In an 8.18 interview with Christiane Kubrick, the 78 year-old widow of Stanley Kubrick, Guardian contributor Jon Ronson reveals what seems to me like an exceptionally sad fact. Vivian Kubrick, 50, who played “Squirt” in 2001: A Space Odyssey and who shot that Making of ‘The Shining’ doc, succumbed to Scientology about a decade ago, and now her mother considers her “lost.”

Vivian Kubrick about 10 years ago, and during her bush-baby scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“She was hugely loved, and now I’ve lost her,” Christiane says. “You know that? I used to keep all this a secret as I was hoping it would go away. But now I’ve lost hope. So. She’s gone.”

“It all began, she says, while Stanley was editing Eyes Wide Shut, which starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Stanley asked Vivian to compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn’t. Instead, she disappeared into San Francisco and Los Angeles. ‘They had a huge fight,’ Crhistiane recalls. ‘He was very unhappy. He wrote her a 40-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.’

“On the day of Stanley’s funeral, Christiane says, ‘Vivian arrived with a woman nobody recognized. She just sat in Vivian’s room. Never said hello to us. Just sat. We were all spooked. Who was this person? Turns out she was a Scientology something-or-other, don’t know what.’

Scientology “is [Vivian’s] new religion,” Christiane explains. “It had absolutely nothing to do with Tom Cruise by the way. Absolutely not.”

“I think she must have been very upset [by her father’s death],” Christiane says, “but, again, I wouldn’t know. I know nothing. That is the truth. I can’t reach her at all. I’ve had two conversations with her since Stanley died. The last one was eight years ago. She became a Scientologist and didn’t want to talk to us any more and didn’t see her dying sister Anya, didn’t come to her funeral. And these were children [who] had been joined at the hip.”

The following portion of Ronson’s interview stopped me short: “[Christiane] says that when Stanley was alive, he kept her and their daughters cosseted from stress, from life’s legal and financial arrangements, allowing them to float through Childwickbury without worries.”

Let me explain something. If anything is going to interfere with the ability of a younger person to cope with life as they begin to make their way on their own, it is having been “cosseted from stress” and shielded from “life’s legal and financial arrangements” as a child.

Parents believe that allowing a child “to float through” his or her early life “without worries” is a profound expression of love. It is in fact one of the worst things you can do to a son or daughter. I know three or four people who lived somewhat shielded lives as children, and now they could arguably be called hiders in one way or another. They aren’t unhealthy or uninteresting people, mind, but they seem to have sought to recreate that sense of being “sheltered from the storm” that they knew during childhood. The strongest people tend to be those who’ve experienced a little up and down and rough and tumble in their formative years. Like me.

My understanding is that Christian Alvart‘s Case 39 was shot in ’06. This is indicated by the fact that Bradley Cooper, whom I’ve totally written off since The A-Team and his sickening appearance on the last MTV Movie Awards, has his chubbier face — i.e., the one he had in The Wedding Crashers, before he buffed up in order to look like a smokin’ hot movie star.

One might think that the combination of (a) the three-year delay and (b) Renee Zellwegger‘s presence would be more than ample reason to stay away from this. For me Chubby Cooper seals the deal. Is that thoughtful? Have I not read comments that Case 39 is better than its reputation indicates?

In an hours-old Facebook posting, Daniel Plainview (a.k.a., Matthew Wilder) has criticized documentarian Thom Andersen as an “inexplicably revered megasnob.” He also raps him for having said that Point Blank “was liked only by people who hate L.A.” Wilder is alluding to a quote from Andersen’s L.A. Plays Itself, but that’s not the exact phrasing. The line is “people who hate L.A. love Point Blank.”

The growing number of right-wing ignoramuses who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim (and therefore, by implication, more in sympathy with the aims of Middle Eastern wackjobbers than those of the U.S.) is beneath comment. And yet while Obama’s support of the Ground Zero mosque is noble, the issue itself is arguably muddled.

To build a mosque directly adjacent to the site of the greatest slaughter of noncombatant U.S. citizens in this country’s history, a slaughter perpetrated by young Muslim loons who shouted “Allahu Akbar!” right before the planes hit, would obviously be an act of spiritual generosity. Magnanimous, Christian, loving, compassionate, mature.

It’s not the same thing as, say, a Jewish synagogue being built on the site of a World War II-era Nazi concentration camp. We all get what that means — a renunciation of evil and the triumph of tolerance and brotherhood. A Ground Zero mosque obviously wouldn’t make the same statement. It would be more about who and what we are. It would say “we’re more than just revenge monkeys — we’re about genuine Christian values, and the rights of each and every U.S. citizen.”

