Any man of spirit understands that drunkenness and debauchery can be joyful in your 20s and 30s, but making a habit of it can be tiresome all around. And God forbid you’re behind any kind of wheel. But oh, the stories! I’m guessing that the late Peter O’Toole‘s visit to Late Night with David Letterman was part of his Venus promotional tour, or sometime in late ’06. Gravestone epitaph (originally from Sycamore Cleaners): “It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.” The camel bit (after the jump) is included, of course, because of the Heineken. Essential viewing.

Two days ago I posted a riff about how the 3.27 opening of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome To New York feels a little too late in the cycle. The next day I was informed that the version that IFC/Sundance Selects is releasing theatrically is R-rated and therefore tamer than what was shown in Cannes last May and subsequently on European VOD. The R-rated cut was apparently prepared for Showtime as part of a pay-cable sale and then IFC decided to use it for the theatrical release as well, despite Ferrara’s vehement objections. I got in touch with Ferrara yesterday and he’s agreed to speak with me about it tomorrow. Honestly? If the difference between the R-rated cut and the 2014 Cannes cut largely consists of images of the unclothed Gerard Depardieu, I might be okay with the R version. Update: I guess I’ll just buy the British Bluray (released last October) that contains both versions.

Universal is looking to make money off the 30th anniversary of John Hughes‘ The Breakfast Club. Who cares about seeing a restored version of this mildly okay, far-from-earthshaking detention hall character piece? Those who were in their late teens or early 20s when it popped in ’85, one presumes. Which costar has had the most engaged or interesting or productive career? Emilio Estevez, right? Followed by Anthony Michael Hall, who’s done fairly well as a character actor. Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald have hung in there in various modest ways. Every generation enjoys a blaze of glory kickoff in their early to mid 20s, and then the real-life challenges kick in and we all get to see what the players are made of.

Steven Spielberg reportedly intends to direct a film about war photographer Linsey Addario, which will be based on Addario’s recently published memoir “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.” The 25 year-old Jennifer Lawrence will portray the 42 year-old, still-very-much-active photographer, but where’s the movie? Addario is a brave, tough adventurer who has photographed conflicts in Iraq, Darfur, Libya and Afghanistan and gone through a lot of trauma and cast a special focus on the victims. But where’s the movie?

Just capturing the emotion, excitement and danger of a real-life professional putting herself on the line does not comprise, in itself, anyone’s idea of narrative engagement. Ask any professional screenwriter. Movies can’t just be built on a series of adventures. You have to have a story, a theme, a dramatic surprise or two, a pivot point, an unspoken undercurrent and an actual ending as opposed to just downshifting and bringing things to a close.

In short, Spielberg’s Addario flick sounds like cultural propaganda by way of “you go girl” hagiography. It’s basically going to be a film that will say the following to the audience: (a) “Whoa…here’s this ballsy woman who’s doing what Robert Capa did and has written a book about it, except she’s still fairly young and is still doing it big-time!” and (b) “Okay, we don’t really have a great story to tell, we admit that…this is basically a movie in which this happens and that happens and then this happens and then that happens and then this happens…but it’ll give Spielberg an opportunity to deliver some intense action photography in the Middle East.”

Right away I sensed that Neil Blomkamp‘s Chappie (Columbia, 3.6) was a likely no-go. I could smell the old “ghost in the machine” notion of a robot having a semblance of a human heart and perhaps even a soul, and decided I wanted nothing to do with it. So I had my own reasons for really not looking forward to seeing today at 5 pm, but now reviews from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and Variety‘s Justin Chang have filled me with even more trepdiation. Chappie “represents a further downward step for Blomkamp in the wake of the highly uneven Elysium,” McCarthy has written. Chang has similarly warned that “intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is one of the major casualties of Chappie, a robot-themed action movie that winds up feeling as clunky and confused as the childlike droid with which it shares its name.” It suffers from “a chaotically plotted story and a central character so frankly unappealing he almost makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like tolerable company by comparison“…hah!

“A large portion” of the Academy’s board of governors has been pushing for a return to five Best Picture nominees, according to a piece filed last night by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway. A “high-level source” is quoted saying the Academy “tried” the current system of allowing up to ten nominees “but it didn’t do us any good.” What an idiot. The point of allowing for more Best Picture nominees is to include a people’s favorite or two. If you nominate American Sniper or The Dark Knight or The Blind Side you’re presumably engaging a wider audience…right?

You don’t want to just nominate the kind of high-calibre films that Hollywood Elsewhere readers prefer or…you know, elitist foo-foo movies. You have to strategically lower or democratize the real-estate value and try to liberally redefine the idea of “best” (at least for appearances’ sake) if you want to keep the riff-raff in the pen.

The underlying reality is that cultural devolution will continue regardless of how many Best Picture nominees are allowed. The cinematic interests of Joe and Jane Popcorn have never been very sophisticated, but they’re even more degraded now with most of them agreeably submitting to soul-suffocating big-studio franchises and the indie sector pretty much generating all the Best Picture nominees. The whole idea of average mainstream ticket-buyers hankering to see quality-level films has been gradually losing currency for at least the last 20 to 25 years. But on other hand how can it not be good for ratings if one or two Best Picture nominees offer at least some general appeal?

