I didn’t comment on the 5.28 theatrical debut of Alejandro Amenabar‘s Agora because I was in Europe, but now that I’m back and domesticated I may as well re-run my 5.18.09 Cannes Film Festival review, which began with my calling it “a visually ravishing, intelligently scripted historical parable about the evils of religious extremism.

“And I don’t mean the kind that existed in 4th century Alexandria, which is when and where this $65 million dollar epic is set. I mean the evils of the present-day Taliban and the Neocon-aligned Christian right, and the way Agora metaphorically exposes these movements for what they are.

“As Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Nightmares sagely explained, these two extremist faiths are similar in their loathing for liberalism and militant yearning to turn back the clock and to above all hold high the flag of religious purity. The 9/11 attacks kicked off their holy war against each other — a war that fortified their positions in their respective cultures during the Bush years.

“And now comes Agora, dramatizing how purist zealotry among 4th Century Christians led to the persecuting of Jew and pagans, to the sacking and burning of the great library of Alexandria, and to the murder of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), the first widely-noted female scholar who taught philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. (Note to whiners: Noting a well documented event that happened 1600 years ago can’t be called a spoiler.)

“Amenabar’s film, an English-language Spanish production that was shot in and around Malta, seems to me like the most thoughtful and intellectually-talky big-screen epic ever made, although there’s a fair amount of strife and sword-stabbing and mob violence all through it.

“The intense conflicts, exacting and cultured dialogue, dashing visual energy and top-notch performances from Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Rupert Evans, Ashraf Barhom, Rupert Evans and Michael Lonsdale make Agora more than gripping for its entire 141 minutes. I was surprised, really, that it moved as fast as it did.

“Some are calling it too talky or insufficiently emotional, which translates into the imprecise term known as ‘boring.’ It isn’t that, trust me, although I admit it’s hard to imagine the U.S. fans of sludge entertainment being keen to see it. You need to be keyed into what it’s saying about our world and to be rooting against the bad guys (i.e., old-time Christians) to really get into it, I suppose, although the high-quality sheen is unmistakable in every department. It’s well worth it for the CG alone.”

Leon Gast‘s Smash His Camera, the HBO doc about the legendary, fearless, pain-in-the-ass paparazzo Ron Galella, does a solid, professional job with the usual portraiture. Who he is and was, career recap, what his friends and detractors think and remember, etc. It’s smart, tight, well assembled.

But the most intriguing thing Smash His Camera does is underscore — prove — one of the more intriguing philosophical points made by Marlon Brando‘s Col. Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

Describing some thorny-tough Vietcong he’d fought in Vietnam, Kurtz said “you have to have men who are moral, and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment…without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”

Replace “kill” with “take pictures of celebrities” and that’s a pretty good summary of Galella’s approach to his rather sleazy profession. He doesn’t judge himself — can’t, won’t, doesn’t know how. And for what it’s worth, he seems like a relatively happy guy. Partly because he does what he does with real feeling and passion. He loves his work.

For decades Galella’s rep among celebrities — including, in their day, Jackie Kennedy and Marlon Brando — has been (a) he is/was New York’s most famous and notorious celebrity photographer, and (b) is/was some kind of Ultimate Insect — an obnoxious thief, invader, stalker, mosquito.

But their scorn doesn’t get through to him. You can see that in his manner and words. Either he’s incapable of understanding what people find infuriating about a paparazzi pest, or he’s shut down that part of him that could understand it.

For the last 40-plus years Galella has presented himself as just a regular New Jersey guy (cannoli-eater, a bit of a primitive, lacking sophistication, not well-educated) who does what he does and gets paid for it, period. He could be a brick-layer or a cab driver, except he lives in an ornate Tony Soprano house and has questionable taste in furnishings and God knows what else.

But he’s a king in his world — renowned, successful — with his photographs published in books and shown in galleries woldwide. And all due (or at least partly due) to the fact that he’s never undermined himself with doubts or concerns. A lesson in this?

In an age in which every paparazzo shoots digitally, Galella — 79 years old — appears to still be shooting on film. Strange. He has a darkroom in his New Jersey home, just like the one that David Hemmings‘ character has in Blow-Up. Quaint.

