Publicist Kathleen Talbert said a while ago that Francis Coppola‘s Tetro, which will open the Director’s Fortnight program in Cannes, is in black and white and color. A slight exaggeration, it seems. There are dabs of red in the manner of Rumblefish and Schindler’s List , but the trailer is 97% monochrome.

“When a movie comes out great, I’m not even happy it came out great. I just think, ‘Wow, whoo. That could have turned out really badly, and I escaped a horrible situation.’ ” — Funny People director Judd Apatow quoted by N.Y. Times contributor Dave Itzkoff in a Sunday piece called “Funny Men With Serious Ambitions.”

I love this quote because it precisely echoes the bottom-line attitudes and personalities of many if not most comedians. Dour, glum, guarded.

“Green is good, but there is no ecological benefit in recycling intellectual properties or in treating pop-culture treasures like so much scrap material,” A.O. Scott also wrote this morning in one of the Memos to Hollywood published today. “So let us read our comic books and watch our DVDs of old movies and television shows and try to capture our imaginations with something new.

“Enough with the serial killers (unless you’re David Fincher); period dramas; movies in which children die or are endangered; (bad) literary adaptations; superhero epics; tween-pop exploitation vehicles; scenes with bubble-breasted women working the pole in strip clubs; shady ladies with hearts of gold; Google Earth-like zoom-ins of the world; sensitive Nazis; sexy Nazis; Nazis period” — Quentin Tarantino!

And “dysfunctional families; dysfunctional families with guns; suburban ennui; suburban ennui with guns; wisecracking teenagers; loser dudes scoring with hot women who would never give them the time of day even if they were drunk out of their minds or too young to know any better (hello, Judd Apatow!); feature films that should have been sketch comedy routines; shopping montages; makeover montages; bromances (unless the guys get it on with each other); flopping penises; spray-on tans; Kate Hudson; PG-13 horror remakes; or anything that uses any of the ‘classic’ songs that we are sick of hearing.”

In the view of the Observer‘s Ryan Gilbey, “the early years of Quentin Tarantino‘s career” — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, his screenplays of True Romance and Natural Born Killers, his pinch-hitting screenplay work on Crimson Tide — “were the most dynamic by a long chalk.”

Which makes it understandable why “some of us are eager to know what happened to the Tarantino who gave U.S. cinema a hefty adrenaline shot to the heart, much like the one administered to Uma Thurman‘s Mia Wallace.

“Perhaps the very act of expecting Tarantino to mature and evolve, or to return to the tenor of his early work, is like waiting for Wim Wenders to make a frathouse comedy. It could be that he wanted all along to devote his career to paying homage to hacks and trashmeisters. Will the chasm continue to widen between the qualities that made Tarantino’s first three movies so fascinating and the shameless, sometimes juvenile passions that drive him on?

Gilbey ends by writing that “perhaps those of us who hailed Tarantino as a cinematic revolutionary will find further support for our case this month in Cannes” — i.e., when Inglourious Basterds shows its face,

Hah! Unless it’s been transformed to something almost entirely different from what’s on the page, Inglourious Basterds is going to be, at best, an ironic World War II wankathon — a movie with a semi-sincere middle section that has a reverent, film-loving Cinema Paradiso vibe but is otherwise about archness, smugness and smirk. But in a way that kind of works. On paper, that is.

Here’s what I wrote last July after reading the first half of the script:

“While it’s easy to see why others have called it Kill Bill meets The Guns of Navarone meets The Dirty Dozen meets Cinema Paradiso, I have to say that I’m mainly enjoying it as a violent, vaguely art-filmy World War II attitude comedy — a deliberate exploitation piece full of war cliches turned on their ear, and a general theme of Jewish payback upon Nazi swine for the Holocaust.

“It is absolutely the most inauthetic, bullshit-spewing World War II movie that anyone’s ever written. And I love it for that. Every other line is a howl or a chortle. It almost could have been written by some 15 year-old suburban kid who used to play pretend WWII games with his friends when they were 10 or 11. Four or five times I literally laughed out loud, and that’s rare for me. And every scene is pure popcorn, pure shit-kickin’ Quentin, pure movie poontang.

“When I read the character name of ‘Pvt. Butz,’ a German combat soldier, I almost fell out of my chair. This is straight out of the mind of Stanley Kubrick when he called two hotel-clerk characters in Lolita ‘Mr. Swine’ and ‘Mr. Putz.’

