I’m kind of fed up with traumatic recovery movies. Hard-knock tales about the resilience of the human spirit, I mean. Protagonists walloped and nearly destroyed by some godawful tragedy only to gradually fight their way back to a semblance of a normal life. 

And so I sat down to watch David Gordon Green and Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Stronger (Roadside, 9.22) with a guarded attitude. Here we fucking go again, I told myself — the story of real-life Boston bombing victim Jeff Bauman (played by Gyllenhaal) overcoming the loss of his legs and becoming a hero of perseverance. This is certainly what’s been sold by the trailer, which is full of rah-rah uplift.

Well, guess what? Stronger includes a few inspirational moments in the third act, but mostly it’s a darker, grimmer and more despairing thing than you might expect. It’s been shot and cut in an intimate, off-angled way, and it certainly doesn’t unfold in the usual manner, at least in terms of rousing third-act recovery music and scenes designed to tug at your heartstrings. And Gyllenhaal, it must be said, really drills into Bauman’s pain, shock and despair, and I mean in a Robert De Niro-as-Jake LaMotta sort of way.

Is this Gyllenhaal’s most award-worthy performance ever? That’s a tough call for a guy who’s slammed it out of the park four or five times over the last dozen years (Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, Nightcrawler, Demolition, Nocturnal Animals) but I honestly think it might be.

Augmented by some first-rate CG that totally convinces you that his legs are truly absent, Gyllenhaal’s Bauman is certainly more intense and blistering than Gary Oldman‘s Winston Churchill, I can tell you that. And I really admire that he never seems to be trying to charm the audience into liking him. That’s partly an aspect of John Pollono‘s script, which is based on “Stronger,” a personal recollection book by Bauman and Bret Witter, but it also comes from Gyllenhaal’s bravery.  

The overall emphasis is a lot more on “fuck me” and “this really sucks” than “I not only have the strength to improve my life and make things better all around, but I will make you, the popcorn-munching audience member, feel better about your own life in the bargain.”

Tatiana Maslany earns respect and points as Erin Hurley, Bauman’s girlfriend who later became his wife.

Maslany is not…how can I put this?…she’s not exactly my idea of an actress I’d like to hang with for long periods of time or, you know, have a couple of drinks with or whatever, and she’s certainly not the birds-of-a-feather equal of Gyllenhaal in terms of basic attractiveness, but she  knows how to make difficult situations and emotions play in relatable dramatic terms. (Last February’s announcement that Bauman and Hurley intend to divorce is ignored by the film.)

The degree to which Stronger is not a formula recovery flick can’t be over-emphasized. The trailer makes it seem like an uplift thing but the trailer lies.

As of right now there are seven fall-holiday biggies, listed in order of likely award-season importance, that are yet to be seen: Steven Spielberg‘s The Post, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread, Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel, Ridley Scott‘s All The Money In The World, Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying, Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman, and Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (which should obviously be re-titled as 3:17 to Paris).

I would also add Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife, the Glenn Close-starring contender that’s only been shown once at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival, for a total of eight.

I don’t regard Tomas Alfredson‘s The Snowman, Rian Johnson‘s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Denis Villenueve‘s Blade Runner 2049 (all but written off at this stage of the game) and Pixar’s Coco as potential award contenders. (Thanks to Jordan Ruimy for the nudge.)

I’ve chatted with Alicia Vikander at a couple of social events. She’s a fine actress (loved her to death in Anna Karenina and Ex Machina) but she’s no more of a muscular, martial-arts badass than Angelina Jolie was when she made Salt. Like Jolie, Vikander is wirey and slender and on the petite side. Unlike Gal Gadot or Gina Carano, she’s no one’s idea of an Olympian, Amazonian badass. So that’s an instant “no sale” on her Tomb Raider, which will on 3.16.18.

I am Yul Brynner‘s Ramses, standing in my gleaming blue-and-white chariot and holding three golden arrows above my head as I attempt to rouse the fighting spirit of the Egyptian army: “Death to Tomb Raider! Death to the executives who pushed this through the Warner Bros. bureaucracy! Death to any and all attempts to make super-muscular action heroes out of 110-pound actresses whom I could personally take with one hand tied behind my back!”

“Living’s over for me, but it’s a thrill to be standing here before you, Father. I was what I was. What can I tell ya? There were times when I was so stupid, so stupid, but I wasn’t an animal. Okay, I was an animal. I was raised among animals in the Bronx and I followed suit, and Lord, I suffered for that. Let me into heaven. Okay, I shouldn’t have smacked my wife…okay, both wives and my brother around, but I fought well, held the middleweight champion title for a couple of years, played a bartender in The Hustler, and then Marty Scorsese made a great movie about me. You hear what I said? You hear what I said? There’s no way I’m goin’ down to hell. You’ll never get me down there, Father. I swear on my mothah’s soul I wasn’t that bad…I wasn’t that bad.”

