“And then you do this Jedi serenity waiting-to-die thing….yeah, that’s it…your eyes closed, waiting for it…and then…no, you won’t be struck or fall…your brown tunic will fall and Obi-Wan will just, y’know, dematerialize. That way he’ll transform rather than die, without actually getting tagged by a light saber. No, I just want it that way. Alec? I don’t care, dammit, if it makes no sense to you. Listen, Alec…I wrote this, I’m the director.”

Is there an embed code for this webcast of Al Pacino talking to Katie Couric on 60 Minutes “about his films and how he prepares for them, including his upcoming movie in which he stars as Dr. Jack Kevorkian in You Don’t Know Jack“? Yes, it turns out.

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Selectively speaking, Ashley Horner‘s brilliantlove is an exceptionally hot and skillful depiction of sexual delirium. A tale about a lickin’ love affair between a couple of none-too-brights that succumbs to melodramatic poisoning by way of (horrors!) money and ambition, this British-produced Tribeca Film Festival entry, which I caught the night before last, is at the very least a stylistic stand-out. And yet I’m not sure where it stands (or writhes) in the annals of erotic cinema.

I know it feels a bit more feverish and free-fall than vaguely middlebrow sex films like Sex and Lucia and Warm Summer Rain and the like, but isn’t quite as kinky as Last Tango in Paris or graphic as The Brown Bunny or as given to obsessive perversity as In The Realm of The Senses, and yet it’s definitely a cut above. It’s certainly above the realm of Michael Winterbottom‘s 9 Songs, which I found tedious.

I said “selectively” because the story isn’t all that great. It would’ve been fine for me if brilliantlove had just been about the simple matter of Manchester (Liam Browne), a novice photographer, doing Noon (Nancy Trotter Landry), a taxidermist, over under sideways down. I certainly would have preferred a less dramatically loaded story. One about healing the broken wing of a small bird, let’s say, and the commitment that such an effort may require of two kids with very little money. Something along those lines.

That sounds like I’m describing straight hard-R porn, I realize, but Horner is very good at capturing that erotic dreamwhirl feeling that takes over when you’ve really lost yourself in someone else and you’ve long ago stopped noticing their less than radiantly attractive aspects because you’re just breathless and sliding around and shrieking and crying and finding God, or being kissed by Him/Her.

This movie really gets and recreates that, and it’s all the more remarkable due to the fact that Browne and Landry, while pleasantly or nominally attractive, aren’t model- or movie star-fetching. I for one have a major blockage about women with big feet, but Horner’s special touch somehow persuaded me to put this phobia aside.

“So, Jeff…are you thinking about seeing The Human Centipede?,” an IFC guy asked me a night or two ago. My response was something along the lines of “Gee, I…uhm, well, not at the moment but…” That was party-speak for “I’ve heard such repellent things that I tossed it out of my mind and haven’t given it a second thought until ten seconds ago.”

“It’s time to add a new type of bad movie to the ever-growing list: The aggressively bad movie,” wrote Horror Chick on 4.23. “There’s no ironic badness or nudge-nudge wink-ery here — it’s more like ‘screw you, you were sucker enough to see this movie and now we will do our best to make bile shoot straight up your esophagus and launch out your nostrils’ bad.

“Our prime example is The Human Centipede (in theaters — or maybe just Manhattan’s IFC Center). ‘Wait,’ you say, ‘isn’t that the ass-to-mouth movie?” Yes. Yes it is. In every literal and figurative sense.”

Anyone who’s ever succumbed to addiction or dealt with an addict over an extended period knows what a fascinating monster denial can be. Addicts can be right on the edge of obliteration with death blowing cool air on the back of their necks and still they don’t think they’re in any kind of trouble. Lindsay Lohan‘s dad has his issues, but at least he understands this.

I’ve seen where addiction ends up, and it’s always the same place if the victim doesn’t wake up. I’ve said before that Lindsay’s saga needs an ending — she needs to save herself or she needs to die, which at least might have an instructive effect in the same way that James Cagney going to the electric chair in Angels With Dirty Faces may have helped the Dead End Kids to fly straight. All I know is that the people in the Collisseum cheap seats are getting restless. They don’t want another Whitney Houston saga that lasts for years and years. Poop or get off the pot.

It was known, of course, that Alex Gibney‘s Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film, which screened earlier this evening via the Tribeca Film Festival, would focus on the sudden and scandalous fall of Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor, due to his involvement with prostitutes. What I didn’t anticipate, and what in fact surprised the hell out of me, is that the doc unfolds and holds like a masterful political suspense drama.

Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film director Alex Gibney during post-screening q & a; former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.

I was expecting a smart and comprehensive recap of the Spitzer saga — a kind of PBS Frontline-type deal. What I got instead was a totally gripping nest-of-vipers thing with a complex and self-destructive anti-hero and a great supporting cast including an assemblage of powerful, politically connected bad guys worthy of Sidney Lumet or Scott Turow or John LeCarre even, and all of them real as hell.

