CANNES, France — It’s official: Steven Spielberg just watched a man set someone’s genitals on fire. The Cannes International Film Festival, which kicked off its 66^th edition Wednesday night with the rain-drenched international premiere of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, is notorious for art-house auteurs pushing cinema to its extremes. But Amat Escalante’s ham-fisted Mexican competition entry Heli, which grimly (and dimly) depicts corrupt policemen as nihilistic envoys from Dante’s Inferno who crack the necks of puppies, make people roll in their own vomit and, of course, immolate crotches, has set a new record for fastest controversy at the storied event. (If #penisflambé isn’t trending yet on Twitter, it’s only a matter of time.) And as this year’s jury president, the director of E.T. is now obliged to watch every frame. Welcome to France!

Leo DiCaprio at a rain-drenched Cannes premier of The Great Gatsby. (Getty Images)

Cannes is off to a wet and wild start. The soggy opening night extravaganza for Gatsby Le Manifique included Leo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan braving the elements for a black-tie premiere and afterparty that featured the Brian Ferry Orchestra and Florence Welch, not to mention a screw-the-weather fireworks display that lit up the torrential downpour. And this morning’s screening of François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful steamed up the 3,000-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière with the provocative study of a bourgeois 17-year-old Parisienne (lithe newcomer Marine Vacth) who goes from virgin to whore in the span of a year. A nuanced but minor portrait of sexual awakening, budding confidence and emotional immaturity, Mr. Ozon’s lightly erotic and oddly touching ode to youth is alarming, arousing and affecting in equal measure.

More delightfully blunt is the hipper-than-thou kleptomarathon The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s brightly polished ode to 21^st century youth as refracted through TMZ-fueled thieves who invade the homes of tabloid stars. Based on Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” about a real-life group of high schoolers who became Hollywood Hills burglars, Bling Ring shows a culture of unchecked narcissism and serial irresponsibility coddled by Facebook posts and Google searches. There’s no there there, critics may wag, which is entirely the point of this glittery cautionary tale of shallow lives in a shallow town longing for the through-the-looking-glass experience of Reality TV fame. Toplining the cast is former Harry Potter icon Emma Watson, who’s clearly angling for the same good-girl-gone-bad career choice that Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens pulled off earlier this year in Spring Breakers. One highlight: Ms. Watson showing off her best pole-dancing moves in the party room of Paris Hilton’s glam-tastic house. (The celebutard heiress even let Ms. Coppola shoot in her actual home, a fabulously gaudy temple of tacky self-aggrandizement.)

Director Sofia Coppola, second from left, with the cast of The Bling Ring. (Getty Images)

Not a bad way to begin Cannes, a paean to excess and flash that has something for everyone, high and low. Especially low: in the film market, held alongside the festival, people can watch a cannibalistic Maori family frolicking through the black comedy Fresh Meat or the last known fertile woman struggling to survive in an underground tunnel system in the sci-fi horror flick Crawl, Bitch, Crawl. And if you’re Troma, the NYC-based granddaddy of schlock peddlers, you’ll hold a self-proclaimed "secret" screening of your latest, Return to Nuke ‘Em High: Volume One – but not without inundating international journalists with a press release first. What’s the point of a secret if no one knows about it?

The Best Picture category isn't the only thing that bulked up.

What is it about the Academy Awards? Intellectually, it's hard to muster up that much enthusiasm about who "wore it best" (Ang Lee) or how modest Katniss will be in her acceptance speech, hopefully avoiding a First Wives' Club reference that sounded like she was hating on Meryl Streep this time. And yet ... we still feel compelled to watch. Maybe it's because secretly, deep down, we still find it fascinating that the guy who does the voice of Stewie looks like the host of a reality game show about finding true love by having a dance-off on a stripper pole.

Or maybe it's because we're just suckers, who deep down believe that Beasts of the Southern Wild might still possibly have a chance against Argo or Lincoln.

