Los Angelenos with an academic interest in Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence will be able to catch a pair of live q & a’s she’ll be doing this weekend. The first will be on Friday, 6.25, at the Landmark 12 following a 7:30 pm screening, and the second at Hollywood’s Arclight on Saturday, 6.26, after the 7:40 pm show.

Calls about who gets to see which early-peek screening of a major film have always led to grumbling. It was revealed today, for instance, that Warner Bros. flacks have already shown Inception to Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, and I know that another major critic was given a recent looksee in Los Angeles. I don’t know about any further screenings this week or next, but I know there’s one in Manhattan the following week for a relatively select group.

Hollywood Elsewhere will be catching an all-media showing on Tuesday, 7.13 — three days before the big nationwide opening. In a big Manhattan theatre although not, I’m told, in IMAX, which sounds to me like the only way to see this thing. I guess that means I’ll be seeing it in IMAX on opening day. I’ll need to see it twice anyway, given what Travers is saying about it being “too smart” for the schmoes and “turning your head six ways from Sunday.”

We all know, of course, that with all the buzz chasing Inception that those seeing it the week after next will be blogging and Twittering about it almost immediately, no matter what terms may be requested or demanded, and that the trades (along with Indiewire‘s Todd McCarthy) will definitely post reviews on the weekend before the big opening on Friday, 7.16. We know they’ll do this.

In short, those catching the 7.13 screening won’t be among the first wave of commenters. They’ll be part of the second wave. Not that big a deal, right? I guess not. But the yen to see the Next Hot Movie sooner rather than later can be intense.

Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers has seen Chris Nolan‘s Inception (Warner Bros., 7.16) and handed out a 3 and 1/2 star review, according to N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick. Wait…why 3 and 1/2? Why not four stars? What’s the issue or aspect that Travers — not exactly regarded as the world’s most blistering critic — isn’t fully delighted with?

“[Travers’] review isn’t on the magazine’s website yet,” Lumenick writes, “so I’m going to quote his first lengthy paragraph:

“The mind-blowing movie event of the summer arrives just in time to hold back the flow of Hollywood sputum that’s been sliming the multiplex,” Travers begins. “Inception…will be called many things, starting with James Bond Meets The Matrix. You can feel the vibe of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner in it, and Nolan’s own Memento and The Dark Knight. But Inception glows with a blue-flame intensity all its own.

“Nolan creates a dream world that he wants us to fill with our own secrets . I can’t think of a better goal for any filmmaker. Of course, trusting the intelligence of the audience can cost Nolan at the box office. We’re so used to being treated like idiots. How to cope with a grand-scale epic, shot in six countries at a reported cost of $160 million, that turns your head around six ways from Sunday? Dive in and drive yourself crazy, that’s how.”

In other words, some of us (i.e., the ones who used to get Bs and Cs in pop quizzes in high school, like myself) may have to see Inception twice — once to get the basics down, and a second time to fully figure it out.

Travers’ review seems to be “predicting this expensive movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon Levitt may play be too smart to rack up numbers anything like The Dark Knight ,” Lumenick writes. “But he sure makes it sound intriguing.”

Everybody’s got it wrong on the moving-up-the-Oscar-telecast story, I’ve just been told. The confusion stems from Nikki Finke‘s just-posted story (i.e., last night) about the proposed idea of moving the Oscar telecast back to January. But the proposal — hello? — applies to the 84th Oscar Awards , which will air in early 2012. The locked-in date for the 2010 Oscar telecast (i.e., the 83rd award ceremony) is 2.27.11 — period. Announced, consecrated, set in stone.

I was persuaded that Finke’s story is wrong — i.e., was wrongly interpreted — by L.A. Times columnist Pete Hammond, who just called me ten minutes ago. Backdating the telecast to late January 2011, he says, “would throw an already established and announced schedule — including foreign-language eligibility and everything else — would throw everything into utter chaos. The house of cards would totally crumble. If this was real it would look like the Academy has lost their minds. The Academy is too conservative to do things on a whim like this, especially with ABC television tied in to this. This change, if adopted, has to apply to 2012, not 2011.”

Between playing nutbag studio boss Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, a looney rogue agent in Knight and Day and now Les Grossman again in a forthcoming Ben Stiller film, Tom Cruise seems to have accepted his forceful-guy-with-a-bent-personality persona. Meaning that the public will probably never again accept him as a struggling everyman a la Jerry Maguire. In effect Cruise has become the new William Shatner, albeit in a higher pay bracket. I think this is okay for the most part. I think it works for him.

You should hear the MSNBC commentators and Capitol Hill legislators falling all over themselves in lockstep praise of President Obama‘s whacking of Gen. Stanley McCrystal and tapping General David Petraeus to take his place. One guy actually said that Petraeus “can do the job” and “turn it around.” What? Afghanistan is a swamp, a quagmire, the wrong wicket. Eight years there and we haven’t a prayer of suppressing the Taliban or achieving anything else for that matter. All Petraeus can do is manage an exit — Napoleon retreating from Russia.

