The essential task of any quality biopic is to persuade the audience that however “good” or “bad” or likable or dislikable a person may have seemed to his/her peers (or seems right now to history), the character had his/her reasons for acting as she did and being who he/she was. So if you decide to show this person acting like an insensitive, arrogant asshole — even in a single scene — you need to explain why with a semblance of empathy.

I’m mentioning this because I’m finally seeing the Ian Dury biopic, Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll, at a Tribeca Film Festival screening tonight, and it occured to me this morning that I’ve been feeling slightly irate for months over a certain clip in the trailer. I’m speaking of a shot that happens around 33-second mark in which a presumably drunken Dury (Andy Serkis) pours a bottle of what looks like a bottle of white liqueur directly into a mixing board in a recording studio.

I can shrug off or at least tolerate rock stars throwing furniture out of hotel windows or seducing 15 year-old girls at L.A.’s Park Hyatt (sorry, pitchforkers!) or driving Lincoln Continentals into swimming pools — they’re expected to do this, after all, and they do have a responsibility to their fans — but only an absolute world-class wanker would ruin the mother-board circuitry in a recording studio. People who run recording studios are respected members of the rock-music fraternity, and hurting the owners of a studio by costing them untold thousands to replace a mixing board is beyond despicable.

I’m open to whatever explanation or mitigating circumstance may be presented by director Mat Whitecross, but the excuse for ruining that mixing board had better be damn good or else.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has also commented on Robert Welkos‘“Blogger War” piece for HollywoodNews. I wasn’t as taken with the slight re-hash of the Nicolas Chartier e-mail debacle as the minor bickering that flared between Stone and L.A. Times columnist Pete Hammond over the perception of an anti-Hurt Locker bias among L.A. Times contributors. Or more particularly, over Stone’s resentment of Hammond’s mild dissing of Awards Daily.

“There is a lot of tension between actual journalists — people who went to school for it, studied it and worked for newspapers and magazines until the online media began to smoke them out — and the self-made blogger,” she says. “Many of these journalists are not doing straight journalism anymore but are, by necessity, dipping their feet into the world of the blogger – which is mostly opinion-based. Most bloggers take a position because they must. Some of them still do objective reporting but it becomes harder and harder, I think, to figure out who is invested with whom.

“Welkos’ story did not go into the equally big story about last year’s race — the LA Times‘ continual Hurt Locker bashing prior to the ballot deadline. No one ever got to the bottom of that and it still hangs out there like a bad stench . This was, of course, part of the whole Chartier thing – the LA Times appeared to be taking a side. But that has never been proved nor investigated. It was just an accusation made by a few bloggers, Stu Van Airsdale among them.

“So Pete gets one more dig in when he says that I run a site for Oscar fans. I guess that’s one way to look at it. But I can tell you this much — that’s never how I’ve looked at it. There probably hasn’t been a more critical site of the Oscars and the Oscar race than this one. It may not be journalism but if it’s fandom for anything, it’s fandom for the movies.”

Hammond, contacted this morning, responds as follows: “It’s not a negative thing to say Awards Daily is a fan site, and that the content is all of a fan nature. It’s not Deadline Hollywood Daily with agents and people in the industry chiming in. I don’t look at what I said as a negative comment. [Sasha] can redefine it in her own mind, but that’s the clientele she does it for. And she’s an advocate for films, for certain films winning this or that Oscar. It’s not an average journalistic endeavor. She does what she does, and she does it well.”

Former L.A. Times reporter and current Hollywood News.com editor Robert Welkos has posted Part Uno of a two-part piece called “Inside The Blogger Wars: Finke, Waxman, Poland and Wells among others.” Kind of a lumpy-sounding title, no? But it’s a decently written thing. Welkos captures a whiff of the flavor of the 24/7 intrigue and mood-swing humor and rat-a-tat-tat of this all-consuming racket. It’s not an in-depth Vanity Fair article but it’s all right. I shrugged, I chuckled, I can roll.