“The Inglorious Basterds script flaunts its fakery and movie ‘tude to such a degree that it’s pure adolescent (i.e., teenage boy) pleasure. The Europe it depicts doesn’t exist and never will exist, and that’s totally fine. The German and French characters are so idiotically cliched they almost sound like the kind of material that a John Candy SCTV skit would use. But not quite. It’s actually kind of perfect that way. The balance, I mean.

“The script seems twice as fake as the Italian villlage in Blake Edwards‘ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and that was pure mid ’60s Hollywood bullshit. It’s faker than Hogan’s Heroes, even. If Tarantino has done any research about France, Germany or any World War II particulars other than watch World War II movies, I’ll eat my motorcycle tool kit.

“He doesn’t care, of course, and that’s why he’s Quentin Tarantino You can feel him in his element, living in his head and flaunting a clever, dumb-ass yarn that entertains every step of the way, and — this is the cool part — in a kind of oddly sophisticated fashion. Which is what he’s been doing since Pulp Fiction.”

But the ’92 to ’97 period is over, and none of us can go home again.

“The Oscars are just not working,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott declared this morning among several “Memos to Hollywood” (which are co-authored by Manohla Dargis). “The Academy Awards broadcast, with its mixture of snark and high-mindedness; the pool of pseudoserious, faux-prestigious specialty-division B-pictures; the long, dreary slog of the awards season. You’re losing touch with the mass audience on one side and the tradition of popular art on the other. Take some risks, rejigger the formula, expand the membership pool. Do something!” And then he says disregard and just “kill the Oscars” altogether.

Rejigger and rejuvenate by all means, obviously, but never kill the Oscars. Never. Not because the show itself is anything magnificent (although we all derive fleeting emotional charges each and every year), but because every Oscar season is like a great spiritual Olympics. Because each and every film of any merit and our reactions to them are opportunities for assessing the whole magillah. Because the Oscars, of course, are only nominally about the competing films. They’re really about how we feel and think about these films, and what we’re looking or hoping for each time we enter a theatre and submit to the dark. In short, they’re about us.

Each year the Oscar race allows — demands — that we assess who we are, what we need and want, what defines artistic greatness or at least distinction, and the kinds of spells that films need to provide. Every day I’m looking to understand and sometimes redefine who I am and what I want, but we all do this en masse during Oscar season. It’s a stirring, at times joyously argumentative process. (I loved trashing Chicago and praising The Pianist in ’02 — it was all to the good.) For me, the October-to-February argument is all, or certainly 95% of the game. The show is maybe 5% of it — the end, the crescendo, the cherry on top, whatever. And through all of it the distributors of the films in the arena, the ones that each year compete and strive and receive the constant attention, clearly benefit.

The Birth of Benjamin Button, the feature doc on the Button Criterion Bluray, “clocks in ten minutes longer than the movie — 2 hours and 55 minutes. And it covers almost everything one could want. Nearly half the running time focuses on the various stages of practical and CG work, and rightfully so. I found myself replaying each of the post-production chapters covering the replacement effects after watching the whole thing in one go.

“The consummate professionalism brought to the production value of this doc is why a single-disc edition wasn’t going to cut it. The movie’s craft deserved better, and it got the best. Even if you didn’t fall in love with the movie, the doc alone is worth purchasing the set. It’s a high-end film school class on a disc. I could actually see re-watching it, and more than once.” — from Moises Chiullan‘s Bluray review on Arthouse Cowboy.

If you couldn’t hit a note with a gun to your head, would you sing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” in front of 50,000 people — as Denise Richards did yesterday at Wrigley Field? Singing this badly is a felony in most states. Ghastly.

Last night I attended a Tribeca Film Festival showing of Barry Levinson’s Poliwood, a blah-fine-whatever documentary about Levinson and his Creative Coalition pals attending numerous meet-and-greets at last year’s Democratic and Republican conventions, and then milling around at Barack Obama‘s inauguration last January. And it’s mainly….well, footage of this dedicated crew of actors (including Tim Daly, Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, Alan Cumming, Josh Lucas, Matthew Modine, Richard Schiff and Rachael Leigh Cook) talking about how they’re looking to learn and contribute and how their fame doesn’t disqualify them from participating, etc.

All through the doc they discuss the fact that major issues and political news don’t seem to penetrate with the public without the aid of showbiz pizazz, famous faces, staged arguments and catchy graphics. Which is what the film is supposed to be about — i.e., the notion that politics has become entertainment, that television has blurred the lines between reality and myth, and that we’ve all lost our bearings as a result.

So Poliwood is a rhetorically earnest film, no question. But it pretty much ignores the irony that no one would be paying attention to these guys in the first place (or to Levinson’s film) if they weren’t famous Hollywood actors. So what’s this movie saying exactly that’s challenging and/or provocative? Nothing I can figure. It’s a muddle.

