In a 4.30 piece that includes some thoughts about the forthcoming Bluray of George Cukor‘s A Star Is Born (1954), N.Y. Times contributors Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek note that Judy Garland “looks badly used up here” and “is just not believable as a fresh young star.”

In a 4.22 HE posting I wrote that Garland “was born in June 1922, and was between 31 and 32 years old when she made A Star Is Born. That’s fairly young in my book, but she looks closer to 40 in the film, certainly by today’s standards. She certainly doesn’t look like a young actress-singer just breaking through, which is what Esther Blodgett is supposed to be. She looks stressed, worn down and plain with a too-short haircut and her chin starting to disappear — there’s a straight line between the tip of her chin and the base of her neck. Garland had lived a tough life up that point, and it didn’t get any more peaceful. She died in 1969 at age 47 — barely into middle age.”

James Franco‘s Saturday Night, which screened this afternoon under the aegis of the Tribeca Film Festival, is a highly intelligent, interesting, amusing, and very decently assembled doc about how the Saturday Night Live team puts a show together. The problem — mine, not the film’s — is that I wrote a full review a few hours ago only to see it wiped out due to not having saved it when Firefox decided to collapse out of the effin’ blue. And I don’t care enough to re-write it. Not now anyway. Too bummed.

Saturday Night director James Franco (far left) and Entertainment Weekly writer David Karger (far right) during a q & a following a 3 pm screening at the DGA theatre on West 57th Street. That’s Kenan Thompson, of course, in the middle. Many people know the other guy and the girl, I presume — I just don’t happen to be one of them. I only watch SNL sporadically.

I can at least force this out: Franco has shot and cut his film with a sharp observational eye, and seems to have gone with a moderately laid-back, come-what-may, go-with-the flow strategy. Which is more or less how the preparation of the show goes, so it all fits. I came away with a newfound respect for Lorne Michaels and the gang.

The SNL process is a bitch. 50 sketches pitched on Monday, a reading on Wednesday, Lorne Michaels and his producers choosing nine finalists, two days or refining and rehearsals, a full-dress performance before a crowd early Saturday night to see what works and what doesn’t, and then the final airing at 11:30 pm. A day of non-rest for the eternally weary on Sunday, and then right back into it on Monday.

I just can’t get past having lost what I wrote. I’m so angry I can’t think.

Please forgive the quality of these two video clips. I forgot the trusty Canon SD 1400 IS; had to shoot with the iPhone.

Last night I attended a special Tribeca Film Festival screening of Amir Bar-Lev‘s The Tillman Story (Weinstein Co., 8.20) — far and away one of the finest films I’ve seen this year, and a likely contender for the 2010 Best Feature Documentary Oscar. I know it’s early but this movie has the stuff that engages and holds and sinks in deep.

I felt just as stirred up last night — seething, close to tearful — as I was after my initial Sundance viewing three months ago. Because this is not a film about the Middle East conflict but about a stand-up American family and how they responded (and continue to respond) to an orchestrated governmental obscenity that tried to diminish the memory of a fallen son.

I’m speaking, of course, of former Arizona Cardinals safety and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, and particularly his April 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan — a result of his being shot three times in the head by a fellow U.S. soldier. It happened because of the usual idiotic confusion, and some young intemperate guys who wanted to be in a fire fight and acted foolishly in the heat of the moment. Tillman was enraged that his own fellows were shooting at him, of course, and his last words were an attempt to get them to wake up — “I’m Pat fucking Tillman!”

The obscenity was the attempt in ’04 by the U.S. military and Bush administration to make political hay out of Tillman’s death by manufacturing a bullshit scenario that claimed he was killed by Taliban troops and that he died in an effort save his fellow troops.

Tillman Story producer John Battsek, narrator Josh Brolin following last night’s special screening of The Tillman Story.

Of course, 97% of American moviegoers are going to ignore The Tillman Story when it opens because (a) they’re resolutely opposed to seeing any film that has anything to do with the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan and (b) they don’t much like documentaries anyway, and (c) they just want to chill out and be entertained. The fact that The Tillman Story leaves you feeling angry and alive and engaged with the actual world will most likely have no effect on this determination

Producer John Battsek and narrator Josh Brolin did a q & a following the screening, which ended around 11:40 pm. Brolin, a good hombre, mentioned he’ll be doing Cannes promotional duty for five days, partly for Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street 2 and partly for Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

This was taken at last night’s final Tribeca Film Festival party, and in the immediate wake of the mystifying announcement about Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage having won the Audience Award. Why is it that every house DJ at every New York party plays wretched disco jizz? Tracks, I mean, that I would instantly turn off if I heard them on my car radio? The people who throw these parties pay these guys to make people like me suffer.

