I went to Wednesday night’s Academy screening of Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, and stayed for the q & a between Tarantino (who really, really needs to hit the treadmill) and Elvis Mitchell. His movies are one thing; his interview patter another. Tarantino will always be a great conversationalist, story-teller, educator, what-have-you.

I actually don’t care who they quote. As long as Zero Dark Thirty gets its Best Picture due & as long as Lincoln doesn’t win. I don’t get the attacks about the film depicting torture. Obviously Al Qeada allies were tortured during the Bush admistration so what’s the problem? How do Diane Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain know for a fact that no good information resulted from torture? They believe this because they’ve been told this, but how do they really know?

Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg is reporting that because Magnolia Pictures wouldn’t pay $13K for screeners to support the Best Supporting Actress campaign of Compliance‘s Ann Dowd, Dowd and her husband have coughed up the cash themselves. Senior Magnolia marketing guy Matt Cowal says the company has already taken a bath on the release of the film (Compliance only made $319,285 before being yanked) and “so we just are trying to be as responsible as we can.”

Compliance cstar Ann Dowd.

Dowd, who got paid a pathetic $1600 for acting in Compliance over a 16-day period, is basically doing a Melissa Leo. If there’s a SAG God she’ll get more quality work out of the acclaim for her Compliance performance, but this sucks all the same. Save Ann Dowd’s bank balance! She won Best Supporting Actress from the National Board of Review, and has been nominated in this category by the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Independent Spirit Awards.

The reason Compliance didn’t make more money is because too many people refused to believe that the fast-food employees (principally Dowd’s manager character) in the film were too gullible in not challenging the pervy guy on the phone who claimed he was a cop…even though this scam happened several times in the mid-to-late ’90s and early aughts, and it worked particularly well in the Kentucky case that the film is based upon.

Baz Luhrman‘s The Great Gatsby was pulled from December 2012 release because Luhrman wanted to further refine it, or something along those lines. I immediately presumed this was code for “it wasn’t quite working,” but I loved the Gatsby footage I saw at Cinemacon last April so I still have hope and faith, despite the nightmare of Australia.

An hour ago Jack Reacher director-writer Chris McQuarrie called from a car heading out to LaGuardia or Newark for a flight to tonight’s Pittsburgh premiere. We went over the basics, which can be boiled down to the fact that Jack Reacher isn’t a game-changer as much as a game-restorer — an urban thriller in a ’90s or ’80s or ’70s vein of Walter Hill, which is to say intelligent, detailed, restrained and nailed down. Straight, lean and plain. No sick-whack digital jizz-foam. Here’s the mp3.

(l. to r.) Jack Reacher costars Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, director-writer Chris McQuarrie.

There’s a reason, of course, why winners of the Sundance Audience Awards always seem a bit more vital and exciting than the awards handed out by Sundance jurors. Because Sundance jurors are always the same cool enlightened industry people who would never stray outside their tasteful, sensitive perimeter. It’s a club, the Sundance juror fraternity-sorority…a clique. And becoming a member is no duckwalk. You have to prove that you’re one of them and that you get their sensibility and their lifestyle, and that means observing certain rules and conditions.

It’s the same with joining any elite golf course or elite tennis club or elite Hollywood poker game.

The just-announced Sundance jurors are total club members. They’re all hip professionals with excellent credentials and elegant educations and an enviable dress sense. If I were doing the inviting I’d pick these guys also. I’m not saying they’re not cool. I’m just saying there’s not a madman or wildcat or loose cannon among them. They all “talk the talk and walk the walk,” so to speak. Nothing wrong with that, but it tends to result in the same kind of films winning Sundance juror awards.

The 2013 U.S. Dramatic Jury is composed of Ed Burns (Fitzgerald Family Christmas), Wesley Morris (film critic for Boston Globe, Grantland), Rodrigo Prieto (cinematographer of Brokeback Mountain, 8 Mile, 25th Hour, 21 Grams), Tom Rothman (former 20th Century Fox chairman), Clare Stewart (British Film Institute).

