For the last five years Melena Ryzik has been writing the N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” column, having inherited it from David Carr. But now Ryzik is bailing and handing the torch to Cara Buckley…congrats! It’s all a hustle for Oscar ad dollars anyway, but I’ve always found it irksome the way Carpetbagger columnists always jump into the award season in early December and go “tah-dah!…here we are!…let the games begin!” I wrote the following in response to Melena’s 12.4.13 piece called “Eyes On The Prize”: “Hardcore awards-tracking watchers and handicappers like myself and Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg have been riding the rails for over seven months now (i.e., since the 2013 Cannes Film Festival) and humping it extra-hard since Telluride, Venice and Toronto (or for the last 13 weeks), and then Melena comes breezing into the room with her video crew and writes, ‘The Oscars are not until March but the jockeying for position has already begun.’ Early December is ‘already’?”

New N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley…tah-dah!

While watching The Leftovers last night I was thinking it was a shame that Pope Francis, the first truly compassionate, Franciscan-like good guy Pope in many a decade, had to be raptured along with Gary Busey, Jennifer Lopez and Vladmir Putin. I nonetheless decided that Francis Bacon‘s “Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X,” painted 61 years ago, was no longer just a perfect image in its own right. It was also, suddenly, a perfect capturing of a Pope being “taken.” I’ll probably never be able to look at this painting again without thinking of The Leftovers. Is that a good thing? You tell me.

What is Joe Popcorn supposed to do with this downer attitude and grim-thug vibe? Channing Tatum looks like an ape here, and his bee-stung nose makes him look like Shrek, for God’s sake. The critical quotes from Kenneth Turan and Stephanie Zacharek praise his performance, but the guy he’s playing (real-life former wrestling champ Mark Schultz) is mainly just clenched and sullen. Plus he doesn’t have much of a character arc. I’m guessing this a contractual gimme from Sony Classics to Tatum’s managers. The acting awards and nominations are all going to Steve Carell, guys. You know this, of course, but I’m just saying.

This is what I was talking about earlier in my review of The Leftovers. A bitter or drunken authority figure needs to deliver a hard-nosed assessment of the big cataclysmic event that drives the story of the film around…oh, the 30-minute mark. Leftovers co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta probably decided they’re too cool and cutting-edge to follow in Stanley Kramer‘s footsteps, and that’s fine. But one result of this mindset is that some people aren’t feeling the love for this pain-in-the-ass miniseries as we speak.

“Bill Hader‘s angry, vulnerable, hurting-guy performance in The Skeleton Twins is a career-changer. He’s no longer the SNL smartass who delivers zingy movie performances on the side. He’s now a real-deal actor who can bore into a character as deeply as any other gifted performer.” — from 1.20.14 Sundance post.

Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta‘s The Leftovers, which I watched last night on HBO, is about a community of sad, numbed-out souls in a small New York State town experiencing something between a stasis of the spirit and a combination slow-motion freakout and behavioral meltdown over the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population, or roughly 140,000,000 people. I didn’t like it that much. The show, I mean. Or the premise, for that matter. I felt intrigued from time to time, but mostly I felt irritated and underfuckingwhelmed.

It’s not so much that relatively little is “explained” or even discussed in any kind of half-comprehensive way, although it’s a standard technique for a drama about a cataclysmic event (The Day The Earth Caught Fire, On The Beach, The Rapture, Godzilla) to have an authority figure arrive around the 30-minute mark and deliver a bitter or drunken assessment of the whys and wherefores. But all we’re given along these lines is a CNN glimpse of a Congressional hearing with one guy claiming that “God sat this one out” — obviously a questionable assertion.

All we’re told is that a lot of characters are feeling rather sullen or nihilistic about being left behind. A lot of people are smoking and drinking and unshaven and saying “fuck it” in various ways. Packs of feral dogs running around and being shot by gun nuts. And a lot of Godhead types and visionary eccentrics are enjoying a newfound power.

I was just reading a ten-year-old review of Sam Raimi‘s Spider-Man 2 this morning, and in so doing I asked myself, “Is there anyone in the world right now who would rent or stream this film now, ten years after? What kind of soul cancer would you have to have to say to yourself, ‘Hmmm, what should I watch tonight? Something I haven’t seen in a while. I know — Spider-Man 2!'”

