Dinner for Schmucks “is not a great movie, or even a coherent one, but in nearly every scene it draws laughter from an impressively eclectic array of sources, both obvious and new. People fall down, things break, funny accents are used, crazy misunderstandings occur, and an impressively high number of witty, bizarre and outrageous lines are uttered. It is less a full-scale comic feast than a buffet of amusing snacks, and while it does not necessarily exalt or flatter your intelligence, it doesn’t treat you like an idiot, either.” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review.

People voted for Barack Obama because they wanted transformation, a house cleaning, religious uplift, fervor. Instead he became Jimmy Carter — moderately progressive, mild accomplishments, turn the other cheek, currying favor with Republican scum, mildly mellow, Bush lite in terms of Afghanistan, etc. What people wanted (and still want) is the kind of moral clarity and righteous hellfire that Rep. Anthony Weiner let go with on the floor of the House yesterday afternoon.

Maddow Blog’s Laura Conaway posted the following at 10:35 this morning: “The House yesterday voted down a measure to provide $7.4 billion in health care for 9/11 responders made ill by their work. It’s an outrage, and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) stood up and got outraged about it: “It’s Republicans wrapping their arms around Republicans, rather than doing the right thing on behalf of the heroes! It is a shame…a shame!”

The bill 9/11 health care bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass — here are the yays and nays.

In a 7.30 piece called “Lure of The Dark Side for Bright Young Things,” The Independent‘s Tom Teodorczuk explores the syndrome of younger big-name actors (Kristen Stewart, Amanda Seyried, Robert Pattinson, Zac Efron, Amber Heard, Emma Roberts) making low-budget indie flicks alongside tentpole blockbusters.

The pattern, of course, is that the mob that pays to see these actors in tentpole flicks usually avoids their indie-ish outings. It’s not the stars they’re interested in as much as the moods and colors and exhilarations that big movies tend to deliver. Name-brand stars matter to some extent when appearing in a primary-color movie made by a big studio, but they’re secondary to the films.

The article ends with an agent saying that “the movie’s now so much the star in Hollywood that the trend for [young actors] to go off and do indie movies will proliferate…[but] the challenge lies in getting their fans to be as interested in paying to see the movies as they are in looking at the on-set pictures online.”

Agent Translation: The majority of under-35 moviegoers (i.e., “Eloi”) are looking for fundamental drug highs every time they see a film. They want sweeping, heavy-impact movies that carry them along on a powerful North Shore wave that won’t require a lot of energy to catch — movies that will excite, induce awe, make them laugh or get them to feel strong emotions. But they don’t seem to have an interest in doing much heavy lifting on their own, which is what indie films tend to ask of its audience, or muddling through ambiguities, which is also what they sometimes require.

Some indie flicks tie things together in a nice red bow at the end, but many of them say “here are some characters and a story and a milieu, but don’t expect to be spoon-fed like a baby. We’ll give you a little help here and there, but you have to bring the elements together on your own and…you know, think it out and talk it out with your friends.”

In short, indie-ish films tend to treat moviegoers as thinking, semi-educated adults while big studio movies (which the exception of films by Chris Nolan, James Cameron, Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, etc.) tend to regard audiences as children looking for rules and guidance.

It’s perfectly allowable to take shots at Get Low and thereby lower its Rotten Tomatoes rating to 88 and Metacritic rating to 78. But I’m having trouble comprehending how any critic could say to himself or herself, “Wow, this film really deserves to be slammed and I’m going to tear it a new asshole.” I know that feeling and the qualities that tend to motivate it, and, trust me, Get Low doesn’t deal those kind of cards.

(l. to r.) Bill Murray, Lucas Black, Robert Duvall in Aaron Schneider’s Get Low

Aaron Schneider‘s period drama is one of those laid-back fable movies — not quite “real” but carefully done and honestly rendered as far as it goes and therefore real enough. Set in 1938 backwoods Tennessee, it feels polite and quiet and connected to the gentler aspects of life. There are no sudden jolts in the story, and no child molester characters, no malicious toothless hillbillies or murderers or moonshiners, no shotgun yokels, etc. It takes its time and doesn’t push too hard (although some of it feels a little on-the-nose), and knows what it’s doing every step of the way.

Get Low is a restrained and atmospheric soft-shoe shuffle about regret, decency, nightmares and making amends, and about one ornery old dawg (very nicely played by Robert Duvall) finding a measure of peace at the end of the road. It’s about clean, elegant dialogue and exceptional, pitch-perfect acting all around, especially from Duvall, Bill Murray (as a considerate, fair-minded, moderately greedy undertaker with a certain Murrayish wit about him), Lucas Black (as Murray’s solemn assistant) and Sissy Spacek (as the sister of Duvall’s…I’d better not say). It’s slowishly paced, but fittingly for the time period and milieu.

