“The glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don Draper. So you don’t really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad news.

“‘The world is so dark right now,’ she says. ‘One of the boys killed in Mississippi, Andrew Goodman — he’s from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him from summer camp.’ Her date is too busy studying her decolletage, so she fills in the dead air. ‘Is that what it takes to change things?’ she asks. He ventures no answer.

“This is just one arresting moment in the first episode of the new Mad Men season premiering tonight. Like much in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of what people don’t say and can’t say. Mad Men is about placid postwar America before it went smash.

“We know from the young woman’s reference to Goodman — one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964 — that the crackup is on its way. But the characters can’t imagine the full brunt of what’s to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know what history will bring.” — from Frank Rich‘s 7.24 N.Y Times piece, called “There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin'”.

I’m not on AMC’s screening list or I’d have a thought or two of my own to pass along. I probably won’t see the opening Mad Men episode tonight because I’m on a flight back to New York this evening around 10 pm, and so it goes. I don’t know what it is about me and Mad Men, but I never seem to watch it. This may be because I started to intensely dislike Draper during season #2. No offense to Jon Hamm , who plays him well and believably. It’s just that Draper is such a prick.

The Salt vs. Inception competition has been settled and resolved, and the plain fact is that Chris Nolan‘s film — complex plot and all — has beaten Phillip Noyce‘s despite the supreme skill and relative ease with which Salt goes down. So the Eloi weren’t intimidated and turned off by the Inception challenge, or not to any significant degree. It was a misreading on my part to suggest that they might be. I stand corrected.

This weekend wasn’t a photo finish. Inception was #1 with almost $44 million (a relatively slight 31% drop from last weekend) while Salt came in second with $36.5 millon, a little more than $7 million behind. By the standard of a strong film tripling its opening weekend haul, Salt should end up with a bit more than $100 million domestic.

I wanted to catch the final 45 minutes of The Apartment last night, but it seemed exorbitant to pay $12 bucks (or whatever the Aero charges) for that small pleasure. (That’s me standing near the main door.) I’ve never seen Billy Wilder‘s 1960 dramedy on a big screen. By the time we (two friends and myself) got there today’s Wilder films — Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole — were up on the marquee. Of all the things I miss about Los Angeles, the Aero may be on the top of the list.

Saturday, 7.24, 8:55 pm

You have to wonder about the fairly well-off people who live in the vicinity of Santa Monica’s Montana Ave. I was standing at the corner of Montana and 13th last night around 9:05 pm, and looking south, west, north and east. The bar across the street from the Aero was lively, but otherwise the neighborhood was like a scene from Stanley Kramer ‘s On The Beach with everyone dead in their beds from radiation. Or “Where Is Everybody?”, that Twilight Zone episode with Earl Holliman. I saw exactly one guy walking his dog. Everyone’s sitting at home with their plasma screens and glasses of white wine, I suppose. Rome’s Trastevere district beats this all to hell.

“There’s a thunder god, there’s a green giant rage monster, there’s Captain America from the 40s, there’s Tony Stark who definitely doesn’t get along with anybody. Ultimately these people don’t belong together but the movie is about finding yourself [through] community. And finding that you not only belong together but you need each other, very much. Obviously this will be expressed through punching but it will be the heart of the film.” — Joss Whedon describing his forthcoming Avengers feature.

If you were Robert Downey Jr., Clark Gregg, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo, would you have second thoughts about poisoning your soul and compromising your reputation by taking an Avengers paycheck and working with the likes of Whedon, whose stewardship automatically guarantees problems in terms of the film being a satisfying, full-bodied experience? No. Of course not. You would suck it in, hold your nose and do the job.

“Yesteday’s roof-blowing was owed completely to Harrison Ford‘s first-ever appearance at Comic-Con to promote Jon Favreau‘s Cowboys & Aliens. It was a geek’s wet dream as Han Solo/Indiana Jones took to the stage at Hall H in handcuffs (which we all thought was making light of an earlier stabbing incident but was actually a pre-planned gag, as in Favreau had to drag Ford to the convention in shackles).” — reported by In Contention‘s Kris Tapley.

“The crowd was treated to close to 10 minutes of not just footage, but polished, well-mixed footage with great effects and a decent temp score. Earlier, Favreau said he wanted to make a straight western akin to John Ford or Sergio Leone. He said he looked at films like Predator and Aliens, examples of sci-fi blended with horror elements, rooting the material in a kind of reality. And that’s a good way to describe what we saw.

