Last night I finally saw Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me. It’s not a “bad” film, but the savage beatings of Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are certainly sickening and easy to loathe. Most of the audience was in a lousy mood to begin with because the stars arrived so late and spent so much time on the red carpet that the film started 45 minutes late, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch to tip over into animosity.

On top of which I was strongly rooting for Casey Affleck‘s chilly-eyed psychopathic lawman to get caught, especially with his mumbled Texas accent making at least half of what he said indecipherable, which goaded me into wishing it would all end sooner rather than later.

I know the game that this movie is playing. It’s saying “are you going to be a moral milquetoast and take offense at some deeply offensive depictions of violence, or are you going to be cool and get beyond that?” To hell with that game. I am not and never will be cool when it comes to films of this sort, and I’m rather proud of that fact. And I don’t care how milquetoasty that makes me sound.

This isn’t some icky piece of exploitation or some Eli Roth butcher movie. Winterbottom has gone down the wrong path here, but he’s an accomplished director who deserves basic respect. The problem is that The Killer Inside Me is fairly flat and mundane except for the beating scenes and, okay, maybe one or two of the sex scenes. It isn’t especially scary or humorous or suspenseful or thrilling — I know that much. All it allows you to do, really, is wallow in repulsion. Okay, repulsion mixed with amazement.

Just because Winterbottom and co-screenwriter John Curran have closely adhered to the original Jim Thompson novel doesn’t mean it has some special integrity badge. All this means is that they’ve closely adhered to the original Jim Thompson novel, and so what? Thompson is renowned as a great pulp-noir writer, yes, and this movie will make whatever sense of decency you carry around in your heart melt into stomach bile and leak out your anus and dribble down your leg.

All any of this means is that various producers managed to raise the cash on the names of the three stars, and IFC decided to distribute and here we all are with Jessica Alba’s pus and mucus and blood splattered all over our laps….what did we do to deserve this?

I’m amazed, really amazed, that the producers of this thing — Chris Hanley, Andrew Eaton and Bradford L. Schlei along with exec producers Lilly Bright, Chad Burris, Randolf S. Mendelsohn, Jordan Gertner and Fernando Sulichin, co-executive producer Tricia Vam Klaveren and co-producer Susan Kirr — thought it might actually generate interest or sell tickets. Well, it did generate interest on the part of the super-ballsy IFC Films, and it’ll probably sell tickets to the nocturnal Quasimodo types.

Anyone who sees The Killer Inside Me and says to a friend or a girlfriend, “Hey, I want to take you to this cool new noir about this mumbly Texas cop who shuffles around and beats his mistress and his wife to death when things boil to a head”…the person who wants this film to be seen by others is extremely hip and fundamentally diseased. They are a carrier of some kind of spiritual plague with really, really sophisticated taste buds….ooh, yeah.

I suppose that’s a kind of selling point if you want to be perverse about it. I don’t know if it’s an Antichrist-type thing, but maybe it is. The problem is that it’s not sick-funny — no talking fox, no afterbirth. Maybe IFC could go with a slogan that says “are you fucked up enough to want to see The Killer Inside Me?” Hey, I know — maybe the Criterion Collection could release a Killer DVD sometime next fall? Get some high-falutin’ Lincoln Center-affiliated film snob to write the liner notes. The Criterion guys, trust me, are perverse enough. Because you really do need to be a terminal film dweeb and suffering from lupus of the soul to “enjoy” a film like this.

It was clear during the Glenn Kenny-moderated q & a that the audience was doing everything it could do to suppress its dislike of the film for the sake of politeness. I wasn’t convulsing with hatred for this thing, although I was certainly sickened. Here’s the irony: I had heard and read so many ugly warnings that Killer failed to live up to expectations. I was saying to myself, “Gee, this isn’t that disgusting. Well, it is but I’m able to watch it with a certain dispassion. I thought I was going to be retching in the aisles.”

