Traffic conspires to close a meal window, consign me to only massive servings of popcorn for dinner, along with two movie screenings… not feeling too good about that.

Sadly, the Mann Festival Theatre closed Thursday night, and Encino-based Mann Theatres has apparently given notice that they don’t intend to renew their leases on two Broxton Avenue theaters — the Spanish Mission-style Mann Village, with its neon-lighted Fox tower, and the Mann Bruin, with its wraparound marquee, stand-alone ticket booth and open-spaced outdoor lobby. For a city already reeling from myriad exhibition problems, this is sad news.

Even if they’ve steadfastly refused to name or at least denote the theaters with what I’ve memorably seen there, and thus help me navigate the area on those evenings when my brain’s memory power has been drained by a long day, I’ve always enjoyed the communal vibe given off by Westwood’s attractive collection of single-screen movie palaces. There’s just something pleasurable about being able to bop around on foot — certainly in a festival setting, but also more generally speaking — between theaters; I have to think it helps breed curiosity in a way that mega-plexes don’t. For all the modern advantages of stadium seating and the like, there is definitely an electric quality that results from sharing darkness in these sorts of places, when a movie really goes off, and pops. Maybe it’s an audience that is sometimes a bit more forward-leaning, and savvy (college towns, urban centers and what not), but space matters too.

Old news by a couple days, but the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has stirred up a storm (perhaps quite purposefully) in disbanding its film program, the various travesties of which L.A. Observed’s Cari Beauchamp more than adequately and persuasively dissects here. The chief culprit is the same felling a lot of other industry programs, series and satellite businesses, according to LACMA CEO and Director Michael Govan (and it rhymes with honey, don’tcha know), but there is something particularly dispiriting about the prospect of film no longer having an anchored presence at the flagship art museum of the entertainment industry’s capital. To that end, there’s a blog site up to help save the program, as well as an online petition and even a Twitter page. Act accordingly, if so moved.

Long story, but apparently the past week’s entries have to be manually re-posted, since I’m for the moment lacking code from other laptop. Sigh. I’ve made the determination that this doesn’t rise to the level of an emergency, though. Que sera sera. It’ll take more to ruin my weekend. Like a bullet.

Well, it seems like an entire week’s worth of posts are missing. That’s decidedly uncool. Working to resolve and rectify that. Meanwhile, some information which might help expedite this is held hostage on old laptop. Major suckage all around, and a reminder again of how things are going to end for humanity, or at least modernity.

Seven months, six to eight phone calls and probably around 45 emails later, I finally extricate last fraction of overdue payment from a now deceased outlet. Still ongoing: one lawsuit and three minor skirmishes, including a missing, month-plus-old wire transfer. Welcome to the glamorous writer’s life!

In response (corporate community service?) to backlash over his remarks about hating the Internet, and nothing good ever coming from it, Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton has performed penance by penning a piece for Huffington Post in which he “welcomes the Sturm and Drang [he’s] stirred,” and yet seems to still misconstrue criticism and entangle two separate arguments.

To just reiterate in brief, it’s not at all that I advocate online piracy; I’m both far too busy and lazy to engage in it myself, but, furthermore, as someone who’s had work stolen, re-tagged and re-purposed by others, I understand wholeheartedly the idea of intellectual property rights, and the need to protect the economic viability of large-scale creative endeavors.

The problem is that Lynton and others like him in the film industry — folks in lever-pulling positions of power — have been static and/or almost nothing but reactive with respect to the Internet, both as a form of entertainment and an economic game-changer with respect to how entertainment content will be delivered to future generations. Railing against piracy and hand-wringingly calling for vague governmental “guard rails” (and yes, there is a comparison to the Interstate Highway System under the Eisenhower administration in Lynton’s piece) isn’t, I’m sorry, the sort of discerning insight or leadership I would expect on this front from the chairman and CEO of a huge, multi-national corporation dependant on capturing a significant market share of people’s free time.

Collectively, the film industry uses the hammering language and technique of fundamentalists, but piracy alone isn’t the problem; illicit efforts to obtain entertainment product reflect, fundamentally, unhappiness with current modes of deliverance, as well as costs. People take a look — some consciously, some less so — at the price it costs to manufacture DVDs, versus their $25-plus MSRP, and decide they’re going to buy far less. Throw in the advantages of portability that downloads afford, and you have an active cannibalization and erosion of what was the saving grace of the film industry, the sell-thru DVD market, less than a decade ago.

