I noted last week that I found Robert Downey, Jr.’s appearance in Iron Man 2 irksome. All that base and mascara and tanning spray, and that prissy Van Dyke beard. Today I finally put my finger on it — he has a bit of that Cesare Danova-in-Cleopatra thing going on. That’s the only notable Van Dyke beard performance I could think of, but there must be others. I only know (or feel, at least) that in Downey’s careful clippings and waxy skin something icky this way comes.

(l. to r.) Robert Downey in Iron Man 2; Cesare Danova in Cleopatra; Leonard Frey in The Boys in the Band.

The fact that Iron Man 2 made $133.6 million this weekend is marketing, of course, but there’s no reasonable explanation for it having earned an “A” with CinemaScore. Not in my head at least. Sooner or later, I also feel, Downey will have to deliver a real performance in a good film and get away from this tentpole franchise crap that has recently consumed his energies. If I could will it with a wave I would have him play “Harold” in William Friedkin‘s The Boys in the Band — the role that Leonard Frey did so well with 40 years ago.

“What I am, Michael, is a 32 year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy, and if it takes me a little while to pull myself together, and if I smoke a little grass before I get up the nerve to show my face to the world, it’s nobody’s god damned business but my own. And how are you this evening?”

Isn’t a movie that fans the flames of the old “William Shakespeare didn’t really write all those plays” controversy a kind of literary birther flick, in a sense? Roland Emmerich‘s currently rolling Anonymous, which alleges that Edward De Vere (Rhys Ifans) was the actual author, strikes me as such.

Team Anonymous on the muddy Elizabethan set: (l. to r.) Mark Rylance, screenwriter John Orlov, Vanessa Redgrave, Roland Emmerich, Joely Richardson, Rafe Spall, David Thewlis, Rhys Ifans.

Pic is nonethless being called a “political thriller.” A friend who’s read John Orloff‘s screenplay says “this is the best screenplay I have read in ten years. It is clean and frightening and elegant — a kind of All The President’s Men set during the time of William Shakespeare. It’s a mind bender and very convincing. If it was not Emmerich but, say, Michael Mann or Ridley Scott directing we would already be engraving the Oscar — it’s that good. Luckily, Roland has brilliant actors pretty perfectly cast.”

What a curious side trip for Emmerich, given his usual wont.

The costars include Rafe Spall (Shakespeare), Vanessa Redgrave (Queen Elizabeth), Joely Richardson (Young Elizabeth), David Thewlis (William Cecil), Xavier Samuel (Southampton) and Mark Rylance (Gloucester, a Globe actor).

A 5.8 clip of Seymour Hersh speaking on 4.24 at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva about how Barack Obama is being “dominated by the military” on “Iran, Afghan and Pakistan,” is “following the policies of Bush and Cheney almost to a fare-thee-well,” and is “in real trouble.”

I’ll put up with chilly, buffeting Santa Ana winds for a day — but not two. Blowing my hair all to hell, putting scarves and sweaters and winter coats back into use. Eff you, Mother Nature. It’s early May, summer beckons and it’s like Montana in early March.

The image on the left — i.e, a red-haired Monica Vitti mildly intrigued by the idea of physical congress with a certain someone as she pauses at a bedroom door — is what comes to mind when I think of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (’64). The cover of the upcoming Criterion Bluray, by contrast, is the monk version of same. Monks are averse to sex; they wear brown robes and sandals, pray a lot and tend to the goats in the barn. They respect Vitti, of course, but they also fear her.

(l.) the 2008 British Red Desert Bluray vs. (r.) the forthcoming Criterion Bluray version, out on 6.22.

So a 48-inch tall Anakin Skywalker-type kid with a shaved head — not with the hang-ups but the special powers — is the Nickelodeon-sired hero of M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender (Paramount, 7.2)? Consider this excerpt from Brad Brevet ‘s two-day-old report about crowd reactions to the Airbender trailer: “[Started out excited] but quickly turned to impatience and a few boos when writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan’s name popped up.”

