Rather than hang around Manhattan and attend and cover the New York Film Festival I decided last weekend to pack it in and return to Los Angeles. My flight leaves late this afternoon and arrives this evening. I’ve seen Captain Phillips, of course, and I gather I’ll be able to see Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in Los Angeles concurrent with its NYFF showing. I’m presuming that a day-and-date LA screening of Spike Jonze‘s Her will also kick into place.

If I was really loaded I would try and save LexG from himself. I say this knowing that no one can be saved. You can lead a person who’s in trouble to water but you can’t make them drink. (Most of the time they’ll refuse to drink out of dumb pride.) But I would still try because I believe in his writing. I would pay him a decent salary to bang out some kind of daily HE sub-column, but it would be contingent on his firm commitment to a rehab program and to an austere diet — both of which I would fund. I would throw in a modest but tasteful new wardrobe (no K-Mart lace-ups or cross-training shoes), a year-long membership in a health club and a hair-restoration procedure that would require a visit to Prague. But no hookers. And if he fails to adhere to the program I pull the plug and he’s back to the life he has now. What are the odds that he’d tow the line?

Despite feeling a profound distaste for organized religions (or even the concept of faith) since I was 11 or 12 years old, I’ve never been able to call myself an atheist. It just feels lazy to simply say “there is no God…no governing, all-encompassing force throughout creation.” Of course there is. The discovery of the Higgs Boson provides the scientific proof. As I wrote last June, “I despise what Christianity has become in this country, but in a certain sense I believe in intelligent design — in the idea of a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.”

At least part of the fervor behind the applause that greeted Paul McCartney‘s visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live was his appearance. Slim, dark-haired, agile, quick-witted — this is what a 71 year-old in good physical shape looks and sounds like in 2013. As opposed to, say, your typical 71 year-old, madras-shirt-wearing tourist from Phoenix. Not so much about “denying the biological reality” but a vigorous pushback. At the same time I haven’t the slightest interest in listening to McCartney’s New…sorry. The last McCartney act that got me out of my chair was the Nirvana performance. Here’s a clip from last night’s Hollywood Boulevard set.

This being a relatively fallow period, I’m in the mood right now for Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25). I’d like to see it this weekend, I mean. Or tonight at a screening. Cameron Diaz‘s style and makeup consultant did a pretty good job at conveying her character’s trashy inclinations or low-rent origins — leopard-spot tats, gold tooth, black-and-blonde hair, a little too much mascara. But I’m stuck on the last line. Diaz says “what a world,” Penelope Cruz says “you think the world is strange?” and Diaz says….what? “I meant yours”? “I’m a source”? “I meant Soros”…a subtle reference to to Democratic donor George Soros? I’ve listened to it five times on earphones and I can’t make it out.

Yesterday In Contention‘s Kris Tapley wrote that “a release-date bump” for Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 11.15) “is looking very likely.” Paramount execs saw the first cut last weekend “but almost no one has seen it yet as [Scorsese] has been hard at work whittling down a typically massive first cut (with elements that would easily yield an NC-17 rating, by the way). But does it go to 2014 or to December?”

2014? Who’s saying that? A eunuch? If Paramount distribution execs are actually pondering a bump into next year (and I’m not presuming anything at this stage), they need to grim up and conduct themselves like persons of character and conviction. Having read and really enjoyed Terence Winter‘s Wolf script, I know what this film more or less is — Goodfellas/Casino meets Wall Street. Or, if you will, the conclusion of Scorsese’s Rise and Fall Of A Flamboyant American Criminal trilogy. Any talk about concerns over a possible NC-17 rating is totally candy-ass, in my view. From what little I know of editing an R rating is certainly achievable.

TheWrap‘s Todd Cunningham reported this evening (Monday, 9.23) that The Weinstein Co. has decided to bump Olivier Dahan‘s Grace of Monaco into early 2014 — almost certainly due to concerns about the biopic’s ability to hold its own during award season. The film, which costars Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly and a moustachioed Tim Roth as Prince Rainer, had been set for an 11.27 limited opening. (Kidman offered a few words about Grace at a Weinstein Co. promo party during last May’s Cannes Film Festival.) Cunningham reports that Grace “has been pushed to next year to allow for the film’s completion, according to an individual close to the project.” He adds that “the most likely scenario at this point calls for a January release in France ahead of a U.S. debut in March.”

A Masters of Cinema Region-2 Bluray of Howard Hawks‘ Red River will street on 10.28. High-def 1080p presentation (as opposed to what…720p?) A booklet featuring the words of director Howard Hawks containing “rare imagery.” Original trailer. Exclusive lengthy video conversation about Red River and Hawks by filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt, conducted by Jaime Christley, and shot by Dustin Guy Defa and James P. Gannon.

“La Strada may be almost 60 years old, but Federico Fellini’s masterpiece is in the news,” writes Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf. “In an interview published late last week, Pope Francis called La Strada his favorite film. Some might have expected a more church-friendly movie, like Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City — which Fellini co-wrote — about a priest helping the Italian Resistance fight Nazi occupiers during World War Two. While he also mentions it, the pontiff’s favorite choice crystallizes his embrace of the fallible and the marginalized.

“From the very first shot – an extended, foul-mouthed epic poem to the glory of his own sex organ — Jude Law’s titular Dom Hemingway exudes the very specific rapscallion charm British bad boys have in spades,” writes Film.com;s Jordn Hoffman. “But this…is not just another case of glamorizing an outlaw. Indeed, the opening shot of gratification ends with a punchline — Dom Hemingway is simultaneously a cool guy and a goof, a sliver-tongued genius and a bit of a dumbass. It’s a marvelous and rich character and Jude Law, a little puffier and hairier than usual (he looks like Liev Schreiber in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) turns in a career-best performance.”

Eight months after its debut at the just-concluded Toronto Film Festival, Fox Searchlight will release Dom Hemingway on 4.4.14.

A publicist pal asked this morning if I saw Nick Ryan‘s The Summit (IFC Films, 10.4) at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, and I said “nope…can I get a screener?” And then I remembered that I’d not only seen it but had posted a review. What does that indicate? Obviously that this absorbing, highly complex doc didn’t stick. Why? Because its examination of the death of 11 climbers on the notorious K2 in August 2008 is a little too even-handed. It’s so fair-minded (i.e., reluctant to call a spade a spade) that butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth.

“The story of the 2008 tragedy demands specificity and exactitude, and Ryan’s film (which is partly re-enacted) certainly provides that,” I wrote last January. “But in the name of thoroughness and looking at all the angles, it declines to judge or point fingers. Ryan decides to not say in clear, talking-to-a-dumb-guy fashion if this or that climber was guilty of carelessness or negligence. He just says, ‘This happened, and a lot of factors came into play. Either way I’m not going to give you, the viewer, the satisfaction of being able to say ‘this guy screwed up’ or ‘this guy should have known better.’ You can figure that out yourself on your way home, if you want. Or you can do some in-depth reading about it.”

I’ve seen two of the films opening on Friday, 9.27 — Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s Don Jon (formerly Don Jon’s Addiction) and Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier‘s Muscle Shoals. I meant to see James Franco’s As I Lay Dying in Cannes but then the word got around and other stuff came up and then the one-sheet surfaced — the film (like the 1930 William Faulkner book it’s based upon) is an ensemble piece and the poster image is no-big-deal snap of a frowning Franco?