HBO publicists didn’t invite me to see Todd Haynes‘ Mildred Pierce miniseries in advance, but I’ve seen two episodes so far (#1 and #3) and found it pretty absorbing. I’d read that it might be a wee bit sluggish, but I wasn’t the least bit impatient or disengaged with any of it. I believed every shot, line and scene. And it’s obviously very well acted by everyone (and I haven’t even gotten to Evan Rachel Wood‘s section yet).

Kate Winslet‘s performance as the struggling titular character, a role previously owned by Joan Crawford in the 1945 Hollywood version, uncovers something anxious and frumpy and unmistakably genuine in herself. I think it’s one of her finest.

I read that Mildred Pierce opened to disappointing ratings. I’m guessing the numbers haven’t dramatically shot up since, and if so that’s a shame.

Last week’s Vulture‘s Jane Mulkerrins asked Haynes about criticism that the series is a bit too slow and luxuriant. “I’m sure some viewers are not up for this experience,” Haynes replied. “I don’t agree, but it is all according to people’s tastes. I think it’s good for us, in our era of constant distraction and digital multitasking, bite-size information and endless texting, to have an experience where you actually move through someone’s life without leaping hysterically, flashing forward, and jumping around.

“I’ve never done anything this doggedly linear in my career as a filmmaker, and that’s what the novel does — it spans nine years. The novel is intensely, realistically linear, and that is one of the challenges that I took on. I think if you enjoy getting in-depth, and you enjoy following characters over time, you will enjoy this. It’s an experience that is more akin to reading a novel than watching a single film. And with these performances, and this amazing era that you get to travel through, there’s an awful lot to enjoy beyond just the narrative.”

Okay, maybe not “dead” but I’m getting enervated expectation vibes from all but a few April films. It feels worse than January-February right now. I haven’t yet seen The Double Hour (opening Friday) or Water for Elephants (4.22) or Prom (which screened for karaoke-singing junketeers last weekend) or Atlas Shrugged (the Tea Party movie) or 13 Assassins or Stake Land or Rio but I’m scanning the list and muttering to myself, “This?”

And with May just around the corner the summer-crap tentpolers (Pirates of the Caribbean, Effin’ Thor, The Hangover Part II, Kung Fu Panda 2) will soon be ruling (smothering?) the conversation. Thank God for the diversion of the Cannes Film Festival.

Bertrand Tavernier‘s The Princess of Montpensier (IFCFilms) is the best film opening this weekend that I’ve actually seen, and Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (IFCFilms, 4.29) is…okay, minor Herzog, but the unusually geological, take-it-or-leave-it 3D photography makes it worth catching in a theatre with glasses.

Almost everyone was underwhelmed by Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator (4.15) at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. (I was surprised by how History Channel lifeless it felt.) Atlas Shrugged, also opening on Friday, has barely been shown to press, but is apparently/obviously a Tea Party movie that will die a quick death. Scream 4 (4/15) is something you either pay to see or you don’t, but conversational buzz is probably not an option.

Water for Elephants (4.22) hasn’t screened for anyone I know and isn’t having press screenings until next Wednesday, or two days before opening.

What else? I wouldn’t see Incendies again on a bet. I still haven’t seen Morgan Spurlock‘s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold and won’t be seeing it until next week. Nobody wants to even acknowledge Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family (4.22). I respect and admire Takashi Miike and the quality that has reportedly gone into his 13 Assassins (4.29) but Asian battleswords have never been my cup of tea. All I remember about the Sundance 2010 showings of Mark Ruffalo‘s Sympathy for Delicious is Ruffalo stating that “we got our asses handed to us by the critics and we’re still here.”

A five-second clip of a CG WETA monkey from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 8.5)? That’s it? But this, for me, is a more interesting hybrid-simian than the kind Tim Burton created ten years ago, and way better than the Rodeo Drive monkeys in Franklin J. Schaffner‘s 1968 original.

This is a chimp, obviously. It looks more or less like a “real” one instead of a human wearing an ape suit. The ears are well done and so, especially, are the intelligent eyes. The eyes, in fact, reminded me a little bit of the “Dawn of Man” apes in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey — still the high-water mark in this realm.

Rupert Wyatt‘s sci-fi-adventure, an origin story set in present-day San Francisco, costars James Franco, John Lithgow, Freida Pinto, Andy Serkis and Brian Cox. The generic p.r. paragraph says it’s “a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.”

Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Double Hour (Samuel Goldwyn, 4.15) “is a tremendous flick that [will] probably be remade by Hollywood with Katherine Heigl starring and McG directing with a tacked-on happy ending. Until then we have the original — a brutal, beautiful fusion of The Vanishing, A History of Violence, Mulholland Drive and Les Diaboliques” — 3.28 Quickflix review by Simon Miraudo.

Miraudo also called it “a haunting meditation on grief and guilt masquerading as an intense psychological murder mystery.”

John Anderson‘s 4.8 N.Y. Times story about spoilers mentioned that The Double Hour “faces information age challenges to keep its plot secret.”

I haven’t seen The Double Hour on either coast, but I’ve asked the good people at Ginsberg-Libby for help in that regard.

Earlier today an HE reader ran a portion of my quote from John Anderson‘s 4.8 N.Y. Times piece about spoilers, so here’s the whole thing: “There’s no holding on to anything these days. It’s just a matter of minutes of searching around. And it’s a shame, because the greatest thing is seeing a film fresh, with no advance buzz. Now you know everything about a film before you go see it. But I’m part of that process, so who am I to complain?”

My point was that none of us can go home again. I used to see long-lead screenings of new films in the early ’80s as a Manhattan freelancer, and every now and then it was beautiful. One of my all-time transporting movie experiences was seeing Local Hero totally cold, before anybody had said a single word about it. But those days are long gone and no amount of accusatory finger-pointing and hand-wringing will bring them back.

