Adam McKay‘s The Big Short (Paramount, 12.11) screens tonight at AFI Fest — a big moment for Paramount and potentially an even bigger moment for presumed Best Actor contender Steve Carell…maybe. But this featurette is a little too generic, and I’m not sure what I feel about a director who always wears a scarf, which to me is like a director in the ’50s or ’60s wearing a beret and an ascot. If you ask me Paramount should have put out a featurette that answers The Big Adam McKay Question, to wit: how did a comedy director whose whole career since the turn of the century has been more or less about directing or producing low-rent Will Ferrell movies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, Land of the Lost, The Campaign, Casa De Mi Padre, Get Hard) suddenly spins around and directs an allegedly smart, fully-grounded drama (dramedy?) about the collapse of the American economy? Due credit and huzzahs if The Big Short turns out to be as good as some are claiming, but how did McKay’s transition suddenly come about? McKay to Paramount: “Hey, I know I’ve been making comedies for popcorn-munchers for the last 12 or 13 years but I’d like to upgrade my stock by directing something a little sharper and darker and more real-world adult…okay?”

A ton of movie sites have posted stories about their all-time favorite opening sequences over the last several years, and a lot of their choices are bullshit. The “authors” of these pieces don’t seem very thoughtful or perceptive — they mainly want you to click on 10 or 25 or 50 pages. There are two kinds of opening sequences that can be called great or highly memorable — one, the kind that put the primal hook in by whatever means and prompt you to say “Wow, I want to see the rest of this!” but don’t necessarily tell you much about the story to come, and two, the kind that do deliver key information about the story to come and/or the character who will be at the center of things.

A fine example of the first kind (“No clue what this is about but the footage and the vibe feel cool!”) is the George Gershwin-scored opening of Woody Allen‘s Manhattan (’79). It tells you two things about Allen’s lead character, Isaac Davis, which is (a) he’s head-over-heels in love with Manhattan (i.e., the film was shot before way, way before Brooklyn existed as a hipster habitat), and (b) that he’s a writer working on a book. That’s all it tells you, but it so wins you over that it’s like “forget it, I’m watching this movie to the end.”

A great example of the second kind is the music-free opening credit sequence in Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (’82). (Which I can’t find a clip for.) It’s basically a long, slow dolly-in of a gray-haired Paul Newman playing pinball in a low-lit bar somewhere, sipping whiskey from a shot glass, daylight outside. Right away you know he’s a guy with a problem or two and that difficult trials await. Another sterling example is the opening scene in The Godfather — tells you everything about who Don Corleone is, what the Corleone family is about, how it works, what the terms are plus the old-time gangster milieu. You’re fully informed by the time the scene ends, and totally hooked.

The best comedies are not the “funniest” but the ones that make you laugh and pluck your heartstrings. I know that sounds sappy but it’s true. Exceptional comedies always touch bottom on some level by saying something true and lasting about the need for love and soul food, and by adhering to the rules or at least the attitude of good, well-written relationship dramas. You could say, in fact, that comedies that are just out to be “funny” are arguably the least impressive. Remember the words of the immortal Michael O’Donoghue: “Simply making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.”

The Writers Guild has officially voted Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman’s Annie Hall (’77) as the “funniest” screenplay of all time. How does that sit?

I love Annie Hall because it deals with real-deal neuroticism and urban-smart-people issues all the time, and so I have no problem with it winning. But calling it the “funniest” doesn’t sound right. Like the WGA’s the second- and third-place finishers Some Like It Hot and Groundhog Day, Annie Hall is a funny but wise film that deals with the altogether.  And because it reminds every viewer that life is often miserable and is over much too quickly, and that we keep getting bruised in relationship after relationship because we “need the eggs.”

My fourth-place finisher is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Peter George and Terry Southern.

My fifth-place choice is Young Frankenstein (’74) — screenplay by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, story by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks, based on Characters in the novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. “Blucher!”

