Something still feels off here to me, for all the snazzy editorial work. The only joke that’s actually funny is Kevin Spacey‘s spot-on Al Pacino impersonation, though even the choice of Spacey feels off. Perhaps I’m being too literal minded, but Abramoff was younger and more jockish and athletic when all of this was going down. On the other hand, the movie-obsession is correct. Abramoff is a movie buff who even co-produced an actual action film or two, including the Dolph Lundgren vehicle, “Red Scorpion.”

Still, I’m keeping an open mind. He hasn’t had gigantic luck with fiction features so far, but director George Hickenlooper (“The Big Brass Ring”) has been involved with probably two of the best all-time documentaries about outrageous show business figures, the Francis Ford Coppola-centric “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” and the even better “Mayor of the Sunset Strip” about DJ and ultimate scenester Rodney Bingenheimer. I’m sure there’s a bit more here than meets the eye, at least I hope so . . .

* As of tonight, corporate raider Carl Icahn appears to be a majority stockholder in Lionsgate.

* I’ve never been a fan of the seventies movie of the silly seventies film version of “Logan’s Run,” but with Carl Erik Rinsch directing, my interest in the new film perked up considerably. Now, Alex Garland — who wrote and produced the not-entirely-unrelated upcoming version of “Never Let Me Go” which I discussed yesterday — has jumped on board, making it even more interesting. Better, they’re approaching it as a new version of the book, not a remake of the film. In the 1976 film, by the way, no one in the futuristic society was permitted to live past 30. In the novel, it was 21.

* Sam Raimi has been confirmed as the director of “Oz: The Great and Powerful.” Apparently Robert Downey, Jr., who just formed a new company with his producer wife, Susan Downey, is the most likely Oz at this point.

* Be sure and check out Will Harris’s terrific interview with one of the best, Isabella Rossellini. Easily one of the most fascinating  actresses of the last thirty years or so, with quite a backstory behind her. Don’t miss it.

*Though Ms. Rossellini seems perfectly at home in a very humorous way with her fifty-something status, that is not really always the case for actresses. This month’s conversation between Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard at the House Next Door underlines that point as the cinephile thinkers discuss two of Hollywood’s greatest show-biz based films, “Sunset Boulevard” and “All About Eve,” both released in 1950 and both dealing with actresses who struggling with this whole passage of time thing.

* That film geek Ahab, Quint, manages to capture the elusive Ridley Scott and discusses “Alien” stuff, specifically the proposed 3-D prequels and Scott’s attitude towards the process, not to mention the brilliant advertising campaign for the original film.

* The White Elephant Blogathon has taken place. It’s a deeply sado-maschistic ritual in which film bloggers fob off films they wouldn’t inflict on their worst enemies to other film bloggers, and then have to review one such film themselves. Dennis Cozzalio caught the “Mannequin 2: On the Move,” and let’s just say the results border on the psychedelic.

*If Tom Tyker’s Wachowski-produced film version of the novel “Cloud Atlas” ever gets made, it’s likely going to be big.

* I’ve had some obvious mixed feelings about Nikki Finke since starting this here gig, but director Joe Carnahan’s idiotic attack on her confirms my initial unflattering hunches about him. I never understood why his film “Narc” got the praise it got. I found it merely irritating.

* One of several reasons I’m scaling back the blogging fairly radically for a couple of weeks is so that I actually would like time to catch some movies at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. Karina Longworth and the gang at the L.A. Weekly are helping me to make some selections.

* RIP film scholar and freelance writer Peter Brunette, who died suddenly at a festival in Italy at age 66. Glenn Kenny has a nice remembrance up.

* The trailer for “Bagman,” retitled from “Casino Jack,” is anything but promising. Also, isn’t it time for an indefinite moratorium on the use of “Gimme Shelter” in trailers and even movies? I’m talking to you too, Mr. Scorsese!

Even though I had my quibbles, it seems pretty likely that “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” also about the Jack Abramoff affair, will prove to be the better film.

* I think Leo the Lion just digs torturing fanboys and fangals.

* OMG! OMG! It’s the dark Miley!

* If you haven’t absolutely nothing better to do, you can watch the new Smurf  movie’s teaser trailer. It’s looking like a real clustersmurf to me.

* Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me,” based on a the ultra-ultra-dark novel by Jim Thompson, has been the talk of the festival circuit for some time because of some scenes of extreme violence (just how graphic they actually are remains slightly unclear, though their emotional impact is clearly extremely strong) that have raised some hackles. Over at the the Daily Beast, Allen Barra marks its release by taking a look at Thompson’s works and wondering if they’re ever truly been filmable.

* Speaking of films that made their names with a single scene of violence against a woman, Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of “Psycho.” While there is no doubting that Hitchcock’s film is a hugely important milestone and its first forty minutes or so are a kind of perfection. Louis Vertel at Movieline is absolutely correct that it’s not his best — I’m not sure who thinks it is, except for people who haven’t seen many other Hitchcock movies. In fact, I’d rank it significantly lower than Vertel does. For me, it’s not even in Hitchcock’s top 10, though that less a knock on it than praise for a number of truly great films by of one of the real geniuses of the movies. It is, however, one of Bernard Herrmann’s very best scores.

On a separate note, if you’re a real movie geek, make sure you don’t miss another chapter in the long running Glenn Kenny v. Jeffrey Welles moviegeek smackdown, this time over “Psycho” and, wait for it, aspect ratios. Both enlightening and entertaining if a bit more polite than usual.

And, okay, “Psycho” is kind of amazing.

There’s no doubt that Alex Gibney is on a historic roll as a documentarian. Within only a few years, he’s been involved with probably the largest number of popular and influential documentaries of any single human being not named Michael Moore. Those works would include the outstanding “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and the equally strong, and Oscar winning, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” about American use of torture in the “war on terror.” Gibney has also made his share of more historically themed documentaries, including “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.” He was also involved as a producer in two of the other most important and controversial documentaries of recent years, the Iraq-war expose, “No End in Sight” and “Who Killed the Electric Car?”

If Gibney’s past output is hugely impressive, however, his upcoming list of films is dizzying. At the recently wrapped Tribeca Film Festival in New York, he premiered as a “work in progress,” a new and apparently very revealing, look at former New York state governor, attorney general, and Wall Street watchdog Eliot Spitzer and the sex scandal that drove him from office. He also has a segment in the upcoming film version of the super-hot bestseller, Freakonomics, as well as new films about two very different cultural legends: bicyclist Lance Armstrong and author/super-hippie Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Merry Pranksters fame.

There’s also the recently completed “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” and the film Gibney was promoting at his publicist’s L.A. office one recent afternoon, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.” It’s a work of amazing journalistic detail that also works very hard to be lively and accessible.

Even if I felt that Gibney didn’t quite master that “accessible and lively” aspect too consistently this time around, his “Casino Jack” reviews so far have been great overall. He’s certainly a filmmaker to be reckoned with and one with an outstanding body of work behind him and much, much more to come. Not my idea of a lazy person.

Premium Hollywood: Things have been busy for you lately.

Alex Gibney: I’ll say.

PH: They’re calling the Tribeca Festival the “Alex Gibney Fest”…

AG: Right, right, right.

PH: I was reading the Wall Street Journal article about you and it said that the reason these have all come out at once is that all these interviews have materialized for you fairly recently. These are movies you’ve been working on for several years, though.

AG: That’s right. Some of them were supposed to have been finished one or two years ago, but they weren’t quite ready and we hadn’t quite gotten to the center of the story. You hope that these not only have an immediate impact but a kind of lasting impact. If you’re trying to tell a story from the inside out, you can’t really tell it until you get to the inside.

PH: Which brings us to “Casino Jack.” Now, you did speak to Jack Abramoff off-camera but not on-camera. What made you decide that you were ready to go?

