On top of my other dislikes and pet peeves, I need to add another one — i.e., the term “water dog.” Not the reason or history but the damn sound of it. What have dogs got to do with water apart from the fact that good owners given them warm baths every so often? Who has pleasant associations of dogs and wetness? The term sounds inane. What if someone decided to call a certain species an Arabian sand dog? Or a Lithuanian milk dog? Would that make any sense to anyone?

I recoiled the instant I heard the term. It made me think of a dog covered with water-filled tumors, and an image of the tumors bursting and spilling water all over the floor when you pick the dog up. Revolting. I’m not kidding or putting anyone on about this — I really don’t care or the sound of it. Obviously not the dogs themselves.

The death of Marilyn Chambers at age 56 is obviously suspect. Barring an accident or unlucky genes, healthy people don’t die in their mid ’50s unless they’ve hastened it along in some way. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet anyone that Chambers’ lifestyle was in some way a factor. I’m referring, of course, to the people she hung with and the influences she encountered as a result of her porn-star career. The Mitchell Brothers, Linda Lovelace, John Holmes…who else?

As Tyson director James Toback said in our interview last weekend, the constant celebration and looking back at the ’60s by boomer-age producers and filmmakers is a tacit admission that their lives were much better back then. Or a suspicion, at least, that on this or that level their lives felt better (apart from the fact that life tends to feel more sensually gratifying and spontaneously enjoyable when you’re 22 as opposed to 62.) Despite all the power and creature comforts that boomers have accumulated and come to enjoy over the last 35 or 40 years since, they were happier back then. And this realization won’t leave them alone, like a slight back itch. Which is why they keep revisiting it, or rather why it keeps revisiting them, like Charles Dicken‘s Ghost of Christmas past.

What are the best making-of docs ever included as DVD supplements? At the top of my list is Laurent Bouzereau‘s two-hour-long “making of Jaws” doc that was originally included on a Jaws special edition laser disc in the ’90s and re-appeared on the 30th anniversary DVD that came out in ’05. Second is Charles Lauzarika‘s Tricks of the Trade, an innovative 71-minute doc about the making of Ridley Scott‘s Matchstick Men, which was more or less inspired by Project Greenlight. The list could go on and on.

But here’s the real question: what major films that have come out on DVD need a first-rate, multi-chapter doc about their creation? I’ll tell you two right now — Woody Allen‘s Annie Hall and Manhattan. And one about Hal Ashby and Warren Beatty‘s Shampoo. And one about the calamitous making of the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty.

“On behalf of everyone here at Movieline, welcome,” writes editor Seth Abramovitch on this, the first day of the new Movieline site. “Whether you come to us as a fan of the original magazine, a follower of our previous online efforts [on Defamer], or out of sheer curiosity after noticing our URL carved into a bathroom stall at one of L.A.’s mustier drinking establishments, we’re thrilled to have you here.”

Senior Editors are the Manhattan-based S.T. VanAirsdale and the Los Angeles-residing Kyle Buchanan. The Contributing Editors are Matt McCluskey and Julie Miller.

There is, of course, a Tony Scott movie in the pirate-kidnapping standoff that ended yesterday with Navy Seal snipers shooting three Somali pirates in the head (and one other pirate being captured) and thereby securing the freedom of freighter captain Richard Phillips. Or at least a fictional movie of some kind based on the misadventures of Somali pirates.

And I don’t mean some bullshit Raid on Entebbe thing like Menahem Golan would have greenlit 20 yuears ago. I mean a film with the first-rate chops of Black Hawk Down minus the grim downer vibe and a raw you-are-there quality. The material is certainly there. If I were a studio production chief I’d be hunting around right now for stories. Maybe there’s a City of God-type film to be made from the point-of-view of the pirates. That’s what my son Dylan suggested last weekend.

Two reactions to the 4.12 New York interview with Sasha Grey, porn performer and star of Steven Soderbergh‘s The Girlfriend Experience, which will be released on 5.22. (Oddly, the New York piece doesn’t mention this.)