Come join us, will you, on this the most magical of evenings for producers, people who are married to movie stars, and dress designers? We'll be hosting a live chat below. Just click the big countdown button and you're all set. Got it?

Great.

This year we're making our predictions in order of the film and/or celebrity, not the award. That's because this time ... it's personal. No, seriously: between Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck being iced out of Best Director, the Weinstein Bros. not having a snowball's chance in hell of scoring a big win and the fact that we're practically giving an award to Anne Hathaway just to make her stop sing-crying, there's going to be a lot of sore losers tonight. But don't worry; we're using a time-tested formula for predicting the bitter ceremonies, including taking all of the guesses on Twitter and averaging them against Nate Silver's predictions. Then we throw those out the window and  get ourselves angry over Lincoln’s inevitable windfall of awards that should be going to that movie that had all those great New Yorker articles written about it and stars a 9-year-old who wasn't even an actress when she started the film, which is about 50 percent more method than Daniel Day-Lewis's decision to become an Italian cobbler every time he's taking a hiatus from Hollywood.

So enjoy, and don't forget to tune into our live chat on the Oscars, starting at 7 p.m.!

Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln.

Okay. So Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s bloated $50-million history lesson about Abraham Lincoln’s final days in office as he attempted, by hook or crook, to abolish slavery, is noble, civic-minded, exhaustingly researched, immaculately detailed, crowded with a parade of cameos by good actors who look like Smith Brothers cough drop models, and noteworthy for another critic-proof performance by Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role. It is all of those things. But Lincoln is also a colossal bore. It is so pedantic, slow-moving, sanitized and sentimental that I kept pinching myself to stay awake—which, like the film itself, didn’t always work.

The Civil War is in its fourth year. Lincoln has already signed his famous Emancipation Proclamation, a year before his re-election to a second term. Now he wants an anti-slavery amendment to guarantee that the slaves he freed will stay that way forever, protected by law. He needs votes from a hostile, divided Congress to pass it. That means getting the support of Democrats—rabid right-wing conservatives in those days—as well as liberal, left-wing Republicans. (How times have changed!) And that’s what Lincoln is about. People pining for a comfortable cinematic biopic about the controversial 16th president like those made, in the past, by Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey will be disappointed to learn that the film’s interminable self-indulgence sheds no new light on the life and death of the man himself. Based on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, it boasts a dry, ponderous screenplay by long-winded playwright Tony Kushner, whose verbosity does to movies what a House filibuster does to action on a health-reform bill. It’s a whopping drag.

Instead of concentrating on Lincoln and the war that divided a nation, the movie stays off the battlefield and focuses on the internecine shenanigans behind closed doors on Capitol Hill—the House debate, the ranting and shouting, the insults in both aisles of Congress, the arguments defending and denouncing blacks. Instead of action, we get intellectual ideas set forth while storming around conference tables behind the scenes of history. Ugly sets make 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue look like a rooming house. The sun never shines in 1865. Instead, garish lighting filters through dirty windows into dark rooms that look like the inside of a Hershey syrup can. Into this matte-finish gloom marches a cumbrous crowd of expensive-dress extras, most of whom Mr. Kushner never bothers to identify. Oh, look, it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lincoln’s oldest son Robert, a rebellious college student who defies his parents’ wishes (every family has one). And there’s David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward. Here comes John Hawkes as a lobbyist, and an unidentifiable James Spader. Who is he playing? He’s gone before we get to know him. The ensemble enters through one door and exits through another: Jared Harris as General Ulysses S. Grant, and Jackie Earle Haley, Hal Holbrook, Tim Blake Nelson, Joseph Cross and a cast of hundreds playing senators, soldiers and servants. Jean Kennedy Smith, the last surviving sibling in the Kennedy dynasty, is listed in the credits as “Woman Shouter.” It’s that kind of movie. An endurance test with guest stars.

