The Iran dictatorship’s threatened crackdown moves — shootings, tear gas, water cannons, baton beatings — are happening as we speak. All the Hangover and Zach Galifianakis fans (who are not being necessarily equated with simian-level idiocy) need to watch this poem video, which was apparently taped last night. Bless the woman who wrote and taped these words.

It’s one of those late-filing days with too much to do and not enough hours. I now have to move my bags to another place and then see 500 Days of Summer at 5 pm and then attend an LA Film Festival party. But what is all this running around town compared to the terrible coming fate of Iran’s green opposition forces? Awful news.

Kieran and Michele Mulroney‘s Paper Man, which kicked off the Los Angeles Film Festival last night, is, at best, a qualified dud. People were too polite to groan or whimper or walk out (even I stayed for the whole thing) but this was a film determined to just loll around and talk about loss and lament and enervate the living shit out of the audience at any cost. The atmosphere in the theatre (and I’m not exaggerating) was one of terrible suppressed calamity.

“Is this really happening?” I said to myself about 40 minutes in. I was exhaling and beginning to question the fundamentals. “They chose this movie to open the festival? A film this flat and meandering and borderline amateurish at times? Why…?”

LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham, I’m told, didn’t want to open the LAFF with Taking Woodstock or some other Cannes Film Festival selection that had already been seen and worked over. She wanted a farm-fresh entry. She actually said to Variety‘s Anne Thompson that she “wanted to find a film that reflected the spectrum of great movies in our contemporary film culture.”

And so naturally she chose an obviously problematic, low-energy, dialogue-driven indie-downhead drama that no one (and I mean no one with any practical financial sense) will ever acquire for distribution, barring suicidal instincts. But of course!

Paper Man is about a failed mid-50ish writer (Jeff Daniels) who, unable to deal with just about everything, least of all a new book he’s under pressure to deliver, sits around a yellow Montauk cottage that he and his surgeon wife (Lisa Kudrow) have rented, and goes on fantasy trips. He mainly tries to think and feel and behave like a kid so as to…I don’t know or care what his adolescence obsession is about, and neither does anyone else for the longest time. But it’s basically a case of serious writer’s block, chronic maturity issues, woe is me, why doncha kill me, etc.?

Guys in their mid 50s with adolescent behavior issues are deeply unappealing. You can’t be this pudgy and puffy-faced and this fucked up and expect an audience to empathize. It’s just not in the cards.

The story is mainly about Daniels’ non-romantic friendship with Emma Stone, who plays a local teen. She has two emotional exposure scenes — this is who I am, what I’m dealing with, what my hurt is about — and I’m sorry but she overplays it. There’s nothing worse than an actor pretending to suppress tearful emotion and losing the battle. Always win, always suppress. Let the audience feel what you’re feeling — never show it.

Paper Man‘s biggest problem is Daniels’ imaginary superhero friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), who pops in every eight or nine minutes in a blue and red Superman-type getup to advise or goad Daniels about this or that decision or behavioral issue, or to try and help with his writing. The metaphor is immediately tiresome — I was sick of it before the film started — and Reynolds is a bother every step of the way. The movie would’ve been 20% better off if they’d tossed him altogether and just focused on Daniels, Stone and Kudrow.

Another good thing would have been if someone (a lesser character, an extra, anyone) had come up behind Keiran Culkin‘s character, a morose gloom-head who does nothing for the entire film but stare at Stone and profess his love for her, and shot him in the head.

Besides being an actor, Kieran Mulroney is the younger brother of Dermot Mulroney. (His IMDB page notes that he’s “the ex-brother-in-law of Catherine Keener.”) Neither he nor wife Michele Mulroney have directed a film before.

HE humbly and wholeheartedly agrees with New York’s Vulture squad that Tom Cruise would be the best guy to replace Sean Penn-as-Larry in the Farrellys’ Three Stooges movie. God, what a beautiful idea! I read this a couple of hours ago and have been in the best mood since.

The new trailer for Roland Emmerich‘s 2012 trailer promises a slightly more ferocious rehash of other doomsday movies. Here and there I felt the lingering ghosts of Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, etc. It’s a miracle that all those meteorites (or whatever they are) manage to miss the SUV carrying John “paycheck” Cusack and his son. I’m bored. Emmerich is bored. We’re all bored.

