At a recent Mexican press conference for The Last Airbender, director M. Night Shyamalan recently defended himself against charges from a questioner that “he’s lost it and is a sell-out,” according to this Popeater account.

A wild-card vision came to me late last night, just before nodding off. The only way Terrence Malick can save The Tree of Life from embarassment and possible ruin is to deep-six the dinosaur sequence. How do I know that embarassment and possible ruin are likely or even possible scenarios for this much-dithered-over film, which may or may not be released in 2010? I don’t. I haven’t the first clue about how Malick’s dinos integrate with the whole. Nada, nothing. It may turn out that The Tree of Life will be seen as a work of genius because of the dinosaur sequence.

But I’ve always suspected on some deep, murky, primordial level that mixing a time-flipping personal drama (i.e., Sean Penn‘s screwed-up older guy looking back at his dysfunctional family travails with Brad Pitt as his dad) with some kind of dinosaur sequence was a nutball idea that just couldn’t work. And I’m just thinking that if — if, I say — Malick is having dinosaur difficulties that perhaps he needs to man up and cut bait and just drop the whole thing and make The Tree of Life into a straight personal/psychological weight-of-the-world drama and let it go at that.

In other words Malick may need to follow in the footsteps of James L. Brooks when he decided that I’ll Do Anything , which he filmed as a musical, didn’t work in that mode and that he needed to remove all the songs. What a painful decision that must have been, and what a shame that the musical version never saw the light of day.

I got started on this jag when I completely cracked up after reading the following section from Scott Feinberg‘s assessment of The Tree Of Life: “The story, from what little we know about it, is set in the 1950s Midwest and focuses on a character during both his happy childhood and his troubled adulthood; the sad events and experiences that brought about the change; and his quest to regain meaning in his life. Somehow or other, dinosaurs come into play, according to a visual effects artist who worked on the film and apparently didn’t get the gag-order memo from Malick.”

“Somehow or other”….exactly!

Is the red rage effect — Danny Trejo‘s character literally becoming Hellboy red — a trailer-only effect or part of the film? It’s mildly cool, I’ll grant that, but also a way for director Robert Rodriguez to say “you get what we’re doing, right? We’re fucking around and don’t care all that much so why not throw in a comic-book-styled visual signature thing?”

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is “not a perfect movie — the ending is rushed, and the serialized graphic novel doesn’t lend itself well to a three-act structure,” Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich reports from Comic-Con. “[And] it probably won’t fly with older critics” — cranky-heads burdened with cinematic standards, she means — “[because] it’s too shallow, too silly, too obsessed with pop culture references to mean anything on its own. But I suspect anyone young enough to grow up with video games will feel an instant connection.

“Lucky for [director] Edgar Wright and Universal, that young audience makes up most moviegoers. If the Con audience tells their friends, and their friends tell theirs, Scott Pilgrim — flaws and all — might stand a chance at becoming a generational milestone. People outside of the insular world of Comic-Con just need to be willing to take the risk.”

Indeed — the mantra and meme of all Comic-Cons now and forever is “insular.” That insularity is welcome to itself, of course, and accessible to all comers, but what kind of thumbs-up review (which this is) basically says “see this movie as long as you’re willing to man up and take a risk, which you won’t actually regard as a risk if you’re young enough and wear shorts and dorky-looking sneakers with no socks and have had your narrative vistas defined by video games and graphic novels”?

“What the world needs now is insularity…that’s one thing that’s good for you and for me.” — Jackie DeShannon, “What The World Needs Now Is Insularity,” lyrics by Hal David, music by Burt Bacharach.

Does anyone care about anything going on at Comic-Con? Like, at all? Scott Pilgrim vs. The Shallowness? Okay, a new Tron Legacy trailer with a de-aged Jeff Bridges — fine. And a forthcoming Brad Pitt zombie movie called World War Z…great. Seven minutes of Machete previewed by Robert Rodriguez. It’s all toilet water. Just a Big Geek trailer-watch, walkaround, drink-in and schmoozathon.

I wish I could think of something else that will help to disparage and/or de-value Comic-Con, which I regard as Command Central for the end-of-the-world deconstruction, infantilization and general mongrelization of movies, including the absolute total ruination of action scenes. In my dreams I am part of an Apocalypse Now helicopter attack on Comic-Con, coming in from the sea to the strains of Richard Wagner and strafing the geeks. Eat death, you whiskered fat-asses with your man shorts and ugly-ass corporate T-shirts!

There was a “bad,” muddy-looking trailer for Stone that I posted briefly and then took down. Now the good one is up. I have to be upfront and say I really don’t like Norton’s corn rows. But there’s something about Milla Jovovich this time out, so maybe. DeNiro will be okay, but he’s diluted his brand to such a degree that his prescence no longer moves me.

Salt numbers have bumped up sharply over the last couple of days. Unaided awareness, particularly, has risen 10 points to 19 — a very good number. Aided awareness is 84, definite interest 40, first choice 13 (presumably rising to 17 or 18 by tomorrow or Friday). Older and younger females are almost as gung-ho as 25-plus males. Younger Eloi males appear to be the weak link.

Either way the basic indicators suggest that moviegoers are too scattered and ADD to focus on films until the final week, and that’s why Salt is finally kicking in now.

Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy Brain: “Whadaya wanna see Friday, Marty?” Scattered Lame-o: “I dunno. What do you wanna see, Beano?” Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy Brain: “I dunno. Seen Inception, gotta see Salt, I guess. Nothing else around. Angie runnin’ around barefoot, little pedicured piggy feet.” Scattered Lame-o: “Annie comin’?” Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy Brain: “Aahh, she’s going with her girlfriends on Saturday. I’m stag tonight.” Scattered Lame-o: “This isn’t some kinda spy relationship chick flick thing, is it?” Distracted iPhone-Obsessed Lazy-Brain: “I dunno. Don’t think so.” (Throws down half a can of Diet Coke, belches.)

Guillermo del Toro announced during a Comic-Con Tron Legacy panel this morning that his next gig will be to co-write and possibly direct a 3D Haunted Mansion reboot. “We are not returning Eddie Murphy‘s calls… and we are not making it a comedy,” del Toro said. “We are making it scary and fun, but the scary will be scary.” The story, he said, will be built around the Hatbox Ghost. Jesus God!

Yesterday a Variety story speculated in a kind of half-predicting way that Anton Corbijn‘s The American would play the 2010 Venice Film Festival. Well, it won’t. I have this straight from the horse’s mouth. From one of the horses, I mean.

A video essay about unpaid interns by Huffington Post college page contributor Jett Wells went up a short while ago. Lotsa tweets. “I’m an unpaid intern who made a short documentary about unpaid internships,” the intro reads. “For someone who’s worked for free since I was 17 (besides a few short stints as a bus boy), this project hit close to home.

“Not only did it open my eyes to what constitutes an illegal internship, but it brought to light how touchy the issue is — the amount of interns and companies that employ interns who turned down the opportunity to talk to me because they were afraid was remarkable.

“When did unpaid internships become the norm, and why? That’s what I wanted to get to the bottom of.”

Watch this 55-second clip from John Irvin‘s The Dogs of War (1981). Fast, savage, high-octane, rip-roarin’… right? As battle sequences went in the early Reagan era, this was a little fiercer than most. But by today’s standards, it doesn’t deliver enough. Not nearly. It might even be considered boring.

And yet Irvin uses all kinds of visual exaggeration. An actual assault on a Central American compound would be darker, less noisy, and generate very few fireballs.

But the hard fact is that a 2010 film using these same chops in an action sequence (one that, let’s say, is about a team of mercenaries attacking a Central American compound) would almost be laughed off the screen. It’s not cut fast enough, the pyrotechnics aren’t big or loud enough, there isn’t any hand-to-hand chop-socky, no limbs are severed, no windpipes are ripped out, nobody jumps out of a hovering chopper or is blown skyward, and the action choreography is too easy to follow.

This is because (and this is an even harder fact) action films are caught in a trap. They all have to top each other and the only way to do that is to go more cartoon X-treme, and credibility be damned. Because action fans don’t care that much about approximating reality. All they want are action sequences that are wilder, more CG-ish or acrobatic in a Cirque de Soleil or Pang brothers fashion, more crazy-ass.

Very few action thrillers have operated beyond these constrictions and delivered by their own style and criteria. The Matrix, the only honorable film in the Wachowski brothers‘ misbegotten trilogy, did this. So did Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men. Ditto the Bourne films by Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass. Phillip Noyce‘s Salt, plot issues aside, traffics in first-rate chops. But for the most part the action genre has become a kind of entrapment — a minimum security prison patrolled by armed guards (i.e., studio executives) in which certain rules have to be followed…or else.

But who are the real jailers? Here’s a list of the forces that have caused action films to become caged beasts, prowling ’round and ’round, snapping at their own tails and never going anywhere.

1. Asian martial-arts films. An argument doesn’t have to be made that Hong Kong, Chinese and Southeast Asian fare (violent ballet, foot-fist, wire flying, two guns blam-blam) introduced a kind of fantasy cartoon virus into action films. This is an accepted fact. But much of the blame has to fall on the shoulders of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and (yes) the Wachowski brothers for Americanizing the influenza.

2. The Comic-Con Mentality, surely the most pernicious and ruthless present-day carrier of said virus.

3. The increasing rapidity of cyber communications. The pace and intensity of action fare today is a reflection of high-speed downloading, the option of high-grade CGI, the multitude of offerings on cable, and an increasing ADD syndrome among younger viewers. Action movies can’t hide inside a ’70s and ’80s time warp. They have to embrace and expand upon current CG vistas. The bar is the bar is the bar.

4. The increasing dominance of kneejerk, follow-the-leader tendencies among souless studio executives who believe that movies must never outsmart the Eloi. And who tend to make it tough for innovators, who always go for the easy dough, and who believe in always serving the lowest common denominator.

5. The failure of nerve among filmmakers and studios to follow the lead of Children of Men. Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film was a startling groundbreaker — a realistic, pulse-pounding action film with three long single-take sequences that felt so fresh and immediate that jaded action fans were left gasping in its wake. And then something weird happened. Nobody followed its example. Action films went right back to the same old cut-cut-cut, boom-boom-boom, orange-fireball crap. Why? Doing it the Cuaron way is too hard, too fraught with potential peril, too costly.