The 2013 Documentary Jurors are Liz Garbus (Ghosts of Abu Ghraib), Davis Guggenheim (Waiting or Superman), Gary Hustwit (Urbanized), Brett Morgen (Crossfire Hurricane, The Kid Stays in the Picture) and Diane Weyermann (Participant).

And it goes on like that. It’s all fine, all groovy. But the Audience Awards, no offense, are where it’s at.

Full disclosure: I won’t be seeing 5 Broken Cameras until tomorrow sometime (when the screener arrives) but the buzz is out there & worth noting.

I was about to post this photo…well, I am posting it, one of my favorite Obama captures in a long time. (Especially because of the mirror reflection.) Then along came this morning’s “where have you been?” moment [after the jump] in which Obama basically says that he hasn’t made gun control a priority because he didn’t want to weaken or jeopardize his political alliances on other major initiatives.

“This has gone back all the way down to Shakespeare’s days. When there’s violence in the street, the cry becomes ‘blame the playmaker.’ And you know, I actually think that’s a very facile argument to pin on something that’s a real-life tragedy.” — Quentin Tarantino on the cultural interplay between (for one example) the casual, cine-stylish, mock-ironic violence in Django Unchained and the real-life slaughters that are happening daily in this country.

The fact that Shakespeare resolved his dramatic conflicts with third-act violence is hardly analogous to the way Tarantino soaks his characters (and, in Django, the walls of his sets) in blood and brain matter. Tarantino’s blood baths are done with a wink, “referenced,” in no way earnest. They’re a jape, and yet underneath that jape is a message that says two things, in my view. One, bullets slamming into a long line of racist bad guys is at the very least amusement for jaded cineastes, and if I, Quentin Tarantino, could think of some way to make blood, entrails and brain matter more amusing, I would. And two, the slaughter of a long line of Southern racists is justified payback for the sins of slavery, and so I can go to town all I want because I’m wrapped in an anti-slavery, anti-racist cloak.

This To The Wonder trailer is five or six times more engaging than the film itself, and Javier Bardem‘s narration (the content of which is wise and dead-on) is something close to the sum total of his dialogue in the whole magilla, and with more clarity as his voice is much softer and mixed down in the feature. As I said in my 9.11.12 Toronto review, To The Wonder “doesn’t precisely fart in your face.”

“The Olympian indifference and almost comical current of fuck-you nothingness that runs through Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder, which I saw last night at the Princess of Wales theatre, carries a certain fascination.

“I was prepared for it, having heard from Ben Affleck in Telluride that it “makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers” and having read the Venice Film Festival reviews. So it was hardly a shock to encounter a wispy, ethereal thing composed of flaky intimations and whispers and Emmanuel Lubezki‘s wondrous cinematography with maybe 20 or 25 lines of dialogue, if that.

It’s basically The Tree of Life 2: Oklahoma Depression. It’s Malick sitting next to you and gently whispering in your ear, “You wanna leave? Go ahead. Go on, it’s okay, I don’t care…do what you want. But you can also stay.”

And that’s the thing about this film. Malick gives you so little to grapple with (at least in terms of a fleshed-out narrative and that thing we’ve all encountered from time to time called “speech” or “talking” or what-have-you) that it’s pretty much your responsibility to make something out of To The Wonder‘s 112 minutes. It’s all about you taking a journey of your own devising in the same way we all take short little trips with this or that object d’art in a gallery or a museum. The film is mesmerizing to look at but mostly it just lies there.

Well, no, it doesn’t “lie there” but it just kind of swirls around and flakes out on its own dime. Run with it or don’t (and 97% of the people out there aren’t going to even watch this fucking thing, much less take the journey) but “it’s up to you,” as the Moody Blues once sang.

To The Wonder doesn’t precisely fart in your face. It leads you rather to wonder what the air might be like if you’ve just cut one in a shopping mall and there’s someone right behind you, downwind. That’s obviously a gross and infantile thing to think about, but To The Wonder frees you to go into such realms if you want. It’s your deal, man. Be an adult or a child or a 12 year-old or a buffalo. Or a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo. Naah, that’s dull. Be a buffalo and sniff the air as Rachel McAdams walks by! You can go anywhere, be anything. Which is liberating in a sense, but if you can’t or won’t take the trip you’ll just get up and leave or take a nap or throw something at the screen. Or get up and leave and head for the nearest mall.

