In a just-posted discussion with Ain’t It Cool’s Mr. Beaks, Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn has shared an observation about Aaron Johnson‘s performance as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy, which Vaughn has seen.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi and Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy.

Vaughn: I nearly postponed the movie for a year because I couldn’t find Dave Lizewski [the lead character in Kick-Ass]. I just couldn’t find Kick-Ass. It was a Friday morning, and I said to the guys, ‘We’re going back to London tonight, and we’re postponing the movie until we figure out who’s playing Dave.’ Then Johnson came in, who, mark my words, is going to be a huge movie star.

“I just saw Nowhere Boy, where he plays John Lennon, and it is a ten-out-of-ten performance. The whole film is fantastic, but he is phenomenal in it. I actually feel like a juvenile moron for what I did to that kid compared to what he does in that film.

Beaks: “What sort of qualities does he bring to the character?

Vaughn: “He has that charisma where you believe every word he says. He can also stand in front of the camera and say nothing, but you still want to watch him. He’s fun. The actor I think he’ll become is Robert Downey, Jr. He’s very similar to him.”

Nowhere Boy is slated for a 2010 release. Beaks remarks that “if Johnson is as good as Vaughn says, I wonder if the Weinstein Co. will consider moving this film into 2009 for a run at Best Actor (especially if Nine turns out to be troublesome).”

“I’m trying to think of another American comedy that has this kind of vigor and springy step,” I said this morning during a breakfast interview with In The Loop director Armando Iannucci. “The overwhelming majority of American comedies are geared for guys like Turtle on Entourage, and they don’t have a fraction of the mental alertness, that special Preston Sturges-like quality, that In The Loop has.”

I forgot to snap a photo this morning of In The Loop director Armando Iannucci, but this is where we sat for breakfast at the Cooper Union hotel.

I also remarked that “if I was a major comedian — if I were a Jim Carrey or a Steve Martin — I would consider it vital to somehow work with you somewhere down the line. Sooner or later. There are just not that many people who know how to do this sort of thing, or even care to do this sort of thing well. The lines are just snap-snap-snap. Like Sullivan’s Travel or The Lady Eve.”

Seven months after enjoying an uproarious debut at the ’09 Sundance Film Festival, In The Loop — easily one of the sharpest and funniest potty-mouth comedies about governmental inanity and media mis-speak ever made — is finally about to open. IFC is doing one of their simultaneous indie-level theatrical and IFC On Demand preems on 7.24.

I posted my first Iannucci interview (including an mp3) on 1.13, when George Bush was still president. And now I’ve done another one.

With an invitational Manhattan screening-and-after-party of In The Loop set for this evening, I sat down this morning with Iannucci at the Cooper Square hotel.

In The Loop director-writer Armando Iannucci, costar James Gandolfini.

In The Loop costars Peter Capaldi, James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander, David Rashe, Gina McKee, Chris Addison, Anna Chulmsky and Mimi Kennedy. It’s basically about how the media can sometimes focus on a gaffe by an official or spokesperson and make it sound (via sheer repetition and obsession) to represent firm government policy concerning this or that major issue.

In The Loop‘s major issue is a potential military conflict involving U.S. and British troops — think Iraq in late ’02 and early ’03. The humor is about how various second- and third-tier government types in London and Washington try to dodge, maneuver and counter-spin their way around an essentially meaningless statement by a British cabinet minister that war is “unforeseeable.” Meaningless and yet strangely meaningful once the media gets hold of it. And the source of endless misery for many people.

“One of the most robust pleasures of In The Loop,” I said this morning, “is the wonderfully creative and liberal use of absolutely disgusting profanity. It’s really some of the funniest uses of it. Was every word of it pretty much scripted?”

“More or less, yeah,” Iannucci replied. “You do improvisation, but that’s just to loosen it up and make it feel more natural. But with Malcolm’s…with Malcolm’s swearing, it has to be so precisely done. He does it syllable for syllable, precisely as on the page.

“I’ve tried to describe that sense of absolute certainty that comes when you’re watching a comedy that is absolutely working,” I continued. “To get that feeling one of two things seem to have happened. One is that al the actors have gone to some kind of comedy boot camp and had it drilled into them that there’s a certain attitude that energy that they all need to absorb and radiate, because they’re all of a piece.”

I love how Iannucci, who is Scottish-British, says “Pentagen” rather than “Penta-gone.

“Simply put, Criterion’s Blu-ray of Roman Polanski‘s Repulsion outperforms every other release I have seen. Contrast is excellent, clarity very impressive and detail simply fantastic. The color-scheme is also superb – blacks are deep and lush while whites are gentle and natural looking. Additionally, this is a pure, unfiltered print with plenty of healthy grain.” Plenty? Healthy? “To sum it all up, Criterion’s Blu-ray release is nothing short of a revelation.” — from Svet Atanasov‘s 7.10 review on Blu-ray.com.

Here‘s Gary Tooze‘s review and version comparisons on DVD Beaver.

Amazon UK has a PAL version of Warner Home Video’s North by Northwest Bluray being released on 11.16.09.

The Towering Inferno was entertaining crap when it opened 35 years ago, and the exact same deal applies now that it’s on Blu-ray. But Paul Newman and Steve McQueen are honorable and oak-solid in their starring roles. This is impressive given the fact that neither actor has a real part to play — they were just paid to show up and go through the Irwin Allen paces. They knew it then and we know it now, but they deliver the goods anyway. That’s professionalism and star power.