About 25 years ago I drove up to the Guadalupe Dunes area (due west of Santa Maria) to inspect the remnants of the ancient Egypt set used for Cecil B. DeMille‘s 1926 version of The Ten Commandments. It’s nothing — just a big sloping sand dune littered with chunks of cheap plaster and pieces of weather-worn lumber sticking out here and there. There’s no “lost city” — the whole legend is a con job. You might find scraps and shards of material from a 90-year-old movie set “interesting”, but I sure didn’t. The story about DeMille having dynamited and then buried the set after he finished shooting makes sense. It certainly makes no sense that he would have left the set intact for other filmmakers to use at will.

Official trailer “The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille” [SBIFF] from dan coplan on Vimeo.

In a 9.19 DVD Beaver review of Criterion’s new Barry Lyndon Bluray, Gary Tooze reports that the 4K-scanned images are “brighter” than those provided by the previous Warner Home Video Bluray with “superior detail…colors (red) have become richer and deeper…it looks beautiful [and] is far closer to how Barry Lyndon looked theatrically. Kubrick fans should rejoice at this image quality. It’s magnificent.” But again I’m asking, and this is obviously not an extreme thing to say in September of ’17: Why isn’t Criterion simply releasing a 4K Bluray instead of a 4K-scanned Bluray rendered in 1080p? I’m buying the new Lyndon for $25, and next year I’ll be asked to shell out another $30 or $40 when they finally release a 4K version…is that it?

I saw Stephen Frears‘ Victoria and Adbul (Focus Features, 9.15) at the Toronto Film Festival, but I wasn’t able to summon the energy, much less the enthusiasm, to write about it. Now that I’m back in Los Angeles, rested and settled and sitting at home, I still can’t write about it. Nothing will come. The 68% Rotten Tomatoes rating says it all. It’s not a bad film, but it’s mainly decorous and stiff-necked. Having played Queen Victoria 20 years ago in Mrs. Brown, Judi Dench is her usual mesmerizing self as the same royal in her late 70s, and Ali Fazal is fine as Abdul Karim, the Indian gentleman whom Victoria bonded with during her final years on the throne. I’m sorry but this is just another one of those stuffed-shirt Masterpiece Theatre flicks for the older set. TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde called it “Buckingham Palace fetishism cranked up to peak mumsy.” Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman called it “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner served with mango chutney.” What do I, Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere, have to say? Overall I found Victoria and Adbul mildly diverting — “entertaining” would be too strong a word — but at the same time I felt like the sand was draining out of my hourglass as I watched it. Me to me: “If Judi Dench is so good in this, and she is….probably another Best Actress nomination in the bag…why do I feel as I’m on my deathbed?”

Almost all dreams are symbolic manifestations of some real-life issue you’re experiencing, but I always figured that my childhood boxer-dog nightmare, which I wrote about yesterday, was just a run-of-the-mill kid’s dream. I was only six or seven at the time, so what buried issue could I have been dealing with? I always figured the boxer dogs were just standard-issue goblins.

The dream was about sitting in a jail cell and waiting to be prepared as a main course in a gourmet meal. The chefs were two boxer dogs, standing on their hind legs and wearing starched white aprons. One of them was carrying a large silver tray with all kind of knives laid out, and one of them was narrating the dream like a cooking-class instructor, explaining very precisely how I was to be prepared with just the right sauces and spices.

The meaning hit me this morning, and it was like the clouds parted. The boxer dogs were my parents, talking in a careful, restrained, soft-spoken manner about how to prepare me for life, for school, for the coming regimentation that every kid has to submit to in order to find his/her place in society and therefore survive. The knives on the big silver trays were lessons, books, rules, admonishments, wagging fingers, do’s and don’ts. This was exactly what I was going through as I was starting school at age seven. The regimented aspects were obviously getting to me.

Wow…I finally figured it out.

Now this is a bedroom with a helluva view. It is occupied, the poster is telling us, by a Brooklyn-residing woman (i.e., a clam-house waitress) who’s in the grip of some kind of red-furnace sexual current in her life. You could almost call her a woman channelling the glow and the fire of Anna Magnani, except that Kate Winslet‘s Rose isn’t the type to know the first thing about Italian cinema. Rose couldn’t possibly know this, but as she’s lying on her bed and seething and lamenting about all the things that aren’t working out for her, she’s at least being captured by the great Vittorio Storaro, so at least she’ll look good as the walls close in.

Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel will have its world premiere as the New York Film Festival on Saturday, 10.14, or three and a half weeks hence. Amazon Studios will release Wonder Wheel on 12.1.17, the first film the studio will distribute independently. Kate Winslet for Best Actress, Jim Belushi for Best Supporting Actor, and maybe even Wonder Wheel itself for Best Picture…who knows?

Posted within comment thread for “Smart Assesment, Subtle Denigrations,” an HE riff about Kris Tapley‘s Variety piece titled “Are you Ready For The Most Exciting Oscar Race in years?” piece: “If there’s one thing that Oscar race know-it-alls agree upon and with great passion, it’s that Streep, who will OF COURSE be nominated for playing Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in Steven Spielberg‘s The Post, must be stopped at all costs. From winning, I mean.”

Over the last 30-plus years the feeling of Streep inevitability has always felt somewhat oppressive or at the very least irksome, but now she’s returning with a battalion of Sherman tanks on either flank. In the company of Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Sony Pictures and a big-deal, big-echo newspaper yarn that obviously reflects upon today’s pitched battle between Trump and the fact-beholden press, the Streep blitzkreig (which obviously hasn’t even begun yet) feels overwhelmingly favored, especially given her eloquent, unanimously well received speech about Trump that she delivered last January at the Golden Globe awards.

The culture, the fates and considerable industry heat will usher in a Streep nomination — we accept that, fine, no stopping it. And most of us are fine with Hanks being Best Actor nominated and perhaps even winning for portraying Ben Bradley, but Streep must not win….no! I don’t care how good she is in the film, and you know she will be.

Tom Hanks as former Washington Post editor in chief Ben Bradley (center), Bob Odenkirk as former Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikin during filming of The Post.

Kris Tapley‘s latest award-season analysis piece (“Are You Ready for the Most Exciting Oscar Race in Years?“) appeared this morning. It’s mostly an accurate read. Especially if your definition of “accurate” is taking the pulse of your Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby go-alongers (i.e., the people who hold their moist fingers to the wind before deciding what they like or which film has the heat). How is Hollywood Elsewhere any different? I’m as aware as the next guy about which way the winds are blowing, but forecast-wise I go by insect antennae vibrations.

The four Best Picture biggies right now, Tapley is saying, are Dunkirk, The Shape of Water, Darkest Hour and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Two of these, Dunkirk and Three Billboards, are ballsy stand-outs that deliver something extra by setting out on their own paths. The Shape of Water is a geeky Beauty and the Beast thing attempting to slide into the Oscar fold on a current of emotion and erotic fantasy, and Darkest Hour is the most traditional or old-fashioned of the bunch, a historical drama that is both stylistically striking while walking a very familiar path, and with a lead performance that screams “I am doing almost everything that an Oscar-baity performance can possibly do to win your allegiance — clever mimicry of a famous voice, elaborate facial prosthetics, big cigar, quirky behavior, etc.”

I know what I’m about to say will irritate some people, but I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t also describe Tapley’s article as a very cleverly phrased takedown thing (and I’m saying this with genuine respect). It manages, almost by sleight of hand, to lower the Best Picture chances of Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. If the 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating and Toronto Film Festival reactions are any barometer (CMBYN was the 2nd runner-up in the TIFF people-ballot vote), this is certainly one of your Best Picture slam-dunkers. But Tapley has given it the elbow.

What’s happened is that Tapley (who, don’t forget, expressed vague annoyance last July at the “overbearing Call Me By Your Name mafia”) has thrown in with David “punching chance” Poland as well as a modest fraternity of “older, vaguely prudish industry guys” in describing this Sony Pictures Classics as a deserving but struggling second-tier contender, trying like hell to climb aboard a moving train.

Respectful denigration is an art form, and Tapley has mastered it. I do this shit myself from time to time so don’t tell me.

Oh, to have been in Ron Shelton‘s shoes in the ’80s and ’90s. The reigning auteur of soulful sports movies. 29 years ago the director of the great Bull Durham (’88) was at the top of the heap, and to have followed this up with the reasonably decent Blaze (’89), White Men Can’t Jump (’92), Cobb (’94) and Tin Cup (’96)….smokin’! Hell, I was even half okay with Hollywood Homicide (’03). But now this…a light-hearted septugenarian thing…a cock-of-the-walk cialis-boner comedy set in the Palm Springs area. Lo, how the mighty have fallen. Morgan Freeman, Tommy Lee Jones, Rene Russo, Joe Pantoliano, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Graham Beckel and the late Glenne Headly. Broad Green’s Just Getting Started pops on 12.8.