One, Grey’s statement that “the contract [said] I would be nude” seems ironic considering that Soderbergh doesn’t really go there. (At least in the print I saw at Sundance.) There’s certainly no “okay!” nude scene of any kind — that I’m sure of. Which is a bit like making a movie about Babe Ruth without showing him hitting homers in Yankee Stadium. But that’s Soderbergh for you. He’s not Bernardo Bertolucci and he never will be. I think it’s fair to say, in fact, that he’s somewhat averse to sensual show-and-tell. Or that he’s become that way, certainly, in the 20 years since sex, lies and videotape.

And two, Grey mentioning that “when I had the first meeting I assumed I would be naked and do a sex scene. Did I think I would do five, like in my adult work? No, but even up to the point when [we began] to shoot, I thought there was going to be at least one sex scene.” Wait…is there some kind of Rule of Five in a porn film? Five sex scenes, I mean? I’ve watched maybe one porn film in my life and I never heard of any such rule (if it in fact is one) until today.

Grey has only just turned 21. Jesus, she’s only three months older than my oldest son, Jett. I feel dated. But I really hate porn.

Last weekend’s visit to the original Bethel, N.Y. site of the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair led me to think about buying the 245-minute director’s cut DVD of Michael Wadleigh‘s Woodstock. This led me to Warner Home Video’s Bluray version of this cut, which will come out on June 9th. This same cut will open Roger Ebert‘s Overlooked Film Festival on 4.22.

So between the possible Cannes showing of Ang Lee‘s Taking Woodstock next month, the Woodstock Blu-ray on June 9th, and the commercial release of Lee’s film on August 14th, the coming summer will definitely have a persistent Woodstock-nostalgia vibe.

Not to mention Michelle Esrick‘s Saint Misbehavin’, a doc about Woodstock star and onetime Merry Prankster Hugh Romney (a.k.a., Wavy Gravy) that….uhh, won’t be coming out this summer. The doc has played at the recent South by Southwest and the Full Frame Film Festival, but Ira Deutchman, who’s handling distribution, is wondering about competition from Lee’s film and thinking about waiting for the fall.

It seems to me that most people will be in the mood this summer to re-experience (or freshly experience) the old 1969 hippie-tribal vibe, but come Labor Day it’ll be on to other moods and discoveries.

In his 4.9 review of Observe and Report, Time‘s Richard Corliss wrote the following: “About an hour in, mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) has finally achieved his dream and taken the blonde, egotistical, doltish perfume saleslady Brandi (Anna Faris) to bed, basically by getting her drunk. Problem is, she’s pretty much passed out, her puke staining the pillow, as Ronnie happily, obliviously churns away. He pauses for a moment to notice her comatose state, and without opening her eyes, Brandi mutters, ‘Why’d you stop, malefactor?’ Or a 12-letter word to that effect.

“Now that‘s character comedy, I mean tragedy, I mean tromedy, of the highest, I mean lowest, I mean high-lowest order. Beyond the weirdness, if you can get there, is a quick portrait of trailer-park America pursuing its urges by any means necessary. It’s clear that Ronnie, no babe magnet, will take what he can get on this night of nights, even if it’s not quite the exalted ecstasy he had hoped for; and that Brandi, who’s been in this position once or twice before, wants the sexual exercise, even if she’s not awake to take an active role in it — somewhere in her stupor, she’s feeling a rote rumble of pleasure.

“The scene achieves what few American movies even attempt: to pinpoint the grim compromise, the desperation, that can attend the sex act. Don’t call it love; don’t call it grand; but whatever it is, don’t stop.”

I’ve long regaded Tom Wolfe as a political conservative, but I’ve never thought of him as an old-line racist. This is nonetheless the view of New Yorker critic David Denby in a new hardback essay he’s written called Snark. Here’s an excerpt from a review/summary/critque by reasononline’s Michael C. Moynihan.