Dennis Dugan‘s Grown Ups (Columbia, 6,25) “is like Jason Miller‘s That Championship Season, except with douchebags who think they’re funny,” writes Marshall Fine. “Rather than offer actual punchlines, the film seems to consist of ad-lib wisecracks and insults to which Dugan and the cast repeatedly said, ‘That’s good enough.’ Not by half.

“The story, such as it is, focuses on five friends, one-time teammates on a championship middle-school basketball squad, who went their separate ways. But they reunite for the funeral of the coach who guided them to that championship when they were adolescents, gathering at a church in ‘New England.’

“Yes, that’s what it says on the screen: ‘New England.’ In other words, this is a movie so lazy that the title card can’t even be bothered to specify a single state for its location, let alone a city. Why say ‘New England’? Why not ‘The Northeast’? Or perhaps: ‘The East Coast’? You don’t want to have to think too much, right?

What’s alarming is that there is an entire generation that considers these guys — Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, David Spade — the comedy touchstones of their era. This is why Generation X is doomed.

“Grown Ups is a scam on the audience — a paid vacation for its stars masquerading as a movie that people will actually pay to watch. There are more laughs in any ten minutes of Toy Story 3 than in this entire flimsy piece of garbage.”

For me, the problem with Knight and Day (20th Century Fox, opening today) isn’t that it’s absurd, excessive, preposterous — a largely incoherent, romper room Coyote-vs.-Roadrunner travelogue cartoon. The problem is that it doesn’t go far enough in this regard.

Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz in James Mangold’s Knight and Day

The Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz film adheres to what has become a standard summer-movie formula — the anarchic, exotic-location bullshit action comedy with a soupcon of romance. The difference here is that director James Mangold and screenwriter Patrick O’Neill have (a) cranked up the craziness to a bolder, loonier level than anything seen before, and (b) thrown out most of the connective plot-and-plausibility tissue that other films in this realm make…well, at least some use of.

The problem is that Mangold and O’Neill have inserted strands of reality here and there — little touch-and-go acknowledgments that aspects of the actual world are part of the story. What they should have done, I feel, was throw the book out and jump off the proverbial cliff and really cut loose. You know, turn it into some kind of fuck-all action fantasia.

I’m just thinking out loud, but I’m imagining Cruise and Diaz and the various costars (including Dale Dye!) embracing the fanciful mindsets of escaped mental patients running nude down an English country road. A movie that pops the cork, gulps down the champagne and goes sailing over the waterfalls saying “nothing matters any more….we don’t care and neither should you!…we’re free, you’re free! We can turn into animals! We can spend the whole film driving souped-up stock cars in Utah! We can take over the White House. We can get jobs as bartenders in Cancun!”

And at the same time (illogical as this sounds) have it be, you know, about something. Like Theodore Flicker‘s The President’s Analyst. That 1967 James Coburn film was a silly, slip-shod satire in some respects, but it had a giddy, curiously liberating tone that ended with a shoot-out between the good guys and the phone company. It started out as a vaguely spooky comedy about a shrink having sessions with President Johnson, and ended up as an invasion-of-privacy thing — a Paul Revere rallying cry about the need for free men and women to fight the corporate goons trying to invade our lives.

But of course, Mangold and O’Neill and their bosses at 20th Century Fox didn’t have the balls to venture into the wild blue. They felt obliged to protect the interests of Newscorp stockholders by keeping at least one foot on the ground, or one foot, rather, tromping down on an accelerator as Cruise roars down a freeway with five or six guys shooting at him with automatic weapons.

It’s all crap, really. The movie realm of 2010, I mean, in the sense that now more than ever, Big Budgets mean Iron-Clad Conventionality. The corporate rule book is always followed, always looming. Pinkberry: The Movie isn’t all that funny because it’s a fairly accurate reflection of what’s going on today.

Knight and Day kicks out every so often. I’ll give it that. It’s not hamburger but expensive, well-prepared marbled steak. It looks great most of the time. Every so often Cruise and Diaz have these little mood moments that kind of click into place. But it mostly feels like time — an eternity, in a sense — spent in the recreation yard of a large and lavishly outfitted minimum security penitentiary.

I love the closing line in A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review. In an early scene Cruise says to Diaz, “Sometimes things happen for a reason.” Scott calls this “a statement — perhaps generally true — that applies to absolutely nothing about Knight and Day, including the making of the movie itself.”

General Stanley McChrystal has to be canned or President Obama will look like an even bigger wuss. Those are terms — he must to do an Abraham Lincoln upon his own General George McClellan (who was disrespectful to his commander-in-chef). Because McChrystal “and his hard-bitten, smart-aleck aides nuked the president, vice president and other top advisers as wimps, losers and clowns in a Rolling Stone profile meant to polish the general’s image,” as Maureen Dowd puts it in her current column. No third chances, no slaps on the wrist…fire his ass.

As I wrote on May 2nd, Amir Bar Lev‘s The Tillman Story is “far and away one of the finest films I’ve seen this year, and a likely contender for the 2010 Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It has the stuff that engages and holds and sinks in deep.” Which means, as Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale predicted earlier today, that the fiends at Big Hollywood will probably try and trash it in some way.

