I actually received 11 screeners today. Jon Favreau‘s Chef also came from Open Road but I couldn’t fit it into the photo in a balanced symmetrical way. Plus it was the second Chef screener I’ve received. The first (received several weeks ago) was actually the first of the season.

Joe Wright, make no mistake, is a first-rate, major-league visionary director. I was totally on-board with his Anna Karenina, which I regard as a near-masterpiece. I’m therefore a bit sorry that he’s jumped into the Peter Pan legend, which we can all probably do without. Particularly an origin story. I think that Steven Spielberg‘s Hook killed the Pan mystique for anyone who was over the age of five when it came out. That said, Wright’s Pan (Warner Bros., 7.17.05) is obviously nicely designed and handsomely produced. Certainly interesting from a compositional perspective. And we all love the flying sailing ship. Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard, Garrett Hedlund as James Hook (I’m presuming his hand will be bitten off by a crocodile in Act Three), Levi Miller as the orphan who became Peter Pan, Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily, Amanda Seyfried as Mary, etc.

Richard Curtis‘s Love Actually opened roughly 11 years ago. I recall sitting through it like it was yesterday. I despised its grotesquely sentimental tone. It connected in my head to Robert Stigwood‘s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I saw at a New York all-media screening in July 1978. I remember a guy sitting in the front yelling “yecch! agghh!” when costar Peter Frampton sang “The Long and Winding Road.” That was my response to Love Actually. I almost went into convulsions. I was spitting, sputtering.

“I believe that Richard Curtis has done more to sugarcoat and suffocate the romantic comedy genre than any other director-writer I can think of,” I wrote about 14 months ago. “If there’s someone else who has injected his films and scripts with more mirth, fluttery-ness and forced euphoria, I’d like to know who that is. Curtis has no discernible interest in ground-level reality. When writing romantic material he seems interested only in those levitational moments when an attractive man and a simple-but-dishy woman can finally let their true feelings out and look into each other’s eyes and…aaahhh!

The first Jurassic World trailer was supposed to pop on Thursday (i.e., Thanksgiving) but Universal marketers jumped the gun. The jizz-whizz aesthetic applied to howling, snarling dinosaurs? In the words of Elliot Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe, “Ladies, it’s okay with me.” Does this movie have the balls to show a kid being eaten? Of course not. Does it have the balls to show a dishy 20something female tourist being eaten? Almost certainly not. Will it have the balls to show anyone of a vaguely sympathetic nature being eaten? Or will it follow a standard Spielberg-like scheme and have only corporate jerks and fat greedy guys and tour guides get eaten? Almost certainly.

The six nominations given to Alejandro G. Innaritu‘s Birdman for the 30th Film Independent Spirit Awards means it’ll probably take two or three top honors — definitely Best Actor (Michael Keaton), probably Best Feature and maybe Best Director for Inarritu, although Boyhood and its director, Richard Linklater, could nab the Best Feature and/or Best Director trophy as a split-decision gesture…who knows? Boyhood, Nightcrawler and Selma each snagged five nominations. Whiplash was also nominated for Best Feature. Ira Glass‘s Love Is Strange was nominated for Best Feature strictly as a token attaboy neck rub, strictly to round out the pack.

HE Suggestions/Predictions For Spirit Wins:

Best Feature: Birdman (suggested); Birdman or Boyhood (predicted).
Best Director: Alejandro G. Innaritu (suggested); Inarritu or Richard Linklater (predicted).
Best Screenplay: A Most Violent Year‘s J.C. Chandor or Nightcrawler‘s Dan Gilroy (suggested); ditto (predicted).

— excerpt from grand jury testimony of Officer Darren Wilson, posted by N.Y. Times.

“Leaving aside the present ugliness, no one should misunderstand a simple fact about cops, which is that they deal with the worst aspects of human nature 24/7 and that the only way to deal with them when they’re angry and barking some kind of order is to chill and obey. Don’t run or argue or flip the bird. Just give in and mildly submit and that’ll be the end of it. The key is to make them feel placated so they’ll move on. You will always make it worse if you give them any kind of shit. You can’t improve the situation by going ‘why don’t you leave me the fuck alone?’ Some people can’t seem to understand this.” — from an 8.14.14 post called “Is Ferguson (a) Cairo or (b) 1968 Chicago?”

Tweeted by “Joe Veix”, re-tweeted by Stu Van Airsdale.

Variety‘s Justin Chang calls Peter and Michael Spierig‘s Predestination (1.9.15) “an entrancingly strange time-travel saga [that] succeeds in teasing the brain and touching the heart even when its twists and turns keep multiplying well past the point of narrative sustainability. Playfully and portentously examining themes of destiny, mutability and identity through the story of two strangers whose lives turn out to be intricately linked, [pic] offers a skillful and atmospheric adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1960 short story ‘All You Zombies.’ If it’s better in the intimate early stages than in the more grandiose later passages, all in all it’s the sort of boldly illogical head trip that gives preposterousness a good name.”

How much more dynamic can Jurassic World be if all the action takes place on Isla Nublar? It’ll basically be the same crap, which nobody will mind, I suppose. Boilerplate: “22 years after the initial events of Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a totally commercialized dino theme park, Jurassic World, with a surprisingly slimmed-down Chris Pratt conducting behavioral research on the Velociraptors. But when Jurassic World’s attendance rates begin to decline, a new attraction, created to re-spark visitor interest, gravely backfires.” A NOLA industry guy tells me Jurassic World features an aquatic dinosaur “and a sequence where a la Seaworld they feed a great white shark to the leviathan for the tourists to applaud.” I have a guilty liking for The Lost World, which came out 17 years ago. The full-boat trailer airs on Thanksgiving Day, seeking to arouse a nation slumping on the couch and all pigged out.

For me, the throbbing, bassy sound mix at New York’s Alice Tully Hall killed a good half of the dialogue during the 10.4 screening of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice. Which I mentioned that night and in a morning-after piece the next day. I noted in the second riff that “I was able to understand somewhere between 15% and 20% of Katherine Waterston, Joanna Newsom and Jena Malone‘s dialogue, largely because they all seem to converse in hippie-chick fry.” Well, deliverance has arrived with the Inherent Vice screener, which the UPS guy dropped off an hour ago. I popped it in and watched the first scene (i.e., between Waterston and Joaquin Phoenix) and could hear 95% of the dialogue without the slightest difficulty. I still don’t understand what’s going on and Phoenix still sounds slurry-muttery here and there, but I can hear the words. Finally! Don’t even suggest that the Avery Fisher problems were about my own ears. Some readers tried this after I moaned about the Interstellar sound mix, and look what happened with that one. In all modesty I’m a Zen master of theatrical sound assessments.

The first trailer for J.J. Abrams‘ Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney, 12.18.15) will screen in theatres nationwide on Friday, 11.28. I’m guessing it won’t simultaneously appear online. This means that I’ll be humping it down to the AMC Century City or Hollywood’s El Capitan and paying full ticket price just to see it. Which is what happened on 11.6.98 when hundreds (including Paul Thomas Anderson) poured into Mann’s Village in Westwood to see the world premiere of the trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I was there. Every Los Angeles film fanatic with blood in his or her veins was there. The movie that nobody stayed to see was Edward Zwick‘s The Siege. The late Tom Sherak, Fox’s top marketing guy at the time, introduced the trailer. I remember how the mostly geek crowd was mocking the Zwick film…”Siege! Siege! Siege!” And then The Phantom Menace opened on 5.19.99, and the whole thing came tumbling down. It doesn’t matter how much money that mostly tedious movie made. It destroyed the Star Wars theology. True believers were shattered, crestfallen.