Wilnervision!

So here I am in New York, just kind of hanging out, doing a couple of work things, writing, trying not to let the sweat drip down my fingers onto the keyboard. You know how it is.

And my (forwarded) cell phone rings, and it’s a producer from CTV Newsnet asking me if I can do a quick hit about that “leaked” trailer for Oliver Stone’s upcoming “W” in, like, two hours.

I explain to them that I’m out of town, so they’d be better off getting somebody else.

“Oh, that’s fine,” she says. “We’ve got a reciprocal deal with CNN. Can you get to Ten Columbus Circle?”

I just happen to be staying at 6 Columbus Circle. CNN is literally across the street — which is great, because walking more than a block and a half will trigger every sweat gland in my body, leaving me utterly useless as a talking head unless I’m doing a promotional spot for VitaminWater.

I find the one summer-in-Manhattan shirt I have that can be worn on television. I shower, for the third time that day, and I cross 58th Street. And I go to CNN and talk about the trailer for Oliver Stone’s new movie.

Did I mention I really love my job?

I think I need to take a moment and praise Jonathan Levine for getting the sticky, sweaty feel of summer in New York so perfectly right in “The Wackness“.

However much Ben Kingsley’s mannered, twitchy performance may annoy me, the movie’s sense of place is dead-on.

If you’ve ever been in Manhattan between late June and early September, you know precisely how unpleasant the city can be — a steamy, sun-baked slab of concrete that focuses its heat back onto the poor saps unlucky enough to be outside, making us feel like we’re trapped in one of those Moroccan tajines.

Of course, there are certain compensations you just can’t find anywhere else … but that, my dears, is a story for another time.

Hey, remember my visit to the set of “Lost Boys: The Tribe” last fall? Well, the movie comes out on DVD today, and thus is the focus of this week’s Sympatico/MSN DVD column.

Wanna see me be gentle but honest? Click the link.

“The X Files: I Want to Believe” did not exactly set the box-office on fire this weekend, opening in fourth place with just $10.2 million.

Fox — or at least Chris Carter — will spin this as less than negative for a couple of reasons: “The Dark Knight” continued to dominate the screen, so anything opened this weekend was going to be crushed under its Bat-momentum; “I Want to Believe” was made on the cheap, coming in somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million, so it doesn’t need to gross $300 million; all the fanboys were off at Comic-Con this weekend, and they’ll pick it up on DVD.

Most of those things are true. (Like “The Happening”, I expect “I Want to Believe” will be a huge hit on DVD, as everyone rushes to see whether it could possibly be as bad as they’ve heard.)

But the larger truth is that “I Want to Believe” was released to a great, collective “meh” from moviegoers. Even the show’s most die-hard fans are acknowledging that the toxic word-of-mouth on the movie is, well, a reasonable assessment. Carter had been talking about using this film to test whether audiences would be game for another mythology-related feature a few years down the road — say, sometime in 2012, when that long-threatened alien invasion is supposedly scheduled to occur.

Maybe he should have made that movie first. Because he’s not going to get the chance to make it now.

Funny story: I hadn’t intended my latest Sympatico/MSN movie column to be a photo gallery; when I wrote it, I expected it’d run as a conventional article, with a couple of photos and the text spread over maybe two pages.

Anyway, sorry about the tiny text. But I hope the topic makes it worth the eyestrain: Nine great movies  based on television shows. Click on the images to read the rationales, obviously.

Oh, and I should have posted this yesterday, but I plumb forgot: Here’s my latest NOW online column, in which — among other things — I attempt to shame Torontonians into seeing “Jules et Jim” at the Bloor next week.

Hey, it’s a far better thing I do now …

“The X Files: I Want to Believe” doesn’t bother with any of the show’s elaborate alien-invasion mythology. As Chris Carter has been telling everyone, this new feature is a lot more the one-offs that had Mulder and Scully chasing the monster of the week — a stand-alone story that doesn’t require you to have seen all nine seasons of the series.

Fair enough. The thing is, the story he came up with is really, really lame. Seriously; six years after the show goes off the air, this is the best he could do?

I briefly considered coming up with a totally different plot for the movie for my review — something about the agents stumbling across a genetically enhanced werewolf army — and then coming clean in the last paragraph, explaining what the movie was really about, because there’s just no way anyone would believe that my story wasn’t a better premise for an “X Files” movie.

But that just seemed cruel.

Also opening this week:

“Brideshead Revisited“: You know how Joe Wright’s “Pride and Prejudice” raced through all the scenes of the book in order to squeeze as much plot as possible into a feature-length running time? Julian Jarrold’s movie tries a similar trick, boiling Evelyn Waugh’s epic tale of class and desire down to its three principal characters and reinventing the plot as a sort of romantic triangle. It sort of works.

“Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer”: A homegrown monster movie with practical effects and Robert Englund! How did I miss this? (Well, I was on deadline with some other stuff, so Rad got the assignment. But still.)

“Just Buried”: Saw this at TIFF. Hated it like poison. Barrett and Adam don’t have much time for it, either. Jay Baruchel’s a talented and relatable actor; maybe his role in next month’s “Tropic Thunder” will be the vehicle that finally breaks him out of crappy Canadian movie hell.

“The Last Mistress”: Is legendary French provocateuse Catherine Breillat mellowing? Or has she just discovered the advantages of a coherent plot? Either way, this period drama about the push-and-pull tensions between an aristocrat (Fu’ad Ait Attou) and the woman with whom he’s dallied for a decade (Asia Argento) is a lot more watchable than most of her recent work.

“Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired“: Marina Zenovich’s film about the media circus of the director’s 1977 rape trial and his subsequent flight from justice plays a bit more like an advocacy documentary than I’m entirely comfortable with; she does make some valid points about the corrupt Los Angeles court system, but that doesn’t exactly excuse the nature of Polanski’s original offense. (Adam argues the same points from a different angle.)

UPDATE: The Eye review to which I’d linked above was actually Jason’s; Adam wrote his for Metro, and you can find it here. My bad.

“Step Brothers“: Judd Apatow and Adam McKay have encouraged Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly to follow their bliss wherever it takes them in their latest arrested-development comedy — and it takes them to some delightfully absurd places. Also, if you’ve been waiting to see Richard Jenkins get another comic role on the level of “Flirting with Disaster” … well, your patience will finally be rewarded.

Matthew Goode and Hayley Atwell came through town last week on a promotional tour for their new version of “Brideshead Revisited”. I sat down with both actors, though my NOW coverage ended up focusing exclusively on Goode.

(Atwell co-stars in “The Duchess”, which is a TIFF gala, so I’m sure we’ll find a place for that interview somewhere down the line.)

Anyway, once you’ve read my Goode Q&A, pop over to Eye’s website and take a look at Adam’s “Brideshead” interview. He was interviewing Atwell in another room while I was talking to Goode, and we swapped after 20 minutes, but it certainly seems like the actors had hit something of a groove by our point in the schedule …

Well, here’s that DVD column I promised you yesterday, running down all the truly wonderful titles that hit the shelves this week.

New Criterion reissues of “High and Low” and “Vampyr”, a three-disc definitive collection of Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson’s “Spaced” from BBC Video, and Facets’ long-awaited four-disc set of Bela Tarr’s “Satantango” … really, the cumulative awesomeness is immeasurable.

Plus, the only notable new movie release was “21″, and … well, come on.

I know Tuesdays are DVD column day, but there’s something far more important to discuss: The Onion AV Club has interviewed Jonathan Coulton.

Sure, they talked to him just last month, but that was for “Random Roles Rules”, so it doesn’t count.

Anyway, go read that, and when my column finally goes up, I’ll see you back here.

America has a way of exploding in disproportionate horror at momentary offenses. Or at least certain Americans do — the sort who make a lot of money by pretending to be cultural shepherds, and spend a lot of time bleating in terror at the possibility of a flash of nudity on national television. Won’t someone think of the childrens?

Seriously, when has the U.S. looked dumber and more reactionary on the world stage than the January, 2004 kerfuffle over the appearance of Janet Jackson’s boobie shield, or whatever the hell that thing was, during the Super Bowl halftime show?

The country went bananas — or, at least, those portions of the country claiming moral superiority and the guardianship thereof, meaning that a bunch of Republicans had a new stick with which to beat them decadent, coke-snorting child molesters in Hollyweird, and pander to their terrified constituents with stories of how those godless liberal bastards were deliberately staging these provocative little accidents to erode America’s soul one boobie at a time, or something.

Eventually, the Federal Communications Commission slapped CBS with a $550,000 fine for broadcasting the scandalous non-flash, Americans had closure on their long national nightmare, and George W. Bush was re-elected later that fall. Way to go, moral guardians.

Anyhow, long story short: It seems that certain Americans have come to their senses. Not the moral guardians — they’ve long since bargained those away in exchange for their soapboxes — but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which just threw out the FCC’s fine, saying the commission “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in response to what was (a) an accident for which CBS could not have planned and (b) not really all that offensive, in the final analysis.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not arguing that CBS is a poor little Mom and Pop operation that deserves to be protected from the big, bad FCC. But l’affair boobie shield was an empty scandal kept alive so a few people could score some cheap political points, and it’s gratifying to see that four years later we’ve come a little bit further down the road to being grown-ups.

I expect John McCain and Barack Obama will be making statements about this later today. After all, wasn’t Super Bowl XXXVIII the darkest day in the history of American culture? I seem to remember that being the collective wisdom at one point.