There are several indications on the tube that tens of millions of lower-middle-class Americans — that plague-culture of coarse, under-educated, fast-food-eating, mall-meandering, Transformers-loving fat asses — are experiencing some kind of profound emotional catharsis over the death of Michael Jackson.

The tipoff for me came last weekend when the folks who live upstairs, the fabled “Hispanic party elephants” who’ve earned their rep and then some by playing loud Latino dance music at all hours and then dancing to it like pachyderm storm troopers, began playing Thriller over and over. That’s when I knew that Jackson Death Mania had spread over-under-sideways-down

Why is Jackson’s legend and memory so big with so many? It’s not just because they loved Jackson’s sugar-pop music but, I suspect (and correct me if I’m wrong) because he lived in a manner that they themselves would love to savor — a kind of whimsically perverted, high-denial, candy-cane existence in which all malignancies are ignored or suppressed in order to satisfy each and every fantasy-dream whim, without compromise or hesitation.

This is why we’re truly doomed — why the country will never do what’s necessary to face much less avert whatever greenhouse-gas, ice-cap-melting apocalypse is coming our way. A nation that worships a monster like Michael Jackson is a nation of undisciplined “I want!”-ers and high-lifestyle drunkards. I don’t want to sound harsh but they’re the kind of manifestations that God wanted to get rid of when he got in touch with Noah. I can hear Morgan Freeman saying to Steve Carell right now, “Things are rancid out there — look at Jermaine Jackson on MSNBC! Look at Joe Jackson! — so I need you to build me a huge ark.”

Jackson lived an absurdly lavish, grossly indulgent lifestyle marked by constant escapes from everything and anything that didn’t feed or support his neurosis — plastic surgeries, all manner of prescription drugs, self-loathing behavior, twisted and predatory sexuality, absurdly reckless spending, and across-the-board Peter Pan values. He was the ultimate fantasy-tripping Frankenstein beast, and now there’s a nation of people out there who are reacting to his death as an excuse to celebrate not just his music but all aspects of the disease.

This tearful, feel-his-pain piece by MCN’s Kim Voynar is nothing short of disgusting. “I never found jokes about Jackson’s life funny while he was alive, and I find them even less funny in the wake of his death. This was a man who’d been used, abused and manipulated from the time he was just a little boy, chewed up and spit out for most of his adult life by the tabloid press, and it baffles me that anyone could find humor in the tragedy of his life and death.” Oh, by all means — let’s all cherish the memory of a ridiculously wealthy man who used the excuse of an abusive childhood to justify the most malignant famous-person behavior in history.

Assemble the ghosts of Abraham Lincoln, John Reed, Isadora Duncan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Alva Edison, James Dean, Bix Biederbeck, Cary Grant, Chet Baker, Michelangelo Antonioni, Edgar Allan Poe, Jimi Hendrix, Lillian Hellman, Federico Fellini, Leland Hayward, Jack Paar, Che Guevara, Django Rinehart, Tallulah Bankhead, Andrew Wyeth, Buddy Holly, Ernest Hemingway, Amelia Earhart, Louise Bryant and Eugene O’Neil, and sit them down before a high-def LCD screen and show them how the news channels are all spraying shorts over the Jackson frenzy, and they’d all be weeping on their knees in a matter of minutes.

The public funeral for Jackson at LA’s Staples Center on Tuesday July 7th is going to be a huge Diane Arbus event, like nothing ever seen or imagined. A Multitude of Grotesques. If I could afford it I would fly the hell out of the country that day, just for the statement value.

In short, a social convulsion of this sort is embarassing and sickening. I don’t live in Michael Jackson nation — millions don’t — but there are so many other millions who are sipping the Kool-Aid right now that it seems as if the whole country has gone nuts. Because the media is paying so much attention to this middle- and lower-middle class movement, because they know that’s where the sales and ratings and page views are.

The thrust of this Kim Masters/Daily Beast hit piece (“The Knives Are Out for Michael Mann“) is that if and when Public Enemies tanks with Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmoe and their kids over the July 4th holiday then it’s curtains for Mann in terms of getting any kind of heavy funding for his next film.

Haven’t I already figured this out? Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmoe and their kids will not be all that happy with Public Enemies — let’s face it. It’s not a mojo burger, pickles and potato chip type of film and it never will be.

