For whatever sloppy or forgetful reason I’d forgotten until today to put James Marsh‘s Theory of Everything (Focus Features, 11.7) under the “Presumed High Pedigree” section of HE’s Oscar Balloon. (I should change the title to “Likeliest Best Picture Contenders” because that’s what it really means.) It could be this year’s A Beautiful Mind — a brilliant young fellow with a bright future is brought down by tragic illness, but he eventually rebounds with his intellect undmimmed and in fact all the stronger. Eddie Redmayne as super-genius physicist Stephen Hawking, and Felicity Jones as his wife Jane. (The other Oscar-bait movie about an eccentric-nerd brainiac is the Weinstein Co.’s Imitation Game, about the WW II-era cryptogrqpher Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who incidentally played Hawking in a 2004 British TV film.)

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is wondering if Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up (Universal, 8.1), the James Brown biopic starring Chadwick Boseman, will get slapped around for being a white person’s take on a black man’s saga. Or that the gritty realism of Brown’s story will somehow be soft-pedaled or watered down or tidied up. A little while ago we talked it over. I read a month-old riff by HE reader Anna Zed: “Brown’s bombastic personality and unmistakeable personal style, not to mention his checkered personal life, really don’t seem like they would lend themselves to this kind of glossy wash . [Brown] was a very dark-skinned black man, intensely muscular and frenetic, thick necked and small (not matinee idol or even lead-singer material for the period that he emerged from) who just burst past all these hindrances by sheer force of will, fantastic charisma and unstoppable originality as a musical stylist. Boseman is lithe and handsome but sort of winsome and sweet and nonthreatening, and I see none of Brown in him.” Again, our brief exploration of this and other matters.

Sasha and I also briefly discussed Life Itself, the Roger Ebert doc, as well as the just-out trailer for David Fincher‘s Gone Girl.

Four impressions off the top of my head. One, this is going to be Zodiac-level good but minus the thematic or evidential uncertainty that comes with any “cold case.” Two, Rosamund Pike appears to be playing a very chilly character. Three, Ben Affleck is acting well outside his comfort zone here and that’s the way we like it. Four, could Gone Girl contain the first tolerable performance from Tyler Perry?

Kevin Smith recently spoke in Switzerland about having visited the set of J.J. Abrams‘ Star Wars, Episode VII. He couldn’t say much due to having signed a non-disclosure agreement, but he said this much: “So we go to the set, and they’re actually shooting — and this is what I can’t tell you what they were shooting — but what I saw I absolutely loved. It was tactile. It wasn’t a series of fucking green and blue screens in which later on digital characters would be added. It was there. It was happening. I saw uniforms. I saw artillery that I haven’t seen since I was a kid. I saw them shooting an actual sequence in a set that is real — I walked across the set; there were explosions — and it looked like a shot right out of a fucking Star Wars movie.

Abrams is “building a tacticle world, a world you can touch. And he’s replicating it with all the love of somebody that has the world’s greatest collection of Star Wars figures. It’s like Field of Dreams, and if J.J. builds it, we’re all going to come hard because it’s amazing. It looks fantastic. So anyone out there wondering if he’s going to pull it off? He’s pulling it off. He showed me cut scenes. He showed me sequences, images, pictures. I cried, and I hugged that guy. And I’m sure as I was crying and hugging on him that he was thinking ‘time is money’ because they’re making a movie. But he got it. He was very flattered. And I was like, ‘Honestly dude, you’re doing it. You’re making my childhood again. You’re doing our Star Wars.’ What I saw blew me away.”

Last night I spoke to a friend who knows a woman who recently saw Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice (Warner Bros., 12.12). Her initial nutshell reaction was that she “didn’t get it” because…well, how could I know? But one of the apparent blockages was that it doesn’t adhere to a precise narrative through-line that led anywhere in particular (i.e., no third-act payoff). But then she started to understand it a bit more when she began to think about it the next day. A film that’s more about the journey than the destination. I told this guy that three months ago an industry friend who’d seen Vice had described it in a similar way, calling it “brilliant and mesmerizing in an atmospheric, non-linear sort of way” as well as “Lebowski-esque.”

As reported on 7.2, I’ve heard “convincing chatter” that Vice will debut at the New York Film Festival.

Here‘s an interesting excerpt from Paul Seydor, Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman‘s commentary on the Twilight Time Bluray of The Train. They’re basically saying that 21st Century moviegoers are completely accepting of action feats that no one outside of cyborgs would be able to do in any realm governed by the laws of physics. Even people in the best of shape (i.e., X-treme sports champs) get tired and bruised and can only handle so much. They’re capable of this and that but they’re made of flesh, blood and bone. And yet vulnerability is something you rarely see in films these days. That, again, is due to the ComicCon influence, and that is why someday you will see certain producers and directors facing charges in the cinematic equivalent of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. I can’t wait to prosecute. Here, again, is the mp3.