Sure enough, BH’s John Nolte responded as follows: “Big Hollywood hasn’t seen The Tillman Story. It wasn’t even high on our radar. But when two of Tinseltown’s top leftist water-carriers” — the L.A. Times‘ Stephen Zeitchik also wrote about it on 6.20 — “carry this much water to assure us there’s nothing political to see here and then assume the highly defensive crouch of challenging us to ‘smear’ it…well, something’s up. And we very much appreciate them letting us know.”

Returning to my 5.2 review: “I felt just as stirred up last night — seething, close to tearful — as I was after my initial Sundance viewing three months ago. Because this is not a film about the Middle East conflict but about a stand-up American family and how they responded (and continue to respond) to an orchestrated governmental obscenity that tried to diminish the memory of a fallen son.

“I’m speaking, of course, of former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, and particularly his April 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan — a result of his being shot three times in the head by a fellow U.S. soldier. It happened because of the usual idiotic confusion, and some young intemperate guys who wanted to be in a fire fight and acted foolishly in the heat of the moment. Tillman was enraged that his own fellows were shooting at him, of course, and his last words were an attempt to get them to wake up — ‘I’m Pat fucking Tillman!’

“The obscenity was the attempt in ’04 by the U.S. military and Bush administration to make political hay out of Tillman’s death by manufacturing a bullshit scenario that claimed he was killed by Taliban troops and that he died in an effort save his fellow troops.

“Of course, 97% of American moviegoers are going to ignore The Tillman Story when it opens because (a) they’re resolutely opposed to seeing any film that has anything to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan and (b) they don’t much like documentaries anyway, and (c) they just want to chill out and be entertained. The fact that The Tillman Story leaves you feeling angry and alive and engaged with the actual world will most likely have no effect on this determination.”

A Reuters story broke today about Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan) being on-board as the new director of the troubled Paramount remake of Footloose. Wait…what? That clattering sound you just heard is 10,000 fans of Hustle & Flow falling out of their chairs.

A paycheck job, obviously. Brewer needs the scratch. He’ll do the work as best he can, and then he’ll presumably make the next “real” Craig Brewer movie.

In a prepared statement Brewer said “he’s been a fan of the original 1984 Footloose, which features hit songs ‘Let’s Hear It For the Boy’ and ‘Holding Out for a Hero’, since he was 13 years old,” the Reuters story says.

“I can promise Footloose fans that I will be true to the spirit of the original film,” Brewer is quoted as saying. “But I still gotta put my own Southern grit into it and kick it into 2011.”

25 year-old Kenny Wormald, a veteran of the MTV series Dancelife, will play the Kevin Bacon role of a rebellious teen who shakes up a small town. Dennis Quaid will play the John Lithgow role — i.e., stern-faced, butt-plugged Reverend Moore. Dancing With the Stars champion and country singer Julianne Hough will play the Lori Singer role, i.e., the minister’s virginal daughter.

The Paramount release will open on 4.1.11.

“The remake has also lost two directors — Hairspraydirector Adam Shankman and High School Musical helmer Kenny Ortega — over the past two years,” the Reuters story says.

Two or three days ago Ken Russell‘s controversial, long-submerged, curiously-delayed The Devils (1971) turned up on iTunes for sale or rental. This got a little attention in the online press, and then last night….phffft! Yanked, one assumes, by some bigwig at Warner Home Video who hadn’t realized that the digital distribution guys had made it available, or something like that.

Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave in dream sequence from Ken Russell’s The Devils.

This morning I asked a WHV spokesperson to explain this strange turnaround.

“Please help me regarding the issue of The Devils being put on iTunes for a day or two or three and then hastily withdrawn,” I wrote. “This is the second time that The Devils has been put before the public and then withdrawn — the first time in early ’08 when a Devils DVD release was announced and then un-announced, and now with the movie having been recently made available for download and then suddenly withdrawn.

“What in the name of Christ is going on with Warner Bros. and this title?

“I can guess but with this second incident I really do think Warner Bros. owes the intelligent viewing public a frank explanation. This is a highly respected film and arguably Ken Russell‘s greatest, and after going to the trouble of digitally remastering it for distribution (it looked beautiful on my iPhone when I watched it the night before last) Warner Home Video is once again treating it like some kind of ugly hot potato.

“And it’s not right. You know it isn’t. It’s disrespectful and, forgive me, cowardly if, as some suspect, WB is in convulsions about the film because it has the potential to offend the religious right. I have to report about this now because it just happened, but it really is time to explain what is behind all this Warner Bros. weirdness about The Devils.

Do a search for Devils on iTunes movies and this is what comes up. A day or two ago Ken Russell’s The Devils was one of the offerings. I made the mistake of renting it instead of buying. Now I’m out of luck.

“I’ve been told that certain studio guidelines have to be observed, etc. And that’s fine, but what about the studio guideline that says when you issue a press release saying a DVD is coming out, you issue the DVD commercially — no ifs, ands or buts. Or the studio guideline that says when you make a Warner Bros. film available for purchase or rental on iTunes, you make it available for a year or three years or indefinitely but you sure as hell don’t remove it from iTunes after three days?”

Here’s a 3.29.10 article I wrote about the 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.