Legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard, who wrote thousands upon thousands of the most beautifully shaped sentences and digressive dialogue riffs I’ve ever read in my life and who incidentally influenced the living shit out of me, has ascended and is now hanging out with Dennis Farina. A stroke took him down. He was 87. A Detroit guy through and through. Well, a Bloomfield Hills guy. **

Leonard wrote and wrote and wrote for…what, sixty-five years straight? He never stopped working and enjoyed a brilliant hot streak during the ’80s and ’90s. And he boiled the bullshit out of his prose each and every time he put pen to paper. And he was nice enough to talk with me on the phone a few times during my reporting days with Entertainment Weekly and People and the L.A. Times Syndicate. He didn’t even hiccup when I called him “Dutch” a couple of times.

It was announced earlier today that Randy Moore‘s Escape From Tomorrow, the black-and-white Disneyland-meets-The Shining fantasia that played Sundance ’13, will be released commercially on 1.1 by Cinetic Media’s PDA. Pic will open theatrically as well as day-and-date on VOD. The public will see a somewhat shorter version than the one that played at Sundance. Here’s what I wrote after seeing it last January:

“Set entirely in Disneyland and shot in black-and-white, it’s basically a riff on The Shining with a vein of social criticism about pudgy, desperate, flabby-brained Americans indulging themselves with sugar, booze and fantasy while corporations control and exploit them like cattle. Is this not the central middle-class affliction of the 21st Century?

Dick Van Dyke‘s hot-shit Jaguar caught on fire earlier today when he was driving on the 101 near Calabassas. The car melted but DVD got out okay and everything’s fine. But since when do late-model Jaguars, which are very expensive, very well-made cars, burst into flames? Van Dyke to Jaguar salesman: “And what are the chances…you know, just between you and me and the walls with no recording devices…what are the chances of this little honey bursting into flames when I’m on the freeway?” Jaguar salesman to Van Dyke: “Oh, fairly remote, I’d say. Okay, maybe a 5% chance. But that’s the chance everyone takes when they buy a Jaguar. Under the wrong conditions they can turn into tinderboxes. But hey…just concentrate on the 95% chance that it won’t happen.”

Dick Van Dyke

Almost every damn year the same thing happens. Journalists who’ve attended the Berlin or Cannes festivals praise a knockout performance in a small or foreign indie release (like Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue Is The Warmest Color) and mention the idea of this actor or actress being a contender on the awards circuit, and right away the middle-of-the-road handicappers say “well, that’s very nice but veteran industry types and journalists in this country are more comfortable with nominating familiar faces, and so we think that the following brand-name actresses are the likeliest contenders.”

Except by saying and writing this crap they’re perpetuating default thinking. They’re not describing industry complacency — they’re winking at it and nudging it along.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has urged his Oscar experts (including myself) to make some predictions. It’s a bit silly to do this before Telluride/Toronto/New York but what the hell. Out of ten Best Picture spitballers, four are predicting David O. Russell‘s American Hustle, two are betting on Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street and two are predicting Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska. Except Nebraska is not going to win Best Picture — get real. It’s a good film, but on the Payne scale it’s a middle-ranger. Bruce Dern has a good shot in the Best Supporting Actor race (forget Best Actor) and it’s conceivable that June Squibb could prevail as a Best Supporting Actress contender.

Here are my transitional, know-nothing picks for the leading Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor contenders:

As noted, first-time-anywhere showings of Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, Spike Jonze’s Her and Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty will highlight the 51st New York Film Festival (9.27 to 10.13). But otherwise the fest will screen a slew of Cannes repeats — Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, J.C. Chandor‘s All is Lost, Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue is the Warmest Color, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive and James Gray‘s The Immigrant.

Other Cannes pop-outs screening in Manhattan: Claude Lanzmann‘s The Last of the Unjust, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (winner of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Prize) and Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar (winner of a Certain Regard prize).

I missed Alexandre Moors‘ Blue Caprice (9.13 theatrical, 9.17 iTunes/VOD) at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I’d like to see it before leaving for Telluride on 8.28. Hello, Brigade Marketing — can I get a screener? “A chillingly plausible and responsibly handled attempt to dramatize the disturbing bond between the two men behind the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks” — Variety‘s Justin Chang.

There are two ways to pronounce “villa.” If you’re in Italy looking to rent a villa, it should rhyme with “Godzilla.” But if you’re managing an old-style, Spanish-flavored, pre-war hotel in Santa Barbara called the Villa Rosa Inn, you obviously need to pronounce it like a Spaniard or a Mexican and call it the “Veeya Rosa.” It’s not rocket science. I’m mentioning this because I’m staying at this Santa Barbara establishment next weekend, and twice when I called a woman picked up and said “Villa Rosa Inn” like she was Raymond Burr in Tokyo.

Santa Barbara’s Villa Rosa Inn.

I hate being stuck at the end of a line of cars inside a large, multi-level underground parking lot. Everyone is looking for an empty space, of course, and it takes forever — cruising the same lanes, driving really slow, floor to floor to floor. Occasionally the line stops and nobody moves because somebody three or four cars ahead is waiting for a person who’s just gotten into their car to leave, except that person…excuse me, that sociopath isn’t leaving but just sitting in the driver’s seat and diddling around, knowing full well that he/she is making all the empty-space seekers wait. This person will typically sit and sit and sit and finally turn on the ignition and then sit there some more. Four or five minutes later he/she will finally back out. If there was a God…

I watched a slightly watered-down version of the forthcoming Bluray of Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden (Warner Home Video, 11.5) on Vudu last night. I’ve been watching this film on laser disc and DVD since the ’90s and know it backwards and forwards, and the Vudu HDX version is a very significant upgrade in terms of clarity, sharpness, color vibrancy. It’s never looked this good. Straight out of the lab and robust and clean and tied together with a big red ribbon. The Bluray will have a lot more data and will presumably look that much better

Thoughts of guy in white hat who eventually gets shot: “Wow, lotta gunfire ’round here. Hundreds have been killed by the military over the past two or three weeks and I might be next. Why tempt fate then? Because if I die I’ll be sent to paradise with 100 virgins waiting to caress me with their tongues. Maybe if I just raise my arms peacefully and act like that kid in front of the tank during the Tiananmen Square protests…fuck! I’m shot! Everything is turning black. Oh, look…a white light. A feeling of peace and serenity has come over me, but no virgins…where are the virgins? At least I died well.”

I don’t mean to sound cavalier about the carnage going on in Egypt right now, but what do these guys think is going to happen? They know the troops have been given “shoot to kill” orders. They’re obviously looking to be sent to paradise. Winston Churchill once said that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” The Cairo protestors seem to almost have the opposite view. To be shot and killed while protesting the coup against Morsi is a blessed thing, and since we’re dying anyway sooner or later why not go out in a glorious way?