Nobody fully respects a guy who, when faced with a momentous career decision, ponders and frets and dithers and says “I don’t know if I’m ready,” etc. I don’t care what tragedy has befallen you or how gut-punched you feel. A person wanting to be president has to have the stomach to push through all that and do the hard thing regardless. In the end Joe Biden‘s Irish-heartbreak emotions won out, and on a personal level that’s fine. But if he had decided to run, people would be wondering “what if Joe’s going through a difficult emotional time when the next major crisis hits? Does he have the steel for this job?”

The apparently troubled Jane Got A Gun will open in the U.S. next February. Two and two-thirds years ago (mid-March of 2013) director Lynn Ramsey quit the film and was quickly replaced by Gavin O’Connor (Warrior, Pride and Glory, Miracle). O’Connor is a good director but the vibes aren’t right. Wiki boilerplate: Pic was set to be distributed in the U.S. by Relativity Media on 8.29.14, but then Relativity cancelled that on 4.10.14, switching the opening to a 2.20.15 release, which was then shifted to 9.4.15. And then Relativity sold the film to the Weinstein Co. amid their filing for bankruptcy. Pic opens in France on 11.25.

On top of which there’s my Joel Edgerton problem — i.e., whatever he’s in, I’ve learned that I probably won’t like it. The last full-bore Edgerton performance I’ve been down with was in Animal Kingdom. (He was fine in Zero Dark Thirty but that was barely more than a muscle cameo.) I didn’t like him in Black Mass or The Gift. I didn’t like him as Ramses in Exodus: Gods and Kings or as Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. He’s marginally more tolerable than Ben Mendelsohn but that’s not saying much.

Jane Got A Gun is basically Edgerton and Natalie Portman up against a passel of bad guys, including Ewan McGregor.

Nobody bats .1000 but when’s the last time a Bill Murray flick tallied more than 90% negative?

Yup, that’s right — not a single mention of the Miracle Mop. This is so not a Miracle Mop movie. Running its own game, walking in the rain. And clearly not in it for the laughs. Speaking as a small business owner I know all about JLaw’s tough-it-out, stand-up-for-yourself attitude, and as much as I hate to say this I’m presuming the film will strike a chord with conservatives…right? David O. Russell takes no prisoners. That said, I don’t know what to expect any more. Well, I do and I don’t. I know that Joy test-screened last night at the Pasadena Arclight, and that one attendee (said to be an acute contrarian) has called it “a mess.” HE to Acute Contrarian: Shut up. More to the point, are you actually saying it doesn’t do the usual this-happens-and-then-that-happens “everything’s gonna be okay” backrub thing with a red ribbon tied in a bow? Maybe the Pasadena version was different than the one that screened in Manhattan Beach? My mind is flying back to that tweet about three editors having taken a whack at it. There’s nothing wrong with tossing lettuce leaves, re-scrambling the eggs, searching for clear light.

From HE 9.5 review, posted from Telluride: “Carey Mulligan, looking appropriately hangdog for the most part, handles every line and scene like a master violinist. She’s always been my idea of a great beauty, but when she chooses to go there she has one of the saddest faces in movies right now. And I don’t mean gloomy. The strain, stress and suppressed rage of Maud’s life are legible in every look, line and gesture. Mulligan is fairly young (she just turned 30 last May) but she’s a natural old-soul type who conveys not just what Maud (a fictitious everywoman) is dealing with but the trials of 100,000 women before her, and without anything that looks like overt acting. All actors ‘sell it,’ of course, but the gifted ones make the wheel-turns and gear-shifts seem all but invisible.”

Suffragette director Sarah Gavron following Tuesday night’s premiere screening at Samuel Goldwyn Theatre.

Suffragette dp Edu Grau (r.), dp Svetlana Cvetko (Red Army, Inequality For All, Inside Job).