Nobody should ever reveal a significant third-act plot point of any kind (and revealing that Meek’s Cutoff ends with the sight of a big, half-dead pine tree is definitely not a spoiler), but sometimes you have to let this and that detail leak out if you’re going to mix it up and discuss new angles and undercurrents in quasi-early bird fashion..

One of the really great things about dogs is that they actually look at the camera when you take their picture. Cats might glance at it for a second, if that.

Sonya Kirasirova, Joey, Jett Wells somewhere in Central Park — Sunday, 4.10.

“You know what we haven’t seen? That small-town wrestling movie…what’s it called? Somebody told me it’s really good. You didn’t read the reviews? Paul Giamatti? You know and I know critics who do unqualified cartwheels over Meek’s Cutoff can’t be trusted, but they all really liked this thing. You don’t wanna…? Sure? ‘Cause I really don’t wanna see Arthur.”

Yesterday’s Sidney Lumet tribute by Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz was the most perceptive and best written of the nine or ten I’ve read so far. Lumet’s style of directing “has a subliminal effect on what we’re feeling as we sit there in the dark,” he said. “He thought about the story from the inside out, letting text and performance dictate visuals, rather than superimposing meaning.

“It’s not the only valid way to make a movie, but it’s demanding and illuminating, and there are not as many rewards in it as there are in the shoot-the-camera-out-of-a-cannon type of directorial pyrotechnics.

“That’s why, even though Lumet’s films sometime became hits and won awards, they never gained much currency with auteurist critics. [But] just because you don’t instantly notice what directors are doing doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything.”

I doesn’t matter if I’m the last guy on the web to post this. Somebody has to be.

Why is it even slightly interesting to anyone that Michael Shannon has been cast as General Zod in Zach Snyder ‘s Man of Steel, the Warner Bros. Superman flick? Decisions like this are about the same rote, knee-jerk thinking that Hollywood always buys into.

As I said three months ago, if an actor is gifted and cool but doesn’t look like Justin Timberlake or Nic Cage he gets tagged and bagged as a villain, a creep or an obsessive.

And Shannon will probably be stuck in that jail for life. (Unless he lands a good part in an interesting play that opens in London or New York.) Because whatever Shannon might have to offer that doesn’t fit into standard movie-bad-guy behavior is going to really be ignored with a passion from here on.

I go narcoleptic when Shannon plays a wacko. I’d like to see him play a nice-guy dad or a heroic big-city detective or a brilliant CIA operative based in the Middle East.

“Some actors are better at playing heavies, agreed, and we’ve all heard time and again that it’s a lot more enjoyable to play darker personalities than dutiful good guys,” I wrote on 1.11. “But the world is full of gentle, brilliant and compassionate men and women who don’t look like conventional movie stars. It would be nice if American mainstream films could acknowledge this every so often.”

So it’s Shannon as Zod, Henry Cavill as Superman/Clark Kent, Diane Lane and Kevin Costner as Clark Kent’s parents, and Amy Adams as Lois Lane. This movie has such an impressive bullshit potential. You know what it’s going to be with Snyder calling the shots. I have little faith that producer Chris Nolan is going to step in and keep Snyder from indulging in his usual ComicCon CG-whore routine.

I have this tendency to space out occasionally, especially if I’m tired, and leave valuables like credit cards and phones and shopping bags in stores and cafes. (I used to be much worse when I was in my teens.) Three days ago I left my black leather bag with my 13″ Macbook Pro inside it at LASC, a stylish gay-man’s clothing store on Santa Monica Blvd.

When I called the next day they said they had it somewhere in the back — relief! — but when I showed up an hour later the bag had disappeared. It was apparently nipped by a customer or an employee. The good news is that LASC has theft insurance so I’ll be covered in a month or two.

In any case I had to buy another Macbook Pro yesterday, a slightly improved unit compared to the one I purchased last May. One of the differences is that Apple is no longer offering their “spaces” app (which allows you to separate and organize various websites into four separate squares) as a stand-alone whatsit that can be put into the dock and opened at a second’s notice. Now they have it embedded into the top-right tool bar, and the only dependable way to expand and use it is to hit Function + f1 — a thumb-forefinger maneuver.

There’s also a new command that brings up the “spaces” boxes if I push the cursor into the top-right corner of the screen, but it only works when it feels like it.

I love it when developers improve perfectly good software so it isn’t as user-friendly as before. Now I’m looking around for third-party software that (a) offers the exact same 2010 “spaces” functionality that I’m used to and (b) can be dropped into the dock.

Thursday night Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that Ben Stiller will probably play the lead role in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a film based on a 1939 James Thurber short story that first appeared in The New Yorker.

The 20th Century Fox project has been kicking around forever, but a new script by Steve Conrad , writer of The Pursuit of Happyness, persuaded Stiller to sign on, and now a director is being sought for a late-fall start.

I haven’t read Conrad’s script and that would be the whole thing, of course. But a film about a guy who lives half his life in a fantasy-daydream realm? That sounds a bit so-whatty. With all the dream-supply technology available today, what less-than-fully-fulfilled person in 2011 isn’t living in some kind of alt.reality? In 1939 James Thurber‘s story might have been up to something a little bit brave and unusual and perhaps even subversive, but today….? Daydreams, fantasies and inner realms are the norm, the national religion.

Plus there’s that title, or, more to the point, the name “Walter Mitty.” It sounds musty, anachronistic — an invented name meant to convey dweebiness, like Herman J. Beedle or Chester P. Finklestein. What under-40 guy is named Walter? It’s one of those pre-war cobweb attic-storage names like Ethel or Mildred or Milton. The piece would be freed of a lot of baggage without it.