I heard today from an older North Carolina couple. Not very sixpacky in their taste and attitudes (the husand is former Manhattan-based entertainment reporter Lewis Beale), but they went to the film today and here’s what they thought. “The Beales saw it today, and loved it,” Lewis wrote. “We agree that it’s an art film, which is why it’s really problematic at the b.o. But languid, elegaic and beautifully shot. Depp and Cotillard are great. Stirring social-political subtext (lone entrepreneur up against big business and big government). A major work.”

Masters also reports that Johnny Depp decided not to talk to Mann at some time during filming — big deal.

“I think the idea of going to conservative Republicans, who are essentially representing the insurance companies and the drug companies, and watering down this bill substantially, rather than demanding we get 60 votes to stop the filibuster….I think that is a very wrong political strategy.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), quoted in 7.1 Huffington Post story about health care strategy.

I can’t watch the young Harve Presnell sing “They Call the Wind Maria” in Paint Your Wagon. I’ve never watched him sing in The Unsinkable Mollie Brown. I just tried to watch this clip of him signing a duet with Julie Andrews — painful. To me he’ll always be grumpy old Wade Gustafson in Fargo, which he nailed to the wall. He died yesterday at age 75 from pancreatic cancer.

The legendary Karl Malden died today at age 97. We should all be around so long and look back on such a full and accomplished life. Malden was a solid and believable presence in 70 films on top of his run in that 1970s TV cop series, called Streets of San Francisco. But he earned major artistic esteem in only seven films, three of them with Marlon Brando and spanning an 11 year period, from 1951 to ’62.

Malden’s first blue-ribbon, brass-ring film was A Streetcar Named Desire (’51), in which he played the beefy momma’s boy Mitch, the best friend of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski. The next Brando pairing came with On The Waterfront (’54), in which Malden played Father Barry. His third and final Brando collaboration was in One-Eyed Jacks (’61), in which he played the cowardly and sadistic Dad Longworth, under Brando’s direction.

Malden was also excellent as the chief detective in Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess (’53); as the obsessive high-strung father of Jimmy Piersall (Tony Perkins) in Fear Strikes Out (’57); opposite Burt Lancaster in Birdman of Alcatraz (’62), in which he played Alcatraz warden Harvey Shoemaker; and as Warren Beatty‘s dad in John Frankenheimer‘s All Fall Down (’62).

Okay, I’ll throw in his role as Gen. Omar Bradley in Patton (’70) and make it eight. But he only had one or two decent scenes in that Franklin Schaffner film, which George C. Scott owned top to bottom.

With Marlon Brando in On The Watrerfront.

I love Malden’s third-act Waterfront moment with Brando in the Hoboken bar when he snaps at the bartender, “Gimme a beer!” And his line to Eva Marie Saint in the beginning: “You think I’m just a gravy-train rider with a turned-around collar…don’t you? Don’t you? (Pause) I see the sisters taught you not to lie.”

In Streetcar Malden says to Vivien Leigh, “I was fool enough to believe you were straight.” And she answers “Straight? What’s ‘straight’? A line can be straight, or a street. But the heart of a human being?”

I love the One-Eyed Jacks moment when the hog-tied Brando spits in Malden’s face just before being bull-whipped on Main Street; ditto Brando’s faking Malden out in the final shoot out, running and diving into the dust and shooting Malden in the back three times.

The recent revealing of a ComicCon banner image of a Na’vi, a tallish, cat-eyed, blue-skinned resident of Pandora in James Cameron‘s forthcoming Avatar, is regarded as big news in some circles.

Lionsgate’s arty new one-sheet for Lee Daniels‘ Precious (11.6), which HitFix’s Gregory Ellwood exclusively revealed this morning, is stylish and striking — a visual hint that Precious isn’t up to the usual-usual. It tells you it’s a film that comes to grips and flexes artistic muscle.

Gabourey Sidibe

The silhouette figure is a slight cheat. I presume it’s meant to be Gabourey Sidibe , the morbidly obese young girl who plays Precious, but the silhouette is of a woman who should probably be described, in all fairness, as simply large or overweight. I’m just saying.

I just watched the trailer again and as much as the film touched me when I saw it in Cannes I don’t know if want to see it again. That is, I don’t know if I can take more hangin’ time with Mo ‘Nnique’s mother-from-hell character. She’ll almost certainly be nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but “the pleasure of her company” is not a term that comes to mind. What comes to mind, in all honesty, is that spending time with a person this deplorale and abusive is an unpleasant thing no matter you slice it. Except Mo ‘Nique really knocks it out of the park in her final confession scene.

