A 6.24 CNET report by Erica Ogg about the dropped-call complaints dogging the iPhone 4 explains the basic beef — i.e., touching the metal antenna band that runs around the iPhone 4, especially if you’re holding the iPhone 4 in your left hand, “interrupts reception, slowly causing the phone to lose its signal.”

There’s a solution, apparently, in the rubber bumper (which costs about $30 bills) that fits around the phone. I was given one and I haven’t had any dropped-call issues…yet. But it is rather sickening to consider that a highly touted device like this would actually drop calls due to touching the lower left part of the metal band with your naked skin. I mean, I spent most of the day in line to buy this device and a development of this kind is appalling. The Apple guys should be brought up on charges.

I have a complaint about the iPhone 4.0 that nobody’s mentioned yet. It won’t synch with your computer unless you use the new white cord that connects the phone to a USB plug (which also fits into a square wall-socket plug) that comes in the 4.0 box. In other words you can’t synch the new iPhone to your computer, or so I’ve discovered (and have been told by Apple techies), with the identical white USB cord that worked just fine with the previous iPhone models (3GS, 3G, etc.).

So the four USB cords I’ve bought over the last couple of years — I like to have extras just in case — are worthless with the new model. Thanks, guys!

Fox News anchorperson Jane Skinner, famed worldwide for that hilarious 2006 Freudian slip, is leaving her job to become a traditional wife and mom. That’s nice, but imagine if a male newscaster had said that his life “over the last twelve years has changed significantly in wonderful ways…I added a wife who’s become [a serious big shot], and who has a job even busier than mine. I have twin daughters, so to do justice to this new life I’ve decided to take a break from the business.”

You’re not supposed to say this, but professional women in pretty much any realm have this great escape clause they can turn to if they’re so inclined. And it seems a little weird that these drop-out decisions are completely accepted some 40 years after the launch of the women’s movement. Society is totally cool with highly competitive, generously compensated, top-of-their-field female professionals doing a sudden 180 and becoming June Cleaver at the drop of a hat. I mean, nobody blinks an eye.

I’ve been waiting in line to buy the iPhone 4.0 since 6:55 am this morning. Currently at 14th and Washington, or about 200 yards from the Apple store at 14th and Ninth Avenue. 200-plus people ahead of me. It’s 9:23 am right now and the line is nudging along. I’ll have the phone and be heading home by 12 or 12:30…maybe. Free Smart water bottles being passed out. The advance-reservation phone line is two to three times longer than the impulsive walk-in line, and the latter line is nudging along also. Is that fair? Doesn’t seem to be. I talked to a guy who got in line at 4 am. What is our life? I don’t know but this my life right at this instant — a T-shirt-wearing sidewalk monkey tapping out Twitter posts and now a column item. Thank God and nature for the breezes coming off the Hudson.

Some might know of a 1984 Steve Martin movie called The Lonely Guy. It was inspired by a nifty, morose little book by Bruce Jay Friedman called The Lonely Guy’s Guide to Life (1978). All those forlorn Hollywood Elsewhere guys out there need to be at least familiar with this thing. Because this book is the Holy Grail of that three-in-the-morning LexG thing.

In her review of Martin’s film, N.Y. Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that Friedman’s book “didn’t have any plot to speak of [and] the film version doesn’t either, though not for lack of trying. The Lonely Guy can certainly be funny; the idea of a New York in which bachelors bellow from the rooftops for their lost girlfriends or drop like flies off the Manhattan Bridge, has its bleak appeal. Unfortunately, the screenplay, which is by Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels from an adaptation by Neil Simon, doesn’t even begin to sustain this droll humor. It tries a little bit of everything, and winds up with an air of messy desperation.”

Silence continues to emanate from Warner Home Video about its weird suppression of Ken Russell‘s The Devils, which I reported about yesterday. Last Sunday I rented this 1971 film for iPhone viewing, a day or two before WHV withdrew it from iTunes, and it looked beautiful, obviously indicating that WHV put serious money into remastering it. But they’re now keeping this major film by a respected director from being seen. Okay, by a relatively small (but fanatical) nation of film buffs, but it’s the principal of the thing. Suppressing a film crosses ethical lines.

Presumably a certain Warner Bros. bigwig hates the film and has said “no way…Warner Home Video is not issuing this film…not on my watch.” (Or so the rumble goes.) Either he’s afraid of some sort of adverse reaction by the religious right or he just hates it himself, I’m guessing. In doing this he’s standing, of course, alongside a long line of uglies who’ve made similar calls in the name of governmental or political prohibition. Does he really want to be identified in this light?

This person is personalizing an issue that is of great interest and concern to tens of thousands. He may have the power to suppress circulation of The Devils but he doesn’t have the right to do this. His personal feelings don’t (or shouldn’t) matter. What matters is the right of film lovers to savor valuable films, and the right of filmmakers to see their work distributed as widely as possible. It’s morally wrong to stand in the way of this.

