I’ve been so exhausted a couple of times that I’ve been barely able to stand, but even in my most sleep-deprived state I could have held it together, I think, in a room full of people and press while listening to Sen. John McCain speak in front of TV cameras. I would have somehow gotten through that and then collapsed in a nearby hallway or the bathroom.

“We are in the midst of a profound cinematic change,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote about 25 days ago, in the immediate aftermath of Cannes, in an article called “Cinematic Change and the End of Film.” Yeah, change hurts — it feels scary, traumatic — but I’m fairly happy with most of today’s digital makeovers. Not entirely, of course, but you can’t have everything perfect.

Dargis was repeating a familiar lament about celluloid’s vinyl-like delivery system — the technology and mythology of cameras and projectors, splicing tape and editing tables and skanky projection booths, Xenon and carbon-arc lamps, eight-at-the-gate and that little ding-ding-ding sound when a reel is about to expire — giving way to digital shooting (Monte Hellman and the Canon 5D Mark II!) and digital projection — i.e., the equivalent of CD/mp3/iTunes. And implying that the film-treasuring culture that was born, grew and thrived under celluloid is being somehow altered or undermined, and that this makes Dargis feel funny.

I get that. I don’t like the feeling of ground moving under my feet any more than the next guy. But what exactly will we be losing with the gradual evaporation of celluloid and all of that Thomas Alva Edison-era technology with it?

Not all that much, really. Because today’s theatrical presentations are much, much better today than they were in the bad old analog days, for the most part. It’s not pleasant to recall all those dozens and dozens of times that I would complain to theatre managers in the ’70s and ’80s about movies being shown with weak illumination or with the wrong aperture plate in the projector or with sound that was so tinny or muffled that I had to cup my ears to hear the dialogue. That still happens occasionally, but not as much as it used to.

And because an enterprising filmmaker can shoot and present a movie in the fashion of Two-Lane Blacktop or Breathless or The Outfit or The Big Heat even, if he/she is so inclined. If you want to make a film that looks and projects as if Fritz Lang or ’60s-era Sam Peckinpah or Samuel Fuller shot it, a filmmaker can do that quite easily after capturing his/her film digitally. They just have to be careful not to allow those tell-tale digital photography signs (those “splotches of yellow in white images” that Dargis speaks of, or those inky splotches of digital blacks and blues that appear when deep shadows are part of the compositions).

I’m not saying I know for a fact that you could go out to Spain’s rugged country and the Jordanian desert and re-shoot a new Lawrence of Arabia that would contain the same exquisite 70mm values that the original 1962 film had, but I’m persuaded that you can almost capture the same thing with digital cameras these days, and that the cameras that’ll be available three or five years hence will be able to do an even better job of it.

90% if not 95% of the films I’ve seen projected the old way over the last ten years or so have not impressed me. With my fervor for film and reasonable journalistic access, I’ve experienced and been delighted by top-grade celluloid projections at first-rate houses for the last 25 years or so. But the general public has never experienced this level of projection. A relatively small culture of cinefans watch new and older films at places like the Academy theatre or the Steven Ross theatre on the Warner Bros. lot or the Arclight or the American Cinematheque in Hollywood or Santa Monica, but Joe and Jane Popcorn have never been invited and probably wouldn’t show if they were.

But now, due to digital, viewers in Bumblefuck, Colorado, are seeing films that look much brighter and sharper with rich and precise sound.

Every other time I see a classic film projected at the Film Forum (which Dargis praises for informing its patrons whether or not they’re seeing a real film or a digitally-projected image that isn’t, she says, much different than showing a Bluray disc) I feel mildly irked and let down. The image isn’t sharp or clean enough, the sound is muffled or squawky, and the black-and-white films, instead of presenting that silvery velvety sheen, look murky or sludgy. I hated the way Preston Sturges ‘ Christmas in July looked and sounded when I saw it there last fall. Ditto Nicholas Ray‘s Bigger Than Life, which I enjoyed much more when I watched it on Bluray at home.

So I’m sorry but the big changeover, from my perspective and on balance, isn’t that bad a thing.

As L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has reported, producer Cotty Chubb is delighted that Unthinkable, a torture-the-terrorist melodrama with Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Sheen and Carrie Ann Moss, is the hottest flick of the moment in terms of searches by IMDB users, but also pissed and flabbergasted that a stolen copy of the film has been watched illegally by God-knows-how-many-thousands since it appeared last month.

DVDs and Blurays of Unthinkable are purchasable online and in stores today, but did the scumbag community (pirates and downloaders alike) wound the goose before it was hatched? Or will the online exposure led to increased DVD/Bluray sales?

