With the apparent theatrical demise of I Love You, Phillip Morris, the somewhat weird, no-laugh-funny but certainly respectable Jim Carrey-Ewan MacGregor gay farce, being reported, recapping my original 1.19.09 Sundance review seems fair:

“The tone of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa‘s I Love You Phillip Morris is hard to describe. It’s a kind of dark comedy (i.e., there are bits that are intended to draw laughter), but since it’s a tale of obsessive gay loony love there’s really not that much to ‘laugh’ at,” I began.

“But there’s conviction in it — the emotions are as real as it gets — and the performances by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as the lovers are intense and out-there and fully grounded. Nobody’s putting anyone on, I mean.

“The tone is somewhere between high-toned soap opera and hyper-real absurdism, but it’s more or less fact-based. And the things that make it respectable and worthy and bold (which I feel it definitely is) are the sad moments, the irrational I-love-you acts, the bad behavior, the hurt. It’s nuts, this movie, and that’s what I liked about it.

“Love is strange, silly, demeaning, glorious, heartbreaking. A drug and a tidal wave that can destroy as easily as restore. And I Love You Phillip Morris is not laughing at this. At all. It’s a movie with balls and dicks and loads of heart and soul.

“I like this line from the Sundance notes: ‘As a primer on the irresistible power of a man who is either insane or in love (is there a difference?), I Love You Phillip Morris surely serves to remind us of the resilience of the human spirit.’

“Longtime writing partners Ficarra and Requa are making their directing debut with this. It’s based based on the true-life tale of Steve Russell (Carrey), a onetime married police officer turned gay Texan con man, and his passionate love he shares with ‘blonde southern queer’ named Phillip Morris (McGregor) whom he meets in prison, where he’s been sent for credit card fraud.

“Carrey’s website says that ‘after reading the script, he immediately signed to do the movie, explaining that there have been only three scripts that he truly felt compelled to do — The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and this.

“‘The film had a very low budget, estimated to be just $14 million,’ it reads. ‘It was initially to be directed by Gus Van Sant, but he dropped out to make Milk. So Carrey agreed to let Ficarra and Requa direct. The financing is from director Luc Besson‘s EuropaCorp. The filmmakers hope to sell domestic rights at the Sundance Film Festival.”

If you understand and agree with the concept of life improving as you get older (as long as you live it like Clint Eastwood, that is — amply funded, constant flexing of creative muscles, working out daily, cracking jokes and all that), leaving this mortal coil at age 70 is, I feel, a profoundly sad thing. Yesterday’s departure of 70 year-old actress Dixie Carter (Designing Women, That Evening Sun, Desperate Housewives) is noted in this context. A spokesperson wouldn’t say where or how, but husband Hal Holbrook‘s use of the term “tragedy” rather than, say, “quiet passing” suggests that she met with an unexpected, unfair-seeming affliction.

How could the sharp decrease in Clash of the Titans dollars this weekend (off 68% yesterday morning) not be expected with the murky faux-3D? It’s hardly the fault of Sam Worthington (who, by the way, has a massive, buffalo-sized head, as do most movie stars). Clash was off 68% yesterday morning but the overall weekend drop may be less. Date Night, the #1 film, did $9.3 million Friday on approximately 4,600 screens for an average of $2021, or $2756 if you’re going by “engagements.”

Now that I’ve located some decent Chrysler building machine-gun footage from Larry Cohen‘s Q: The Winged Serpent, it should be a small matter for some enterprising CG whiz kid to find the right clips of Russell Brand and paste them onto one of the two cops who get eaten. (You first have to get past the Michael Moriarty-Cathy Clark argument scene at the beginning.)

This trailer is brilliant, by the way. Inspired. Particularly the transition from Richard Roundtree‘s line (“What I wanna know is, how the hell does this tie in with the murders and mutilations?) to Candy Clark‘s “whah?” expression.

This pic is more than a month old (snapped at Vanity Fair‘s post-Oscar bash) and no big deal, but I was struck by (a) Katy Perry‘s look of tingly delight and transportation and (b) a thought that it’s awfully nice to be the recipient of such a gaze. Then again these inner-light expressions tend to happen more often within the first few months of a relationship than after a year or two or three. Perry has been with Russell Brand, a three-time winner of the Sun‘s shagger of the year award, since September ’09, so that fits.

Then again Perry may have spotted the photographer, knew a shot was coming and decided to slightly “act” the part of a love-struck, recently engaged fiance. Just as Brand decided to act the part of a cool hawk-eyed hustler, scanning the room for his next opportunity.

