It’s well and good for The Hurt Locker to have Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings of 98% and 91% respectively, but you know something really special is happening when the notoriously fickle and eccentric N.Y. Press critic Armond White is standing arm-in-arm with the usual elite-critic suspects — i.e., Joe Morgenstern, A.O. Scott, David Denby, David Edelstein, Scott Foundas, Dana Stevens, etc.

Some excerpts:

(a) “The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn’t lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.” — Edelstein, New York;

(b) “So far, the best fiction films about the Iraq War are Nick Bloomfield‘s Battle for Haditha, Irwin Winkler‘s Home of the Brave and John Moore‘s allegorical Flight of the Phoenix remake. It’s sufficient praise to say The Hurt Locker joins that short list. Kathryn Bigelow has found her perfect subject.” — White, N.Y. Press.

(c) “The Hurt Locker is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise. If it’s not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car.” — Scott, N.Y. Times.

(d) “With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today’s dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. The Hurt Locker is the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood.” — Foundas, Village Voice.

(e) “In this period of antic fragmentation, Bigelow has restored the wholeness of time and space as essentials for action. Occasionally, a plaintive reader writes me a note after I’ve panned some violent fantasy movie and says something like ‘Some of us like explosions. Ease up.’ Well, I like these explosions, because I believe in them. Realism has its thrills, too.” — Denby, New Yorker.

(f) “A first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances. Most of all, though, The Hurt Locker is an instant classic that demonstrates, in a brutally hot and dusty laboratory setting, how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can’t kick the habit.” — Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal.

(g) “After The Hurt Locker (which is without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Jeremy Renner‘s name.” — Stevens, Slate.

Cue all the bloated empties out there in middle America. Are we ready? One, two….”we’re not seeing it because we’d rather just be entertained!”

If the people behind Michael Jackson‘s now-scuttled concert tour have any sense, “they’ll assemble an all-star tribute concert,” writes HE’s Moises Chiullan. “There are plenty of faded-glory performers who could use a boost. They’ll retitle the concert to something like ‘Long Live the King’ that’ll inspire angry responses from Elvis fans in rural areas. Paula Abdul will be there — who else needs a major leg up? Part of the proceeds will go to charity, the rest to paying down Jackson’s crushing debt his kids are saddled with.”

For what it’s worth, TMZ is passing along information from “a close member of Michael Jackson‘s family” that Jackson “received a daily injection of a synthetic narcotic similar to morphine — Demerol — and yesterday he received a shot at 11:30 am” and that “family members are saying the dosage was ‘too much’ and that’s what caused his death.”

TMZ is also reporting that “law enforcement [reps are] looking for a doctor who may have given Jackson an injection before he died. [The doctor] lived at Michael Jackson’s home [but] is nowhere to be found. Law enforcement sources tell us a BMW belonging to the doctor was towed from Jackson’s home last night.”

Here’s an hour-long mp3 of yesterday’s sitdown with Humpday costars Mark Duplass and Josh Leonard. I found their easy manner, sage observations and steady wit relaxing — I felt like I knew them quite well within minutes — and of course interesting. They let me ask the questions but we mainly just talked. The recording, in a sense, is a kind of preview of the flavor of their back-and-forth in Humpday (Magnolia, 7.10). Wait for Leonard’s second-hand anecdote about Michael Bay — “trust the box-office!”

Humpday costars Josh Leonard, Mark Duplass — Thursday,6.25, 1:42 pm.

It’s 11:25 pm and the coverage of Michael Jackson‘s death on MSNBC is starting to drive me crazy. Tribute interviews with friends and colleagues, recaps, recollections, music videos, relentless references to the phenomenal record sales of Thriller, footage of the crowd outside the Apollo theatre, etc. And not a single word about why the poor man is dead at age 50.

I’m not talking about the diagnostic cause or an analysis about what amounts of which prescription drug (or drugs) may or may not have caused cardiac arrest. Nobody knows anything but we’ve all read today’s report and we all have our guesses and suspicions. We’ll be hearing the details soon enough.

What I’m wondering is why TV commentators won’t even obliquely allude to Jackson’s notoriously diseased lifestyle and behavior (particularly since the allegations of child molestation, which began in ’93, began to gradually collapse his career) and what I believe was surely a case of massive psychological anguish caused by his constant efforts to deny and obscure his sexual nature.

I’m asking because it seems fairly obvious to me that this anguish, deep down, is what killed Michael Jackson, and because the media are playing chickenshit games tonight in their efforts to avoid discussing this.

Jackson didn’t commit abrupt suicide but he almost certainly died from what he did to himself in increasing increments over the years. The reason he behaved and lived the way he did over the last 16 or so years and died the way he did today was due to the toxic effects of constant lying and denying about who and what he was. I believe in the end that his body and soul just couldn’t take it any more. The bullshit caught up with him.