The usual response is to claim that the scurvies who illegally download movies are never going to pay for a DVD/Bluray — it’s just not in their blood — but a film that’s become a hot topic due to online exposure will sometimes benefit when it becomes legally available. But has this ever been statistically proven or indicated? Did Michael Moore‘s decision to release Sicko for free result in better-than-expected home video sales? I’m asking.

“I always saw [Unthinkable] as a ticking-bomb movie,” Chubb tells Goldstein. “The one time we previewed it in Pasadena, positioning it as a suspense picture starring Sam Jackson, basically saying, ‘How far would you go to defend your country?’ we recruited 350 people and turned away another 250 at the theater. That told me it was a picture people would go to see.”

“So I’ve been unbelievably torn over the whole thing. It’s tremendous to see that our IMDB user rating is 7.3, which is the highest rating of any movies in the current Top 10. But on the other hand, while everyone is debating all these important moral questions, I want to ask them another important question — hey, guys, what about the morality of watching this movie on the internet for free?

Goldstein includes a condensed version of a statement Chubb made on the IMDB message board:

“I’ve heard a lot of reasons why streaming or downloading movies is a good idea, why everyone concerned should be happy with the attention (and in fact I am grateful for it), and how it’s the new real world, but I haven’t heard how the folks that paid for the picture are supposed to make their money back.

“So here’s one question, expressed a couple of different ways: Is there a fair price, fair in your eyes, that you would pay for a download? ‘Hey, take a chance, it’s only a buck?’ ‘People tell me it’s great, I’ll drop two bucks?’ ‘Here’s three bucks, I can afford it and it’s only fair?’ What number seems right to you? ‘Or is it ‘zero, screw it, I don’t care?'”

“We’ve got to come up with a new model, because the old one just isn’t working anymore,” Chubb concludes. “You just can’t fight against a model where the movie is available for free. People clearly want to download movies online, so it’s time we figured out how to get some money out of it.”

“I enjoy movies when they’re sincere, from personal experience. I like taking your time meandering with the music. There’s so much that isn’t said in a look. I like observing things. I’m not interested in a lot of dialogue.” — Somewhere director Sofia Coppola speaking seven years ago to Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson.

Screenwriter Derek Haas (Wanted, uncredited contributor to The A-Team) has a website for screenwriters to publish short works of fiction, called Popcorn Fiction. The conceit is that it gives writers a chance to flex their literary muscles. The underlying conceit is that these stories are treatments they might sell and see made into films. A friend notes that “it’s eye-opening to see how some successful people ‘write.'”

Sofia Coppola makes slender stylish movies about herself, her past, her head, her wanderings. The daughter of a legendary big-shot director, she’s inclined to favor films about innocent younger women floating in the orbits of older guys possessed of swagger and power (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette). Somewhere, her latest, is about a young girl (Elle Fanning) dealing with her somewhat damaged Hollywood-actor dad (Stephen Dorff ). The concern, of course, is that the title suggests a kind of listlessness. An apparent upside is that it costars Benicio del Toro and Michelle Monaghan.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to think or feel about this Megan Fox-meets-mannequin video, which has been put out as an accompaniment to an interview she has in the June/July 2010 issue of Interview magazine, which was agreed to, of course, to promote Jonah Hex (Warner Bros, 6.18), her latest film. The Louise Brooks bob is a wig.

I’m a little afraid of Jay Roach‘s Dinner For Schmucks (Paramount, 7.30). One, the trailer suggests that the humor is crude and common. Two, U.S. adaptations of Francis Veber comedies, which are fine in their native French tongue, never seem to quite work — Partners, The Toy, Buddy Buddy, The Tall Blonde Man with One Red Shoe. (The exception is Mike Nichols‘ The Birdcage, which came from Veber’s La Cage aux Folles.) And three, I don’t like Steve Carell in broad goofy mode.

Dinner for Schmucks is based on on Veber’s Le diner de cons/The Dinner Game, which came out twelve years ago.

I’ll admit to being slightly distracted by two enthusiastic IMDB commenters, who could obviously be studio plants. The first guy says “it’s hands down one of the funnier movies I’ve seen in some time…several incredibly funny lines plus a generally ridiculous performance by Steve = good times…think Michael Scott of The Office, to the extreme.” The second guy says “this literally one of the funniest movies I have ever seen in my entire life…the trailer is crap compared to the movie…it made The Hangover look like Freddy Got Fingered…really smart writing, really well acted, and there was brilliant chemistry between Paul Rudd and Carell…I was not disappointed one bit.”