Upstaging them all is Tommy Lee Jones as passionate abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who has all the bitchy lines, and a secret black mistress to boot. He’s belligerent, tortured and committed to the abolitionist cause (with personal motives that don’t always extend to the country’s best interests). His cantankerousness gives the film a desperately needed pinch of comedy. And there’s no mistaking the valuable contribution by Sally Field, adding fire in an inspired performance as Mary Todd Lincoln, the woman behind the man. Daniel Day-Lewis does what he can to delve beneath the legend and make Lincoln an ordinary man: Lincoln telling corny jokes, Lincoln visiting the wounded in a military hospital, Lincoln talking turkey with black soldiers, Lincoln threatening his wife with the madhouse for her grief over her favorite son killed in battle, Lincoln fumbling with his hands yet writing speeches that changed history with clarity of vision. But his power is diminished by a script that forces him to explain his theory of equality by quoting Euclid on the rules of mechanical reasoning. In reality, Lincoln believed in equality under the law, but not racial equality; he had no use for blacks and maintained a strong personal belief that whites were a superior race. In his efforts to get his amendment passed, Honest Abe was not so honest either. He and his cabinet of rivals were not above bribery, lies, suspending habeas corpus or bending the Constitution to break the South’s economic infrastructure. These are facts Spielberg conveniently overlooks. The title is misleading. Lincoln is about the votes, not the man. I’m more interested in the way the movie shows the terrible physical toll the passage of the 13th Amendment took on the man’s life than in the disparate personalities he fought, cajoled and strong-armed in order to pass it. The movie ends on Saturday, April 15, 1865, when Mary bosses her reluctant, bone-weary husband into the carriage that takes them to Ford’s Theatre. There is no mention of the name John Wilkes Booth.

In all, there’s too much material, too little revelation and almost nothing of Spielberg’s reliable cinematic flair. But on the plus side, there is nuance and wit, and Daniel Day-Lewis always makes you care. And you can’t deny the timing of Lincoln. In a divisive election year when the Sunday morning pundits knock themselves out debating whether the political system still works, it’s a good time to revisit a year when it did.

rreed@observer.com

LINCOLN

Running Time 120 minutes

Written by Tony Kushner (screenplay) and Doris Kearns Goodwin (book)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and David Strathairn

2/4

Scott Rudin has won the so-called "EGOT," a distinction we would like more if it had a better name.

Gloria Steinem is pleased that Sarah Jessica Parker will play her in the Linda Lovelace movie, as she's a big Sex and the City fan.

The Times's website ran two pieces on television in Putin's Russia, both by former Russia correspondent Alessandra Stanley.

Steven Spielberg came to the Saturday Night Live after-party for some reason--perhaps he's a big Zooey Deschanel fan?

Genuine class. (Getty Images)

Last night’s Golden Globes—which we covered live!—were notable for yet more star worship than even the perpetually star-worshipping Globes usually get up to, and most of the stars were of a somewhat aging vintage. Awards went to practically anyone who might have been on People’s Most Intriguing People of 1998 list: Steven Spielberg for Tintin over the makers of Rango, Madonna over Mary J. Blige, Meryl Streep over Viola Davis, Jessica Lange over Evan Rachel Wood, Matt LeBlanc over Johnny Galecki, Laura Dern over Zooey Deschanel, George Clooney uber alles. If this show was too self-consciously snarky to be a tribute to so-called “Old Hollywood,” it was at least a tribute to the period about fifteen years ago when the stars were bigger and shined brighter.

Host Ricky Gervais, who spent more time recounting his past comedic triumphs at this awards show than engaging in anything risky or new, joked about Johnny Depp’s career failures—then welcomed Mr. Depp to the stage, giving the show a feel less of a no-holds-barred slugfest that had been advertised and more of the world’s most loving Comedy Central roasts. Of all that could be said about winner/presenter/synecdoche of the evening’s nostalgic feeling Madonna, Mr. Gervais went with a “Like a Virgin” joke. She countered with a joke about her 2003 kiss with Britney Spears. The past, ladies and gentleman! Mr. Gervais saved his meanest material for Kim Kardashian, who’s an easy target for a roomful of movie stars trying to shore up their shrinking claim on cultural currency.

