I missed Nikki Finke’s first report yesterday (which went up around 2:50 pm) about poor John Lesher getting fired as president of Paramount’s Film Group and Adam Goodman taking his place. The somewhat notorious Brad Weston (i.e., the guy who wasn’t interested in Twilight) has also been demoted.

I was out of the loop due to suffering through an obscene traffic jam on Sunset (allegedly due to a couple of accidents on the 10 and the 405). I had to cancel an appointment because of my entrapment; it also kept me from checking for online updates. You can’t fume and swear in the midst of stop-and-go traffic while surfing on your iPhone — being angry consumes you 100%.

A friend called and told me about the Lesher whacking around 4 or 4:30 pm, as I was heading over to the Fox lot for that 500 Days of Summer screening. But when I got out I figured nobody cared that much and it could wait. I care personally — Lesher always treated me decently and seemed a reasonably humane and responsive guy. (Plus I related to his neurotic temperament.) But I’ve never understood how the firing of another suit affects the price of rice in any meaningful way. Finke and Sharon Waxman and Kim Masters and Claudia Eller positively live for these stories…whatever, fine, go for it.

For me the bottom line is that the door is constantly revolving at the big studios — always has been, always will be — and none of these guys is Irving Thalberg so where’s the fire?

So when I got out of the film I said, “You know what? Fuck it.” I arranged to meet a good friend over at Typhoon, that cool exotic restaurant located on the Santa Monica Airport runway. The proprietor is Brian Vidor, son of director Charles Vidor. Excellent vibe, good people, delicious eats. My favorite L.A. haunt.

This BBC-provided Tehran-demonstration footage, only a few hours old, feels like raw footage from a Paul Greengrass film. I’ve been in a violent demonstration and know that demonstrators who risk bludgeonings and worse by fighting back have more courage than I. Mahsa from Tehran: “I was in the rally today and police forces in Azadi square cruelly killed people.” From Iran: “I am home since 10 minute and Basij forces and police were killing young people like animals”

President Obama “has been right to tread carefully, given the poisonous American-Iranian history,” says N.Y. Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, “but [he] has erred on the side of caution. He sounds like a man rehearsing prepared lines rather than the leader of the free world. A stronger condemnation of the violence and repression is needed, despite Khamenei’s warnings.

“Obama should also rectify his erroneous equating, from the U.S. national security perspective, of Ahmadinejad and Moussavi. Ahmadinejad is Iran’s Mr. Nuclear. He has rapidly advanced the program and, through preaching in every village mosque, successfully likened it to the nationalization of the oil industry as an assertion of Iranian nationalism. By contrast, Moussavi has not abjured the program, but has attacked Ahmadinejad’s ‘adventurist’ and ‘delusional’ foreign policy. These are essential distinctions.

“Obama should think hard about whether this ballot-box putsch is not precisely about giving Ahmadinejad and his military-industrial coterie four more years to usher Iran at least to virtual nuclear-power status. He should also think hard about the differences in character: Ahmadinejad is volatile and headstrong, the interlocutor from hell, while Moussavi is steady and measured.

“Shrugging away these distinctions like a dispassionate professor at a time when people are dying in the streets of Iran is no way to honor this phrase in his Inaugural Address: “Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.”

Snapped early last evening on the 20th Century Fox lot after a screening of Marc Webb‘s 500 Days of Summer (Fox Searchlight, 7.17), which isn’t half bad and may be, in fact, be the most honest and agreeable blend of romantic headiness and sinking despair since Jerry Maguire. I’ll get into it in a subsequent post, but this could work nicely with the educated under-30 date crowd.

Young pot-bellied wildebeest males may shine it on, but Webb is seriously taken with the love and the #1 romantic myth surrounding it, which is that we all have a destiny to meet a perfect soulmate, etc. I came out loving Summer for having very persuasively debunked this idea — but not cynically and with feeling. And with an obvious affection for intelligent writing and the emotional legacy of The Graduate. It doesn’t wallow in cheap manipulation and emotional-behavioral pig vomit like so many other youth-romance pics. It’s the anti-I Love You Beth Cooper. And I could actually stand Joseph Gordon-Levitt this time.

The Iran dictatorship’s threatened crackdown moves — shootings, tear gas, water cannons, baton beatings — are happening as we speak. All the Hangover and Zach Galifianakis fans (who are not being necessarily equated with simian-level idiocy) need to watch this poem video, which was apparently taped last night. Bless the woman who wrote and taped these words.

It’s one of those late-filing days with too much to do and not enough hours. I now have to move my bags to another place and then see 500 Days of Summer at 5 pm and then attend an LA Film Festival party. But what is all this running around town compared to the terrible coming fate of Iran’s green opposition forces? Awful news.

Kieran and Michele Mulroney‘s Paper Man, which kicked off the Los Angeles Film Festival last night, is, at best, a qualified dud. People were too polite to groan or whimper or walk out (even I stayed for the whole thing) but this was a film determined to just loll around and talk about loss and lament and enervate the living shit out of the audience at any cost. The atmosphere in the theatre (and I’m not exaggerating) was one of terrible suppressed calamity.

