Last night I decided to skip the L.A. premiere screening of Ondi Timoner’s BRAND: A Second Coming and just hit the party instead. Little did I know that Timoner has trimmed about 15 minutes from the version I saw two or three months ago at the L.A. Film Festival, and I didn’t think that cut needed tightening at all. I’m nonetheless told that it plays quite nicely. The party was at St. Felix on Cahuenga. I spoke briefly to Amy Berg about her doc, Janis: Little Girl Blue, which I saw and loved in Toronto. HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko, who shot a large portion of the Brand doc, was in attendance along with Timoner, of course, as well as street artist and illustrator Shepard Fairey.

(l. to. r.: Shepard Fairey, BRAND: A Second Coming director Ondi Timoner, dp Svetlana Cvetko.

I attended this morning’s press screening of Robert Zemeckis‘ The Walk at IMAX headquarters in Playa del Rey. I found the first 100 minutes fairly dreadful — over-acted, “cute”, hamboned, like some kind of Gene Kelly musical…as manipulative and ungenuine and disrespectful of reality as any Hollywood bullshit fantasy you’ve ever sat through. But the last 25 minutes deliver one of the greatest visual knockout experiences I’ve ever seen on an IMAX screen. This finale is so good that I have no choice to but recommend The Walk despite all the awful stuff.

Yes, that’s my review in a nutshell — The Walk will make you feel nauseous but you need to see the finale so I’m sorry but you’ll have to suffer through it. 98% of the time a movie that drives you nuts for the first three-quarters will deliver a sucky finish. But not this time.

What Zemeckis has done is take the real-life, inspirational saga of wire-walker Phillippe Petit (played by Joseph Gordon Levitt), the ginger-haired Frenchman who walked on a wire between the World Trade Center towers eight times on the morning of 8.7.74, and turn it into cliched, manipulative, family-friendly oatmeal.

James Marsh‘s Man on Wire (’09) took the exact same material and made one of the most fascinating and spiritually uplifting docs of the 21st Century. Zemeckis’ film is basically Man on Wire for megaplex idiots — for the fine citizens who need to feel scared or awed and have everything spelled out for them, as if they’re eight or nine years old. If you’re a fan of dumbing stuff down for whatever reason, you’ll love The Walk. It has laughs, charm, love, silliness, slapstick, quirky humor, thrills, passion, suspense! And broad strokes every which way. And that knockout ending!

I now have a good idea what it was like for Petit to walk between the towers on that fateful morning. Seriously. Try watching this segment without moaning or groaning or gripping your knees. Try looking down 110 stories in 3D from Petit’s POV. Go ahead, give it a shot. The words “holy” and “shit” will form in your mind. Whether or not you say them is up to you.

I’m aware, obviously, that no other award-season spitballers have insisted, as I have, that Amy Schumer‘s emotionally subtle and occasionally tear-inducing performance in Trainwreck is Best Actress-worthy, but I swear it definitely is. Schumer’s work in that brilliant Judd Apatow film is no less of an achievement than that of Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, and just because Schumer is a comedian is not (hello?) a mark against her. She delivers the goods. You can feel exactly where her character is coming from in each and every Trainwreck scene, and she never goes for just one note — she’s always juggling two or three conflicting considerations or impulses at any given moment. I realize I’m going to have to be a realist and drop my Schumer crusade down the road, but shame on the punditry for not even raising the Schumer balloon. It’s September, for God’s sake — time to mix passion and advocacy with the usual tea-leaf readings.  Live a little.

Yesterday Hollywood Reporter award-season analyst Scott Feinberg, relying on exhaustive cross-checking of data and precedents mixed with his usual Yoda-like perceptions (which are not the same thing as being graced with Hollywood Elsewhere-style insect antennae), posted some spitball projections on the basis of “if the Oscars were held tomorrow and voters could consider only contenders that have already been screened” — i.e., at Telluride and Toronto. I’m reposting a few along with HE commentary:

(1) Feinberg starts by declaring that Spotlight would win Best Picture, Tom McCarthy would win Best Director for his work on that Boston-based drama, and that Spotlight would win for Best Original Screenplay. (HE comment: Agree, fully deserved) He also projected that The Danish Girl‘s Eddie Redmayne would win Best Actor (HE comment: Just you wait) and that Brooklyn‘s Saoirse Ronan would win Best Actress (HE comment: Fine).

(2) Feinberg also projected that Joel Edgerton‘s over-performed and overly-accented John Connolly in Black Mass would win for Best Supporting Actor. (HE comment: The light blue suits won by Edgerton in Scott Cooper‘s film are a disqualification in and of themselves.) Feinberg also believes The Danish Girl‘s Alicia Vikander would win Best Supporting Actress (HE comment: I get it — everybody gravitated toward her performance when they realized that Redmayne’s was so relentlessly delicate and one-note, but it’s early yet).