“The biggest set-piece was a full on alien spaceship attack in the middle of a mid-town showdown. It felt like War of the Worlds invading Unforgiven, and it worked. Hopefully the film can do for the hybrid western what Jonah Hex could not, but at the same time, I can’t help but recall the positive response to Jonah Hex footage at last year’s Con, so time will tell.”

Wells interjection: Comic-Con dog-and-pony shows are meaningless. The geeks will clap and howl like woo-woo dogs for just about anyone or anything.

Back to Tapley: “Still, it’s a heck of a nod from Favreau, who said that when he took on the project he knew he had to have something ready for the convention this year. He delivered, clearly grateful to the audience that helped start the buzz wave on his Iron Man franchise. And he plans to be back next year with more.”

As the Comic-Con eyeball-stabber was led away yesterday by authorities, he was reportedly “wearing a Harry Potter T-shirt,” according to CNN.com. The attacker was reportedly provoked by the victim “sitting too close,” according to reports.

Attacks of this sort are abhorrent. I naturally feel for the victim. That said, I’ve never been one to jump to conclusions but could “too close” mean the victim was (not atypical for a fan boy) Jabba-sized and was therefore lounge-bulking into the privacy space of the attacker? I’m just thinking out loud.

$100 bucks says that at least one 2011 or 2012 fantasy-crap comic-book movie shows a bad guy getting stabbed or shot in the eye.

Inception nudged ahead of Salt yesterday, but just barely. The bottom line is that Inception has caught on big-time and Salt is being sampled. Reactions to the latter?

Last night I took an instant dislike to Sur, a white-walled, Moroccan-appearing restaurant in West Hollywood that a lady friend (an ex-literary agent, now producing a feature) talked me and a couple of friends into patronizing. It’s nicely lit with candles and decorated with large flower urns and has a kind of casbah-in-Tangiers vibe, but it’s essentially an environment for vaguely shallow, easily-impressed, Maxim-magazine-reading, out-on-the-town tools who don’t know any better.

Buddha statue in main foyer/hallway of Sur.

Listen to the music that kicks in when you visit the website…good God! I was particularly offended by the peon T-shirts that the male waiters wore (i.e., the name “Sur” spelled out in sparkly gold letters) and the hot-casino-hooker dresses that the waitresses are obliged to don.

I was particularly revolted by the synthetic disco music that they began playing around 10:30…party hour! We asked one of the waiters if they could please not play this music. He said “of course” and then went away and the music continued. We asked him again and he said “yes, surely” and went away and the music continued. Okay, that’s it, I told myself. I’m going to get these guys.

So did a Steve Buscemi and left no tip. I’ve generously tipped waiters and waitresses all over the world, but last night I had to draw a line. Something in me revolted. I will not tip any waiter or waitress wearing garish Tijuana-level clothing that I wouldn’t wear with a gun to my head, and I will deprive any waiter or waitress working in a restaurant that plays disco music of any and all gratuities. If they choose to work at a Vegas-styled place like this, it’s their problem. If they can’t figure out there are people like me whose stomaches fill up with acid when subjected to disco music, that’s their misfortune. Actions have consequences.

The food, drink and service were totally fine. That wasn’t the issue. Subject me to an Uday Hussein-type environment and someone, trust me, is going to pay.

I too now have a copy of Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life script, and will consider sharing it with specially trusted correspondents. It’s dated 6.25.07, and runs 126 pages. I love how someone — Malick? — has hand-written various words on each and every page, words that weren’t printed clearly enough and/or required clarification, whatever.

“Eternity — that realm of pure and endless light. How shall we represent it? A single image might serve better than several combined. The whole creation is in the figure of a tree. The smallest leaf communicates with the lowest root, all parts feeding on the same sap, breathing in the same air and sunlight, drawing the same life up from the darkness of the early below.”

Empire‘s Genevieve Harrison has broken the embargo on The Expendables (Lionsgate, 8.13) with a fairly tough pan. “More The Wild Geese than The Wild Bunch, The Expendables is not a wasted opportunity, but is one not fully exploited,” she writes. “Even action fans raised on Commando and Cobra might wish for something better.

“Clive James once described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like ‘a condom filled with walnuts’ — now it’s the other way round. Perhaps that’s why director-writer-star Sylvester Stallone (64) has recruited young upstarts like Jason Statham (38) and Jet Li (47) to accompany fellow fossils-with-muscles Dolph Lundgren (52), Bruce Willis (55), Mickey Rourke (57) and Arnie (63) to take down the bad guys (and possibly the insurance premiums).

