Day: September 3, 2013

Nobody remembers or cares about John Avildsen’s Neighbors (’81), a John Belushi vs. Dan Aykroyd comedy which played fast and loose (to put it mildly) with Thomas Berger’s same-titled novel, described on the Wikipage as “a satire of manners and suburbia, and a comment on emotional alienation with echoes of the works of Franz Kafka.” Everyone called it lowbrow and not that funny. But compare the tone of the trailers for the Avildsen vs. the upcoming Nicholas Stoller film with Seth Rogen, Zac Effron and Rose Byrne. The former almost seems like an Ernst Lubitsch film compared to the newbie, which seems like a metaphor for the downmarket mongrelization of mainstream comedy.

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Variety‘s Peter Debruge has gone apeshit for Ron Howard‘s Rush, which will have its big debut at the Toronto Film Festival. “Too often Howard has played it safe, but here his choices are anything but obvious. He embraces the power of music to heighten the experience, but goes the opposite direction that one might expect with it, using Hans Zimmer’s cello-driven score to steer things to a deeper place. The same goes for the story itself: Who else would have imagined Formula 1 as an appropriate conduit for existential self-examination? And yet, you’ve seldom felt more alive in a movie theater than you will experiencing Rush.”

Because I live in a right-brain flotation fog, I have an annual tradition of leaving my passport at home when I leave for Telluride. Who needs a passport for Colorado, right? I don’t consider that I’ll be flying directly to New York and then Toronto hours after returning from Telluride, etc. So I had a friend send my passport to my son’s place in Brooklyn for pickup today. But the Labor Day holiday allowed for only an 8:30 am drop-off on Wednesday, which doesn’t work since tomorrow’s Toronto flight leaves from Newark at 11:10 am. But I was saved when FedEx screwed up and forgot to send the passport, so they offered to put it on a commercial flight today and deliver it in Brooklyn by 10:30 or 11 pm tonight. So all’s well. I slept 90 minutes on the red-eye so I took a nap this afternoon, and now I have a date with…uhm, a film at 6 pm.

Taken from a fifth-floor Airbnb rental at 515 West 48th, just off Tenth Avenue.

Snapped last night from a backyard patio on Sandy Cape Drive, Pacific Palisades, where I had dinner during a seven-hour stopover in Los Angeles after flying back from Telluride.

This week Sony will begin liberally screening Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips (10.13), and not just for elite NY and LA press, I’m told, but also regional critics. Five weeks out that means one thing: Sony is very confident they have a winner. It also means they want the word-of-mouth circulating and building during the Toronto Film Festival and particularly during the lead-up to the film’s 9.27 New York Film Festival debut. Captain Phillips has been produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca. Pic is rated PG-13 and runs 2 hours and 14 minutes, or the same length as 12 Years A Slave.

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg is reporting that A24 will be campaigning James Franco for Best Supporting Actor in Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers. The campaign “will pay homage to Franco’s character Alien and his extended boastful rant in the film about his cool property by using the slogan ‘CONSIDER THIS SH*T’ as he holds an Oscar statuette in each hand,” Feinberg writes.

On 8.13 I riffed on a relatively new fall-festival phenomenon — “the Oscar-contending, Telluride-only, Toronto-blowoff movie.” This referred to three Telluride Film Festival headliners — J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis and Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska — having bailed on Toronto, possibly because their producers felt that the Toronto clusterfuck factor (i.e., so many films, so little time) meant that their films might get overlooked in the shuffle. I wondered if this indicated a significant shift in thinking among award-season strategists. Is Toronto losing some of its lustre to the Venice, Telluride and New York Film Festivals, which happen right before and after Toronto?

Today Variety reviewer and Motion Picture Blog editor/essayist Joe Leydon, a longtime Toronto Film Festival veteran, shared some thoughts along these lines:

“Considering how many Toronto-bound films are premiering this year at Venice and Telluride, I wonder how long it will be before someone suggests that TIFF go back to calling itself the ‘Festival of Festivals,'” Leydon wrote. “Not that there would be anything wrong with that, you understand.

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