President Barack Obama‘s likely nominee to replace retiring Chief Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is said to be solicitor general (and former Harvard Law School dean) Elena Kagan. The general understanding is that she’s (a) quite brilliant, (b) ideologically centrist if not conservative (Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday that “replacing Stevens with Kagan would shift the Supreme Court substantially to the right on a litany of key issues”), and (c) openly gay.

If Kagan is in fact nominated Team Obama will be viewed as having gone the cautious if not vaguely chickenshit route, considering that Kagan’s conservative leanings will make it hard for Republicans to sqawk all that loudly and will deprive them of an election-year issue. Unless, of course, they want to play the anti-gay bigot card.

Yesterday’s posting about that Nike/Tiger Woods ad led me to an anonymously-penned piece about infidelity in the current Esquire. The opening reads as follows:

“I’ll tell you why I cheat. I need to. Infidelity makes me remember things. The details that expand to fill my life (my upcoming performance reviews, the aches and pains of training, the recovery of my 401(k) ) and the ones that deaden it (my guilt, my smug self-satisfaction, my fake epiphanies about my progress in this life) — all of that drops away when I look down at the naked spine of an unfamiliar woman, twisting slightly in the late-afternoon sunlight streaming onto the sheets of a Hampton Inn in some nameless suburb.

“This is the most absolute choice I can make. I am there on my own. Against every code, rule, and set of mores I pretend to obey. Against better judgment, against every lesson of hindsight and every shard of wisdom that comes with age, I have no regrets in that moment, because I am naked, or without pants, and I have chosen to be there. I have voted by my presence, declared it, and I feel the blood moving in me again. So it’s the blood. That’s who I am. That’s why men cheat.

“Men don’t cheat because they can. Men cheat because they must, because they need to. This is the male struggle. Need compels us to try again. Because copulation is not in any way about fate. It is not about two individuals destined to meet on some dark night. It’s about random collisions.

“If you cheat, you must believe this much: that fated love is a lie, and monogamous love a deception. If you cheat, these two sentiments are your guiding light. Doesn’t mean you’re incapable of love, doesn’t mean you don’t want what love — or even marriage — can offer. It’s just a paradox. You have what you believe, and it is never the lie. You train your sentiment to fit inside the lie. Your rules fit right inside that sentiment.”

“The odds greatly favor death coming with a sudden terrible shock,” a friend once told me, “or from a long agonizing illness.” Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria, and several Polish political and military leaders have ducked the second scenario. Their plane hit a treetop as it attempted a landing in heavy fog this morning near Smolensk, about 225 miles southwest of Moscow, and then broke apart and exploded into flames. Awful. The mind reels.

Polish president Lech Kaczynski, Barack Obama in 2009.

Kaczynski, 61, was arriving in Smolensk “for a ceremony commemorating the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Red Army as it invaded Poland,” a N.Y. Times story reports. TV footage “showed chunks of flaming fuselage scattered in a bare forest. An official with the Russia’s Investigative Committee said possible causes were bad weather, mechanical failure and human error.

“The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, killing what may be a tenth of country’s top leadership in one fiery explosion.”

Polish president Lech Kaczynski and wife Maria

Russell Crowe is credited as co-producer of Robin Hood (Universal, 5.14) alongside Brian Grazer and director Ridley Scott, and is nothing if not proud of the on-screen result, writes the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Peter Fitzsimons.

“So proud that this will be the first of his many films that he will allow his sons, Charlie and Tennyson, to watch. ‘I think it would be confusing for them to see me in films, just as it is confusing for them to see people stop me on the street and ask for autographs,’ Crowe says. ‘But I want them to see this one. Really, all kids have gotta see Robin Hood. It is important to grow up with that thing in your mind.'”

A concept, he means, of a “really normal” fellow with an aptitude for exceptionalism.

“Robin is not a superhero,” he explains. “He doesn’t have a cape. He’s normal. He’s just a bloke. But he’s a man who’s seen a lot of things and understands how it all works. [Going back and forth to the Crusades] he’s been through France, been through Italy, seen the control of the church, been through Greece and he understands that democracy works. He’s seen all of the great empires of his time, come back to his own country and realizes that his own people are the poorest of all, and that things must change.”

In short, Robin Hood is not a film for the likes of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, etc. For Robin Hood is about nothing if not a certain economic fairness, the redistribution of wealth, forcing the moneyed elite to do the right thing by society’s lessers. Sounds an awful lot like socialism to me!