“If only Sly had spent less time on the phone to his mates, and more on the script.

“Instead it seems that, having assembled his dream cast — and thrown in wrestler ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and Ultimate Fighting Champion Randy Couture for the ‘kids’ — Stallone clearly felt that such fuddy-duddy film staples as story, characterisation and dialogue that makes sense were, well, expendable.

“Sure, there’s some direct-to-video-level plotting and an attempt at creating motivation for Stallone and his fellow cigar-chompers to care — in a nutshell, ‘The general’s daughter is a hottie’ — but that’s really as far as it goes.

“As the film lurches from scene to scene, one becomes increasingly convinced that not only is everyone making it up as they go along (director Stallone shares a screenwriting credit, so it’s entirely plausible), but that Sly could only convince his cast to jump on board if he agreed to very specific, and often very strange, demands: ‘I want a scene where I kick Jet Li’s ass.’ ‘I want to blow up a dock from the open-air gun turret of a giant seaplane.’ ‘I want to meet Charisma Carpenter, can you fix us up?’ (And apparently, in the case of the much-ballyhooed on-screen team-up between Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Willis, ‘I want a scene with all the verbal and visual fireworks of a Planet Hollywood annual general meeting circa 1993.’)

“That said, The Expendables does what it says on the tin: it delivers a super-size portion of bone-cracking, bullet-spraying, muscle-flexing, head-exploding action, thankfully with the kind of tongue-in-cheek ironic distance which was fatally absent from Stallone’s last directorial outing, the ill-advised, ill-fated Rambo. Although the set-pieces are hardly on a par with the man-fires-tank-falling-out-of-plane antics of the all-new A-Team, the fight scenes prove that the almost-all-old ‘E’-Team can still cut it when push comes literally to shove.

“If nothing else, it gives the audience a chance to answer the perennial question, who would win a no-holds-barred fight between Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li?”

The Second Recession is looming and threatening to spread across everyone and everything. One million home-owners are expected to lose their homes this year. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has just said that the country faces “unusually uncertain prospects.” Does this suggest that Company Men (Weinstein, 10.122) will strike a kind of communal chord when it opens three months hence, or will the opposite effect happen?

In a 1.23.10 Sundance review, I wrote that this drama of layoffs and despondency affecting three Boston-area white-collar guys (Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper) “plays like an intelligent funeral in a nicely furnished minimum-security prison.”

John Wells‘ drama “is an honest and competently assembled attempt to capture the Great Recession lamentations of the moment, but the story just kind of plods along. It feels lifeless and confined — stuck with itself with no escape plan. It’s kind of proud, in fact, of being a story about well-dressed prisoners and their wives and children. Each dawn I die.

“Wells was obviously convinced that just telling these three stories in a plain, no-frills, reality-reflecting way would suffice. Over and over Company Men says that losing one’s job can be devastating on several levels, that unemployment requires lifestyle cutbacks, that older men need sometimes need the jolt of an affair to feel alive, that job-seekers frequently fall into denial and despair, and that this country’s inability to compete in the honest making of things amounts to a huge spiritual deficit.

“Yeah — agreed, agreed. But I kind of knew or suspected all of this. And yet the movie confines itself in an upper middle-class ghetto that feels — I’m going to steal a line from Camille Paglia — so lacking in ‘the lurid pagan truth about life.'”

“There’s no madness, no sexual intrigue to speak of, no wily characters, no humor, no violence, no fist fights, and no Sopranos-style aplomb in portraying the grim or ironic undercurrent of things among suburbanites with power and money, etc.

“Company Men is obviously occupying a portion of the same turf as Up In The Air minus the Clooney-and-Farmiga charm, the emotional resonance, the air miles, the sharp dialogue and the smartly angled characters.

“Kevin Costner has a smallish role in Company Men as the house-renovating brother of Affleck’s wife, played by Rosemary DeWitt. He doesn’t have very many lines, but I wish the story had been mostly about him because he’s easily the most appealing personality on the boat. The second most engaging performance is given by Craig T. Nelson as the blunt-spoken CEO of the company whose cost-trimming decisions cause all the grief.

“I’m genuinely sorry to have said most of this. A team of smart, sophisticated and well-intentioned people made Company Men, but it’s an absolute stiff in terms of real-world theatrical potential. I could see watching Company Men on HBO on a Sunday evening and going ‘yeah, not half bad,’ but I wouldn’t dream of recommending it as a movie to go out and pay $12 bucks to see plus parking and popcorn.”