The cinematic blogosphere has been resounding today with calls of "What ho!" and "Top o' the morning, govn'r!" since a fair number of America's leading film bloggers have boarded planes courtesy of 20th Century Fox for Jolly Olde England to attend the premiere of The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

This morning, The Fantastically Cranky Mr. Jeffrey Wells gave us a glimpse into the hard-scrabble life of a junketeer with this peek inside the asylum that makes it sound not unlike a posting in Saigon circa 1969:

Arrived at Heathrow this morning at 7:40 am, bought an Oyster card, took the Underground to Hyde Park station and registered at the Dorchester by 10:30 am or so. (Things always take longer than you expect.) I then ordered a pricey breakfast in the salon, sharing a table with the Boston Herald's Stephen Schaefer, also here for the Fantastic Mr. Fox junket. I got about 90 minutes sleep on the plane, at most, and am consequently too fried to write anything. So the best I can do for now is simply post photos.

Later Wells blogged from the home of Roald Dahl, where the junketeers had been dragooned, earning their inter-continental transit with a forced visit (and presumed blog entries to follow) to the historic home of Mr. Fox's author. After posting pictures of the Mr. Fox merch-littered estate, Wells signed off with what seemed a slightly desperate cry for help from one trapped on a promotional bandwagon, saying of his schedule ahead, "Nothing of any substance until this evening, and even then..."

The forced frog-marching however, does not prevent Wells from giving Anderson a chance to respond to Sunday's Los Angeles Times piece in which the Mr. Fox crew filed some eye-raising complaints about the boy genius, including his propensity for staying in a separate country from his movie set. After opening his video interview with a bold compliment of Anderson's footwear, Wells puts it to Anderson of the gripers quoted in the piece, "When you're going to do a film somebody's way, you're obviously going to adhering to a very particular thing and that's all there is to it." (Anderson responded agreeing that one crew member in particular had said "a bunch of things that were a bit outrageous for someone to say about their boss.")

Elsewhere on the junket, things were a bit more serene. At firstshowing.net, blogger Alex Billington advertised a planned an escape for the PR-imprisoned bloggers to the freedom of a genuine, unmonitored pub.

Over at The Hot Blog, David Poland conducts a forthright soul-searching inspired by his own London voyage and a recent fracas sparked by the Tahitian Couples Retreat junket a few of his internet colleagues suffered through. After declaring his own fairly modest annual junketing schedule, Poland points out the conundrum facing entertainment reporters in what passes for the entertainment press today, noting that for many reporters, their jobs are dependent upon serving up a constant stream of timely celebrity interviews and reporting on upcoming films, the sort of interviews and reporting that can only be gotten in conjunction with the PR campaigns for movies and are thus only available on official trips or set visits.

For all but those few working for the dwindling number of publications with a travel budget, the thought of getting your employer to cover your trip to Tahiti is absurd. But nonetheless, that same employer will expect their reporters to provide them with the interview with Vince Vaughn that can only be had in Tahiti. So what's a poor schlub to do but swallow his doubts, and go to Tahiti.

To those who would argue that accepting junkets compromises the ability of a reporter to write critically of a film in production, Poland argues that horse has long since left the barn. The idea that a reporter from Entertainment Tonight or the NY Times would visit a set and come back with a less than approving story is as outdated a concept as a printing press itself. In fact, what was so startling about the LA Times' Mr. Fox story was how rare it was. When was the last time a story in a major paper, magazine, anywhere visited the set of a film and delivered a single remotely critical word? Farther back then we can remember, that is for sure...

Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeff Wells titled his post about the matter "Not Supposed to Say," claiming that "movie critics haven't come within 20 feet of mentioning this [unremarked-on interracial marriage] in their reviews." We're not sure what critics Wells is reading, but a boatload of the ones we've looked at mention exactly that — and they do it in a way that seems to beg for someone to bestow an aura of au courant hipness on their courageously un-PC observations.

Both EW's Owen Gleiberman and New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane take great pains to mention the film's unmentioned racial diversity, though to hear Lane discuss it, it sounds like he'd rather be watching a blunt parable like Crash. "The wedding party is the ultimate guide to Demme’s benign vision: the groom is black, the bride is white, she and her bridesmaids are dressed in saris, [and] nobody so much as mentions race," says Lane. "I don’t know if there were any Republican voters involved in this movie, but, if so, it must have been a lonely time." Ok, yes, some Republicans are racist — but damn, Anthony! Are you really implying that conservatives can never be bred within a cultural melting pot?

Worse is Wells, who virtually calls Demme a fetishist of all things African, rattling off some of the black characters Demme has previously included in his oeuvre before concluding:

So it feels very Demme-ish that the union that's endlessly celebrated in Rachel Getting Married, his latest feature, is between a very alabaster lassie (Rosemarie DeWitt, playing Rachel) and a handsome Afrique-ebony guy (musician Tunde Adebimpe, playing Sidney the groom). It's also a very Demme thing that nobody so much as mentions this.

You can say "well, why would anybody mention it?" and I'd take your point, of course. We all like to see ourselves as color-blind. My point is that in real life someone in the wedding party would at one point or another throw some kind of slider ball — something anecdotal, flip, netural, whatever— into the proceedings. In the same way someone would say "oh, it's raining" if a cloudburst were to happen. My other point is that such a remark (which wouldn't necessarily be coarse or gauche ) is verboten in a Demme film because it doesn't reflect his values or sensibilities.

...If the blunt-spoken alcoholic played by Howard Duff in Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978) had been invited to Rachel and Sidney's wedding, he would have said something or other, trust me. Because he was the kind of wealthy middle- aged guy who didn't give a shit because he was always half in the bag.

Why, though, does it need to be said? One might think that by the time Rachel and Sidney had gotten married, their families would have gotten used to the idea that they were of separate races (in fact, Rachel's divorced father has since remarried a black woman, and screenwriter Jenny Lumet is the product of an interracial marriage herself). Are these critics really unable to set aside their apparent discomfort with the idea unless an on-screen surrogate points out the obvious? What if Rachel's family were Latin (imagine Penelope Cruz donning Anne Hathaway's smudged eyeliner instead) — would their non-white, mixed marriage suddenly become less of an issue for these older, Caucasian film critics?

Guys, there's plenty of actual criticisms to be made about Rachel Getting Married (won't someone address the interminable sequence that is the dish-washing competition?). Why don't you stick to film critique and leave the awkward investigation of racial dynamics where it belongs — at a Sarah Palin rally?