Since he broke through with a star-making performance 40 years ago in Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson — who today turns 72 — has made 45 films, or a little more than one a year. Except he hasn’t made a film since ’07’s The Bucket List and apparently has no irons in the fire. So what’s going on? His absence has just hit me so I’m asking. I’m thinking of Jack Cardiff having worked until his early ’90s. There’s no fun in sitting around.

Cinematographer Jack Cardiff is no longer with us. Is there sadness in having lived 94 robust years, and in having shot 73 movies over a 72 year career? None I can sense. My favorite Cardiff-shot film is John Huston‘s The African Queen (’51), which I think was the first major-studio film to capture African locations in Technicolor. My second and third faves are The Vikings (’58), which Cardiff shot for director Richard Fleischer, and John Irvin‘s The Dogs of War (’80) — Cardiff’s last truly decent film.

Other noteworthy films shot by Cardiff (running backwards) include Girl on a Motorcycle, Fanny, Legend of the Lost, War and Peace,The Barefoot Contessa, The Black Rose, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Under Capricorn, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and Michael Powell‘s A Matter of Life and Death (a.k.a., Stairway to Heaven). Cardiff’s first job was uncredited photography on the 1935 version of The Last Days of Pompeii (when he was 21); he also shot a 1984 TV miniseries version with the same title.

Does it not seem likely (if not inevitable) that the Tribeca Film Festival will soon decide to become a mid-fall film festival, launching sometime in mid-October or thereabouts? I’ve been hearing that one for…I don’t know, two of three weeks? Or maybe it started when Geoff Gilmore left his Sundance post to become the new TFF honcho, and the talk just didn’t around to me until last month.

As the Tribeca Film Festival launches this evening with an opening-night screening of Woody Allen‘s Whatever Works, the back-in-New-York John Anderson essentially argues for a fall switchover in a Village Voice piece.

“Right now, fall is the New York Film Festival’s turf,” he explains. “Started in the ’60s, the NYFF — built around about two dozen of what are deemed the best films of the festival year — represents a kind of classic, Cannes-style, two-week-long soiree: black-tie on opening night, an audience largely of subscribers, and a selection of films that have either gotten distribution already, or probably won’t. As such, it’s a purely cultural event.

Tribeca, however, “currently dwells in no-man’s-land,” he says. “It hardly wants to be a springtime NYFF, but at the same time, it can’t be a major player in April because it doesn’t have the cachet to draw films away from next month’s Cannes, and is too long after January’s Sundance to get producers to hold off premiering there.

“[But] if Tribeca moved to the fall, it could free itself from the spring season’s logjam, wherein SXSW, the Los Angeles film festival, and even less competitively minded fests like San Francisco and Seattle vie for the same films. ‘It would be a roll of the dice,’ said Variety critic Todd McCarthy, ‘but if studios knew they could open films in November at Tribeca, they wouldn’t have to show them early in September at Toronto.’

TFF co-founder Jane Rosenthal “makes the very valid point that much of Tribeca is weather-dependent — the annual street fair and even the drive-in movies are springtime events. But the cachet of a late-October/early-November TFF — when distributors would be falling all over each other to premiere their awards-season films at a major New York festival — might be more than its organizers could resist.”

Rosenthal’s weather argument has convinced me that TFF is definitely planning a fall move because it’s so specious. Yes, New York City weather is a tad warmer in April than October, but not dramatically. Both months lean more towards pleasant and/or palatable than not. Okay, so you’d wear a sweater and jacket to a TFF street fair or drive-in movie in October…big deal.

“‘I think there are old models here,’ said Gilmore, asked to survey his new city and the future of festivals in general. ‘To be honest, that’s the kind of question I think about a lot: how to reinvent festivals, what they should be doing, whether or not their agendas– which have evolved greatly — need to be rethought completely.’

“It’s worth noting,” says Anderson, “that one of the things that occurred over the course of Gilmore’s tenure at Sundance was its transformation from a ‘discovery’ festival to a market and showcase. It’s probably a symptom of success, but thanks largely to Sundance, there’s no such thing as a discovery festival anymore. The feeding frenzy goes on all year long.”

The big Gilmore quote in Anderson’s piece, already pointed out by Spoutblog‘s Katrina Longworth, is a lulu: “When one considers what’s going on technologically and commercially, [Gilmore] said, there’s a real question about whether festivals ‘are going to be obsolete in a decade, because people won’t find them valuable anymore — they won’t be the platform from which people need to operate.'”

