There’s no relation between the fact that I’m sitting inside a McDonald’s (free wifi!) at Burbank Airport at 5:20 am, and the fact that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity has premiered to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival. But there’s no harm in just stating facts. Here’s Justin Chang’s Variety review…over the moon. Significant sentence: “As visual an experience as the film is, it would be far less effective without the exceptional sound work by production mixer Chris Munro and sound designer Glenn Freemantle, which makes especially potent use of silence in accordance with the laws of outer-space physics.” Dozens if not hundreds of second- and third-rate filmmakers who’ve worked on mediocre space-adventure flicks are scratching their heads as we speak. A potent use of silence, observing laws of outer-space physics? This might work for a high-falutin’ film festival movie like Gravity, but generally speaking popcorn-eaters want to hear stuff in space movies. You know…booms, whushes, pyoom-pyooms.

It’s a little bit ballsy, I think, of Focus Features to approve this one-sheet for Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyers Club (11.1) as the blurry image of what I presume is Matthew McConaughey‘s face obviously flirts with the macabre. The film is a true-life tale about a guy (Ron Woodruff) who saved himself from an AIDS death for years by smuggling non-approved medications into the U.S. McConaughey is wearing black shades, of course, but he looks like the man who’s found dead in his pajamas in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds with his eyes pecked out. Big black sockets. The poster is clearly saying “whoever and whatever this cowboy-hatted guy is, he’s got one foot on the gallows and the other on a banana peel.”

I’m told it’s not going, but this would also be a good choice for the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, which kicks off the day after tomorrow. An obvious Best Actor push for Matthew McConaughey could obviously use Telluride buzz to start things off. The Jean-Marc Vallee-directed drama will play the Toronto Film Festival for sure, and then Focus Features will release it on 11.1.

A friend has just passed along talk about Jonathan Glazer‘s Under The Skin playing the 2013 Telluride Film Festival. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows? The film will definitely play at the Venice Film Festival on 9.3, or a day after Telluride wraps.

Scarlet Johansson plays a dark-haired alien who dresses like Bayonne mall trash circa 1983. If you want to talk superficials Johansson’s character — Isserley is her alien name, Laura her earth name — has more kinship to the Kanamits in the famous Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man” than to David Bowie‘s character in The Man Who Fell To Earth. But the themes, derived from Michael Faber’s 13-year-old novel, are allegedly more complex than just “alien hottie looking to scoop up hitchhikers so they can fattened up and eaten by her employers.”

In a 5.2.12 Variety interview, Johansson told Stephen Schaefer that “I’ve never been in a movie where the logline of the movie, where the plot has been so twisted. It’s crazy. ‘Are you eating people on the side of the road?’ I’m like, ‘No, no!’ Okay, yes, I do play an alien who is wearing my own skin. But it’s actually not a science-fiction film. It’s sort of a film that asks existential questions and much more complex than the logline.”

Closed Circuit (Focus Features, 8.28) is an intelligent, moderately suspenseful, British-made melodrama (and not really a “courtroom drama”, despite what some reviewers are saying) about domestic terrorism and morally derelict higher-ups. The latter prove their dastardly mettle in Act Three by pursuing the once-romantically-linked barristers (Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall) who are onto the Big Secret that no one can know about…all right, no spoilers. But the fact that these two get chased down some dark streets underscores the basic movie maxim that (a) if you stumble onto some Really Shocking Information and (b) indicate that you may spill it, the bad guys will definitely try and ice your ass.

We all know the name of that tune, don’t we?

It’s conceivable that three 2013 films about the African-American experience in this country will snag a Best Picture nomination — Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (which runs 134 minutes), Lee Daniels‘ The Butler (technically known as Lee Daniels’ The Butler) and Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station. But it’s more likely that only one will really compete. Because there’s an assumption out there, possibly influenced by a benignly racist mindset, that only one black film can be nominated for Best Picture and that if all three push hard they could end up cannibalizing each other.

Maybe it’s not such a racist thing. If there were three big-scale superhero films opening this year that were thought to be as good (or almost as good) as The Dark Knight, only one would make any headway as a Best Picture contender…right? (People would say, “Oh, come on…we can’t have two superhero movies competing for Best Picture…please!”) Same thing if there were three first-rate dramedies about women involved in tough competitive urban careers — only one would be singled out for possible Best Picture consideration. And so on.

