I’ve gotten some heat from persons of Latin heritage over the last 24 hours due to yesterday morning’s “Loud Latinos” post. One of the gentler reprimands came last night around midnight from an HE reader named HoopersX. “Generally speaking I attempt to live my life by the physician’s creed of ‘first, do no harm,'” he wrote. “Sometimes it’s a lot easier to say it than live it. That said, gross generalizations of sex, creed or ethnicity don’t do much to advance one’s point of view.”

I responded as follows: “You say you try to live by the physician’s creed — ‘first, do no harm.’ The reason I wrote that piece yesterday morning is that harm was done to me, or rather my eardrums and sense of decorum. Those three braying, boomy-voiced guys in the cafe drew first blood. I was just quietly sitting and reading and these three donkeys turned the cafe into a Latino AM talk-radio show with the volume level turned up to 8 or 9.

“I lived for a year [11.08 to 11.09] in a middle-class Hispanic community in North Bergen, New Jersey and know whereof I speak. New York-area Latinos tend to converse (not always but often enough) in a loud and grossly exuberant manner. They speak much more loudly than they need to because…I don’t know why. Because they fucking feel like it? Because it’s in their blood? And like I said yesterday, I’ve been among Latin people in other parts of the world and they really do seem to be classier people than their New York cousins.

“As BCarter3 said yesterday, ‘It’s a class thing, not an ethnic thing. The further down the social scale you go, the louder the public conversations.’

“And this doesn’t make me Don Imus — it makes me someone who’s unafraid to say what he’s heard and seen and felt out in the real world. It’s not a rumor — common, coarse people are out there in force.

“We’re not living in a Henry James world or a John Reed-and-Louise Bryant world or an F. Scott Fitzgerald Egg Harbor world or an Ernest Hemingway-in-Paris world of the 1920s or even a Bob Dylan West Village world of the early 1960s. In many if not most of our 2010 social realms, refinement is out the window for the most part. The best seems to have come and gone in terms of culture. Things are cool in my realm — I like my gig and love what I do — but they do seem to be generally downswirling at the same time in an educational cultural Ms. Manners sense. As Jose Ferrer‘s Turkish Bey character said in Lawrence of Arabia, ‘I am surrounded by cattle.'”

A friend wrote the following this morning: “Hey, Jeff…not sure if you heard but your “Loud Latinos” post has caused a bit of a stir with the guys at Latino Review. And others on Twitter…it was a topic of much discussion on Twitter last night.”

This morning an email from Ralph Morales said, “You think Hispanics are loudmouths? We think uou [sic] are a jerk.”

Another guy called “Loud low-rent Latino” wrote, “Well, for your information I have observed savage white men speak and behave at obnoxious levels without consideration on Several occassions [sic] so next time muster up some balls and let those loud savage Latino men know that they are disturbing you or else move into a monastary [sic] everyone is free to be loud you narrow minded bigot.”

Did everyone get that? “Everyone is free to be loud.” I rest my case.

“Can you imagine that goofy gravelly voice of his coming out of a masked crimefighter?,” an IMDB guy wrote a few months back. Well, we don’t have to any longer with the trailer out. Clearly, Seth Rogen is not taking the “earnest” and “committed” approach to playing newspaper heir Britt Reid in Michel Gondry‘s The Green Hornet. That’s for Christian Bale, he clearly decided, but not me.

Rogen is playing the part joshingly, one step removed, like a superhero fan not quite accepting or believing that he can be one himself, nose pressed against the glass but enjoying the show for its rock-out aspects.

Rogen initially committed to making a comedic farce version with director Stephen Chow, but then Chow was muscled off the project (“We can make a lot more money, guys, if we make a semi-conventional, same-old-crap superhero flick instead of a comedy”) and replaced by Gondry.