Over 90 minutes of work time today plus 75 minutes of same yesterday were consumed by arguing with the Orwellian fiends at AT&T over European data charges. They’re claiming I racked up data charges of $253.89 from using my AT&T Air Card while in France and Spain. Except (a) I never once used it and (b) even if I had used it wouldn’t have functioned because you can’t get an AT&T signal over there with a U.S. Air Card. They’re also saying I used 49 megabytes in iPhone data charges on top of a pre-purchased 200 meg usage allotment for a total of $345.00. All through my time there I carefully monitored the iPhone usage tracker on the iPhone and stopped using AT&T air when I hit 198 megs. All in all they tried to hit me for $1285. They took off $300 but you can’t win with these guys. One way or another they’ll stick it to you. Intentionally.

Listen to the real J. Edgar Hoover here and here — his way of speaking was clipped and municipal, but there was no trace of a British accent or a speech tendency that was anything close to fey or foppish (in a tinsel-and-cold-cream Marlon Brando/Mutiny on the Bounty sense). But Billy Crudup‘s Hoover in Public Enemies (listen to a clip of him speaking from the 55 to 1:01 marks in this hi-def trailer) is clearly doing that. He sounds like an English swell, a country club type, an Oxford debating star. Why?

After last Thursday night’s all-media screening of Public Enemies, I was praising Michael Mann‘s gangster flick while two formidable critics — Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman and renowned essayist and filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire — were putting it down, wearing faint grins of dismissal as they said it really didn’t deliver.

“I hear you,” I said. “You’re saying it doesn’t do the thing you wanted to see it do. But…you know, it’s an art film!” Gleiberman’s reply was somewhere between skeptical and incredulous: “An art film?” “Well, yeah,” I said, feeling sheepish in the face of withering disdain. But why sheepish when it’s true? Public Enemies is an art film first and a popcorn film second (if not third or fourth). I’ve been at this racket for over 25 years and I know what I’m talking about. But on some level I felt slightly chagrined for having used a simplistic term.

And then this morning along came Manohla Dargis, the N.Y. Times critic, starting her review with the following sentence: “Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a grave and beautiful work of art.”

Gleiberman didn’t end up writing the EW review — Lisa Scharzbaum did, giving it a B-minus.

In his review of Universal Home Video’s DVD of Henry Hathaway‘s Trail of the Lonesome Pine (out July 7th), DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze says the digital mastering of this 73 year-old film “may be one of the best looking SD transfers I’ve ever seen of a film over 50 years old.

(l. to r.) Fred Stone Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney in Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936)

“The colors look wonderful — no bleeding. Detail is shockingly strong. I didn’t see anything on the box about restoration. It can look a shade glossy but it’s also extremely clean with no untoward chroma or disturbing artifacts. I’m both utterly impressed and perplexed at how it can look this good. Wow!”

I love that N.Y. Times critic Frank Nugent devoted the first five paragraphs of his nine-graph review (dated 2.20.36) to Trail‘s groundreaking cinematography, being the first color feature to be shout outdoors.

“Color has traveled far since first it exploded on the screen last June in Becky Sharp,” Nugent began. “Demonstrating increased mastery of the new element, Walter Wanger‘s producing unit proves in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which opened yesterday at the Paramount, that Technicolor is not restricted to a studio’s stages, but can record quite handsomely the rich, natural coloring of the outside world and whatever dramatic action may be encountered in it.

“The significance of this achievement is not to be minimized. It means that color need not shackle the cinema, but may give it fuller expression. It means that we can doubt no longer the inevitability of the color film or scoff at those who believe that black-and-white photography is tottering on the brink of that limbo of forgotten things which already has swallowed the silent picture.

Fred McMurray, Sylvia Sidney

“Chromatically, Trail of the Lonesome Pine is far less impressive than its pioneer in the field. Becky Sharp employed color as a stylistic accentuation of dramatic effect. It sought to imprison the rainbow in a series of carefully planned canvases that were radiantly startling, visually magnificent, attuned carefully to the mood of the picture and to the changing tempo of its action.

