Sally Menke, Editor (1953 – 2010) from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

For more on the murky but extremely vital role of the editor, and Ms. Menkes’ skill at that art and craft, you should definitely read Jim’s original post accompanying this video.

A confession: I probably won’t even get a chance to see it for a few more weeks, but I’m already a little tired of Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster-in-waiting. Hailed as an instant classic in some quarters, including over at Bullz-Eye by our own David Medsker, the science-fiction brain-caper, “Inception,” is also reviving some rather tiresome movie geek and cinephile controversies left over from “The Dark Knight.” If you’re not aware of it and want to be know all about the cine-annoyance, Jim Emerson does a great job of boiling it down and, earlier in the week, Dennis Cozzalio did an interesting takedown one of the worst abusers over at the L.A. Times.

All I’m going to say is that it’s only a movie and we’re all allowed to react to it however we like. If you find yourself loving it beyond all reason and agree with David that it’s time to consider Nolan with the greatest directors of all time or if you think he’s nothing more than a Michael Bay with a literature degree, please do not assume that anyone who thinks differently is putting on some kind of show. No doubt, there are fools and pretentious twats aplenty in this world, but most of us come by our moviegoing opinions honestly.

Of course, all of this means almost nothing to your ordinary rank and file moviegoer — the kind who don’t care what the movie scored on Rotten Tomatoes and who don’t read posts like this one — and commercially speaking, that’s really the question here. Can a hard-to-describe premise of the Phillip K. Dick school be counterbalanced by the promise of amazing action and visuals, brain candy, and a stunning all-star cast headlined by Leonardo di Caprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy and even a part for promising newcomer Michael Caine?  Perhaps.

The Warner Brothers awareness machine is working over time on this one and there’s certainly no way this film doesn’t win the weekend.  How the movie does beyond that is pretty much up to the whims of the public. Lacking a well known marketing hook, it’s really anyone’s guess whether the film enjoys a modest reception and goes into Nolan’s “one for me” file, or whether it breaks out into becoming the kind phenomenon that will  really justify it’s no-longer-unusually-enormous $200 million budget. Checking in with jolly Carl DiOrio over at THR, he’s calling it at between $50-60 million, though I personally can see the movie making nearly half as much or twice as much as that. It just sort of depends on what people are in the mood for right now.

Now, there is another movie that will be doing battle with last week’s #1 holdover for the family/tweenage, and that’s Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” which has Nicholas Cage doing his eccentric-guy act as the sorcerer and Apatow-alum Jay Baruchel stepping into some literally big shoes in taking over a part originated by Mickey Mouse in the most popular episode of 1940’s “Fantasia.” Attempting to get a couple of day’s jump on the PG-13 “Inception,” Disney released “Sorcerer” on Wednesday but, as per Nikki Finke, there’s no reason to expect this film to make huge numbers and she guesses it will gross roughly $30 million for the entire five days. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if it came in at the #3 for the Friday-Sunday contest after last week’s box office winner, “Despicable Me,” given that it’s a strong family film which made $56 million and has every reason to suffer only a very modest decline in its second week.

On the limited release circuit, “Standing Ovation” will be on over 600 screens and is aimed at the same family/tween demographic that goes gaga for “High School Musical” style movies. However, lacking any big names or marketing muscle and getting very bad reviews from the few critics who’ve even bothered to see it, I don’t see how this film stands a chance. On the other hand, the two probable indie hits of the summer will be expanding significantly across the country, so stand by for Sunday for news on “The Kids Are Alright” and “Cyrus.”

* “Cyrus” — This played early in the festival and was pretty much concurrent with it’s opening in theaters. I’ve already said in passing elsewhere that I enjoyed the film quite a bit despite some flaws and, by now, you’ve probably heard something about this oddball romantic comedy of gently Oedipal horrors. It first came  up on my radar some time ago when I interviewed Mark Duplass, one half of the directing Duplass Brothers.

About the worst thing I can say about “Cyrus” is that, unlike the similarly improvised film Mark stars in, “Humpday,” which also involved a woman caught between two problematic men, the female role here is relatively under-developed. The fact that that movie was written and directed by a woman, Lynn Shelton, is, I’m sure, not entirely coincidental.

There’s also been something of a cinephile backlash to the Duplass’s camera work, among other issues, which may interest you wonks. You can read about that via Glenn Kenny, Bill Ryan (my further thoughts are in comments at his place) and Jim Emerson.

* “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone” gets a little long in its last third, but otherwise this is an extraordinarily entertaining and thoughtful music documentary about the all-African-American band from South Central L.A. that blends traditional R&B, punk, ska, early metal and just about every other influence under the sun. The band first became popular locally in the early 1980s when musical segregation still held sway and black musicians playing rock was not a common thing. Fishbone found themselves outsiders in their own community, to some degree.

Directors Lev Anderson and Chris Meltzer do an absolutely A-1 job of describing the human drama of a band which never quite broke out nationally while also placing it in a historical and regional context that makes this one of the best documentaries about Los Angeles that I’ve seen in awhile. It tells a great story and gets my city right. The music is good, too.