Jerry Lewis‘s The Errand Boy (Le Zinzin d’Hollywood) was reviewed in the “Notes on other films” section in the March 1963 issue of Cahiers du Cinema by Bertrand Tavernier: “After having proven with The Ladies Man that he as well capable as each and everyone and better than anyone at directing an authentic burlesque-surrealistic masterpiece, Jerry Lewis returns with The Errand Boy to his first love: the conversion of an absurd scenario into a succession of gags without any logical sequence, a principle which he carried out in The Bellboy.” The Cahiers critics on the conseil des dix gave The Errand Boy three stars — François Weyergans, 2 stars — Jacques Rivette and André S. Labarthe while Eric Rohmer abstained. The Errand Boy was cited as one of the 10 Best Films of the year by Tavernier.

I somehow got past my Anomalisa blockage last night. My basic Telluride response was to call it “another downhead visit to Charlie Kaufmanland” — an emotional reaction to the melancholy, flirting-with-self-loathing worldview that you always get with any Kaufman-penned film. But last night’s screening at the London West Hollywood opened a couple of new doors and closed one in particular. The morose element didn’t bother me as much as I knew exactly what to expect so those feelings more or less left the room. And I paid much more attention to the painstaking craft that went into the making of this adult-level, stop-motion character drama, which required three full years (all of ’12, ’13 and ’14) as the average daily capturing was around 48 frames or two seconds. Plus I enjoyed listening to Kaufman, co-director Duke Johnson and producer Rosa Tan during the post-screening discussion. And fourthly, I began to appreciate Anomalisa more fully as a potential Best Animated Feature contender. What a landmark it would be if an animated film that eschews the usual family-friendly blah-blah wins the Oscar in this realm? A hand-made animated film about flawed, lonely, uncertain adults coping with real-world ennui and depression — the tyranny of peppy, sparkly CG-animated films would be temporarily overthrown at least once. I was also struck by the smallish size of the lead character puppets (i.e., Michael Stone and Lisa, who are voiced by David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh). The models in Wes Anderson‘s Fantastic Mr. Fox were twice as tall. By the way: Tan told me that an Anomalisa trailer will pop in about two weeks.

Little “Michael Stone” and “Lisa” shown to last night’s audience at the London West Hollywood. Maybe…what, ten inches? Less than a foot tall, I’d say.

Screenwriter/co-director Charlie Kaufman (second from right); co-director Duke Johnson (far right). The T-shirted bearded guy to Kaufman’s right was the interviewer — probably some journalist.

Fantastic Mr. Fox costar Meryl Streep, director Wes Anderson.

I have three…uhm, concerns about Mike Fleming‘s Deadline story, posted earlier today, about an intention by producers Beau Flynn and Basil Iwanyk to produce Mayday 109, a retelling of the famous story of Lt. John F. Kennedy‘s World War II adventure when his PT boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer and the ordeal that followed. Samuel Franco and Evan Kilgore‘s script reportedly tells the “true” story of what happened. Obviously the casting of the lead role will be crucial. For whatever reason Fleming chooses not to mention PT 109, the stodgy, overlong and obviously sanitized Warner Bros. film about the incident. Released in June 1963, it wasn’t well reviewed (JFK called it a “good product” but worried about the 140-minute length) and it didn’t make much money — basically a tank. Nor does Fleming ask what kind of “true” material the new version will have that will distinguish it from the Cliff Robertson version. And if I was a keeper of the PT 109 flame, I would be seriously worried about any re-telling co-produced by Flynn, whose San Andreas was a ludicrous CG cartoon. Iwanyk, producer of Sicario, reps a more respectable brand. Here’s Paul Mavis’s DVD Talk review of PT 109 is streaming in high-def on Amazon…odd.

Variety‘s Tim Gray is reporting that Chris Rock “is in serious talks” to host the 88th Academy Awards. “An official announcement [is] expected shortly,” Gray adds. Rock is funny but he flubbed the gig ten years ago…right? That was my clear impression. Hell, everyone’s. Those Jude Law jokes! No matter. Oscar co-producer Reginald Hudlin has worked with Rock before (he directed the pilot of Everybody Hates Chris) and it’s possible that decade-older Rock has learned a few things about what doesn’t work at the Oscars so maybe.

