The day before yesterday I spoke with Asif Kapadia, the director of the highly praised, Oscar-favored Amy, which has so far won the National Board of Review’s Best Documentary award as well as the same honor from the Satellite Awards. We met at the too-cool-for-school Standard Hotel with all the intense ice-blue colors and the hot babes roaming around. I began with my standard beef that almost all musician biopics (be they doc or narrative) are about self-destruction — dying young from drugs and alcohol abuse. Whether it’s Amy Winehouse, Hank Williams, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Edith Piaf or Bix Beiderbecke — it’s the same damn story every time. They grew up hard, found fame with their great gift, burned brightly for a relatively brief time and then keeled over. Kapadia offered a smart and spirited retort, of course, and we were off to the races. Here’s the mp3.

Amy director Asif Kapadia — Friday, 12.4, 3:40 pm, lobby of Standard Hotel.

From my 7.2.15 review: “I came out of Asif Kapadia‘s Amy with a sense of sadness, of course. But I didn’t have any one reaction, to be honest. Ten minutes after the screening ended I bought Back to Black. When Amy Winehouse was great, which was nearly every time she sang, she was insanely great. But she was a mess for so long and such a foregone conclusion in terms of an early death that when it finally happened it was hardly a shock. It was almost a relief because at least the tortured aspects of her life had come to an end. That sounds a bit heartless but some people seem so bound for oblivion that you can’t help but feel a certain distance and disinterest.

I’m always losing combs so I always carry two or three in my back pocket. But I don’t like the hard, inflexible kind that cost $2 or $3 bills each in pharmacies. I like the cheap, flexible, soft-plastic kind they sell in liquor stores for 90 cents or whatever. I like the teeth of a comb to have a little “give.” Two days ago I hit paydirt when I visited Terner’s liquor store on the Strip (i.e., right next to the Viper Room). For a lousy $2 dollars and change they were selling a whole plastic bag’s worth of cheap combs. I’m now carrying ten flexible combs in my rear pockets — five black, two lime-green and three violet. I’m thinking of buying another bag of these guys so I can replace the current ten, all of which I’ll lose sooner or later.

Cornucopia of combs

Sasha Stone, Awards Watch‘s Erik Anderson and I are waiting for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Boston Film Critics to finish voting on their year-end awards before recording the latest Oscar Poker podcast. Wells to Stone, Anderson: “You want to wait so we can discuss the MOMENTOUS, EARTH-SHAKING DECISIONS made by LAFCA and the Boston Film Critics? What do they know? Do they have midi-chlorians in their bloodstream and therefore their year-end picks are something extra-noteworthy?” Question: will LAFCA continue its beyond-lame tradition of stopping voting midstream so they can stuff their faces with brunch vittles? I’m hoping/trusting that at least one of these groups will belly up to the bar for Spotlight, and if that doesn’t happen I don’t know what.

Hateful Eight star Kurt Russell and I were having a nice enough interview earlier today, talking not just about Quentin Tarantino‘s soon-to-open film and Russell’s flinty, craggy-voiced performance as a tough-talking bounty hunter named John Ruth, but also, briefly, about a possible film version of Chapman and MacLain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball.

Released in 2014, Battered Bastards was and is a wonderful doc about a scrappy-ass, mid ’70s minor-league Portland baseball team (called the Mavericks) that was owned and managed by Kurt’s dad, character actor Bing Russell. Russell said that Todd Field might direct with Russell possibly playing his dad…or not. Too early to say but here’s hoping.

Kurt Russell as snarly-mouthed John Ruth in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.

Then I segued into a riff about how movies tend to reflect the times and the culture they come from. I was thinking that the Quentin Tarantino brand, which has always included a swaggering, half-smirking, bordering-on-flippant use of violence at times, might not fit or reflect the post-Paris, post-San Bernardino culture now as well as it did the all-is-well Clinton ’90s.

I was thinking in particular of a 12.3 N.Y. Times survey piece I read this morning. Written by N.R. Kleinfeld and called “Fear in the Air, Americans Look Over Their Shoulders,” it basically observed that “a creeping fear of being caught in a mass rampage has unmistakably settled itself firmly in the American consciousness.” And I was wondering how that wink-wink grindhouse blood and brutality that colors the second half (and more precisely the final third) of Tarantino’s film is going to synch with that…or not.

Here’s a reasonably close transcript of our gun-and-culture discussion. I guess it wasn’t so much a discussion as a kind of argument, except it was more about Russell arguing with me than vice versa. I played it cool and made my points in a mild-mannered way. Listen and judge for yourself:

Wells: The Quentin cult, if you will, is, like, 23 years old, starting with Reservoir Dogs…right? Violence as attitude, violence as style, violence as fashion…not dealt with in an earnest, realistic way. The swagger thing.

Russell: Right.

Wells: And I was looking in the N.Y. Times this morning and this guy interviewed several people in the country in the Midwest and West. And with almost everybody out there, he reported, there’s a feeling of anxiety in the culture…when’s the next one?

Russell: So how do you connect the dots?

My 9.13.15 review of Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, reposted in the wake of pic’s 11.27 release: “The notion that Eddie Redmayne might win a second Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Einer Wegener/Lili Elbe in Tom Hooper‘s The Danish Girl (Focus Features, 11.27) died last night in Toronto.

“Okay, it didn’t die but it certainly downshifted. And the cause of that downshift was the film itself, a reasonably decent effort which screened for press & industry yesterday morning and the public last night. It seemed to play well enough, but it didn’t seem to lift anyone off the ground either. And Redmayne seems caught in a kindly web of calculation. As submissive and devotional and brave as his performance is — you have to give him credit and respect for really letting Lili into his soul — the effort is gently muffled by Lucinda Coxon‘s script (based on David Evershoff‘s same-titled book) and Hooper’s direction, which feels overly poised and burnished and finally confining.

