Robert Altman‘s California Split was screened earlier this month at Telluride as part of Kim Morgan and Guy Maddin‘s special programming effort. I would have loved to have kicked back and just settled into the loose-shoe groove of this film, but I had to catch the hotties. Split is “one of those movies so special it’s hard to even write about,” Morgan wrote on 8.31. “It’s just so alive and breathing and real and charming and sad you can practically smell it. It’s a movie I turn to time and time again because, even if I know it’s not a healthy world, I want to be in that world again. I want to experience its off-kilter cool, its bummer vibes. I want to, once again, fall in love with its scruffy-cool, wisecracking, charismatic leads.”

Do you believe that an unarmed older guy, no matter how strong or commando-trained, can take out four or five bad guys with his hands, a knife, a corkscrew and another guy’s gun in less than 30 seconds? I think it’s showoffy. No serious ex-commando would go into a roomful of villains un-armed. Whether you believe it or not, this is the best violent scene in Antoine Fuqua‘s The Equalizer (Columbia, 9.26). It only gets crazier and more ludicrous after this. Fuqua violates HE’s ten-shot rule, by the way. By the end of the film (and the final bullshit finale inside an unlighted Home Depot-type store) a couple of thousand rounds have been fired, minimum. I liked the first half-hour and then I began zoning out.

I was mostly miserable when I was 11 and 12 years old. I was miserable before that (I think I started to feel really badly about life’s possibilities when I seven or eight) but the onset of puberty seemed to make things worse in so many ways. My only encounters with happiness, however brief, came from hanging with certain friends and catching new films at my local theatre (the Westfield Rialto) and on WOR’s Million Dollar Movie or the CBS Late Show when I visited my grandmother, who would always let me stay up as late as I wanted.

My childhood was a gulag experience. So were my teens. Things started to get a little better when I began as a film journalist but my life didn’t really pick up until ’80 or thereabouts. And even then it was constant struggle, struggle, toil and trouble.

My home town of Westfield, New Jersey, was a pleasant enough place, but the social aggression and general bullshit in junior high school meant there was always a taunt and a challenge and some kind of shit going on being your back. A fairly rancid atmosphere. Everything was awkward or tortured or tedious.

So I got into the habit when I hit 13 or 14 of taking the bus into Manhattan (a secret mission as my parents wouldn’t let me go alone) and just roaming around Times Square and looking at the various marquees and just soaking it all in. It was a mild little weekend adventure. I’d take the bus in the late morning, visit Mecca for three or four hours and get back for dinner by 5 or 6 pm. I paid for these trips with my modest weekly allowance plus a little extra lawn-mowing money.

I used to love the smell of bus exhaust inside those Port Authority parking areas. To me those fumes were the city itself — they smelled like oxygen.

Last night I made the mistake of watching a Region 2 Bluray of Phil Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78). People turning into emotionless seed-pod versions of themselves in Don Siegel‘s 1956 original was a perfect metaphor for 1950s conformity, but the idea doesn’t fit into the liberal culture of late ’70s San Francisco. There was social pressure to submit to the human potential movement, of course, but that was all about open emotionality and uninhibited sexuality and not stiff, robotic behavior. So many scenes are poorly (i.e., woodenly) acted. Kaufman’s idea of naturalism is for people to talk at each other; no one seems to listen to what anyone else is saying. And all the effort put into icky-gooey pod makeup and prosthetic models and special FX realism is for naught — it’s boring. The film generates a creepy noirish feeling in the third act, aided by Michael Chapman‘s shadowy photography, but the only aspect that got my full attention is the fact that Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy has a significant (if dialogue-free) cameo as a pod person. (Siegel and original Body Snatchers star Kevin McCarthy also appear briefly.) I was also reminded that San Francisco culture was one hell of a traumatic thing in late ’78 — the mass suicide of the followers of San Francisco-based Jim Jones in Guyana on 11.18.78, the murder of San Francisco’s openly gay supervisor Harvey Milk on 11.27.78, and the opening of Kaufman’s film on 12.20.78.

