Having missed last Tuesday’s screening of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons at the Walter Reade, I finally caught it yesterday afternoon on my Macbook Pro while waiting at Newark Airport for my Virgin America flight to LA. Obviously it’s not that great but it’s not that bad either. Or at least it didn’t seem that bad after reading all those shitty reviews. The characters couldn’t be chillier or more spiritually vacant, but that’s the idea, right? It’s present-day Los Angeles as a kind of Dante’s Inferno. Everyone lies, nobody trusts anyone, a rancid scene every which way. The film has issues (including technical ones) but I got through it. I wasn’t greatly offended.

The best films always start off impressively or at least respectably, and then they get better (i.e., richer, deeper, more dazzling) with each successive viewing. Kubrick’s films always do this. In this sense Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango In Paris is an exception as far as my own reactions are concerned. I was so knocked out by my first viewing that I wound up seeing it five or six times within a two- or three-month period, but over the last couple of decades (and especially during my most recent viewing via Bluray) it’s been falling off and generally losing its potency. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen it too often, but portions of this landmark film almost irritate me now. I can’t stand those scenes between Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud, for example.

With the exception of a 24-hour visit to George Clooney‘s Monuments Men set in rural Germany roughly three months ago and then a two-day visit to Lauterbrunnen in early June I’ve been living in intense, thundering, big-time cities over the last three months — New York, two weeks in Berlin, 10 days in Cannes, 20 days in Paris, five or six days in Prague, back to Paris and then a straight 40-day bunkdown in New York’s financial district (i.e., since 6.20) with the highly significant girlfriend.

The best elements in Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car “are the performances from Robert Duvall and John Hurt,” London Evening Standard critic Derek Malcom wrote last February from Berlin. “To see these two pitted against each other is sheer cinematic joy. To watch Billy Bob, Kevin Bacon and Tippi Hedren too is an additional pleasure.”

The 86th Academy Awards will be hosted by Ellen DeGeneres…okay. She’ll be fine. EDG was nominated for an Emmy after emcee-ing the Oscar telecast in ’07 so whatever. The song-and-dancey, Vegas-minded Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will again executive produce. The show will air on Sunday, March 2nd — seven freaking months from now. And the 2013 Oscar season begins less than 30 days hence with Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York…bang, bang, boom. Get ready, cadres. It’s gonna be a long bumpy ride. Well, a long one anyway.

When it comes to Machete flicks, slapdash genre-wanker Robert Rodriguez — a man who has lived in torment for 20 years over his inability to make another movie as good as El Mariachi, his debut film which cost $7000 — morphs into Zucker Abrahams Zucker. Amusing as a trailer (the Charlie Sheen menage a trois gag works), probably very trying as a feature. You can’t sustain this kind of tonal attitude over 95 or 100 minutes — it turns into cottage cheese. No name-brand director is as deeply opposed to infusing his films with thematic or spiritual content as Rodriguez. He would sooner slit his throat than have one of his films deliver subtext (except for his “let’s have fun with this or that exploitation cliche by overcranking it” bullshit). You’ll never get more than what you see when you watch a Rodriguez fick.

I need to speak to someone who can tell me how to pronounce David Oyelowo‘s last name. I hesitate every time I try to say it. My tongue shrinks from the challenge. Oh-yay-low-woe? My inner ten-year-old wants to say oh-yellow.