I went with it. I wasn’t bored. Well, at least not for the first hour. I knew what I’d be getting into and I basically roamed around in my head as I was led and lulled along by Lubezki’s images and as I contemplated the narcotized blankness coming out of Affleck’s “Neil” character, who is more or less based on Malick. Or would be based on Malick if Malick had the balls to make a film about himself, which he doesn’t. If Malick had faced himself and made a film about his own solitude and obstinacy and persistence…wow! That would have been something. But Malick is a hider, a coward, a wuss. He used to be the guy who was up to something mystical and probing and mysterious. Now he tosses lettuce leaves in the air and leaves you to put them all into a bowl as you chop the celery and the carrots and the tomatoes and decide upon the dressing.

I came out of it convinced that I will never, ever visit Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where the film was mostly shot.

There’s a kind of mad breakout scene in the second half in which Romina Mondello, “playing” an Italian-born friend of Olga Kurylenko, who “plays” Ben Affleck‘s French wife, says “there’s nothing here!” and you’re sitting there in your slumber and going “no shit?” But it’s not just the place — it’s the emptiness and the nothingness that Affleck and Kurylenko, who have become lovers in her native Paris (just as Malick fell in love with and married Michelle Morette in the mid ’80s), bring to their blah-fart activities in the film — wandering around, making love, playing kid-wrestling games, staring at sunsets, moving this or that piece of furniture from one room to another or lifting it out of a cardboard box, etc. These are people who are investing in their own torpor. People who bring nothing to the table. Deadheads.

Kurylenko and McAdams did a brief q & a after the film, and Kurylenko talked about how her character is supposed to be a little “crazy” — unbalanced, obsessive. Except there’s nothing in the film that persuades you of this, or even hints at it, really. Her character is passionate and emotional and has no real compulsion in life — nothing to do except twirl around, make goo-goo or fuck-you eyes at Affleck, take care of her 12 year-old daughter, sleep, make love, wonder about stuff, prepare meals, wander, daydream.

I raised my hand and asked Kurylenko and McAdams if Malick ever talked about how the film is largely based on his own life and how this was at least a key part of the fabric of it all, and they both kind of looked at each other and then at the floor and more or less said, “Ask Terry…that’s his affair.”

From the TIFF press notes: “As Malick liberates himself more and more from the restrictions of conventional narrative and pursues a more associative approach, he gets closer to eliciting pure, subconscious responses from his viewers. It is gratifying to note that the same man who long ago wrote an uncredited draft of Dirty Harry now finds freedom in the transcendental.”

While writing last night’s near-rave of Jack Reacher I was reminded of Matthias Stork‘s brilliant Indiewire video essay (posted in August 2011) called “Chaos Cinema.” Not because Reacher exemplifies this trend — far from it. To the contrary and to its credit, it exemplifies bare-bones Clarity Cinema.

“Trying to orient yourself in a work of chaos cinema is like trying to find your way out of a maze, only to discover that your map has been replaced by a reproduction of a Jackson Pollack painting,” says Stork.

It’s must-viewing, this piece. It articulates and clarifies a lot of things that many of us have been feeling for a long while. “The only art here,” Stork declares, “is the art of confusion.”

Action films of the late 20th Century embraced classic cinema language, he explains. They were “coherent, understandable, riveting, economical, stabilizing — classical cutting. But in the past decade that’s gone right out the window. Commercial films have become faster, over-stuffed, hyperactive. Rapid editing, close framing, bipolar [something or other] and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial action films.

“Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action films, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload…a film style marked by excess, exaggeration, over-indulgence, a never-ending crescendo with no spacial clarity…chaos cinema. The new action films are fast, forward, volatile, an audio-visual war zone.”

Stork approves of the cutting in The Hurt Locker. I’m sure he also admires the way Drive is thrown together.