Nationally syndicated columnist and Washington Post op-ed contributor Michael Gerson has written an impression of Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver (Weinstein Co., 8.15), which he recently saw. He calls it an “updated but respectful re-telling” of Lois Lowry’s slim 1993 book about totalitarianism, euthanasia, suicide, sexual awakening and infanticide, and “clearly the labor of someone’s love.” He also calls it “an odd candidate for a blockbuster,” as much of what happens in the book and the film is “an interior moral struggle.” But he predicts it will “provoke political commentary” as The Giver‘s main point is that pain is a difficult but necessary component in any meaningful life as “the very things that make us vulnerable to loss — choice, emotion, desire — also make us human.” This, says Gerson, is “fairly serious stuff for a summertime movie. But it is precisely what causes Lowry’s book to transcend the genre of teen literature it created.”

I’ve just been disinvited from participating in next week’s Magic in the Moonlight press junket in Los Angeles. No biggie, no sweat…but I’m wondering who pushed the button. I’m guessing it was Colin Firth‘s publicist. On 3.31 I wrote a piece called “Repressed British Clod,” about Firth’s downward career trajectory following a remarkable three-year hot streak from ’09 to ’11 (A Single Man, The King’s Speech and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), so perhaps they’re afraid I might get into that. (As Firth himself did, prophetically-speaking, when he accepted his Oscar.) I wouldn’t, of course. Firth’s performance in Magic in the Moonlight is his best since The King’s Speech, and that’s the current reality. Or was I deep-sixed because I recently lamented that crude-looking Magic in the Moonlight one-sheet? It can’t be because of today’s review, which was mostly positive.

“A well-rounded and compassionate portrait of an outsider with some degree of misdiagnosed mental illness, Art and Craft is an engrossing document of immense talents gone sideways. Art forger Mark Landis has a level of craft and mimicry that is unparalleled, which goes beyond copying. But its meticulous fastidiousness seems rooted in a mania he cannot control. Soft-spoken and shy, it’s clear Landis has no malicious intent, but he’s nevertheless a massive stain on the reputation of the art world that many want to blot out.

Ignore the 1.85 aspect ratio info on Amazon’s Marty Bluray page. Why? Because it’s incorrect. I’ve been asleep at the wheel for the last month but in mid-June Kino Lorber vp acquisitions and business affairs Frank Tarzi announced a decision to issue the Bluray of Delbert Mann‘s Oscar-winning 1955 drama in the preferred Hollywood Elsewhere aspect ratio of 1.33 (or is it 1.37?). I love the smell of napalm in the morning, and especially when someone ignores the advice of aspect-ratio historian Bob Furmanek, who, if he had his druthers, would chop every standard-Academy-ratio 1950s film made after April 1953 down to 1.85. Being on the winning side of these battles is wonderful!

Look at the headroom in this frame capture from DVD Beaver’s review of Kino Lorber’s Marty Bluray, which streets on 7.29.

All the 1.85 fascists were hopping mad about this last month, and here I am just joining the party. Did I miss anything?

On June 7th I reported that KL’s Marty Bluray would be presented “in the dreaded 1.85 with the tops and bottoms of the protected 1.37 image (seen on TV, VHS, laser disc and DVDs for the last five or six decades) severed with a meat cleaver.” A month earlier aspect-ratio historian Bob Furmanek noted in a Home Theatre Forum post that (a) the Marty Bluray would (a) be presented “for the first time since the original theatrical release with Mann’s intended 1.85:1 compositions,” and that (b) “we provided the documentation to insure mastering in the correct ratio.”

Every comedy needs an antagonist of some kind. That’s what Harrison Holzer plays in Jake Kasdan‘s Sex Tape — a chubby little prick who tries to blackmail Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz when he discovers their accidentally uploaded sex-tape video and threatens to send it to YouPorn unless they cough up $25K. There are two problems with Holzer and his character. One, he’s not very funny — all you get are “evil little sociopath” vibes because his first and only instinct is to profit from Segel and Diaz’s misfortune despite the fact that he’s the son of their best friends, played by Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper. And two, all villain or wicked witch figures get their comeuppance in Act Three and yet Holzer’s character skates. Segel is furious with him during Act Two and Three but when things settle down at the end and Holzer’s character tells Segel he’s dropping the blackmail plan because he wants to hang with Segel’s son, Segel dismissively and somewhat lightly calls him a “goofball.” That’s almost like calling Hannibal Lecter an eccentric gourmet.

There are four categories of Woody Allen movies — classics (Manhattan, Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters), very goods (Husbands and Wives, Match Point, Stardust Memories, Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets Over Broadway, Vicky Cristina Barcelona), fairly goods (Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Sweet and Lowdown, September) and duds or semi-duds (Scoop, Alice, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Hollywood Ending, Melinda and Melinda, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Curse of the Jade Scorpion). His latest, Magic in the Moonlight, is mostly a third-category effort but in the general realm that equals a solid B grade. We all know how this goes. We’re all accustomed to our annual Woody fix, and as long as it’s not a burn (which this isn’t) there’s nothing to complain about. This one actually has a notable quality or current that kicks it up a notch and in fact makes it entirely unique in the Woody canon.

Emma Stone, Colin Firth in Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight.

To the less perceptive Magic in the Moonlight presents itself as a typically mid-tempo ensemble piece, very dry and mild-mannered but often amusing. Set in various Cote d’Azur locations in 1928, it’s about Stanley (Colin Firth), a witty, curmudgeon-like magician who’s been asked to debunk Sophie (Emma Stone), a professional mystic who may be exploiting a rich Pennsylvania matron (Jackie Weaver), and who is also being aggressively wooed by the matron’s son (Hamish Linklater).