So what we’re left with is basically The Drunk Knight becoming the Sardonic Smart-Ass Knight as he gets to do all kinds of cool, loud, bang-smash crime-fighting stuff with Kato (Jay Chou) that might be diverting if superhero flick fans hadn’t seen this exact same stuff 1749 times over the last ten to fifteen years.

Cameron Diaz is playing Lenore Case, the classy and compelling would-be girlfriend (a thoroughly stock role by way of the Batman movies). Christoph Waltz snags his first Inglorious Basterds straight-paycheck role as Chudnofsky — a gangster/crime-lord bad guy. And Tom Wilkinson plays Britt’s disapproving father who gets offed by the ne’er do wells at the end of Act One. Who else? Oh, yeah….Edward James Olmos and Edward Furlong. Fine.

I haven’t seen The Green Hornet, so why do I have this strong feeling that I have seen it? I can see it in my dreams right now. The watching of it six or seven months hence is going to be a mere formality.

A decision was made two months ago to push back a scheduled 12.22.10 opening of The Green Hornet to 1.14.11, ostensibly to allow tecchies more time to work on the 3D conversion. (This came after the original 6.25.10 release date had been jettisoned, of course.) My suspicion had been all along that Sony management decided to convert because they felt the goods hadn’t quite been delivered and that a dimensional enhancement might make a box-office difference. I also think they were punting, a January release being cheaper and less competitive.

Every time I run across a decent-looking YouTube clip from Shampoo, I have to post it. It just gets better and better, this thing. The understated satiric tone is such a pleasure to settle into. And it’s so rare to find a lead protagonist as screwed up as Warren Beatty‘s George Roundy — immature, scrambled mind, compulsive — who’s this vulnerable and touching. His final line is “I don’t trust anybody but you.” One of the saddest endings of a comedy ever.

And riding a Triumph with no helmet! And finding an empty lot in the Beverly Glen or Coldwater Canyon area that you can just pull into and have a heart-to-heart. Those days are so far gone it’s not funny.

Oh, to have been gay and feisty and lucky enough to have been at the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, which is where and when the gay rights movement began. You can’t “nice” people into abandoning oppression or prejudice. You have to tell them to stop it, and nothing says “no” like a little street action. Shoves, shouts, cuts, bruises and broken glass have a way of getting right to the point.

Instead of accepting a typical rousting by the NYPD for the crime of being themselves, the patrons at this West Village bar at 53 Christopher Street hit back. They fought, jeered, threw beer bottles, broke windows, and persuaded the arresting officers to take refuge in the bar out of concern for their own safety. A few more nights of disturbances followed, and it was clear to those on either side that things would never be the same. A year later the first Gay Pride parade happened, and the long drip-by-drip process of de-prejudicing straight American began.

Homophobia obviously lives some 40 years later. In early May an Obama adminstration spokesperson referred to rumblings about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan possibly being gay as a “charge.” But it’s a different country now than it was back then, significantly, and it’s a real emotional pleasure to savor the spirit of awakening and revolt that the Stonewall riots signified, if only to grasp the changes that have happened and the upheavals that were required.

This is what Kate Davis and David Heilbroner‘s Stonewall Uprising — a doc based on David Carter‘s “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution” — does for the average viewer, gay or straight. It takes you back to the bad old days and shows what it was like to be gay in the ’50s and ’60s (“There was no out — there was only in,” as one veteran recalls) and allows for a sharing in that flashpoint Stonewall moment.

(l.) Stonewall Uprising co-director Kate Davis, (r.) director John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) during Stonewall Inn after-party following last Wednesday’s premiere screening at Film Forum.

David Heilbroner, Davis, Mitchell.

The chief accomplishment of Stonewall Uprising is the concise delivery — the discipline and tight editing and impassioned, first-person recollections that provide a blow-by-blow, hour-by-hour history of how that night unfolded. I was in the grip of it from the beginning. I got a kind of contact high from it, in a way. I recommend the film to anyone with the slightest interest in the ’60s rebelllion dynamic, or who simply wants to learn a few things about the Stonewall convulsions without buying Carter’s book.

