascinating to watch Lindsay go in and out of character. When it was all done, she sat on the bed with me while I asked questions (and here, simply listened, like a therapist), and she talked quite easily about the sadomasochist relationship of Lovelace and Chuck Traynor, at one point saying the script reminded her of her parents. Yes. She has been through some things.”

“At first glance The Romantics (Plum, 9.10) gives the impression of being one of those trendy value-packed romantic comedies laced with bits and pieces of top talent aimed at getting fans in the seats, but which offer little in the way of good story-telling (He’s Just Not That Into You, Valentine’s Day). But The Romantics is a true ensemble piece where the actors work stronger as a unit then alone.

“The casting by producer-director-screenwriter-novelist Galt Niederhoffer is near pitch perfect, and the players work together seamlessly to create a smart story about the unpredictability of love and how we may get older and wander around, but some things never change.” — an intelligent sounding IMDB person (perhaps a plant) who claims to have seen The Romantics at Sundance 2010.

A critic friend saw Eat Pray Love today. “So how is it on a scale of 1 to 10?,” I wrote five or ten minutes ago. “Is it, like, a 7? Maybe a 7.5?” His reply: “I’d give it a 6. Pretty bland self-help movie with a lot of pretty travelogue footage.” Update: HE reader “bobbyperu” has given it an 8.

Disney publicity is showing Randall Wallace‘s Secretariat (Disney, 10.8) to certain folks in the loop, so I called around today and finally heard two non-vested views. Both informers believe that Diane Lane may be in line to snag the same kind of praise that Sandra Bullock got for her performance in The Blind Side.

“It’s very good for Diane, is what it is,” says one viewer. “Because it’s a strong role, because of her performance, it could turn into a kind of Blind Side thing for her, depending on how Disney handles it.”

Everyone presumably knows the Secretariat story about owner Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), a horse-farm inheritor who brushed back financial pressure and adversity while guiding Secretariat, an unlikely seeming champion at first, to win the 1973 Triple Crown.

The significant costars are John Malkovich, Nelsan Ellis, Dylan Walsh, Dylan Baker and Fred Dalton Thompson.

“It’s a great story with really good acting…a very solid horse-racing movie that’s somewhat conventional but very good,” another viewer says. “They use a special horsey-cam in the racing scenes, a camera that wasn’t used for Seabiscuit, a camera right on the hooves, right in front, right in that race. The sound is really good, the sounds of the horse breathing, as it all happens.

Lane’s character “inherits the horse-farm business from her ailing father (Scott Glenn), a woman in a man’s world….the real story is Lane’s character…persevering against the odds, actually going against her own brother and then her own husband, who wants her to sell the horse because of a $7 million tax bill….they didn’t believe the horse had the stones to win, much less win the Triple Crown. Malkovich is really good. I though it was terrific for what it is, beautifully done.”

I wrote a few months ago that I couldn’t invest in Queen Latifah in a romantic context in Just Wright because she seemed too physically imposing for a guy like Common. I’m also down with any actor who seeks privacy in order to not interfere with any chance of some producer being reluctant to cast him/her in a mainstream romantic comedy.