Manhattan Wise Guy #1: “Finally saw The Gambler and it wasn’t as bad as everyone has been saying. Aside from the upbeat ending, of course, which blows. Saw N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick at the screening. He was wearing one of the most exhilarating sweaters of this century.” Manhattan Wise Guy #2: “What a dog. Loved John Goodman and Michael K. Williams but I thought it was dreadfully written. And I’d just re-watched the original and thought it hadn’t aged well.”

A little while ago I got into a polite back-and-forth with a friend about the qualitative differences between J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year and Ava Duvernay‘s Selma, which I saw again last night. I found myself responding a bit more supportively to Selma — it went up slightly on my rate-o-meter — but even its best scenes don’t approach the quality of this art-of-the-sell clip. THere’s nothing in Selma that’s as well-written or interesting or mesmerizing, really, as this. This scene is on a whole ‘nother level, particularly due to Oscar Isaac‘s Buddhist Zen calm. The way those 20somethings stand still as statues and respond with the slightest of expressions except for the guy who smirks, and Isaac’s response to that. The vibes in this scene are world-class. This is Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross material. You can feel it.

An ex-girlfriend recently said on Facebook that she “loves” this four-month-old ASL Grease video by Paul and Tina Sirimarco. I watched it…okay, cool, I get it. Paul and Tina seem like nice, kindly, up-attitude people, and they seem more happy than most couples I know. But who listens to “You’re The One That I Want” while driving? I’ll tell you who. People who go to see stage revivals of Grease and Chicago when they visit New York City once every five or ten years, that’s who. People who are unfailingly kind and sensitive and polite, and who wouldn’t mind being a little famous and maybe trading in on that and (who knows?) moving into a bigger, roomier home one day, and maybe vacationing in Cancun or Monte Carlo or Orlando Disney World if fortune permits. People who might have seen Gone Girl but focused only on the plot (as opposed to the actual substance of that David Fincher film) and were kind of bummed by the downbeat ending. People who would probably look at me blankly if I asked them what they thought of Birdman, Citizen Four, Boyhood, A Most Wanted Man, The Babadook, Locke, Nightcrawler, The Drop, etc.

In The Age of Adaline (Lionsgate, 4.24.15), everlasting youth is apparently offered as a pleasant fantasy for the female demographic. Dorian Gray lite, Forrest Gump serendipity…something like that. And yet a similar idea in “Long Live Walter Jameson,” a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, delivered a darker, creepier vibe.

In a just-posted piece about how the immediacy of online conversations and judgments brought about the downfall of Bill Cosby, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson links to a Guardian piece by Lili Loofburow. The piece argues, Thompson says, “that TV recap culture has created an ‘ethical community’ of viewers, who engage with [TV] shows not just as entertainment, but as cultural texts.” Excuse me but I’ve been looking at movies this way my whole life. It’s a very rare film that isn’t a cultural text or artifact or reflection of something or other. Are there any film fanatics who don’t feel this way? No film exists as a stand-alone fantasy that evaporates when it’s over. Okay, some do, but most don’t. All films are about echoes, meditations, ping-backs. Morality, cultural character, sexual politics, political winds…you name it. No movie is an island. Everything, like, reflects everything.

“Not every Mike Nichols production was great. The first time I met him was in 1975, when, as a fledgling magazine writer, I spent days on the Culver City lot where he was shooting The Fortune, a seemingly can’t-miss period comedy starring Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. It missed by a mile, an outcome that seemed apparent to Nichols as well. But again, as I could now see in close-up, he was relentless in trying to fix it, never forsaking his urbane optimism and preternatural calm. As befit a former performer, he showed extraordinary patience with actors, including at least one who had a habit of turning up late and not always in peak condition.” — from Frank Rich’s Vulture piece about the late director, posted late this morning.

The exaggerated expressions worn by Warren Beatty and especially by Jack Nicholson suggest why Mike Nichols‘ The Fortune didn’t work. They were more or less trying to inhabit or reanimate the spirits of Laurel and Hardy, or so it seemed. A limited edition Twilight Time Bluray is streeting early next month (I think…Screen Archives doesn’t like to post dates).

Forget the award-season bunker mentality, forget the odds, forget handicapping and definitely forget the passions of Joe Popcorn. For herewith is my almost final list of 2014’s finest films, totalling 23 and compiled with a focus on world-class coolness, aesthetic exceptionalism and serious envelope-pushing originality. Obviously I’ll update after seeing Unbroken, Into The Woods, Winter Sleep and Big Eyes. These are the personal bests that I’ll be happy to own in some high-def form (Bluray, Vudu HDX, whatever) and will be watching from time to time in years to come. It’s funny how the movies you’re supposed to like or are obliged to publicly support kind of fall away when you take yourself into a purist frame of mind. I’m not 100% locked into this order but it’s close to this:

Top Twelve: 1. Birdman (d: Alejandro G. Inarritu); 2. Citizen Four (d: Laura Poitras); 3. Leviathan (d: Andrey Zvyagintsev); 4. Gone Girl (d: David Fincher, who took a film with an airport-lounge plot and made it into something much more resonant); 5. Boyhood (d: Richard Linklater); 6. A Most Violent Year (d: J.C. Chandor); 7. Wild Tales (d: Damian Szifron); 8. A Most Wanted Man (d: Anton Corbijn); 9. The Babadook (d: Jennifer Kent); 10. Locke (d: Steven Knight); 11. Nightcrawler (d: Dan Gilroy); 12. The Drop (d: Michael R. Roskam).

