It’s obvious that Jack Pettibone Riccobono‘s The Seventh Fire, a doc about to screen at the Berlinale, is a cut above. Boilerplate: “A portrait of gang life in rural Minnesota as seen through the eyes of two Native American gangsters — a veteran bad guy named Rob Brown and a 17 year-old up-and-comer named Kevin.” Cinematography by Riccobono and Shane Slattery-Quintanilla. “Presented” by Terrence Malick and produced by too many people to mention, but Chris Eyre and Natalie Portman are among them. Original Music by Nicholas Britell.

I’ve okay with Steve Carell, but I’ve never been a huge fan…no offense. He seemed like a nice enough guy during last night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute, which was moderated by Pete Hammond, but it was obvious that the crowd felt a lot more enthusiastic than I did. They seemed completely delighted with everything he said…with themselves for being in his presence. I recognize that Carell is a gifted, “funny” guy but I’ve never found him all that amusing…sorry. He mugs too hard or something. I hated Evan Almighty, his Noah movie. I thought that the chest-hair-removal scene from 40 Year-old Virgin was a so-whatter. I actually respected Carell’s performance as Toni Collette‘s mean-spirited boyfriend in The Way Way Back and he did make something exceptional out of diseased ruling-class malevolence in Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, but the only Carell performance I’ve really and truly been delighted with was his nearly-suicidal gay professor in Little Miss Sunshine.

I attended the Carell after-party for five or ten minutes but I left early before he showed in order to join Scott Feinberg for dinner. What would I have said to Carell anyway? “Hey, Steve….Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere. I’m the one who was comparing you to a slow-running wildebeest before you got nominated for Best Actor. I wasn’t trying to be cruel or unfair…it just came out that way. You did a good job in Foxcatcher and I loved the nose, but honestly? I think your slot should have gone to Nightcrawler‘s Jake Gyllenhaal or Locke‘s Tom Hardy…no offense.”

Except I wouldn’t have said that. I just would have just smiled and offered the usual sheepish pleasantries and maybe asked him about his next dramatic role, etc.

Boyhood costars Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette were honored the night before last (i.e., Thursday) by the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. An elegant interview was conducted by festival director Roger Durling, running only about 100 minutes or so. Sophisticated patter start to finish, but we tend to pay the closest attention to the stand-out, tabloidy moments in these interviews, and Durling uncorked one when he alluded to an issue about Arquette’s weight gain over the last few years. It seems that some years ago one of the producers of Arquette’s hit series Medium had asked her to drop a few pounds, and she not only refused but got militant about it. She explained to Durling that a request of that sort was completely inappropriate. In other words, she had decided to abandon that super-hottie thing she had going in the ’90s.

Patricia Arquette and her towering boyfriend, painter Eric White, prior to Thursday night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute.

Arquette explained to a Telegraph interviewer a year ago that “you don’t have to buy your mate’s fidelity by looking a certain way…if you’re really in it for the long haul, ten pounds isn’t going to make — shouldn’t make — a world of difference.” I don’t know how to put this gently but nobody in the world welcomes a mate putting on weight…no one. Plus the 46 year-old Arquette has gained a bit more than ten pounds since her performances in Flirting With Disaster and Lost Highway. I’m sure I’ll be derided for saying this, but she’s become, no offense, a woman of somewhat ample proportions. It happens to short women in their 40s unless they become workout Nazis, and Arquette, it seems, doesn’t care to go there.

I saw Jupiter Ascending this afternoon, and — shocker! — despised it to the depths of my soul. I hate the Wachowskis, the Warner Bros. guys who approved this thing, CG space fantasies in general, the fans, myself for wasting two hours of my life, the production designers who labored to recreate the aerial metropolis of The Phantom Menace, the guys who made Channing Tatum‘s wolf ears and Gugu Mbatha-Raw‘s deer ears, the way everyone “acts” like they haven’t an honest thought or bone in their bodies, those godawful bees buzzing around Sean Bean‘s farm, Eddie Redmayne‘s revoltingly prissy performance, Drew McWeeny and Alonso Duralde for saying “okay, sure, it’s silly but it sure is lively!”…don’t get me started. The CG galactic fantasy visions of Andy and Lana Wachowski are everything I hate in mainstream movies today…everything thick, dreary, narcotized, spiritually stifling, mandated by corporate goons and therefore more or less the same space shite we’ve been sitting through for the last 25 years, constipated and rank with tired formula.