Smash His Camera will begin showing on HBO on Monday night at 9 pm.

With the story of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair back in the cultural soup via HBO’s The Special Relationship (which I still haven’t seen), it seems allowable to re-state HE’s longstanding opinion of President Clinton’s fibbing about the Monica Lewsinky mess.

My view is this (and I’m not just saying this to drive up page views): Clinton’s refusal to talk plainly or honestly to Ken Starr‘s inquisitors was one of the moral high points of his administration.

I’ve always thought it slimey and wrong to dredge up the private lives of political candidates. The press corps was right not to pester JFK for his randiness. Jimmy Carter shouldn’t have taken heat for admitting to “lust in his heart.” And beating up on Clinton for Lewinsky was wretched and absurd.

The real issue in ’98 and ’99, of course, wasn’t oral sex, but whether or not an American President should be impeached for lying about having received same, or having otherwise fudged certain particulars under oath. Clinton was not only entitled to lie about this matter; by any standard of dignity he was absolutely honor-bound to do so, given the absolute inappropriateness of such a matter being investigated by lawmakers and given the gutter-grovelling character of many of Clinton’s opportunistic pursuers.

In recent months The Cove, winner of the Best Feature Doc Oscar, has reportedly been a victim of organized agitation in Japan, mostly likely due to fishing-industry interests paying goons to stir up trouble. With “two more movie theatres having cancelled screenings,” director Louie Psihoyos has recorded an explanation/response:

“In recent months, protesters with loudspeakers have been shouting slogans at the Tokyo office of Unplugged, the distributor of The Cove, criticizing the film as a betrayal of Japanese pride,” the story says.

“Unplugged said Friday the cancellations at Cinemart theaters in Tokyo and Osaka were triggered by worries about safety of moviegoers and businesses nearby. The Tokyo cinema where the movie was to open changed its mind Thursday after getting angry phone calls and warnings of protests.

“Most Japanese have never eaten dolphin meat. But some believe killing dolphins and whales is part of traditional culinary culture and resent the interference of outsiders focused on species protection.

“The Cove screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October and at smaller events in Japan but has not opened to the Japanese public. The Japanese version blurs the faces of some people on screen to lessen the possibility of trouble.

“Unplugged said talks were under way with other theaters to show the film, although details weren’t released.”

Enough with the Inception-is-coming clatter. We’ve all been sold on the idea that it’s the only decent summer flick on the horizon, and now it’s time, dammit…time to quit farting around and show it to somebody somewhere. Warner Bros. has to be extremely careful about early look-sees because they don’t want reports about the big third-act surprise getting out. But they need to start having little peek-ins — i.e., not “screenings” per se but carefully controlled, outside-the-box witnessings.

Show it to some boomer-aged Swiss scientists in Geneva who can be trusted not to blab online. Take a print (or a hard drive) to Beijing and show it to some Kentucky Fried Chicken employees after closing. Have a surprise outdoor screening in some small Montana town — show to some grizzled old guys with calloused hands who won’t be able to comprehend most of it. Show it to some big-name directors and producers on the Warner Bros. lot — Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, etc. — and then have an after-party and allow some media people to mingle and report what they’re saying.

I’m just feeling a little snippy about reading yet another here-it-comes piece. “Give us some more hints, Chris,” whoa-hoa!, “It’s actually a love story…going soft in my old age…On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” blah, blah.

They really should have shown a 25-minute Inception product reel at Cannes. That would have sated the troops, and people like me wouldn’t be snorting and grumbling as we speak.

“Here’s our latest take on what [the story] could mean,” writes The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez. Oh, God…exactly what I’m talking about!

“Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) specializes in the secretive art of constructing and entering dreams in order to extract information. He is given an intriguing proposition: take a job where he won’t extract anything, but rather, insert an idea.

“Then things become complicated. DiCaprio’s character presents himself to Cillian Murphy‘s business magnate character as an expert in ‘subconscious security — the ultimate in corporate espionage'” In truth, Cobb has been hired by rival of Murphy’s character (Ken Watanabe) to insert an idea. That job also somehow offers DiCaprio’s dream thief character some kind of personal redemption connected to the fate of his wife (Marion Cotillard).

