A couple of hours ago I wrote a tidy little riff about Jack Clayton‘s Room At The Top (’59), and then it was accidentally erased. The point is that I finally saw this sharply-written, very cleanly composed film last night for the first time and was seriously impressed by it. The first belch of British kitchen-sink drama (resentful, self-destructive working-class blokes and their birds + lots of drinking, smoking, arguing and shagging), Room opened in the U.S. in May 1959. It was followed four months later by the film version of John Osborne‘s Look Back in Anger with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, and a new genre was off to the races. When the late Simone Signoret won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Laurence Harvey‘s somewhat older love interest, she became the first non-integrated, foreign-based actress to do so. I’d forgotten she was fairly hot at the time. But it wasn’t long after her Oscar triumph that Signoret decided to (is there a p.c. brownshirt way to put this?) let herself go and become a character actress. She died at a relatively young age, 64, in 1985.

We definitely need another futuristic, CG-driven, inter-planetary, mythical-minded, grandiose sci-fi adventure involving a freelance assassin (Channing Tatum), a Han Solo-type adventurer (Sean Bean) and a lowly main character (Mila Kunis) who learns she has “a great genetic destiny,” which is more or less what Luke Skywalker realized when he was told that the midi-chlorians in his blood allowed him to harness “the Force.” We also need another film of this sort in which a main character drops off a very tall skyscraper at night.

The last Nymphomaniac update was that (a) the Danish distributor would be screening Lars Von Trier‘s film for local critics on 12.17 and that (b) the British distributor was thinking of screening it for London critics the same day. Soon after I was told by a top Magnolia guy that his company wouldn’t be screening it stateside “before the [12.25] Denmark opening.” This morning a friend told me I could slip into a special Munich screening of Nymphomania this coming Friday — too far, too sudden, too costly. Today another Magnolia guy told me that the company’s policy has changed from “no U.S. screenings this year” to (and I quote) “the only U.S. press that the film is being screened for this year are the trades.” To which I replied, “Does that mean critics for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and The Wrap? Or just the two ‘print’ trades?” I could still see it commercially in Copenhagen starting on 12.25, which would cost me around $1750 or $1800, all in. But you know what? The hell with it. This film isn’t worth it. I don’t care anymore.

I have a very slight problem with this LAFCA-vote discussion on James Rocchi‘s “The Lunch” podcast. Rocchi’s contributors — LAFCA members Alonso Duralde (The Wrap), Amy Nicholson (L.A. Weekly) and Karina Longworth — are obviously bright and knowledgable, but their observatons are too measured and political. I wanted a snippy, resentful, sour-grapes discussion about why this winner didn’t deserve to win and why that winner did, etc. I wanted the real nitty gritty. I wanted occasional expletives. I wanted undercurrents and hidden agendas exposed.

It takes a while for Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg to mention Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street as a late-to-the-table but formidable Best Picture contender, which of course it is. (Isn’t it?) Feinberg is still predicting 12 Years A Slave to win and O’Neil is still betting on Gravity. Minor complaint: Feinberg’s voice sounds a little bit murky.

I was determined to try and cut Bruce Beresford‘s Bonnie & Clyde miniseries a break. The only fair way to watch it, I decided, was to at least temporarily erase the memory of Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty‘s 1967 classic. But I couldn’t do it. I tried but I couldn’t. Beatty and Faye Dunaway‘s Clyde and Bonnie had an irrepressible charisma, vulnerability and turbulence of spirit, and Emile Hirsch and Holliday Grainger‘s…I don’t want to be cruel or dismissive, but Beresford’s version just doesn’t cut it. It feels like a Depression-era crime story re-styled by for 2013 generation and re-enacted by the C team. But show me any decently assembled documentary about the real-life pair and I’m hooked. It’s not the song, it’s the singers.

Earlier today (Sunday, 12.8) Deadline posted an “Oscars q & a” between Pete Hammond and Gravity star Sandra Bullock, and out of this came a curious admission by Bullock. Without making a big deal out of it and with no prompting by Hammond, Bullock said that Gravity “was supposed to be an amusement ride for the viewer.”

This strikes me as a classic “obiter dicta” bomb, or words in passing that give the game away.

We all have different reasons for deciding that a given film deserves a Best Picture Oscar, but usually they have something to do with a presumption of serious (or at least semi-serious) artful intent on some level, as a reflection or condensation of life as we know it, rendered with a certain poignance or social resonance and particularly with the viewer being touched or moved or turned around by it.

I’ve been reminded of the source of that famous Howard Hawks line about how a good film always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.” It’s from Joseph McBride‘s “Hawks on Hawks,” which has just been republished by University Press of Kentucky. I referenced the line in last night’s “Howard Hawks Wants to Know” piece. But the broader Hawks quote contains a side-thought that nobody ever mentions these days.

“Not that you’re trying to make every scene a great scene, but you try not to annoy the audience,” Hawks tells McBride on page 36. “I told John Wayne when we started to work together, ‘Duke, if you can make three good scenes in this picture and don’t annoy the audience the rest of the time, you’ll be good.’ He said,’“Do you believe that?’ I said, ‘Yeah. If I make five good scenes in this picture, and don’t annoy the audience, I think I’ll be good.'” Wells insert: Now wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute…did Hawks believe that nailing three great scenes was all you needed, or did he believe that five was a much better tally and that three might not be enough?

“We are not the mistakes of our past. We’re the resources and capabilities that we glean from our past.” — Jordan Belfort, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street.

I don’t believe that the two finest, boldest and most morally definitive films of the year are Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave and Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street — I know that they are. And yet the critics groups, so far, don’t seem to fully get this. Or maybe they do but they’d rather not. They haven’t been dismissing these masterpieces — everyone is respectful — but they’ve been kind of half-blowing them off and certainly not giving them the love they deserve. The Scorsese especially. Both films should be standing tall and proud on the mountaintop right now. Critics, guild members and film buffs alike should be bowing and cheering, but they seem to be hedging somewhat. Responses have been mixed and fluid and less fervent than initially anticipated.

I was euphoric when I came out of The Wolf of Wall Street and so far…well, some agree with me at least. I knew I’d seen a masterpiece when I first caught 12 Years A Slave in Telluride and now…what has happened exactly? I know about all the grumbling by long-of-tooth Academy members about how they respect it but don’t like it, blah blah. But why have the critics done a slight but noticable fade on Slave?

Two or three days ago I announced an intention to fly to Copenhagen sometime after 12.20 to catch Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac while expressing hope that Magnolia, the film’s U.S. distributor, might screen the two-part, four-hour film domestically (NY or LA) for trades and certain columnists to allow them to post reviews on the 12.17 worldwide embargo date. I was eventually informed that Magnolia will not be screening Nymphomaniac any time soon for U.S. critics. I was then told by Premier‘s Liz Miller that Danish publicists are planning a 12.17 screening for Scandinavian press in Copenhagen, and that Nymphomaniac‘s U.K. distributor is currently “deciding whether to do that here (in London) on that date.” I wrote Magnolia again, noting that “the worldwide conversation about the film will begin for European critics on 12.17 and continue henceforth. It seems a shame that you and yours are deciding to make U.S. critics pay at least $1800 in air fare plus hotel and everything else in order to take part in that discussion on a timely basis.” I can’t attend any 12.17 press screenings in Europe, but I’m thinking of flying to Denmark and seeing the film commercially on Christmas Day. I’ll be happy to bang out a review (different than the one I’ll post here) for any publication that wants to throw me a grand for my time and trouble. I’ll eat the rest.