I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that Martin Scorsese‘s The King of Comedy came out 27 years ago. Robert De Niro‘s Rupert Pupkin represented, of course, a burgeoning mob obsession with celebrity that’s probably ten times more malignant today. The problem is that viewers have to spend 109 minutes with him — perhaps the most clueless and pathetic worm in cinematic history, and definitely with one of the worst haircut-and-moustache combos in any realm.

And yet this scene between De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott and the servants has never left my head. It’s agonizing, excruciating and sadly truthful all at once, and there’s no comfort to be had from any aspect of it. You just want the fucking scene to end, and yet it’s spellbinding.

I also love that scene when a fan begs Lewis to sign an autograph for a relative and he politely refuses, and she says “You should get cancer…I hope you get cancer!”

De Niro is a moron whom you can’t stand, but we’re all stuck with him. Lewis’s Jerry Langford, an old-school talk-show host by way of Johnny Carson, is stuck with Pupkin also and wants nothing more than to be rid of him, but you can sense that Langford isn’t very good company himself — he seems morose, resigned and more than a little contemptuous of his fans. (Perhaps, one suspects, like Lewis himself.) And forget Sandra Bernhard‘s Masha — a braying egoistic psycho.

And yet distasteful and unappealing as these characters are, they’ve somehow “grown” The King of Comedy into something more than what it was. The film has endured the test of of time because of people’s willingness to be tortured by it, year in and year out. It’s not just an uncomfortable film to sit through, but perhaps one of the most deeply uncomfortable viewing experiences with movie stars ever put before the public. I too am spelled by this quality, the way it makes me clear my throat and grind my teeth and feel faintly nauseous.

I’ve either trained myself to think this way or have been trained by the FSLC dweebs: The King of Comedy is a great film! Are the people who swear absolutely by each and every frame of Barry Lyndon (i.e., the ones who don’t share my “dead zone” issue) also King of Comedy devotees? Something tells me they are.

Has there ever been another lead character as chalk-on-the-blackboard detestable as Rupert Pupkin?

I’m sitting in a little joint on Second Avenue near 11th Street, trying to do a little work and savor the warm mid-afternoon air. But I can’t. I have to pack up and leave. A group of hysterical shriekers sat down about ten or twelve minutes ago — okay, a shrieking man and a cackling woman accompanied by two hee-hee-ers — and all I want to do is see one of them choke to death on a piece of ham. Or…you know, be garroted by one of the waiters.

It has to be said again because this trend isn’t ebbing — it’s getting worse. There’s nothing quite as awful to me (and others, I presume) as people who laugh like drunken coyotes or wild orgasm dogs in restaurants. The key component in any display of obnoxious public behavior is being utterly oblivious to the possibility that you might be offending others. Clearly such a thought hasn’t occured to the gang sitting next to me now. It’s almost as if they’re getting off in some Marquis de Sade-ish way by bludgeoning people with their hideous gaiety.

I for one have never made other people miserable by laughing loudly — not once. I have never howled or shrieked or thrown my head back and made the paint chip and flake off the wall from my ecstatic gales. And if I’m with a large group that is starting to get louder and louder so as to cause discomfort in others, I’ll politely excuse myself.

My dream job if I wasn’t writing this column would be to join a secret government group modelled on the East German Stasi. Our whole thing would be to go from restaurant to restaurant and surreptitiously video-record offensive shriekers, and then get their info and get into their lives and their tax records and proceed to make them so miserable that they’d be willing to fink on others. And that’s when the fun would start.

Here’s a satisfying video-screen explanation of that overhead soccer-game shot that went right down into the crowd in The Secrets In Their Eyes. Satisfying but not mind-blowing because some of us, frankly, are starting to take this stuff for granted with all the expert blending of CG and live footage these days.

Harry Brown is “a movie about the one guy who did something,” Michael Caine recently said to Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale. “The idea [in making it] was, If you don’t do something, then this is what innocent people will do.’

“A reporter said to me yesterday, ‘Have you ever seen this with a proper audience?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘When you kill those people, they all cheered.’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s how far it’s gone.’ You’ve got to do something, because people are cheering the killing.”

Well…c’mon. People have been cheering the right killings for decades. If the bad guy is getting his, and if it feels just and righteous and satisfying, Average Joes are going to go “yeah!” and “woo-hoo!” People cheered the Death Wish killings back in ’73. People cheered when Dustin Hoffman started killing the home invaders in Straw Dogs. Audiences watching Day of the Dolphin cheered and laughed, even, when a crew of bad guys were blown up by a mine placed on the hull of their yacht by a dolphin. I’ve read somewhere that audiences howled their asses off when Grace Kelly shot Robert Wilke in the back in High Noon.