Scott McFadyen and Sam Dunn‘s Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage has just been named the winner of Tribeca Film Festival’s Audience Award. The doc isn’t bad, but Rush’s music, for me, is mute nostril agony and incessant torture. This award, trust me, is as much if not mostly about the fervor of Rush-heads stuffing the ballot box as an expression of general audience admiration for the film.

I just saw this trailer for Xavier Dolan‘s Les Amours Imaginaires, which was posted yesterday on the alternate Playlist. The analysis is correct: it is a Pedro Almodovar film. The plot is about Francis (Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) falling for the same guy — i.e., Nicolas (Neils Schneider). The Canadian-made feature reminds me of a 1977 Coline Serreau film called Pourqois Pas!.

Les Amours Imaginaires will play in the Un Certain Regard programming of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. No U.S. distributor as we speak, but opening in Canada in early June.

Schneider is almost as pretty as the young boy everybody wanted in Fellini Satyricon.

It suddenly hit me five minutes ago that I’ve never read Wlliam Monahan‘s London Boulevard script, so if anyone could forward…thanks. It’s pretty much finished, no distributor yet, presumably destined for distinction in the fall. That’s Colin Farrell, of course — a guy named Mitchell, just out of the slammer and fated to fall in love with Keira Knightley‘s Charlotte, the actress in the black-and-white photos, and run afoul of some gangster guy or guys (presumably played by Eddie Marsan or Ray Winstone).

The London-based crime drama also costars David Thewlis, Anna Friel, Ben Chaplin, Sanjeev Baskhar and Jamie Campbell Bower.

The above photo was first linked to by Awards Daily.

Pic is based on Ken Bruen‘s 2001 novel . Mitchell’s romantic interest in Bruen’s book is a 60 year-old reclusive actress named Lillian Palmer, so Monahan has definitely shuffled that element around. So Knightley will play…a reclusive 25 year-old actress?

Bruen’s book was described in a book-review synopsis as a “gritty reimagining of Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard, transplanting the action from glitzy Hollywood to the rough and tumble London streets…looking for an honest job, Mitchell finds work as a handyman for a wealthy and reclusive former stage beauty, Lillian Palmer, who lives in a sprawling estate with her taciturn butler, Jordan.”

Thewlis is playing Jordan in the film, and Friel is playing Briony, who is Palmer’s sister in the book but Farrell’s in the film.

Rodrigo Perez‘s constantly on-the-stick The Playlist has been missing for…what, two, three days now? Google shut him down over a DMCA violation of some kind. In the meantime, here’s an alternate Playlist.

Within the trappings of its somewhat old-school, ’60s widescreen-epic realm, David Lean‘s Dr. Zhivago (’65) has always been a nice warm schmaltz-bath — eye-filling, movingly scored, nicely edited, decently written and for the most part very well acted (especially by Tom Courtenay, Rod Steiger and bit player Klaus Kinski). And it looked quite good when the November 2001 DVD came out — play it on your plasma or LCD flatscreen and it’s still handsome as hell.

The new Bluray Zhivago, of course, is more desirable. More detail, delicacy, vibrancy. Cleaner, sharper, etc. I could go on and on about how this or that scene looks decidedly better due to this or that enhancement, but we all know what a well-mastered Bluray delivers, and what exacting technicians the Warner Bros. home video guys (led by Ned Price) have always been.

Price was in Manhattan earlier this week for some Dr. Zhivago promotional activities (including a 4.28 screening at the Tribeca Film Festival). He spoke to me on the phone for a few minutes on Thursday, and explained some of the challenges and aplications that brought about the necessary upgrade in the basic Zhivago elements. But I didn’t speak with Ned as long or as thoroughly as Glenn Kenny did for his 4.30 piece for The Auteurs. Read it and get back to me in the morning.

I’ll always have problems with that shot of the rainbow over the dam at the very end. To me it’s an attempt to give a nice, bright happy ending to a film that didn’t need one. The story is fairly melancholy throughout, always about longing and sometimes about finding relief or brief serenity, but mostly about the brutal forces of early Bolshevism interfering and destroying time and again. I only know that a glowing rainbow at the end of such a tale feels wrong.