The recent European Union ruling that granted citizens the “right to be forgotten” from Google’s search engine surprised me when it was announced three or four days ago. I thought the power of the web assured that everything that was ever recorded would be eternally available to everyone — nothing redacted, no edits or omissions, open access forever and ever. And then suddenly the European Union says no — people have a right to bury certain skeletons and keep them buried, and that the solace which may or may not result from a certain sliver of their personal history being forgotten is to be respected. Presumably this new consideration doesn’t apply to sexual predators or war criminals on the lam, but otherwise there’s something compassionate about declaring that people are entitled to be left alone about past mistakes and embarassments. We all suppress unpleasant memories but who doesn’t have an episode or two they’d like to erase from the public record?

Did any HE regulars even see Tammy this weekend? It was so universally dismissed by discerning types as well as regular CinemaScore Joes that I would be surprised…what do I know? The word “dead” doesn’t mean financial ruin. It means that the movie doesn’t matter. No importance to anyone, not in the conversation, evaporated, etc. Melissa McCarthy has to move beyond the coarse schtick or she’ll be in trouble two or three films down the road. Tammy cost $20 million to make and will earn just shy of $33 million by this evening. But only $21 million by the strict Friday-to-Sunday standard. Compare this to the $34 and $39 million earned by Identity Thief The Heat on their respective opening weekends.

The Twilight Time Bluray of John Frankenheimer‘s The Train is pretty wonderful, but I was expecting that. There must at least 737 separate shades of gray and silver in this thing, not to mention the inky, to-die-for blacks. I’ve listened to Frankenheimer’s audio commentary (originally recorded for the old MGM/UA laser disc) a couple of times now. The Bluray offers fresh audio commentary from Paul Seydor, Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman. At one point Seydor or Redman (couldn’t tell which) quotes from Kate Buford‘s “Burt Lancaster: An American Life“, in which she noted that “the seducer Elmer Gantry and the control freak J.J. Hunsecker were closest to who Lancaster really was while the Birdman of Alcatraz character was the man Burt wanted to be.” As for the clip below, the best reaction shots happen when a character hasn’t time to react.

If it’s a choice between the occasionally caustic or callous Joan Rivers and CNN’s Fredericka Whitfield, I’m definitely with Rivers. At least Rivers is honest while Whitfield is my idea of a smiling corporate hatchet woman, pretending to be all alpha and perky and lah-dee-dah. Consider that crocodile smile and that half-animal, half-bird sound she makes when Rivers accuses her of being a hypocrite….”Nahhoo!” Whitfield might be the person she’s pretending to be or she might be something else, but she’s definitely putting on an act. In Rivers’ mind wearing leather shoes, eating hot dogs and wearing a fur coat are all equal sins in the eyes of PETA, and besides her fur coat is 15 years old so it’s okay. In July? It’s not the age of the coat but the metaphor. Wearing a fur coat is like wearing a necklace made of dried ears.

Way back on July 3rd (three days ago!) Movieweb.com‘s B. Alan Orange, which sounds to me like a fake name, passed along a possibly valid but nonetheless curious (i.e., possibly INSANE) allegation from “an anonymous source deep within the Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice production.” The tipster claimed that an alleged shooting script (which contained “four new villains alongside Lex Luthor”) which had recently surfaced on Badass Digest is (a) fake — an alleged attempt to hoodwink the fanboy community or otherwise throw them off the scent of the real, still-under-wraps Batman vs. Superman script, and (b) was written by none other than Kevin Smith.

There are two…actually three things wrong with the alleged tipster’s story. One, the idea of a studio actually investing time and serious money to produce a red-herring “foiler” script is beyond ridiculous…a bunch of high-ranking, studio-connected nerds in black lace-ups who’ve crawled so deeply into the ass of their own mythology that they’re actually playing tradecraft fake-out games with lower-ranking nerds who then pass along the bullshit to even lower-ranking nerds?…WHAT? Two, I can’t imagine that Smith would accept a fee to write a fake anything (remember the humiliation that George C. Scott‘s General Patton felt when Allied command was using him to try and trick Germany into thinking that D-Day invasion would happen at Calais?) as this violates the Sacred Artist’s Code — i.e., lie to no one. And Three (and most tellingly), the fact that the Movieweb.com tipster refers to Warner Bros. marketing honcho Sue Kroll as “Susanne Knoll” obviously casts doubt upon the whole story.

I sat down a few days ago with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves at the Four Seasons. Here‘s the discussion. Reeves has a kind of joyous intensity about him — you can hear that pretty plainly. He expounds about some of the ideas and elements that went into Dawn and that’s fine, but there’s a Reeves metaphor that tells you more about the film, in a sense, than what he might say about it. During the exhaustive editing of Dawn, Reeves said, he decided to become a dapper (dare I say fastidious?) dresser, specifically a wearer of bow ties. It’s understood that Reeves, also the director of Let Me In and Cloverfield, is quite admired by the ComicCon crowd and guys like Harry Knowles. But the bow tie and the black polka-dot handkerchief in his breast pocket [after the jump] should tell you Reeves is not really “of” that realm and that crowd. And so the many ingredients, noticable and perhaps not-so-noticable, that Reeves has put into Dawn in order to make it special and distinctive are not “ComicCon-ish” (whatever you might imagine that term to mean) or particularly aimed at trying to please those enthusiastic but nonetheless low-rent geeks who congregate in San Diego every July. Reeves, in short, is up to his own game and singing his own tune. That’s all I’m saying, really.