Searching Google Maps for Meavy, England, where Steven Spielberg was shooting War Horse a few weeks ago, led to me the ancient village of Wells, about 90 minutes to the northeast. There was a moment in a London office of British Airways 30 years ago when an agent said my last name, and that instant I realized that only the British can pronounce it properly. I had unknowingly mispronounced it all my life. I’ve tried to convey how it sounds with pheonetical mimicry, but it doesn’t quite work.

I’ve never visited Wells, but when I eventually do it’ll be like Kunta Kinte returning to the village of Juffure in The Gambia, West Africa.

Wells, incidentally, is not to be confused with Tunbridge Wells, which Claude Rains, in the role of Dryden, referred to at the end of Lawrence of Arabia. Prince Feisal (Alec Guiness) asks his opinion of the conflict between the Arab Council and the situation created by the Sykes-Picot, and Dryden/Rains replies, “Me, Your Highness? Well, on the whole, I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.”

Update: The SXSW coupon credential software screwup has been solved, or at least overridden and put to bed. Thanks to all concerned.

Previously: “Wells to SXSW press office: I find it mildly idiotic that SXSW insists that credentialed SXSW journalists fill out a form in order to redeem a coupon that excludes them from having to pay $500 or whatever for the privelege of covering SXSW. I presume you know that no other film festival in the world requests this kind of thing.

“In any event I filled everything out and tried to do it as correctly as humanly possible, but after pasting in the code [that was supplied by your office an email] in the ‘redeem coupon’ slot the software told me “that coupon does not exist.”

“I guess I’m going to have to come down to the convention center and haggle this out with someone. Wonderful system you guys have here. I was so impressed I felt I just had to share.”

Videos of the Japanese earthquake-tsunami tragedy have a quality that disaster-fetishists like Roland Emmerich have never been interested in. Commenting on the visual aesthetics of a terrible devastation like it’s an entertainment of some kind may sound offensive, but this has always been my first reaction when videos of this sort appear. CG-infected Hollywood is more interested in amplifying and intensifying — in making the ComicCon culture go “kewwll!” –than recreating the truth of nature’s wrath.

The Pacman-style graphics are appropriate for the new Hobo With A Shotgun game/app. I don’t know why I’m paying attention as I didn’t even like Hobo With A Shotgun that much. Nobody did. But everyone still loves the title and the metaphor.

“From producer Steven Spielberg,” it says at the very beginning. At the 59 second mark it says, “And director JJ Abrams.” As if people needed to be told. Super 8 (Paramount, June 10) is Abrams’ heartfelt, highly assured homage to Classic Spielbergland as it used to exist in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It’s Close Encounters + E.T. plus scary threat. It’s Abrams saying to audiences, “Remember when Spielberg held mountains in the palm of his hand?”

Small-town America, misunderstood kid with dreams on his mind, dad doesn’t get the obsession with home movies and monster makeup, pretty would-be girlfriend, chubby friend, monster is discovered/escapes, arrival of troops, Noah Emmerich (hide in your homes and bolt your doors shut….it’s Noah Emmerich!) and a John Williams-like score by Michael Giacchino, who’s worked with Abrams before on Star Trek and Cloverfield.

Never in all my years of reading blogerati coverage about South by Southwest have I seen actual pictures and/or video of Austin places and happenings and pseudo-landmarks. Well, Hollywood Elsewhere is here with a Canon Elph SD1400, and that shit stops tonight. But what is Austin on Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 10:27 pm? I don’t know. I’m just at some bar on Sixth Street, nursing brewskis and uploading photos on my Toshiba. It’s dark and loud and noisy and packed with hee-hee 20somethings, like a thousand other bars in cities all over America and Europe and Southeast Asia.

For a New Jersey/New York guy like myself, Texas used to be an exotic place to visit. It used to be about shitkickers and Texas accents and honky tonks and country music and pick-up trucks. The vibe on Austin’s Sixth Street isn’t “Texas” — it’s overflowing with white 21st Century hip-hop homies dancing to the same tunes and rhythms that you’ll find in bars in San Francisco’s Union Street or in some Boston Back Bay bar or on Ninth Avenue in the 40s. The entire under-35 hip social world has become homogenized and corporatized. Nothing is different or dangerous. Or so it goes on Sixth Street, at least.

I’ve never been a major worshipper of director MIchael Winner, but I’ve enjoyed and will always respect three of his early ’70s films — The Nightcomers, Death Wish and Scorpio. They’re screening this weekend at Santa Monica’s Aero. Variety‘s Steven Gaydos is handling the q & a with Winner. South by Southwest prevents my attending.

What has Will Smith done since the failure of Seven Pounds? Nothing, which is another way of saying he hid for two years and then boldly reemerged last year by committing to Bad Boys and Men in Black sequels. The man is basically George Lucas, talking a diversionary game about wanting to make non-corporate, content-driven movies while doing nothing except going for the safe “brand” money. I’m saying this because he obviously needs to do something that isn’t about growing his bank account, and one good way to do this would be to play Senator Barack Obama in Jay Roach and Danny Strong‘s Game Change.

