“My fondest dream is that it will be the date movie that breaks up couples nationwide. Maybe people will walk out of there and think, ‘Maybe not…I don’t know if I know you well enough.’ The movie is about how well you can possibly know one another. We’re so steeped in pop culture and so steeped in different roles. How can you possibly combine with another person and have that truth exist in a relationship. The [story] definitely plays off of that idea.” — Gone Girl author & screenplay adapter Gillian Flynn, speaking about David Fincher‘s upcoming film in a 7.21 interview by Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Brian Brooks.

Apart from the somewhat smaller, Adam Westy bat-ears (check out the size of George Clooney’s bat-ears after the jump), the most significant feature of Ben Affleck‘s Batman are the worry furrows. Or…whatever, stress lines. When’s the last time a facsimile of a facial feature normally caused by middle-aged, weight-of-the-world anxiety was incorporated into a superhero mask? Also: If I’m not mistaken all the Batmans have been clean-shaven up until now. (Variety‘s Marc Graser reports that the Batfleck image is “part of a 75th anniversary montage of Batman images created for Comic-Con…the photo can be seen at D.C.’s booth on the show floor of the San Diego Convention Center.”)

In English-speaking territories Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player (’62) has always been called Shoot The Piano Player. No longer! At least as far as the folks at England’s Artificial Eye are concerned. They have a Bluray version of Truffaut’s classic coming out on 7.28, and it’s called…

From my 1.17.14 review: “Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.14) is a raging two-hander about a gifted drummer named Andrew (Miles Teller). Enrolled at an elite Manhattan music school and determined to be not just proficient or admired but Buddy Rich-great, Andrew is a Bunsen burner. We can see from the get-go he’s going to be increasingly possessed and manic and single-minded about the skins. (All great musicians are like this to varying degrees.) On top of which he really doesn’t want to be like his kindly, failed-writer dad (Paul Reiser), and he can’t find peace with a pretty girl (Melissa Benoist) because she isn’t as consumed as he is — too uncertain and unexceptional.

A journalist friend just asked me for some thoughts about the ongoing popularity of religious, Bible-based faith movies. So I sent him six or seven graphs, of which he might use a line or two. Here’s the whole outpouring in one great gush:

Christian movies are principally made for people in the conservative hinterland regions who do not, shall we say, have a circumspect view of the scriptures. They believe in literal interpretations of the Bible, start to finish and top to bottom. Christian movies are therefore not about realism — they’re fantasy projections of what people would like the world to be governed or ordered by. Or at least projections of what they think will happen when they die. Or what happened to a certain Judean rabbi when he died at age 33.

There are a lot of simpletons out there who believe, for instance, that the Noah’s Ark saga actually happened, chapter and verse. And who believe that, like in Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth was more or less a WASP, and that he resembled a handsome, European-descended quarterback with broad shoulders and freshly shampooed honey-brown hair.

The operative terms are fantasy or fanciful visions, which is what a belief in a non-provable, non-tangible vision or philosophy boils down to. Christianity is a form of optimistic denial, and that’s what these movies offer — a reflection or a dramatic fortification of that fantasy. Which a lot of people want to swim in.

I haven’t seen Alan Pakula‘s Klute (’71) since…well, I might have watched it on laser disc in the ’90s or at a repertory cinema in the early ’80s…maybe. But I haven’t seen it on a big screen in eons. I might just catch it tomorrow night at the Aero. Slow burn whodunit + ’70s Manhattan noir + richly-drawn characters + wide-open emotional exposure + simmering sexuality. The following tribute video was put together by the San Francisco-based La Belle Aurore Films. They claim on their page that “cinema is our mistress.” Then why don’t they un-distort the images in this montage, which are obviously horizontally squeezed?

Alan Pakula (speaking to friend in 1970): “You know, I’ve been sensing this vibe lately, this odd paranoid vibe, especially in New York and other towns. Things aren’t working out, people are perturbed, they hate the war, they hate Nixon and they feel alienated by straight society.”

Friend: “Yeah?”

Alan Pakula: “And I’m thinking I’d like to make a film about this. Or better yet, maybe three.”

Early this morning Scott Feinberg posted a Hollywood Reporter analysis piece about the Toronto-vs.-Telluride, bruised-ego, us-or-them war, which was initiated by TIFF’s Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling. The conflict began with their Al Capone-style policy, announced last January, that said (a) if producers or distributors want a prestigious slot during the Toronto Film Festival’s first four days, they can’t sneak their films in Telluride first…like it or lump it, and (b) if they do travel to Telluride first they’ll be punished by having to wait until the fifth day of TIFF (i.e., Monday, 9.8) to show their films. That or they’ll be classified as a “Canadian premiere,” which might be another kind of demotion…I think.

Feinberg is reporting that Toronto’s tough new rule has to some extent backfired, and that a lot of producers and distributors are pissed off. “Many — including even Canadian filmmakers — are calling Toronto’s bluff by heading to Telluride first and either accepting a later Toronto screening date or skipping Toronto altogether,” his story states.

“Regardless of where their films will be playing, the distributors with whom I’ve spoken agree on one thing: they are angry at Toronto for forcing a choice in the first place.

Apart from the already-announced, much-anticipated world premiere of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman, the just-unveiled films set to play the 71st Venice Film Festival strike me as interesting and well-chosen as far as they go, but where are the sexy, award-season attractions? Or at least a surprise or two that no one saw coming? It’s fine for festival director Alberto Barbera to have gone with an assortment of mostly quirky, indie-level titles, but you need a little pop-pop-fizz-fizz with your kale salad and steamed carrots or the troops will get bored. If I was press-accredited with my ticket to Venice all paid for, right now I’d be saying “that’s it? Why didn’t I choose Telluride instead?”

Competition titles include David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn (one of two Al Pacino flicks screening, the other being Barry Levinson’s The Humbling), Andrew Nicoll‘s Good Kill (I’m sorry but I wrote Nicoll off a long time ago), Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes and Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini.

Non-competing titles include the afore-mentioned Humbling (basically about Pacino, an aging actor, having an affair with a much-younger lesbian, played by the always-cool Greta Gerwig); Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way‘ Joe Dante’s Burying the Ex; a partial sampling of Olive Kitteridge, an HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand; Michael Almereyda‘s Cymbeline; Josh and Ben Safdie’s Heaven Knows What; Ami Canaan Mann‘s Your Right Mind; Benoit Jacquot’s Three Hearts; Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts…I’m almost nodding out as I type this.

The Venice jurors will include Alexandre Desplat, Joan Chen, Tim Roth…I’m getting bored again.

Who cares what someone like myself thinks about Sam Taylor Wood‘s adaptation of E.L. James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13.15)? Talk about superfluous. That said, the trailer conveys a tone of restraint…succinct, underplayed, taking its time. Seamus McGarvey‘s cinematography alone lends a veneer of class. From a purely hot-or-not perspective the good-looking Jamie Dorman has it together (i.e., sufficiently reserved and cool, nice washboards abs) but Dakota Johnson looks…can I be honest?…a bit pale and mousey. She acts mousey. She seems as if she’d be a pushover for the mailman so submitting to the b & d demands of Christian Grey doesn’t seem to deliver a lot of undercurrent. It’s too late now but Johnson’s hair should have been a bit lighter, the way it was in The Social Network.

The world is divided into three kinds of people — those who prefer to spell it “gray,” those who prefer to spell it “grey” and those who can never remember which spelling is correct and feel a bit irked every time they’re about to use it.