L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan has written an agreeable travel piece about a recent pilgrimage he made to Monument Valley, largely in tribute to his memories of seven John Ford films that were shot there — Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn.

And of course, Turan follows the herd by describing or discussing Monument Valley only in terms of the staggering beauty of the place and not once about the whopping absurdity of any 19th Century settlers living in Monument Valley because it has (a) no grass for cattle to graze on, (b) no rich soil to grow crops with (it’s all sandy, desert-type moon dust with rugged cactus and sage brush-type plants), (c) no big river running through it, and (d) no forest to invade and cut down trees to build log cabins and make lumber with with…no nothin’ in the way of life-sustaining, community-building elements of any kind.

Or at least, none that I’ve been able to notice in watching all these Ford films. Not a damn thing except worthless scenic beauty. And none of the Ford worshippers have ever complained about this…not once. Or have I missed something?

Daylight savings time begins a week from today, or Sunday, March 11th — three weeks earlier than usual. Get ready to manually reset your Treos, Blackberrys and computers because many devices, apparently, haven’t been programmed to synch with the new time change arrangement.

A 3.5.07 N.Y. Times story by Steve Lohr says that “the daylight-time shift, according to technology executives and analysts, amounts to a ‘mini-Y2K.’ That is a reference to the rush in the late 1990s to change old software, which was unable to recognize dates in the new millennium, 2000 and beyond.

“The fear was that computers would go haywire, and there were warnings of planes falling from the skies and electronic commerce grinding to a halt. Billions of dollars were invested to fix the so-called millennium bug, and there was no wave of computer-related disasters.

“This time, with extended daylight saving time, the problem is subtler. The potential pitfall is a disruption of business, if the clocks inside all kinds of hardware and software systems do not sync up as they are programmed to do. In a business world that is increasingly computerized and networked, there could be effects on everything from programmed stock trading to just-in-time manufacturing to meeting schedules.”

“I learned that if you don’t want fleas, you don’t lie down with dogs….but there are only so many distributors out there.” The speaker is producer Aaron Ryder (The Amateurs ), the subject is producer Philippe Martinez, head of the troubled distribution company Bauer Martinez; and the forum is an L.A. Times piece by reporter John Horn.

Some of the same Martinez material was covered in a 10.26.06 Sharon Waxman piece in the N.Y. Times, particularly the fallout from his allegedly not living up to promises he’d made about promoting Harsh Times. Horn also discusses The Flock, a Bauer Martinez movie starring Richard Gere, and another one called I Could Never Be Your Woman starring Michelle Pfeiffer.

Horn also reports that Bauer Martinez has pacted with Die Hard‘s John McTiernan “to direct the $50-million Hayden Christensen action movie Crash Bandits ” and that it “said it would spend $850,000 for the adult film comedy The Amateurs, starring Jeff Bridges.”

Last October, in response to the Waxman piece, I wrote the following about the Martinez syndrome: “Time and again Hollywood types — directors, producers, studios — get into business with oily foreign guys (European or Israeli) who tend to live high and swagger around and smoke cigars. The Hollywooders are always interested because there are always fresh oilies looking to buy their way into the business, and they’ll hook up with almost anyone with a connected rep in order to do so. Elie Samaha, Giancarlo Peretti, Jean-Marie Messier, Bob Yari, Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus, Avi Lerner, etc.

“Yari has been doing pretty well for himself lately (The Illusionist is a hit), but sooner or later the matters of oily men always seem to turn sour or go south. Hollywooders who make movies with them always seem to regret it, sooner or later. ”

And yet I’ve seen The Amateurs, which the IMDB says has been retitled The Moguls, and can sympathize with Martinez not wanting to go the distance for it, despite what Ryder may say. A friend of the film could call it quirky or mildly amusing, but it’s just not very good.

To promote/salute Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.6) in the Los Angeles area, Quentin Tarantino is programming the New Beverly Cinema with so-sleazy-they’re-hip-in-retrospect exploitation films. A double-feature every two or three days, playing now through May 1st — and just about every one a diposable wank except for Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), which shows 3.25 through 3.27. (Rock Hudson as a high-school teacher and lecherous poon-hound, plus one or two nude Angie Dickinson scenes….I’m there.)