My initial reaction to Harry Brown, boiled down, was this: “Caine, an East End roughneck in his youth, knows how to eyeball the bad guys and give them all sorts of pain with magnificent conviction and style. The film satisfies as nicely in this regard as the confrontation scenes in Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino, if not more so.”

I just sent an important message to a friend who’s going to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, and I thought I’d share it with anyone else who’s also going but has never been: If you don’t bring an electrical adapter (i.e., adapteur) that looks almost precisely like the one shown in these photos, then you are dead in Cannes.

I’m not talking about a power converter, but an adapter. And it has to be the exact same shape because all the French power receptacles in walls and electric multi-plug strips are recessed, so it’s not good enough to just have a converter with those two rounded metal plugs — you need the kind I’ve got here because the rounded white plastic base from which the metal plugs extend fits into the recessed area.

American travel stores will sell you French power converters with the metal plugs sticking out but they’re worthless because they’re flat — lacking a small protruding base as shown here — which prevents the plugs from fitting into the recessed area.

If you can’t score one of these wherever you live in the US you’ll need to go to buy one at FNAC, a big electrical department store on rue d’Antibes, which is more or less parallel to the Croisette. They sell these adapters there. There’s another similar store near FNAC that sells them also.

But buy them early. What happens is that people swarm into Cannes on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then quickly realize they don’t have the right adapter because their power converters won’t fit into the recessed power outlets, and they freak out and run over to FNAC and buy up all the adapters. Yes, all of them.

I’ve never known the Cannes FNAC guys to stock up on extra adapters to meet the increased festival demand — a day or two into the festival and they’ve always run out. Every damn year.

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn agrees with my view that the highlight of the Tribeca Film Festival “was Eliot Spitzer — or, rather, Alex Gibney‘s wry, even-handed account of the disgraced former New York governor’s rise and fall, which may or may not be called Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.” Kohn lists some of the attributes, which I’ve abridged:

(a) The Credibility Factor: “It’s an honest, believable portrait. Despite the many strange ingredients of Spitzer’s final undoing — including the multiple enemies on Wall Street and particularly the head honchos at AIG, whose cheeriness at his public embarrassment seemed almost slimier than his own seedy deeds — Gibney avoids the conspiratorial route and sticks to the facts. The man willfully put himself in the line of fire long before anyone knew about his trysts with the gals at New York Confidential. Spitzer was a tough-as-nails New York Attorney General prone to behind-the-scenes outbursts, which he jokingly blamed on his non-existent evil twin ‘Irwin.’

(b) Comedy/Tragedy: “The movie is hilarious, and not just because of ditzy New York Confidential head Cecil Suwal. Gibney stages the events of the past decade as an extended farce that culminated with Spitzer’s prostitution scandal but got pretty weird long before then. Joe Bruno, a current convicted felon and Spitzer’s obnoxious Lieutenant Governor, becomes a bizarrely funny internal foil to the leading man’s Wall Street clean-up act. As Gibney puts it in a voiceover, Bruno was “the turd in Elliot’s punch bowl.” Roger J. Stone, meanwhile, serves as the movie’s shameful goon-for-hire and self-made political cartoon — a man so intent on enforcing conservative ideals that he has a Richard Nixon tattoo on his back. “I believe in a gonzo brand of politics,” he says, while basically confessing to having left a threatening voicemail for Spitzer’s father. His enabler, the cantankerous investment banker Ken Langone, acts like he lives 24/7 showdown with Spitzer as if they stumbled into a Western-style duel. Despite all this, the story retains a dramatic edge. Spitzer restrains himself and places the blame for his downfall squarely in his own lap. ‘My view,’ he says, ‘is that I brought myself down.’

(c) It’s a Movie!: “Unlike Gibney’s Jack Abramoff profile Casino Jack and the United States of Money, his latest feature has more going on than a basic arrangement of talking heads and a few snappy graphics. Gibney injects the story with an appreciable amount of energy, thanks to a series cinematic tricks. He hires an actress to read the lines from an interview with ‘Angelina,’ the prostitute Spitzer visited most often, since she refused to appear on camera. He cycles through various media images at a rapid pace, uses ironic music cues, and applies a great soundtrack that includes Cat Power’s Sea of Love set to a montage of other politicians whose careers got jumbled up in sex scandals. (The tune works a lot more effectively than it did in Juno.) Oh, and spoiler alert! The last shot of Client 9 shows Spitzer wandering the streets of New York alone, blending with the crowd as Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind ends the story on an optimistic note. Even news junkies readily familiar with much of the movie’s narrative have likely never contemplated its subject like this.”