“And it’s pretty clear that while DiCaprio and Watanabe are allies at first, somewhere along the lines, they become foes.

“Another potential hint lies in Ellen Page‘s architecture character, and ‘assistant’ to Cobb, the aptly named Ariadne, who was you might remember from your school days, is the girl in Greek mythology who aids Theseus’ escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. We think her ‘assistant’ role will be more than she bargained for and more than what we have been led to believe thus far.” Wait…secretly in the employ of one of Cobb’s rivals or adversaries?

DiCaprio has the best line: “[The script] reminded me of Insomnia and Memento, but on steroids.”

Inception opens on July 16.

Posted on 6.3 and tagged as “Trailer #2,” this is the kind of teaser that you throw together before you start shooting, not after. The Expendables will be out nine weeks hence and they’re selling reputational pomp and circumstance?

Lionsgate’s advertising team (led by co-marketing chiefs Tim Palen and Sarah Greenberg) have gone with a Saul Bass-ian, Vertigo-like one-sheet for Rodrigo Cortes‘ Buried (9.24). Which everyone likes or admires or both. Me included. Any sort of Bass tribute gets my vote.

I reviewed Buried at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s a highly claustrophobic (to say the least) exercise about an American contractor in Iraq (Ryan Reynolds) who’s been kidnapped and buried alive in a wooden box. Cortes uses Hitchcock-like ingenuity in telling this story, but the bottom line is that Buried refuses to deliver the kind of ending that any popcorn-eating moviegoer would want to see.

“You may assume going in that Buried will be a harrowing mental ingenuity/physical feat/engineering movie about a guy managing to free himself from a large coffin-sized crate that’s been buried two or three feet underground,” I wrote. “But what it is, really, is a darkly humorous socio-cultural message flick about selfishness and distraction — i.e., how everyone is too caught up in their own agenda to give a shit about a person who really needs help.

Reynolds’ character “manages to speak to several people on a cell phone that he’s found inside the crate. The prolonged joke is that each and every person he turns to for help (with the exception of his wife) tells him that they first need him to address or answer their needs before they”ll give him any assistance.

“Boiled down, the movie is kind of a metaphor for dealing with tech support or any corporate or bureaucratic employee who specializes in driving complaining customers crazy. Everyone Reynolds speaks to patronizes him, tells him to calm down and speak slowly, asks stupid questions and in one way or another blows him off or fails to really engage and provide serious assistance.”

I’m getting sick of repeating this so this is the last time. Chubby or corpulent or run-of-the-mill fat is associated with “funny,” as The Wrap‘s Leah Rosen reiterated yesterday. But Jonah Hill‘s button-busting obesity in Get Him To The Greek pushes this equation to the breaking point, I feel. The fact that his performance is arguably his best yet — — he’s as funny as he was in Superbad but with more maturity and internal conflict — is a tribute to his talent, but he has to grapple with his girth at every turn.

Jonah Hill, Russell Brand in Get Him To The Greek

He’s so ballooned-up, in other words, that it’s almost an obstruction to the material. It doesn’t “stop” his hilarious performance as record-company flunkie Aaron Green, but it seems to mess with the vibe a bit. Hill is running down a Las Vegas hotel hallway with Russell Brand and it’s hard not to think “Jesus, he’s gonna need oxygen if he doesn’t slow down.” Hill is talking to g.f. Elizabeth Moss about possibly moving to Seattle and you’re thinking “I can’t buy this…he’s just too fat for her.”

Hill’s surplus tonnage is easily the most visually distinctive thing about him, and yet it’s never once commented upon in Greek, a no-holds-barred comedy in which everything and everyone is batted around for fun. Start to finish, nobody utters a single fat crack of any kind. There’s one visual gag about Hill’s exposed ass, okay, but it’s a mild gross-out. (Or it was in the screening I attended yesterday — some people went “eewww.”)

Hill is short, but he’s like a beach ball with legs and arms. As fat movie comedians go, the only ones I can think of who were more super-sized was Sam Kinison and Chris Farley at the end of their respective roads.

(l. to r.) Fatty Arbuckle, Oliver Hardy, Jack Black, Chris Farley.

