JJ Abrams will direct the seventh Star Wars movie, it was reported today. There will be pressure, obviously, for Abrams to ensure that his film blends with the previous six. Is there any chance he’ll tell those episodes to go eff themselves and make his very own Star Wars flick? I suspect Abrams wants to. It shouldn’t matter what George Lucas wants because he’s taken the cash and is out of it, but if Lucas holds any sway at all (and I’m sure he does in a Obi-Wan Godfatherly way) the 7th will walk and talk and race around like all the others. Resist this impulse, Mr. Abrams. Please.

About an hour ago I briefly sat down with Upstream Color director-writer-producer-star Shane Carruth inside the Prospector Cinema’s “green room.” He even allowed me to take a couple of snaps. He wrote yesterday to suggest a meeting. Carruth says he’s “been a lurker for a while” on Hollywood Elsewhere, which is flattering.

Upstream Color director-writer-producer-star Shane Carruth — Thursday, 1.24, 2:35 pm in room adjacent to Park City’s Prospector Cinema.

Carruth may or may not evolve into the new Terrence Malick in terms of journalist-dodging reclusiveness, but there’s definitely a certain tension between his having acted in Upstream Color and his previous film, Primer, and the vague dread he feels about being invaded or probed. He’d like to just make films and drop them into the marketplace, he said, without any of the hoo-hah. That’s unrealistic, but Carruth seems like a nice enough guy. Friendly, patient, respectful, impish smile.

And I admire his decision to self-distribute Color — theatrically in April, VOD/digital in May. I offered to run ads gratis if I have any space to spare.
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He also told me he had a chance to meet Malick in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, during shooting of what was then being called The Burial but eventually become To The Wonder. Malick’s soft manner belies, etc

Carruth’s shoes.

Jessica Winter‘s profile of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and the torture-related controversy that KB and producer-screenwriter Mark Boal‘s film has sparked is essential reading. Will it help to wake Academy members up and remind them — shake them into recognizing — that ZD30 is by far the year’s finest? Time offers an analysis of the Oscar situation.

This is going to sound a bit odd, but it suddenly hit me yesterday that just about every lead actor in every Sundance film I’ve seen over the last seven days has smallish, rounded girly-shoulders. Broad male shoulders are analagous to large female breasts, and you can call me a closet case but I like broad shoulders on male actors. Most of us do, I suspect. I know that I’m starting to almost hate little nancyboy ones, probably because I feel like I’ve been deluged by these since arriving in Park City.

People will think you an ape if you complain about the lack of big boobs in Sundance films but you can gripe about this, I’m presuming. Narrow, rounded girly shoulders are a metaphor for a lack of balls and slacker-tude and impotence. and big broad shoulders are metaphors for strength and confidence, like strong jaw lines and deep gravelly voices.

Seriously — name one male star or costar of one Sundance ’13 film with broad shoulders who isn’t The East‘s Alexander Skarsgaard.

Prince Avalanche‘s Paul Rudd has small rounded shoulders. Before Midnight‘s Ethan Hawke has small rounded shoudlers. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints costar Casey Affleck has small rounded shoulders. The only actors with half-decent-looking shoulders so far are Skarsgard and (and I’m not talking wide as much as semi-wide in a chiselled sort of way) Upstream Color‘s Shane Carruth. The late Tim Hetherington, “star” of Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?, had broad shoulders but docs don’t count.

Cary Grant had broad shoulders. Ben Affleck has broad shoulders. Hell, I’ve got broad shoulders. SLP‘s Bradley Cooper has broad shoulders. Where am I going with this? I don’t know but it bothers me slightly. I’m the only guy who shares observations like this but many physical traits are digested as metaphors, and this has a bearing on films people want to see and don’t want to see. At the very least this smallish-shoulders thing suggests that indie-ish, Sundance-destined films don’t tend to attract alpha-male types, or they aren’t written for same.

Thanks to publicist Susan Norget for slipping me a DVD screener of Sebastian Junger‘s Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?: The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington. It’s an affectionate, reasonably honest tribute to the respected war photographer and co-director and co-producer of the Oscar-nominated Restrepo. It was made in response to Hetherington’s death by mortar blast in Libya on 4.20.11.

I watched the doc during last night’s hibernation withdrawal. It’s well made, tight, solid. I respected the blend of discipline and candor and sadness. I was especially touched by the playing of “Danny Boy” over the end credits.

Hetherington was a good guy who lived fully and laughed a lot, but he was a war-adrenalin junkie and we all know the name of that tune. We’ve all contemplated that famous Winston Churchill quote about how “there is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without consequence.” The doc tells us that Hetherington was getting over this addiction and was starting to look at another way of living and working, but he had a hard time saying no in a final, absolute sense.

I still have an issue with the lack-of-contextual-candor aspect of Restrepo, which I explained in a 1.20.10 article called “Afghanistan Bananistan.”

“There’s no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what’s really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense,” I wrote. “I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.

“Hetherington and Junger spent a little more than a year (May 2007 to July 2008) with several U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, a.k.a., ‘the valley of death.’ They focused mainly on the grunts’ hilltop camp called Restrepo (pronounced res-TREP-o and named for a medic in their unit who’d been killed). The film does a clean and competent job of portraying their endless firefights with Taliban forces and their community dealings with the locals, and it acquaints us with various members of the hilltop platoon — their faces, lives, impressions — in what seems like a frank and forthright manner.