Most American yahoos, many of whom are illiterate or ill-informed dumbasses, equate the Muslim faith with anti-U.S. sympathies and terror cells. If you want to process the situational ins and outs with crude mental tools, I can see how they might think that way. But a U.S democracy can’t hope to function with his kind of rank stupidity influencing the conversation.

What can you do about such people, really, except wait for them to die? There’s the age-old Hollywood Elsewhere solution of putting them into green reeducation camps for minimum one-year terms, but people snicker at such thoughts. Green camps, by my way of thinking, are about compassion and enlightenment and investing in human potential. Don’t punish or imprison your enemies — help them to see the light.

David Fincher‘s The Social Network “is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller, packed with energetic incident and surprising performances,” writes former L.A. Weekly critic and NYFF associate director Scott Foundas. “It is a movie of people typing in front of computer screens and talking in rooms that is as suspenseful as any more obvious thriller.

Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network

“But this is also social commentary so perceptive that it may be regarded by future generations the way we now look to Gatsby for its acute distillation of Jazz Age decadence.

“There is, in all of Fincher’s work, an outsider’s restlessness that chafes at the intractable rules of ‘polite’ society and naturally aligns itself with characters like the journalist refusing to abandon the case in Zodiac and Edward Norton‘s modern-day Dr. Jekyll in Fight Club. (It is also, I would argue, what makes the undying-love mawkishness of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button seem particularly insincere.) So The Social Network offers a despairing snapshot of society at the dawn of the 21st century, so advanced, so ‘connected,’ yet so closed and constrained by all the centuries-old prejudices and preconceptions about how our heroes and villains are supposed to look, sound, and act.

“It would be easy enough, of course, to vilify” controversial Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) “as a greedy twerp who betrayed his friends (what few he had) and partners on his way to the top — we are, after all, talking about a 24-year-old billionaire who once carried business cards reading ‘I’m CEO…bitch.’ It would be even easier, perhaps, to exalt him as a nonconformist deity, a Holden Caulfield of the information superhighway.

“But to the sure nervousness of the studio, and the potential discomfort of some viewers, Fincher and Sorkin chart a more treacherous course straight down the middle of Zuckerberg’s many contradictions, one in which there are no obvious winners or losers, good guys or bad — only a series of highly pressurized social (and genetic) forces.

(l. to r.) Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield

“Adapted by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin from Ben Mezrich‘s nonfiction best-seller The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network was one of those ‘buzz’ scripts that seemed to be on everyone’s lips in Hollywood for the past couple of years, and it’s easy to understand why. The writing is razor-sharp and rarely makes a wrong step, compressing a time-shifting, multi-character narrative into two lean hours, and, perhaps most impressively, digests its big ideas into the kind of rapid-fire yet plausible dialogue that sounds like what hyper computer geeks might actually say (or at least wish they did): Quentin Tarantino crossed with Bill Gates.

“Just as All the President’s Men — a seminal film for Fincher and a huge influence on his Zodiac — was less interested by the Watergate case than by its zeitgeist-altering ripples, so too is The Social Network devoted to larger patterns of meaning. It is a movie that sees how any social microcosm, if viewed from the proper angle, is no different from another — thus the seemingly hermetic codes of Harvard University become the foundation for a global online community that is itself but a reflection of the all-encompassing high-school cafeteria from which we can never escape.”

It’s funny that Foundas (whose “review” is obviously colored and perhaps modified by his responsibilities and alliances with the NYFF) notes that (a) the warts-and-all portrayal of Zuckerberg “risks the potential discomfort of some viewers” and yet (b) Foundas himself has no supportive words for Eisenberg’s performance. Hah! Especially since it appears that Eisenberg’s portrayal of the manic Zuckerberg is the most relentless expression of The Social Network‘s “no heroes or villains” viewpoint.

Foundas does, however, congratulate the “superb” Andrew Garfield, who plays Eduardo Severin, and Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker, “who’s like Zuckerberg’s flamboyant, West Coast id.”

Anton Corbijn‘s The American (Focus Features, 9.1) will screen for press two days before it opens on Wednesday, September 1st. My sense is that Corbijn has made an exquisite-looking, almost arty-type film, but it may not be juicy enough for Joe Popcorn. My only other comment is that George Clooney‘s hair is too short in this thing. It looks a little Third Reich-y, too intense, something.

I’ve been feeling frustrated for a while now about the release-date delay of Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs. The initial plan was to open it in spring 2011, but last March it was bumped to September 2011, which seemed to me like a candy-ass move. Distributors always delay when they’re scared. They tend to put off releasing so-called intimidating films on their slate the same way financially-troubled folk will sometimes put off paying the mortgage.