Look at all the other funny fat guys of yore — Oliver Hardy of Laurel & Hardy, Lou Costello, Fatty Arbuckle, John Candy, Curly Howard of The Three Stooges — and they were all somewhere between big-chubby and run-of-the-mill fat. During their prime none could be called obese (although Hardy grew into this during Laurel and Hardy’s career decline in the mid to late ’40s).

I’m not saying all this to be cruel, but to simply point out that there are gradations and degrees of heavyness, and that there’s a point at which bulk starts to get in the way of humor.

Rosen doesn’t seem to get this. Her piece about Hill says he’s part of a “long line of chubby men who have reigned as box-office stars in comedies almost since movies began.” Calling Hill “chubby” is analogous to describing the current BP oil leak as “problematic” instead of “catastrophic.” (Is it problematic? Yeah, but is it the right proportional term to use? No.) She also calls him “rotund” and “pudgy” — terms that are more polite than descriptive. She also calls him a “double-wide guy” — that I’ll buy.

(l. to r.) Lou Costello, John Candy, Anthony Anderson, Sam Kinison.

I saw this yesterday afternoon in the meat-packing district. What sold me is that Alfred Hitchcock‘s sunglasses could almost be empty eye-socket holes. Reminding us, of course, of that slumped-over dead farmer discovered by Jessica Tandy in The Birds. What killed that Michael Bay-produced Birds remake that Naomi Watts was going to star in?

Last year someone finally YouTube-d John Magnuson’s Lenny Bruce performance film — a 45-minute capturing of one of Bruce’s final nightclub appearances, at San Francisco’s Basin Street West, sometime in late ’65. I chose this excerpt because the material between 3:15 and 9:00 is especially good.

I enjoy Bruce’s weary-bitter delivery in this thing. His energy is down — he’s half-performing and half-muttering to himself, depleted from his various court battles — but he’s still “Lenny Bruce.” Dustin Hoffman ‘s performance as Bruce in Bob Fosse‘s Lenny didn’t get that slightly irritated hipster vibe. DH smiled too much, for one thing. If Bruce smiled it was only for an instant, and always he half hid it when he did.

Who uses the word “schtark” these days? Who ever used it except Bruce?

There are probably some under-30s who haven’t heard that much about Bruce, so here’s a starter quote from music/cultural critic Ralph J. Gleason: “Lenny Bruce was really, along with Bob Dylan and Miles Davis and a handful of others (maybe Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and Allen Ginsberg in another way) the leader of the first wave of American social and cultural revolution which is gradually changing the structure of our society and may effectively revise it.”

Vanity Fair.com‘s Rebecca Keegan is reporting that two days ago in Washington, D.C., Avatar director James Cameron “convened a meeting of more than 20 scientists and engineers in Washington to brainstorm fixes for the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.”

“‘I know a lot of smart people who regularly work a whole lot deeper than that well,’ says Cameron, referring to BP’s 5,000-foot gusher. ‘I figured this group of top sub guys and deep-ocean scientists and engineers could maybe come up with something constructive.’

“The director did not, as many news outlets reported, respond to a call from the Environmental Protection Agency, but rather organized the meeting himself , and invited government bodies including the E.P.A., the Department of Energy, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coast Guard to participate.

“Cameron says he first contacted BP a month ago, but was told they had the crisis handled. ‘I didn’t want to be another well-meaning idiot with a bunch of suggestions,’ Cameron says. ‘But when the situation went on without a resolution, I figured the guys I knew had to be as smart as the engineers at BP, so it was time to sound the horn.;

“Tuesday’s 10-hour engineering brainstorming session included representatives from the federal agencies, as well as Anatoly Sagalevich, the Russian Mir sub pilot who first took Cameron to the Titanic; oceanic explorer Joe MacInnis, who participated in Cameron’s deep-sea documentary Aliens of the Deep; professors from the Universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara; Navy salvage contractors; and Cameron’s brother, Mike, an engineer with whom the director built a pair of mini remotely operated underwater vehicles (R.O.V.) that explored the Titanic wreck.

“The group made recommendations to various agencies, which will funnel them to BP. ‘It was fertile,’ Cameron says.”

How can Big Hollywood spin this and the Penn/Haiti story negatively? There must be some way. C’mon, Nolte — this is what you’re good at.