This morning’s New Moon/Comic-Con press conference began at 9:54 am — almost a half-hour late — inside a super-sized meeting hall within San Diego’s Bayfront Hilton. The film’s three stars — Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner — posed for photos and took questions from a throng of about 75 or 80 journalists. It was my first Comic-Con event, but I have to say that the most heartening aspect happened before it began.

The heart moment happened when MSN Movies’ James Rocchi told me he completely agreed with my Twitter post this morning about Judd Apatow ‘s Funny People being “stunningly good” and “a kind of epic in the realm of selfish, scabrous, pissed-off comedian movies.” I’ll get into this in a subsequent post, but we both agreed it was a ballsy, mostly realistic and darkly funny film that never once took the manipulative, emotionally soothing way out.

Summit will open the Twilight sequel, a romantic triangle piece focusing on the mortal Bella Swan (Stewart), the vampire Edward Cullen (Pattinson) and a hottie werewolf Jacob Black (Lautner), on 11.20.

Lautner is clearly the most ambitiously press-friendly among the three. While Stewart and Pattinson did their usual usual — i.e., giving answers that suggested they’re a lot more complex and aloof and thoughtful than their participation in movies based on the Twilight series might suggest. It’s the age-old “I’ll do this but only if I can answer questions like Marlon Brando” routine. But Lautner, who has a bee-stung Beagle Boy nose , exhibited the personality of a publicist or a glad-hander. He clearly enjoys smiling and wants everyone to like him. He could be the next Regis Philbin if he wanted to go there.

If I was Lautner I would have the schnozzola re-shaped. I’m sorry but it’s an On The Waterfront longshoreman’s nose, or a nose belonging to a Russian wheat-farmer. If he’d come up through the ranks of old 1930s Hollywood studio system the moguls would have said “cute kid but fix the nose.”

(l. to r.) Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson

Stewart was wearing her Joan Jett haircut (for her currently filming The Runaways) and looked, frankly, kind of rock-and-rollish herself with a kind of cigarettes-and-booze attitude with stress bags under her eyes. She’s a fascinating actress, but clearly not someone who’s looking for peace as much as truth, even if it scalds.

Pattinson also looked vaguely seedy and grubby, like he took a shower the day before yesterday. He was in a pleasant-enough mood with a grinning, self-effacing attitude and nice white teeth.

The Summit publicists made the photographers stand back from the talent table about twelve feet or so. Apparently they didn’t want the actors to get all freaked out by a too-close physical proximity to the mongrelish paparazzi. (I’m certain it was the reps for Stewart or Pattinson who asked for the push-back; it sure as hell wasn’t Lautner.) This isn’t the way things are done at the Cannes, Sundance and Toronto press conferences but no biggie.

12:35 pm: In the hour since I posted my video of the New Moon kidz, my inbox has lit up with notifications that dozens of YouTube watchers around the world have watched it.

I’m sitting in an air-conditioned Super Shuttle van on Wilshire Blvd., and I can feel the inferno-like heat baking the sides of it. It’s like we’re cruising down 111 in Palm Springs or Palm Desert. You could fry a bloody egg on the sidewalk. Oh, yeah. Bloody hell. I’m sweatin’ here. Roastin’, bakin’, boilin’…and San Diego will probably be a tad hotter, I won’t arrive until midnight or thereabouts. Seeing Funny People first at the Arclight this evening.

Tina Brown‘s enormous media-changes thought #1, as passed along by the Chicago Tribune‘s Phil Rosenthal: “This particular wilderness that we’re in will change,” Brown says, “but it’s a very difficult time for people in old media.

“It’s most difficult, I think, for the people in their 50s who are part of a big media organization where they’ve spent most of their lives. They see it all changing around them and there isn’t time for them to make the adjustment, or they fear making it.”

And quote #2: “We’re in a transitional period that I think will only last another few years in which [journalists are] not paid the way they were. That’s the scary part. If you’re up to seeing the opportunity and recognize it as a transition, [and if] you have enough put away to ride this wave, it’s going to be fantastic. I think it’s a big liberation of every kind of talent.”

“What is cinema?,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a piece about a mesmerizing Michael Jackson tribute site called Eternal Moonwalk. “André Bazin published a book of essays that tried to answer that question. But if somebody asked me for the short answer, I’d advise them to visit EternalMoonwalk.com. Seriously.