The evening’s big winners stuck close to the theme of navel-gazing, with George Clooney presenting a tribute to Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt presenting a tribute to George Clooney, Madonna citing Fellini and Godard as seminal influences, and Meryl Streep shouting the names of actresses she liked in lieu of a traditional speech. The evening’s big winner, the French film The Artist, gave the game away, dragging the film’s canine star onstage with the rest of the cast in an antic attempt to entertain, to make some statement about “movie magic.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Irvine.

Steven Spielberg at the top of his powers as one of the most successful and creative film directors of the past century is the best reason I can think of to get off your duff and head for the cinema on Christmas Day. You will not believe the epic splendor, sweeping drama and heart-stopping passion he brings to War Horse. It’s a rare and genuine movie masterpiece that deserves the label in a thousand ways.

Turning a beloved play into a movie is a job for either a fool or a daredevil. Mr. Spielberg is neither, but he is a visionary with unflinching faith in his own instincts. He must have known going in that he couldn’t satisfy the myriad fans of the London and Broadway hit about the cruel things the British did to their horses in World War I. On the stage, the familiar theme of a boy’s unshakable love for his horse was innovative in its use of life-size puppets with real feelings and expressions that moved like Tinker Toys. The film uses actual horses to tell the story of a colt named Joey, sold to the cavalry to lug the cannons of war through the German trenches, and a farmboy named Albert Narracott, who enlisted to travel halfway across Europe to rescue him from the front lines. On screen, Albert is played by impossibly handsome newcomer Jeremy Irvine, whose career is already reaching rocket force (he follows War Horse as Pip in the new production of Dickens’s Great Expectations). Instead of puppets, Joey is played by 15 different horses, but the one featured most prominently is American equine Finder, who starred in Seabiscuit. Finder is a four-legged superstar who can do everything but talk, even though he has a way of communicating with Albert that is awesome. What he goes through in War Horse is so rending that never before has the disclaimer “No animals were harmed in the filming of this motion picture” carried so much badly needed reassurance. Finder deserves an Oscar for—well, for being the best and most beautiful horse on the screen.

Based on the 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, War Horse is an elegiac film that clocks in at two hours and 20 minutes, but I treasured every single second. Mr. Spielberg brings so much decency and integrity to the familiar theme of a boy in love with a horse that I didn’t miss the puppets at all. The humor and spirit that had such a profound impact on audiences young and old are not only preserved, but enhanced by the personalities of real animals. The careful result is a personalized experience that inspires the same kind of love audiences used to have for Lassie.

The vast and sprawling screenplay by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis respects the story enough to leave it unchanged, without embellishment. A hardscrabble sharecropper named Ted Narracott goes to auction to buy a plow horse, but instead he arrogantly outbids his greedy, mean-spirited landlord (David Thewlis) for a magnificent animal of no real value to a crop planter, bringing down the wrath of his pragmatic, long-suffering wife, Rose (Emily Watson). Their besotted son, Albie, names the horse Joey and vows to teach him how to pull his weight and till the soil. Joey is stubborn and willful with a mind of his own, and when the crops fail, the only way to pay the rent is to sell Joey to the military. The next hour is told from the horse’s point of view as the camera follows him through the French battlefields in 1914, where he is cared for by a kind British officer, to enemy lines, where he bonds with a headstrong black stallion, a German deserter and a Dutch girl who protects him by hiding him in a windmill. Captured by the enemy, Joey finally ends up in the Somme where Albie sees combat at last. In one particularly sensational sequence, Joey is trapped in barbed wife and rescued by two soldiers, one German and one British, who momentarily put aside their differences through a mutual compassion for an injured animal, use wire cutters to save the horse’s life, and take a minute to share memories of their homes on opposite sides of the conflict. If you are not moved to tears by that scene, or by Albie’s eventual reunion with his horse, then you need to see a doctor.