Youngish Tom Luddy in one of many scenes in which he appears in Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Altmans are a family of Jewish neurotic grown-ups who come home for their father’s funeral in Shawn Levy‘s This Is Where I Leave You (Warner Bros., 9.19). Mom is played by well-tended shiksa Jane Fonda, and the four kids are Judd (Jason Bateman), Wendy (Tina Fey), Paul (Corey Stoll) and Phillip (Adam Driver). Driver obviously resembles no one in the family, and I mean not even a tiny bit. Not with his long John Carradine face and those black-weasel eyes and that huge honker and that tall, lanky, broad-shouldered bod. He doesn’t even look like a cousin. Driver’s lineage is pretty much all English, but he looks part Russian, part Mongolian, part ape and part Jewish Navajo. I didn’t much like the film but every time Driver was on-screen I was saying to myself, “Why was he cast? He’s obviously an alien. If Levy and his casting director decided to go wildly inappropriate, why not cast Tracy Morgan?” The obvious solution would have been to make Driver an adopted son. Two or three lines of dialogue and the problem would be solved. Brilliant, guys.

In the view of Empire‘s Dan Jolin, Scott Frank‘s A Walk Among The Tombstones (Universal, 9.19) is “in many ways the anti-Taken. Matt Scudder, an ex-cop played by a grizzled Liam Neeson, “doesn’t pack heat. Although he throws a mean punch, violence is something he avoids if possible, preferring to talk his way out of tricky situations. His particular set of skills involves wheedling information out of people (without resorting to torture), pounding pavements and having “a strong bladder”. He’s an old-school shamus, suspicious of cellphones and computers. Frank has unapologetically served up something talky, complex, grown-up.

L.A. Times critic Betsy Sharkey believes that most of the offerings from the 2014 festivals (Cannes, Telluride and Toronto) have been underwhelming so far, and that a kind of “void” is in the air — a sense of “movie malaise.” She’s not the only one. I’ve heard “this has been a weak year so far” from two distribution executives over the past couple of weeks, and where there’s smoke there’s usually fire. “There was no Gravity to lift us up” at the end of Toronto, Sharkey writes. “No 12 Years a Slave to leave us weeping. No American Beauty. No Slumdog Millionaire. No Silver Linings Playbook. No handful of movies that you just know will take hold, capture the imagination of filmgoers, if not the awards. If ever there has been a year looking for a dark horse, 2014 is it.”

I don’t know what Sharkey has seen or not seen, but so far this year I’ve been levitated and gobsmacked by Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman (i.e., “the new 8 1/2“), Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan, Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales, Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything, Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Steven Knight‘s Locke, Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins, Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash and Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies. They all had their big debuts at Sundance, Cannes, Telluride or Toronto.

It’s Monday morning and everyone needs to calm down about The Imitation Game having won the Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Award. It’s certainly a classy, highly efficient Richard Attenborough film but there is some evidence to suggest that the Toronto win was pushed through by Benedict Cumberbatch’s hopped-up fan base. Mr. Lizard Face (Cumberbatch has said he looks like “something between an otter and something people find vaguely attractive”) is very hot with women in their 20s and 30s right now, in large part due to the BBC/PBS Sherlock series. On 9.10 Vanity Fair‘s Joanna Robinson reported that during a post-Imitation Game discussion a female audience member asked Cumberbatch if she could “feast on [your] yumminess.” Cumberbatch’s response: “I did not go into this q & a about a gay icon who killed himself at 41 thinking I’d have to answer questions from someone who wants to taste my deliciousness.” There’s no proof that this yummy deliciousness is what led a majority of female and gay TIFF fans to put Imitation Game at the top of the list, but you can’t say that alleged Cumberbatch lust didn’t have at least something to do with snagging the Big Vote.