“On first glance, the site seems little more than a poignant goof: a tribute to the late Michael Jackson that draws its inspiration from the John F. Kennedy memorial in Washington, D.C., with its eternal flame — but instead of a flame that never goes out, it’s a video loop featuring variations on the Gloved One’s signature move.

“But it’s more than that. In addition to being diabolically mesmerizing — between the array of clips and the faintly Billie Jean-like backbeat, one tends to lose track of time staring at the damned thing — Eternal Moonwalk is also an incidental tutorial in the basic properties of cinema. It returns motion pictures to their origin point, when the medium’s core appeal was the chance to watch strangers performing, their bodies moving from Point A to Point B, their familiar or amusing actions serving as an emotional connection point, a reminder that we’re members of the same species inhabiting the same small world.”

Tweeting about your arrival at LAX — hardly any kind of big deal — should suffice, but I may as well make it official by HE sights.

Delta flight to LAX was supposed to leave at 8:25 am, and we’re only just now pushing off. Delightful experience. Did I just hear something about wifi above 10,000 feet? HE’s six-hour dark period hereby begins.

Everett Sloane‘s finest acting moment was in Citizen Kane when his “Mr. Bernstein” character talked about the vagaries of memory. “A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember,” he said after William Alland‘s reporter dismissed the likelihood that Charles Foster Kane might recall a minor anecdotal event that had happened decades earlier.

“You take me,” Sloane/Bernstein began. “One day back in 1896 I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in, and on it was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all. But I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

We all have a few odd but lasting moments that have stayed in our heads. But the most interesting ones are those that don’t (or didn’t) involve someone we once saw and felt attracted to but never made a move on. That’s because they all refer to the same thing. The ones that are worth mentioning are those that have lingered for decades but defy interpretation as to why. But which contain or reflect some sort of metaphor that obviously matters.

Here’s one from my late teenage years. It happened on a late summer night in Wilton, Connecticut. There were two or three of us drinking beer on a bench in a small green area next to Route 7, the town’s main drag. And we were just gazing out at the road when two guys we knew drove by in a souped-up something or other, going 45 or 50 mph. We knew it had to be one of our friends because respectable citizens didn’t wail around town in muscle cars at midnight.

Anyway the guy riding shotgun — his name was Chip — opened the door, leaned down and dragged a beer can along the pavement as they sped by. And it created a small but beautiful shower of sparks. I don’t recall reacting all that strongly but I remember the shared contentment the three of us felt from watching this. “That was good,” one of us said without making a big deal out of it. And that was it. But I’ve never forgotten that lightshow. And I’ve never wondered why. It’s just a keeper and that’s that.

Tomorrow’s JFK-to -LAX flight leaves at 8:30 am, requiring a pre-dawn wakeup. A few errands to attend to when I hit town and then a 7 pm screening of Funny People , which I’m told is an in-and-out, up-and-down, 145-minute ahem thing. In a respectable/honorable way, some feel. (Universal guy to journalist friend: “It’s real, and some people don’t want real.”) Then then I’m driving down to San Diego and Comic-Con around 10 pm. I’ve rented a crappy little Craig’s List cottage with a futon on the floor.

There are all kinds of parties and events, and starting early is key. (I wonder what time the press room opens?) There’ll be a New Moon press conference at 9:30 am Thursday in a Gaslamp-area hotel. And I’ve already reported that I’m safely okay to attend the Avatar presentation, which happens Thursday afternoon from 3 pm to 4:125 pm. There’s an Entertainment Weekly poolside soiree around dinner hour. And a private little Peter Jackson gathering for 40 or so fans on Thursday night (9:30 pm to 11 pm) so the Great Genius can expound about District 9, The Lovely Bones, Tintin and The Hobbit . There’s also an Avatar gamer party going from 8pm to midnight.

The inside-the-big-hall events are well covered in this Luke Y. Thompson/ Deadline Hollywood Daily summary. I’m just going to play it like it lays. Expecting a lot of chit-chat, cruise-throughs, hey-ho’s, photos and videos. One trap I’m not going to fall into is partying too much in the evenings. I’m planning on filing in Starbucks for hours on end.

In any event, HE will be unrefreshed and all-but-dead starting tomorrow morning and lasting until God knows when tomorrow afternoon.