When and if these films ever get released as a Tarantino-approved DVD box set, I wonder if I’ll care enough to even rent one or two.

Has Tarantino ever sat down and written a definitive manifesto that explains what it is that he finds so wonderful about these films? The thing he worships about them, I think, is their low-rent vitality and lack of pretension, and (I guess) the occasional standout performances. They have all that, yes (if you want to be generous), but they’re not about anything the least bit internal or profound.

Tarantino is a lazy wallower — an attitude huckster, an iconographer, a street- corner smart-ass. Inherent in this is a disinclination to believe in (much less seek out) art or transcendence — in any sort of practice or exercise or canvas-splattering that tries to imagine a world beyond the mundane.

There’s nothing wrong with wallowing in and of itself — I like to go there from time to time, and I’ll probably enjoy Grindhouse when it comes out — but celebrating ’70s grindhouse films as brash and nervy and better than people realized at the time….I don’t know. I think it’s basically horseshit.

World discourse will never lack for intellectual stimulation as long as there is strong diversity of opinion. It’s a slightly different equation when you’re dealing with documentarians living in states of profound denial, and spreading their disease to millions, like the flu. “Sad” is not a word that comes to mind — “malicious” says it better.

Wild Hogs wailed at the box-office this weekend while Zodiac struggled. The consistency in supporting and back-slapping low- brow entertainments straight out of the gate (i.e., as long as they feel familiar and amiable-friendly) is what sets Americans proudly apart from other cultures. (Is there another big-time industrial western society as blue-collar oafish as ours?) A slovenly homophobic movie about four pot-bellied male menopausers on motorcycles handily kicks the ass one of the unquestionably great early films of ’07…as it should be! Yeah!

It was obviously in the cards for Zodiac to come in second — I was just hoping against hope that it would do more like $14 or $15 million. My new dream is that it’ll drop a lot less than Hogs does next weekend.

The yaw-haw Disney flick costarring John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy played in about 900 more theatres than Zodiac did, and wound up with $38 mil lion, give or take. Zodiac, playing on 2,362 screes, ended up with $13.1 million and a per screen average of $5,546.

Ghost Rider dropped 43% to the #3 position…what, non on DVD yet? Paramount Vantage’s Black Snake Moan, a tasty, morally positive gridhouse drama (liked it quite a bit at Sundance), came in eighth place with just over $4 million on 1252 screens, averaging $3,208 — hey, not as good as Zodiac‘s!

The long lowdown on Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner‘s running of United Artists, plus the Harry Sloan determinations that paved the way along with the views of others about the viabiliy of such a venture, according to N.Y. Times reporter Richard Siklos.

Apologies to all, but today was one of those vroom-vroom motorcycle Saturdays. I guess I figured after erranding and plotzing and then running around all morning and then hiking in the mid to late afternoon out in Malibu Canyon it’s better to let things lie for a day….just one day…and then jump back in Sunday morning.

A brief David Fincher q & a with the Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy…and that’s it.

A few Zodiac dissenters — Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern, Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek, Washington Post‘s Stephen Hunter, N.Y. Daily News‘ Jack Matthews, Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum, Austin Chronicle‘s Marjorie Baumgarten — have weighed in, and the Metacritic score has resultantly plunged to 77% positive. This calls for some kind of congregational ceremony. How about David Poland‘s on Sunday for beer, hot dogs and potato salad?

Does this justifiably pissed-off letter from John Sinno, producer of the Oscar-nominated feature-length doc Iraq in Fragments, complaining about Jerry Seinfeld‘s having referred to the five nominated docs on last Sunday’s Oscar telecast as “incredibly depressing,” increase or decrease the possibility that Seinfeld might be hired to host next year’s Oscars? Or does anyone care how ticked off Sinno and other doc makers might be? People laughed at Seinfeld’s joke, after all.

They shouldn’t have, and they damn well should care. Seinfeld not only dissed the docs and their makers — he flat-out lied. The better-made docs don’t depress you — they get the blood going. There’s at least the same amount of narrative punch, thematic weight and genuine emotion in a typical well-made doc as can be found in most mainstream features these days, if not more so. Docs are what you pop into the DVD player when you want to feel something real, when you want to flush the crap out.