For most of my life I’ve had a problem with people who stand and walk like ducks with their feet spread out at a 55 or 60 degree angle. I distinctly remember feeling this way when I was eight or nine years old and eyeballing some douchey-looking guy in a TV commercial, standing with his feet spread apart as he made the pitch, and deciding then and there that I would never allow myself to do that.

I was walking behind a huge bear-like kid this morning, and he had the duck-foot thing going big-time. There’s a reason for this condition, I’m sure. I’m not trying to assign “fault,” per se, but I know that if I notice a duck-foot person I tend to cross them off right away.

I doubt if anyone has ever mentioned this in a review of film column, but Tom Cruise has this condition, at least to a slight extent. It’s faintly noticable as he’s walking across his back yard during the party scene in Risky Business, and you can see that he runs a little bit like a duck when he’s chasing Jamie Foxx in Collateral.

This image from Florian Von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Tourist (Columbia, 2.16.11), via Worst Previews and Awards Daily, is obviously quite handsome. Nice atmosphere, well-balanced, intriguing undercurrent. And, as noted in other columns, it shows that after looking like a 36 year-old for the last several years, Johnny Depp, 47, has finally shifted (or settled) into Russell Crowe territory — a little bit beefy, that boozy widening of the features, face like a satchel, grizzled Rennaissance man.

The Tourist is a remake of (or has certainly been suggested by) Jerome Salle‘s Anthony Zimmer, a 2005 French-produced feature costarring Sophie Marceau in the Angelina Jolie role (i.e., “Chiara” in the ’05 version, “Elise” in Von Donnersmarck’s) and Yvan Attal in the Depp role (“Francois” in ’05, “Frank” in ’11).

The ’05 film had to do with money laundering, mistaken identities, a certain amount of sex, identity substitution and plastic surgery.

“In Paris, the international police force and the Russian mafia are chasing Anthony Zimmer, an intelligent man responsible for laundry of dirty money in France,” the ’05 synopsis reads. “Zimmer has had extensive plastic surgery, and his new face and voice are completely unknown. The only means to reach Zimmer is through his beloved mistress Chiara, who is under surveillance of the police and the mobsters.

“While traveling by train to the country near Nice, a man named Francois Taillandier, who has the same body shape of Zimmer, is select by Chiara as if he were Zimmer and used as a bait to lure those that are pursuing her. When Taillandier is chased by the professional Russian killers, he seeks the aid of the French police when the real situation begins to be disclosed to him.”

Von Donnersmarck’s film, per the IMDB, “revolves around Frank, an American tourist visiting Italy to mend a broken heart” while “Elise is an extraordinary woman who deliberately crosses his path.” This indicates that Depp will perhaps play a double role with one of his characters looking just a little bit different than the other, but not enough to make a significant difference as far as his pursuers are concerned.

Snapped by yours truly about ten years ago.

There’s something about the prose stylings of box-office analyst Paul Degarabeidan, currently with Hollywood.com, that has always driven me up the wall. His box-office assessments — bland, toothless, oppressively mundane — have time and again prompted the same “involuntary reaction,” as I wrote in ’03, emanating from “a perfectly likable box-office analyst with a warm smile and a narcotizing way with words.”

Yesterday Degarabedian hit one out of the park while speaking to AP reporter David Germain about the huge success of The Karate Kid, which is very much a Smith family affair — it stars 11 year-old Jaden Smith, and was produced by dad Will Smith and mom Jada Pinkett Smith.

Germain wrote that The Karate Kid “had an opening weekend that stacked up well against the track record of [Jaden’s] superstar father who has had only two bigger debuts — I Am Legend at $77.2 million and Hancock at $62.6 million.

And then Degaradebian chimed in with one of his little pearls: “It’s like ‘Who’s the biggest star now, dad?’ It proves the box-office apple doesn’t fall far from the money tree in that household.”

Yes, that appears to be true — the Smith family is indeed a money machine, and the son is clearly competing with the father now. And I would like very much to leap from a rooftop like Jack Nicholson in Wolf and chase Degarabedian down like a deer.

In the wake of the $76 million opening weekend for I Am Legend, Degarabedian said that “it’s no wonder Will Smith feels so lonely…everyone else on earth is in the movie theater.”

Here’s a piece I wrote about Degarabedian in ’07. It was mostly inspired by a 7.12.07 New York/”Vulture” piece called “Paul Degarabedian Must be Stopped” (written by Dan Kois), and borrowed liberally from my ’03 article.