Does it bother anyone in 2014 that within the CG-driven, comic-book-adaptation realm, almost nothing has changed since ’04? If anything the things that were underwhelming or dispiriting or soul-suffocating about Spider-Man 2 have metastasized. One reason is that some of the kids who were 16 or 17 when Spider-Man 2 came out have grown up to be zombie development guys, agents, producers and studio execs.

If the tag line for the Deliver Us From Evil poster used “New York Police Department” instead of “NYPD,” the copy would read “Inspired By The Actual Accounts Of A New York Police Department Sergeant.” So why does this version say “…An NYPD Sergeant”? Am I missing something? Writing and grammar are what I do for a living, and this isn’t right. On top of which I don’t particularly want to see or know about Scott Derrickson and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s horror film, which opens on 7.2.

“If you’ve ever done any independent filmmaking, you might have heard a producer say: ‘Good, on time, on budget: pick two.'” — from Da7e’s 6.27 Latino Review piece called Star Wars: December 2015 or Bust.” The origins are…I don’t know what they are but there’s a Wikipedia topic called the Project Management Triangle. I could spend hours going through all these links.

John Carney‘s harmless, almost entirely pleasant Begin Again (Weinstein Co.) opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles. On 3.28.14 I called it an “agreeably dreamy, up-spirited Manhattan street musical…nowhere near as good or authentic feeling as Carney’s Once but not half bad, and some of the music is genuinely on-target and enlivening.” I also said the following about costar Adam Levine, who plays Keira Knightley‘s famous musician boyfriend: “Not good-looking enough, for one thing. I also hated Levine’s dress sense and his fake serenity and slightly detectable air of entitlement. (He’s the lead vocalist for Maroon 5 and a rich entrepeneur who’s marketed his own fragrance and menswear collection.) I also felt a tiny bit alienated from Knightley for being with Levine in the first place. How come I could see through this asshole right away and she couldn’t? I began to feel repelled by images of Knightley (or anyone for that matter) having sex with Levine. I honestly wanted to see him get hit by a bus or die in a plane crash, or at the very least get beaten up in a fight. Levine is rat poison.” Similar or opposing reactions?

What’s the nicest way to tell an employee of an apparel store that you’d rather just browse than be helped (i.e., hustled)? I used to just smile and say “I’m good” but lately I’ve been half-heartedly raising my hand in a friendly kind of “stop” or “no offense but not now” gesture. About an hour ago I was a teeny bit snippy with a girl in a shop on Robertson. She said the usual “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” and I said “Well, yeah, but it’s kinda between me and me for the time being…no offense.” A few weeks ago I was tired or something but I was also a bit of an asshole when this question was asked. “Actually, I don’t really know what I want,” I said with a vague smile. “I guess I’m kinda hoping that a salesperson will come along and make suggestions and nudge me into buying this or that. I mean, I can’t seem to focus on my own and I have a little coin to throw around so…uhm, could you help me decide?” I said this with enough sincerity that the woman wasn’t sure how to respond. My pet peeve is the hurt farewell. After doing my best to ignore the sales staff I’ll head out the front door, and just before I’m out of earshot one of the sales girls will chirp out “Bye!” in a way that means “well, you certainly weren’t very communicative and you definitely didn’t buy anything and that kind of hurts our feelings, but we can roll with that!” When they try this I always turn around and look at them in a way that says “you’ll survive.”

There was a fair amount of talk a couple of years ago about Andy Serkis deserving a Best Actor (or Best Supporting Actor) nomination for his performance as Ceasar in Rupert Wyatt‘s Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Which of course SAG voters ignored because they feel threatened by the idea of digitally-assisted performances. Which of course is delusional. Hollywood actors have been cool with old-fashioned theatrical makeup for decades but not digital makeup, which is all that WETA is providing here. If you ask me Serkis’s follow-up performance in Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is even more impressive than his work in Rise because it’s a bit sadder with a more deft and gentler touch — a subtle, carefully measured portrayal of a leader who has the weight and the fate of the ape world on his shoulders. It once again seems an entirely reasonable if not necessary thing to state that Serkis again deserves a Best Actor nomination. SAG blue-hairs will probably never understand that Serkis alone is doing the performing here. 80-plus years ago AMPAS members managed to accept the fact that Frederic March and not the makeup guy was the performer in 1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which led them to give him a Best Actor Oscar (along with The Champ‘s Wallace Beery). Try it again — Serkis’s performance is not about motion capture or performance capture. The WETA guys are simply providing a kind of augmentation that’s no different than a makeup or wardrobe person applying a fake beard or putty nose or offering the right kind of apparel.