AG: In waiting for Jack, two other people came forward, [jailed former Ohio congressman] Bob Ney and [ex-Abramoff gambling associate] Adam Kidan, who were close enough to the center. So, it feels like a story from the inside out. I was telling somebody earlier, in “The Wizard of Oz,” you don’t spend a lot of time with the Wizard of Oz. It’s called “The Wizard of Oz.” But you learn an awful lot about the Emerald City and the Land of Oz. I think in this film you find out a lot about the Oz-land of Washington, D.C., and you find it out from the inside out. Bob Ney also closed the circle. Not only did he know Jack, he was part of Jack’s circle, and he was manipulated by Jack. Also, his close personal relationship with Neil Volz, who was Bob’s chief of staff and then went to work for Jack — by having those two people in the film, that showed in a very personal way not only how this “revolving door” thing works in Washington and how people like Jack manipulate it, but also how corruption tears at the fabric of human relationships.

PH: I was looking in the press notes, and one of the interesting things you allude to there and in the movie is the whole question of “rotten apple or entire barrel?” You definitely lean toward the entire barrel side of the story.

AG: Yes.

PH: Do you think it’s always been this bad or do you think this is a recent development, that it’s gotten worse?

AG: It’s not like powerful people didn’t always have influence in government, they always did. They probably always will. What has changed is the cost of getting elected now is just going through the roof. It shows no sign of abating. These TV spots turn out to be very effective. They’re very expensive to produce and they’re also very expensive to buy the time to put on. Every year, the price of getting elected gets higher. When you need that much money to get elected, what do you do? First of all, you spend more than half your time, sometimes, raising that money, but also you go to lobbyists who have connections with people or companies with lots of money to be able to solve your election problem. Then, we have a real problem because it’s become so immense that it’s now unbalanced. In the past, big money would be balanced by, say, popular rage. It’s very hard to mount enough popular rage to counteract the power and influence of money.

PH: And, of course, we have that recent [Citzen’s United vs. F.E.C.] Supreme Court decision…

AG: Which will exacerbate the problem, which says now that corporations have the same rights as citizens. I have huge issues with that. By the way, I do think that, [about] that Supreme Court decision, a modest decision that was more focused on that particular case would have been appropriate. In other words, I think that Citizens United had a certain good argument, but the idea that a corporation is the same as a citizen, I don’t buy.

PH: Changing gears just a little bit, one of the things I noticed in the movie was that you constantly go back to movies. You start off with Jack Abramoff’s career advice to you about giving up documentaries and to start making action films and then you elude to “Patton.” “Fiddler on the Roof” plays a big part….

AG: “The Manchurian Candidate”…

PH: There’s a clip from that and also…what was the other one?

AG: There’s a couple of other ones. There’s actually a pirate movie, one of my favorite pirate movies, “The Crimson Pirate.”

PH: Really, “The Crimson Pirate” with Burt Lancaster? It was in black and white [in “Casino Jack”] though…

AG: Yeah, I know, we took the color out. Don’t tell anybody — and also “The Natural” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” And, “Patton”…did I say “Patton”?

PH: We mentioned “Patton.”

AG: And, of course, Jack’s movie.

PH: “Red Scorpion” [the propagandistic Dolph Lungren action film from 1989, produced and with a story by Abramoff and his brother, Robert]. Yes, I decided to not look it up and see who directed that because then we’d end up talking about nothing but that.

AG: Oh my God.

PH: But, obviously, movies play a part in your understanding of Abramoff’s psychology.

AG: He was a movie buff and I also think he was a fantasist — a man of great imagination. I think to some extent he was Walter Mitty-esque. He imagined himself as inhabiting a sort of larger-than-life narrative. And he was a not only a movie buff but a movie producer. So, it seemed somehow essential to his life and in that sense I felt I had license to go there. It was part of telling the Jack Abramoff story.

PH: You do indulge [the movie side of the story] a little bit. I actually really like the opening a lot, where you follow up that suggestion from Abramoff that you should make action films with….

AG: An action film.

PH: An action film sequence.

AG: Right.

PH: You’ve done this in other films, as I recall.

AG: “Enron,” I think.

PH: When do you decide that it’s time to do a staged sequence?