I remember talking to an older actor in the late ’80s who wasn’t exactly enlightened in his view of homosexuality, but he once confessed that he respected — feared — the anger of gay people. “Those guys are brutal,” he said. “You don’t ever want to mess with the fags…whew. They’re like hornets.” I don’t think too many older homophobes had that trepidation before Stonewall.

It’s fascinating to consider how homosexuality was generally seen in the mid to late ’60s. It really was the Pleistocene era. Consider this 2.12.65 article in Time magazine called “Psychiatry: Homosexuality Can Be Cured,” and this May 1967 article in Harper’s magazine, “A Way Out for Homosexuals,” by a “curing” proponent named Dr. Samuel B. Hadden. Or The Detective, the 1968 Manhattan melodrama in which Frank Sinatra‘s character, portrayed as relatively decent and humane in his attitude toward gays, says at one point that “these people are sick.”

I’m having a late breakfast at a cafe near my place, and there’s this jabbering Hispanic guy sitting two tables away who’s louder than hell. To be heard by his tablemate he’d need to talk at a level 4 or 5 (which is how I do it — I talk to someone like I’m having a conversation, not like I’m giving a speech in an outdoor arena without a microphone). This guy is talking at a level 8 or 9.

A couple of Latino guys sitting at the counter are doing the same thing, bellowing from the diaphragm so everyone in the cafe can hear what they’re saying. Except they have to talk even louder because they have to be heard over the first loud guy.

There’s no way around it — New York Hispanics can sometimes be socially unsubtle people, and they don’t seem to care if people like me are bothered by their patter. It never even occurs. We all act thoughtlessly from time to time, but the mark of a real animal is someone who never considers that he/she might be giving offense.

Is this primarily a New York-area thing? Or something that only low-rent Latinos do? I’ve been all around Spain and I’ve rarely noticed this level of conversational obnoxiousness in cafes. Nor did I notice this element when I visited Buenos Aires a few years ago. The Latin men and women I’ve observed in other countries can be spirited and exuberant, of course, but they mostly seem to converse at moderate levels. People with money and/or accomplishment under their belts are always more soft-spoken. You can bet that if you were to go to a cafe with Paul Shenar‘s Alejandro Sosa, the Bolivian drug dealer in Scarface, that he wouldn’t be carrying on like these three nearby donkeys. Does Edward James Olmos bellow in cafes and cause guys like me to complain about him? I seriously doubt it.

I finally saw Toy Story 3 last night — 10:40 pm show, 3D, small plex on Second Ave. and 12th Street. And I get it all. The people doing cartwheels over this thing are responding to the usual quality Pixar stuff — a deft application of charm, wit, soul and panache. The key ingredients are cleverness plus heart, relatable emotionalism, polished story-telling skills and a script (primarily written by Little Miss Sunshine‘s Michael Arndt) that fits together like a fine Swiss watch.

Plus…what else? Thematic resonance, dazzling digital painting, top-of-the-line craft in all departments and the usual double-track appeal to adults-plus-kids.

It’s an exceptional, grade-A entertainment — a family ride that tickles and massages and sinks in and never slacks off. It’s the most emotionally touching film of the year thus far, and one of the most smartly constructed. It’s going to make gazillions, and it’ll probably win the Best Animated Feature Oscar next February.

But very few have identified another obvious characteristic, which is that while Toy Story 3 is nutritious, it’s also a heaping plate of comfort food. As much as it invests in the idea that we all need to be loved and needed, and that loyalty to family and old friends is essential to a fully-felt life, it never stops shovelling corporate-created brands and associations that we all knew and felt relaxed with as kids (or as young parents). This is what makes the film feel “good” and “reassuring” — I get that. We know and relate to the world it’s recreating and is playing with so cleverly. But I began to feel as if the story was taking place in some emotionally-finessed corporate gulag.