Oh, sure — let’s start junking all the film festivals as we approach 2020 and henceforth just stay indoors and watch all the new independent movies on our iMacs. Who needs to discover new movies communally? Who needs to fraternize, gauge the mood, sip wine, laugh, exchange opinions, and get an organic sense of things? Let all of that go. In fact, if we plan it right it ten years from now we can limit our social-contact activities to (a) grocery-buying, (b) visits to 24-Hour Fitness, (c) the occasional play, and (d) family and in-law visits.

“Blasting onto the screen at warp speed and remaining there for two hours, JJ Abrams‘ new and improved Star Trek will transport fans to sci-fi nirvana,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “Faithful enough to the spirit and key particulars of Gene Roddenberry‘s original conception to keep its torchbearers happy but, more crucially, exciting on its own terms in a way that makes familiarity with the franchise irrelevant, Abrams’ smart and breathless space adventure feels like a summer blockbuster that just couldn’t stay in the box another month.

“Star Trek here joins the James Bond series as the long-term ’60s franchises that have been most successfully rebooted, although the current accomplishment is the more surprising since, after 10 films and a succession of TV series, Star Trek was widely thought to have exhausted itself. While respectfully handling the Roddenberry DNA, Abrams and longtime writing cohorts Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have successfully transferred it to a trim new body that hums with youthful energy.”

I wont see it until, like, the 30th, but here’s an impression I tapped out after seeing a half hour’s worth of footage last December:

“It zips along and is enveloping and beautiful to watch — highjly pleasurable to just friggin’ look at. It’s buoyant and bountiful of spirit, it’s pop celestial, it’s Young Men in Space. The massive super-cities shrouded in mist in the Iowa flatlands — superb concept! Zachary Quinto‘s Spock has focus and authority, and was my favorite for that. Pine, for me, has the necessary force and swagger and I applaud Abrams’ balls in not casting a Shatner clone.

“Pine is certainly an everyman James Tiberius Kirk. A Kirk who is first brawn, anger and bluster, and secondly a Kirk who develops the character and courage to grow his inner strength. A Kirk who is part Luke Skywalker, part surfing instructor, part lifeguard, part first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals, partly a guy who could have costarred in Mike Judge‘s Office Space, part poet, part motorcycle mechanic.”

The first remarked-upon instance of “mood hair” since Mickey Rourke‘s appearance as the sometimes white-haired, sometimes grayish-black haired, sometimes grayish white-and-brown-haired Det. Stanley White in Year of the Dragon (1985) has been pointed out by Variety critic Todd McCarthy in his rave review of JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek.

Chris Pine in Star Trek; Mickey Rourke in Year of the Dragon.

McCarthy doesn’t make a big deal out of it, but he does note that the mane of young Chris Pine, who plays a kind of surfer-dude version of Cpt. James Kirk, “varies from reddish to blond in some instances [so] someone should decide about his hair color.”

The term “mood hair” was coined 24 years ago by critic Elvis Mitchell in his review of The Year of the Dragon. It was quoted by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael in her review of same.

I was told yesterday afternoon to watch for a leap-out New York Observer piece about the Hollywood blogger/columnist. Called “Get Me Rewrite!” and written by John Koblin, it turned up last night at 11:39 pm. Ten minutes later I was going…this? It’s a scamper through the poppy fields, is what it is.

Photo totally stolen from New York/Vulture’s summary of Koblin’s piece. Cheers to photo illustrator Everett Rogue.

Drew Friedman‘s illustration of Alec Baldwin, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore in Walter Burns/Hildy Johnson/Front Page garb told me not to expect much, and so I wasn’t disappointed.

Boil the snow out of it and Koblin’s piece (a) summarizes that the leading Hollywood reporting blogs (as opposed to opinion/personality/reporting/cherry-pick ghoulash columns like my own, which isn’t mentioned) have pretty much elbowed Variety and the Hollywood Reporter aside; (b) recaps last month’s Nikki Finke vs. Sharon Waxman/The Wrap feud and that brief little dust-up between Patrick Goldstein and Variety‘s Brian Lowry; (c) includes some anti-Waxman views by the eternally dour Anita Busch, chiming in “from beyond the journalistic grave”; and (d) mentions that a slew of enterprising celebrity-actors (Kutcher, Baldwin, etc.) are churning out their own stuff on the Huffington Post. And that’s more or less it.

In short, Koblin’s view is that the most noteworthy online Hollywood coverage is more or less generated by the hammerheads — i.e., two hard-charging women who focus pretty much on the Hollywood economy, the labor disputes, the politics, the hires and fires, the agencies and all that trade jazz. Which are all fine and necessary but where’s the music, man? Waxman-Finke are but one piece of the pie. Goldstein, at least, is a serious film lover and all the more intriguing and readable for that.