Nobody will ever accuse me of jumping the gun on 45 Years. I finally saw it (well, most of it) a couple of weeks ago during the Savannah Film Festival, and while I wasn’t entirely blown away by Andrew Haigh‘s film, I was seriously impressed by Charlotte Rampling‘s performance. It started to hit me about…oh, one-third of the way through, certainly by the halfway mark. “Wow,” I murmured without moving my lips or making a sound. “She’s really doing something here with the most delicate of brushstrokes, and it’s building into something greater than the parts.”

I’m only about the 345th critic/columnist/journo to say this, but that’s why they pay me the big bucks…to be 345th in line! And then I was sitting in the front row of the Aero theatre last night and watching sexy, slender Charlotte with her sly, knowing smile and those slim gams and shiny black pumps as she was interviewed by Pete Hammond, and I was thinking “Yeah, I’d also like to be her trampoline…”

45 Years is not my idea of a knockout relationship drama (i.e., everyone cheats, harbors secrets, is less loyal than you’d like them to be), but it does seep into the system like ice water and give you the gradual chills. So maybe it is a knockout relationship drama and I’m just slow to understand that.

Inhabiting the soul of a good woman who comes to realize, 45 years into her marriage, that her husband (played by the doddering, paunchy, white-haired Tom Courtenay)…God, what to make of him?…is more of a shit than she realized and even possibly a kind of monster, Rampling never projects just one thing. At any given moment she’s conveying at least two if not three thoughts or conflicting feelings. Rampling flickers like a candle, like an anxious deer contemplating a pair of not-yet-glimpsed headlights, like a woman starting to consider the horrid possibility that her entire married existence has been…well, not exactly fraudulent but a good deal less and certainly far from glorious.

You have to wait roughly 23 minutes before Michael Moore starts talking about how the country has changed (“81.5% of the country is either female, people of color or young people between 18 and 35…and the remaining 18.5% — conservative white men over the age of 35, the conservative base — is not the country any more”) and — finally — Where To Invade Next. And David Poland doesn’t do the bee-bee-beedle-bee-bee-bee-bup-duh-bee-bee thing too much either. And the conversation is fun, spirited, good-natured.

In my 9.11.15 review of Michael Moore‘s Where To Invade Next I called it “an amusing, alpha-wavey but factual love letter to the kind of European Democratic socialism that Bernie Sanders has been espousing for years. And it’s funny and illuminating and engaging in an alpha, up-with-people sense. It’s basically an argument in favor of ‘we’ values and policies over the ‘me and mine’ theology that lies of the heart of the American dream.”

Prior to my second viewing of Moore’s film, which happened a week ago at West Hollywood’s Sundance Cinemas, Moore stood up and acknowledged that some portions of Where To Invade Next are going to prompt people to say “no way,” and that he expects conservatives to claim that it presents a slanted view of things. So he urged the audience to check out a forthcoming fact sheet on his website that will help them argue with their conservative friends. 

Except the sheet won’t be posted until sometime in December so I badgered marketing consultant Ryan Werner into giving me an advance look at a few rough portions of it. Ryan sent them along last Sunday. Hang on to the URL for this piece until the film comes out.

I hate it when people take forever to snap selfies. I can hold a smile for maybe two or three seconds, four at the outside. A smile isn’t made of chiselled wood — it’s a living, breathing, momentary thing that glows briefly and then fades, and if you can’t respect and work around that simple fact then fuck off. Because there’s nothing worse trying to hold a smile when you’ve got rigor mortis of the lips. When you see a celebrity coming and you want to take a picture, you need to set the camera app for reverse mode so it’s aimed at the selfie-posers, and then you hit the button in rapid succession…bang-bang-bang-bang. If you’re not a total moron the process is over in four or five seconds, tops. I was watching poor Jane Fonda pose with some locals in Santa Barbara three or four weeks ago, and the guy was holding the camera up and going “okay…just a second!…getting there…hold on!” and I heard Fonda say something along the lines of “any minute now!” Inwardly she seemed to be saying to herself “God, my lips are about to fall off!…what is this guy’s malfunction?”