The only un-muddled thought in the entire film is when former MSNBC Tucker Carlson says that the idea of everyone in the nation learning about and participating in the political process is a myth. Most people probably shouldn’t participate, he says, because most of them out there are basing their beliefs on gut feelings and adversarial smoke and vague impressions fostered by blah-blah political talk shows, adversarial websites and other tangents of the breathless sound-byte media.

But there’s a genuine political process out there, Carlson says, and it’s something of an elite fraternity — a process that’s by the informed, of the informed and for the informed.

At last night’s Poliwood q & a at the BMCC theatre in lower Manhattan (l. to. r.): Barry Levinson, that amiable fat guy with the toupee who’s done focus-group testing for Fox News, Matthew Modine, Tim Daly and Josh Lucas

Precisely! And because I know for a cold fact that I’m one of the informed, I don’t feel confused or lost at all. The only one who seems confused, frankly, is Levinson, who can’t seem to get it clear in his own head that while the Creative Coalition team is a good-guy group trying to stand up for the right things, nobody cares very much about what Tim Daly or Ellen Burstyn have to say about this or that. I would probably agree with most of their views if we shared a sitdown, but that’s no reason for me to watch Poliwood. Or to recommend others to have a looksee.

Levinson recently summed up the movie’s point with a CNN interviewer, to wit: “I think what happened is, you have this television screen, and everything has to go through that screen — and at a certain point, I don’t think that we can tell the difference between the celebrity and the politician. They both have to entertain us in some fashion.

“That’s why I think, in second half of the 20th century, you saw this kind of change where John F. Kennedy was probably the first television politician. He came across, he was good-looking, he was great in the way he spoke, he had a certain sense of humor.

“Then you had [Ronald] Reagan. Someone looked at him giving a speech for [Barry] Goldwater and said, you know, he could be a politician. Two years after that, he became governor of California.

Tim Daly,Josh Lucas.

“So anyone [who] is pleasant enough on television suddenly gets credentials, whether they have earned it or not. And there’s that blurring of it between celebrity and politics and everything else.”

Accurate as Levinson’s observation is, I really don’t think it’s novel-enough or striking-enough to give weight and gravitas to this raggedy-assed home movie.

Item #1: In Patrick Healy‘s 5.2 N.Y. Times piece about “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” Christopher Durang calls his satirical play “a catharsis, a comic catharsis, for the last eight years. What’s particularly strange…is the play running when all of a sudden all these torture memos are released and discussed. It feels like I wrote some of these scenes yesterday.”

Item #2: A 4.30 CNN story reported that “the more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey. More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ justified. The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations — such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians — categorized as ‘mainline’ Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals.”

I picked up the Criterion DVD of The Friends of Eddie Coyle yesterday. There’s a little booklet inside that contains a reprint of a superb Rolling Stone set-visit piece by Grover Lewis (a great journalist who died in ’95 of lung cancer) called “The Last Celluloid Desperado.” It also contains an eloquent essay by Kent Jones , the recently resigned Film Society of Lincoln Center director/programmer, called “They Were Expendable.”

In a discussion of Coyle costars Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan Alex Rocco and Stephen Keats, Jones writes that “these actors, then in their prime, now signify a lost era. Many are dead — Mitchum in ’97, Boyle after a brilliant and successful career, the Harvard-educated Jordan far too early from a brain tumor, Keats by suicide before he turned 50. All of them worked hard on their craft and put flesh and muscle on an entire era’s worth of movies. With the notable exception of Boyle, few ever found roles as good as the ones they played in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.”

Here’s the closing paragraph in Jones’ essay:

And here’s a portion of the commentary by director Peter Yates that gives credit to former Paramount executive (and current Variety guy) Peter Bart for turning Yates on to the George V.Higgins‘ book and suggesting that a film be made of it.

And here’s some noisy dialogue that I’ve always loved, spoken by Keats.

The aspect ratio of Criterion’s Coyle is, of course, 1.85 to 1 or 16 x 9. It looks fine but was shot, of course, in Academy full frame (1.33 or 1.37 to 1) version. I have a full-frame version of Coyle sitting on my backup hard drive, and I have to say that I prefer this shape to the Criterion crop. I always prefer taller, boxier frames. The full-frame version of Dr. Strangelove , for example, is a more purely Kubrickian version than the 1.85 crop version.

Early scene from the 16 x9 Criterion Coyle

The boxier full-frame version of Coyle that’s sitting on my backup hard drive.