Richard Brody’s roster of the 30 Best Films of 2015 is, of course, a partial joke. How else to describe a list that completely ignores The Revenant and Love & Mercy but includes Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man (a so-so film that was certainly thrown off balance if not poisoned by the sight of Joaquin Pheonix‘s enormous pot belly), Andrew Bujalski‘s mildly engaging-but-nothing-to-write-home-about Results and Angelina Jolie‘s By The Sea (which isn’t half bad in a certain light but which hardly belongs on anyone’s best-of-the-year list…c’mon), and which gives a last-place slot to the terminally awful Fifty Shades of Grey. I could assemble a list like this if I wanted to, just to fuck with people’s heads. Then again what can you expect from a guy who seems to genuinely believe that Alfred Hitchcock‘s Marnie is an under-appreciated masterpiece?

As I haven’t seen (and am in no hurry to see) Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, I have no comment about New Yorker columnist Richard Brody calling it his #1 film of 2015.

Bryan Singer‘s X-Men: Apocalypse (5.16.16) is first and foremost about everyone cashing big checks and investing wisely and buying second homes — Singer, the cast, the producers, 20th Century Fox. Everyone wants to live in Fat City. It’s secondarily about Apocalypse, the most malicious and malignant of mutants who awakes after hibernating for eons, is instantly pissed at the world he finds and “recruits a team of powerful mutants to cleanse humanity and create a new world order,” blah blah. You’d never know it but the bull-necked Apocalypse is played by Oscar Isaac. My first thought when I watched this trailer was “hey, Apocalypse looks like that big, bald, white-skinned Mr. Clean guy in Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus.” Right?

Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse.

Mr. Clean monster in Prometheus.

Film purists are always saying that projected celluloid delivers black levels that are far superior to digital…right? Well, perhaps this has changed. In an interview with Indiewire‘s Bill Desowitz, dp Emmanuel Lubezski, who shot The Revenant with an Alexa 65 digital camera, says the combination of this technology with Dolby laser projection is “very exciting” because “the DCP for Dolby laser is the first time in the history of film that directors and cinematographers can project pitch black. I like IMAX laser projection too. I find it immersive but a bit more assaultive on the senses.”

Lubezki seems to be saying (and please correct me if I’m wrong) that images captured on the Alexa 65 and projected via Dolby laser are now equal to the best black levels that can be achieved with film. If that’s what he’s saying, this is highly significant as it means that down the road (i.e., sooner rather than late) film purists will never be able to dismiss digital cinematography again for having weak black levels. I’m waiting for the day when these black-level snobs will be shut down for good.

On 11.26 I got an emailed invitation to the big, fat, three-venue Hollywood premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Monday, 12.14. I rsvp’ed immediately. And yet here it is Friday, 12.11 and I still haven’t been told which Hollywood Blvd. theatre I’ll be seeing it in — the Dolby, Chinese or El Capitan. Actually no one had been given the details as of this morning, a Disney rep told me, but the particulars will be mailed later today. A premiere is always a restricted, exclusive event for, as Peter Ustinov would say, “ladies and gentlemen of quality, those who appreciate a fine kill.” It goes without saying that anyone who rates an invite isn’t going to…I was going to say no invitee would want to feed restricted info to Star Wars fan base loonies but maybe not. This is the first time a premiere-inviter has played things this close to the vest.

BEST PICTURE: 1. Spotlight; 2. The Revenant; 3. Love & Mercy; 4. Mad Max: Fury Road; 5. Carol.
BEST ACTOR: 1. Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant, 2. John Cusack, Love & Mercy, 3. Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs (even though I didn’t like his company).
BEST ACTRESS: 1. Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years; 2. Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn; 3. Rooney Mara, Carol.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: 1. Paul Dano, Love & Mercy; 2. Michael Shannon, 99 Homes; 3. Sylvester Stallone, Creed.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: 1. Jane Fonda, Youth; 2. Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl; 3. Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs (even though she bothered me).
BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS: 1. Jacob Tremblay, Room; 2. Whatsername, the little girl in Joy; 3. Any suggestions?
BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE: 1. Spotlight; 2. The Revenant; 3. Youth.
BEST DIRECTING: 1. Alejandro G. Inarritu, The Revenant; 2. Tom McCarthy, Spotlight; 3. George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road.
BEST SCREENWRITING (Original): 1. Spotlight; 2. Trainwreck; 3. Inside Out.
BEST SCREENWRITING (Adapted): 1. Carol; 2. Brooklyn; 3. The Big Short.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: 1. The Revenant; 2. Mad Max: Fury Road; 3. Carol.