Gibney has always been a first-rate documentarian. But in Spitzer and his psychology and the forces that conspired against him he’s found a great political melodrama that not only matches but enhances his abilities, resulting in a beautiful synchronicity. This movie is going right into my list as one of the best films of 2010.

What a dirty, stinking story this is — a balding oddball hero with the right ideals and goals brought down by a fatal flaw, but whose public exposure and ruin is orchestrated by his powerful enemies, and not just any enemies but some of the same financially speculating, double-dealing Wall Street scumbags whose actions brought this country to the brink of financial ruin. Goodness falls, evil triumphs — great movie material!

It is always the mark of a top-notch film when you think you know what it’s going to do plot-wise, and it more or less does that in terms of what it “tells” but with so much more punch and pizazz and intrigue than you expected. And you come out of it going “wow, damn good!”

One analogy is Fred Zinneman‘s The Day of the Jackal (1973), a thriller about a man hired to assassinate former French president Charles DeGaulle. You know going in that he won’t succeed, but the film holds you regardless. Another similar work is Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981) — a movie packed to the gills with cops, attorneys and prosecutors but which finally delivers a moralistic tale about dark urges, choices, alliances and a New York City demimonde.

One of Spitzer’s enemies, Home Depot co-founder Kenneth Langone, talks to Gibney for the film, and is quite the fascinating character. Sptzer’s other foes included former NYSE chairman Richard Grasso, former Citibank/Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman, former Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget, former AIG honcho Hank Greenberg and Canary Capital Partners’ Edward Stern, to name but a very few.

I’m being kicked out of the Starbucks I’m sitting in so that’s all she wrote, but this is a stellar knockout documentary. It’s actually called Client-9 in the opening credits, but that title is just a temp, Gibney said. Distribution ought to happen by the fall. It’s too early to say, of course, but this looks to me at the very least like a prime contender for the 2010 Best Feature Documentary Oscar, whatever the competition. Because it’s sharp and true and riveting as hell, and that’s what gets the gold.

I ask again for the front page: how is the idea of Mickey Rourke playing Genghis Khan any less ridiculous than John Wayne doing the same thing 54 years ago?

Disgraced wheeler-dealer Jack Abramoff has become a reformed whore, says director Alex Gibney whose documentary, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a study of Abramoff’s abuses, is being screened before its May 7th release. (Gibney’s untitled Eliot Spitzer doc is also being shown this evening at a special Tribeca Film Festival screening.)

Former big-government lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the focus of Alex Gibney’s Casino Jack and the United States of Money.

“He’s going to get out [of jail] soon,” Gibney tells N.Y. Times profiler John Anderson. “I was going to tell him that, like my movie or hate my movie, he should use my movie. Go out with it. He’s become a born-again anti-lobbyist. He’s convinced now that lobbying is horrible thing. And it would be the greatest to hear from Jack Abramoff exactly how it’s done. I’d buy tickets to that.”

Anderson’s 4.25 piece also sketches the animosity between Gibney and director George Hickenlooper, who narrative feature about Abramoff, as portrayed by Kevin Spacey, was also called Casino Jack. But when push came to shove about who would get to use the title, “Mr. Hickenlooper blinked,” says Anderson.

Attention must be paid to David Thomson‘s New Republic review of Peter Biskind‘s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America for the simple fact that Thomson, author of Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes, knows the realm of this former Hollywood heavyweight better than most.

It’s wrong that most of this review, called “You Used To Be In Pictures!“, is hidden behind a paywall. Here are the last three graphs:

“Warren Beatty is an emblem for our last cluster of male movie stars. He is the same age as Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and near enough to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. All of them have lived beyond the natural span of their own stardom. There is a sadness about them now.

“De Niro and Pacino work on — and on — and their new films are, now more than ever, ordeals. Nicholson has said that he is washed up on the shore beyond the tide-line of good scripts. Redford seems as lost and as vacant as ever.” [Wells interjection: Redford’s The Conspirator is, at the very least, based on a well-written script. And Pacino, due respect, has just given one of his best-ever performances in Barry Levinson‘s You Don’t Know Jack.] “Stars are not necessarily self-aware or intelligent, but once they shone. Now these vets huddle together in soft-focus, in scenes that use doubles.

“Star is expert reporting but grinding to read, and it bespeaks an oppressive interest in movieland maneuvers. But it shows why, once upon a time — before AIDS, before Polanski, before special effects and monster budgets — a great-looking guy with his wits about him might think it would be fun to make a movie. And so it was, even if fun is a boy’s sport.

“Now the fun has gone out of American film. The rush of celluloid no longer lives and moves or believes in its own ninety-minute sensation. It isn’t even celluloid, and it’s never ninety minutes. Warren Beatty begins to seem like Norma Desmond.”

The New Republic guys should temporarily ease their paywall to allow people to read this. It’s Thomson after all, and the review is wise, perceptive and eloquent. Fuck it — here are the pages: #1, #2, #3 and #4.

A friend mentioned last night that one of the most intensely desired Blu-rays is Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon. Intensely so for its curious absence, and intensely so for months, years and decades after it’s released, I’m sure. Everyone will have to own the most precisely rendered and visually faithful digital version of one of the 20th Century’s most admired near-great films.

