You can sense discipline over, under, around and through this international trailer for Liv Ullman‘s Miss Julie, which will screen during the 2014 Toronto Film Festival. Discipline on Ullman’s part, but also, obviously, on the part of Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton. Mikhail Krichman‘s cinematography is obviously quite handsome and Barry Lyndon-ish. (Krichman also shot Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan.) Playwright August Strindberg, the author of the original 1906 play, had his issues with women. At least part of his prolific output is thought to be colored by misogyny. The above quote is from Woody Allen‘s Manhattan: “When it comes to relationships with women I’m the winner of the August Strindberg award.” I know that poor Morton suffered a stroke eight years ago and that it took her a while to recover, but why at age 37 is she turning into Tyne Daly?

In a sense Luc Besson‘s Lucy (Universal, 7.25) is a brighter, crazier, grabbier version of Under The Skin as it basically gives Scarlett Johansson another turn as a dangerous alien of sorts — a blank-faced lady with exceptional, unearthly powers who gives everyone and everything an odd, head-tilted look…pretty much the same routine (“Hmmm, what is this odd phenomenon? I need to study it more closely”) that Jeff Bridges used in John Carpenter‘s Starman. Towards the end she’s also playing, in a certain sense, the cyber-being she voice-acted in Spike Jonze‘s Her in that she eventually becomes strongly focused on the Great Spiritual Beyond.

ScarJo starts out as an average, none-too-bright American, living for some reason in Taipei and terrified half to death when Taiwanese (or are they Korean?) gangsters nab her when she delivers an attache case on behalf of some greasy sleazebag she’s idiotically chosen to be a friend. They anesthetize her and surgically insert a bag some kind of blue-crystal stuff called CPH4 into her stomach. But when the bag inevitably breaks open (you were expecting otherwise?) ScarJo becomes a kind of T-1000 superwoman. The CPH4 has unlocked her brainpower and given her greater and greater physical abilities, almost Neo-like.

Once she’s broken away from (i.e., wasted) her Taiwanese captors she’s off to Paris, largely because Besson lives there but also because genetic scientist and scholarly backstory-explainer Morgan Freeman is based there. Then we’re in for some more hyper-drive action sequences and visually nutso (i.e., far-reaching) CG delirium.

Lucy’s T-1000 abilities (she can’t turn herself into gelatin or assume the appearance of others but otherwise she’s quite formidable) means she’s now an unstoppable killing machine as well as a growth-obsessed go-getter who needs to ingest more and more of the CPH4…forget it, doesn’t matter.

If any recent movie is CG-driven, Lucy is. Besson and his homies want to show us a lot of “ooh-wow” stuff, and so they put it into the script at every opportunity. I’m presuming they constructed a whammy chart while writing the script. It’s that kind of movie. It’s a movie that says “you can take a bathroom break whenever you like.”

On one hand Lucy is the kind of tediously frenetic CG action exercise that Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth or any fan of super-hyper violence would fall for in a New York minute. But on the other hand it occasionally veers into trippy-ass visual realms that…well, at least they make the watching less arduous. And at least it’s relatively short (i.e, 88 minutes). You sit down with your popcorn and your lethargy and it’s like “oh, God, oh Jesus, here comes the same old bullshit” but then you start saying to yourself “but at least with a few trippy dipshit diversions along the way!”

Movies like this were made for the Drew McWeeny mature-fanboy mentality. (Quote: “I am in the tank for the way Besson tells stories…he’s got a knack for detail that wouldn’t occur to anyone else…he’s got a signature, one of the things that I love most about filmmakers, and I’ve missed it.”)

Joe Swanberg may be reluctant to acknowledge the word “alcoholic,” but he isn’t the least bit reluctant to cut Jake Kasdan‘s Sex Tape into ribbons. A filmmaker friend sent this along with the following: “Here’s something you don’t often see — a filmmaker taking the time to write an article shitting on somebody else’s film.”