“The new picture attempts none of this. Paradoxically, it improves the case for color by lessening its importance. It accepts the spectrum as a complementary attribute of the picture, not its raison d’etre.

“In place of the vivid reds and scarlets, the brilliant purples and dazzling greens and yellows of Becky, it employs sober browns and blacks and deep greens. It may not be natural color, but, at least, it is used more naturally. The eye, accustomed to the shadings of black and white, has less difficulty meeting the demands of the new element; the color is not a distraction, but an attraction–as valuable and little more obtrusive than the musical score.

“Lest this be interpreted as a completely eulogistic bulletin, let it be known that the Paramount’s new film is far from perfect, either as a photoplay or as an instrument for the use of the new three-component Technicolor process. Again speaking of the color, it would appear that blue still baffles the camera, that light browns have a tendency to run to green, that red is either extremely red or hopelessly orange. These are remediable defects, we feel, and ones that Hollywood’s skill will overcome.”

Last week a serious dolphin lady and longtime friend named Gini Kopecky-Wallace, whom I’ve known since ’79, went to see The Cove (Roadside, 7.31). An off-and-on participant with a research project studying wild dolphins for more than 20 years, Kopecky-Wallace writes about dolphins, whales, diving, islands and oceans any chance she gets. Here’s her review:

It wasn’t an especially dolphin-loving crowd that showed up for last Wednesday’s screening of The Cove — the Jim Clark/Louie Psihoyos documentary about a group of filmmakers, free divers, surfers, techies and activists who team up to document the annual dolphin slaughter that takes place in a sealed-off cove in Taiji, Japan. The talkers in the room were more into bragging about themselves. The film got mentioned exactly once by a latecomer trying to score points by putting it down. “Now we’re all going to learn,” he said, “that killing dolphins is bad.”

But nobody was smirking at the end. For a while after the lights came up nobody moved or said a word. Then one person spoke — maybe this same guy, maybe someone else. “Good movie,” he said soberly. And that was it. No one else said a thing. Everyone just stood and slowly filed out. Which was gratifying, I have to say, and a more accurate gauge of the film’s impact. Of course it got to me. But if it got to these people…

I think the fact that it is such a surprisingly good movie impressed everyone. You’d have to be made of stone not to be horrified by the subject matter and humbled by, good lord, what it took to get the film made. But you hear “killing dolphins” and you gird yourself. You don’t expect a documentary that also works as a feature film, with heroes, bad guys, action, suspense, horror, heartbreak, beauty. You don’t expect to be swept up.

The material for it was there. Dangerous mission, colorful characters, great cast — including beautiful and brave human mermaid Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, and former Flipper dolphin trainer-turned-dolphin liberationist Ric O’Barry with his wonderfully weathered face. But the filmmakers worked the material well too — building suspense, sustaining the action, never straying too far from the main story, jazzing up visual effects with thermal-camera footage, and going easy but not too easy on the carnage.

Watching a lone dolphin struggle and flail as it bleeds to death is excruciating. Watching dozens being brutally speared makes you numb.

I can see where some researchers, advocates and activists might have a few arguments with this film — what’s said and what isn’t, what’s shown and what’s not, how certain issues are framed, who takes and gets credit for what. The film also isn’t completely clear on whether the American captive display industry — the people who bring us dolphin-swim programs and orcas in tanks — can or can’t be linked to these captures and killings. Important as the film is for what it exposes and is trying to stop, it also makes me yearn for another film — maybe a sequel? — that focuses American audience attention on dolphin issues closer to home.

Still. On my way into the ladies’ room after the screening, I passed a woman coming out who took one look at my expression and knew we’d just seen the same film. Impassioned discussion ensued. What a film! She’d had no idea! It made her ashamed to be human! “It sure makes you think differently about going to places like marine parks.” She writes about film, wanted to do something to help. “People need to know.” Maybe she could interview Ric O’Barry. “Or I could do a column on what’s wrong with SeaWorld.” Her higher-ups wouldn’t like it, she said, fire dancing in her eyes. “But it’s my column.”

Score 1 for The Cove. Watch crazy-brave people doing crazy-brave things and there’s no telling what other people will decide they can do.

(Kopecky has written about diving in Bonaire, interacting with wild dolphins, and islands she has loved for Shape Magazine. She wrote about the plight of Keiko, the orca star of Free Willy, and about the handling of the dolphins used in the remake of Flipper for The New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section.)