Screen International‘s David D’Arcy wrote last January that Winterbottom’s “staggeringly violent” adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel “reaches a new extreme in the cinematic depiction of a psychopathic murderer. It is hard to watch — and for some will be impossible — regardless of any psychological logic behind its many killings. Audiences up to their ears in serial killers may enter this film thinking they already know them all. Winterbottom will prove them wrong.”

The video below the first paragraph is actually part 2 but I ran it first because it leads off with Affleck talking about why he wanted to do the film. He basically said that he was impressed by the fact that both the Thompson novel and the screen adaptation offered a psychological explanation for his character’s murderous acts. Hudson decided to do the film, apparently, because she hasn’t made a quality film along the lines of Almost Famous in ten years and her name is synonymous with “empty formulaic chick flick” so she figured what the hell, do an artistically downbeat film for a change. I don’t know why Alba agreed to do this, but I’ll bet she regrets it on some level.

This is four days late, but here are four sequential videos I shot of Alex Gibney‘s q & a following last Saturday’s screening of his Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film. Here are part 2, part 3 and part 4. A fascinating discussion. And here’s my 4.24 review again. (Tribeca Film Festival honcho Geoff Gilmore is the one standing next to Gibney.)

This would obviously be more amusing if the Werner Herzog imitator was more Herzogian, which is to say less British-sounding. And yet the narration is just right.

Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale ran into Fair Game‘s Doug Liman last night (i.e., at an event I missed due to seeing Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me) and of course spoke to him about the film, which will show at next month’s Cannes Film Festival:

STV: “It’s kind of a weird climate for this film. There was Nothing But the Truth, which was kind of mishandled. Then there was Green Zone , which audiences were very cool toward. Where will Fair Game fall in this political intrigue/spy thriller spectrum?”

Liman: “I think it’s in the spectrum of ‘it’s a really great movie.’ And a lot of other movies that have been about the war or dealt with the war have not been great movies. In fact, they’ve been motivated more by politics than by story, and that’s been a turn-off to audiences. This is sort of the first political movie that’s been made where I feel like the commitment was there from the first moment to story and character, and not to politics.”

STV: “I overheard you a moment ago mentioning Naomi Watts is outstanding in this. Can you elaborate?”

Liman: “It’s the best she’s ever been. She is just extraordinary in the film. I don’t think there’s anybody — I don’t care how hardcore Republican they might be — who’s not going to look at the film and say, “That was an extraordinary performance. That was a once-in-a-lifetime performance.”

It is now incumbent upon HE commenters, obviously, to politely dispute Liman by pointing out previous political films that were made with a real commitment to “story and character and not to politics.” I’m presuming that Liman really meant to say “story and character first and politics a distant second.”

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott has delivered one of his perfect little sonnet pieces on James Foley and David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Except he doesn’t mention Foley. No one who talks about this film ever does. Because GGR is a show about one thing and one thing only — Mamet’s “hard-boiled, lyrical mysticism,” as Scott puts it.

Except it’s not, as Scott infers, a commentary on the “the current economic crisis [that] had its origins in the real-estate bubble and bond market frenzy of the last decade.” Nor is it an essential expression of the Clinton-changeover ethos of 1992, when the film was released. Glengarry Glen Ross is based on Mamet’s real-estate job in the late ’60s but it became what it became because it understood and reflected the emerging greed and malice of the Ronald Reagan era — when the seed of everything that stinks today was sewn, in the view of Paul Krugman — and that is when the play’s vitality was greatest, when it gleamed and instructed like a demon orator.

I saw Gregory Mosher’s original New York production just before opening night — some time in mid-March of 1984 — with N.Y. Times theatre critic Frank Rich sitting a few aisles away, and with a truly electric snapping-turtle cast — Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, Robert Prosky, Lane Smith, James Tolkan, Jack Wallace and J. T. Walsh. And I am telling you that night was it — the Glengarry Glen Ross apogee.