Try imagining yourself in a thirtysomething hipster marriage, and living in a house in Chicago. You look like Joe Swanberg and your wife looks like Melanie Lynskey, and you have an infant son. Along comes your younger sister, a dead ringer for Anna Kendrick, to stay in the guest room while she looks for a job. It’s soon evident that she’s some kind of alcoholic. When she drinks she gets completely wasted and passes out…obviously self-destructive and almost sure to get worse. But your creatively stifled wife has been enjoying some creative sex-book-writing sessions she’s been having with your sister and a friend who looks like Lena Dunham. And then your sister gets really drunk again and forgets to take something out of the oven and damn near burns the house down. Smoke everywhere. When your wife asks you about your sister, do you say “yeah, I’d say she has a serious drinking problem”? Of course not! Why would you ever say something like that? All you say is that she’s “really immature.” The words “alcohol” or “alcoholic” never cross your lips or anyone else’s. And your wife is so taken with your sister and those creative bull sessions that she figures “what the hell…your sister might succeed at burning the house down when she gets bombed again and wind up killing us and our baby but I really like the feeling of being creative again so…you know, let’s just take it one day at a time.” Is that cool?

Caged Heat, Crazy Mama, Handle with Care, Last Embrace, Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, Swimming to Cambodia, Married to the Mob, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, Rachel Getting Married — Jonathan Demme has been my idea of a highly respectable, sometimes world-class auteur for 35…okay, let’s make it 40 years. But I swear to God I had a little trouble listening to what Demme was saying in this Ricky Camilleri interview because of that grotesque Indian shirt he’s wearing, not to mention those two necklaces. Okay, I “listened” to his phrases and thoughts but my mind drifted in and out. Interview subjects should obviously guard against outre appearances getting in the way…just sayin’. Demme sat down with Camilleri to plug his latest film, The Master Builder (opening Wednesday).

No, seriously….this is the real-deal Trash (’70). Paul Morrissey‘s, I mean. Intravenous drug use, sex, frontal nudity. “I need money for drugs…do you have any?” Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn, Jane Forth. (Forth, a 17 year-old model at the time, is the one playing opposite JD.) Sissy Spacek allegedly made “a quick uncredited appearance as a girl who sits at the bar but was cut from the final film.” Basically about the perverse mood of downtown late ’60s Warhol-centric hipsters, and secondarily about the vaguely comic humiliations that accompany Dallesandro’s heroin habit.

Even in Portugese you can tell that Stephen Daldry‘s Trash will be fast and mean and kind of City of God-like. The only thing that scares me is the presence of Martin Sheen. Costarring Wagner Moura and Rooney Mara, pic is obviously about three Brazilian ragamuffins (Rickson Tevez, Eduardo Luis, Gabriel Weinstein) who find on a valuable wallet at a trash dump, and are soon after being chased around by baddies. Will Trash play the early fall festivals? With no U.S. distributor on-board, that would seem to make sense.

Roughly ten months after it began filming and eight months before Warner Bros. opens it on 3.15.15, Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of The Sea is having a research screening on Thursday evening, 7.24, at the Sherman Oaks Arclight. I won’t post any reactions or even run a summary, but should anyone attend I’ve love to hear how it plays. Privately, pure curiosity. Howard’s film, a period action-drama costarring Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw and Brendan Gleeson, is basically a Moby Dick origin tale mixed with another shipwrecked-at-sea, survival-in-a-lifeboat saga a la Life of Pi, All Is Lost and Unbroken.

This morning the 2014 Toronto Film Festival (9.4 to 9.14) announced a rundown of I-forget-how-many galas and special presentations (i.e., 40- or 50-something). I read the list two or three hours ago and went “okay, interesting, good, yup, cool….wait, where’s Leviathan?” Will it be announced as…what, a Canadian premiere when the next TIFF announcement breaks? Or is it being punished (i.e., relegated to after-Monday status) because Telluride, as expected, will be the first U.S. festival to show it? I’m a little confused about the Toronto vs. Telluride rules of inclusion vs. exclusion.