The sharpshooters, some of whom are fans of Todd Solondz (if you catch my drift), are primarily complaining that Get Low is too mushy, too cornball, too formulaic, too folksy, too obvious, too unsubtle, too underlined. For them, they mean. They wanted a less conventional, less recognizable, more off-kilter sort of deal.

Well, I know from mushy, cornball, formulaic, folksy, obvious, unsubtle and underlined, and trust me, these guys are being way too picky. Get Low flirts with a faintly cornball vibe from time to time, but the nip-nippers are almost accusing it of being Mayberry R.F.D., and that’s ridiculous. Its a lot closer to the kind of material that the late Horton Foote used to write.

The fact that Get Low will almost certainly wind up as one of the ten Best Picture nominees is especially bothersome to some. Slant‘s Nick Schager writes that “one can practically hear the Oscar telecast’s orchestral music cuing up at the close of Robert Duvall’s every scene in Get Low, what with his role — as a mysterious hermit in 1930s Tennessee who plans to stage his own funeral before his death — the type that’s been designed, down to its measured beats of dialogue, to garner year-end accolades.”

Maybe so, but I know when a film is being relatively honest and straight-shooting and doing everything it can to get it right by taking things down a notch and not forcing the issue, and Get Low is one of those films.

I got stuck on a story late yesterday afternoon and consequently missed my last shot at seeing Scott Pilgrim vs The World (Universal, 8.13) for free. Okay, maybe I half-wanted to miss it due to serious concerns about sitting through another default, deadpan, deer-in-the-headlights Michael Cera performance.

Michael Cera (l.), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (second from left) and the cast of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (including Allison Pill, second from right).

It’s gotten to the point where the very thought of Cera and that annoying look on his face — a look that says (a) “Uhhm, do I want to be here?,” (b) “My mind is slightly blown but I’m also kinda bored at the same time,” (c) “Whoa, she’s kinda hot” and (d) “It’s not easy being the hippest, most deapanny guy in the room” — will make my jaw tighten and my teeth start to grind.

But the mostly positive reviews for the film, especially the one by Cinematical‘s Todd Gilchrist, have convinced me that I erred in semi-consciously blowing off last night’s screening. Scott Pilgrim is some kind of generational event flick, and anyone with any pretensions to being half-aware of movies as diviners of cultural currents has to see it and deal with it. It’s possible that I’ll hate it, but it has to be seen.

My son Jett got to the 6 pm Lincoln Square Scott Pilgrim all-media on time, saw it and liked it. I asked him to bang out a couple of graphs.

“If you grew up with Super Mario, Nintendo and Atari, you’ll be in sync with the humor in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” he wrote last night. “It’s a love story structured like a video game in the cutthroat world of dating when you’re 18 to 24 years old. Before you jump into this flick you’re going to have to think video-game rules — second lives, Japanese anime fight sequences, magical powers, and the possibility that anyone, including Michael Cera, can kick the shit out of you.

“I’m calling it the funniest movie of the year, thanks in part to great performances by Cera, Alison Pill and Kieran Culkin. Try to imagine snarky humor in the style of Speed Racer and Dragon Ball Z, and you’ll come close to the chemistry I’m speaking of.

“Can’t buy into the idea that a guy has to fight off seven evil ex-boyfriends to win the girl of his dreams? If so you’re being too literal. Scott Pilgrim unfolds in a realm like any video game you might play today, which always has a sequence of levels and evil bosses you must defeat in order to win the game. Either you get this or you don’t, and guys like Rex Reed probably won’t.

“If you look past the video game motifs, the story’s jabout a wimpy 22-year old boy in love with a tough guarded girl with a rocky past. But otherwise forget about the absurdity — it’s beside the point.”

Update: I’ve learned that last night wasn’t my last shot at seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World for free. There are five more press screenings on 7.29, 8.2, 8.4, 8.9 and 8.11.

MTV.com is reporting that Radar Online has posted a non-attributable quote from a source close to Leonardo DiCaprio saying there’s “not a chance” that Leo will star in Mel Gibson‘s untitled Viking movie, for obvious reasons.

Okay, Biutiful may not be a Sony Classics movie after all, I heard today. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t, but don’t bet the farm. Sometimes the winds shift.