If I hadn’t been working yesterday on my usual rundown of stimulating articles (including two reviews) and running around trying to get one of those Medeco bolt-lock keys copied (forget it) and trying to return that Sony Bluray player before leaving for Austin, I might have posted a South by Southwest preview article similar to the one by Movieline‘s Jen Yamato.

Like everyone else I agree that Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver, Duncan Jones‘ Source Code (Groundhog Day with a bomb), Greg Mottola‘s repulsive-looking Paul and Billy Bob Thornton‘s Willie Nelson doc top the list. That’s not saying much, is it?

Here’s a good one from the N.Y. Observer’s Mike Taylor, a tech guy: “Abolish South by Southwest!”

http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/abolish-south-southwest?utm_medium=partial-text&utm_campaign=daily-transom&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=DT

I have a sentimental attachment to Burbank (i.e., Bob Hope) airport, and am therefore looking at a Phoenix connection on my way to Austin and South by Southwest. Two laps = six hours, not counting drive-time to and from both airports, or roughly a seven-and-a-half to eight-hour journey. That’s almost what it takes to fly to New York. If I’d flown out of LAX I’d have a one-way flight that would’ve shaved two or three hours. Brilliant.

Jonathan Leibesman‘s Battle Los Angeles (Sony, 3.11) is the work of a moderately talented, second-rate whore with really fast hands. I didn’t mind it that much as I watched (“It’s all right, it’s tolerable,” I told Jett on the phone), but it’s been plummeting in my head ever since. Impressions of decent to pretty-good films tend to maintain initial levels, and very-good to excellent films always gain.

It’s a panoramic, heebie-jeebie, fast-break battle flick about a massive alien attack upon the world and particularly Los Angeles that’s happening because it looks cool and will sell a lotta tickets — an attack for no reason that anyone can figure except for something to do with H20 — an attack that’s massive, overwhelming, coordinated…”look at’ em!”

H.G. Wells‘ The War of the Worlds was inspired by England’s waging of the Boer War (i.e., British troops were the Martians) and the ultimate inability of foreign troops to maintain dominance over nativist elements despite their military superiority. So if you’re looking for a Battle LA metaphor we’re the aliens, the turf is Iraq/Afghanistan and water is oil. But do guys like Leibesman even think, much less care, about real-world echoes, and am I giving him way too much credit by suggesting there may be one here?

I say this because style-wise Battle LA is some kind of War of the Worlds meets Black Hawk Down meets District 9 ghoulash, and without a single fresh element or character turn or rooting element that doesn’t feel like it was cooked up by a roomful of soulless, heavily caffeinated 30something screenwriters, and is therefore choked with cliches about brave sweaty guys up against really tough odds that you can see coming a mile off.

And as the trailers have made clear (and as you expected all along) it’s pure shaky-cam and hypercut, shaky-cam and hypercut, shaky-cam and hypercut. And I’m saying again that this timeworn, dog-eared system for depicting breathless mayhem has been done to death and is ready for retirement after so much usage — it’s a trap, a shipping crate, a coffin. Wow…those scatter-cut computer screen images look like they were generated by 1993 home-security video equipment! Like something Paul Greengrass or Ridley Scott thought was cool 10 or 12 years ago.

The avant garde thing would have been to shoot Battle LA like Stanley Kubrick shot Full Metal Jacket — careful and smooth and measured and comprehensible. But I doubt if Leibesman has the character for that. He was hired to do the old hyper-pants pissy-pants, and that’s what he does.

The aliens are okay — I’ll give Leibesman that. Nice and greasy and slithery with Gold’s Gym physiques (i.e., big shoulders). But having them emit those old duk-duk District 9 bug-talk sounds is rote and unimaginative in the same way that James Arness‘s bald-headed invader howled like some kind of cat in Christian Nyby‘s The Thing (’51). Making aliens sound like insects or animals reduces them to standard-issue goblins.

I loved that Leibesman starts everything off with grunts on a chopper and the battle about to get heavy — roughly the one-third mark — in order to assure the ADD crowd that “the intense stuff is coming, guys….don’t worry…but you need to know that you’re going to have to chill for about 15 or 16 minutes to allow some generic character seeds to be planted…okay, bros?…and for us to put some really pointless title cards with the names and ranks of certain characters and some title cards about where this or that is happened….as if the ADDs could give a damn.

This movie is fast and thoughtless and mundane while pretending to be out-of-control. It’s a B movie for B-level brains. And yet I didn’t hate it. I just sat there and said to myself, “Yeah, yeah…yeah, yeah….okay, yup, uhm-hmm….seen it, been there, got it….know that one, that one…oh, Jesus, the kid is crying… here comes the old Richard Barthelmess ‘not this time!’ bit out of Only Angels Have Wings….know all of this stuff….got it, got it….got it, got it, got it.”

Morning-after note: I thought about the water-is-oil H.G. Wellsian metaphor last night as I drove down to meet some friends around 9:15 pm, just after my hurried posting. So I inserted it this morning.