Here, in any event, are my preferential Toronto must-sees so far in terms of genuine intrigue and excitement, and not necessarily in terms of “ooh, ooh, pant, pant…will this be a serious Oscar contender?” I rarely see more than 27 films during my ten days there (9 and 1/2 days X 3 films daily plus filing, sleeping, occasional parties), and more often in the vicinity of 25 or a bit less. Hottest films listed first, less-hots starting around 15 or thereabouts:

1. Wild, d: Jean-Marc Vallee; 2. The Theory of Everything, d: James Marsh; 3. While We’re Young, d: Noah Baumbach; 4. Rosewater, d: Jon Stewart; 5. Men, Women & Children, d: Jason Reitman; 6. Black and White, d: Mike Binder (hit me hard during first viewing, wanna see it again); 7. Wild Tales, d: Damian Szifron (loved it in Cannes, can’t wait to see it again); 8. Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington‘s The Equalizer; 9. Phoenix, d: Christian Petzold; 10. Pasolini, d: Abel Ferrara; 11. Nightcrawler, d: Dan Gilroy; 12. 99 Homes, d: Ramin Bahrani; 13. Time Out of Mind, d: Oren Moverman; 14. The Judge, d: David Dobkin; 15. This Is Where I Leave You, d: Shawn Levy; 16. The Riot Club, d: Lone Scherfig; 17. Miss Julie, d: Liv Ullman; 18. The Good Lie, d: Philippe Falardeau; 19. Love & Mercy, d: Bill Pohlad; 20. Manglehorn, d: David Gordon Green; 21. The Humbling, d: Barry Levinson; 22. The Last Five Years, d: Richard LaGravenese; 23. The New Girlfriend, d: François Ozon; 24. Top Five, d: Chris Rock; 25. A Second Chance, d: Susanne Bier.

Columbia and Regency Pictures have shifted Cameron Crowe‘s still-untitled film out of a previously announced December 2014 slot in favor of a 5.29.15 release. No harm, no worries, fine. Then again the announcement didn’t exactly feel like a surprise. Nobody in my circle had even mentioned it as a fall-holiday title to look forward to with any excitement. The fact that Crowe never managed to give it a title indicated…well, I don’t know exactly but title-less films always make you wonder “what’s the problem?”

The film, some kind of romantic dramedy set in with Hawaii and having to do with the Air Force and space satellites, costars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Danny McBride, Alec Baldwin, John Krasinski and Bill Murray. An earlier version (a cousin or a close relation) called Deep Tiki nearly went before the cameras 2009 with Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon costarring, but the plug was pulled in pre-production.

In this fascinating trailer for Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler (Open Road, 10.17), Jake Gyllenhaal looks a little more than gaunt. Strung-out is one term that seems to at least visually apply. You can see the whites above and below his pupils. Robotic, serene with a vengeance, very persistent, lots of anger underneath. “A driven young man stumbles upon the underground world of L.A. freelance crime journalism,” etc. Costarring Bill Paxton, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Kevin Rahm, Eric Lange. Gilroy directed (first time) and wrote.

In Katie Arnold-Ratliff‘s 7.18 N.Y. Times review, Emily Gould‘s “Friendship” is described as “a novel that could not exist without the internet — the very entity that has thrust its author into a certain kind of sickly, fluorescent limelight.” The “snark-and-burn ethos” of Gould’s writings for Gawker a few years ago “came back to very publicly haunt her after she left the company,” she reminds. The book is about an up-and-down New York relationship tale between Bev and Amy, the latter closely modelled upon Gould herself. It may be worth reading, but what has my attention are passages in Arnold-Ratliff’s review that remind me of my own vaguely warped existence. Just substitute “Jeff” for “Amy” or “Gould,” “his” for “her”, etc.

“Friendship” author and former Gawker columnist Emily Gould.

Excerpt #1: “‘Friendship’ does not come with a comments section in which people can say to Gould, as they often have, things like ‘go kill yourself.’ Besides which, if you have any interest in what it’s like to be a young woman in a world that exists half IRL (that’s In Real Life, FYI) and half online, where nothing is private and no one is kind…you might enjoy this book.”

Excerpt #2: “Book drafts, spec scripts and other false starts toward a creative, actualized life take up Amy’s mental and literal bandwidth, making her feel guilty — though usually not guilty enough to dig her out of those Wikipedia rabbit holes.”