Armond White has taken a lot of heat for being one of two or three critics to pan Toy Story 3, and I know he can be a reflexive sorehead and a contrarian, but he’s not entirely incorrect in saying that the film “is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination — the usefulness of toys — and strictly celebrates consumerism.”

That said, I loved Big Baby’s macabre vibe (a little bit of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman) with that one half-closed eye, and Mr. Potato Head’s trying to make do with a soft tortilla instead of a plastic potato for a body — this was the one bit (a kind of Salvador Dali nod) that I laughed out loud at. Ned Beatty‘s voicing of Lotso, the emotionally resentful camp commandant, was perhaps the best of the lot. And a malfunction turning Buzz Lightyear into a passionate Latin lover — that was a funny (if thematically meaningless) bit.

I got the trash-furnace holocaust allusion, of course, but…whatever. It didn’t fit into the theme or the milieu so I was like “okay, I see that, yeah” but that’s all.

I have to say that I didn’t quite believe the transformation of 17 year-old Andy (voiced by John Morris) from his first-act identity — a kid who’s into the excitement of college and adventure and hormones and (presumably) girls and who’s mindful of what his toys used to mean to him (especially Woody) but isn’t all that concerned with their fate apart from an instinct to stash them in the attic — and his third-act identity as a tender and loving toy-parent who wants to be extra-sure that the little girl he’s giving them to will be extra caring and considerate.

It’s very gratifying to see Andy be that guy at the end, but I didn’t buy it. At best, some 17 year-old boys might be into saving one or two of their favorite toys but — let’s face it — most toys get the heave-ho (and I don’t mean into a daycare donation box) and most high-school or college-age kids don’t look back. Life is cruel in that respect, which again is why everyone is embracing Toy Story 3 — it’s selling a dream about love and caring and loyalty that we’d like to see embedded in our own day-to-day.

I believe in hanging onto toys myself. My kids’ toys, I mean. I still have a Boris Karloff Frankenstein model and a Lon Chaney Wolfman model also — both purchased at a Universal toy store in ’97 or ’98. I also have a large black Alien queen left over from the early ’90s. I wish that Dylan’s best friend, a monkey named Babiki, was still around. I know that Jett still has a hand-made Joey Ramone doll that I bought him about ten years ago.

Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt has broken the 20th Century Fox embargo and trashed James Mangold‘s Knight and Day, accusing it of lazily mis-using its stars (Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz) and being generally slapdash and far-fetched and irksome.

I have to take off in ten minutes so there’s no time to post a mini-review of my own, but Knight and Day‘s ludicrousness is very boldly and unapologetically “announced” at the beginning. The movie is saying “of course the action is ridiculous, but you don’t know what ridiculous is until you’ve seen this film to the end…we are flaunting the lack of plausibility to level of Coyote vs. Road Runner, and proudly! You get that, right?”

And I have an apology to make for dissing Diaz two or three days ago. As much as she’s irritated me before, she handles herself quite well here. She’s easy to settle in with, emotionally plausible as far as the writing allows, restrained, “real.” It’s her most engaging performance since In Her Shoes.

Rahm Emanuel said this morning that Rep. Joe Barton‘s “shakedown” comment wasn’t a gaffe. Well, actually it was if you define “gaffe” as something you actually think (and that others like you actually think) but which you’re not supposed to say in front of a microphone.

Out of the blue, Ken Russell‘s controversial The Devils (1971), which Warner Home Video has remastered but refuses to issue on DVD for reasons no one can quite figure, has suddenly turned up on iTunes. This isn’t the full-boat, naked-nun, 111-minute version that played at the IFC Center on 1.25.10, and not the truncated 103-minute version either — it runs 108 minutes and 11 seconds.

