I’ll always be a devout fan of Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237 because it’s a treasure chest of endless imaginative theorizing about Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining. I loved the fruit-loop quality. But his latest, a documentary about sleep paralysis called The Nightmare, is almost completely devoid of imaginative riffing of any kind. The film is entirely about descriptions of creepy, real-deal encounters with “shadow men” — Freddy Krueger-like spooks who have terrorized several real-deal folks in their bedrooms (always in the wee hours) and caused them to freeze and be unable to speak and in some cases have trouble breathing. It just goes on and on like this for 90 minutes…”I was half-sleeping and then I felt something and the boogie man was behind me,” etc. Okay but what’s really going on? Why these people and not others? (Ascher himself has been visited.) What kind of scientific proof has been collected? Has anyone ever found any physical evidence, made any recordings, observed changes in electrical energy…anything? One tip-off is that a female victim says that the spooks went away one night when she said the name of Jesus. (What if she’d said Yeshua or Buddha or Sri Krishna?) Another is that the shadow men seem to be a manifestation of individual weakness, vulnerability and fear. But why do the goblins all look like the same (some along the lines of the monster in Michael Mann‘s The Keep) or alien-like creatures with huge serpent eyes? I’m not saying the victims are making stuff up, but just hearing their descriptions over and over isn’t enough. I began to feel antsy about a half-hour in.

Universal Pictures is about to pull the trigger on a Chris Pratt action-fantasy flick called Cowboy Ninja Viking Samurai Street Fighter Fucknose Bare-Knuckled Stud With a Nine-Inch Wang. Pic will be co-directed by David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, whose John Wick wasn’t too bad for the most part. Sources have told Variety‘s Justin Kroll that Pratt has met with Leitch and Stahelski between servings of cheeseburgers and fries and “has given his stamp of approval.” Based on a graphic novel (what else?), the story follows “a man who suffers from multiple personality disorder and is put into a government program to be turned into a super-soldier” with the attributes of a cowboy, a ninja, a viking, a samurai, a street-fighter and a fucknosed, bare-knuckled stud with a nine-inch member. I’ve already explained…okay, indicated…that Leitch and Stahelski are robo-directors, and that they (along with Zack Snyder and all the other zombies in good standing) represent everything about the action-fantasy-superhero franchise business that is rancid, puerile and devoid of a soul. I’ve also noted that Stahelski is the last name of an electrician, a surfer, pool-maintenance guy, a hot-dog chef at Pinks, a garbage man or a guy whose grandfather worked in the same New Orleans factory as Stanley Kowalski.

After eyeballing a Twitter link last night to a Grantland essay about the greatness of Gene Hackman (except for his performance in The Poseidon Adventure), I too wondered if the retired octogenarian had left this mortal coil. That’s because the headline read “The Greatest Living American Actor at 85: Gene Hackman Is Gone But Still in Charge.” There aren’t too many different ways of interpreting the word “gone.” It means “not here,” “elsewhere,” “took a powder” or maybe dead. Gone Girl alludes not just to a disappearance but a permanent state of absence. After thinking it over for ten or twelve seconds I realized Hackman was probably still with us, but others feared the worst. A Hackman spokesperson has told ABC News that Popeye Doyle is alive and well and walking around. Grantland has erased the word “gone” and all is back to normal.

Here’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it teaser for the trailer for Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland (Disney, 5.22). The real thing will play during Sunday’s Superbowl telecast. It’ll probably turn out to be a moderately satisfying commercial ride, but like I said on 10.9.14, the hand of Damon Lindelof scares me: “To me, Lindelof attached to a film or TV project constitutes a threat. They don’t mean ‘this movie will be shit’ but they do mean ‘okay, here we go on the fucking inconclusive Lindelof train to Meanderville.’

“After slogging through the frequently infuriating The Leftovers I’m convinced that Lindelof isn’t so much a story-teller as a situational explorer. He’s strikes me as this dorky, bespectacled, comic-book-generation guy who goes ‘Oooh, here’s a cool idea! What if this happened and that happened and then our lead character suddenly realizes…well, let’s not get hung up on resolutions but this is a cool realm…let’s play with it!’

“Lindelof was one of the many architects of Cowboys & Aliens but I’m sure he did what he could to imprint himself upon it, and I hated it. He rewrote Jon Spaihts on Prometheus and I double-hated that one. The Star Trek film he co-wrote was okay, but World War Z was basically a situational zombie slog with no way out, and then came The Fucking Leftovers.

Make no mistake — Mike Binder‘s Black or White is a strong, nervy film that deals fair cards, as Steve Harvey acknowledges in an episode airing on Friday, 1.30. But many critics have slapped it down for, I believe, not saying the right things in the right way. Some are claiming it deals from a stacked deck; what they really mean is that they don’t like the hand. Here’s my Toronto Film Festival review. As I said on 12.3.14, Black or White “wears its emotions a little too plainly at times, but Binder’s script doesn’t slavishly follow the sensitive liberal line about the black-white chasm and the stereotypes that cling to that, and so it’s been thrown under the bus.”

If Ava DuVernay had directed and co-written Black or White and cast Kevin Costner as the lead, would the reception be the same? I suspect that DuVernay’s Black or White would have been saluted and celebrated a hell of a lot more than Binder‘s version has been. The only difference between Binder’s Black or White and DuVernay’s is that Ava would have gone easier on the Reggie character by removing the drug problem and making him an attorney or a doctor. It’s not just the movie these days — it’s the combination of the right movie and the right filmmakers behind it.