“Except the kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — ‘get it done,’ ‘fill up more sandbags,’ ‘ours not to reason why’ and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?

“Hetherington has been a war photographer for years, and guys like him are basically action junkies — let’s face it. He seems almost invested in the Afghanistan conflict, perversely, because it provided him with a year’s worth of adrenaline rushes as well as the opportunity to create a noteworthy film and contribute great pics to Vanity Fair. In any case he’s apparently determined to follow the script set out by The Hurt Locker — i.e., our film isn’t preaching, not taking a stand, just showing how it is for the troops, etc.”

15 months later Hetherington was killed. I’m very sorry, but he knew what he was doing. Condolences once again to his family, friends and colleagues.

The best part of this 1.8.13 Honest Trailer happens at 1:33: “A movie so complex it requires intense concentration every moment which is really difficult when this guy” — Ken Watanabe — “goes over important plot points with a heavy [Asian] accent.” As I wrote on 11.27.10, “My Inception history has been primarily defined by my relationship with Ken Watanabe’s dialogue. I could barely hear what he was saying during viewing #1, [but] I could comprehend 70% to 80% of his dialogue during [a subsequent] IMAX screening.”

Yesterday the Santa Barbara International Film Festival announced that Django Unchained maestro Quentin Tarantino will figuratively step in for Django costar Leonardo DiCaprio. Leo had committed to accepting an American Riviera award with a Lobero Theatre chit-chat on Friday, February 1st. Festival publicist Carol Marshall says that DiCaprio was forced to cancel his festival appearance due to being called back for extra shooting on Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street.

DiCaprio was committed to appear until Tuesday night (1/22), Marshall says. So when festival honcho Roger Durling and Marshall heard about the Wolf conflict they started making calls “and Quentin graciously stepped in…this was done literally in less than 24 hours.”

I passed along a presumption this morning that when DiCaprio’s Django performance wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor on 1.10, he decided to ease himself out because what was the point?

As I wrote on the morning of Thursday, 1.10, a few hours after the Oscar nominations were announced, “DiCaprio is receiving the SBIFF’s American Riviera award on February 1st…except he wasn’t nominated this morning either so what’s the shot? The ‘Leo is Leo’ shot, I guess. Leo is Leo and he’s taking the stage.”

Tarantino’s SBIFF event will actually take place on Wednesday, 1.30, which is always a quiet day at the festival. (I usually drive down to LA that day to take care of stuff and then return on Thursday afternoon.)

DiCaprio’s cancellation still leaves a celebrity-appearance gap as far as the festival’s second weekend is concerned. A Jennifer Lawrence “Outstanding Performer of the Year” tribute happens on Saturday, 2.2, but Friday, 2.1, is…what, a do-it-yourselfer?

Hey, Roger — how about scheduling another “Oscar bloggers discuss the Oscar odds” discussion on 2.1? A few of us (myself, Sasha Stone, Pete Hammond, Anne Thompson) did that a couple of years ago at the Santa Barbara Museum and managed to bore everyone to tears. But this is a better year for arguments as we’re witnessing a real Best Picture race this year. I could do my Lincoln thing. We could talk about the Zero Dark Thirty attacks by the Hollywood Stalinists. And about the Argo resurgence. (I’m presuming that Argo will win the big Producers Guild Award on Saturday, 1.26, and thus cinching the Best Picture Oscar.)

The DiCaprio cancellation recalls a similar situation when Javier Bardem bailed on a 2005 Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute when he wasn’t Oscar-nominated for Best Actor for his performance in The Sea Inside. (He returned to SBIFF when he was Best Supporting Actor-nominated for No Country For Old Men.)

“We were obviously saddened by DiCaprio’s conflict, but blown away at the chance to honor Tarantino, one of the most stylistically daring directors who is [also a] SBIFF favorite,” Durling said in an official statement.

More from Marshall: “Leo has been a friend of the festival ever since he was honored in 2005 and was excited about coming back. And the fact that Quentin was able to juggle things around so quickly to step in and not leave the SBIFF audiences in the lurch, was an exceptional feat.”

Every time I get up and leave one of the Park City theatres, one of the ushers always turns on a little flashlight. The light is either stationery or aimed at my feet. A courtesy, of course. Mainly for the sake of older people whose eyes don’t adjust as well to the dark as they used to so they need to see the light to avoid stumbling or banging into something. But I don’t want the damn flashlight, you see, no offense. My eyes are fine in the dark. And I always seethe a bit when I see that beam. I always whisper to the usher “thanks but please turn it off…no light, thanks.”

I truly loathe this kind of plastic twist-the-dial shower device. The outer smaller wheel is for turning the water on and off…fine. And you have to turn the larger inner wheel to the left to get the warm or hot water, but you have to keep turning it and turning it before anything happens. One revolution, two revolutions, etc. And it sticks. This morning I turned the crap out of it and I never felt any seriously hot water at all, and then I turned it some more and the water turned tepid and then cold.

Is this invention a nouveau riche Utah thing? Remember the old days when you had two metal-chrome controls, one for hot water, another for cold and a third for switching between shower and bath water?

I’ve seen this sickening TaxAct Hero commercial on MSNBC five or six times now, and I’ve come to despise it way, way beyond the conventional understanding of the word “despise.” The agency that thought this up needs to be identified and blackballed in all major markets. The actors, I feel, also need to be outed and shunned. Those blue choral outfits! Those haircuts! I almost want to hit someone. Or myself.