And it looks awfully nice — crisp and painterly with that fresh-from-the-lab sheen. It hasn’t looked this spotless and vibrant since it first opened 39 years ago. And in 2.35 to 1, of course. It’s really quite amazing. It’s sitting on my iPhone as we speak. Not quite the format that I would have chosen — you can’t really savor some of the wide-angle compositions, which are quite detailed and contain information that is just too granular and microscopic when seen on such a small screen — but it’s better than nothing. Maybe a DVD will happen down the road.

It was probably remastered for that Warner Home Video DVD that was announced in early 2008 but reversed soon after. The Devils has always been a bit of a hot potato because of its blending of religious symbolism and iconography with scenes of sexual hysteria. It’s a highly intelligent, superbly acted, exquisitely designed historical drama but also one of the most vivid and super-creepy depictions of political evil and religious perversity ever released by a major studio.

So some WHV executive probably suggested in a meeting, “Hey, I know…let’s send it to iTunes! That way we don’t have to deal with packaging and duplication costs and…you know, we can sort of keep it under the counter so to speak as far as reactions from the religious right might be concerned.”

Here’s a 3.29.10 article I wrote about the confusing (or perplexing) Warner Home Video Devils DVD situation. And here’s a 5.26.10 article on the same subject by Adam Balz on Not Coming To A Theatre Near You.

An honorable guy named Sergio wrote about this today on his blog Shadow and Act.

I’m not one to talk given my shameless pluggings of my sons’ talents, but with all those critics out of work it’s nice to see that Cody Gifford, the son of Kathie Lee Gifford, will be doing movie reviews every Friday this summer during TODAY’s fourth hour. “Cody is currently studying film in college and wants to direct movies after he graduates,” the website copy says. “The TV reviews are part of his summer internship at TODAY.”

I think I’m done with war documentaries that make a point of not offering any sort of opinion about anything — no history or context, no political point of view, just “this is war, war is hell, taste it.” Well, I’m sick of that shit after seeing Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger‘s Restrepo, a bravely captured, technically first-rate documentary about a year under fire in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, a.k.a., “the valley of death.”

There’s no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what’s really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense. I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.

Hetherington and Junger spent a little more than a year (May 2007 to July 2008) with several U.S. soldiers in that besieged neck of the woods. They focused mainly on the grunts’ hilltop camp called Restrepo (pronounced res-TREP-o and named for a medic in their unit who’d been killed). The film does a clean and competent job of portraying their endless firefights with Taliban forces and their community dealings with the locals, and it acquaints us with various members of the hilltop platoon — their faces, lives, impressions — in what seems like a frank and forthright manner.

Except the kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — “get it done,” “fill up more sandbags,” “ours not to reason why” and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?

Imagine a documentary about the day-to-day life of Steve Schmidt, John McCain‘s ’08 presidential campaign manager, that ignores how the campaign is going and instead focuses on Schmidt’s relationship with his family and his dentist and his kids’ homework and his visits to a local cafe and his dealings with the guy who mows the lawn once a week. What would you call that approach? Thorough? Honest?

Rest assured that if I was one of those Korangal troops I would ask a shit-load of questions about the general game plan, as in what the fuck are we doing there and how the hell do we ever get out? But nobody wants to go there, least of all Hetherington and Junger, and so Restrepo is just about cigarettes and weapons and wrestling matches and firefights and sandbags and a cow that got stuck in some barbed wire and had to be killed, and then had to be paid for in order to chill down the locals.

I’m of the view that the Afghanistan War is pure quicksand, and that we can’t help to prevail (i.e., defeat the Taliban or at least reduce them to insignificance) because we’re foreign invaders and sooner or later all invaders are out-lasted by the natives, and that natural organisms will infect and weaken them, and as a result they’ll eventually pack up and go home. Ask H.G. Wells or Ho Chi Minh.

We’re not stopping another 9/11 from happening by fighting there. We’re just fighting a series of skirmishes and offensives that will continue for years to come, perhaps even decades, and which can’t hope to lead to “victory.” It would be great if the Taliban could be finally defeated, sure, but it’s not going to happen and any military or intelligence person who claims otherwise is dreaming. The bottom line is that (a) we can’t win and (b) there’s no way out other than just quitting.