The much bigger, macro problem, though, is that movie studios have in large part done nothing to bolster, reinforce or instill the cultural value that Lynton assigns to what they peddle. “Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don’t figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer,” he writes. Yet when you have an industry that relies so heavily on prepackaged product (videogame adaptations, sequels, franchises, spin-offs, etcetera), is it any wonder that a younger generation views your wares as collagist, temporary, ethereal and therefore, to a degree, unimportant? The dearth, in relative terms, of originally scripted stories; the foot-dragging on the DVD release and attendant lack of interest in publicizing so many classic titles; the embrace of a distribution system that continues to place more value on opening weekend box office numbers than deep, sustainable catalogue value; the evidenced unwillingness to commit to make and market small- to mid-budget humanistic stories — these are all related, in their own way, to the generally low opinion that invites the criminality of illegal downloads.

Lindsay Lohan‘s rib-nudging eHarmony profile, for Funny or Die, might be funny… if it weren’t so sad. I believe this is what’s called whistling past the graveyard…

Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton has gone and mildly stepped in it, confirming corporate bias and general cluelessness by saying, at a breakfast panel yesterday co-hosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker, “I’m a guy who doesn’t who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet, period.”

Well, of course not. Is there a studio executive who isn’t, at core, a status quo guy or gal? To a degree, this is why studios can drive such an unreasonable bargain with respect to online residual payments to artists. It’s not because they’re negotiating from a position of ultimate strength, as some think; it’s because, pushing on 15 years into the Internet Age, they’re still uncertain — scared shitless, really — of new business models, and would rather just put their fingers in their ears and make noises instead of making choices and infrastructure improvements that move entertainment consumption options forward in a truly progressive manner. They know change lurks out there, so they’ll protect profit percentages in draconian fashion and just bide their time, maybe hoping some governmental underwriting (in the form of copyright extension and embedded anti-piracy software with federal broadband legislation) eventually kicks in.

Targeting one of the most important sectors among consumer groups, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has partnered with Maxim to offer a free one-year subscription to the magazine with the purchase of any one of Sony’s newly re-branded “Action Unleashed!” DVDs. “We wanted to create a campaign to leverage some of our existing male-focused catalog,” explained Marc Rashba, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, in a press release. “The Action Unleashed! campaign is designed to create awareness, and through our partnership with Maxim we hope to connect to this very important audience.”

So what does this all mean? Errr… just re-packaged DVDs in new slipcovers with faux bullet holes, it seems. Which makes some sense for both Bad Boys flicks, say, but not so much for Rocky Balboa. The discs — including the aforementioned titles, xXx: State of the Union, Black Hawk Down and Ghost Rider, among other movies — hit major retail outlets, as well as drug and grocery stores, on May 12.

Both interesting and a shame that David Ogden Stiers, who came out as gay in a March interview, says that he was repeatedly cautioned to stay in the closet if he wanted to continue getting work as a voice actor for [Disney] family films. “A lot of my income has been derived from voicing Disney and family programming,” says Stiers. “What they might allow in a more known actor, they prefer not having to deal with in minor players.” This is the legacy of intolerance that groups like Focus on the Family bring us.

Entertainment Weekly‘s Missy Schwartz, jerked out of a moment by empty coffee cups on Southland, shares my previously expressed rage at Hollywood’s disturbingly frequent inability to fill beverage containers with actual liquids. Join me, Missy, and we’ll start a petition to put an end to this shameful, ridiculous scene-killer.

“Plus zero” is the new “plus one,” apparently. Oh, not in any original invite, of course. Just if you mention a guest in an email confirmation of attendance. Which makes you wonder what the fuck folks would do if you just showed up as a pair, and staged a good scene.

I won’t source this further at the moment, but I will say that it’s not at all frustrating when studios insist on making films available via only one all-media screening for a large subset of legitimate working critics, despite screening the film other times for online back-slappers. Or, say, when they obfuscate a screening situation through incomplete email responses and not communicating information in a clear and timely fashion. I love that, seriously. Can’t get enough of that.

Long-chat interview transcriptions absolutely killing me, waaay behind on all manner of email, and at least three movies a day the last three days on top of all that. Why can’t sleep and food be banked, to be withdrawn when needed? “Life is a Highway,” Tom Cochrane once opined. Yeah, with a shitload of potholes, I’d argue.

I’m still not sure I know what happens at the end of Fast & Furious, but I know it’s terrible, an engaging trailer notwithstanding…