“I had the great fortune of attending the 79th Academy Awards following my nomination as producer for a film in the Best Documentary Feature category,” Sinno begins. “At the Awards ceremony, most categories featured an introduction that glorified the filmmakers’ craft and the role it plays for the film audience and industry. But when comedian Jerry Seinfeld introduced the award for Best Documentary Feature, he began by referring to a documentary that features himself as a subject, then proceeded to poke fun at it by saying it won no awards and made no money. He then revealed his love of documentaries, as they have a very “real” quality, while making a comically sour face.

“This less-than-flattering beginning was followed by a lengthy digression that had nothing whatsoever to do with documentary films. The clincher, however, came when he wrapped up his introduction by calling all five nominated films “incredibly depressing!”

“While I appreciate the role of humor in our lives, Jerry Seinfeld’s remarks were made at the expense of thousands of documentary filmmakers and the entire documentary genre. Obviously we make films not for awards or money, although we are glad if we are fortunate enough to receive them. The important thing is to tell stories, whether of people who have been damaged by war, of humankind’s reckless attitude toward nature and the environment, or even of the lives and habits of penguins.

“With his lengthy, dismissive and digressive introduction, Jerry Seinfeld had no time left for any individual description of the five nominated films. And by labeling the documentaries ‘ncredibly depressing,’ he indirectly told millions of viewers not to bother seeing them because they’re nothing but downers. He wasted a wonderful opportunity to excite viewers about the nominated films and about the documentary genre in general.

“To have a presenter introduce a category with such disrespect for the nominees and their work is counter to the principles the Academy was founded upon. To be nominated for an Academy Award is one of the highest honors our peers can give us, and to have the films dismissed in such an offhand fashion was deeply insulting. The Academy owes all documentary filmmakers an apology.

“Seinfeld’s introduction arrived on the heels of an announcement by the Academy that the number of cities where documentary films must screen to qualify for an Academy Award is being increased by 75%. This will make it much more difficult for independent filmmakers’ work to qualify for the Best Documentary Feature Award, while giving an advantage to films distributed by large studios. Fewer controversial films will qualify for Academy consideration, and my film Iraq in Fragments would have been disqualified this year. This announcement came as a great disappointment to me and to other documentary filmmakers. I hope the Academy will reconsider its decision.

“On a final note, I would like to point out that there was no mention of the Iraq War during the Oscar telecast, though it was on the minds of many in the theatre and of millions of viewers. It is wonderful to see the Academy support the protection of the environment. Unfortunately there is more than just one inconvenient truth in this world. Having mention of the Iraq War avoided altogether was a painful reminder for many of us that our country is living in a state of denial. As filmmakers, it is the greatest professional crime we can commit not to speak out with the truth. We owe it to the public.

“I hope what I have said is taken to heart. It comes from my concern for the cinematic art and its crucial role in the times we’re living in.”

That Warner Bros.-funded movie about the political firestorm that happened when Bush White House higher-ups decided in ’03 to get Ambassador Joseph Wilson by outing his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent….this could be a seriously gripping All The President’s Men-type thriller. If the screenwriters — Jez and John Butterworth — and the producers — Akiva Goldsman, Jerry and Janet Zucker — decide to portray what really happened and not pussyfoot around.

That means they need to go with good colorful villainy (they obviously have to work Karl Rove in as the opportunistic maestro) and they need a solid hero figure to oppose the Bush baddies. I see Tom Hanks as Wilson, Robin Wright Penn as Plame and Ned Beatty as Cheney. Any suggestions for Scooter, Rove, Bush, etc.?

Variety‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that WB “has secured the life rights of Plame and Wilson. Studio also will use Plame’s memoir, Fair Game, if the CIA permits her to publish it. Plame made a reported publishing deal in the $2.5 million range last year, and Simon & Schuster is expected to publish late this year.

“While it would be ironic for Plame’s story to be illegally leaked by the White House, only to have another government branch deny her the right to tell it herself, the CIA has the latitude to silence Plame.

“She left the agency in late 2005 and she and Wilson have filed a civil lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff for Cheney who’s currently on trial, defending himself against charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to FBI agents who were investigating the leak of Plame’s identity to journalists.”