I was walking along Santa Monica Blvd. early last evening when I noticed or more precisely heard a young T-shirted guy riding shotgun in a nearby moving car. The guy was looking at the driver and laughing hysterically and slapping his bare leg for emphasis. I was instantly appalled by this, and quickly took out my iPhone and tweeted the following: “I really don’t like people who clap their hands or slap their thigh while laughing at a joke told by a friend or colleague. That’s monkey body language. The clap or thigh-slap is basically a gesture of obeisance to the joke-teller. As loathsome as it gets.” The first time I noticed obsequious monkey-submission gestures was in junior high-school. The first time I noticed a celebrity slapping his leg to emphasize the wonderfulness of a joke he’d just heard was, I think, on a network TV Frank Sinatra tribute, and the knee-slapper was…who else?…Sammy Davis, Jr. I’m just reminding readers that if they want to be seen as a shameless kiss-ass, this is the way to go.

For the unpardonable sin of having directed and written a moving, strongly acted, mostly well-received and somewhat profitable Adam Sandler film called Reign Over Me (’07), Mike Binder was arrested and charged with intent to make dramadies, found guilty and sent to Movie Jail. (It’s not widely known that Movie Jail is a real-deal, privately-funded correctional facility, located just east of Bakersfield.) Binder was furloughed from time to time for acting gigs, meetings and tennis lessons, but he wasn’t fully “sprung” — i.e., allowed to direct again — until last summer when he began shooting Black and White, a racially-tinged parenting drama starring Kevin Costner, Jillian Estell, Octavia Spencer and Andre Holland. The film has been fine-tuned and will probably be part of the fall conversation, but first things first. Binder is one of the few directors left who are into character-driven, human-scale films about flawed guys enduring loss, failure, transitions, relationship breakthroughs, etc. Remember The Upside of Anger? Remember Anthony Lane’s review of Reign Over Me?

Black and White director-writer Mike Binder, Kevin Costner during filming last summer.

Kevin Costner, costar Jillien Estell.

Atom Egoyan‘s The Captive (A24, no firm release date) “makes it thuddingly obvious from the get-go that the villain is a wealthy, debonair, gray-haired creep played by Kevin Durand. How do we know this so quickly? Because he walks down staircases with his hands folded behind his back. Only bad guys do this, the movie is telling us. In fact, only bad actors do this.

“I began to lose my mind less than ten minutes in, and the insanity began with Durand’s historically terrible performance. Everything Durand does in this film says ‘I am a profoundly twisted fuck, and I am going to over-convey this fact until you are dying to reach into the screen and strangle me to death…but this is not The Purple Rose of Cairo and so you can’t. You have two choices — suffer through my performance or walk out.'” — from my 5.16.14 Cannes Film Festival review.

“It’s no surprise that watching actors naturally age on camera without latex and digital effects makes for mesmerizing viewing. And at first it may be hard to notice much more than the creases etching Ethan Hawke’s face, the sexy swells of Patricia Arquette’s belly and Ellar Coltrane’s growth spurts. You may see your own face in those faces, your children’s, too. This kind of identification is familiar, as is the idea that movies preserve time. Andre Bazin wrote that art emerged from our desire to counter the passage of time and the inevitable decay it brings. But in Boyhood, Mr. Linklater’s masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn’t fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.” — from Manohla Dargis‘s 7.10 N.Y. Times review.

Boyhood currently has a 97% Metacritic rating and a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Yeah, definitely Spirit Awards material…kidding!

Yesterday afternoon N.Y. Post film critic Lou Lumenick posted a tribute piece about Robert Zemeckis‘s Forrest Gump, which opened 20 years and four days ago (i.e., 7.6.94). Millions of moviegoers fell in love with this delusional film about a kindly, aw-shucks simpleton who leads a charmed life. We all know it wound up with six Oscars and made a mountain of money, etc.

But in my mind Gump‘s most noteworthy achievement is that it showed how myopic Americans (particularly American males) were about themselves. They really love (or loved) the idea of half-sweethearting and half-dipshitting their way through life. Gump is also one of the most lying, full-of-shit films ever made when it came to portraying the tempests of the 1960s.

Here’s how I put it way back in October 2008, although I was drawing at the time from an L.A. Times Syndicate piece about the Gump backlash that I wrote just after it opened:

“I have a still-lingering resentment of Forrest Gump which I and many others disliked from the get-go for the way it kept saying ‘keep your head down’, for its celebration of clueless serendipity and simpleton-ism, and particularly for the propagandistic way it portrayed ’60s-era counter-culture types and in fact that whole convulsive period.