“The Danish Girl is a finely rendered, exquisitely sensitive, middle-of-the-road Oscar-bait film that will win respect and applause among the 50-plus Hollywood guild & Academy set. But it’s almost bloodless — well acted, handsomely captured and intriguing to some extent, lulling and softly emotional but never fascinating and absolutely dead fucking terrified of doing or saying anything that might be construed as brash or nervy or irreverent or out of synch with today’s p.c. drumbeat.

“A creeping fear of being caught in a mass rampage has unmistakably settled itself firmly in the American consciousness. People are able to recite with precision how often they think about a mass shooting touching them. Every day. Twice a week. Up to four times a day. Every other day. Every two weeks. Every time they’re in a crowded space. Whenever her teenagers are out. Every time she walks into her office and back to the parking garage. Every day. Every day. Every day.  ‘And they are worrying that the randomness of it, which on one hand makes the odds of something happening to them very small, that randomness also makes it possible to happen to them,’ says Alan Hilfer, the former chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.” — from a 12.3 N.Y. Times survey piece by N.R. Kleinfeld, called “Fear in the Air, Americans Look Over Their Shoulders.”

Key passages from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 12.1 Nation piece about the declining quality of life among rural white working-class guys, who are feeling fucked and diminished from all sides and are therefore clinging to guns as they slide more and more downhill as they die at a higher rate than in decades past…hence Donald Trump:

Excerpt #1: “In relation to people of color, whites have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity — 5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women — though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.”

Excerpt #2: “When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working-class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.”

Excerpt #3: “At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken [white power] up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement.”

Last month I was wandering around during a Savannah Film Festival after-party, and I noticed a white-haired guy sitting all alone at a table in a corner. I wasn’t entirely convinced it was Robert Loggia, but he sure was a dead ringer. And what did I do? Did I walk over and say “excuse me but I’m 95% convinced you’re Bob Loggia…am I right?” No, I said nothing, guarded coward that I sometimes am. Even if it wasn’t Loggia (he had Alzheimer’s and probably didn’t do a lot of travelling outside his Brentwood home), I’m sorry for not saying hello anyway. Because now he’s gone. Loggia’s first big breakout happened in Walt Disney‘s Elfego Baca series (’58 to ’60), and then he half-hibernated for over 15 years until his next distinctive performance in Blake Edwards‘ S.O.B. Loggia worked steadily since but delivered classic performances in five world-class films, four of them in the ’80s: Frank Lopez in Scarface, Eduardo Prizzi in Prizzi’s Honor, Sam Ransom in Jagged Edge, Mr. MacMillan in Big and Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent in Lost Highway.

Three days ago the New York Film Critics Circle creamed over Carol, and now the Boston Online Film Critics Association has tumbled for Mad Max: Fury Road to the tune of five awards — Best Picture, Best Director (George Miller), Best Cinematography (John Seale), Best Editing (Margaret Sixel) and Best Original Score (Junkie XL). And Creed took two awards — Michael B. Jordan for Best Actor and Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor. Will this be a regional critics group trend for the next two or three weeks — to honor films that haven’t been heavily favored by the Gurus of Gold or Gold Derbyites, to deny Spotlight any Best Picture awards, to ignore The Revenant, to favor genre films about physical conflict, to celebrate Kristen Stewart‘s performance in a negligible Olivier Assayas film that peaked during the 2014 film-festival season? Other BOFCA honors: Best Actress — Brooklyn‘s Saiorse Ronan, Best supporting Actress — Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria, Best Documentary — Amy, Best Animated Film — Inside Out.

The other day renowned critic, author and filmmaker F.X. Feeney and I spent a half-hour discussing Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant — here’s the mp3.

F.X. Feeney, author of “Orson Welles: Power, Heart, and Soul”, “A. Hepburn”, “Michael Mann“, “Roman Polanski“.

Here’s a short Feeney piece about the film: “A man left for dead rises and, against every possible obstacle, seeks vengeance against those who not only abandoned him but murdered someone he loves. This is the plot of The Revenant. It has a classical familiarity. John Boorman’s 1968 crime drama Point Blank follows this outline, as does Man in the Wilderness, a 1971 western which starred Richard Harris and John Huston and was coincidentally based on the same historic incident – but all prior variations on such themes disappear as this film unfolds.

“One doesn’t ‘watch’ The Revenant so much as live it. If this movie becomes a smash hit, it will be because survival — pure and simple — has become such an across the board concern in so many of our imaginations, especially as the world degenerates daily into an ever more senseless shoot ‘em up. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu gives actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy ample time and space to act out this primal duel.

Shane Black‘s The Nice Guys (Warner Bros., 5.20.16) is some kind of thriller comedy costarring Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe, Kim Basinger and Margaret Qualley. Cowritten by Black and Anthony Bagarozzi. Boilerplate: “Set during the 1970s, a Los Angeles private detective partners up with a rookie police officer to inquire about the apparent suicide of a fading porn star.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this feels like a programmer, a throwaway.

Jason Moore‘s Sisters (Universal, 12.18) is a relationship comedy about the disparate Ellis sisters reviewing and reliving their childhood…or something like that.  Tina Fey‘s Kate is loosey-goosey and somewhat immature, and Amy Poehler‘s Maura is divorced and uptight, etc. Pic is about “one last party at their childhood home, which their parents are about to sell,” etc. Today I received an award-season screener — the first time in my life I’ve received a mainstream comedy by UPS/Fed Ex before the release date. The all-media is on 12.15 — the embargo lifts the following day.