Second-Tier Top Twelve: 13. Whiplash (d: Damian Chazelle), 14. The Theory of Everything (d: James Marsh); 15. The Imitation Game (d: Morten Tyldum); 16. The Grand Budapest Hotel (d: Wes Anderson); 17. Selma (d: Ava DuVernay); 18. Omar (d: Hany Abu-Assad); 19. Last Days in Vietnam (d: Rory Kennedy); 20. Life Itself (d: Steve James); 21. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (d: Matt Reeves); 22. Red Army, (d: Gabe Polsky); 22. Foxcatcher (d: Bennett Miller); 23. Edge of Tomorrow (d: Doug Liman); 24. The One I Love (d: Charlie McDowell).

Some are truly gifted, and if those in that small, choice fraternity are tenacious and lucky and sometimes scrappy enough, they get to develop their gift and turn what they have inside into works that matter for people of all stripes and philsophies. And then there are those gifted types who are fortunate enough to catch a certain inspiration at the right point in their lives, which turns into a wave that carries and defines their finest work for all time to come. This was how things pretty much went for the late and great Mike Nichols, who passed yesterday from a heart attack.

His film-directing career (which alternated from time to time with directing and producing hit Broadway plays), which was flourishy and satisfying and sometimes connected with the profound, lasted from the mid ’60s to mid aughts. Nichols had a touch and a style that everyone seemed to recognize, a certain mixture of sophisticated urban comedy and general gravitas. His first gusher was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff in 1966, and his last truly excellent film was HBO’s Angels in America. If you add Nichols’ brilliant early ’60s stand-up comedy period with Elaine May he really was Mr. King Shit for the better part of a half-century.

But Nichols’ most profound filmic output lasted for eight or nine years, or roughly ’66 through ’74 or ’75 — a chapter known for a certain stylistic signature mixed with an intense and somewhat tortured psychology that came from his European Jewish roots. Longtime Nichols collaborator Richard Sylbert, whom I knew fairly well from the late ’80s to the early aughts, explained it to me once. Nichols had developed that static, ultra-carefully composed, long-take visual approach that we saw in The Graduate, Catch 22, Carnal Knowledge, Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune, and this signature was, Sylbert believed, what elevated Nichols into the Movie God realm.

And then Nichols suffered a kind of crisis or collapse of the spirit after the double-flop of Dolphin and Fortune, and he withdrew from feature films for eight years, doing little or nothing for a certain period and then focusing on plays for the most part. He rebounded big-time with Silkwood in ’83, but the way he shot and paced that successful, well-reviewed drama showed that the great stylistic signature of his mid ’60s to mid ’70s films was no more. The ever-gifted Nichols never lost his sensitivity or refinement, but the anguished artist phase had ended.

A few weeks or months from now some seasoned journalist will write an absorbing, almost certainly colorful history of the Aaron Sorkin-scripted Steve Jobs project, which has not had a smooth ride so far. The latest development, reported by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming, is that Sony Pictures has decided against distributing — why? — and that Universal has all but snapped it up. This following the abrupt abandonment of the Jobs role by Christian Bale, and before that David Fincher leaving the project over a pay dispute. Based on the Walter Isaacson biography of the Apple founder, the film will be directed by Danny Boyle with Michael Fassbender reportedly a possible candidate to fill Bale’s slot. (He doesn’t seem like the right guy to me — wrong physical look — Bale would have been perfect.) The film is being produced by Scott Rudin, Christian Colson, Mark Gordon and Guymon Casady.

Earlier today Variety‘s Brent Lang suggested that Laura Poitras‘ Citizenfour, easily the year’s best feature-length documentary, deserves a Best Picture nomination. Lang is apparently concerned that the Academy’s documentary branch might be too contrarian or mule-headed to nominate it or that the general Academy membership, which prefers to vote for docs that make them feel emotionally nourished, might regard Citizenfour as too controversial or something. This despite the International Documentary Association (IDA), a pretty good indicator of Academy sentiments about documentaries, having last month nominated Citizenfour for Best Feature Doc.

I’ve always loved this old SCTV skit about longtime Bob Hope worshipper Woody Allen attempting to collaborate with his idol. Until today I never knew that the phrase “aging Pentagon clown,” a Hope description that I first heard back in the early ’70s, came from a Russian journalist. Ten or twelve years ago Albert Brooks delivered an entertaining speech to some industry gathering of some kind (I seem to recall it occuring in Santa Monica) and I somehow got hold of an audio tape of Brooks’ remarks, and I transcribed a portion of them. And one of the stand-out portions, for me, was when he talked about watching Bob Hope on TV as a kid in the 1950s, and how his father would get really excited when an upcoming Hope appearance loomed, but when Hope did his act “you never laughed,” Brooks recalled. I posted a transcript of Brooks remarks about Hope and the absence of seatbelts in 1950s cars, and a couple of days later Howard Stern read from the Hope stuff on his show. (This was at least a couple of years before he started with SiriusXM.) Note to Brooks if he’s reading this: Any chance you have a recording of this speech lying around, and could I persuade you to share it?