Will Smith and the fans last night on Hollywood Boulevard prior to the AFI Fest screening of Concussion at the TCL Chinese./

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg is reaching when he claims that last night’s Concussion screening confirmed that Will Smith‘s performance as real-life NFL whistleblower Dr. Bennet Omalu is a serious Best Actor threat. Smith delivers a better-than-decent performance, nicely augmented by what sounded to my white-ass ears like a believable Nigerian accent, but at best he’s a mild Best Actor threat. If he gets nominated, fine…but the film won’t bounce him into contention. Smith will need “sell it” on his own. Can he? Does he care to?

Peter Landesman‘s NFL-related drama is smart and credible in many respects, but also inconclusive as one is left wondering two things at the conclusion: (a) why doesn’t Omalu accept a prestigious and influential Washington, D.C. job that he’s offered at the finale, as his revelations about CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) result in his being threatened and marginalized during the whole film, and so the D.C. job would refute all that while affirming his cultural standing, which the audience would take comfort in, and (b) what can be done to prevent football players from being afflicted by CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) short of quitting the game? No one in the film ever talks solutions — just the importance of getting the NFL to admit the problem exists.

The bottom line is that Concussion is interesting and well-ordered and nothing if not earnest, but it’s a little bit shy of riveting. The most it can hope for is to make a pile of dough. Award-season contention is out, trust me. In large part, I feel, because of James Newton Howard‘s overbearing score, which isn’t just bad but Amistad-bad.

My name is Billy Pilgrim, and I’ve become unstuck in time. I was just reading Anthony Breznican‘s EW interview with Harrison Ford about Han Solo, The Force Awakens, that golf-course plane crash, etc. Ten minutes later I was told that a Bluray of Peter Weir‘s Witness, in which Ford gave his first lead performance that really landed, will arrive on Thursday or Friday after a long delay. And then right after that I was reminded of Bernard Girard‘s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go Round (’66), in which Ford had his first speaking part, on 12.15. And then I went back to EW and noticed that Carrie Fisher has suddenly slimmed down (serious HE respect) and no longer looks like Elton John.

I had my second viewing last night of Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.18). The previous time was in Cannes seven months ago, but it packed the same punch. I noticed an hour ago that Sony Pictures Classics has no teaser or trailer up, and it seems that there should be. Some kind of acknowledgement that a major Holocaust flick is coming down the pike in January that will qualify in December and that, you know, it’s absolutely essential to deal with it.

Shot entirely in close-ups (and occasional medium close-ups), Son of Saul is a Hungarian-made, soul-drilling, boxy-framed art film about an all-but-mute fellow (Geza Rohrig) with a haunted, obliterated expression. This titular-named survivor — a walking dead man, a kind of ghost — toils in an Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp as a Sonderkommando — i.e., prisoners who assisted the Germans in exterminating their fellow inmates in order to buy themselves time.

I’ve noted before that I found Saul devastating. “No day at the beach but one of the most searing and penetrating Holocaust films I’ve ever seen,” I wrote on 5.14.15, “and that’s obviously saying something.”

From Shia LeBeouf we expect more than eccentricity — we expect behavior that challenges conventional notions of, like, sane or sensible. We expect intensity and vulnerability. We expect tears, drunkenness, car accidents, a fine madness, paper bags, etc. We expect to see LeBeouf teetering on the precipice of a sheer cliff in a rainstorm. So I’m not sure that allowing people to watch him as he watches all his movies in reverse chronological order is nutty enough. On top of which LeBeouf has seemed sane, calm and good-humored as he’s watched Nymphomaniac, Part 1. So…why? What’s the point of boring people? I want LeBeouf to get naked, paint himself like an Amazonian native, go up to the Empire State building’s observation deck and jump off with a parachute and then shoot colored flares in the air as he floats down to 34th Street and reads poetry into a bullhorn. The AllMyMovies performance-art piece will unspool on a 24-hour basis and will last until sometime on Thursday. It’s happening live at Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston Street. Anyone can drop by. Admission is free.