From a 2.21.15 Indiewire piece called “5 Terrible Oscar Hosts (and Their Worst Jokes),” by David Canfield:

“Chris Rock’s material as Oscar host wasn’t inherently terrible, [but] here was a case where the talent just didn’t fit the crowd. From the moment Rock made it onstage, he was rushing through his material, skipping over pauses for laughter and applause whenever he sensed a joke wasn’t landing. Even if the bits themselves were good, Rock didn’t handle the lack of an audience response particularly well.

Barry Levinson‘s Rock The Kasbah (Open Road) opens Friday but hasn’t been liberally press-screened, or at least not to my knowledge. The first screening I was invited to happens tonight. The review embargo is tomorrow morning at 6 am Pacific, but a review by the Village Voice‘s Alan Scherstuhl popped this morning. It’s a fun read. The best part is Schertstuhl’s assessment of the Murray formula:

“Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill Murray movie where that doesn’t happen: Zombieland? That one where he played FDR as our nation’s most twinkling hand-job enthusiast?

“Whether his sleepy-eyed hero is saving New York (Ghostbusters 1 and 2), his platoon (Stripes), or something more like his own threadbare soul (Scrooged, Groundhog Day, almost all of his whiskery late-career indies), Murray movies mostly hold to template whether they’re playing in the cineplex or the arthouse.

“In the final moments of last year’s miserable St. Vincent, his cantankerous bastard drunk is actually hauled onstage at an elementary school assembly and treated by local parents to a standing ovation, all just for being himself — a guy who in real life you would detest. The wearying thing about this? In those scenes where he’s a prick, Murray can still be an unsavory delight. He’s quite funny as St. Vincent‘s cartoon monster, right up until the movie starts insisting that we have to believe in this guy, too, just the way an Adam Sandler picture would.

“But even that doesn’t hold true in most of the listless and haphazard Rock the Kasbah.”

The bottom line is that Kasbah doesn’t, in Schertsuhl’s eyes, work very well. Again, the review.

I cold-called Matt Drudge sometime in either late ’96 or very early ’97, when I had a desk at People magazine. I wanted to report something or other about the Drudge Report, which was fairly new at the time. We soon became friendly. Not friend-friends but on the phone from time to time, talking about stories, friendly enough. I introduced him to Julia Phillips, with whom I was also palling around at the time. They quickly took to each other and she wound up helping him write The Drudge Manifesto. He eventually moved to Florida and then a falling-out of some kind happened over an email I sent him in ’01, some kind of lefty slam of one of his righty articles…can’t recall.

But putting a JEFFREY WELLS link on the Drudge Report home page was good and generous on his part. I think it appeared sometime in the fall of ’98, or right after my Mr. Showbiz column appeared. Matt was a real friend from the get-go. One weekend I was having computer trouble at the People office, and Matt — at the time a Los Angeles resident — was enough of a pal to drive all the way over and take a look at whatever the trouble was. (People editor Jack Kelly was there also that weekend, lurking and bothered by the presence of a non-staffer in the inner sanctum.) I brought Matt with me to a somewhat early screening of Titanic in November of ’97, and I distinctly recall both of us feeling the feel as we walked back to our cars on the Paramount lot.

Adam Driver‘s Kylo Ren knows exactly who he is and what he intends to do. But the good guys aren’t so sure. They got nothin’, ma, to live up to…but then it gradually comes to them. Clarity, purpose. At the very beginning an older woman’s voice says “who are you?,” and Daisy Ridley‘s Rey says “Ahmahwan.” For a moment there I was hearing Johnny Rivers sing “Ahmahwan, ahmahwan…the one they call the Seventh Son.” At least I understand Ridley at the end when she says, “The force is callin’ to you…just let it in.” And of course I got the middle line when she asks Harrison Ford‘s Han Solo about “those stories about what happened” and he says “it’s true…all of it.” John Boyega‘s Finn looks like an amateur rugby player who works in sanitation to pay the rent. Oscar Isaac‘s Poe Dameron seems smooth, resolute…what’s he yelling about? Have they aged Carrie Fisher? She looks like Grandma Moses.