David Koepp‘s Mortdecai is looking like a contender for the Worst of 2015 roster, to go by early reviews. The arch, ultra-mannered Johnny Depp farce has an 11% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak. But I had a great time with Robbie Collin‘s Telegraph review. Excerpt #1: “It’s hard to think of a way in which the experience of watching the new Johnny Depp film could be any worse, unless you returned home afterwards to discover that Depp himself had popped round while you were out and set fire to your house. Excerpt #2: “What’s fascinating about the film, other than its early and near-impregnable status as the worst of 2015, are its superficial but nagging similarities to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a project to which Depp was once attached. Both films center on fey but sexually rapacious men who belong to bygone eras, and both involve a missing art treasure. Perhaps in a parallel universe, Ralph Fiennes missed a train by a fraction of a second, and Depp is now the star of a tragicomic Academy Award nominated masterpiece, while Fiennes gropes co-stars half his age and jokes about statutory rape.”

During a segment on last night’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, screenwriter and former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett described the one-eyed-jacks milieu in Washington, D.C. Politicians, he said, “put one face out to the public and, behind the scenes, they’re devious lunatics. They’re headcases…broken, garbage people. They are. They’re terrible, short-sighted, venal, cowardly douchebags. Some of them.”

Which is vaguely analogous to the difference between this or that person’s online rantings and the mild-mannered, comme ci comma ca personality they wear when you see them on the street. Very few, it seems, are the same person in both realms. The usual online tempest vs. a semblance of mature behavior when they’re standing two to three feet away, and the tempestuous stuff is usually closer to the nub of things. I’m mentioning this because a guy some of us know recently blocked me from reading his Twitter posts because…getting into it will only exacerbate but it was next to nothing in the general scheme. I’ll be running into him during Sundance and we’ll probably sort it out, but online temperaments are strange.

And yet, oddly, it’s more comfortable to live in our digital pods. Almost all interaction these days happens digitally while the face-to-face stuff…well, you can’t get away from it entirely. And I would’t want to. But oh, the irony of it.

Minutes after arriving at the Park Regency, Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas (who’s sharing the pad for three nights) gifted me with an official “Yo, Whiplash!” hat. For the uninitiated, this was the original title of the story that was changed to “Miles Teller ‘Pervert’ Story,” which I posted on 10.24.14.

One of the many gloom-inducing things about Michael Mann‘s Blackhat are the Asian urban locales, which are mostly gray, grim, congested and corporate fuck-ugly with little else but high-rises, office buildings, freeways and skanky, neon-lit fast-food joints. The IMDB says Blackhat shot in (a) Jakarata, Indonesia, (b) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, (c) Klang, Malaysia and (d) Hong Kong besides Los Angeles. They all seem like the same soul-less Asian hell-hole. Mann obviously decided to avoid the conventionally photogenic and emphasize the stinky, but good God. The footage of over-developed Bangkok in the 2nd Hangover movie made me feel the same way. In some ways the above-named burghs looked a bit like Tokyo, Seoul and Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon — cities I didn’t care for and have zero interest in ever visiting again.

Shot adjacent to a Burger King in Las Vegas’s McCarran airport — Wednesday, 1.21, 1:10 pm.

I’ve been in love with Preston Sturges‘ Sullivan’s Travels for 40-odd years now, and pretty much every time I’ve seen it (most recently a year or two ago) it’s looked sharp and rich and chromatically full-bodied. I just don’t see how I can justify buying the Criterion Bluray because I can’t imagine it delivering a noticable Bluray “bump”. And yet I took the leap with Criterion’s Foreign Correspondent and got a good bump out of it…go figure. Wiki excerpt: “Veronica Lake was six months pregnant at the beginning of production, a fact she didn’t tell Sturges until filming began. Sturges was so furious when he learned that, according to Lake, he had to be physically restrained. Sturges consulted with Lake’s doctor to see if she could perform the part, and hired former Tournament of Roses queen Cheryl Walker as Lake’s double. Edith Head, Hollywood’s most renowned costume designer, was tasked to find ways of concealing Lake’s condition.”