I remember the derisive chortles during an early press screening of John Derek‘s Tarzan, The Ape Man (’81). I presume that the idea behind the making of David Yates‘ The Legend of Tarzan (Warner Bros. 7.1.16) was to take things in a semi-classy direction a la Hugh Hudson‘s Greystoke (’84). My nose, alas, is smelling a dogshit programmer. The CG is obviously excessive if not ludicrous. Any movie in which the hero swan dives off a high cliff or building is automatically problematic. Why would Alexander Skarsgaard and Margot Robbie costar in this thing? You know that a movie is ahead of the curve when it casts Christoph Waltz as the villain…right?

Yesterday I received a Revenant promotion in the form of an old, dusty-feeling book containing aged parchment, a somewhat florid poem/narrative written by director Alejandro G. Inarritu, black-and-white photographs along with simulated 19th Century daguerrotypes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Forrest Goodluck and one other. The book is titled ‘THE REVENANT — a poem on the subject of HUGH GLASS as translated for a study in pictures by ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU.” The feeling of this thing…delicate in the way of decades-old books and documents with the worn binding and all…even the smell of it…a truly impressive artifact that must’ve taken many, many weeks if not months to assemble.

Since succumbing to Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s Revenant score I’ve been asking the powers that be for an mp3 excerpt or two. I’ve been explaining that people need to hear how sad and strikingly solemn Sakamoto’s anthem is, particularly for its simplicity as it pretty much boils down to six or seven notes. Those bassy symphonic strings have melted me down twice now, as I wrote on 12.4. But the soundtrack guys have been saying no to the excerpts — wait until the album is digitally released by Milan Records on 12.25. So I recorded a portion off the Revenant screener that arrived yesterday. Here it is. Definitely from the same guy who composed the Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence theme.

It hit me yesterday afternoon that I’d forgotten to write a review of Ron Howard‘s mostly mediocre In The Heart of the Sea (Warner Bros., 12.11). So I tried to bang something out but it wouldn’t come. I just tried again an hour ago, but I don’t give enough of a shit. (Writing about something you care about is fairly easy or at least not too difficult, but when you don’t care it’s always a slog.) Sea is basically a primitive B-level adventure saga that indulges in tired popcorn cliches. And it has only sporadic interest in the real-deal particulars of the notorious Essex tragedy, which not only inspired Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” but which are more interesting than the film’s simple-dick tale.

The Essex disaster was described in first-person accounts by Essex cabin boy Thomas Nickerson (whose 1876 book, “The Loss of The Ship Essex — Sunk By A Whale — and The Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats,” didn’t publish until 1984 due to the manuscript being lost until 1960) and first mate Owen Chase, who wrote a book about the Essex disaster only months after returning to Nantucket (“Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex“) and saw it published in 1821.

It was Chase’s book that inspired Melville to write “Moby Dick” and not, as Charles Leavitt‘s screenplay imagines it, as a result of Melville (Ben Whishaw) interviewing a reluctant and hostile Nicholson (Brendan Gleeson) about the incident. The screenplay makes no mention whatsoever of the Chase account, and it tells us that the absurdly over-sized whale that sank the Essex stalked and tormented the survivors in lifeboats for weeks after the sinking, which is ridiculous bullshit. 

There are shards and sometimes larger portions of truth in Howard’s film, but it lies and omits and often seems to fantasize or otherwise dumb things down. You stop trusting it early on.

I was in a Pacific Palisades shoe store yesterday around dinner hour, and something clicked when I happened to notice a pair of pink shoe laces. Millenials and GenXers will never give a shit but way back in the Paleolithic era there was a mildly popular song called “Tan Shoes and Pink Shoe Laces,” and last night it suddenly hit me that I have a pair of tan shoes and that this was the moment. And speaking of old songs, here’s how the first line of Elton John‘s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” has always sounded to me: “I can’t lie no more aubrey dog mehhh.” (Actual line: “I can’t light no more of your darkness.”)

When’s the last time a sequence in a Woody Allen film left the planet and created its own orbit? The Purple Rose of Cairo? When’s the last time an Allen delved into any kind of pointed political satire?