Year: 2014

I’m sorry but I don’t see the downside in posting Papermag‘s ass photos of Kim Kardashian if I throw in a nice Russell Brand rant. That way I get the numbers without looking like a click whore. It makes me seem more principled. In and of itself I’ve always found KK’s bum disproportionately large and not all that inviting. A bit freakish. Ample-ness is fine but there are limits, I feel, to “more than a handful.” Brand, the star of Ondi Timoner‘s Sundance 2015 documentary Brand ( which was partly shot by HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko), has this.

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I have to fly up to the Napa Valley Film Festival today. Notice the use of “I have to fly” as opposed to “I’m flying,” which implies duress. Why am I going? One, because I enjoy spending money on Burbank-to-Oakland air fare, cat care fees, parking fees, a three-day car rental, a tank of gas, random meals and odd incidentals. Two, because I’ll almost certainly have a pleasant time (great food, fresh air, nice people, bountiful scenery). Three, because I’m a full-on admirer of Mike Binder and Kevin Costner‘s Black and White, which is getting the NVFF champagne treatment this evening.

4 pm update: I’ve regretfully bailed on the whole thing. Profuse apologies to all concerned. I kept missing flights and forgetting to do certain things and then it all collapsed into a heap when I got to Burbank Airport and realized I’d left my temporary driver’s license at home, which of course meant no car rental. At that moment I just imperceptibly slumped. On top of which Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone cancelled also.

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Ava DuVernay‘s Selma, which had its first hotshot media screening last night at 6 pm, is a better-than-decent drama in…well, some respects. It has human-scale currents (compassion, moral vision, racism, cowardice, bureaucratic cynicism and brutality). DuVernay does a fair-to-decent job of re-creating the fire and the pain of the Alabama voting-rights protests of 1965, although I’m more of a fan of the “Bridge to Freedom” segment in Eyes on the Prize, the PBS doc that first aired in ’87, than I am of Selma. And yes, David Oyelowo does a reasonably good job of bringing Martin Luther King back to life, although I have to say he doesn’t quite capture King’s wonderfully melodious voice or the soaring oratorical spirit of his speeches.

Last night’s response tells us Selma is going to get lots of knee-jerk love from journalists and politically-correct lefties who swooned over Lee Daniels’ The Butler (a decent, so-so film) and 12 Years A Slave (a masterpiece) because their socially progressive instincts told them to. Selma, after all, is about the struggle by the Rev. King and his followers to demonstrate in racist Alabama for voting rights — a hard, punishing crusade that ultimately led to President Lyndon Johnson pushing for and then signing the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. If you can’t stand up for a film like this then where is your liberal soul?

So this is a good story about a noble and courageous effort, and so to pan this film, which was produced by Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt‘s Plan B productions, or to complain about parts of it, is not cool. Who wants to stand outside the circle of liberal camaraderie as far as this film is concerned? Not me, brother. It’s easier to get with the program, applaud each other for being generous of heart and enlightened enough to look past Selma‘s shortcomings and celebrate its social-historical virtues, which are genuine and tangible.

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I’m not what you’d call an Avengers: Age of Ultron kind of guy. I purposely didn’t post the initial teaser for this sure-to-be-wonderful film, which will open on 5.1.15. I felt it was a better idea to steer clear and let well enough alone. But I need to put something up with half my day getting sucked up by DMV matters so here it is. This is going to affect my karma on some level. The cast includes Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen and James Spader.

I wasn’t sure until an hour ago if it was cool to post a Selma review. I was told last night that Paramount publicists, in defiance of the usual system in which any film that plays at a festival is fair game, were talking about a review embargo. In any event I only had time this morning to bang out the American Sniper review. Right now I have to get down to the DMV and pick up my temporary driver’s license, which I took care of a couple of weeks ago but which I didn’t walk away with because I simultaneously tried and failed to get a motorcycle operator’s license. I flunked the written test and was told, naturally, to come back and try again. The DMV guys said once I pass it I’ll get both licenses. That’s the DMV for you. With any luck I’ll be back in two or three hours. Or four.

Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper is a first-rate visceral combat flick — definitely a ride and a half in that respect — with a slight melancholy undertow and a not-so-hot domestic subplot. The several Iraq War combat sequences are major heartbeat accelerators — nervy, rousing, exquisitely shot and cut — and yet, oddly, Sniper never quite lifts off the pad. Well, it lifts off but then it comes back down. Up, down, steady as she goes, less up, down, up again. There’s something a bit rote and at times even flat about portions of it, and that means, no offense, that altogether Sniper is not quite blue ribbon. But it’s certainly good enough if you adjust your expectations and you’re not expecting something, you know, Oscar-baity.

I live in West Hollywood and TheWrap‘s Steve Pond lives a little northeast, about two miles away, but I can nonetheless hear him right now, telepathically if you will, the sound of his keyboard-tappings and his mildly disappointed thought streams…”It’s good but it’s not The One…Academy people are looking for deliverance, for The One, for the big bountiful year-end payoff…and this is just a very good film and in fact one of Clint’s best of the 21st Century. But a hot award-season banana it’s not.”

Sniper is basically one of those “our man grew up this way and then he met this girl and joined the military after 9/11 and then this happened and that happened” films. The subject is a guy — the late, legendary Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle— who lived quite large in a sense, which is to say mythically by killing 160 enemy combatants during his four tours in Iraq. It tells an intriguing and at times suspenseful tale but not my idea of a great one, and while it ends on a tragic note it doesn’t deliver anything you could call a knockout finish — it doesn’t hit you on the side of the head like a waffle iron, which is how I felt at the end of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.