“Is this really happening?” I said to myself about 40 minutes in. I was exhaling and beginning to question the fundamentals. “They chose this movie to open the festival? A film this flat and meandering and borderline amateurish at times? Why…?”

LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham, I’m told, didn’t want to open the LAFF with Taking Woodstock or some other Cannes Film Festival selection that had already been seen and worked over. She wanted a farm-fresh entry. She actually said to Variety‘s Anne Thompson that she “wanted to find a film that reflected the spectrum of great movies in our contemporary film culture.”

And so naturally she chose an obviously problematic, low-energy, dialogue-driven indie-downhead drama that no one (and I mean no one with any practical financial sense) will ever acquire for distribution, barring suicidal instincts. But of course!

Paper Man is about a failed mid-50ish writer (Jeff Daniels) who, unable to deal with just about everything, least of all a new book he’s under pressure to deliver, sits around a yellow Montauk cottage that he and his surgeon wife (Lisa Kudrow) have rented, and goes on fantasy trips. He mainly tries to think and feel and behave like a kid so as to…I don’t know or care what his adolescence obsession is about, and neither does anyone else for the longest time. But it’s basically a case of serious writer’s block, chronic maturity issues, woe is me, why doncha kill me, etc.?

Guys in their mid 50s with adolescent behavior issues are deeply unappealing. You can’t be this pudgy and puffy-faced and this fucked up and expect an audience to empathize. It’s just not in the cards.

The story is mainly about Daniels’ non-romantic friendship with Emma Stone, who plays a local teen. She has two emotional exposure scenes — this is who I am, what I’m dealing with, what my hurt is about — and I’m sorry but she overplays it. There’s nothing worse than an actor pretending to suppress tearful emotion and losing the battle. Always win, always suppress. Let the audience feel what you’re feeling — never show it.

Paper Man‘s biggest problem is Daniels’ imaginary superhero friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), who pops in every eight or nine minutes in a blue and red Superman-type getup to advise or goad Daniels about this or that decision or behavioral issue, or to try and help with his writing. The metaphor is immediately tiresome — I was sick of it before the film started — and Reynolds is a bother every step of the way. The movie would’ve been 20% better off if they’d tossed him altogether and just focused on Daniels, Stone and Kudrow.

Another good thing would have been if someone (a lesser character, an extra, anyone) had come up behind Keiran Culkin‘s character, a morose gloom-head who does nothing for the entire film but stare at Stone and profess his love for her, and shot him in the head.

Besides being an actor, Kieran Mulroney is the younger brother of Dermot Mulroney. (His IMDB page notes that he’s “the ex-brother-in-law of Catherine Keener.”) Neither he nor wife Michele Mulroney have directed a film before.

HE humbly and wholeheartedly agrees with New York’s Vulture squad that Tom Cruise would be the best guy to replace Sean Penn-as-Larry in the Farrellys’ Three Stooges movie. God, what a beautiful idea! I read this a couple of hours ago and have been in the best mood since.

The new trailer for Roland Emmerich‘s 2012 trailer promises a slightly more ferocious rehash of other doomsday movies. Here and there I felt the lingering ghosts of Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, etc. It’s a miracle that all those meteorites (or whatever they are) manage to miss the SUV carrying John “paycheck” Cusack and his son. I’m bored. Emmerich is bored. We’re all bored.

If I was running the Public Enemies p.r./marketing effort, I would give the okay to one or two select journos who admire Michael Mann‘s film to post retorts to Lou Lumenick’s now-redacted pan. I’ve heard from one guy who says Lumenick is “so wrong in so many ways” about the film. There’s also Kris Tapley‘s claim that PE is Mann’s best since The Insider. Get in front of it, slap it down — don’t let Lou control the conversation. Mann loyalists, unite!

A couple of good guys, Lee Ginsberg and Chris Libby, are partnering in a new p.r. film called Ginsberg Libby. “Libby joins the venture from B|W|R Public Relations,” the release says, “where, as vice president, he expanded the company’s film division. He is followed by Chris Regan and Gina Lang, who will serve as directors of film and corporate entertainment; Kate Payne, who will serve as a senior account executive; and Karina Vladimirov, who will serve as administrative support. Ginsberg segues from PMK/HBH where he served as vice president, and is joined by Laura Paulsen who will serve as a senior account executive at the new entity.” Congrats to all, go get ’em.

English translations provided by Andrew Sullivan, to wit: 1: (Girl in street): Defending civil rights. 2: (Boy next to old man): Counterbalancing poverty and deprivation. 3: (Boy pushing away donation box): Nationalizing oil income. 4: (Man standing on rooftop): Reducing tension in international affairs. 5: (Boy sitting next to satellite dishes): Free access to information. 6: (Girl sitting besides her mother): Supporting single mothers. 7: (Girl with cast):? Knock down violence against women. 8: (Boy): Education for all. 9: (Boy infront of man locking car): Increasing public safety. 10: (Girl on rooftop): Ethnic and religious minority rights. 11: (Man on rooftop): Supporting NGOs. 12: (Girl in front of wall): Public involvement. 13: (Boy and girl): We have come for? change. 14: Change for Iran. (Ad was for Iran’s reformist candidate Mehdi Karroui.)