I attended this morning’s press screening of Robert Zemeckis‘ The Walk at IMAX headquarters in Playa del Rey. I found the first 100 minutes fairly dreadful — over-acted, “cute”, hamboned, like some kind of Gene Kelly musical…as manipulative and ungenuine and disrespectful of reality as any Hollywood bullshit fantasy you’ve ever sat through. But the last 25 minutes deliver one of the greatest visual knockout experiences I’ve ever seen on an IMAX screen. This finale is so good that I have no choice to but recommend The Walk despite all the awful stuff.

Yes, that’s my review in a nutshell — The Walk will make you feel nauseous but you need to see the finale so I’m sorry but you’ll have to suffer through it. 98% of the time a movie that drives you nuts for the first three-quarters will deliver a sucky finish. But not this time.

What Zemeckis has done is take the real-life, inspirational saga of wire-walker Phillippe Petit (played by Joseph Gordon Levitt), the ginger-haired Frenchman who walked on a wire between the World Trade Center towers eight times on the morning of 8.7.74, and turn it into cliched, manipulative, family-friendly oatmeal.

James Marsh‘s Man on Wire (’09) took the exact same material and made one of the most fascinating and spiritually uplifting docs of the 21st Century. Zemeckis’ film is basically Man on Wire for megaplex idiots — for the fine citizens who need to feel scared or awed and have everything spelled out for them, as if they’re eight or nine years old. If you’re a fan of dumbing stuff down for whatever reason, you’ll love The Walk. It has laughs, charm, love, silliness, slapstick, quirky humor, thrills, passion, suspense! And broad strokes every which way. And that knockout ending!

I now have a good idea what it was like for Petit to walk between the towers on that fateful morning. Seriously. Try watching this segment without moaning or groaning or gripping your knees. Try looking down 110 stories in 3D from Petit’s POV. Go ahead, give it a shot. The words “holy” and “shit” will form in your mind. Whether or not you say them is up to you.

I’m aware, obviously, that no other award-season spitballers have insisted, as I have, that Amy Schumer‘s emotionally subtle and occasionally tear-inducing performance in Trainwreck is Best Actress-worthy, but I swear it definitely is. Schumer’s work in that brilliant Judd Apatow film is no less of an achievement than that of Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, and just because Schumer is a comedian is not (hello?) a mark against her. She delivers the goods. You can feel exactly where her character is coming from in each and every Trainwreck scene, and she never goes for just one note — she’s always juggling two or three conflicting considerations or impulses at any given moment. I realize I’m going to have to be a realist and drop my Schumer crusade down the road, but shame on the punditry for not even raising the Schumer balloon. It’s September, for God’s sake — time to mix passion and advocacy with the usual tea-leaf readings.  Live a little.

Yesterday Hollywood Reporter award-season analyst Scott Feinberg, relying on exhaustive cross-checking of data and precedents mixed with his usual Yoda-like perceptions (which are not the same thing as being graced with Hollywood Elsewhere-style insect antennae), posted some spitball projections on the basis of “if the Oscars were held tomorrow and voters could consider only contenders that have already been screened” — i.e., at Telluride and Toronto. I’m reposting a few along with HE commentary:

(1) Feinberg starts by declaring that Spotlight would win Best Picture, Tom McCarthy would win Best Director for his work on that Boston-based drama, and that Spotlight would win for Best Original Screenplay. (HE comment: Agree, fully deserved) He also projected that The Danish Girl‘s Eddie Redmayne would win Best Actor (HE comment: Just you wait) and that Brooklyn‘s Saoirse Ronan would win Best Actress (HE comment: Fine).

(2) Feinberg also projected that Joel Edgerton‘s over-performed and overly-accented John Connolly in Black Mass would win for Best Supporting Actor. (HE comment: The light blue suits won by Edgerton in Scott Cooper‘s film are a disqualification in and of themselves.) Feinberg also believes The Danish Girl‘s Alicia Vikander would win Best Supporting Actress (HE comment: I get it — everybody gravitated toward her performance when they realized that Redmayne’s was so relentlessly delicate and one-note, but it’s early yet).

My attention is diverted by a low-priced Witness Bluray streeting on 10.13. This offers an opportunity to praise one of the most satisfying punch-out scenes ever captured in the history of motion pictures. It works because it arrives after nearly an hour of milking cows, raising barns, fixing car engines and making goo-goo eyes at Kelly McGillis. It feels so good when those bullies start giving grief to Alexander Godunov because they don’t know what’s coming…but we do. You’re about to get schooled, assholes.

