A boilerplate riff from Deadline‘s Pete Hammond about the Oscar worthiness of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity was posted this afternoon. It includes a new video piece about the merits of the screenplay by Cuaron and his son Jonas (below). It’s a nicely composed look at the year’s mostly visually astounding and innovative film, and I want to once again emphasize my absolute respect and admiration for the brilliant technical craft that went into this $80 million survival flick. But the Hammond piece led me back to my original Telluride review (“Spectacular, Eye-Popping Gravity Could Be Deeper“), and I really do think my reactions were solid and straight and fairly dead-on.

Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity “is the most visually sophisticated, super-immersive weightless thrill-ride flick I’ve ever seen. If Stanley Kubrick had been there last night he would freely admit that 2001: A Space Odyssey is no longer the ultimate, adult-angled, real-tech depiction of what it looks and feels like to orbit the earth. Nifty and super-cool from a pure-eyeball perspective, Gravity is certainly the most essential theatrical experience since Avatar. You can’t watch a top-dollar 3D super-flick of this type on anything other than a monster-sized IMAX screen.

As reported by Buzzfeed, the Rome-based marketing outfit Fanatical About Cinema has created some posters for the February release of 12 Years A Slave in Italy. The campaign could be called one of two things: (a) “Chiwetel who?” or (b) “Ragazzi bianchi l’avevano duro durante la schiavitu troppo” (i.e. “White guys had it tough during slavery too”). Clearly Fanatical About Cinema was instructed by BIM Distribuzione, the film’s local distributor, to try and reach Italians who occasionally use the term “mulignan.” What kind of hip ad agency would create this kind of poster for a film like 12 Years A Slave? English translation: “You put-ah Brad and Michael upfront or we hire someone else…kapeesh?”

In his story about Hope Holiday’s outburst, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond says he spoke to Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese last Friday, and that Scorsese said the following: “[Wolf] is brutal. I’ve seen it with audiences, and I think it plays. I don’t know if it will be to everyone’s taste — I don’t think it will. It’s not made for 14 year olds.” HE correction: Wolf is not brutal for cineastes with any kind of social perspective and spirit in their souls — it’s a huge orgiastic turn-on that all but blows you away. And the film will totally whup ass with 14 year-olds, with all teenagers. It’s just not working with the scolds and the harumphs and the old farts — that’s it, that’s the whole contingent. Oh, and it’s not working for New York‘s David Edelstein. I’m not going to speculate about Edelstein being some kind of scold in terms of personal mores and temperament, and never having gone bonkers with coke or quaaludes in his 20s. He just didn’t find it worthy, is all. That’s allowed. To each his own.

Every film buff on the planet knows Hope Holiday, a 75 year-old actress whose career peaked 53 years ago. But it was a helluva peak. She played Mrs. Margie McDougal, a lonely lady with a squeaky, spunky voice whom Jack Lemmon‘s C.C. Baxter meets in an Upper West Side bar in Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (’60). She and Baxter speak about loneliness on Christmas Eve (“‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirrin’…nothin’…no action!”), and about her husband (“Looks like a little chihuahua”) doing time in a Cuban prison. They close the place down and retire to Baxter’s apartment. Baxter finds Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) passed out on his bed from an overdose of sleeping pills, and promptly kicks Margie out. “Some sexpot!,” she brays as Baxter slams the door.

(l.) Hope Holiday as Mrs. Margie McDougal, (r.) Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (’60).

Anyway, Mrs. McDougal has stormed back into the world of show business with a Sunday morning Facebook post that attacks The Wolf of Wall Street, which she’d seen the night before. “Three hours of torture,” she calls it. “Same disgusting crap over and over again. After the film they had a discussion which a lot of us did not stay for. The elevator doors opened and Leonardo [DiCaprio], Martin [Scorsese] and a few others got out. [And] then a screenwriter ran over to them and started screaming “shame on you…disgusting.”

Warner Home Video is releasing a Bluray of Mike Hodges‘ Get Carter (’71) in April. I’m assuming that the aspect-ratio information provided by Bluray.com is either a mistake or a sick joke because it says the film will be cropped at 1.85:1. All non-Scope British films of the ’70s were masked at either 1.66:1 or 1.75:1. (The Bluray of Criterion’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, released the same year as Carter, is masked at 1.66.) If you look at Get Carter now on Vudu.com it has a 1.75 aspect ratio. An Amazon listing for the Get Carter DVD says it was masked at 1.66. HE to WHV execs: Please respect tradition and go with 1.75 or 1.66. You’ll gain nothing but the loathing of the Movie Godz if you slice the image to 1.85. Vandalism, pure and simple.

