Last Thursday night Call Me By Your Name star Timothy Chalamet told me that the new Woody Allen film in which he costars with Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez would begin filming on Monday, 9.11 (i.e., today). Sure enough, this happened several hours ago on the streets of…not sure if it was Manhattan or Brooklyn but definitely somewhere in the general New York City area.

(l. to r.) Selena Gomez, Timothy Chalamet, Woody Allen on the set of Allen’s latest.

Lili Fini Zanuck‘s Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars illustrates a rule about documentaries and particularly talking-head footage that bears repeating.

If you have an ample supply of alluring, great-looking, non-grainy footage, you’re free to forego talking heads. Just hire a top-tier editor, overlay some wise, insightful narration and you’ll probably be fine. But if your footage is mainly composed of grainy, shitty-looking photos mixed with black-and-white TV footage, you definitely need to intercut with well-recorded, high-def color footage of this and that knowledgable, insightful authority.

The reason, obviously, is that you’ll want to occasionally free the viewer from the prison of fuzzy, shitty-looking stills and black-and-white TV footage, and you’ll also want to heighten the impact of your vocal observations as a way of adding intellectual intrigue and fighting the general monotony.

Eric Clapton, 72, during Sunday’s visit to the Toronto Film Festival to promote Lili Fini Zanuck’s Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars.

I’ve just walked out of a screening of Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars because the portion I saw (a) was almost all grainy, shitty-looking photos and black-and-white TV footage (it really needs a roster of well-lighted talking heads) and because (b) the cutting felt uninspired and inelegant and (c) I began to feel hugely irritated and then angry from the generally sloppy, substandard feel of it.

Granted, I only lasted from the beginning of Clapton’s guitar-playing career to the dawn of musical psychedelia, or from late ’63 to early ’67 (Yardbirds, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Cream). But Zanuck didn’t even touch upon the musical influence of pot and LSD and particularly the mystical-psychedelic consciousness that began to spread all through the music industry starting in late 1965, and which flourished in ’66, ’67 and beyond.

Cream wasn’t just another band for Clapton (or Jack Bruce or Ginger Baker) — it represented a whole spiritual changeover, a new way of living and seeing…everything top to bottom. To quickly transition from being a hard-core blues purist to a psychedelic pioneer was huge for a guy like Clapton, and yet the doc just cuts from shitty-looking black and white stills and footage of Clapton hanging and playing with Mayall and the gang to shitty-looking black and white film of Clapton, Bruce and Baker playing “I Feel Free,” which was among the strongest cuts from Fresh Cream.

All of a sudden I said to myself, “Fuck this movie…Zanuck and her producers and editors are just going through the motions, running footage, hanging wallpaper.” I suddenly needed to feel free, and so I got up and left.

I may catch the rest of Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars when it plays on Showtime. Maybe. If I feel like it. We’ll see how that goes.

Among the films I’ve seen but haven’t written about: Chappaquiddick (first-rate…saw this morning, review half-written), The Florida Project (excellent! Oscar-quality), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Frances McDormand acting honors, surprising story — more about forgiveness than revenge), Victoria and Abdul (Judi Dench definitely one of five Best Actress nominees), Disobedience (so well-made and full of feeling that I’m not even going to use the phrase ‘hot lesbo action,’ although it does have that), The Mountain Between Us (not bad but nowhere near Touching The Void…slowish, talky) and Battle of the Sexes (I tapped out a reaction or two during Telluride, but haven’t found time to write the requisite four or five graphs.

Plus I’m about to catch Lili Fini Zanuck‘s Eric Clapton:A Life in 12 Bars.

Films I’m looking to see: I, Tonya, Outside In, Sammy Davis: I Gotta Be Me, The Disaster Artist, The Death of Stalin.

I’m going to retire to the apartment tonight to catch up…the to-do list is just going to grow and grow.

The great Darren Aronofsky, director-writer of the controversial but essential mother! — Sunday, 9.10, 5:40 pm at Toronto Ritz Carlton.