And Lean’s quick cut to an electric power-line spark when Omar Sharif‘s Zhivago and Julie Christie‘s Lara brush against each other on a Moscow subway car is way too on-the-nose. A similar strategy was used by Alfred Hitchcock when he cut to fireworks during a Cary Grant–Grace Kelly love scene, but there the tone was strictly playful. On the other hand Lean, who’s telling a straightforward love story, appears to be offering a note of assurance. “Are these two are destined to fall in love or what?,” he seems to be saying. “I mean, my God, even the overhead subway wire can sense something’s up!”

Last night I attended a one-time-only film and music event at MOMA called Here [The Story Sleeps]. It sounds arty-farty, yes, but that was the point — come see an original multi-media presentation from some very committed and cool people, and try and figure it out.

I couldn’t quite manage that, but it was awfully pleasant to just let the avant-garde-ish sounds and images wash over and say to myself, “Yeah…this is cool and different, all right, which sort of makes me cool and different because I was invited to see it.”

It was basically a three-screen tryptich presentation of footage from a forthcoming feature called Here, a two-character relationship drama with Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal from director Braden King. The music was by Michael Krassner and the Boxhead Ensemble, and the projection design was by Deborah Johnson.

Here will be out sometime next year, King said in a q & a after the show. It was shot last year in Armenia, which makes it the first American feature ever filmed in that former Soviet republic. The film is described in the program as “a landscape-obsessed road-movie romance chronicling a brief but intensely affecting relationship between an American satellite-mapping engineer (Foster) and an expatriate Armenian art photographer (Azabal).”

I loved the triptych effect mixed with music, but I don’t know how inspired it was. You can take footage from any heavily covered film and break it into three reels, and then project the main footage on the main screen plus ancillary footage on the two adjoining walls, etc. And yet I haven’t seen a presentation quite like this anywhere, and if I have I’ve forgotten about it.

The Boxhead Ensemble was quite good, particularly the drummer. They had rehearsed extensively, they said, but their music sounded moody and ethereal and unstructured in a kind of improvised, half-Grateful Dead-y sort of way, which seemed just right.

The funding came from Creative Capital and Pomegranate Arts.

I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that Martin Scorsese‘s The King of Comedy came out 27 years ago. Robert De Niro‘s Rupert Pupkin represented, of course, a burgeoning mob obsession with celebrity that’s probably ten times more malignant today. The problem is that viewers have to spend 109 minutes with him — perhaps the most clueless and pathetic worm in cinematic history, and definitely with one of the worst haircut-and-moustache combos in any realm.

And yet this scene between De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott and the servants has never left my head. It’s agonizing, excruciating and sadly truthful all at once, and there’s no comfort to be had from any aspect of it. You just want the fucking scene to end, and yet it’s spellbinding.

I also love that scene when a fan begs Lewis to sign an autograph for a relative and he politely refuses, and she says “You should get cancer…I hope you get cancer!”

De Niro is a moron whom you can’t stand, but we’re all stuck with him. Lewis’s Jerry Langford, an old-school talk-show host by way of Johnny Carson, is stuck with Pupkin also and wants nothing more than to be rid of him, but you can sense that Langford isn’t very good company himself — he seems morose, resigned and more than a little contemptuous of his fans. (Perhaps, one suspects, like Lewis himself.) And forget Sandra Bernhard‘s Masha — a braying egoistic psycho.

And yet distasteful and unappealing as these characters are, they’ve somehow “grown” The King of Comedy into something more than what it was. The film has endured the test of of time because of people’s willingness to be tortured by it, year in and year out. It’s not just an uncomfortable film to sit through, but perhaps one of the most deeply uncomfortable viewing experiences with movie stars ever put before the public. I too am spelled by this quality, the way it makes me clear my throat and grind my teeth and feel faintly nauseous.

I’ve either trained myself to think this way or have been trained by the FSLC dweebs: The King of Comedy is a great film! Are the people who swear absolutely by each and every frame of Barry Lyndon (i.e., the ones who don’t share my “dead zone” issue) also King of Comedy devotees? Something tells me they are.

Has there ever been another lead character as chalk-on-the-blackboard detestable as Rupert Pupkin?