AG: Both “Enron” and this one, they happen rather early in the film. They each come out of a certain moment. In this one, it follows immediately off that Jack Abramoff e-mail — and, by the way, that was a playful bit of mine, too. It was a comment he made to somebody that I put in e-mail form because, later on, we’ll get to a whole e-mail section. But, up front then, within that context, that serves the function of creating that action movie but also, in a very visceral way, showing the violence of a murder [the mob-style killing of Greek ex-casino owner Konstantin Boulis]. And then we immediately flash — which has similarities to “Enron” — to the real-life consequences of that murder: the actual car on the sidewalk. The news report saying that someone’s been murdered on a Miami street. So that, rather than in the middle of a real sequence suddenly going to a recreation, you’re in a moment emotionally which is purely that. And then you snap out of it and realize, “Oh my God, I’m in real life now.” It’s done for that reason and partially to get you into the movie vibe but also partially to elicit that emotional vibe of a murder. In the Enron film, it was to put you on the seat of an executive who might blow his brains out — who does blow his brains out. I think by being on that seat you see the Enron executives and the cost of that corruption more effectively than would just by covering that with archival footage. So, that’s the purpose. I’ve never done it to kind of fool you or to be a recreation inside the film which says, “Well, we don’t have good footage now. Let’s hire some actors.”

PH: I don’t think anybody ever doubts what’s real and what isn’t in your films.

AG: Right.

PH: That actually brings me to an interesting thing. I was thinking about how you’ve got this body of work behind you — I can’t think of anybody else who’s put out this many documentaries and with a lot of acclaim. But when I think about “what makes an Alex Gibney documentary?” it’s not the same thing as thinking about what makes an Errol Morris or a Werner Herzog doc.

AG: My view is that form follows functions. So, you look at the story and try to craft a style for a film that seems to suit the story rather than become precious about your own style.

PH: I was going to get to the flattering part where I mentioned William Wyler and Stephen Frears and other great movie directors without obvious personal styles. I mean, if Errol Morris is kind of the Orson Welles of documentaries….

AG: I mean I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t denigrate that at all. I think it’s important. For some people, that’s a kind of a signature thing. That’s not what interests me.

PH: [I look up and see the very nice publicist making a “wrap it up” gesture behind Mr. Gibney.] They’re telling me to finish. I’ll give you just one more thing. This came up in The Wall Street Journal today and, getting back to the politics a little, all of these last few films — “Enron,” “Casino Jack” — and the upcoming one that’s getting all the press right now, the Eliot Spitzer film, all seem to come back to Wall Street.

AG: Look, it’s the problem of our time. Our economy and our polity has been hijacked by people who have found an extraordinarily lucrative way of making money, in part by manipulating the federal government, that’s unproductive. It’s also outrageous in the sense that there’s never been a kind of money machine that bestows so much on so few. Yeah, Henry Ford made a lot of money. Rockefeller made a lot of money. They also employed a lot of people.

PH: Right. [Wall Street is] not really producing anything.

AG: They’re not producing anything except wealth for themselves and at some cost to us now. It’s one thing to enjoy the fact that a guy goes out at night and wins at baccarat and takes home a million dollars. It’s great. God bless. But when he loses $20 million and comes to us and says “Now, you have to pay,” that’s a kettle of different fish.

Moreover, Nikki Finke is reporting that the film has already earned $132 million from 53 assorted countries where it has already opened. The summer solstice is more than six weeks away, but summer-time film madness is, we are informed, very much upon us. (Just btw, Anthony D’Alessandro offers a brief historical look at the outward creep of the summer movie season over the last couple of decades.)

So, the question remains, just how many millions will the second film about billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) fetch. Will it beat the record $158.4 million opening of “The Dark Knight” and crack $160 mill? Or, will it get a mere $140 million or so and send everyone to the immensely well appointed and hugely relative poor house? That seems to be the floor being offered up by the various gurus, including Ben Fritz of the L.A. Times‘ Company Town blog and THR’s jolly Carl DiOrio, who characteristically seems to be leaning slightly towards the possibility of a huge opening for Marvel and Paramount.

Nevertheless, there is a small dark cloud here and that’s the general perception, at least among us press types — who are, I remind you again, people too — that “Iron Man 2” is, while not at all bad, also not as good as the first one. This is a rare case where I’ve actually seen the week’s big movie in advance myself and, quality wise, I’m seeing this one as a glass-half-empty. For me, the story simply fails to find a strong emotional connection between Tony Stark’s troubles and the various threats he’s facing. It all feels a bit vague and disconnected despite director Jon Favreau’s way with humor, mostly good acting, and some very decent action scenes.

