All I want from Sylvester Stallone‘s The Expendables is some integrated Dirty Dozen action. I want a solid ensemble piece, and not three or four of them (Stallone, Jason Staham, a couple of others) getting most of the screen time while the rest parachute in for quickie cameos. I will not be happy if either Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke or Arnold Schwarzenegger do walk-ons a la Frank Sinatra in The Cannonball Run II.

Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale is reporting that All Good Things, “that Andrew Jarecki/Ryan Gosling/Kirsten Dunst shelf-dweller,” has moved from the Weinstein Co. to Magnolia.

Plus “according to info buried on the website for [Laemmle’s Encino plex], the film could make its first appearance as early as next week,” he reports. What — no similar showing in NYC?

Stu recounts the basics: (a) the film “is based on the tabloid-ready life of New York real-estate scion Robert Durst“; (b) “Furst’s wife disappeared in 1982”; and (c) Durst “was later acquitted of murdering his neighbor in Texas — he claimed self-defense, despite having dismembered the body and dumped the parts in Galveston Bay.” On top of which Durst was probably schizophrenic.

Now, why wouldn’t anyone want to see a movie about this? Especially with Ryan Gosling, one of the most gifted but self-absorbed actors in the business, playing him, albeit as a stand-in called David Marks? Kirsten Dunst plays his doomed wife, and Frank Langella plays Durst’s overbearing/controlling father.

Here are three ten-minute mp4s from last Sunday’s chat with Salt director Phillip Noyce. I delayed posting because I’d asked Jett to prune them into a single piece with three or four Salt clips integrated into the whole. But after a day or so Jett decided that Noyce’s comments, no offense, were “too short or too long” and that he didn’t have time to make it right. So I’m just running them raw.

Here’s chapter 2 and chapter 3.

A certain chatty informality always creeps in whenever you’re interviewing someone you personally know. I may have also erred in sitting too far away; camera sound is always cleaner and fuller if the subject is within two or three feet.

I don’t know many specifics about Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, which will reportedly debut at the Venice Film Festival six weeks hence, but the term “supernatural thriller” obviously sounds cooler and classier than “horror film,” which is how a certain fellow described it to me several weeks ago.

“Supernatural thriller” means films like The Orphanage and Don’t Look Now; “horror film” means allegedly scary Eloi gruel.

A Variety report says that Aronofsky’s Swan “is likely to be the Venice opener, providing plenty of star power, with Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder and Vincent Cassel potentially in tow.” It also says that test screenings for this Fox Searchlight release have reportedly been generating plenty of buzz. (If anyone has attended one of these screenings I’d love to hear a reaction or two.)

The Variety story doesn’t mention The Tree of Life or The Dithering Fraidy Cat Known As Terrence Malick.

Other likely Venice attractions include Ben Affleck‘s The Town (Warner Bros., 9.17), Anton Corbijn‘s The American, Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere, Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech, Julian Schnabel‘s Miral, Monte Hellman‘s Road to Nowhere, Richard J. Lewis‘s Barney’s Version, Al Pacino‘s Wilde Salome, Tom Tykwer‘s Three, Anthony Cordier‘s Happy Few, Takashi Miike‘s Thirteen Assassins and Danny and Oxide Pang‘s The Child’s Eye, “the first Hong Kong 3D horror pic.”

For me, the two Mesrine movies feel like the most intriguing adrenaline rides of the late summer. A total of 245 minutes (112 + 133) = a French Scarface by way of Carlos minus the politics with more sex and shouting. The usual self-destructive violent arc, life as a roman candle, this way madness lies, ’70s sideburns, etc. The name is pronounced “Mayreen.”

The problem for Music Box Films, of course, is that however you want to pronounce it, “Mesrine” means nothing to Joe Popcorn.

The wiser way to go for the U.S. market would have been to forego the name altogether and called the films Frog Blaster 1 and Frog Blaster 2. It’s genius if I do say so myself — the kind of name that Hip-Hop Homeys (i.e., the natural fans of this sort of film, having embraced Al Pacino‘s Tony Montana as their patron saint) would relate to. On top of which Frog Blaster sounds like a video game.

The first installment — Mesrine: Killer Instinct — opens on 8.13 on a gradual roll-out basis, and the second — Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 — opens on 9.10.

No one can do blood-vessel-popping madness like Vincent Cassel.

You know how two-part crime movies go. They’re all The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. The first part is about the upswing — fighting through and creating the legend; the second is about the action intensifying, various gathering complications and the inevitable death or downfall.

The director is Jean-Francois Richet; the screenwriter is Abdel Raouf Dafri. The Mesrine films are two years old (of course, naturally), having played in France in ’08 and in England the following year.