There are four ways that brand-name actors deliver straight-paycheck performances in mediocre big-studio films. One, they do it straight and plain and cruise by on chops and charisma, like McQueen and Newman. Two, they do it straight and plain and don’t cruise by on chops and charisma — they sink into the movie like quicksand and slowly suffocate. Three, they behave in an extremely mannered and very actorish way as a way of telegraphing to the audience that they are totally aware that they’re in a crap film, and that they want everyone to know that they know this. And four, they go beyond mannered and go waay over the top (like Jon Voight in Anaconda) and turn their performances into inspired farce.

Examples of any of the above?

“The Palinist ‘real America’ is demographically doomed to keep shrinking,” notes N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich. ” But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Sarah Palin enjoyed stoking during her ‘palling around with terrorists’ crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Illustration by Barry Blitt.

“These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.”

Last night some friends and I sat down with the recently-released DVD of Lonely Are the Brave. I haven’t seen it since ’96 but it really and truly works. Still. It’s an honest, well constructed, beautifully shot (in ravishing black-and-white Scope), deeply sad film with small servings of comic absurdism on the part of the secondary lawmen characters (i.e., not Walter Matthau‘s but everyone else).

Lonely Are The Brave is probably Kirk Douglas‘s finest film, and his performance as the sentimental but obstinate Jack Burns is argbualy the best of his career. (Although my favorite Douglas performance is still his Colonel Dax in Paths of Glory.) There’s a tribute doc on the DVD with Douglas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Douglas and costar Gena Rowlands praising it as an unsung gem.

And you can only get this sublime little film through mail order. The DVD isn’t buyable in any retail store in Manhattan, or at least none that I could find. (I took the F train to Brooklyn yesterday and snagged a copy from Glenn Kenny.) It’s not in the few DVD stores that remain in business (a fast-dwindling number) because it’s regarded as such a fringe title that it’s not even worth stocking. Terrific. Wonderful news. Let’s all drive down to the plex and go see I Love You Beth Cooper, and then get together outside and take turns committing suicide with a samurai sword.

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke ran a boxoffice update yesterday that said Bruno, which enjoyed a strong $14.2 million Friday kickoff, experienced a devastating 37% Friday-to-Saturday dropoff, resulting in a dispiriting $9 million Saturday haul.

So instead of Bruno earning a potential $40 million or so (which would be indicated by Friday’s earnings, no?) the comedy will finish this evening with about $30 million (a per-screen average of $10,881 in 2,757 situations). That’s okay from a certain perspective but throw in Bruno‘s reported “C” rating from CinemaScore and you have two clear indications that Bruno has no future– that it’s all downhill from here on.

Why the 37% dropoff and “C” score? The Borat retread factor (i.e., been-there, done-that). The brusque and somewhat misanthropic tone (particularly in the Ron Paul sequence). The lack of genuinely hilarious moments. What has everyone heard, felt, detected, observed? A journalist friend told me this morning about reports of walkouts — has anyone witnessed any?

In Michael Powell‘s N.Y. Times profile of Andrew Sarris, it is noted that the legendary film critic has been entirely cut loose by the N.Y. Observer. Which wasn’t supposed to happen. Life is hard and people lie. The solution, of course, is for Sarris to immediately switch to an online berth. As I wrote about his situation on 6.11, “All writers need to keep on chooglin’ until they drop. There is no spoon and there is no retirement.”

The initial reports on 6.10 and 6.11 were that diminishing revenues had forced Sarris’s Observer editors to whack him. It was soon after reported by Dave Kehr, who’d spoken to Sarris’s author-critic wife Molly Haskell, that rumors of Sarris’s dismissal were “not true” and that he would”continue to write on a freelance basis, exactly as Rex Reed does currently.”

A reversal of strategy only three or four weeks later suggests that the editor who assured Sarris/Haskell that everything would be more or less jake (albeit on a freelance basis) was being disingenuous.

“There’s a part of me that looks beyond everything now,” Sarris tells Powell. “I don’t approve of Woody Allen‘s view of death. I acknowledge it, but I hope there’s more time, as there’s a lot of movies I’d like to see and think about.”

What Woody Allen view would that be exactly? The only one I can think of is “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work — I want to achieve it by not dying.”

I said last month that writing is brutal or difficult or at least a slog for most of us, but not writing is a death sentence. Writing keeps you in the game, sharpens your mind, makes you inquisitive, feeds the engine, keeps you on your toes, etc. It is the only thing for a writer to do.

You can tell within seconds that John Huston‘s Moby Dick understands the look and culture of mid 19th Century New England, and that you’re in the company of seasoned actors and a sturdy script. I’ve been a fool for this film for years, largely due to my love for Oswald Morris‘s desaturated half-color, half black-and-white scheme, achieved by the blending of a color and a monochrome negative in post.

If you’d asked me a few years ago (sometime, say, between ’01 and ’03) if I thought Mary Louise Parker was a firecracker, I would’ve said, “Uhh, well…she’s attractive but not really.” MLP used to be a semi-struggling actress who did solid work in films like Fried Green Tomatoes and Angels In America, and on-stage in productions like Proof. Then she began starring in Weeds four years ago and now she’s totally reinvented as smokin’ material.

More power and all that, but this Esquire snap sums it up.