Thanks to HE reader “Geoff”

I expected to slip into my usual hate funk during the opening ten minutes, but I was choking on Jupiter Ascending within seconds.

It begins with Mila Kunis (Jupiter Jones) narrating her life, starting with the meeting of her mother (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and father (James D’Arcy) somewhere in Russia. D’Arcy is looking through a telescope next to a bridge over a river, and Kennedy, naturally mystified, says to D’Arcy, “Excuse me, sir, but whatever are you doing?” Right away I hated her and her spawn. And the Wachowskis for writing the dialogue, and for telling Kennedy to over-act the line. You stupid fucking cow, I said to Kennedy’s character. You’re walking along and you notice some fellow looking through a telescope (generally an indication of curiosity and intelligence) and your first thought is “Good heavens, what a truly absurd thing to do…this man needs to explain himself”? D’Arcy turns and smiles like an idiot and explains that to Kennedy he’s looking at the heavens and (I think) Jupiter in particular, and that he’s so delighted by the beauty of it all. And then they start beaming at each other.

I felt so badly for Jeff Bridges after looking again at that repellent trailer for Seventh Son (Universal, opening today), by all appearances a fourth-tier, piece-of-shit fantasy film (11% on Rotten Tomatoes) in which he plays a kind of bearded, all-knowing Gandalf figure…what a rank embarassment. Better to get high and find a way to watch a much younger Bridges in close-to-peak form in Bob Rafelson‘s Stay Hungry (’76), a movie that ought to be streamable on Amazon or Vudu but isn’t. One of the best family movies ever made — one of the gentlest, warmest and funniest. You’ll notice that Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to have actually been a reasonably decent fiddle player.

The first two episodes of Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling‘s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, a six-part HBO series about the twisted history of wealthy oddball and likely murderer Robert Durst, were screened at the Sundance Film Festival a week or so ago. What I saw was a crafty, high-end crime documentary about an obviously fucked-up old guy who probably killed his wife in 1982 and then killed an elderly guy named Morris Black in Galveston, Texas in 2001. But you’re fascinated nonetheless. Durst was investigated but never charged with his wife’s murder. He was tried for the Galveston murder but acquitted. The doc seems to basically be saying that rich guys, even crazy rich guys, tend to skate if they’re crafty and slippery enough. This is the second time to the Durst well for Jarecki, who directed and produced All Good Things, a 2010 melodrama based on the disappearance of Durst’s wife that costarred Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst. The HBO series pops on Sunday, February 8th.

Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam, which is running neck-and-neck right now with Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, is viewable right here for the remainder of today (Friday, 2.6) and all of tomorrow (Saturday, 2.7).

Again, my comments after seeing Last Days in Vietnam at the 2014 L.A. Film Festival: “The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in Saigon during the last few days and particularly the last few hours of the war on 4.30.75 wasn’t about policy. For some Saigon-based Americans it was simply about taking care of friends and saving as many lives as possible. It was about good people bravely risking the possibility of career suicide by acknowledging a basic duty to stand by their Vietnamese friends and loved ones and do the right moral thing.”

Posted on 12.12.14: “The difference between Last Days in Vietnam and Citizenfour is that Vietnam spreads the heroism around — it’s about a small community of people who stood up and did the right, risky thing. In a sense it exudes a somewhat more positive view of human nature.”

If In Contention‘s Kris Tapley was a school teacher in the ’50s or before, he’d tell you to stick your hand out so he could whack it with a ruler. Tapley is pissed, seriously pissed about those Eddie Redmayne‘s Norbit pieces, and his words — “stop…just stop” — remind of me of HAL 9000. But he finishes his rant with an interesting thought.

Tapley’s sentence structure is a little awkward so here’s my rewrite: “If you want something of substance to chew on,” he more or less says, “ponder whether Bradley Cooper is Ralph Nader to Eddie Redmayne’s Al Gore or John Kerry…siphoning votes off and thereby potentially allowing for someone like Birdman‘s Michael Keaton to slide up the middle.” That’s fairly close to what Tapley has actually posted, and a reason for hope among the “yay, Keaton” crowd.