It was awfully nice of Bob to bring up the Vinessa Shaw nude-photos thing again — owe ya one! A hard-core guy would have at least mentioned that my letter to 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold went on for sixteen graphs, covering this, that and the other thing, and that just one of those fucking graphs mentioned Shaw. And that a friend/ally of Lionsgate marketing hot-shot Tim Palen fed that letter to Nikki Finke because Palen had been pissed about my criticism of the “gay” Yuma poster campaign — it was a total dirty-pool scumbag payback move. And that Finke running it was a true expression of a back-alley mentality. The other fifteen graphs were about…you know, other things! The movie, the themes, the characters, my thoughts, etc.

But you know what? Screw it. It’s over and done with, and Welkos isn’t writing a book, and he isn’t being paid $15,000 by Vanity Fair to nail each and every angle just right.

Matt Zoller Seitz intros his latest video piece as “a totally fluffy essay that will contribute absolutely nothing to anyone’s cinematic education. It’s just a collection of loud ties with sarcastic captions, scored to Three Dog Night. Enjoy!”

Dialika Krahe‘s 4.23 Der Spiegel article, titled “Nollywood’s Film Industry Second only to Bollywood in Scale,” has the following subhead: “Two-thirds of its population lives on less than a dollar a day, and yet Nigeria has the world’s second-largest film industry. It’s called Nollywood, and it provides Africa, and beyond, with a steady stream of action flicks and love stories.”

The average definite interest number for Jon Favreau‘s Iron Man 2 is 71 — 84 for under-25 males, 81 for over-25 males, 55 for under-25 females and 62 for over-25 females. That’s quite high for a film opening two weeks hence (i.e., 5.7). The average first choice figure for IM2 is 32, for God’s sake, while the average first choice for Furry Vengeance, which opens on 4.30, is 1 with an average definite interest of 19.

Roman Polanski pitchforkers will be heartened to learn that the likelihood of the 76 year-old director being flown back to Los Angeles for prosecution and probable jail time is now fairly high. The California 2nd District Court of Appeal has rejected the director’s 3.18 petition for an inquiry into alleged prosecutorial misconduct during his 1977 trial for unlawful sex with a minor, and now the final extradition decision is in the hands of Swiss authorities.

Dominic Patten‘s 4.23 Wrap report notes that “based on comments from the Swiss Foreign Ministry in March that such judgments are usually made within a year of the individual’s arrest, [a decision on Polanski’s extradition] may be made by September.”

Of the final four films announced as official Cannes selections, I’m most interested in Andrei Ujica‘s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu, which will be shown out of competition. Because it’s emotionally satisfying to see a dogmatic murdering bastard eat lead for his sins, symbolically or otherwise.

The president of Communist Romania from 1974 until his firing-squad death in December 1989, Ceaucescu was a selfish, ruthless weasel of a dictator. The evidence is that he and his wife Elena deserved to be gunned down in a courtyard. Sic semper tyrannis.

The showing of Lucy Walker‘s Countdown to Zero, first seen at Sundance and acquired by Magnolia from Participant, was also announced. Ditto the last two competiton entires — Wang Xiaoshuai‘s Chongqing Blues, and Kornel Mondruczo‘s Tender Son — The Frankestein Project.

Between Hotel Rwanda, Peter Raymont‘s Shake Hands With The Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire, Ghosts of Rwanda and those PBS Frontline documentaries about the 1994 slaughter, I feel Rwanda-ed out. But I’ll still be catching Deborah Scranton‘s Earth Made of Glass, a Tribeca Film Festival selection, at Monday night’s premiere.

Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda will be there for the q & a as well as Jean Pierre Sagahutu, the genocide survivor featured in the film.

“From the director of The War Tapes comes a powerful new film that looks at the horrific 1994 genocide in Rwanda from both personal and political perspectives,” the Tribeca notes begin. “On August 6, 2008, against the backdrop of the world’s deadliest war in neighboring Eastern Congo, Rwandan President Paul Kagame released a report detailing the French government’s hidden role in planning the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Three months later, his closest aide, Rose Kabuye, was arrested by France on charges of terrorism.