The evidence has been clear for years that the man was a closeted pedophile, and that the elaborate games he played in order in order to conceal this aspect of his nature and misdirect the media and his millions of fans as much as possible led, I strongly suspect, to increasing spiritual stress and trauma. I’m obviously not pretending to know any of the particulars but Jackson, I believe, was surely driven mad by everything that he failed to deal with. Tell me I’m wrong.

Jeff is going into a screening of Public Enemies and has asked me to post his thoughts on the still-developing Michael Jackson story — Moises Chiullan.

CNN is finally going with the report by the LA Times, with TMZ having called it nearly an hour ago. As soon as it came from multiple sources that he wasn’t breathing when paramedics arrived, it was over. Who dies at age 50 if you’re fit and not Elvis Presley, or otherwise not a standard candidate for a heart attack?

Overheard just before Public Enemies screening at the Loews 84th St. today: “Peter Pan couldn’t grow old.” He would have been 51 years old on August 29th.

MTV, the cable network that owes their existence to Jackson, is only just now breaking into its regular promgramming with a Jackson tribute. This marks the first time in well over a decade that they have resembled the music video network they started out as.

A 6.24 Salon story, anonymously written, reported that “Tehran state television — Channel Two — is putting on a Lord of the Rings marathon,” as “part of a bigger push to keep [protestors] busy” — i.e., distracted. “Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it’s two or three films a day. The message is ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Let’s watch, forget about what’s happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.'”

In an interview with CHUD’s Devin Faraci, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman don’t dispute the rap about the Jar Jar Twins being racially offensive and basically say that if you’re looking for the go-to bad guy in this affair, go to director Michael Bay.

“It’s really hard for us to sit here and try to justify it,” one of them says. “I think that would be very foolish, and if someone wants to be offended by it, it’s their right. We were very surprised when we saw it, too, and it’s a choice that was made. If anything, it just shows you that we don’t control every aspect of the movie.

I shared an easy and friendly lunch an hour ago with Humpday costars Mark Duplass and Josh Leonard at an old-world Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue. I’m going to wait until tomorrow morning to post the mp3, but these guys are very cool and sharp as a tack. I’ll say it again — Humpday (Magnolia, 7.10) is the best written, best acted mumblecore bromance flick of all time.

Josh Leonard, Mark Duplass — Thursday,6.25, 1:35 pm.

The LA-residing, married-with-daughter Duplass has wrapped a supporting performance in Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, among other acting gigs.. He and his brother Jay are now working on their latest co-directed film, which may or may not be called Don’t Fuck My Mom.

The Owen Wilson-ish Leonard (a.k.a., a smoother and more appealing version of Zach Galifianakis in Humpday) is directing a drama called Everything’s Alright (per the IMDB) and has acted (or is currently acting) in Hung, the forthcoming HBO series with Thomas Jane. Or so I heard him say.

Farrah Fawcett, 62, took off about two and a half hours ago, and I’m sorry. Nothing but stillness and serenity now, or so we’d like to think. I’ve long believed that a kind of singular consciousness stays with you as you leave the mortal coil, but that it merges with the grand cosmic altogether like a drop of water into a pool. We’re all going to get there, no exceptions. Live well and fully and cherish it all.

For both parties there’s an obvious element of self-destructive insanity in any extra-marital affair. The infidel is flirting with the possible destruction of his/her marriage, and, if he/she has a high-profile job, inviting possible harm to his/her reputation for the sin of indiscretion and the suspicion that he/she has an emotional screw loose. And the other man/woman will be emotionally wounded sooner or later, and made to feel like shit.

But having been there myself (i.e., I was the other guy in an off-and-on, two-and-a-half-year affair with a married journalist), I know that there’s no resisting the siren call if and when it gets inside you. Falling in love in the wrong way — illicitly — is always a troubling but mesmerizing experience, to put it mildly. You obviously know it’s not “right,” but dangerous affairs can make you feel intensely alive and vibrant, like you’re 19 years old and tasting God’s glorious nectar for the first time. You feel plugged into something extraordinary and magnificent, and you’ll say or do almost anything to keep it going, including jumping off a cliff without a parachute.

I don’t blame anyone, including Republican politicians, for succumbing to temptation and falling in love outside the bonds of propriety. The hypocrisy of Republicans who talk family values and then fool around with girlfriends in Las Vegas or Argentina is disgusting, of course, but airing private love letters online and on TV is disgusting also. Powerful politicians almost always fool around. It’s part of their makeup, and any woman who marries a politician and doesn’t realize that this kind of thing will most likely manifest sooner or later is flat-out delusional.

Why should any of us care about affairs if the politician is standing up for what he/she believes or doing what he/she promised to do for her constituents? Flying to Argentina on the taxpayers’ dime is ethically wrong, of course, but how corrupt is that, really, in the grand scheme of things? Has there ever been a politician who hasn’t used public funds for personal pleasure? Please.