A brief respite in a small neighborhood park, a block from HE headquarters at 74 Oxford Street.

Dan Gilroy‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq., which screened on late Sunday night at the Ryerson, is a whipsmart, cunningly performed, immensely satisfying film in so many ways. Such a skillful job of character-building on Gilroy’s part, layer upon layer and bit upon bit, and such a finely contoured performance by the great Denzel Washington.

My only hang-up is that I wanted a different ending. Not that Gilroy’s ending is “bad”, per se, but I didn’t agree with it. I didn’t want it. 

Otherwise this is such a brilliant, invigorating and fully believable film for over-30s — milieu-wise, legal minutiae-wise, Asperger’s-wise. It’s my idea of pound cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries…give it to me. You can take a terrific bath in this film and never feel unsatisfied that the story isn’t quite delivering the way you want it to.

Until the last 25 or 30 minutes, that is, but even then it’s not a fatal problem, just an air-escaping-the-balloon one.

Alas, I have to awaken at 6:30 am for an 8:30 am screening of Chappaquiddick, which I hear is quite good, and it’s 1:28 am now.

7:01 am update: Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman agrees with me — a wonderfully detailed Gilroy character, superb Washington acting but with a less-than-satisfying third act:

“The way Roman J. Israel, Esq. is set up, the film should be building to a moral-legal confrontation that tests everyone involved. Instead, it’s content to be a character study; but the audience, after a while, may not be so content.

“Roman gets assigned to the case of a young man (Niles Fitch) accused of murder (he tagged along when his buddy killed a convenience-store clerk). After a while, Roman goes through with an action that seems, in movie terms, to be justified: He turns the identity of the killer over to the victim’s relatives, gathering a private reward of $100,000. Legally, it’s a dicey thing to do, but no one innocent has gotten hurt, and Roman uses the money to put himself through a transformation that feels good.

“He buys real suits. He rents a fabulous apartment. He brushes back his hair. He scarfs honey-and-turkey-bacon donuts. He goes on a date with Maya (Carmen Ejogo), who runs a non-profit and, in her small way, is carrying on the dream of Roman’s formative era. The audience surveys all of this and approves, because Roman J. Israel, Esq. looks like a guy who could use a break.

“But the reward money comes back to haunt him. And that seems, in the end, a little facile. The movie turns into a war of signifiers, an archetypal L.A. battle pitched between going-for-the-bucks and holding-on-to-your-values. We’ve seen that battle before, a few too many times, and Roman J. Israel, Esq. doesn’t play it out in a particularly satisfying way. It leaves us with a character you won’t soon forget, but you wish that the movie were as haunting as he is.”

A chat with Darren Aronofsky at 5:30 pm, a Roy Thomson Hall showing of The Mountains Between Us at 6:30 and then a 9 pm screening of Dan Gilroy and Denzel Wahington‘s Roman J. Israel at 9 pm, which of course won’t start until 9:25 or 9:30 pm, if that.

Everyone’s seen it by now, so please have at it. Please understand that if you say you really liked it, you’ll automatically be defining yourself as an unsophsticated, popcorn-inhaling boob…no offense.  We’re all friends here.

Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! is about the madness, the mob, the awfulness, the vulgarity, the end, the abominations, Dr. Phil, the poison, the ego monsters and rampant obscenities and tables of half-drunk 20something girls wailing with laughter in bars…it’s about every unfortunate social horror of the 21st Century, manifested in an obviously allegorical form. 

This is definitely a Hollywood Elsewhere kind of horror film, or one that’s about much more than chills and shivers. Just as making people laugh is the lowest form of humor, simply trying to scare people is the lowest form of horror.

It doesn’t matter if you think the mother! effects are super-cool or run-of-the-mill. It doesn’t matter if the octagonal Victorian home that Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence are living in has a garage or a driveway. Because it’s not about the home or even the characters, but the world beyond and the realm within.