The logistics are overwhelming. According to the Imperial War Museum, more than four million horses perished in the so-called Great War, and Mr. Spielberg puts you right into the middle of their pain and terror in sequences using as many as 5,800 extras and 280 horses without computer-generated images. What an accomplishment. Like the play, the emotional high point of the film is when Albie finally finds Joey. By this time, you’re so weary from the gas masks, the grenades, the rats and the cannon fire that you can hardly summon the strength for tears, but when Albie, blinded by mortar, and Joey, lame and half-dead, reach the green pastures and rose gardens of Devon, the tears are evident without coaxing.  Will Rogers always said, “Horses are smarter than humans. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.” True, but when Albie and Joey reunite, two wounded soldiers of war going home together, you feel the values horses and humans can share through love, loyalty, persistence and understanding. It left me emotionally wrecked.

War Horse is a don’t-miss Spielberg classic that reaches true perfection. It’s as good as movies can get, and one of the greatest triumphs of this or any other year. For maximum enjoyment, I recommend both a box of tissues and a box of popcorn.

rreed@observer.com

WAR HORSE

Running Time 146 minutes

Written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson and David Thewlis

4/4

Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning and Ron Eldard.

The summer vacation doldrums are here, providing I.Q. challenges to moviegoers of all ages, but for adolescents with a lot of free time on their hands, Super 8 promises something extra.

It’s the work of  J.J. Abrams, the slam-bam hack writer-director of such junk as Star Trek and Mission Impossible 3 (OK, he also wrote the nifty, nail-biting road thriller Joy Ride, which I liked a lot), but this time the producer is Steven Spielberg, so you have a right to expect something with a bit more quality. Sorry to dash your hopes, but it’s just more of the same junk.  Junk for children, with an estimated $45-million budget. There oughta be a law.

The premise is simplicity itself. In the summer of 1979, six school chums in a small steel-mining town in Ohio decide to make a zombie movie with a hand-held 8-mm. camera to enter in a Cleveland film competition. A smart, imaginative kid named Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), wise beyond his years like Henry Thomas in E.T., does lights, monster makeup and special effects. Joe has recently lost his mother in a mining accident, but despite the  bravery and can-do attitude that make him a leader among the others, he still carries around his late mom’s locket for good luck. He also harbors a secret crush on Alice (Elle Fanning), who objects to working with Joe because his father (Kyle Chandler, who plays the football coach on the popular TV series Friday Night Lights) is the deputy sheriff who arrested her father for drunkenness at Joe’s mother’s funeral. In fact, both Joe and Alice have been forbidden to continue working on their little home movie, which their fathers consider a frivolous waste of time, but secretly continue, disobeying orders and sneaking out at night when their Dads aren’t home. This is easier than it sounds, since zombie movies are all night scenes anyway, right?

But one night while filming at the depot, they accidentally witness a spectacular train crash (and we witness some spectacular special effects that get the movie off to a breathtaking start). Out of the wreckage, a man warns: “Do not speak of this or you and your parents will die.” Good advice. Because, wouldn’t you know, an alien from outer space also emerges. This is no cuddly E.T., but a monolithic monster capable of destroying everything in its path, and it’s hopping mad. Automobile transmissions fail, generators die, all of the pets in town disappear, telephone wires vanish, water and electricity are on the fritz—and the kids caught it all on their Super 8! It’s all the result of some evil plan, natch, cooked up by the U.S. Air Force, in a secret military operation to imprison and study a master race from another planet… but never mind. You needn’t concern yourself about things like plot, character development, and science. Better to just let the charm and resourcefulness of the six kids take over, enjoy the sci-fi effects that appear at the beginning and end of the movie, and be grateful for small favors.