Indeed, while the film’s current 68% “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes is not at all bad, especially for an action flick, it’s a fairly precipitous drop from the outstanding 93% rating the first film garnered. It rating among “top critics” is an even more disappointing 61%. Taking a closer look, there’s a muted quality and less of a difference between the thumbs-up and thumbs-down reviews than you might think. Our own Jason Zingale (linked to above) might have liked the film better than me, but reading his review, it’s a matter of emphasis and personal quirk.

For example. I, and also CHUD-meister Devin Faraci, missed Terrence Howard, who was replaced on this film by the Don Cheadle, an actor who is at least as strong a performer as Howard is over all, but one with very different qualities. For some of us, he just doesn’t come across quite as strongly as James “Rhodey” Rhodes.  As Faraci puts it:

…he’s just slightly too straight and stolid and good to be fully believable as Tony’s best friend. Terence Howard has taken a ride on the Stark jet to Tijuana while Don Cheadle politely begs out of such an expedition.

Jason, on the other hand, didn’t miss Howard at all, but these are all fairly minor matters. This is a movie that no one really hates and no one I know of yet really adores and that’s why I think it makes some sense to look at reviews in a box office context for a movie that is most certainly as review proof as they get. I think most audience members will like it, but I doubt many will see it multiple times. My own prediction is that a huge opening weekend will mainly mean a big drop-off later on. A more muted opening weekend will likely be a bit more leggy as the film skates by on its fairly modest, but very real, assets. I’ll be surprised if generates the kind of love a critical and popular smash like “The Dark Knight” or “Avatar” gets. Either way, though, we’re looking at a very nice pay day, just maybe not the uber-mammoth one some excitable folks are talking about.

One factor that may mean a slightly smaller opening weekend is that this Sunday, lest any of you forget, is Mother’s Day. Sure, there are some geek-friendly moms out there, but I really wonder how many would actively choose “Iron Man 2” as the movie they’d choose to see on their special day. That, I’m sure, is the logic behind releasing “Babies” this weekend. I mean, what could possibly be more motherly? Not quite a wide release, it’s going into 534 theaters and apparently the cute factor here is, as the title might lead you to believe, simply off the charts. Still, all I need to do is go to YouTube and enter “cute babies and adorable little kitty cats” and I get that factor pretty much for free, but then, I’m not a mom. Similarly, the well-reviewed “Mother and Child” is another themed release. The latest from indie-mainstay director Rodrigo Garcia, this all-star drama features Anette Benning, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington and will be showing up in six theaters in NYC and L.A., according to the Numbers.

In another interesting bit of counterprogramming, Summit Entertainment, will be sneaking the romantic drama “Letters to Juliet,” starring up-and-coming it-girl Amanda Seyfried and acting great Vanessa Redgrave, in over 880 theaters on Sunday. It’s a clever way to get around the giant road-block that is “Iron Man 2” to try to milk some shekels out of the Mom’s Day tradition of trying to make up for whatever we did wrong the rest of the year by doing whatever mom wants.

There is actually too much action for me to detail among smaller releases this week. A certain horror film I still refuse to even name is expanding into 17 theaters, and I do want to mention yet another sequel — but not just any sequel. “OSS 117: Lost in Rio” is opening in three theaters, two here in Cali and one up in NYC, and those of us who saw the clever French spy spoof  “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” know what the scoop is there, especially the genius of star Jean Dujardin. It’s one part Inspector Clouseau by way of Maxwell Smart and Steven Martin, one part the French spy equivalent of “Black Dynamite.” (For more, my equally spy-loving friend, Randy Reynaldo, wrote about “Cairo, Nest of Spies” a couple of years back.)

Finally, opening in nine theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and, for obvious reasons, Washington D.C., is “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” from Oscar-winning super-documentarian Alex Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side“). I was slightly disappointed with this detailed look at lobbyists gone wild, given Gibney’s other political films, though there’s plenty to recommend it. However, critics in general seem quite taken and it’s an important and very timely topic. If mom is a political junkie and doesn’t mind being told her entire government is for sale to the highest bidder, you could do a lot worse.