I’m a fool for color snaps of famous actors during shooting of renowned black-and-white films. So naturally my heart skipped a beat when I noticed a couple of nights ago that Stevan Riley‘s Listen To Me Marlon uses a few seconds of 16mm color film taken during the Hoboken filming of On The Waterfront in late ‘1953 and early ’54. Riley found the film in the AMPAS library and managed to secure permission to use it. To the best of my knowledge no color images from this 1954 Best Picture winner have ever been seen, much less published, until now. I really enjoyed and admired Listen To Me Marlon — an intimate, fascinating, full-scope portrait that turns rather sad during the final 20 minutes. I also did a quick interview with Riley Tuesday afternoon. More on Thursday.

Lee J. Cobb, Brando shooting nocturnal bawl-out scene. The one in which Rod Steiger goes, “It’s an unhealthy relationship!”

I don’t know much about shooting for black-and-white, but this shot makes it seem as if Brando was wearing a certain degree of makeup (eyeliner, some kind of base or facial smoother). He doesn’t look au natural. His eyebrows have been darkened, intensified.

There is something about dying way too young from some cruel force or circumstance (cancer, car crash, suicide, a Hunger Game) that just floors teen and 20something audiences, and to some extent authors and filmmakers. I don’t know how many YA novels have used this plot element, but movie-wise we’ve had If I Stay, The Fault In Our Stars, The Lovely Bones…a lot of kids buying the farm. Hell, cancer-wise you could go all the way back to Arthur Hiller and Eric Segal‘s crushingly maudlin Love Story. They’ve all been manipulative and overbearing to varying degrees. And now we have Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl…yes, another one. Lukemia killing a teenaged girl. But this time the material is finagled in a much hipper, somewhat dryer, less maudlin, a lot more clever, Wes Anderson-like form, and it’s not half bad. Much of the crowd seemed to be moved; I was a bit more circumspect. At times I felt the film was behaving in an almost oppressively sensitive fashion. But it doesn’t quite. At times I felt it was too much in love with the main character’s (i.e., Greg Gaines) sensitivity and the way his heart is slowly cracking as a pretty girl named Rachel, with whom he’s fallen in love, slowly succumbs. But most of the time it holds back just enough. The youngish Gomez-Rejon is a gifted and inventive filmmaker who prays at the church of Criterion — he has a deep and abiding worship of movie lore — and he weaves his hip-film-nerd sensibility into Jesse Andrews‘ screenplay (based on his 2013 novel of the same name). I’m not sure I want to see this film again because on some level it almost felt like a chore. Please. But it’s definitely the smartest and coolest and arty-doodliest film about a cancer-afflicted teen that I’ve ever seen. Damning with faint praise? No, but Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is what it is. I have to catch the Jared Hess film at 6:30 pm…25 minutes from now. I’ll expand on this later.

Aside from a relatively short list of stand-out narrative features, for the most part Sundance ’15 has been a festival of great docs, particularly Alex Gibney‘s Going Clear, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon‘s Best of Enemies and — my personal favorite — Doug Tirola‘s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead — The Story of the National Lampoon. A generally hilarious history of a great magazine and a period of inspired anarchic subversion, it’s essentially about the birth and shaping of the irreverent mindset that has defined American comedy for the last 40 years, or since the debut of NBC’s Saturday Night Live (’75), National Lampoon’s Animal House (’78) and National Lampoon’s Vacation (’83). But the magazine and its half-demented staffers were the finest and most outrageous expression of this, and Drunk, Stoned is an absolutely vital history lesson for under-35s who’ve never read any National Lampoon issues or sunk into the mythology. I don’t know what the distribution picture is, but I could see this film again right now. It captures the whole saga in one swift, punchy, well-finessed package.

Any film by noted British documentarian Adam Curtis is worth carving out the time to see. I’ve raved over the last decade or so about his two landmark docs, The Century of the Self and particularly The Power of Nightmares. which introduced an idea that the anti-western Islamic terrorists and the neocon hardliners are almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth. Now comes Curtis’s Bitter Lake, which popped in England last weekend and is now viewable on YouTube. The Guardian‘s Sam Wollaston has called it “a story full of violence, bloodshed, and bitter ironies, mainly about how the west, through misunderstanding and oversimplification, repeatedly achieved pretty much the opposite of what it was trying to achieve. America protected Wahhabism through its thirst for Saudi oil, and in doing so helped sow the seeds of radical Islam today. In Afghanistan they built dams to irrigate the Helmand valley, making it perfect to sow actual seeds — opium poppy seeds. The past is strewn with patterns, and warnings, if only anyone had bothered looking and tried to understand.”

Today begins my eighth day in Park City and my seventh day of serious Sundance humping (screenings, filings, running around town). I’ve been averaging four films per day but today I have only two — Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s much-buzzed-about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at the Library at 2:30 pm, and Jared Hess‘s highly anticipated Don Verdean at the Eccles at 6:30 pm. Thursday’s schedule looks underwhelming and to be perfectly honest I’m starting not to care that much. If they would arrange for a special p & i Brooklyn screening I’d be there with bells on, but that’s not in the cards. My “fuck it” mentality always kicks in around the seventh day of any festival. Let’s see what what happens.

DataLab‘s Harry Enten has reported that the ridiculous New York blizzard hysteria of the last two or three days was due to an over-reliance on the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting. Late Sunday evening less excitable data came out of the SREF, or Short-Range Ensemble Forecast. “Five of the 21 models in the SREF [predicted] less than 10 inches of snow falling,” Enten summarizes. “Nine of the 21 predicted a foot or less. Only eight could have been said to support 18 or more inches of snow in New York City. By Monday afternoon, 11 of the 21 members were on the 10-inches-or-less train. Eight of the 21 still supported big-time snow, but they were a minority.”