“Meanwhile, Jean Pierre Sagahutu, a genocide survivor haunted by his father’s unsolved murder, scours the Rwandan countryside on a 15-year-search for clues and ultimately finds himself confronted with his darkest desire: being face-to-face with his father’s killer. As President Kagame fights to free Rose from France and expose the truth about what really happened in Rwanda 15 years ago, Jean Pierre journeys to the scene of the crime, and the doorstep of a killer, to uncover the chilling facts behind his father’s death.

“As each relentlessly pursues the truth — with the fate of a family and a country hanging in the balance — they find themselves faced with a choice: enact vengeance or turn the other cheek Deborah Scranton crafts this dark material into an inspiring and uplifting examination of the search for truth beyond justice and the long road to redemption in Rwanda.”

Two days ago seven 2010 Tribeca Film Festival selections — The Infidel, The Trotsky, Metropia, sex & drugs & rock & roll, Climate of Change, The Birth of Big Air and Road, Movie — became available as On Demand titles through various cable providers. Four 2009 selections were also included in the package: TiMER, My Last Five Girlfriends, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia and The Swimsuit Issue.

Has this happened before during a Tribeca fest? Here’s an assessment by The Wrap‘s Brent Lang.

This is a result of a new partnership between Tribeca Film and American Express. Cable providers include Time Warner Cable, Cox, Comcast, Cablevision (iO), RCN, Verizon Fios, DirecTV Cinema, Brighthouse Networks, Bresnan, Amazon On Demand and Vudu.

In a chat with Vulture before last night’s Tribeca Film Festival red-carpet gala for Shrek Forever After, Eddie Murphy said something interesting: “I’ve lost a lot of my cool and edge…I think my cool and edge are gone.” No! After doing the overpaid superstar asshole trip for the last 23 or 24 years (starting with his role in 1986’s The Golden Child) which culminated with exiting the ’07 Oscar ceremony after he didn’t win for Best Supporting Actor in Dreamgirls, Murphy is actually copping to this possibility?

“You know, I think I’m onto some other place,” he added. “Whatever my edge or cool was back then, I’m onto some other area. I don’t know what it is. I’m thinking about getting into stand-up, see what comes up.”

That may be red-carpet b.s., but it’s still the most genuinely appealing comment I’ve heard Murphy say since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Speaking as one who saw him do his stand-up act twice in the early ’80s (once at Catch a Rising Star in Manhattan, the other at the Universal Amphitheatre in ’83), this seems like the smartest thing he could possibly do at this stage. The only thing, really, that that inject something vital into his veins and his soul. He’s been Charles Foster Kane living behind the gates of Xanadu and wearing that smug-ass, “I’m rich and you’re not” expression for an awful long time. But that kid I saw perform 27, 28 years ago was alive on the planet.

Yesterday the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell observed that (a) the “crystal balls of box-office wizards, prophets and know-it-alls have gone cloudy in the weekly game of predicting which movie will top the charts,” and (b) the primary reason is that box-office expectations have in some cases been too high.

How to Train Your Dragon was initially called an under-performer, Howell writes, but is “still breathing fire” with $158 million in the till and therefore “a profitable slow-burner.” Kick-Ass‘s $19.8 million opening was called disappointing (it certainly wasn’t triumphant) but it “may yet prove to be” another steady earner, he says. Date Night‘s opening was also called a short-faller but has since become “more than just a one-night stand” with ticket buyers. Throw ’em all together and handicapping box-office stats has become like “playing the ponies or betting on Stanley Cup finalists,” he concludes.

Variety‘s Peter Bart and Box-Office Guru‘s Gitesh Pandya tell Howell that recent forecasts have been “wrong” and “out of whack,” but Howell doesn’t mention two important considerations.

One is that that box-office expectations are never primarily based on hunches and guesswork. They’re always based on tracking reports, particularly the definite interest and first-choice numbers among the four demographic quadrants — under-25 and over-25 males and females.

The other is that marketing experts in the employ of major distributors come up with more or less the same box-office expectations, and also that sometimes they’ll attempt to obscure this data by downplaying expectations in conversations with reporters in order to enhance the perception of a film’s performance.

So if anything, the issues at hand are (a) how accurate are tracking reports?, (b) what is lacking in their assessments of Average Joe sentiments about upcoming films?, and (c) how could their methodology change to improve things?