Ageism can be hilarious! The underlying message in this broad slapstick piece, an apparent creation of Huffpost‘s Ricky Camilleri, is that companies should think twice about using 60-plus interns because of their health issues and whatnot. They might drool or crap in their pants or even die on you. Note: The white-haired actor dies too quickly. He should look worried, exhale loudly a few times, put his right hand over his heart and then die.

From my Tellruide Film Festival review of Davis Guggenheim‘s He Named Me Malala (Fox Searchlight, 10.2): “The people on my gondola coming down from the Chuck Jones Cinema were beaming, almost swooning. But they were reacting, trust me, more to the subject matter than the film itself. Which feels and plays like a lesson, a sermon, an 80-something minute educational piece that…you know, we all need to see and contemplate and so on. It’s a good-for-you spinach movie, as I supposed it would be yesterday.

“One can’t help but feel touched and inspired by the saga of teenaged Pakistani education activist (and current resident of Birmingham, England) Malala Yousafzai, and particularly how she managed to not only survive being shot in the head three years ago (when she was 15) by a Taliban fanatic, but how she recovered and continued to campaign for female education in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and how she won the Nobel Peace Prize late last year. The more this film is seen worldwide (particularly in Middle-Eastern territories where the suppression of women is appalling), the better.

“But Guggenheim’s film is just okay. If you wanted to be a sorehead you could say it almost flirts with mediocrity. But I don’t want to say that because I don’t want to discourage anyone from seeing it. He Named Me Malala stands for the right things, shows the right things, says the right things and uses watercolor-like animation to convey portions of Malala’s life…all to the good. But it never seems to find any kind of levitational groove or strategy that would result in a 2 + 2 = 5 equation.

Three days ago Etiquette Pictures released a Bluray of The American Dreamer, a 1971 doc about the late Dennis Hopper during his looniest, druggiest, hippie-dippiest phase. About five years ago I was invited by co-directors L.M. Kit Carson (a longtime friend who passed last year) and Lawrence Schiller to a special Film Society of Lincoln Center screening of the film. Here’s a portion of my review, which I titled “American Boob”:

“Speaking as a longtime pal of Carson’s and an admirer of Schiller’s, I regret being unable to think of anything remotely flattering to say. The vibe in the room was kindly and sympathetic, but what I heard and felt after the show was mainly polite astonishment. Why had Schiller and Carson decided to even show this thing?

“I was stunned by the doc’s shapeless sloppiness, and amused and repelled by its portrait of Hopper as a bearded, drug-fried horndog on the verge of destroying his directing career with the abomination that was The Last Movie.

“You might expect The American Dreamer to be a portrait of an allegedly gifted director (Hopper helmed Easy Rider two years before the doc was shot) at some kind of personal crossroads, his state of mind clearly affected (to put it mildly) by pot and hallucinogens. You’re thinking you’ll at least get to sample Hopper’s milieu and personality as he was finishing editing on The Last Movie, a film so allegedly incoherent that it ended his behind-the-camera career until he finally sobered up in the mid ’80s. And maybe get to ‘know’ the guy on some level.

Strange as this may sound, Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t have that much of a problem with Nancy Meyers‘ The Intern. I caught it last night, expecting to be underwhelmed or narcotized in the usual Meyers way…and yet somehow this combination of two 20 mg. Xanax tabs and a mild slice of quiche went down easy. Does it give you a feeling of electric discovery and high-throttle wowser and a flood of emotion pouring out of a fire hydrant? No, but it lulls you into thinking that there’s more to life than just this. Especially if you’re 50-plus with a vial of Cialis in the bathroom cabinet.

It’s about Ben, a 70 year-old retiree (Robert De Niro) who needs a job of some kind to keep from losing his mind, and so he lands a senior intern gig at an online fashion company run by Jules (Anne Hathaway), a driven, detail-obsessed entrepeneur. And nothing really happens. Not that much, I mean. The Intern reminded me of “Nothing Is Easy,” the Jethro Tull song, but in a different context. Sometimes “nothing” is no sweat.

The sharp, organized and always gentlemanly Ben fits right in, and not only does he not fuck anything up but Hathaway eventually realizes he’s a kind of low-key gift from the Gods — nice guy, problem-solver, friend, chauffeur, silver smoothie, confidante, etc. A 21st Century Mr. Belvedere.  De Niro and Hathaway and the friendly, well-groomed supporting cast just amble along. This happens and that happens. Easy does it. How can you hate a film that begins and ends with a nice Tai-Chi class in a park?