I’m so delighted with the new Criterion Repulsion Bluray (out 7.28) that I’ve played it twice start to finish, and I only opened the package last night. I didn’t sit there like a bowling pin and literally watch it twice. I watched it once and I ran it a second time as a kind of white-noise sideshow in the corner of my eye, tuning in and out and half-listening as I worked on the column.

It doesn’t seem to have been de-granularized in the slightest and I still love it. Just goes to show that people like me are fine with a natural grain look as long as it’s been done right. For all I know the grain has been toned down, but it looks amazingly sweet. It’s there but it’s fine. The monochrome tones are pleasingly vivid and soothing, and the sharpness of the picture is just right in an unforced and untweaked way.

The Ugly Truth (Sony, 7.24) is about a shrill and tightly-wrapped morning TV producer (Katherine Heigl) who decides to take guidance lessons from a sexist cock-of-the-walk talk-show guy (Gerard Butler) about how to land a prospective new boyfriend. Which gradually leads, of course, to Hiegl falling for Butler and vice versa and the other guy getting the blowoff. It was all there in the trailer.

I like Butler but he didn’t have a chance with this steaming pile of uptown fantasy chick-romance horseshit. The crude craft and lack of finesse make it a stunningly plastic, relentlessly boorish thing to sit through. It doesn’t wear its loathsomeness with pride as much as…I don’t know, cluelessness. It is arch, syrupy, cliche-ridden and girlish in the worst sense of that term. The whorish plotting and half-formed, rough-draft dialogue are just awful.

The Ugly Truth doesn’t even try to work with recognizable human behavior or tendencies or whatever. There seems to be a determination on the part of director Robert Luketic and the screenwriters (Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) to studiously avoid any depictions of human behavior that might remotely resemble what passes for believable behavior among real people dealing with real situations.

The problem is that there’s a whole generation of filmmakers out there who believe that once a film is “just a comedy” that this amounts to a license to show people cavorting several miles outside the boundaries of realism and credibility and recognizable human genetics because…it’s a comedy! And it’s cancer. It’s pure cancer afflicting and tumorizing a once-respectable form. Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey and David O. Russell would be bent over and vomiting on the floor after watching this thing.

Comedies are nothing unless they’ve been imagined and written like Hamlet — they have to be about serious hurt, real fears, genuine anxiety — and then lifted and contorted and pratfalled into humor with agility and spirit and split-second timing.

The Ugly Truth is just repellent sitcom crap aimed at younger women unencumbered by taste buds or judgment of any kind, and who are therefore easy lays. I understand “crazy” and I get “everyone is on drugs”…but you first have to realistically invest in and make people believe in the reality of what’s being said, done, decided upon and so on. Luketic and his screenwriting trio have totally ignored this responsibility.

If there was a court system within Hollywood that addressed exceptional creative crimes the whole Ugly Truth gang — Luketic, Eastman, Lutz, Smith plus producers Steven Reuther, Kimberly di Bonaventura, Deborah Jelin Newmyer, Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi plus executive producers Andre Lamal, Eric Reid, Katherine Heigl, Nancy Heigl, Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith and Ryan Kavanaugh — would be wearing orange jumpsuits and handcuffs and standing before the judge. If it were my call they’d all get time. Okay, suspended sentences with community service.

Heigl hasn’t done herself any favors with her performance. She plays it pinched and highly strung and neurotically unappealing for the most part. You could put a nickel between her butt cheeks and it would never drop to the floor. She touches emotional bottom towards the end — I’ll give her that.

Butler has a kind of crude mannishness that comes across decently here and there, but his loutish American accent — the same one Mel Gibson began using in the mid ’80s with lines like “gimme a hot dawwg with rehhlish!” — sounds forced and ungenuine. He needs to stop trying to be American and speak in his own native Scottish accent, which is quite appealing.

Here‘s Todd McCarthy‘s review in Variety.

Every bullshit cliche in the big-studio, high-adventure, CG-crapola pantheon, packed into one self-regarding, thoroughly self-amused franchise. It’s Indiana Zorro 007 Jones in 19th Century London, for God’s sake. It gave me instant cardiac arrythmia. I feel as if I’ve already sat through two screenings, been to the junket and watched it on a coast-to-coast flight. It’ll probably do extremely well with the chumps. I’m betting right now that the pre-disposed Drew McWeeny will cream all over it.