Jacques Mesrine (1936-1979) was a French John Dillinger who had a couple of straight jobs for brief periods, wore outrageous mutton-chop sideburns in the ’70s, and was finally cut down in a hailstorm of bullets in a cop ambush.

I love the following portion from Mesrine’s Wikipedia bio: “Mesrine escaped again on the 21st August 1972 with five others from Canada’s famous Saint-Vincent-de-Paul prison. With accomplice Jean-Paul Mercier, a wanted French-Canadian murderer, Mesrine robbed a series of banks in Montreal, sometimes two in the same day.

“On 3 September, they failed in an attempt to help three others escape from the same prison (Saint-Vincent-de-Paul) but remained at large. A week later they murdered two forest rangers. They continued robbing banks in Montreal, and even sneaked into the USA again for a brief stay at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. By the end of the year they moved to Caracas, Venezuela with two mistresses in tow.”

Two mistresses in Caracas? Stopovers at the Waldorf Astoria? Mesrine’s life was a Warren Zevon song.

A Hollywood Reporter story quotes Los Angeles sheriff’s officials saying that Lindsay Lohan “will likely spend about two weeks of her three-month sentence in jail.” What happened to estimates that she’d serve about 25% of her 90-day sentence, or about three and a half to four weeks? The system is already cutting her slack?

That said, the lighting is strangely flattering in this mug shot. The skin tones are smooth and beguiling. The eye makeup looks professional. And I love the faintly flirtatious, come-hither expression.

If you’re like me you love filmmaking style as an end in itself. I’ll always admire Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura for that jaded ennui thing, but I adore the shooting and cutting. The brushstrokes are so clean and confident and assured, the kind that only a master scenarist can apply. Phillip Noyce, the director of Salt, has never lived (or sought to live) in Antonioni’s realm, but he’s just as good at dispensing high-powered, studio-funded action flicks (along with quieter, smaller-scaled films like The Quiet American and Rabbit-Proof Fence) as Antonioni was in fashioning his kind of experience.

Know-how and finesse come in many guises, elegant caviar is elegant caviar, and bullshit always walks or takes the bus. Wanted, the last Angelina Jolie actioner, blew chunks from the get-go, but it really seems bad when compared to Salt. The Russian animal who directed it, Timur Bekmambetov, isn’t fit to shine Noyce’s boots.

Salt is one extremely well made, doo-wacky spy movie. The plot will make your head spin (unless you see it a second time, in which case it all starts to make some kind of sense), but it delivers constant tension and thrills by way of highly refined skill. It’s like a cartoon drawn by Renoir or Matisse or De Kooning. Every second of this 95-minute vroomathon feels like you’re sitting shotgun in a brand-new, high-powered BMW, straight out of the showroom. Each and every element, beginning with Jolie’s fierce, burn-through performance, has that exciting new-car smell.

The plot is a bit too complex for my taste, obsessed with hiding the ball in a somewhat cynical and robotic fashion, but it’s still the work of the very best people — the best M.I. team imaginable for this kind of venture — and that makes it a pleasure.

I’d like to congratulate James Newton Howard for creating one of the coolest-sounding action scores I’ve heard in….well, I think I can say years. And I love the moment when Jolie flips her shoes off and goes barefoot in preparation for heavy action. When’s the last time a star did this same exact thing? Tom Laughlin in Billy Jack?

Now, you can turn around and say, “Okay, fine, but how good are the internals? What is this film really about, how original is it, and how long does it stay with you after you’ve left the theatre? Does it hang in your head like Inception or is it gone the second you’re out the door?” My answer to all these questions is “you’re on your own, pally, but this is one well-made film.”

I have to say I like the first act, when Salt/Jolie, a CIA agent, is shown being freed from a North Korean prison – rough stuff, red swollen eye — and then flash-forwarding two years to her workaday gig in Washington, D.C. as…whatever, a CIA operative in a suit. This act contains Jolie’s first runaway, duck-and-hide scenes, and for my money the best of them. During this portion Jolie is an exceptional operative with a heart and a smile and a certain normality. This contrasts with the New York-based second act, when she morphs into full cyborg mode. The third act returns her to D.C. and the White House.

I admired the support provided by Liev Schrieber (although his face is getting chubby) and Chiwetel Ejiofor — a.k.a. “Chewy.”

“The Russians” aren’t the bad guys. As I mentioned in an earlier post, they’re basically sentimental Commies — nostalgic psycho assassins living in the Jimmy Carter past and trying to perpetuate the glory of belligerent pre-Gorbachev Russia. Out of their gourd, off the reservation.

I was thrown, I have to say, by the sudden intrusion of nuclear launch codes. Which I’m not going to explain except to say this happens in the basement of the White House. The last time a U.S. President made tough choices in this milieu was…was it Fail Safe with Henry Fonda as the President? Or Charles Durning in Twilight’s Last Gleaming? A guy named Hunt Block has the role this time.