Foley’s film improved upon Mamet’s stage play by way of Alec Baldwin‘s live-reptile speech to the salesmen (“Third prize is you’re fired”) and Kevin Spacey‘s performance as the office manager (i.e., Walsh’s part), but was otherwise only so-so. In my head I’ve always blamed this on the influence of producer Jerry Tokofsky, whom I’ve always heard was a bit of a cowardly lowballing weasel, but I wasn’t there so what do I really know? Nothing.

The movie took too long to get funded and so, as noted, it came out too late — it missed the cultural synchronicity. And Foley smothered it in standard-issue noir atmosphere — darkness, neon, constant rainstorms — and in so doing blew off the unfettered, straight-from-the-shoulder, granite-like clarity of the play. And Jack Lemmon overdid the jittery desperation of the sweaty downswirling salesman known as Shelley “the machine” Levene. (For my money Robert Prosky did him better on-stage — anxious and vulnerable but also snarly, pugnacious, testy.)

Worst of all the film doesn’t have Joe Mantegna as Ricky Roma — a role that Mantegna owned like Humphrey Bogart owned Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest and Jason Robards owned Murray Burns in A Thousand Clowns. Al Pacino does very well with the part — his handling of the big existential pitch speech that closes Act One is effectively phrased — and we all understand that movie stars like Pacino routinely take parts away from guys like Mantegna for the most sensible of reasons, but it was still wrong.

To my knowledge Mantegna’s Roma was never captured on film or tape (even audio tape), and for this history does not look kindly, especially upon Jerry Tokofsky.

Robert Prosky, Joe Mantegna in Gregory Mosher’s original 1984 stage play of Glengarry Glen Ross

Get Low star and executive producer Robert Duvall said during today’s junket that Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper recently met with Brad Pitt about directing The Hatfields and the McCoys for Warner Bros….if and when Pitt decides to clear a place in his schedule. An excellent script about the legendary family feud of the 1800s has been written by Eric Roth, Duvall said. Pitt’s Plan B would produce with Pitt playing “the main guy,” Duvall said. Duvall would costar, and T-Bone Burnett would do the music.

Get Low star/executive producer Robert Duvall during this afternoon’s Four Seasons press junket — Tuesday, 4.27, 3:10 pm.

Get Low costar Bill Murray — Tuesday, 4.27, 2:45 pm. I love it when Murray takes a disliking to journalist who ask vapid questions, as he did today in the case of a certain questioner. Go, Bill!

Murray, costar Sissy Spacek

The Cinetic/Film Buff team today hosted a few journalists for lunch at the Half King (23rd St. and 10th Avenue) to discuss various new ventures. Big Kahuna John Sloss and aggressive lieutenant Matt Dentler discussed the basics, which is basically that FilmBuff, the digital distribution label run by Cinetic Rights Management, will release Pelada, a doc about soccer that debuted last month at South by Southwest, in June. And that Collapse, which has been among the top-ten iTunes sellers, will be released on DVD on 6.15.

Cinetic/FilmBuff guys Matt Dentler, John Sloss at today’s press luncheon.

Sloss also mentioned that Alex Gibney‘s Eliot Spitzer doc, easily the hottest film of the Tribeca Film Festival so far, will most likely be at the Toronto Film Festival.

I had to be at a 2 pm Get Low junket at the Four Seasons so I couldn’t stay long, but the Half King has an amazing macaroni and cheese and broccoli dish, and the Shepherd’s Pie is pretty great also.

Update: Producer Scott Rudin, producer of David Fincher‘s forthcoming The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo pic, says the report about Carey Mulligan playing Lisbeth Salander, punk heroine of Stieg Larsson‘s bestselling trilogy, is “absolutely not true.”

Previous posting: I’ve been waiting for Nikki Finke or the trades to run a confirmation of John Harlow‘s 4.25 Times Online report that Carey Mulligan is set to play Lisbeth Salander, punk heroine of the bestselling trilogy that began with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” in an alleged feature to be directed by David Fincher and produced by Scott Rudin.”