If I was running the Public Enemies p.r./marketing effort, I would give the okay to one or two select journos who admire Michael Mann‘s film to post retorts to Lou Lumenick’s now-redacted pan. I’ve heard from one guy who says Lumenick is “so wrong in so many ways” about the film. There’s also Kris Tapley‘s claim that PE is Mann’s best since The Insider. Get in front of it, slap it down — don’t let Lou control the conversation. Mann loyalists, unite!

A couple of good guys, Lee Ginsberg and Chris Libby, are partnering in a new p.r. film called Ginsberg Libby. “Libby joins the venture from B|W|R Public Relations,” the release says, “where, as vice president, he expanded the company’s film division. He is followed by Chris Regan and Gina Lang, who will serve as directors of film and corporate entertainment; Kate Payne, who will serve as a senior account executive; and Karina Vladimirov, who will serve as administrative support. Ginsberg segues from PMK/HBH where he served as vice president, and is joined by Laura Paulsen who will serve as a senior account executive at the new entity.” Congrats to all, go get ’em.

English translations provided by Andrew Sullivan, to wit: 1: (Girl in street): Defending civil rights. 2: (Boy next to old man): Counterbalancing poverty and deprivation. 3: (Boy pushing away donation box): Nationalizing oil income. 4: (Man standing on rooftop): Reducing tension in international affairs. 5: (Boy sitting next to satellite dishes): Free access to information. 6: (Girl sitting besides her mother): Supporting single mothers. 7: (Girl with cast):? Knock down violence against women. 8: (Boy): Education for all. 9: (Boy infront of man locking car): Increasing public safety. 10: (Girl on rooftop): Ethnic and religious minority rights. 11: (Man on rooftop): Supporting NGOs. 12: (Girl in front of wall): Public involvement. 13: (Boy and girl): We have come for? change. 14: Change for Iran. (Ad was for Iran’s reformist candidate Mehdi Karroui.)

Last night’s Century City screening of Harold Ramis‘s Year One was so empty and unfunny that I decided to catch a little shuteye. I’d been up since 2:30 am LA time and it wasn’t like I was missing anything. How could the director and cowriter of the inspired Groundhog Day, easily one of the most satisfyingly made and richly themed comedies of all time, have allowed himself to make something as lame and sloppy as this? The current 28% Rotten Tomatoes rating is no surprise. It’s brazenly awful.

Some are comparing Michael Cera and Jack Black‘s comic attitude and repartee to that of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, but the craft that went into the old black-and-white Abbott and Costello comedies of the ’40 sand ’50s puts a piece of shit like Year One to shame. I’m not referring to first-rate A&C films like Buck Privates and Hold That Ghost — I mean the second-tier genre-spoof stuff they started making in the late ’40s (Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, etc.). They were mostly mediocre but at least watchable for that old-studio rigor and professionalism, which is more than you can say for this turdblossom. The idea that professionals made it — guys who get paid millions to write and act funny — keeps failing to compute.

It’s almost as if Ramis and Black and Cera got together and said, “We need to make a movie that will take all three of us down and sully our reputations. We don’t want just a blemish — we want lifelong friends who’ve seen it to cross to the other side of Montana Ave. when they see us coming. Now, how do we do this?” In this sense, Year One is a success.

Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man (Focus Features, 10.2) has been rated R or “language, some sexuality/nudity and brief violence.” I could have foreseen this, I suppose, if I’d simply read the script, which I’ve had for months. But that would have required focus and discipline.

Almost everything I’m posting this morning is a day late and a dollar short due to yesterday’s travel, but the 6.17 Tootsie-like tale, conveyed in Seth Abramovitch‘s Movieline interview of The Proposal‘s Peter Chiarelli, is quite funny.

“So get this pitch: A young, handsome Hollywood executive has some spare time on his hands, so he writes a script — a romcom. And because this is a small town and he wants it to be judged on its own merits, he puts the name ‘Jennifer Kirby‘ on the front page. The script makes the rounds, people love it, and everyone wants a general meeting with this Kirby girl. So our hero gets his best friend to do him over in drag, heads out into the unforgiving L.A. sunshine, and not long after that the macho head of a studio falls for the script…and for him.

“It’s Tootsie for a new generation, right? And right when you have the suit sipping a Diet Coke on the other side of the desk, hooked, that’s when you reel him in with those five magic words: Based on a true story.”