Otherwise Koblin ignores not just HE but David know-it-all Poland and Movie City News, Variety‘s Anne Thompson , The Envelope, In Contention, the various seasonal currents, the flavor, the flow, Movieline, Awards Daily, and everyone else.

“Variety [has] ceded its grip on the town entirely,” Koblin writes, “and now the Hollywood press corps is in a state of revolution. There is no power structure. It’s all turned inside out and upside down. Everyone claims victory, but no one seems to have it, nobody is powerful enough to measure it. And, above all, it’s one nasty, mean, shrill place.”

Ex-Variety editor Peter Bart says that “for one thing, you have bloggers who need traffic and are desperate for attention. The overriding truth of the blogging community is they’re trying to figure out how to monetize their endeavors. So you have to call attention to yourself. On that side, you have a clear motive.”

“I do think it’s kind of surprising that Sharon Waxman even has a blog,” Busch tells Koblin. “I think she’s even one of the worst journalists I’ve ever encountered. I’ve never seen anybody that ignores the basics of Journalism 101 as she does. I find it surprising that she’s got this blog. I try not to click through on Sharon’s Web site because I don’t want someone who doesn’t care about journalism to succeed.” See what I mean? She just oozes the stuff.

Waxman says that she feels “sorry for Anita Busch for saying such a thing like that…I think that’s a pretty sad statement…I think it says more about her than me.” Waxman also unloads on Finke, to wit: “Nikki has her own view of reality which does not always accord to reality as others see it. The way she twists things and the way she always manages to bend the facts — and I put facts in quotes — is in a way that suits her.”

The L.A. Times was going to own Hollywood, Koblin writes, “but that never happened. The L.A. Times became hamstrung by too many internal conflicts (competing desks going after the same story, staffers upset that the website gives into celebrity link-baiting temptations) and, of course, a staff that is less than half the size of what it was eight years ago.

“And they suffer from a similar problem to Variety. Bloggers like Nikki Finke have been nimble and fast, and while an L.A. Times reporter is on the phone waiting for confirmation, Nikki puts it up regardless if it’s right or wrong.”

Busch gets in one good quote, though: “Hollywood is a small town filled with sociopaths. And when you’re assigned to cover that? You really have to be on your feet.”

After coming out of MOMA’s Mike Nichols tribute last Saturday night, I came upon a long line of people at the corner of 53rd and 6th Avenue. 40 or 50, at least, waiting to buy $5 plates of chicken and rice from a food truck. I asked one of the guys in line what the big deal was. “It’s really delicious, man,” he answered. “You’ve gotta try it.” Can’t be that good, I said. “It is,” he said.

I didn’t want to be a lemming so I passed. Everyone in line looked youngish. I can’t think of any other place in Manhattan where can you get a good meal for five bills. A Depression 2.0 special.

This 4.17 Newsweek piece by Jesse Ellison actually argues that Earth, Disneynature’s watered-down feature version of BBC’s Planet Earth miniseries doc, is too unsettling for kids to be rated G. That’s because it contains sequences that imply (but don’t show) that a Caribou calf and a baby elephant are killed due to natural forces and circumstances. Coddle much?

When I was three years old I saw a neighbor chop a chicken’s head off, and then watched as the chicken’s body ran around a bit with the arterial blood spurting out. I was a little bit freaked by this, sure, but I didn’t faint and probably learned something from it also. What did I learn? Uhm…the meaning of the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off”?

Not long after a little black cocker spaniel puppy who belonged to a little neighborhood girlfriend of mine was run over by a garbage truck. The poor thing had been flattened into a black puppy pancake with the guts splattered and the tongue sticking way out. I’ll never forget that tongue. The episode taught me that life can end in a blink of an eye. It was awful to see — traumatic is the word — but it also made me a little stronger, I think, or at least a little tougher.

As I wrote on 3.25, “Parents are realizing that they haven’t done their kids any favors by funding a cut-off, over-indulged fantasy realm for them to live in.

“Kids need to grow up and grim up and learn the realities and skills and disciplines that will allow them to survive. So enough with the Spielberg-aping films that portray a child’s world as a magical-fantastical kingdom in and of itself that adults might be able to learn something from.”

Carson Reeves‘ Script Shadow, which attempts to review the latest Hollywood scripts, is, at the very least, amusingly written. A conversational blunt style that reminds me of….uhm, well, me.