Today is 80% about Sundance travelling. Leaving for Burbank airport at 9 am to catch an 11:15 am flight. Better early than sorry. To save dough I’m flying to Las Vegas and then parking it for two hours, and then flying to Salt Lake City. I get in at 4:30 pm, and it’ll take at least 90 minutes if not two hours to get to the Park Regency with those slow-ass shuttle vans dropping customers off in way-out-of-the-way locations. And for all of it, there probably won’t be any snow to marvel at during the entire nine days. The last time there was any kind of Sundance snowfall was maybe three years ago. 11:10 am update: Southwest Vegas flight delayed by 30 minutes. 1:10 pm update: Enjoying superb free wifi at LV’s McCarran airport. My Southwest Salt Lake City flight leaves at 1:55 pm.

“After sitting through American Sniper twice, I’m more convinced than ever that there’s a level of sardonic commentary at work that is sometimes subtle and sometimes pretty damn obvious. Pay attention to Cooper’s increasingly congested body language, the posture of a man stricken with unmanageable psychic distress. Pay attention to the use of the phrase ‘mission accomplished’ late in the film, or the stateside scene in which Kyle runs into a Marine whose life he saved in Fallujah and can’t even make eye contact with the guy. This is a portrait of an American who thought he knew what he stood for and what his country stood for and never believed he needed to ask questions about that. He drove himself to kill and kill and kill based on that misguided ideological certainty — that brainwashing, though I’m sure Clint Eastwood would never use that word — and then paid the price for it. So did we all, and the reception of this film suggests that the payments keep on coming due.” — from “American Sniper and the culture wars: Why the movie’s not what you think it is” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, 1.20.

I still say the only decent thing Bill Cosby can do at this point is to cough up $10 or $15 million and dispense it to the 30-plus victims in some kind of indirect, half-assedly benevolent way, which would be a form of atonement without actually admitting anything. History will at least record that Cosby half-acknowledged his fiendishness and offered a little restitution as an oblique way of saying “I can’t say I’m sorry because I can’t say I’m guilty but…well, you know.”

“Last night, Obama had the punchy, self-assured air of a President on a roll, freed of old encumbrances (a narrow, nervous Democratic majority in the Senate) and buoyed by both a big jump in his approval ratings and, most important, a growing economy. ‘We have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health-care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years.’ Here he paused, savored these statistics, then ad-libbed: ‘This is good news, people.’ A wink, a smile, a sideways glance. A man pleased with himself.” — from a SOTU review by The New Yorker‘s Jeff Sheshol.

Why would I shell out for a Criterion Bluray of Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73) when I already have the 2009 DVD, which looks totally delectable on my 60-inch Samsung plasma? Coyle isn’t meant to be a splendorific visual experience. It’s just a modest ’70s noir with some wonderfully authentic performances and great George V. Higgins dialogue. Honestly? I’m tempted to buy the Bluray anyway but that’s because I have a neurotic weakness for improved resolution. But if I buy the damn thing and I don’t get my Bluray “bump”, trouble will follow.

“Maybe that’s the trick to it — it was very character-based and very simple when you looked at it. People like Billy Wilder and Frank Capra would really work on structuring things to where everything made sense. But I felt like Preston Sturges knew these people. They were real people; they lived in him somehow and he would just go, ‘Well, here’s what they would do.’ And maybe they’re dictating the movie. All of the characters are just dictating what happened. It really feels like he doesn’t have any control over them. So, maybe he knew they were twins from the beginning and he’s a genius and I’m an idiot. I don’t know.” — Bill Hader on Preston Sturges and The Palm Beach Story (the Criterion Bluray pops on 1.20) with Vulture.com’s Bilge Ebiri.

From a 5.4.14 review by wegotthiscovered.com‘s Adam A. Donaldson: “Mad As Hell (2.6 in NY/LA/VOD) is a rare opportunity to use the life story of Cenk Uygur to say something about the modern media culture, but instead, it’s kind of about the awesomeness of Uygur, how he put together his Ocean’s 11 like team of media upstarts and rocked the so-called squares in their ivory tower, despite the fact that the man leading the revolution longed to have a corner office in one of those very same towers. The documentary does have great energy though, and if you’re unfamiliar with The Young Turks, this is probably a good introduction to the outlet. And hey, if you scroll over to YouTube and click ‘subscribe’ on the Young Turks channel, then I guess it’s mission accomplished.