Anyone who sees mother! and concludes that Aronofsky is some kind of cold manipulator without a conscience or humanistic concerns…well, they’re not paying attention. His latest (which by my yardstick is easily one of his best, or certainly at par with Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream) is as valid and pungent a piece of social criticism as Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (which was about…what, the erosion of moral values and the waning influence of Christianity in the early to mid ’60s?) and Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (the self-loathing and lack of values among the bourgeois elite).

mother! is about…well, social rot and corrosion and the neurotic hunger for fame, about marriage and trust and social apocalypse, and possibly even Aronofsky’s past failings or shortcomings as a husband…who knows? It’s certainly about the fact that marriage to an intense creative guy can have its occasional rough spots.

It’s definitely a movie for upscale, review-reading, smarthouse audiences. It’s not aimed at your typical horror crowd. It’s an art film that uses the trappings of horror to make its points. Somebody (Aronofsky?) said after the Venice Film Festival screening it’s an allegory about global pollution and climate change. Okay, that works, but it’s not what I saw. 

For me, mother! may be the single most profound explanation or dramatization of the saying that “hell is other people.” It was to be seen and wrestled with. Especially if you’re married or living together.

Thomas Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (Weinstein, 11.24) is an eccentric, visually unconventional period drama — that much is certain. 

The movie is basically an AC/DC thing — the battle between direct vs. alternating currents of electricity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, or a stab at creating compelling drama out of a battle of opposing modes and strategies for providing electricity to the public. 

This in itself, especially in an era of increasingly downscale if not submental approaches to mass entertainment, is highly eccentric. But the tone of inspirational strangeness doesn’t end there.

The DC team was led by genius inventor Thomas A. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) while the AC approach was steamrolled by engineer-businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) with a late-inning assist from genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).

This is fine as far as histrionic line readings, personality conflicts and eccentric facial-hair appearances are concerned, but an especially striking visual style from South Korean dp Chung Hoon-Chung (It, The Handmaiden, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) compounds the fascination.

In an attempt to reflect the unusual, headstrong mentalities of Edison and Westinghouse, Gomez-Rejon and Chung have gone with a kind of early ’60s Cinerama approach to visual composition — widescreen images, wide-angle lenses and a frequent decision to avoid conventional close-ups and medium shots in favor of what has to be called striking if not bizarre avant-garde framings in which the actors are presented as smallish figures against dynamically broad images and vast painterly landscapes.

The look of The Current War, in short, closely resembles the extreme wide-angle compositions in 1962’s How The West Was Won.

This visual signature will constitute a huge draw for cinema dweebs, who will no doubt celebrate the audacious yesteryear novelty of such an approach, but average popcorn viewers are probably going to feel a tad confused and disoriented as they try to process what boils down to an experimental arthouse way of shooting a movie, and a curious historical biopic at that.

Gomez-Rejon and Chung deserve approval for choosing a highly unusual method of telling a story that — be honest — your average American moron is going to have very little interest in to begin with.

I can’t honestly say that the screenplay, penned by 34 year-old Michael Mitnick, really sang for me. It struck me as overly 21st Century in its adherence to certain colloquial signatures and attitudes, but at least it’s a dutiful, reasonably literate stab at an ornate subject that doesn’t exactly lend itself to dramatic convention.

I for one was excited and intrigued all through The Current War, but at the same time I was telling myself “this is great, fascinating stuff but it’s not gonna make a dime.” Cheers nonetheless to everyone involved, including distributor Harvey Weinstein, who needs a hit at this stage.

I really wish I had time to get into this more, but Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is screening at 9 am, and it’s now 7:57 am. And right after that is a screening of Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. I’ll wade into this a bit more during the early and mid-afternoon hours.

If you want to dance through the saga of what history has generally referred to as “the war of currents”, here’s a Wiki page summary.

I’ve been hearing good things about Martin McDonaugh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, 11.10) since a West Los Angeles research screening 11 months ago. I’ll finally be seeing it tomorrow morning at 11 am at the Scotiabank plex. Today’s rundown: Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool at 2:15 pm, followed by The Mountain Between Us at 4:45 pm, and then some filing. Then a Sony Classics sit-down dinner at 7:30 pm, followed by a 9:30 pm screening of The Current War at the Princess of Wales.