This movie is divided into two halves: the movie within the movie, and the stuff about the monster destroying the town that only the kids can save. The best thing about Super 8, by far, are the kids, all perfectly cast. The script does a much better job making them believable and real than the adults. The funniest parts of the movie center on the process of filming their zombie epic. Cary (Ryan Lee) is the one who likes to set fires and blow things up. Martin (Gabriel Basso) is the dashing leading man who bursts into tears when real danger threatens. Best of all, there is director Charles (Riley  Griffiths), the overweight, tyrannical Orson Welles of the pack, weaned on cheesy B-movie monsters-and-mayhem thrillers, who doesn’t care what calamities occur as long as the camera keeps rolling. Watching these youngsters following their dream against all odds, I found myself getting some of my inner child back and laughing out loud at the same time. The rest of the movie steals shamelessly from Alien, The Thing, and every other space visitor flick ever made, including Spielberg’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It takes forever, but when we finally come face to face with the actual monster, it’s as silly as it is enigmatic—rolling its eyes like Casper the Friendly Ghost while sucking air-conditioners and toaster ovens into a heap like a walking garbage dump! Turns out he’s just homesick, and all it takes to calm him down is Joe’s locket. He’s no E.T. but he still understands “Go home.” By that time, I could hardly wait myself.

rreed@observer.com

SUPER 8

Written and directed by J.J. Abrams

Starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, AJ Michalka

2/4

Last year, Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks invited a group of banks and investors to hear the studio's pitch for money. The meeting, which was held in a movie theater inside his Amblin Entertainment compound, came amid the global credit crisis. So, despite being hosted by the greatest filmmaker in Hollywood, an insider recounted to me, the gathering had more than a few unfamiliar faces and some empty chairs. In the end, DreamWorks raised money from an Indian conglomerate, but considerably less than it originally sought. And Mr. Spielberg had had to dip briefly into his own considerable coffers to finance some of the company's projects during the interregnum, thereby violating Hollywood's cardinal rule about never playing with your own money.

At the time, the big line around a nervous Hollywood was that financing was so tight that "even Spielberg couldn't get funded." But the bigger story was what had happened to DreamWorks in the 15 years since its founders-Mr. Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen-had beamed from the cover of Time magazine and promised to change the entertainment world, with tentacles in film, TV, video games, music and its own state-of-the-art studio lot. An answer comes now in the form of The Men Who Would be King, a book by Nicole LaPorte, an L.A.-based writer for the Daily Beast and a onetime Variety scribe.

None of the principals at the company would speak to Ms. LaPorte for her book. But in a town where access means so much, she nevertheless plodded determinedly ahead. In some ways, the book is better and dishier for it. Her narrative is a frothy case study of how the creation of three incredibly successful men was arguably a failure-yet the principals themselves always did better individually and did manage to make some great movies along the way (Saving Private Ryan, American Beauty and Gladiator are three films that get a lot of play in the story). Ms. LaPorte shows how the DreamWorks dream was impossible pretty much from the get-go, and got even wonkier when it tried to branch into areas like the short-lived dot-com start-up Pop.com, which, she writes, might better have been called "Implode.com." Ultimately, she told me over an iced tea, her book is about "the art of the sell" as practiced by three of the town's greats.

A decade or so after the original DreamWorks vision of a diversified and independent studio faltered, Mr. Katzenberg split off to run DreamWorks Animation, a separate public company; Mr. Spielberg and DreamWorks' live-action business was sold to Paramount, part of Sumner Redstone's Viacom. Although each of the trio was paid $175 million for the $33 million they each sank into the original DreamWorks-in addition to what they continued to own in the animation company-Mr. Geffen and Mr. Spielberg chafed against their new partners and had a horrible case of sellers' remorse.

Indeed, Ms. LaPorte finalized her book deal on the day DreamWorks announced that it was essentially divorcing from Paramount. It turned out that under the moguls-only deal Mr. Geffen struck with Viacom, they could leave and take the name, which is exactly what they've done, although now Mr. Geffen has bowed out, and Mr. Spielberg's "DreamWorks 3.0" is run with studio veteran Stacey Snider.