This is probably the classiest and most generally appealing one-sheet of the year so far, and it had better be that, given what it’s selling. Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone, which I caught at Sundance 2010, is a straight, earnest and well-honed backwoods tale…but occuring within a grim and scuzzy atmosphere. Joe Popcorn is going to take one look and say, “I work hard all week for insufficient pay at a place I don’t like, and then I’m supposed to watch this when I want to be entertained?”

Aside from Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a steel-backboned 17 year-old trying to fend for her family as he tries to locate her errant father, every setting and character in Winter’s Bone has that weathered, dog-eared Ozarkian quality. Everyone has bad teeth or grayish skin or ugly half-gray beards, and they’re all sucking on cigarettes and wearing grimy clothing. I sat there imagining what torture it would be to live my entire life with these toothless hee-haws, and how heroin addiction might seem like a pleasant thing under such circumstances. It’s a decently made film but not as compelling as Granik’s Down To The Bone. I knew I was watching a sturdy honest effort with good dialogue and always-believable performances, but it was all I could do to get through it.

Two days ago I wrote that Gregg Kinnear‘s decision to play President John F. Kennedy in an allegedly right-wing-friendly History Channel miniseries called The Kennedys “means [he] isn’t all that worried about liberal Hollywood establishment types frowning at this decision, and is willing to risk offending those (like documentarian Robert Greenwald and former Kennedy confidante Theodore Sorenson) who’ve sounded alarms about the tone and political leanings of the forthcoming epic.”

Sure enough, Greenwald went public yesterday with a challenge to Kinnear and Katie Holmes (who’s signed to play Jackie Kennedy) to “insist on a historically accurate and politically unbiased script.” Translation: “You’re already being looked at askance, Kinnear and Holmes, for agreeing to star in a piece of right-wing revisionism about a beloved liberal president, but your reputation with the Hollywood community might be salvaged if you can bring pressure upon those fucks you’re working for to eliminate the wildly fictional and salacious aspects that we read in an early draft of the screenplay.”

Greenwald began squawking about The Kennedys last February, claiming that it does “everything in its power to demean and make them quite disgusting figures.”

The forthcoming eight-hour miniseries is being produced by 24 producer and avid conservative Joel Surnow, and it’s Greenwald’s belief that Surnow intends to paint Jack Kennedy with a morally conservative brush by depicting him as a womanizing sleazeball, and by portraying him as more of a conservative-minded type than his mostly liberal reputation has indicated thus far.

But within the realm and reality of the early ’60s, Kennedy was a centrist and at times center-right. He was pro-free market (although he once got into an angry fight with U.S. Steel over the hiking of steel prices), and was committed to a strong defense, and was fiercely anti-Communist, of course. I doubt if he’d been born in the late 1940s or early 50s and been elected to the Senate or to the White House that he’d be much different than Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton philosophically, but he was hardly a flaming lefty by the standards of his time.

And his womanizing was, of course, legendary…c’mon. He was arguably the randiest U.S. President of the 20th Century. Greenwald is reportedly pissed about a scene in The Kennedys in which JFK asks his brother Robert, “What do you do when you’re horny?” and tells him that if he doesn’t have sex with unfamiliar women “every couple of days I get migraines.” Well, no offense but that sounds an awful lot like the Jack Kennedy I’ve been reading about for years. I can’t remember the source, but I remember an account claiming that Kennedy once remarked to a friend that he didn’t feel he’d really had a woman unless he’d had her all three ways. Hah!

I wonder what persuaded CAA, River Road Entertainment, Participant Media and Imagenation Abu Dhabi to cut a deal for Summit Entertainment to distribute Doug Liman‘s Fair Game? Favorable financial terms, I’m sure, as well as a strong p & a commitment and a promise of marketing vigor when it opens. I for one would have had second thoughts in view of Summit’s half-hearted track record with The Hurt Locker, and to a lesser extent The Ghost Writer.