It’s obvious from the get-go that Firth will gradually fall prey to Stone’s charms, and I don’t just mean her big beautiful eyes but also her spiritual aura, and that she’ll eventually reciprocate in the end.

Breaking: Corporations are essentially sociopathic in their pursuit of greater profits, and they often cozy up to rightwing zealots and social regressives as part of this effort. They’re not “people” and they sure as hell aren’t religious (except in a politically-calculating, catering-to-the-rural-bubbas sense of that term). And yet three weeks ago the Supremes’ Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Decision declared that “closely held for-profit corporations are exempt from a law its owners religiously object to”…hah! That’s shorthand for restricting women’s reproductive rights and choices, which are enforced by the contraceptive mandate adopted by the Department of Health and Human Services under Obamacare. It’s nice that at least one U.S. Senator has the cojones to explain what’s really going on.

I will vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I accept, grudgingly, that when elected she will do a reasonably good job of more or less continuing or building upon President Obama‘s center-right policies and philosophies, perhaps with more of a feisty style. But I love Elizabeth Warren.

At the 1:02 mark Hedwig and the Angry Inch star Neil Patrick Harris tells HuffPostLive‘s Ricky Camilleri about having recently seen David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, in which NPH costars, at a late-night Manhattan showing. Wasn’t color corrected, had temp music. He really liked it, he says, but you know…he’s in it. Camilleri twice refers to the director as David “Lynch”…that happens, no biggie.

First-rate reporting about the renegade Malaysian Airlines shoot-down has been passed along all day by Foreign Policy columnist and Interpreter Mag headliner Michael Weiss. Weiss appeared on at least two MSNBC shows today. [His appearance toward the end of Lawrence O’Donnell‘s The Last Word — after the jump — is worth catching.] The below is an alleged transcript between the bad guys — two (or is it three?) intercepted conversations put out by the Ukranian government — about the missile-caused midair explosion and mass murder.

Here’s a portion of my 1.22 Sundance Film Festival review of Charlie McDowell and Justin Lader‘s The One I Love: “Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss play Ethan and Sophie, a couple who visit a kind of therapeutic country retreat in an effort to heal their damaged relationship (largely due to a brief episode of infidelity on Ethan’s part). Early on something happens that either (a) re-acquaints the couple with alternate, fantasy-projection, somewhat more attractive versions of themselves or (b) reminds them of the people they presented themselves as when they first met.

“We all put on our best sexy/attractive face when we first meet and go out with someone we like and want to be with. Down the road the reality of who we really are eventually comes out, of course. The therapy that Ethan and Sophie experience at the retreat is surreal, but the film is basically saying that when we stop presenting our sexy/giving/open-hearted selves (a process that ends because it’s so exhausting) and come down to earth, we inevitably disappoint our partners. The One I Love is about re-connecting with the person we fell in love with initially and/or ditching the one we’ve become disappointed with since.

“McDowell, Lader, producer Mel Eslyn and executive producer Duplass should be proud and satisfied for at least delivering an entertaining comedy that is clearly unusual and at least semi-thoughtful (even if they don’t quite bring it home). The One I Love is a great date flick — no question. Definitely something to kick around with your significant other and friend over drinks. It should sell.”

“I don’t think anyone has ever not come to a film of mine that they thought they would enjoy,” Woody Allen tells N.Y. Times contributor David Itzkoff in a piece about Magic in the Moonlight (Sony Classics, 7.25). “Nothing keeps them away if they think they’ll enjoy the film. And if they don’t think they’ll enjoy the film, nothing we can do ever brings them in.”

In other words, people can always smell the hits and the flops before they see them, and so they do what they want to do, often regardless of reviews and marketing (or in defiance of them). I don’t fit that mold, of course, but I have instincts like anyone else. Except I often don’t want to see a lot of the hits I can smell coming because I know they’ll be coarse and assaultive and probably infuriating. And then sometimes I’m surprised, which is what I live for.

Will Russia submit Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan as that country’s Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar contender? Doubtful. I think it’s crazy for Russia to bury a film as good as Leviathan but Vladimir Putin and his governmental goons have their own views. I recognize that “doubtful” has been the general speculation since the film’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival two months ago, given the anti-Putin, anti-corruption current in the film. The repressive gangster attitude of the Putin government has spoken for itself time and again (and particularly today), and — I hate to admit this — the likelihood of official Russian support of Leviathan is probably nil. So Sony Classics can probably forget about an Oscar bounce when it opens the film down the road (i.e., probably early next year).

Make no mistake — Leviathan deserves such a bounce. Last May I called it “a drop-dead brilliant, awesomely-composed-in-every-respect melodrama and moral tale that concurrently serves as a microcosm of (or metaphor for) a morally compromised, ruthlessly malevolent, bare-knuckled Russia. Vladimir Putin will love it! (Kidding.) Political corruption, lust and infidelity, way too much vodka, blackmail and thuggery, gunshots, bromide-dispensing priests who kowtow to powerful scumbags, huge whale skeletons, crashing waves, rotting ships — this puppy has it all plus the aura of a majesterial art film plus opening and closing musical passages by Phillip Glass plus the most beautifully lighted, handsomely composed widescreen photography (by Mikhail Krichman) I’ve seen in a long time.”

True, a 5.23 AP story by Jake Coyle reported that Zvyagintsev has “disputed” that his film condemns present-day Russia, saying that the story “could have taken place anywhere in the world.” And yet producer Alexandre Rodnianski admitted in Cannes that Russia’s minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, “didn’t like the film after recently seeing it.”

In a recent sum-up piece about the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson said that it’s “hard to believe” that Russia would submit Leviathan for Oscar consideration as “it is a harsh indictment of the rampant corruption that infects everyday life there…wall pictures of Vladimir Putin watch over everyone.”