At the top of the Script Shadow pile right now is a relative oldie — Brad Inglesby‘s The Low Dweller, which reportedly sold for $650,000 and may/will star Leonardo DiCaprio with Ridley Scott directing. I found it a boringly pretentious effort that took me three tries to get through. Here’s what I said about it on 3.23.08….ready?

“I have an instant problem with scene descriptions of rottin’ dead dogs and mayflies and greasy spoons with good old truck drivers sayin’ where they’ve a’trucked to. I especially don’t like readin’ about some lowdown Robert Johnson tune playin’ as a title card says we’re in the southern Indiana lowlands in the year 1985. That was back when Ronald Reagan was in the White House and scratchy 78 rpms of Johnson’s Delta blues songs were heard almost everywhere, and were cherished in the hearts of the people.

“Hollywood sure loves the idea of rural Middle America bein’ a land where there ain’t no Walmart or Starbucks or nothin’ like that, and where workin’ men called Slim and Buck and Jethro sip from half-pint whiskey bottles and roll their own makins and order eggs, taters ‘n’ bacon as they wipe sweat from their brows with tattooed forearms.”

If Reeves want to get in touch I can provide him with some newer, better scripts.

There are 42 Rotten Tomato reviews of Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth, representing the big-city snoots who had a chance to see this sharp and tight journalism drama before distributor Bob Yari fell into Chapter 11 and Truth became instant road-kill. First-rate film, tough deal.

I understand there are some regional and hinterland film critics who plan to review the Nothing But The Truth DVD as a brand-new feature when it comes out on 4.28. That’s a good and gracious way to go, I feel. Lurie’s film deserves all the benefits of a theatrical opening, including reviews by top-tier critics.

And by the way, Truth isn’t being given a Bluray release after all. The Sony Home Video folks obviously don’t believe it warrants the extra expense. Too talky, not enough action, no tits-and-ass.

There is no spoon, there is no dress, and there is no Nickelodeon/Last Picture Show DVD. Or at least, not in the Manhattan video stores (quaint term!) I’ve been to today.

The kid at the downstairs video desk in the Union Square Virgin Megastore said the buyers never even ordered it. “Only the really big titles between now and closing,” he said. “But Dave Kehr reviewed it last week in the N.Y. Times and made kind of a big deal about it,” I stammered. “I thought you guys might at least have four or five copies.” Naahhh.

Even the guy at my favorite little video store, a place that sometimes sells Blurays ahead of their street dates, said “we never got it in. A friend who works at Sony has a copy but copies never came to us.”

I know it’s irrational and sort-of stupid to go to video stores when it’s obvious they’re no longer the providers they once were and with online ordering being so easy and simple. But I wanted to see Peter Bogdanovich‘s black-and-white version of Nickelodeon today, not next Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday.

This is the end of a world I’ve known and loved since the ’80s. The lazy camaraderie of movie mavens in a well-lit, library-like atmosphere, casually assessing some of the latest releases in terms of remastered visual quality and, strictly as a secondary consideration, how good they are in terms of story, theme, directorial chops and emotional penetration. Union Square Virgin is the last well-stocked DVD store in Manhattan and it’ll be closing in three or four weeks.

Hello, Amazon.com. Farewell, impulse buys and browsing through the stacks and getting lost in that world. No more, never again.

If it was okay and funny and even convincing in Broadcast News (1987) for Albert Brooks to present a half-serious case about super-smooth news anchor Bill Hurt being “the devil,” I should be allowed to express a similar view about Matthew McConaughey…no?

I saw the guy on a billboard this morning for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (New Line, 5.1), and I quickly said to myself, “That’s the devil…the devil walking amongst mortals.” Not that McConaughey is anything but average human. But if the Devil wanted to roam around and foster evil, he’d definitely pick McConaughey as a host. Because no actor on earth seems more vapid. (To me anyway.) And because vapidity, more than any other human quality, is what allows evil to succeed.

I explained some of my feelings about McConaughey two or three years ago in a piece called “King of the Empties.” The Brooks-Hurt analogy doesn’t fully work since Brooks was talking about Hurt personifying and hastening the lowering of journalistic standards in TV news and McConaughey isn’t lowering filmmaking standards, or at least not to my knowledge. He’s just cruising along on whatever current will carry him along. But some of what Brooks said could apply.

“What do you think the devil’s going to look like? He’s not gonna be a guy with a long grey pointy tail! What’s he going to sound like? Acchh-acch! He’ll be attractive, he’ll be nice and helpful, he’ll never do an evil thing, he’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing. He’ll just bit by little bit lower our standards where they’re important. He’ll just coaxe it along, just a little bit…flash over substance. And he’ll get all the great women.”