This is pretty good. Luc Besson‘s flamboyant attitude is semi-amusing. At first I was saying, “Wait, she shoots four or five guys in two seconds?” Then I saw her pull the bullet out and said, “Yeah!” Boilerplate: “Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is a Taiwan-residing woman forced to work as a drug mule for the mob. The drug implanted in her body inadvertently leaks into her system, changing her into a superhuman. She can absorb knowledge instantaneously, is able to move objects with her mind, and chooses not to feel pain or other discomforts.” Lucy pops on 7.25.

The second I saw the pilot-windshield POV in a plane crash sequence from the trailer for Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (Universal, 12.25), I knew it had been respectfully stolen from a very similar shot in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent (’40). Obviously. Hitchcock achieved the effect of water smashing through the cockpit windshield by sending a couple of hundred gallons through a rice-paper projection screen. Jolie reportedly achieved the same effect in a similar physical manner.

Unbroken ocean-impact shot #1

Foreign Correspondent ocean-impact shot #1

A trailer popping in mid-July for Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Wild (Fox Searchlight, 12.5) tells me it may turn up at Venice/Telluride/Toronto. Based on Cheryl Strayed‘s “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” and a screenplay adaptation by Nick Hornby, you can tell it’s a stirring, disciplined, well-mounted thing. Thoughtful, internal. A woman in a difficult transition struggling against the elements and coming out of that with…something new. Certainly with stronger leg muscles. Spiritual cross-currents, layered, brilliant editing, etc. The Venice/Telluride/Toronto strategy, if indeed Fox Searchlight is playing that card, will naturally mean the launch of a Best Actress campaign for Reese Witherspoon. But first things first.

You can tell right off the bat that Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (Universal, 12.25) is handsome, exacting, strikingly performed and generally well made. Obviously. But…Jesus, I’m almost afraid to say this out of fear that Universal marketing execs will take revenge when it comes to Phase One and Phase Two buys. I’ll put it as delicately as possible. While I expect that I’ll probably be genuinely moved and seriously impressed during my first viewing, I’m already getting the feeling that I may not want to see Unbroken twice…no offense. It’s obviously dealing with loads of strife, struggle and pain, and once may be enough. On top of which we’ve all gone through the “alone and adrift at sea” thing twice over the last two years (via Life of Pi and All Is Lost). And we’ve all suffered in various Japanese P.O.W. camps via The Bridge on the River Kwai, King Rat, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Railway Man. I’m not saying it won’t be a very good or great film. I’m just saying there’s baggage.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (Fox Searchlight, 10.17) will open the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, 8.27. Which gives Inarritu and his cast (Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts) enough time to fly to the Telluride Film Festival for screenings beginning…oh, let’s make it Saturday, 8.30, so as not to jam them too hard. They probably won’t make the picnic but no worries. Venice runs from 8.27 through 9.6. Telluride runs from 8.29 to 9.1. And the Toronto Film Festival — sloppy Birdman thirds, guys, but them’s the breaks — is from 9.4 to 9.14.

Like everyone else I’ve seen two episodes of HBO’s The Leftovers, and like everyone else I’m just about done with it. There’s something very, very wrong with the idea of people in a small leafy community acting strange and surly and curiously off-balance because a sudden cataclysmic event has proven beyond a doubt that an absolute cosmic authority rules over all creation. After living with uncertainty all their lives about whether or not there might be some kind of scheme or purpose to existence (i.e., probably not), here is a group of people who suddenly know there’s absolutely a plan or a design of some kind, like something out of the Old Testament only scarier and creepier, and that there’s some kind of all-knowing, all-seeing judgment system that resulted in 2% of the world’s population rising up and into the white light…and this is how they respond? I don’t know how I’d react or how West Hollywood or Beverly Hills would react as a community, but I’m 95%…make that 97% certain that the vast majority in my realm would do more than just slouch around and act strange and surly and shoot packs of feral dogs with high-powered rifles and optionally join a spiritual order that requires no talking and smoking a lot of cigarettes. I’m profoundly disappointed with the imaginings of co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta. My interest in their series has dropped precipitously over the last two weeks. Little Justin Theroux and that morose expression on his unshaven face…silent, stone-faced Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler being told to chop down a perfectly healthy tree…the dog-shooting guy…you can have ’em. I’ll probably watch this lame-ass series for the next couple of Sundays out of boredom but I’m definitely not into it and I’m just looking around for an excuse to watch something else.

David Mackenzie‘s Starred Up, a father-son prison drama, wound up with a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating when it opened in England last March. (I naturally missed it when it played Telluride a little less than 10 months ago.) Boilerplate: “19-year-old Eric (Jack O’Connell) is transferred to the same adult prison facility as his estranged father (greasy Ben Mendelsohn)…as his explosive temper quickly finds him enemies in both prison authorities and fellow inmates — and his already volatile relationship with his father is pushed past breaking point, Eric is approached by a volunteer psychotherapist (Rupert Friend), who runs an anger management group for prisoners,” etc.