I was going to ignore Jupiter Ascending altogether because movies like this are poisoners of the soul, but I guess I have to sink into the damn thing because (a) it’s become a Battlefield Earth-level stinker that people like me have to suffer through whether we want to or not and (b) I need to judge firsthand whether the “Eddie Redmayne’s Norbit” meme has value or is just a lot of bullshit. I had a chance to catch Jupiter Ascending‘s Los Angeles all-media last Tuesday night but I couldn’t make it down. Right Jupiter Ascending has a Rotten Tomatoes rating in the mid 20s and Metacritic score of 40, partly due to easy-lay geeks who can’t resist the visual splendor aspect.

Despite all the “Eddie Redmayne‘s Norbit” articles that have popped today in synch with the debut of Jupiter’s Ascending, I suspect that Redmayne’s puppy-dog appeal will nonetheless prevail among Academy members. It doesn’t seem to matter to the rank-and-file, apparently, that Michael Keaton‘s Birdman performance is loopier, more primally anguished, more exposed…some kind of direct reflection of Keaton’s life and career, or the life and career of any 50-plus looking to get rolling again. People simply seem to like Redmayne more because they do. Because they want to muss his hair or something. Because his Theory of Everything performance as the wheelchair-bound Stephen Hawking…well, that’s almost the whole deal, isn’t it? The chair, I mean.

Emil Lendof’s art stolen from Kevin Fallon’s 2.6 Daily Beast piece, “The Oscar Curse of the ‘Norbit’ Effect: Are Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne at Risk?”

More often that not, it seems, chops and conviction are respected but not enough to win an acting Oscar. You need them, of course, but you also need a gimmick (weight gain, prosthetic nose, wheelchair) plus some kind of compelling backstage narrative.

Except Redmayne, whose Theory performance is undeniably skillful and affecting, has no narrative to speak of. He’s suffered no setbacks, no twists or turns…he’s more or less just beginning. What Redmayne has, clearly, is personal charm, and he’s proven himself a master at turning it on. No Oscar nominee has worked the Academy/guild party circuit harder over the last three or four months.

About two thirds of the way through From Here To Eternity (’53), Burt Lancaster‘s Sgt. Warden says to Montgomery Clift‘s Private Prewitt, “I hear you’ve gone dippy over some dame down at the New Congress Club.” Well, Oscar season is about 85% or 90% finished with about two and a half weeks to go, and I’ve gone dippy with all the interview opportunities and articles about who might win and all the rest of the razmatazz. Everyone who lives off the award-season racket (myself included) is hammering away…bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I was going really dippy last night during the two-and-a-half-hour Directors Panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg did an excellent job of moderating but it just went on and on and on and on and on…I was playing it cool and professional in my front-row seat but I felt like I was drowning in quicksand. During Feinberg’s chat with Boyhood‘s Richard Linklater I noticed that the Austin-based filmmaker was blinking his eyes and steeling himself and looking at Feinberg as if to say, “You’re not going to quit, are you? You’re just going to keep coming, keep digging into my soul.”

And then Linklater suddenly became Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai, damp and pale-faced and weak but determined not to collapse, as he sat in Sessue Hayakawa‘s bamboo residence. “You will not break me,” Linklater was saying silently to Feinberg, wearing an expression of what can only be described as profound determination mixed with spirit-sapping fatigue. He seemed even more existentially depleted than myself, and I’m starting to really tire of this shit. My heart went out to him. Feinberg took a sip of Sake, narrowed his eyes and said, “And so Colonel, I have decided that your officers will not have to do manual labor.” Linklater stiffened, stood up and walked out to the center of the stage. Foxcatcher‘s Bennett Miller, standing at stage right, widened his eyes and whispered to fellow directors Morten Tyldum (Imitation Game), Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and Damian Chazelle (Whiplash), “He’s done it!” They all ran out and cheered and picked up Linklater and carried him off-stage on their shoulders. I have to say that Miller exuded the coolest vibe of all the directors. He had a throughly non-anxious, completely Zen attitude about this charade. Whatever was said or asked or joked about, Miller was serenity itself. He was the Dalai Lama.

Towards the end of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, which happened nine and a half months ago, I decided that Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan or Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales were easily among the two best films I had seen during that ten-day experience. Both were acquired by Sony Pictures Classics. But now, despite expectations, it’s starting to seem as if they’re not really in competition with each other for the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. The competition, rather, is between Wild Tales and Pawel Pawlikowksi‘s Ida (which, in my mind, is really a 2013 film). Something is telling me that Wild Tales, which has played to rousing receptions every time I’ve seen it, is going to win. It opens domestically on 2.20.