* “The Tillman Story” is probably going to be one of the bigger documentaries this year. It certainly features a memorable and affecting lead character in the late football player, Pat Tilman, an intellectual who volunteered for battle and paid the ultimate price, a victim of a friendly fire incident that remains partially unexplained. In any case, the political jockeying among rightwing and non-rightwing film bloggers who haven’t even seen it is already happening.

Ironically, it really is not a political film in the same way that other muckraking documentaries tend to be. People who still believe in the perfection of the Bush Administration, all three of them, and perhaps, far-right Chrisitianists might object (the Tillman family are <shock> atheists and, despite tragedy and divorce, come across as entirely functional). Otherwise, sane people across the political spectrum should find the film compelling and memorable.

It’s about a fascinating character and the struggle of his equally interesting family to take control of his memory against government apparatchiks who wanted him to become a posthumous political asset. The Tillmans would have been just as irritated if his memory had been misused by liberal Democrats, I’m sure. Indeed, director Amir Bar-Lev is no Michael Moore or even an Alex Gibney, even if his film openly wonders whether some of the lies may have originated in the Bush White House. It’s not like the idea of presidents or their administration lying is particularly shocking or even all that damning by itself. (Every president of my lifetime has lied, including the current one. I’m pretty sure most of the other ones did too.) Bar-Lev’s other films include “Fighter,” a holocaust documentary, and “My Kid Could Paint That,” about a four year-old art prodigy. “Fahrenheit 9/11” this is not.

Still, people like John Nolte, who view everything through such a skewed and extreme political prism that a mostly apolitical site like Movieline becomes “hard left,” presumably because one of their writers took a preemptive  potshot at him and because it’s not hard-right, will likely miss the point. The rest of us have a very good and moving film to see.

Believe it or not, there’s still more to come…

* You’ve probably heard it elsewhere by now, but Bryan Singer has been signed to do a “Battlestar Galactica” movie, though of course it’s still very preliminary. I hope it stays that way.

The show will apparently not be related to the recently wrapped, broadly acclaimed TV series, but will be a complete redo of some sort or another and original producer Glen Larson is involved.  That Universal would want to do another reboot on such a recently and brilliantly rebooted property makes absolutely no sense to me at all and shows a real failure of imagination. Moreover, if the idea is to return to something more like the original, I have only one question: Why? One of the things that makes the new series so remarkable is how worthless its original was.

A few years back, I took a fresh look at the first few episodes after dismissing it in my younger geek years and, sorry, the show was three times as bad as I remembered. It was nothing more than a listless knock-off of “Star Wars” with an addition of some surprisingly blatant rightwing agitprop and all the poor characterization and infantile plotting that made seventies television that vast wasteland that it really was back then, with a few exceptions. There is nothing to be nostalgic for here and most modern viewers only know the new show in any case. Bryan Singer’s a smart guy and I just don’t get this.

* Speaking of Singer, his sometime writing partner Christopher McQuarrie (“The Usual Suspects”) has been signed to do the next Wolverine flick.

* In other superhero related news, we are back at the start of it all with some new litigation which returns some of the control of Superman to the estates of his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. It may dramatically speed up, or slow down, production of upcoming Superman projects since the ruling goes into effect in 2013 and Warners might want to keep more money for itself by starting sooner rather than later. Regardless, as someone who remembers the “creators’ rights” movement in the comic book world of the late eighties and nineties, I have to think the good guys won here.

* As all signs point to a profitable weekend for “District 9,” the talk of the cinephile and film geek blogosphere has been an apparent fanboy pile-up at Rotten Tomatoes on critic Armond White of the New York Press because he was one of the very, very few to put up a negative review of director Neill Blomkamp’s feature debut. Roger Ebert’s “District 9” review was mildly positive, but he lept to the defense of Armond White, making the case that this was another example of fans trying to cudgel a critic into submission for the crime of daring to dislike a film they liked and which had garnered mostly great reviews. So, Roger strikes a blow for healthy debate and free-thinking about movies, right?

Not exactly. You see, this is Armond White we’re talking about. I could on and on about this, but Ebert, whose been keeping up an impressive regimen since recovering from an illness that would have put most of us out to pasture, was apparently unaware of a lot of recent history involving White, who has become something of a running joke/object of wonder among serious film lovers online. Perhaps because of his illness, Ebert apparently missed a great 2007 takedown of White’s mindlessly pugilistic approach to criticism by his Chicago Sun-Times colleague Jim Emerson, and some more recent truly unnecessary and needlessly nasty remarks about Ebert that White had made in the middle of a verbal blitzkreig directed pretty much at all film bloggers of all sorts and all film critics who are not Armond White.

In any case, after reading the comments and educating himself, Ebert — who realy is one of my heroes — did what a gentleman does when he realizes he’s missing the point, and mostly took his defense back, although I have to add that the problem goes far beyond White liking certain films and not liking others. (I’d actually never attack a critic on that basis. We’re dealing with one of the most subjective areas of human endeavor here.)

In any case, if you have any interest in this kind of thing at all, I do think you should take a look at the piece I linked to above and read as many of the comments as you have time for. Ebert’s got a great audience and there’s some very thoughtful discussion of what makes one critic a thoughtful provocateur while another might be not much more than a troll.