It’s at least somewhat telling when an accredited film critic has to actively reach out and loudly, repeatedly shake a penny can to try to track down any screening information on a huge studio summer blockbuster with a nine-figure publicity and advertising budget, right? I mean… at the very least, in a state-of-the-industry sort of way. A lot of studios should just hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign on their doors for the first eight or nine months of the year.

Tangentially, one interesting thought Megamind raises is how movies like to make easy use of known pop and rock songs, but always frequently take care to work up creative bridge-to-bridge edits or other choral snippets, to get the emotive/cathartic “meat” of a tune while scrubbing any lyrics that are either potentially offensive or overwhelm/run counter to the moment being presented in the film. Megamind does this fairly liberally, since it works in two cuts of AC/DC and a healthy dose of Michael Jackson‘s “Bad,” but the moment that most stood out to me was its sound mix tweak of Guns ‘N Roses‘ “Welcome to the Jungle,” which of course has a monstrous, get-pumped opening riff. The movie dips its complementary audio track and pumps up the dialogue mix at a couple key moments, making sure characters’ lines cover the lyrics, “If you got the money, honey/We got your disease” and “I wanna watch you bleed.”

I’ll be getting more into Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, the three-part, five-hour-plus drama about pro-Palestinian activist turned opportunistic mercenary/terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (played by Edgar Ramirez) that’s unfurling on a variety of platforms in different iterations this October, in the coming days. But I submitted to the full Carlos experience this past Friday — with only two brief intermissions — and one thing that immediately struck me was that there are perhaps more cigarettes smoked in the full-length version of this movie than in the combined product of Hollywood for the past five or six years. Like, seriously. Straight up.

Assayas doesn’t so much fetishize the act itself (see David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, for instance), but neither is this just a case of one or two characters chain-smoking. All the characters seemingly smoke. There’s variety, too — angry smoking, nervous smoking, post-coital smoking, bored smoking, flirtatious smoking. And they don’t just hold cigarettes incidentally and passively, these folks, like someone absentmindedly rubbing their temple or adjusting their glasses. They draaaag, they put in the effort, really. There seem to be more cigarettes smoked in Carlos than Mitch McDeere drops crumpled $20 bills in The Firm. Which, for anyone who remembers John Grisham’s original text, is probably in the neighborhood of about 10,000.

It has many more noteworthy sins, certainly, but it’s interesting that Kristen Bell‘s You Again is her second film this year to feature sensory deprivation eating. The other was punishingly unfunny When in Rome, which also essentially had two settings: broad, and broader. That film’s one potentially amusing bit — in which Josh Duhamel’s character takes Bell’s character to a pitch-black restaurant, in which the lack of sight is supposed to heighten other senses, and an appreciation of the food and drink — is botched and rushed. In You Again, it’s Bell’s screen dad, played by Victor Garber, who’s undertaking a diet where he blindfolds himself, in order to let his stomach tell him more naturally when he’s full. No word yet on if this has worked or will work for any audience members, who might blindfold themselves in an effort to even more accurately gauge how full of shit the movie is.

A bit old but still very much worth a read, this amusing piece from Cracked.com about five ridiculous gun myths everyone believes because of movies — from the usefulness of silencers and infallibility of bulletproof vests to the dramatic effects of cocking a gun, and how a single bullet can/will ignite pretty much any piece of machinery. If any polling firm wants to donate their services, I’d truly be interested in partnering on some sort of empirical study of youngish NRA members, because surely there has to be some level of buyer’s remorse with respect to most typical Hollywood actioners, right? I mean, when they go to the gun range or out hunting buck or whatever, and experience kickback that doesn’t jibe with what’s been peddled by Sylvester Stallone or whomever. Or is it that all those films are merely a testosteronized manifestation of how they’d like to really see themselves? That they present a world free of obstacles that can’t be overcome with just a little (assisted) masculine acting out? Something to ponder.