Straw Dogs is a smart but violent film with a rape scene, sure, but why bite into a sandwich if you don’t intend to chew and swallow?

One hopes that Screen Gems might grow a pair and decide to release Straw Dogs next spring after all. Maybe. Because release-date squeamishness always colors the buzz. Audiences can always smell indecision. If Screen Gems distribution execs were men, Straw Dogs — a remake of Sam Peckinpah ‘s 1971 classic based on “The Siege of Trencher’s Farm” — would be showing at the Toronto Film Festival and opening in the mid to late fall, or perhaps early ’11.

The general rule of thumb is that if your film isn’t released within a year or so after the end of principal photography, you’ve got some kind of worries going on. Inviting press down to the Straw Dogs shoot last fall and then announcing it won’t open until…oh, who knows but maybe Spring 2011 or September 2011 is like purchasing a Variety trade ad saying, “Okay, we’re a little scared — we admit it. We picked up the sandwich, we bit into it and…uhm, we’re not quite sure how to play it.”

There’s nothing wrong with the movie, I’m told. It works fine, has tested well. The problem is simply (a) a money thing — i.e, the amount of p & a bucks that are available versus the vast amount of films that Sony has to release and (b) the fact that Straw Dogs is fairly modular as to when it can be released — i.e., not a holiday film, not a summer film and so on.

Straw Dogs costars Kate Bosworth, James Marsden.

The rape scene (fans of the Peckinpah original obviously know what I’m talking about) will be a tough thing to get through for some, and there are concerns that the MPAA may slap Dogs with an NC-17 because of it, but Lurie has said all along that he’s not inclined to water anything down. The film is what it is.

My cynical side is inclined to dismiss any release-date hesitation as hiding and whining. Straw Dogs entering the world of 21st Century marketing and becoming Little Yappie Dogs. Fear of critics, fear of Peckinpah, fear of Toronto, fear of failure, fear of rape scene, fear of everything that this movie is about.

The other side says there’s no fear of anything. This is just the way of distribution these days. Nothing is being hidden. Sony has loads of films to put out and there are only so many screens. This has nothing to do with being scared. It has to do with not being morons and finding a way for it to make the most dough possible.

I spoke a while ago to Lurie and he assures that “the film is very intense and the rape scene is not a stepping back from the original at all. Anyone expecting some kind of watering down is going to leave the theater in a state of shock.”

The Straw Dogs house, taken in Shreveport, Louisiana last October.

I have a 4pm midtown screening of an allegedly rousing and well-acted horse-racing flick, and then I’ll retire to some Starbucks and resume the daily grind.

In the current New Yorker, Tad Friend writes “about the strange disappearance of the downtown artist John Lurie, known in the ’80s for his band the Lounge Lizards, in the ’90s for his show Fishing with John, and more recently for his absurdist paintings.

“‘I remember he was very handsome,’ recalls Sylvia Plachy, who photographed Lurie in 1984, during his Lounge Lizard days, at his apartment on the Lower East Side. ‘He looked like James Dean and Marlon Brando, and a little like Adrien Brody!”

“Twenty-six years later photographer Gillian Laub spent a scorching summer day with Lurie at an undisclosed location. ‘When I arrived, he was concerned I’d been followed,’ Laub told me. Before she made any pictures, Lurie ate dumplings and spoke about his past. ‘He said he was just pretty when he was younger, and that maybe his priorities were screwed up,’ wrote Laub.

I’m told by a reliable source that “no decision” has been made about when to release Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. I had gotten in touch after Todd McCarthy‘s stunning prediction yesterday that Malick’s long-delayed film probably wont be out this year and may not be seen until next May’s Cannes Film Festival. McCarthy is “speculating,” the source said.

Sure, of course. McCarthy said as much yesterday. And yet I’ve known McCarthy for many years and he’s no shoot-from-the-hipper. He’s a very careful and prudent fellow, and I can’t imagine he’d write something like this unless he had fairly good cause to suspect as much. Terrence Malick is a gentle loon who cares nothing about what the industry thinks or wants. It’s well within his psychological perimeter to delay this Sean Penn-Brad Pitt film for several more months.

So “no decisions,” okay, but have there ever been any decisions made about anything regarding The Tree of Life other than to keep working on it?