The Wolf of Wall Street has me thinking about old-time druggy behavior, but not so much quaalude-driven as inspired by cannabis sativa. I’m thinking of an episode that happened while riding shotgun in a friend’s car with two others in back, and everyone thoroughly ripped. We were roaming around the wilds of Wilton, Connecticut, which is all shady (or dark) country roads and forest and shaded colonials and mock-farmhouses on two and three-acre lots. It was around 11 pm, and I can recall this like it happened last night. While engaged in a fairly mesmerizing conversation (are there any other kind when you’re fried?) the driver gradually forgot to keep his foot on the gas. The car went slower and slower until it came to a dead stop. And nobody noticed for a good five or ten minutes, of course, until some guy pulled up behind and flashed his lights and honked. If it had been a Wilton patrolman he would have have searched the car and our pockets, and somebody would have been popped for possession.

For nearly two years I’ve been arguing against the thesis that Oscar Isaac‘s hapless folk singer in Inside Llewyn Davis is more or less based on old-time Greenwich Village folk singer Dave Van Ronk. And yet pretty much every movie journalist on the planet has gone along with the party line, largely because director-writers Joel and Ethan Coen mentioned the connection a year or so ago and haven’t disputed it since, and also because of a folk album Van Ronk recorded called Inside Dave Van Ronk. But a much more likely real-life model — certainly a musician who bears in hindsight a much greater resemblance to Isaac’s talented but morose, going-nowhere troubadour — is the late folk singer Paul Clayton.

(l.) Oscar Isaac as the titular character in Inside Llewyn Davis; (r.) ’50s and ’60s folk singer Paul Clayton (1931 — 1967).

If there was ever a tweet that cried out for a YouTube complement, this is it. You can’t just boast it these days — you have to prove it. Attention spans are shorter than ever, people move on to other distractions, etc. Right now other parents are taking their musically-gifted kids to Inside Llewyn Davis, coaching them on the lyrics, rehearsing them.

This Charlie Rose Show interview with Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos is 11 days old…big deal. She was and still is my Critics Choice/BFCA pick for the 2103 Best Actress award. Will the insulated Academy farts even nominate her? Related issues: (a) How high-powered is her publicist? (b) How much schmoozing has Exarchopoulos done at industry parties? (c) How much money has Blue made? These are things that matter a great deal.

The Christmas downshift begins today and won’t end until January 2nd, or 13 days from now. I can feel it in the Manhattan air. The conversation is dying down a tad. I don’t mind and in fact always enjoy the time just before Christmas, particularly in the stores and during walks around the city in the late afternoon and especially at night. But the post-Christmas blahs, a seven-day period that will begin on Thursday, 12.26, and end on Thursday, 1.2.14, are hell. Okay, they’re not “hell” but I know it always feels wonderful when they’re over. Thank God I have the amusements and distractions of New York to fiddle with. Can you imagine sinking into the post-Christmas quicksand in, say, Wilkes-Barre or Birmingham or upper New Hampshire? Do you want to feel really zoned and blah-ed out and generally trapped in your life? See Nebraska. It’s like a cherry on top of an eternally depressing ice-cream sundae. Except during those passages when Mark Orton’s score takes over. Then everything is okay.

“The editing style is really, again, about simplicity and not gimmicks, you know? So it’s a little hard for us right now with the modern style of blender editing, where everything is two frames long. [Marty] keeps saying, ‘Where is the shot?’ Whatever happened to the great shot like Kubrick used to do? And you could watch it for six minutes and never get bored because it was so beautifully framed. It had such beautiful music. And what was going on inside was so great. Now it’s just, the image doesn’t mean anything. And they seem to be getting so short now that I wonder if they’re going to come to the end of the road. I don’t think they can make each cut any shorter! I wonder if there will be a big backlash and everything will go back to being slow again.” — Wolf of Wall Street editor Thelma Schoonmaker speaking to Hitfix‘s Kris Tapley in a 12.20 interview piece.

I always have a hard time deciding which films are exceptionally well cut. If I like a film I like the editing — it doesn’t go much deeper than that. First-rate editing — smart, fleeting, sleight of handish — is invisible, for the most part. If you don’t notice it it’s probably good. What I notice is economy and timing and, at times, the musicality. Good editing and good music share certain qualities. I sometimes notice how long a shot is held, the precise millisecond when a shot cuts to another. I also notice editing with uneven rhythms and jarring tempos, and I definitely notice cutting that seems overly frenzied and chaotic. I know that the editing in Inside Llewyn Davis seems extra-attuned. I love Thelma’s cutting of The Wolf of Wall Street, needless to say. 12 Years A Slave, for sure. Her is perfectly cut.

Are there any films that have stood out as especially well-edited for the HE community?