I’m a lifelong sucker for grilled cheese sandwiches, but they have to be slim and tidy. A thin slice of mozzarrella and cheese on buttered toasted rye…yes! So it doesn’t make sense that I would order a sloppy, overstuffed grilled cheese sandwich with all kinds of sauce and chopped tomato and melted gag-all spilling all over the place when you bite into it, but that’s what happened yesterday when I popped into the Meltwich on Richmond.

A woman sitting nearby was staring at me as I struggled with all the gooey crap spilling out of the sandwich as I took my first couple of bites. I could tell from her expression that she despised my lack of couth and table manners. “Hey, lady…you try eating one of these damn things and see how well you do…you can’t, trust me, without looking like some kind of greasy drooling pig.”

I will never again order an overstuffed grilled cheese sandwich. Yo, Meltwich? We’re done. Why would you make sandwiches that bring disrepute upon your customers? That compromise their dignity in front of strangers? Do you think it’s cool or sexy to have gooey globs of cheese and chopped tomatoes and whatnot falling onto your paper plate and your shirtfront and even the floor? I don’t want to even think about your grotesque concoctions from this point on.

Craig Gillespie‘s I, Tonya, a drama about the notorious figure-skating sociopath Tonya Harding (played by Margot Robbie), was press-screened this morning at 8:45 am. A friend reports as follows: “A fairly straightforward re-dramatization of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan figure-skating fiasco. It portrays Harding as typical white trash surrounded by more white trash. Doesn’t necessarily paint her as crooked or mean — just naive, indifferent and completely aloof about the whole situation. Robbie’s performance great, Gillespie’s direction solid but [this is nonetheless] conventional filmmaking.”

Three weeks ago I was invited to see Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, a 98-minute doc about Scotty Bowers, the amiable, formerly unsung go-between who wrote about servicing Hollywood’s gay and bisexual community during the ’40s, ’50s and beyond in a five-year-old memoir called “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.”

Tyrnauer’s film will screen tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, which means I can finally…hold on…the embargo notice says I can’t review it until 11:59 pm this evening. Okay, so I won’t. But I will share what I came to believe during the watching of it, which is that Bowers, whose tell-all book has been challenged and mocked and who’s been described here and there as an unreliable bullshitter, isn’t lying about anything.

For most of Tyrnauer’s surprisingly intimate, low-key, non-gossipy film is about old Scotty — a 90something, white-haired pack rat who owns two or three homes in the Hollywood hills and lives with a good-natured, seen-and-heard-it-all wife who loves him — and only intermittently about the mostly gay and bi movie stars and celebrities (Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Noël Coward, James Dean) who regarded Scotty as a trusted pimp and pleasure-giver who could and did set them up with same-sex lovers.

After studying Bowers for 98 minutes and listening to him talk about how terrifying things were for gay and bi actors in the intensely homophobic ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and considering the affection he has for his old gay friends and the strong feelings and immense respect they have for him…after the film is over you’ll probably be convinced, as I was, that Scotty is no bullshitter.

It follows that a high percentage of his recollections about the private sexual lives of movie stars are most likely true. I found this an inescapable conclusion. Just as your gut tells you that Donald Trump is one of the worst bullshitters in the history of western civilization, you can just sense that old Scotty is a straight-shooter. Okay, maybe he’s hazy on a few historical details but the man is 94, for God’s sake. Cut him a little slack.

I have not reviewed Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, but I’m telling you that Scotty Bowers is a man of apparent honor. Read this 3.19.12 profile of Bowers by L.A. Weekly‘s Paul Teetor, and then see Tyrnauer’s film, and then read “Full Service” and tell me I’m wrong. I don’t think I am. I really don’t.

I’ve posted four previous pieces about Scott, the book and Tyrnauer’s film — here they are.