The Intern has (a) one really funny line that I laughed out loud at, (b) the usual over-heated slapstick-style reactions to anything to do with sexuality, and (c) a steady supply of mellow.

All I know is that if you can let The Intern in (and I realize that could be a problem in some quarters), it gives you a nice, comfortable, settled-down feeling. Sometimes it’s okay just to lie back and submit to a nice foot massage. As long as you’ve just showered and had a recent pedicure, I mean.

The worst thing that happens is the issue of Jules’ cheating stay-at-home husband, Matt (Anders Holm).  But it’s nothing to get bent out of shape over. One look at Holm’s reddish beard and floppy bohemian hair and bathrobe-and-sweat-pants attire and I decided “whatever…not that hot…a bit of a belly that will grow over the years…considerate guy but not that dynamic…if he and Jules get divorced, fine…they can share custody.”

The allusion, of course, is to John Carpenter‘s They Live and not Costa Gavras‘s Z (’69). The latter title echoed a popular Greek protest slogan that meant “he lives” — a reference to assassinated Greek leftist politician Grigoris Lambrakis. Speaking of politicans, I’m actually a wee bit concerned that Donald Trump’s poll numbers are slipping. The better he does in the Republican primaries, the better things look for Hillary/Biden/Sanders.

There are three months left in 2015, and if you boil the fat and pretense out of all the noteworthy films released or seen over the last nine months, the ones that really stand out big-time are Spotlight, Mad Max: Fury Road, Love & Mercy, Carol, Son of Saul, Truth, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, It Follows, About Elly and Brooklyn. Yeah, that’s right — Love & Mercy in third place. And it’s time turn the engine over and start with an award-season campaign. I’m looking to do phoners with a few name-brand actors and filmmakers who are fans and don’t mind saying so. Five or so, I’m thinking. I’ll call it “The Love & Mercy Conversations: Artists Speak Up For The Little Movie That Could and Did”…something like that.

I forgot about last Monday’s all-media screening of Nancy Meyer‘s The Intern so I’m catching a 7 pm showing at the Hollywood Arclight — 3 and 1/2 hours from now. 53% at Rotten Tomatoes, 51% at Metacritic. I know what I’m getting into here. Fave quote #1: “It’s astonishing to watch De Niro — who’s been great in great movies like The Godfather: Part II and Taxi Driver, and sometimes just as good or even better in imperfect ones like New York, New York — and realize that he’s just as capable as any other actor of slouching through a film like a lump of mold making its way down a tree limb. It’s as if he’s trying to keep all traces of actual personality or verve under wraps.” — Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice. Fave quote #2: “Meyers has wit and a solid sense of craft, but mainly she makes movies about high thread counts and comfy, pricey throw pillows.” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune. High thread counts?

I felt as if I’d been injected with an exciting spiritual drug when I first saw Ondi Timoner‘s BRAND: A Second Coming, which opens tomorrow. I’ve seen it three times since last March and have felt the same juices each time. Because it’s a film about transcendence — about the transformation of Russell Brand from hyper comic libertine to social revolutionary. I fell in love with the arc of his life, which is that he finally found his focus and got it right after floundering around (somewhat like Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X, all of whom found their calling after an uncertain period in their 20s). He became truly interesting when he stopped projecting like a hyper, swaggering, shag-crazy narcissist and became a “champagne socialist” revolutionary and began saying “look at what’s wrong here”…that’s when Brand became a lightning bolt.

Russell Brand, director Ondi Timoner during final shooting on BRAND: A Second Coming.

I wrote last March that Timoner’s doc (partly shot by HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko) is “one of the most unusual and impressive documentary portraits of a famous person I’ve ever seen because of…well, its eagerness to step out of the standard function of a documentary and take the proverbial ride. It’s a film that transcends itself and becomes something else by embracing the attitude and temperament of its subject. Just as Brand has begun moving the focus of his life beyond fame and wealth and the lowest form of humor (i.e., simply making people laugh), Brand: A Second Coming is about seeing and transcending and turning a page.”

Through all the excitement I chose to ignore Brand’s decision not to travel to Austin to help promote Timoner’s doc, which basic professional courtesy required. Brand explained that despite his admiration for Timoner’s film that he wasn’t comfortable discussing the portion of her doc that covers his sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll period (i.e., roughly the first 40 minutes).

I also looked the other way when he got together with Michael Winterbottom to make a somewhat similar documentary, The Emperor’s New Clothes, that covers a lot of the same material in Timoner’s film. Clothes was barely paid attention to on these shores, but the most forgiving person in the world would have to admit this was a huge dick move on Brand’s part.