The bottom-line impression (as opposed to whatever the reality may be) is that while Summit is proficient with Oscar campaigns, they haven’t been that tenacious with their theatrical releases. They seemed awfully hesitant when it came to the distributing of The Hurt Locker, taking forever to commit to a release date after picking it up at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, and then distributing it half-heartedly when it opened in June 2009, barely acquainting moviegoers with the name and the subject before turning tail and running for cover when the initial theatrical revenues proved disappointing. I recognize that The Ghost Writer was never going to do huge business due to its lack of Eloi selling points, but I don’t remember Summit doing all that much to remind Average Joes in print and online ads that it was unmistakably the first high-quality film of 2010. Okay, they may have “said” this in ads, but not in a way that made much of an impression on me.

Recently discharged Variety senior critic Todd McCarthy has announced he’ll be authoring a new online column — Deep Focus — at Indiewire starting on May 12th, or the first day of the Cannes Film Festival. He was probably coaxed into this deal by Indiewire columnist and old pally Anne Thompson, and the benefits are clearly mutual — Indiewire lands a a major brand-name critic and McCarthy gets to play it a bit differently as a pick-and-choose sharpshooter (instead of leading and coordinating a team of Variety critics) while adopting a new bloggy-blog fluidity in his prose.

“With this new site, I will continue writing formal reviews of important new pictures,” he explained on Thursday night, “but the blog aspect will permit me to write about so many other things, from Hollywood personalities I encounter as a matter of course to observations about my son’s progress as a blossoming film buff. In this welcoming column alone, I’m able to write in the first person as I rarely could at Variety, and the possibility to expand the way I write about films and the film world is enormously energizing.”

Aahh, but will McCarthy truly break out into a new personalized mode and — this is one way of putting it — follow in the footsteps of Hollywood Elsewhere, passing along true-life tales and observations with his own versions of encounters with emotionally vivid cowboy hats and Hispanic party elephants? Will he delve into the world of personality itself, into curious admirations and fickle annoyances? Will he not only tell stories about his inner world but pass along opinions about morals and culture and mothers who bring their two-year-old daughters to showings of Hostel II? Or politics, for that matter? Or will he just stick to movies while maintaining that famously disciplined posture that has spelled “Todd McCarthy” all these years, offering that patented blend of shrewd perception and wit and historical insight?

I’m obviously half-kidding, but it’ll be interesting to see where McCarthy decides to take this.

Old news, happened a week ago, but haven’t paid attention to 3D YouTube until today.

Three days ago ScriptShadow’s Carson Reeves posted a review of an “early draft” of Jez and John Butterworth‘s screenplay for Doug Liman‘s Fair Game, which will be playing in Cannes quite soon. Reeves says that the script doesn’t quite do one thing or the other, which I find intriguing. This sentence caught me especially: “It reminded me, in many ways, of Michael Mann‘s The Insider, which is another film that demands a lot from you.”

Here are the final three graphs:

“Whereas [the first] 60-70 pages [are] about the plot which led to the invasion of Iraq, the script [then] becomes this personal journey about how a CIA operative (Naomi Watts‘ Valerie Plame) lives with being outed. She has to go to all her friends and apologize for lying to them for 20 years. She has to explain to her kids why she’s being publicly shunned. Things like that. I suppose this won’t matter as much if the marketing for the film educates the public on Plame’s story, so that they anticipate this turn of events, but for me, someone who didn’t know anything about her, I was stuck going, ‘What kind of movie is this supposed to be?’

“Because if you think about it, this easily could’ve been four different movies. We start out with Valerie being a James Bond/Jason Bourne like super-agent, traveling the world and gaining access to top foreign leaders. Then the story shifts into this extensive procedural about the minutiae of how we gather information and the specifics that led up to the invasion of Iraq. Then the script shifts to the fallout of said invasion. And finally, it shifts to Valerie’s life after she was outed. Each one of those could’ve been explored as a full film. So having them all in the same film was a bit jarring for me.

“But those of you entrenched in the WMD scandal and in Plame’s story in particular to eat this up. It reminded me, in many ways, of Michael Mann’s The Insider, which is another film that demands a lot from you. So, if you enjoyed Russell Crowe‘s turn in that movie, you’ll want to check this out for sure. Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention the great reveal/payoff at the end of the script. It’s truly terrifying, and will definitely make you think twice about what’s going on inside our government’s walls.

“If only this story would’ve been a little more straightforward, I may have enjoyed it. But my simple brain can’t handle all this zigging and zagging. Just wasn’t my thing.”