Quitting is un-American, you say? Shameful, unthinkable, cowardly? Well, two months ago U.S. forces up and quit the whole Korangal Valley offensive. That’s right — they shined it. The lives of 42 Americans who died fighting there over the last four years? Water under the bridge, U.S commanders decided. Better to cut bait than waste more lives.

(l.) Sebastian Junger, (r.) Tim Hetherington during filming.

In fact the general thinking (as expressed in this 4.16 N.Y. Times story) is that U.S. troops’ presence in the valley may have actually made matters worse by creating Taliban sympathies among once-neutral Korangalis.” Or so it says in the Times story as well as this Wikipedia summary.

This massive fact has been ignored by Restrepo — they could have easily added a tagline in the closing credits — and was not mentioned by Hetherington during the post-screening q & a.

I asked Hetherington if he could offer his civilian-observer, non-military perspective about whether he could foresee any circumstance that might allow U.S. commanders to decide, as they’ve done in the case of the Korangal Valley, that U.S. efforts to defeat the Taliban simply aren’t working and that it’s time to just pack it in. Hetherington got my drift, but he ignored it and blathered on about how the Afghanistan situation is different from Vietnam in the ’60s.

Hetherington has been a war photographer for years, and guys like him are basically action junkies — let’s face it. He seems almost invested in the Afghanistan conflict, perversely, because it provided him with a year’s worth of adrenaline rushes as well as the opportunity to create a noteworthy film and contribute great pics to Vanity Fair. In any case he’s apparently determined to follow the script set out by The Hurt Locker — i.e., our film isn’t preaching, not taking a stand, just showing how it is for the troops, etc.

(l.) Hetherington, Rachel Reid during Friday night’s q & a at Walter Reade theatre.

“What I’m asking,” I repeated, “is if there’s any way out of this conflict, or are we going to be there…you know, five or ten more years or indefinitely or what?” Rachel Reid, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch who was sitting next to Hetherington, said that U.S. allies were getting a little fidgety and that the U.S. economy was impacting the situation and other generic blah-blah stuff.

Restrepo doesn’t tell you what’s going on and Hetherington and Reid weren’t in the mood, so consider the following:

A 12.22.09 CNN story by Peter Bergen reported that “a December 22 briefing, prepared by the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan and obtained by CNN, concludes that the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is increasingly effective.

“The briefing, which warns that the ‘situation is serious,’ was prepared by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn last month. His assessment is that the Taliban’s ‘organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding” and the group is capable of much greater frequency of attacks and varied locations of attacks.

“According to the unclassified briefing, the insurgency can now sustain itself indefinitely because of three factors: (a) The increased availability of bomb-making technology and material; (b) The Taliban’s access to two major funding streams, one from the opium trade and the other from overseas donations from Muslim countries, which reach the Taliban by courier or through a system of informal banks known as ‘hawalas’ that operate across much of the Islamic world; and (c) the Taliban’s continuing ability to recruit foot soldiers based on the perception that they ‘retain the religious high-ground,’ and factors such as poverty and tribal friction.

This morning N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich reminded that Gen. Stanley McChrystal “is calling the much-heralded test case for administration counterinsurgency policy — the de-Talibanization and stabilization of the Marja district — ‘a bleeding ulcer.’ And that, relatively speaking, is the good news from this war.”

That quote came from a 5.24.10 McClatchy story by Dion Nissenbaum that read as follows:

“U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

“‘You’ve got to be patient,’ Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. ‘We’ve only been here 90 days.’

“‘How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?’ McChrystal replied.

A charged silence settled in the stuffy, crowded chapel tent at the Marine base in the Marjah district.

“‘I can’t tell you, sir,’ the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered.

“‘I’m telling you,’ McChrystal said. ‘We don’t have as many days as we’d like.'”