Nick Kostopolous posted the following on The Auteurs about eight months ago: “The only reason Barry Lyndon hasn’t yet made it to Warner Home Video Blu-ray is that the elements need re-mastering for the format. Because of the way the film was shot, w/its ultra-sensitive lenses & low light levels, the film poses a real challenge to master for hi-def.

“Trust me, it’ll eventually come out — it’s just a matter of time. Warner Bros. doesn’t license disc rights to the films they own to outside companies like Criterion; they feel they can do the job fine themselves, so sit tight.”

Well, here it is eight months later and no Lyndon Blu-ray. Please don’t tell me WHV is waiting to release a 40th anniversary Blu-ray in 2015….please.

Warner Home Video’s Ned Price and George Feltenstein would be well-advised to present the Barry Lyndon Blu-ray in a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio…or else. No 1.85 to 1 crap for this masterpiece. My understanding is that Kubrick actually protected the framings for a 1.37 to 1 presentation on television, but the important thing to keep in mind is that 1.66 to 1 approximates the aspect ratio of many if not most 18th Century portraits and landscapes, which is precisely the effect that Kubrick was going for — a feeling that you were watching the Lyndon story through a prism of old paintings of the period.

Yes — “near great.” I still maintain that Lyndon, which I saw again last week, is not 100% masterful. I explained my reasoning fairly thoroughly in an article I posted nearly three years ago. Here’s a relevant portion:

“I’ve seen Barry Lyndon at least fifteen times. Possibly a bit more than that — I’ve lost count and who cares? It’s brilliant, mesmerizing, exquisite — a dry, note-perfect immersion into the climate and mores of William Makepeace Thackeray‘s novel, and, by its own terms, one of the most perfectly realized films ever made. But the problem — and this needs to be said (or re-said) with all the passionate but vaguely snobby Lyndon gushing going on these days — is that it turns sour at a very particular point.

“And, in my eyes, Barry Lyndon is just a notch below great because of the dead zone section in the second half.

“I’m speaking of the moment when Barry (Ryan O’Neal) blows pipe smoke into the face of his wife, Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson). Something happens at that moment, and from then on it’s ‘oh, odd…the energy is dropping, and I’m starting to enjoy this less.’ For another 30 to 40 minutes (or what feels like that amount of time), Barry Lyndon gets slower and slower, draggier and draggier, more and more morose — stately compositions, dispassionate observation, grim-faced tableaus.

“Then, finally, comes the duel with Lord Bullington (Leon Vitale) and Barry gets his groove back. Then comes that perfect, dialogue-free scene with Lady Lyndon signing checks with Bullington and Reverent Runt at her side, and she signs the annual payment to her ex-husband. And finally, that perfect epilogue.

“There’s one other draggy component that diminishes Barry Lyndon, and in fact makes the dead-zone portion even deadlier than it needs to be, and that’s Berenson’s performance. Even now, the mere thought of her glacial expression — there’s only one — in that film makes me tighten with irritation.”

In all candor and compassion, the following 2006 Slant article by Matt Zoller Seitz (“They Are All Equal Now”) doesn’t really face up to the “dead zone” issue, which is why it’s very nearly a great piece, but not 100% so

“Barry Lyndon is perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s most uncompromising work, in the sense that of all his films it offers the least of what we’d call ‘entertainment value.’

“It’s not as raucous and cruelly funny as Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, or awesomely chaotic as Full Metal Jacket or as cleverly structured as The Killing. It has a sense of humor, but it’s so slyly sharp — like a needle made of ice — that the film’s jokes register as tremors of discomfort. It’s the hardest of hardcore Kubrick, so hermetic that it makes 2001: A Space Odyssey seem embracing.

“At least 2001 offered audiences spectacular sci-fi vistas they had never seen before [whereas] the main innovations of Lyndon, besides John Alcott‘s justly praised, candlelit interiors, lie in the way the story is told.

“The director’s methods are so precise, so intelligent, and to this day, so necessary, that I consider the film his greatest achievement — a Kubrick film that takes a more cosmic view of humankind’s folly than any other, including 2001; a clinical epic which deliberately puts a vast chasm of identification between the characters and the viewer, a chasm which must then be bridged through sheer willpower and empathy.

“But if you stick with the movie, if you make the effort to cross that chasm, the effort is well worth it. If you adapt to Kubrick’s particular storytelling syntax and give yourself over to his detached tone, you find yourself thinking about the human race in a different way, not as a collection of individuals or nations, but as a species — as animals in clothes, animals who are mainly interested in survival and the accumulation of resources, animals who have the capacity to reason but don’t use it as often as they should, but who feel the loss of loved ones and the dashing of their own hopes as acutely as any creature, perhaps more so.

“Once you’ve hit that stage of perception, suddenly the film stops seeming cold and becomes intensely moving, because the tragedy of Sir Redmond Barry and his wife and their immediately family has become everyone’s tragedy in microcosm.”