Those who recall the halcyon days of “Sixteen” may want to spend a minute with this YouTube video, captured a few days ago at a Syracuse University concert, and consider the moves of the bass player (i.e., stage right).

There is, to me, a kind of warm-bath comfort in the fact of Al Pacino appearing in some current or upcoming film (i.e., one that has a kind of substance) and surging on the oats of raging septugenarian hormones and looking like some kind of incorrigible sartorial dog.

No more guest editorships at the L.A. Times op/ed section because publisher David Hiller has been spooked over the Brian Grazer/Andres Martinez/Kelly Mullens editorial-intimacy scandal and has decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

One should never make decisions about substantial matters out of fear or anger. Hiller is obviously being driven by the former — he’s running for the hills.

There’s nothing inherently corrupt about bringing in guest editors — the idea would obviously make things more nervy, exciting, lively. Nothing betokens death as much as a person or organization unwilling to take risks. As Charles Laughton‘s Graccus said to the Roman Senate in Spartacus, “I’ll take a little Republican corruption with a little Republican freedom…but I won’t take the dictatorship of Crassus, and no freedom at all!”

Things aren’t as soft as they seem for Reign Over Me, which took in $8 million last weekend for an 8th place showing. What matters is that (a) the $4788 per-screen average was fairly decent and (b) the film is expected to motor along with good word-of-mouth from women and over-25s. The per-screen tally was better than the opening-frame $3617 average for Spanglish, a semi-serious Sandler film that “actually outgrossed comedies Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and Little Nicky,” according to Variety‘s Ian Mohr. Reign director Mike Binder confided a couple of days ago that “we actually did okay [last weekend]. Not the kill I wanted but we got a bad [i.e., extremely crowded] weekend. It’s good though. I’m happy.”

Several days after the Hilary 1984 video surfaced, cimaxed and subsided, the N.Y. Times ran a summary piece about it, written by Maria Aspan.

IGN’s Stax Flixburg is reporting that Darren Aronofsky‘s next directing chore will be The Fighter, a fact-based boxing drama that will reteam Departed co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon. Filming is expected to begin this summer in Massachucetts, he says. (Variety‘s Michael Fleming and Pamela McClintock almost certainly read Stax’s story, made a few calls and posted their version last night at 7:16 pm, without acknowledging that Stax broke it. That’s the way they do things over there.)

There’s a premiere screening of the first two episodes of the final season of The Sopranos tomorrow night at the Radio City Music Hall, plus an after-party with the cast somewhere…terrific. Just got into town, didn’t do my advance homework, there’s no chance of attending and this is the end of the line.

“In a world where everyone has an opinion — and can both share their own and seek out others online — respect for critics has taken a severe nose dive,” observes Lewis Beale in his latest Reeler essay. “But everyone seems to have forgotten that just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it’s well-thought-out.

“None of the fanboys at Ain’t it Cool News, for example, can measure up to the chops of Jim Hoberman or Manohla Dargis. I mean, I love opera, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to write a critique of Don Giovanni — I just don’t know enough about the genre’s subtleties.

“Which raises the key question: Why are critics writing about movies like A Night at the Museum anyway? Films like this are absolutely review-proof. It’s also old news that people who want to see them couldn’t care less what any egghead says about them, and given the massive PR machines behind these films, you’d think a critic’s time would be better spent writing about deserving indies, thoughtful foreign releases or Hollywood flicks like Zodiac. You know, films that actually merit an essay.

“Even the thought of the New York Times wasting space on Norbit gives me the willies, so why bother? What does it prove? And who are they reviewing it for, anyway? Some works just do not warrant in-depth examination or critical mention. Does the New York Times Book Review cover every Danielle Steele novel? Or the TV section write about every new program on the Game Show Network?”

A brilliant review by the Toronto Star‘s Geoff Pevere of Ken Loach‘s The Wind That Shakes The Barley, a sobering drama about the terrible price paid by Irish militants in their battle against British troops in the early 1920s. Pevere compares what Loach is saying about violent means — “when it comes to deciding to kill, there is no end” — to the traditional American six-shooter philosophy that “violence is a reasonable means to a justified end — especially if it pre-empts or avenges other forms of violence.”

The great Jamie Stuart‘s latest video piece is an arch, goofball-satiric interview with Black Book director Paul Verhoeven. A female voice-interviewer, an audience-reaction soundtrack and a dash of canary-yellow animation have replaced Stuart’s trademark angst and ennui and lonely-guy gloom. In short, a startling stylistic departure.

Scott Frank‘s The Lookout (Miramax, 3.30) has some good things going for it. Jeff Daniels‘ performance, for one. The dialogue, the craft and the care that went into it, and the snow and the slush covering the dreary Midwestern locales. But it’s largely about a young brain-damaged guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) dealing with hunger and temptation, and I think life is brutal and exhausting enough without having a brain injury to contend with, and I just decided early on I didn’t want to go there. Sorry, but I spook easily.

Jeff Daniels, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

A lot of care and craft and particularity went into The Lookout. It’s nicely sculpted (for what it is), feels well-drawn, has several solid performances (Bruce McGill‘s excellent paterfamillias is another standout) and so on. It was obviously made by a high-end pro who knows how to write snappy, down-to-it dialogue, but the only actor I wanted to hang with was Daniels. He plays a very smart low-rent character with spot-on seasoning and a perfect sense of emphasis. The kind of dumb-ass who knows more than he lets on.

The Lookout is primarily about some low-rent losers embarked on a nefarious scheme to score big dough — a bank job that you know is going to fail because they’re not smart or lucky enough. It’s obviously Fargo-esque in its frequent use of bleak, snowy backdrops as well as the lower-middle-class, criminal-class, upper-class mixture.

Scott wrote the Lookout script well over ten years ago. Sam Mendes was going to direct it (signed on before American Beauty was released), then David Fincher. Michael Mann flirted with it briefly before Frank decided he didn’t want to rewrite it again for another director.

“It was always a small mood piece in my mind, based on someone I knew,” Frank said a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t know how to write about him until I read this piece about these shitty little banks in these tiny towns that sometimes have millions of dollars in the vault for a couple of weeks twice a year, during harvesting and pre-planting seasons.

“I went to these towns in Kansas and you see how empty they are at night. How easy it would be to simply blow up the bank and walk in and walk out with the money! Suddenly, I had this notion of locating this character I had been thinking about in the middle of a thriller and it just went from there.”

I was bothered, frankly, by the bank set-up — all that glass, all those lights, all that exposure. Anyone could have seen those guys doing what they were doing. When a bank job is happening I want the thieves to do the job right and get away, and my thought from the beginning was that the whole place is way too visible and overlit.

Frank had to know that people would compare it to Fargo. If I’d been in Frank’s shoes, knowing full well that I was playing on the same football field as Fargo, I would have gone all the way and written it for dark sardonic laughs all around, like the Coens did. Why not? People are going to Fargo you anyway. When I mentioned this to Frank, he said that a Fargo-like tone “just wasn’t in my head. I wanted something emotional. Maybe I didn’t succeed, but I really wanted a thriller that had some modicum of emotion to it.”

I was impressed by Matthew Goode‘s attempt to get away from the cute and dapper English gentleman stuff that he did in Match Point by playing a low-rent psychopathic thug. But deep down I’m sensing that he really is that guy in Match Point (or a close relation) and that he may as well accept it.