“Denby identifies Wolfe’s Radical Chic as a progenitor of today’s snarky style, but it fails, he says, because the writer’s teasing of haute-liberal infatuation with the Black Panthers ‘now seems more fatuous than the assembled partygoers,'” Moynihan writes. “How so? Because, according to Denby, ‘In the end, [Wolfe’s trademark] white suit may have been less an ironic joke than the heraldic uniform of a man born in Richmond, Virginia, who entertained fancies of a distinguished Old South in which blacks kept their mouths shut, a conservative who had never accustomed himself to the new money in the Northeast.’

“While denouncing bloggers for rumor-mongering and for besmirching reputations with nothing but conjecture, Denby nevertheless finds it appropriate to imply that Wolfe’s writing is steeped in white supremacy.”

“Anyone who has been exposed to the subliterate animosities and grudges of the cruder anonymous commenters or bloggers, or has bristled at the lowered bar of what passes as clever satire on snark-heavy websites, will have some sympathy for Denby’s effort to attack against the ‘everyone-sucks-but-me’ culture,” Moynihan notes. “But his bizarre choice of targets and imprecise definition of ‘snarky’ derails his argument from the beginning.

“At its core, Snark is a deeply political book and, therefore, Denby offers special dispensations for a Right On!-variety of ideological snark.

“‘Snark is irresistible,’ he writes, when discussing our previous president (and who could disagree with that?), but it apparently becomes gauche when directed at Democrats peddling hope and change. A large chunk of his argument is ceded to score-settling and a post-election outpouring of anger against those who said impolite things about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (Denby may be the only writer alive who would describe Sarah Palin‘s description of Barack Obama as ‘palling around with terrorists’ as snarky.)

“Denby tags the Fox News screamer Bill O’Reilly as a boorish knuckle-dragger, but his liberal counterpart Keith Olbermann is something else entirely: ‘One can’t help but noticing…that Olbermann’s tirades are voluminously factual, astoundingly syntactical…and always logically organized.’ The leftist writer Gore Vidal is a ‘master of high snark,’ while his conservative counterpart Tom Wolfe is an overrated racist. If you agree with the snark, it probably isn’t snark.”

It was obvious within ten or fifteen minutes of watching The Mysteries of Pittsburgh what the central flaw is — it’s the way Art Bechstein, the lead character (and narrator), has been written, and particularly the aura of the actor who plays him — the almost 100% repellent Jon Foster. I paid to see Pittsburgh on Friday night at the AMC Empire, and I really can’t remember feeling such acute dislike for any non-villain character in so short a time. One result is that it was a serious struggle to force myself to watch the film to the end.

The problem is that time and again, Bechstein is shown to be a timid and inarticulate liar. His narration (said to be taken straight from Michael Chabon‘s 1989 best-seller) is wry, sharp and candid, but Bechstein is anything but. He’s a dull blob — a kind of bland sociopath — with a skinny frame and a face that is all about non-disclosure. This is not Bechstein from Chabon’s novel, which I remember reading in ’90 or thereabouts.

Foster stares glumly at his gangster father (Nick Nolte) and offers nothing but stupidly evasive half-replies to his questions. Out of boredom he has a hot-sex affair with his book-store boss (Mena Suvari) and treats her like dirt, and lies to her face, ineptly, when she accuses him of dissing her. He obviously hungers for Sienna Miller ‘s girlfriend-of-Peter Sarsgaard character but pushes it all down in spasms of suppression that lead nowhere. You just want to shoot him.

Foster conveys a single emotional condition throughout the entire film — a sense of quiet panic that people might actually be reading who and what he is (i.e., a cypher), and the absolute necessity of preventing this from happening.

On top of which Foster is a bore on his own terms. He has good bones and is somewhat handsome (if you don’t have an aversion to people with red hair) but I’m having trouble remembering another actor who’s conveyed less of an inner life of any kind — less vigor, less aliveness, less wit or humor. His eyes are like little brown pebbles on the side of a road. He needs to be play villains. Pittsburgh director Rawson Marshall Thurber probably would have bored me without Foster in the lead role, but his decison to cast Foster was absolutely fatal.