Except the report hasn’t been confirmed by anyone, or not to my knowledge. I’ve asked a certain party in a position to know so we’ll see.

Mulligan has “won the approval of Fincher as well as the the family of the late Stieg Larsson, the Swedish author who created Salander,” Harlow reported. “The choice follows weeks of casting rumors, with producers sifting through nearly 5,000 potential candidates,” blah, blah.

I was okay with Neils Arden Opley‘s film version of the first novel, but I wasn’t what you’d call a huge fan. The movie was all plot, plot, plot, plot and more plot. Fincher and Rudin, I would imagine, would make something more formidable.

“Iron Man 2 isn’t as much fun as its predecessor, but by the time the smoke clears, it’ll do,” writes Variety‘s Brian Lowry. Wait — didn’t Edmond O’Brien say that to Robert Ryan at the end of The Wild Bunch? “It ain’t like it used to be but…it’ll do.” Life tends to degrade or disappoint rather than improve. But you have to laugh about it.

“Much like The Dark Knight, this Paramount release brings an enormous stash of goodwill to the party, thanks to a well-crafted origin tale whose popularity fueled anticipation for a follow-up. Yet while the first go-round for this lesser-known Marvel hero benefited from its freshness and visual flair, the beats here are more familiar, the pacing more uneven. Given the demand, though, that will hardly matter, and this armored adventure promises to be a money-making machine that clicks on all cylinders.”

An HE commenter named “t.w.” says the following: “Iron Man 2 is a bit of a mess. Too much squeezed in. Definitely not as enjoyable as the first. I found Downey fairly irritating in this, and Don Cheadle (who replaces Terrence Howard) looked like he would rather be anywhere else. The movie it reminded me of most is Spiderman 3. It will make a fortune at the box office as the masses will eat it up, etc., but it’s a major disappointment to add to this year’s already long list of failures. At least it isn’t in 3D.”

I hate it when I’m framing a shot on a Manhattan street and people who are walking along and about to enter into the frame stop and wait for me to snap the shot. They’re being polite, of course, but in a tediously mundane and American middle-class way, which is to say a form of politeness that says “we don’t get it.” Know this and know it well — people who stop and wait for you to take a shot don’t get it.

If you’re in the shot then you’re in the shot, and if you’re not then you’re not in the shot. If I see somebody about to take a photo on a New York street I walk right the fuck in front of them every time. If I wind up in somebody’s Flickr album then so be it. And I don’t then I don’t. Everyone is in everyone’s else’s photo album, and the chances are it’ll be a better shot if someone happens to wander into the frame. It almost always is.

Most people don’t understand this. A photo taken in a crowded city full of life and energy is always better if something untidy happens. Your shot of Aunt Mabel standing in front of a horse-drawn buggy in Central Park is always improved if a derelict happens to stumble into the shot, or if Glenn Kenny is strolling along the footpath and happens to be captured as he walks by. Or if a cop on horseback is clopping along and becomes part of the shot. Or if a dog wanders into the frame.

Plain old shots of Aunt Mabel standing and smiling in front of a horse are bad pictures because aside from the “say cheese!” aspect they’re about suppressing life in order to create a regulated and somewhat banal thing. In this sense I feel that they represent a kind of middle-class cancer of the soul. Life is not tidy or “posed,” and it wouldn’t hurt if this idea got around a bit more, especially among people from Iowa. Aunt Mabel can still smile if life intrudes into the shot and you can still make sure she’s in focus, but life is not a showroom for Nordstrom bedroom settings.

We’re all “in the movie.” Nothing matters. There is no “privacy.” Security cameras and satellite cameras tape everyone all the time for no reason other than rote surveillance. If a fellow human being captures your puss in a photo it’s at least being done with a personal motive of some kind. Live with it, groove with it, be here now.