When I met with Ms. LaPorte, we spoke mostly of Mr. Spielberg, of whom I'm an unabashed fan. Taking nothing away from the successes of K and G, Mr. Spielberg has sent more chills down the spine and tears down the faces of moviegoers than probably anyone in history-in Mr. Katzenberg's words, he is a "national treasure." Ms. LaPorte believes that the DreamWorks odyssey did throw Mr. Spielberg somewhat off his game as a director. While the last Indiana Jones movie and War of the Worlds were box office giants, and Munich was worthy and well told, it has been a while since Mr. Spielberg really pushed his creative envelope.

Which is why it will be exciting to see what he cooks up at the new DreamWorks. As The Men Who Would Be King shows, he's been on a corporate ride that was at times as wild as one of the chase scenes in his films. But now it is finally behind him.

rsiklos@observer.com

“That guy sort of reminded me of Ron Silver,” said men’s wear designer Billy Reid of Mr. Boal, approvingly. He termed the look “easy, but not sloppy.” Mr. Reid, who sells buttoned-up, Southern-style suiting out of a cavernous shop in Noho, himself also maintains a neat beard (reined in by an electric trimmer) and side-swept floppy hair, at least lately. He said that men’s hair and beards are becoming “more well kept. They’re paying more attention to it.”

Men’s hair trends—like men themselves—are usually more sluggish than women’s. Since men started growing their beards like unkempt hedges, for example, the fairer sex has powered through Cleopatra bangs, 1940s Veronica Lake waves, Heidi braids, the long Gwyneth bob, Alexander Wang side braids and now, this spring, pink streaks reminiscent of the Kool-Aid–colored dye you made at summer camp. But men also seem to be experimenting more! Sure, Stumptown baristas still wear mustaches to serve mochas, and full beards are common in yoga studios in Brooklyn and at the bar at Freeman’s, but the Bowie-esque long-on-top, shaved-on-the-sides look is currently in vogue at art openings and on Bedford Avenue, and many of the city’s best barbers—like its interior designers and restaurateurs—say they’re currently in the throes of Mad Men mania. Paul Andrew, an owner of Panyc Salon on 17th Street, said men are buying more product than women these days and coming in every two weeks, compared to six weeks for women. “Men are more high maintenance than ever,” he said. “I’ve been doing hair 25 years, and I’ve never seen it like this.”

SLIDESHOW: A history of floppy hair, from the Kennys (Rogers and Loggins) to the Jasons (Schwartzman and Reitman) >>

NOW, MANY ARE are turning to the blow-dryer decade for inspiration. Experts say they have sniffed the beginnings of a Jon Peters revival here in New York (he’s the hairstylist–turned–movie mogul and Barbra Streisand ex that partly inspired Shampoo), and that it’s not as low maintenance as it looks. “Actually, on Wednesday, I went to play music in Brooklyn, and I was in the subway and I saw two dudes like this,” said prominent men’s stylist and salon owner Martial Vivot. “I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on here?’ I was looking at them, they were very well put together, very well dressed, and I thought, Are we having a trend starting here?” He described the general vibe as “end of the ’70s. Hair parted, but not a sleek part, a part with volume. Like you blow-dried your hair.”

“A more groomed, shaggy, ’70s feel is something we’ve been venturing into in the salon already,” said Shaun Cottle, an owner of Seagull Salon on West 10th Street, which features a picture of Cat Stevens on its Web site, adding that he himself has “a medium-length blond shag with bangs. … I have exactly the ’70s haircut you’re talking about. It starts at the top of my eyes with the bangs and goes right around my face to the back of my neck.” (He admitted that he chemically straightens his pseudo-shag and has it blown out once a week.) He described the look, embodied to varying degrees by everyone from Mr. Boal and Mr. Reitman to Jason Schwartzman and Noah Baumbach to New Orleans tight end Jeremy Shockey, as “obviously very stylized, and giving a really specific projection, but that projection is, ‘I am organic.’”