Qualification: Please notice my decision to refer to Malick as a “gentle loon” rather than a barking one. Several years ago a British journalist playfully described Stanley Kubrick as a loon who primarily barked. Obviously a flip characterization, but the term “barking” didn’t seem totally ridiculous as it alluded to an aggressive tendency — assertive, dogged, relentless — that echoed Kubrick’s legendary approach to filmmaking. Malick is described by all as a quiet man, a man of refinement and thought. But he also seems indifferent to the requests and demands of the marketplace that he’s ostensibly interested in serving. Indifferent to the point of not caring, I mean. You want that? You’re not going to get it.

When I spoke with Malick on the phone in the mid ’90s he was entirely polite and yet absolutely firm about not engaging in even the most inconsequential small talk. I felt a curious tremor from this resolve. A vibration that felt more odd than normal. I decided then and there that Malick is not quite of this earth. Certainly not in a Joe Schmoe way. He’s here, of course, but much of what he’s about is “somewhere else,” so to speak. But then I’m like that. The key thing is that Malick always strikes people as kindly and patient and likable, hence the term “gentle loon.” Which basically means “nuts but in a nice way.”

Brrrrring! Brrrring! Seven or eight rings. Finally someone picks up. The voice of an older woman. Crisp and direct like a bank officer, not like a maid or a neighbor: “Hello?”

Electric rush in the blood. This is it! Q: “Hello, is Mr. Sasquatch in, please?” A: “I’m sorry, but he’s not available right now. May I take a message?” Q: “Well, sure….but uhm, are you saying he’s not in the office or he’s location-scouting in Bartlesville or…?” A: “Mr. Sasquatch is just not available. I’ll be happy to take a message.” Q: “Would you tell Mr. Sasquatch that I’m getting more and more frustrated and angry, to be honest, that he won’t stop diddling around on The Tree of Life?” A: “Yes, I can pass that message along to Mr. Sasquatch. Would you like to leave a name and number?”

I’ve read the 200-plus comments about LexG, and while he’s obviously a mixed package it would be unwise of me to ask him to to push on. There can be no disputing that like most artists, he’s an excessive personality in some ways. I’ve told him privately that I don’t want to read one more post about his feelings of depression or whatever aroused hormonal reactions may be pumping through his system in response to this or that young actress, or the allure of her damn feet and her $75 pedicure.

And LexG does need to man up and publicly write a mea culpa to Glenn Kenny and apologize for saying some truly ugly things. There have to be limits and refinements and kindnesses or our souls will start to grow tumors.

I understand completely that brilliance and aggression and self-loathing and all the rest of it come from the same wellspring, and that anyone with the ability to uncork all that stuff and paint it onto the page in a semi-engaging, well-phrased fashion with the fortification of perspective, education and above-average intelligence is worth his or her weight in gold. LexG is altogether too bright and too circuit-cabled into the essence of it all (himself, his woes, the movies, the culture) to be tossed from this site.

But the coarseness, the self-pity and the occasional eye-pokes and cruel dismissiveness have to be turned down. Way down. Arguments and genuine disdain for certain debaters can be entertaining, mind. I’m not trying to be Ms. Manners. But there finally has to be an emphasis on perception and love and passion and the glories of good writing. There has to be an emphasis on letting in the light rather than damning the darkness of the trolls and vomiting on the floor and kicking this or that HE contributor in the balls.

I’m going to renew and revitalize my determination to restrict or ban posters who seem to be primarily about coarseness or cruelty or a general lack of refinement or consideration towards others. Unless the “others” are haters like Absinthe Quell Pro or the right-wing hammer types, in which case I say beat ’em down with baseball bats like Joe Pesci and his brother in that Casino cornfield.

If LexG wants his own HE forum to talk about his unfulfilling job and hair transplants and being lonely and depressed, he can have his own column — call it “The LexG Show” — on this site whenever he wants it. I’ve told him it’s absolutely his for the asking. But he seems to prefer reacting to my topics than to instigating his own. My column, my rules. Hate on the bad people — the ones who deserve it, I mean — but put a little love in your hearts at the same time. It’s a balancing act. Not easy to do, but worth attempting each and every day.

“I’ve never had a problem with your neutral links to showbiz stories, but so many people do have a problem with you, to go by last night’s ‘Quandary‘ post. I don’t want to lose people, and apparently your links and your comments, for that matter, are infuriating a good number of them. Maybe it was the Avatar box-office thread that broke the camel’s back — I don’t know.

“So I’m sorry but while I have no argument with your posting links to current stories because it’s sometimes hard for me to write and keep up 24/7, you’re going to have to push on. I’m going to have to block your posts. I have to pay attention to what’s in the greater good for the site as a whole. Too many people are infuriated by your stuff. No offense but that’s my call. I have to think of HE’s general well-being.”