Day: April 26, 2014

N.Y. Times columnist David Carr has done more than just write about Jon Favreau, the director, producer, writer and star of Chef (Open Road, 5.9). He’s also eaten a Favreau-prepared meal. Chef is currently enjoying a 91% Rotten Tomatoes rating but it’s opening in less than two weeks and I’ve received no screening invites. (I couldn’t attend the 4.22 Tribeca Film Festival showing.) I’m on a plane to NYC next Thursday night and then I have a week at my Brooklyn rental before leaving for France. Friend to HE: “Dude, Open Road has had a TON of L.A. Chef screenings. I saw it here a month ago. I don’t think you are on their press list if you have missed it. Betting there’s probably another next week, Plus it’s really a fun movie. Best food shots ever!”

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I generally steer clear of docs that appear to be blowjob profiles of showbiz types, but Mike Myers‘ Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon seems amiable enough, and perhaps a bit more than what I’m expecting. (I should have tried harder to catch it at last September’s Toronto Film Festival.) The only grating part arrives at the end. The trailer has sold us on the idea that Gordon is this likable, spiritual, trustworthy heavy-cat manager, and then a prolonged loop of Gordon’s heckle-and-jeckle laughter kills the mood.

2014 is all but one-third over, and by my yardstick there have been ten commercially-released films thus far that have definitely cut the mustard (Locke, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ida, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Noah, Omar, Only Lovers Left Alive, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, Tim’s Vermeer, Fading Gigolo). To these you need to add nine film-festival stand-outs — Yann Demange‘s ’71 (which I saw in Berlin) along with eight from the Sundance Film Festival for a grand total of 19 — par for the course for any January-to-April season.

The Sundance picks, once again, are Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash, (2) Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins, (3) Steve James‘ Life Itself, (4) Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, (5) Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies, (6) James D. Cooper‘s Lambert & Stamp, (7) Charlie McDowell‘s The One I Love and (8) Chapman and Maclain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball.

What other films should I have included? And don’t mention The LEGO Movie. I don’t want to to know about that film, ever. However rich and spiritual it may be, its success has lowered the bar in the Hollywood mainstream industry and made it cool for any puerile kid-distraction concept to be made into a film. It might be cool on its own terms but it has polluted the waters. In my mind it’s a chemical plant dumping toxic substances into the Hudson.

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Now that Steven Knight and Tom Hardy‘s Locke has opened in four NY/LA theatres (Lincoln Square and Angelika in Manhattan, Arclight and Landmark in Los Angeles), there are HE regulars to be heard from. How did the room feel? How was the lobby after-chatter? Is Hardy the year’s first significant Best Actor contender?

In the middle of shooting one of his all-time worst films ever, Otto Preminger gambled that a little provocative symbolism might at least get people talking. It did. How different is this clip from, say, the train going into the tunnel shot at the very end of North by Northwest? Not very. The same question comes to mind whenever you watch a striking, decades-old clip. Does this kind of thing happen anymore in mainstream cinema? Or has straight-dealing erotic symbolism (as opposed to its use in a comedic or satiric vein) been pretty much tossed out?