What has happened to the brilliant M. Night? I thought he was God after seeing Signs, which boldly made use of creepy silences that I thought was a landmark style thing. He alone seemed to understand that less could be a lot more. I even allowed myself to imagine that he might be made of the same genetic code that informed Hitchcock and Kubrick. And now he’s made a feature for the Nickleodeon crowd?

We all know what took him down, of course. It was the debacle of Lady in the Water plus Mark Wahlberg talking to the plants in The Happening and the whole Andy Samberg Wahlberg-parody thing that followed.

“Air, Water, Earth, Fire. Four nations tied by destiny when the Fire Nation launches a brutal war against the others. A century has passed with no hope in sight to change the path of this destruction. Caught between combat and courage, Aang (Noah Ringer) discovers he is the lone Avatar with the power to manipulate all four elements. Aang teams with Katara (Nicola Peltz), a Waterbender, and her brother, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), to restore balance to their war-torn world,” blah blah.

I hate to admit this, but it looks as if The A-Team (a) might have its act together, (b) might know what it’s doing, and (b) might be mildly amusing. What scares me is that director Joe Carnahan started out eight years ago with the lean-and-mean Narc (’02) and then went totally insane four years later with Smokin’ Aces (’06), which indicates that his inner madman runs the show (as opposed to his inner film Catholic).

I realized upon seeing these teabagger bumper stickers early this afternoon on 81 South (“I want you to fight socialism,” etc.) that I’d never been within actual spitting distance of a live teabagger. A minority voice wanted to roll down the window and flip this guy off and scream “eff you!” The majority sentiment ruled, of course, so I slowed down, waited for him to pass on the right, got behind him and took a photo…except my Canon digital was dead so I hastily used the iPhone.

There are probably thousands of exceptionally bright kids attending Syracuse University, but the important thing in life isn’t innate brains or an elegant education — it’s curiosity. Curiosity is perhaps the most attractive human trait, and there seems to be a whole lot less of it now than before. Basic logic, it seems, is also on the ropes.

Example: Four minutes ago I ordered some breakfast at a local Syracuse U. bagel joint. I then asked the girls at the counter — one blonde, pigtailed and zaftig, the other fat and brown-haired with slightly blemished skin — if they knew of a local copy joint. “Copies?” the brown-haired girl said. Yeah, you know…a place that prints computer files on paper or make copies or whatever. “I’m not sure that they have that here,” she said. No copy place in a major college town? “I don’t go to college here,” she said.

This, I submit, is a blade of grass that indicates where a lot of kids are at today. If they’re not getting paid for it, and if it doesn’t feed into their immediate interest or friend-sphere or family environment or is otherwise right in front of their face, they don’t know about it and they don’t care to know. How many brain cells does it take to surmise that a college town will definitely have two or three copy places?

That said, I sympathize with anyone who isn’t the least bit curious about higher math. I hugely resent being put through years and years of torture in math and algebra and geometry classes in junior and senior high school because they’ve had any practical application in real life. If I have a math issue, I use my calculator — end of story. The educators who put me through my pre-pubescent and teenaged math classes were sadists, pure and simple.

A 5.7 N.Y. Times story by Patrick McGeehan reports that Verizon, the dominant local phone company in New York State, “asked regulators on Friday to allow it to end the annual delivery of millions of White Pages to all of its customers in New York. The company estimates that it would save nearly 5,000 tons of paper by ending the automatic distribution of the books.

Which means that those “those inches-thick tomes of fine-print telephone listings that may be most useful as doorstops, could stop landing with a thud on doorsteps across New York later this year,” McGeehan reports.

I haven’t skimmed through a paper phone book in well over a decade, but now they’re really history. McGeehan’s story signifies that the above joke in Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966) — one of the funniest lines I’d heard when I first saw Allen’s film on the tube in the early ’70s — is about to become extinct. It will no longer have even a fragmentary sense of relevancy or meaning in the physical world. It’ll be like a joke about hoop skirts or Model Ts or straight razors or bathtub gin.

“Only about one of every nine households uses the hard-copy listings anymore, according to Verizon, which cited a 2008 Gallup survey. Most have switched to looking up numbers online or calling directory assistance. The phone book for many people, it seems, has gone from indispensable tool to unavoidable nuisance.”