A forthcoming Bluray combo-pack of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (Universal Home Video, 9.21) will include a director’s cut running 156 minutes, or 15 minutes longer than the 141-minute theatrical version. The question, of course, is whether the extra length will make it a stronger film or just another case of directorial indulgence or lost “darlings.” Scott’s longer version of Kingdom of Heaven was, of course, far superior to the theatrical cut, so here’s hoping.

The only officially announced Venice Film Festival selections that seem even vaguely pulse-quickening are Juian Schnabel‘s Miral, Vincent Gallo‘s Promises Written in Water (nice title), Tom Tykwer‘s Three, Ben Affleck‘s The Town (out of competition), Casey Affleck‘s I’m Still Here: The Lost Year of Joaquin Phoenix (ditto), Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones‘ A Letter to Elia (ditto), and John Turturro‘s Passione (ditto).

This recently released trailer for Titanic 2: Electric Boogaloo is not a mash-up. It’s selling an actual, honest-to-God, straight-to-DVD movie about a second Titanic hitting a second iceberg. The stars are Bruce Davison and Brooke Burns. Okay, I’m kidding about the Boogaloo but everything else is genuine. Really.

Asylum will be releasing Titanic 2….wait, is it Titanic 2, Titanic II, or Titanic 2: The Asylum Version? Or Clash of the Titanics? Anyway, it’s out on 8.24.

HE takes its hat off to Titanic 2‘s director, screenwriter and costar Shane Van Dyke. He’s 30 years old, 6’3″ and the grandson of Dick Van Dyke and grand-nephew of Jerry Van Dyke. Making such a film and getting it distributed took balls of steel.

I was talking a while back about Kenneth Branagh throwing up each and every day in his hotel room during the making of Thor. Can you imagine what poor Bruce Davison must have been feeling during production?

The production reportedly used the Queen Mary in Long Beach so “play” the Titanic II or…you know, the actual ship.

According to DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze, Criterion’s forthcoming Bluray of Terry Zwigoff‘s Crumb “has bright colors, heavy grain and looks far more film-like than either of the previous Sony DVDs (1999 and 2006 Special Edition). However, I don’t know that it is a film that benefits extensively from the move to Bluray 1080p.”

Wells translation: Who’s running the show over there? They take a funky little film like Crumb and Bluray it? Why?

Back to Tooze: “Although saying that, it is true that much of the comic art and facial close-ups can look surprisingly impressive in the higher resolution.

Wells translation: Well, I have to say something nice about the Bluray upgrade…right? Gotta keep my relationships at par.

Back to Tooze: “Crumb is not a viewing experience that one will recall for its striking appearance but the Criterion HD does support the ‘rustic’ feel of the film’s content. It is dual-layered with a very high video bitrate and colors seem brighter and truer than SD could relate. Skin tones seem warm and contrast exhibits healthy black levels. One must surely feel that this Blu-ray exports the most honest original representation of this amusing, thought-provoking and, sometimes, painful portrait.”

Wells comment: In other words, the decision to put out Crumb in Bluray was at best quizzical and at worst pointless. What does it cost to master a film for Bluray? $100 grand? Less? I would have much preferred a Bluray of Downhill Racer over Crumb.

If nothing else I’m guessing that the Crumb Bluray is a way for the Criterion grain monks to flex their muscles, strut their stuff and remind the world what they’re still in the game and not backing off an inch. The Grainmakers!

On the left, a 31 or 32 year-old Jeff Bridges in a scene from Tron (’82). On the right, a CG plastic-surgery version of “young” Bridges in the forthcoming Tron Legacy. The latter was achieved by youthing down the present-day Bridges, 60, with digital scrubs and touchups. Except the result doesn’t really look like Bridges. It looks like a cross between a celebrity lookalike and a Bridges dummy you might find inside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. It’s a lazy effort.

Jeff Bridges in Tron; 60 year-old Bridges de-aged through CG scrub-down in Tron Legacy.

Imagine how cool it would have been if Bridges had been convincingly youthified — if the 31 or 32-year-old version had literally been brought back to life. For “real.” I don’t know enough about CG techniques to speak with authority but I know a thing or two about what’s possible. And if you ask me director Joseph Kosinski should have told his team to digitally copy and re-work frame images from various Bridges’ films in the late ’70s and early ’80s and then integrate them into Tron Legacy. That way we’d be looking at Bridges as he actually appeared nearly 30 years ago.

I was told a few months ago that Kosinski is “the new James Cameron.” And I’m starting to doubt that. Cameron would have never settled for this.