There’s an equitable solution, of course. Warner Bros. simply needs to sub-license the film to someone like Criterion or MPI or Acorn Media — one of those guys. It would be nice if WHV could at least say if discussions have happened along these lines, or if they’re open to same.

“I enjoyed and admired Angela Ismailos’ Great Directors when I saw it at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival,” I wrote on 4.8.10. “A concise and well-shot personal tribute doc about Bernardo Bertolucci, Agnes Varda, Stephen Frears, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach and John Sayles, it’s clearly an intelligent and nourishing tutorial — a Socratic inquiry about what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to making lasting films.”

Great Directors director-producer Angela Ismailos, Paladin Films chief Mark Urman at Tuesday night’s MOMA after-party. The doc opens in New York on 7.2, and in Los Angeles on 7.9.

Los Angelenos with an academic interest in Winter’s Bone star Jennifer Lawrence will be able to catch a pair of live q & a’s she’ll be doing this weekend. The first will be on Friday, 6.25, at the Landmark 12 following a 7:30 pm screening, and the second at Hollywood’s Arclight on Saturday, 6.26, after the 7:40 pm show.

Calls about who gets to see which early-peek screening of a major film have always led to grumbling. It was revealed today, for instance, that Warner Bros. flacks have already shown Inception to Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, and I know that another major critic was given a recent looksee in Los Angeles. I don’t know about any further screenings this week or next, but I know there’s one in Manhattan the following week for a relatively select group.

Hollywood Elsewhere will be catching an all-media showing on Tuesday, 7.13 — three days before the big nationwide opening. In a big Manhattan theatre although not, I’m told, in IMAX, which sounds to me like the only way to see this thing. I guess that means I’ll be seeing it in IMAX on opening day. I’ll need to see it twice anyway, given what Travers is saying about it being “too smart” for the schmoes and “turning your head six ways from Sunday.”

We all know, of course, that with all the buzz chasing Inception that those seeing it the week after next will be blogging and Twittering about it almost immediately, no matter what terms may be requested or demanded, and that the trades (along with Indiewire‘s Todd McCarthy) will definitely post reviews on the weekend before the big opening on Friday, 7.16. We know they’ll do this.

In short, those catching the 7.13 screening won’t be among the first wave of commenters. They’ll be part of the second wave. Not that big a deal, right? I guess not. But the yen to see the Next Hot Movie sooner rather than later can be intense.

Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers has seen Chris Nolan‘s Inception (Warner Bros., 7.16) and handed out a 3 and 1/2 star review, according to N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick. Wait…why 3 and 1/2? Why not four stars? What’s the issue or aspect that Travers — not exactly regarded as the world’s most blistering critic — isn’t fully delighted with?

“[Travers’] review isn’t on the magazine’s website yet,” Lumenick writes, “so I’m going to quote his first lengthy paragraph:

“The mind-blowing movie event of the summer arrives just in time to hold back the flow of Hollywood sputum that’s been sliming the multiplex,” Travers begins. “Inception…will be called many things, starting with James Bond Meets The Matrix. You can feel the vibe of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner in it, and Nolan’s own Memento and The Dark Knight. But Inception glows with a blue-flame intensity all its own.

“Nolan creates a dream world that he wants us to fill with our own secrets . I can’t think of a better goal for any filmmaker. Of course, trusting the intelligence of the audience can cost Nolan at the box office. We’re so used to being treated like idiots. How to cope with a grand-scale epic, shot in six countries at a reported cost of $160 million, that turns your head around six ways from Sunday? Dive in and drive yourself crazy, that’s how.”

In other words, some of us (i.e., the ones who used to get Bs and Cs in pop quizzes in high school, like myself) may have to see Inception twice — once to get the basics down, and a second time to fully figure it out.

Travers’ review seems to be “predicting this expensive movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon Levitt may play be too smart to rack up numbers anything like The Dark Knight ,” Lumenick writes. “But he sure makes it sound intriguing.”

Everybody’s got it wrong on the moving-up-the-Oscar-telecast story, I’ve just been told. The confusion stems from Nikki Finke‘s just-posted story (i.e., last night) about the proposed idea of moving the Oscar telecast back to January. But the proposal — hello? — applies to the 84th Oscar Awards , which will air in early 2012. The locked-in date for the 2010 Oscar telecast (i.e., the 83rd award ceremony) is 2.27.11 — period. Announced, consecrated, set in stone.

I was persuaded that Finke’s story is wrong — i.e., was wrongly interpreted — by L.A. Times columnist Pete Hammond, who just called me ten minutes ago. Backdating the telecast to late January 2011, he says, “would throw an already established and announced schedule — including foreign-language eligibility and everything else — would throw everything into utter chaos. The house of cards would totally crumble. If this was real it would look like the Academy has lost their minds. The Academy is too conservative to do things on a whim like this, especially with ABC television tied in to this. This change, if adopted, has to apply to 2012, not 2011.”