Honestly? Truth really be told? I’m a bit of an old-fashioned guy pining for the Phillip Noyce of the early to mid ’90s, when he made the very movie-ish but smart and mostly-buyable Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Sorry but I liked those two a bit more. For all its highly intelligent, grade-A action chops, Salt is aimed at the high-velocity, video-game ADD crowd. Either I’m getting old or action films are getting too corporate. Because Salt feels more like a madhouse Adderal speed ride than a nutritious adult movie with vegetables and emotion and an idea or two thrown in. Although I love the way the flashbacks are cut in. And the CG, which is sparingly used, is excellent when it turns up.

I especially loved an overhead shot of Jolie climbing alongside the ledge of the apartment building. But I don’t agree (and I’m not going to explain milieu or plot particulars) with having Angie leap from one structural elevator beam to another. Why couldn’t she just climb down?

Is this Angie’s Bourne? I guess so, yeah. Except I believed that Matt Damon ‘s character could actually do most of the stuff he did in his films. I bought into the Angie-as-cyborg-spy fantasy, but I didn’t believe she could actually beat up or subdue or otherwise overpower several guys bigger than herself. I bought maybe a third of the things she does in Salt. Which is why I loved the first act, when all she mainly does is run and climb and use her ingenuity. I just wish it had stayed on this level.

I’m most impressed by violent scenes when things are scaled down to some kind of recognizable organic level. I love fight scenes like Sean Connery vs. Robert Shaw in that train compartment in From Russia With Love.

Noyce ends Salt on a kind of open-ended, running-through-the-woods note. Because it pretty much just stops. The sequel, a critic friend said after the first viewing, will almost certainly be called Salt 2.

I don’t want to end this on a pissy note. I’ve seen Salt twice and have been fine with it as one of those “take it or leave it but it is what it is” type of experiences both times. If X-treme espionage on steroids does it for you, fine. And if not then you’ll have the pleasures of craft to fall back on.

Noyce is as good at action as Tony Scott only with more discipline, easily as good as Paul “shaky-cam” Greengrass , and much better at action than Chris Nolan. Salt feels like a 37 year-old directed it. Although credit should also go, I’m told, to stunt coordinator Simon Crane and editor John Gilroy.

Phillip Noyce‘s Salt was premiere-d and after-partied last night at Grauman’s diminished Chinese (i.e., no more balcony) and then at the ballroom atop the Kodak theatre. The red motif (lighting, drapes, wall coverings) was chosen because the baddie Russians in the film are sentimental Commies at heart — psycho assassins who live to perpetuate the glory of belligerent pre-Gorbachev Russia. It was glorious to just stand in the middle of it all and just drink in the redness. Along with the champagne, of course.

Monday, 7.19, 9:40 pm.

I missed Mr. Noyce and only saw Angie and Brad from a distance (swamped by admirers, posing for photos, seemingly loving the attention). I chatted with Angie last summer on the set but I can’t be part of a big throng going “ooh! ooh!” Brad has his Moneyball/Billy Bean hairstyle going. (Bennett Miller’s film began shooting last week.)

I spoke briefly with Noyce’s publicist Mickey Cottrell, who’s also repping Stones in Exile director Stephen Kijak. I took a shot of them but the focus failed.

I also spoke with Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck, director of The Tourist, which also stars Jolie along with Johnny Depp. Florian was hanging with his agent, UTA’s Jeremy Zimmer. The Tourist, which Florian is currently cutting, will come out either in December or next summer, they said. Sony/Columbia is distributing.

7.19, 10:25 pm.

What a wonderful thing it is to sip your morning coffee while listening to the thundering sound of two helicopters hovering over West Hollywood, 800 or 1000 feet up, about a quarter of a mile to the northeast. It’s like that scene in Costa Gavras‘ Missing (’82) when John Shea and Melanie Mayron wake up in Vina del Mar on the day of the coup against Salvador Allende, and helicopters are hovering just outside their hotel-room window.

I begin each and every day by manually banning spammers, and then manually deleting their posts. Every damn day. The column is a 24/7 party/debating society/primal-scream therapy session, but the locks are open and Taiwanese and Eastern European riff-raff drop by every night, and every morning I have to kick them out, clean up their mess, tidy up. Eating up 45, 60, 90 minutes every morning.

Four pics from my last full day in San Francisco — Saturday, 7,17 — which included a hike in the Mt. Tamalpais/Muir Woods vicinity. City weather was windy and borderline chilly at times; Marin County was somewhat warmer but nothing to write home about. They barely have summers up there.

Saturday, 7.17, 3:40 pm.

Saturday, 7.17 — neighborhood Italian joint near corner of Hayes and Gough.

7.17, 3:25 pm.