If I gave a damn about comic-book superhero geek culture, which I very proudly don’t, I’d be asking if the casting of Ryan Reynolds as the Green Lantern for Warner Bros. takes the wind out of the sails of the Deadpool movie he’s also supposed to star in for 20th Century Fox.

If you add the minor fantasy figure of Captain Excellent, the blonde-haired spandex superhero Reynolds played in Paper Man, which opened the Los Angeles Film Festival about three weeks ago, that makes three super-stud roles for the guy. Has any name actor ever played even two separate superheroes in the same approximate time period? If I were Reynolds I’d eighty-six Deadpool. No actor should do more than one.

The Lantern deal also means, of course, that we’re going to have two superhero movies with the word “green” in the title within two years of each other — The Green Lantern and Seth Rogen‘s Green Hornet movie. Isn’t that kind of dumb-sounding?? Is there any chance of George Clooney signing to play The Green Gzornplatt for Sony?

A friend sent me two links to two negative Hurt Locker reviews on Breitbart.com — review #1 and review #2. “Right-wing guys have a problem with this film,” I wrote back. “For whatever philosophical, physiological or emotional reason they can’t seem to roll with it. Obviously off on their own beam and preaching to a select chorus.”

“Agreed,” he said. “But thought you might want to put it up on your site and let your readers give ’em what for. Sometimes it’s informative to get opposing views. I would have thought the right-wingers would have rallied behind this film as an example of the bravery and focus of our troops, etc. But I guess unless a movie is directed by a right-winger like Cyrus N. it doesn’t pass the smell test with the conservative crowd.”

The Twitter crowd seems to like it.

The idea is to listen to the clip and name the film it’s taken from without thinking about it. If you can’t name it within 15 or 20 seconds, forget it.

Before this morning I’d honest-to-God never heard of Tiptoes, a 2003 dwarf movie with Matthew McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale, Peter Dinklage and Gary Oldman. I love how the second-rate narrator calls Oldman’s CG-enhanced acting “the performance of a lifetime.” (Thanks to HE reader Mark Smith.)

The primary impression you get from R.J. Cutler‘s doc, which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, is that Vogue editor Anna Wintour isn’t that much of a horror. It may be a gloss and she may have been performing, but that’s what comes across.

Charles Eastman, one of the most admired and gifted screenwriters of the ’60s and ’70s, has died at age 79. Initially an L.A. playwright, Eastman became a script doctor in his mid 30s on The Americanization of Emily, The Cincinnati Kid and This Property Is Condemned. He later wrote two screenplays that were produced — Little Fauss and Big Halsy and Second Hand Hearts — and a third, The All-American Boy, that he himself directed. He also wrote Honeybear, I Think I Love You, a never-produced piece about a romantically obsessed young weirdo.

Charles Eastman [photo courtesy of L.A. TImes]

The third installment in Matt Zoller Seitz‘s series on Michael Mann is up at the Museum of the Moving Image site. Seitz also has a pair of IFC.com reviews of the vaguely similar Bruno and Humpday.

“I finally got to see An Education after all your raves about it and I’m absolutely head over heels in love with this film,” Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling wrote a few minutes ago. “Ten minutes in I found myself in a state of movie nirvana that I hadn’t felt in years. There’s not a single false note, and all the performances are pitch perfect.

Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan in An Education

“Carey Mulligan, of course, is sublime and the leading contender at this point for Best Actress. Alfred Molina, Peter Sarsgaard, Olivia Williams and Dominic Cooper are all doing their best work. [Wells interjection: My favorite Williams performance is still in Rushmore.]

“But I was particularly taken with Rosamund Pike [who plays Cooper’s somewhat ditzy, arm-candy girlfriend]. That’s a difficult role. There’s a knowingness about this character despite the fact that she’s not supposed to be playing a smart one. At times I felt — delightfully — as if Pike was winking at us and letting us know of the sleight-of-hand she was performing. And it made the role sexier because of it.

“I’ve noticed how beautiful and talented this actress is in other movies, but she’s a knock-out in An Education. God, I hope she gets some recognition!”

Big frowns on N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith for giving a one-star review to the extremely ingratiating and perfectly acted Humpday — far and away a better film that Bruno or anything else opening this weekend. Humpday currently has an 88% positive rating from Rotten Tomatoes and a 74% positive from Metacritc.

The only other major critic in Smith’s corner is the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt, whom Humpday‘s Mark Duplass and Josh Leonard refer to in this 7.6 Movieline chat with Kyle Buchanan:

Duplass: To me, [the response to Humpday] was pretty similar to the way that The Puffy Chair came out for us. It was a very little movie and there weren’t a lot of expectations about the film going in, so it was able to be a surprise hit, which is just the best place you can be: [The critics are] either going to give you a good review if they liked it, or if they didn’t like it, they won’t say anything because you’re just a little movie. No one’s gonna go out of their way to bash a $20,000 movie.

Leonard: Well, one guy at the Hollywood Reporter, he did.

Buchanan: He gave you a bad review?

Leonard: He eviscerated us.

Duplass That’s just ’cause I wouldn’t have sex with him in the bathroom.

“[Michael] Jackson‘s body is still missing his brain, which coroners are temporarily keeping for testing.” — from a 7.10 N.Y. Post story about the temporary parking of Jackson’s coffin in Berry Gordy‘s Forest Lawn crypt.

Jackson’s brain, Donovan’s Brain with Lew Ayres, The Man With Two Brains, the brain of Dr. Hans Delbar in Young Frankenstein. I feel an idea coming on. A struggling Broadway musical performer in his mid 20s comes to Vegas to find work. During a visit with an L.A. friend he’s hit by an SUV on the Hollywood freeway. He’s taken to USC and declared brain-dead. A brilliant irreverent L.A. surgeon somehow gets hold of Jackson’s brain, reanimates it with Dr. Victor Frankenstein-styled lightning bolts and transplants it into the dancer’s head. The kid survives and prospers as a kind of reincarnation of Michael Jackson — a dancing genius with a gentle little voice and a thing for young lads.

And then what? At the very least it’s a short film.