My final predictions for the lineup at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, which won’t be revealed until Thursday (or will it be Wednesday?), are the same that everyone else is kicking around: Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Alfonso Curaron‘s Gravity, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, Ralph Fiennes‘ The Invisible Woman, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color, Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day…what else?

The Telluride departure countdown (40 hours to go) is intensified by the fact that I’m still in Santa Barbara as we speak. I won’t be back in LA until the early afternoon. I’m starting to grind away at the enamel on my teeth.

I’ve said two or three times before that any action- or FX-driven thriller using an overhead shot of the lead protagonists (i.e., characters who probably won’t die) jumping off the top of a building or out of a high window almost certainly sucks. It means that the director is either too stupid to realize what a whorey visual cliche this is (skyscraper-jumping first appeared 25 years ago in Tim Burton‘s Batman) or he/she doesn’t give a shit. I’m not exaggerating — a jumping or falling scene in the year 2013 really is a mark of mediocrity. So you can probably rely on Neil Burger‘s Divergent (Summit, 3.21.14) sucking eggs to some extent.

I was thinking this morning about the influence of the late Elmore Leonard, particularly the way the late crime novelist would occasionally put the article or main object at the end of a sentence. Which seemed odd to English composition teachers and…well, to me also, at first, but then I got used to it. And then it seemed a little odd when dialogue didn’t do that.

I’m mentioning this because it was almost exactly a year ago (i.e., at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival) when I noticed an Elmore sentence in Silver Linings Playbook.

Neurotic dad Robert De Niro is pleading with local cop Dash Mihok to not escort manic-eccentric Chris Tucker “back to Baltimore” until the Eagles game is over. “What’s the problem?,” De Niro says, clutching his green Eagles handkerchief. “He’s not goin’ anywhere. Just let him finish the game, that’s all. The handkerchief is working. We’re killing the Seahawks, twenty-seven-ten. What’s the matter with you? Let him stay, please!” And Mihok says, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief’. And I’m glad that the Seahawks are losing and we’re winning, but I gotta take Danny McDaniels back to Baltimore, alright? He can contest his case from Baltimore.”

I believe that without Elmore Leonard, Mihok would have used a more conventional sentence structure and said “I don’t know what your handkerchief has to do with it” or “What do you mean ‘handkerchief?'” or something along those lines. Screenwriter David O. Russell would not have put the article at the end — “I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief.'” Just saying.

The responses to this riff, I realize, will have nothing to do with Leonard and everything to do with how much this or that pisshead hates Silver Linings Playbook. But that rant is history now. It was a peculiar thing to feel or say in the first place. SLP was and is brilliant. It resonated all over the place with sophistos and Average Joes alike, and it made $132 million theatrically — fuck-you money as far as the naysayers are concerned. It should have won the Best Picture Oscar, and it would have if hadn’t been for the votes taken away by the respectable but tedious Lincoln.

An 8.25 N.Y. Times story by Michael Cieply and Julie Bosman passes along information that “at least five additional books” by the late J.D. Salinger, “some of them entirely new, some extending past work,” will be published beginning in 2015. The reclusive Salinger, who died in 2010 at age 91, stopped publishing new material in the early ’60s. The information about the new writings is contained in Shane Salerno‘s Salinger (Weinstein Co. 9.6), a documentary that no one I know has seen or has even been invited to see. What’s up with that?

I don’t have the experience to eulogize the great Julie Harris, who died yesterday in West Chatham, Massachusetts at age 87. I never saw her once on the New York stage, where she shined the brightest and most consistently, and haven’t seen that many of her films. For decades I’ve associated Harris with only three screen performances: Abra in Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden (one of my favorite female characters of all time), the neurotic, spinsterish Eleanor in Robert Wise‘s The Haunting and Grace Marsh (i.e., Anthony Quinn‘s friend and supporter) in Ralph Nelson‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight. Three films in a seven-year stretch — ’55, ’61 and ’62.

Julie Harris with James Dean during the ferris-wheel scene in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden.

Harris in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (which will be released on Bluray on 10.15).

I’ve always loved Larry Cohen‘s Q, The Winged Serpent (’82), which is out on Bluray on 8.27. I love the jazzy hipster attitude, the flagrantly insincere tone and especially the cheesy special effects. Michael Moriarty‘s performance as a scat-singing eccentric is surreal at times, and let’s not forget the great David Carradine. I’d been an admirer of Cohen’s stuff (God Told Me To and It’s Alive were my favorites) but Q is the film that finally allowed me to understand and embrace the term “Cohen-heads.”