Indeed, it’s a look that channels hot tubs and guitars, more ’70s porn star than grumpy Unabomber. “I’ve done a couple of really extreme bowl cuts from the ’70s on men,” said Mr. Cottle. “No part at all, kind of Peter Berlin in That Boy.”

The style’s key elements are soft, floppy, washed locks, a trimmed beard (if one is worn at all) and a creative, unfussy affect that contrasts with that of the stylized punk hairdos, uncomfortably full beards and strangulating jeans in which New York men have suffered through the past few years. It combines the relaxedness of a recession—very ’70s!—with, perhaps, a dawning optimism. “It’s getting away from the Julian Casablancas, that Williamsburg kind of look,” said Jordan M, a men’s stylist for Bumble & Bumble. “That grown-out, tendrilly, long, Jesus-looking hair that just looks like they haven’t had a hair cut in forever.”

“Before, you will have people who will ask for more hair, and then they just have the pillow hairstyle, like you are asleep, you wake up and whatever happens, happens,” said Mr. Vivot. Now, “I’m seeing kids in their 20s asking for more hair, but they want to take care of it.”

Unlike harder-to-pull-off trends like the Bowie do, the updated porn shag can work for anyone. “Just yesterday, someone got in my chair and it was exactly that,” said Jordan M. “Straight guy, Rolex, works in an art department, and he had the trimmed beard and long shaggy hair, pushed back loosely, probably doesn’t use any product. He basically told me, ‘The more you can make it look like I cut it, the better.’”

The faux–low maintenance of the look eases this transition, in some men, from Paul Bunyan to Kenny Rogers. “You got into a period where everyone was rough and rugged, and soon enough it’s going to be the complete opposite,” predicted Eddy Chai, co-owner of the popular men’s boutique Odin. Mr. Chai foresaw a welcome loosening of clothes to accompany the boyish, floppy shift in hair, democratizing men’s dressing back into a straightforward, unironic affair. After all, Mr. Boal and Mr. Reitman were hardly the best-looking men at the Oscars, but the look, inclusive with an air of historical significance, lent them a flatteringly low-key intellectual edge.

On Sunday, March 14, Gabriel Berezin, 33, the guitarist and singer for the bands Monuments and Ghost Gamblers, was weathering the rain on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint in an updated Laurel Canyon look he pegged to 1970. “You know who it was?” he said, asked to name his inspirations. “There was a picture of Paul McCartney right after the Beatles broke up, when he first started doing solo stuff. I remember being in college, saying, ‘If I could just get my beard and hair looking like that, I’d be totally psyched. Of course, I couldn’t grow a beard at that point. It took me a long time to get the beard in this condition.’ (He said he trims and clips his beard every few days with scissors or a trimmer.)

Mr. Berezin admitted he thinks about his hair “in terms of some old idea of what a musician looks like,” since “part of being artistic is not really giving a shit.” But still, he has a day job to think about these days, and a girlfriend.

“I think it’s kind of rude to have a superlong beard,” he said. “It’s hard for a girl to navigate through.” (Of course, the grizzled look poses its own perils, like a certain prickliness during one act of love.)

Meanwhile, Jordan M, from Bumble & Bumble, cautioned that the rounded shape of ’70s hair-and-beard combinations can add an unwanted fullness to the face. “When the hair’s longer on the sides, it doesn’t look like masculine or flattering to me,” he said.

But early adopters of the trend say they’re not after flattery, but comfort. Indeed, Mr. Reid, the retro-shagged designer, who said he’d been in a continuous process of growing out and shaving off a Paul Bunyan beard since college, suggested the whole thing might be accidental. “You’re probably seeing a lot of guys saying they want a change, and that’s where they’re at—in the in-between,” he said. “It’s hard just to take the full plunge of cutting [your beard] off and going back to nothing.”

mbryan@observer.com

SLIDESHOW: A history of floppy hair, from the Kennys (Rogers and Loggins) to the Jasons (Schwartzman and Reitman) >>