But it’s solidly assembled and restrained and unfettered and Clint Reborn as far as it goes — his best work since Letters From Iwo Jima. There are only two things about it that drove me nuts, and that’s not bad considering my contrarian nature.

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I did a brief phoner yesterday afternoon with The Babadook director-writer Jennifer Kent. We danced around and touched on the usual stuff. Friendly, convivial, not exactly profound but whaddaya want from a 13-minute chat? A brilliant, Polanski-level exercise, The Babadook (IFC Midnight, 11.28, theatrical/VOD) is currently at 90% on Metacritic and 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. “It’s one of those restrained, character-driven, less-is-much-much-more horror films that pop up once in a blue moon,” I wrote on 11.1. “A mix of Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby plus Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage. And significantly more effective than Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining in telling a story of dark spirits overtaking the mind and soul of a parent.” Again, the mp3.

Less than three hours hence the first-anywhere screening of Ava Duvernay‘s Selma begins at the Egyptian at 6 pm, and then the AFI Fest “surprise” screening of Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper at 9 pm at the Dolby. And probably a Selma q & a in between the two. Busy venue, media urgency, will-call tables, converging of Warner Bros. and Paramount staffers. Sniper showed to trade critics earlier today on the Warner Bros. lot. Earlier announced plans for a screening of 30 minutes of Selma footage were apparently a dodge. Paramount intended all along to show the whole film but wanted it to be a surprise.

The other night Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer passed along a good Al Pacino story. It happened fairly recently although I forget where. The 74 year-old Pacino, who’s now doing press for Barry Levinson‘s The Humbling (Millennium, 1.23.15), was about to participate in some q & a appearance at a hotel or cinema, and while he waited he was sitting on a bench and reading a new script. (Or something like that.) And a couple of women came over and one said, “I’m very sorry but could you please do us a big favor?” Okay, said Pacino. “Could you please take our picture?” she said, referring to herself and her friend. Beat, beat. “Uhhm, okay!” said Pacino. He took the shot, the women thanked him and we went back to his script.

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I know what this sounds like but Rupert Wyatt, William Monahan and Mark Wahlberg‘s The Gambler isn’t as interesting or eloquent as Karel Riesz, James Toback and James Caan‘s The Gambler (’74). It deals faster, flashier cards, but it misses the meditative soulful aspects of the Reisz-Toback version, which is partly to say it takes no pleasure in occasional wins and the power and glory of that. The new Gambler is almost entirely about staring into the abyss. Character-wise it delivers a relentless obstinacy and a smug-punk attitude in Mark Wahlberg‘s gambling-addicted character, and story-wise it furnishes a constant cycle of losing and doubling down and then losing a whole lot more, and then borrowing from ugly Peter to pay even-more-terrible Paul and so on. And it blows off those charming tidbits of Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s philosophy that lent a certain spiritual élan to the ’74 version.

This sounds like I’m going “oh, the older version is better because everything older is better” but it’s not that. The 40 year-old Gambler is a very fine film but it’s not perfect. My attitude going into last night’s AFI Fest screening was that the newbie might be a bump-up. All Monahan had to do, I told myself, was take what was jolting and mesmerizing about the ’74 version and then build upon it…all he had to do was reach into his soul and add a few things, and in so doing inspire Wahlberg and Wyatt and make a better film. That didn’t happen. They made another film, which is basically a smart, ultra-cynical jizz-whizz thing.

What Monahan’s screenplay and the film are basically saying is “we’re doing two things here — we’re ignoring a good part of what was sobering and haunting about the ’74 version, and at the same time we’re going to skate figure eights around it and generally kick ass with the usual stylistic flourishes that everyone wallows in these days.”

This is not to say The Gambler is a bad film. It just should have (and definitely could have) been a lot better.

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Tonight is Gambler night at the Dolby. Can’t wait, has to be better than “good,” etc. I’ll be shocked if it isn’t at least an 8 or an 8.5. Particularly Mark Wahlberg‘s performance as James Caan in a manner of speaking, John Goodman‘s as Paul Sorvino (ditto) and Jessica Lange‘s as Jacqueline Brooks, etc. This afternoon I spoke with James Toback, exec producer and author of the original screenplay of The Gambler (’74), which is a blend of the Dostoevsky original plus his own experiences with games of chance. He’s seen the newbie a couple of times and is particularly enthused about Wahlberg. He’s in the middle of penning a Vanity Fair Hollywood issue piece about being adapted twice — this plus Fingers (’78) being adapted into Jacques Audiard‘s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. He told me a great story that I’ll pass along tonight — have to get down there now.

People tend to think of cats as generally contented as long as they have plenty to eat and get their usual 18 hours of daily shut-eye. But half the time Zak, my seven-month-old ragdoll, tells me that he’s bored stiff and wants to go out and look at the sky and smell the air and run around. He looks at me several times a day with an expression that says, “Are you kidding me? You’re serious? This is my life, just sitting around and plotzing?” And so we go out. A lot. We’ve been to a certain Indian restaurant on La Brea a couple of times. Zak is like a dog with a fairly high IQ. He’s totally cool sitting in a moving car — he actually likes staring out the rear window as we buzz around. Sometimes I’ll take him with me while shopping at Pavillions or getting gas or whatever. Last weekend I took him to an afternoon lunch at a friend’s place and he spent a couple of hours roaming around a huge back yard. Loud cars freak him out but he loves staring at people and generally absorbing new aromas and environments. He really, really doesn’t like sitting around. Like me his philosophy is “life is short.” He doesn’t need to intellectually know that — he just instinctually knows this is the only attitude worth having. A regular “go for the gusto” type.