The hip thing was to visit Cuba when it wasn’t that easy. It’s still fairly cool now but in three or five or seven years you’ll start to see American corporate franchises pop up here and there, and while I’m sure the Edsels and cheap hotels and native food stands will hold their ground that old romantic Havana thing that Graham Greene used to write about and Wim Wenders captured in Buena Vista Social Club and which you can sense and almost smell if you watch Carol Reed‘s Our Man in Havana…that thing will eventually start to disappear. So get down there soon before MacDonald’s does. Who am I to talk? I’ve never even been.

On 2.24 I wrote that I was settling into HBO’s Togetherness and starting to feel good about all the characters except for Melanie Lynskey‘s awful, draggy, down-headed Michelle. My heart has been aching for her miserable, screwed-down husband Brett (Mark Duplass), who’s been at least making an effort to pull things together but who naturally feels alienated by her lack of sexual interest in him, and by her blooming platonic relationship with David (John Ortiz). It’s a San Quentin marriage with occasional furloughs. I’ve been sitting in the lotus position in front of the Samsung and pleading with Brett to “give it up, man…move out or move into the garage but cut the cord and let your soul breathe…Melanie is trying to get to a good place like the rest of us but she’s almost Margaret Hamilton.” No, that’s harsh. She’s not a witch. But everything she touches turns to glum.

And then on last Sunday’s “Party Time” episode…breakthrough!

On 2.22 Brett ran into an older hippie check named Linda (Mary Steenburgen) and right away felt a certain spiritual connection, and so last Sunday night he decided to duck out of a charter-school party Michelle was giving and visit a party at Linda’s commune instead. Right away he meets a hippie-cat guy who gives him some psychedelic tea, and not long after Brett starts to hang with Linda the elevator in the brain hotel starts to rise and rise and rise, and before you know it he’s spaced and dreamy and totally tripping.

I need to correct previous reporting about the reason for the glorious absence of the CinemaScope mumps on Criterion’s Bluray of Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (’61), which was released on 9.23.14. I finally bought (or more accurately store-traded for) this disc two days ago. It’s the best rendering of this horror classic mine eyes have ever beheld, but I noticed there’s no mention of any kind of mumps correction in the pamphlet notes…and I wondered why. My 9.4.14 piece was written with the understanding that the original film was mumps-afflicted due to distortions brought about by Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lenses. These lenses were discontinued in the U.S. around 1959 but used here and there on European productions into the early ’60s. One of these, I understood, was The Innocents.

But over the weekend I was told “oh, no, wait…didn’t we tell you? Innocents dp Freddie Francis used Panavision lenses and not CinemaScope lenses, and so the Deborah Kerr mumps were never contained in the original elements. They manifested, rather, in the 2010 BFI Region 2 Bluray and perhaps also in the BFI’s 2006 Region 2 DVD, but they were never in the original elements.” Update: The Panavision information is disinformation. It’s wrong. Sorry but it is. The truth is explained in this 3.5 post.

Did you know that nine years before Edward Snowden told the world about widespread NSA eavesdropping that he was Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge? Well, that’s not really true. He was a U.S. Army reservist beginning Special Forces training but he kind of looked like Eastwood and perhaps — who knows? — was lifting weights and smoking cigars and drinking Jack Daniels in the barracks after chow. This is certainly suggested in the first image from Oliver Stone‘s Snowden (Open Road, 12.25), the currently-rolling drama in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays Snowden. The shot was chosen, of course, to counter assumptions in some quarters that Snowden’s NSA revelations were unpatriotic or anti-American. I don’t need to be convinced that Snowden is made of the right stuff but apparently some do. Or so it is believed.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone’s currently-filming Snowden (Open Road, 12.25).

Snowden is shooting from a script by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, and is based on Luke Harding‘s “The Snowden Files” and Anatoly Kucherena‘s “Time of the Octopus.” The film costars Shailene Woodley, Scott Eastwood, Melissa Leo, Timothy Olyphant, Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson. Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour, a superb you-are-there doc about Snowden’s whistle-blowing, just won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

This morning LexG/Ray Quick observed that “nobody at all has the balls to whip up a serious think piece on the interracial sex in Focus, which is maybe the first fizzy blockbuster big-studio movie in recent memory, if ever, to pair up a black superstar with the WHITEST, BLONDEST CHICK EVER having full-on sex. (I’m sure middle-aged black women in particular are delighted by this.) The movie is positively historic in this sense [except] nobody wants to comment on it.”

I suspect that everyone is stone-cold afraid to write about the Focus sex scenes, much less explore viewer reactions. Everyone, that is, except The Daily Beast‘s Jen Yamato. Last Friday the former Deadline staffer alluded to a pair of despicable racist sentiments as a way into a piece titled ‘Racists Attack Will Smith’s Focus Over Film’s Depiction of An Interracial Relationship.’

Yamato noted that “in his two decades as a bona fide leading man, Smith has never before gotten down with a white woman onscreen.” And yet he “almost did in Hitch (’05) opposite would-be co-star Cameron Diaz. [But] she was recast and Eva Mendes got the gig instead, and Smith blamed Hollywood. ‘How are you not going to consider Cameron Diaz?,” Smith told Female First UK. “That becomes massive news in the US. Outside America, it’s no big deal. But in the US, it’s still a racial issue.”