Sacha Gervasi‘s Hitchcock (Fox Searchlight, 11.23) opens the AFIFest tonight at 7:30 pm with an after-party at the Roosevelt Hotel. I know that Helen Mirren‘s performance as Alma Hitchcock is going to be a home run, and I hope Anthony Hopkins, as husband Alfred, matches her. The only concern I have is that Hopkins’ face looks artificially padded — a bit unnatural. But I suppose I’ll get used to it.

I read a version of the script two or three years ago, and my sense of the film that might have resulted was that viewers would have to really know Psycho backwards and forwards to fully enjoy it. Chuckles, chuckles and more chuckles. I hope it’s like that. I hope it hasn’t been dumbed down.

Scarlett Johansson, Danny Huston, Toni Collette, Jessica Biel, Michael Stuhlbarg and James D’Arcy costar. Screenplay by John J. McLaughlin, based on the book by Stephan Rebello. Shot by Jeff Cronenenweth, scored by Danny Elfman.

It was announced earlier today that restored versions of Wiliam Wyler‘s Funny Girl (’68), Buster Keaton‘s The General (’26), George Stevens’ Giant (’56) and John Sturges‘ The Great Escape (’63) will play next April at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival. But having reported last January that Stevens’ Shane (’53) was being restored by Paramount for a 2013 60th anniversary Bluray, I asked festival programmer Charlie Tabesh if it might be included. He said that showing Shane had been discussed and while it’s not confirmed, he’s hopeful. I’ll be flabbergasted if it doesn’t happen.

Most mainstream animated features are philosophically kid-friendly or kid-nurturing. They push uplifting, socially optimistic, find-your-strength and fulfill-your-destiny messages. And they’re lively, amusing, cute, endearing. It would be nice if an occasional animated feature would deliver a counter-attitude or two. You don’t have to live a normal family life. People who live in prefab neighborhoods are robots. Greedy corporations are bad for the planet. All I know is, I’m sick of be-all-you-can-be themes. I want another WALL*E. Something poignant, socially critical. Or subversive.

I know that sophistos are telling each other than Wreck-It Ralph is an above-average thing, but I’m done with corporate-funded positivism. It feels Orwellian.

Those who are thinking of catching AFIFest screenings of Antonio Campos‘s Simon Killer on 11.5 or 11.7 might want to consider my review of this bleak, nihilistic film, which I posted during last January’s Sundance Film Festival:

“Late this afternoon I suffered through Antonio Campos‘ Simon Killer at the Eccles. It’s an empty, meandering audience-torture film about sex and nihilism and stupidity in Paris. Brady Corbet (the slightly dopey-looking guy who briefly boffed Kirsten Dunst on the golf course in Melancholia) plays a grungy-looking dork who seems ‘normal’ at first but then things turn dark and deranged as he morphs into a psychopathic dork.

“There are no resonating echoes or metaphors that add up in this bleak nihilistic film. Corbet is a recent college graduate who’s distraught about a breakup with his girlfriend of five years, and is visiting Paris to…whatever, hide out and do nothing for a while. Paris is a good town to do that in, but the appeal of Paris plummets if you’re stuck hanging out with an asshole.

“Corbet’s primary trait is that he’s obsessive. I saw him as a whiner with little cash and nothing on his mind except jerking off and fucking and money and extortion and hurting the women who like or love him. One of these is Mati Diop, a drop-dead beautiful cafe au lait girl who works as a prostitute and eventually lets Corbet stay with her because he’s broke, and who lets him goad her into a half-assed ‘john’ blackmail scheme.

“I didn’t relate to Corbet or get what he was about or anything. I hated his unshaven cheeks and chin and neck. I just sat there and watched…and watched…and nodded off for a few minutes…and watched a bit more. And then Corbet finally flew back to the States and it was over.

Approaching Park City shuttle outside the Eccles following this afternoon’s screening of Simon Killer.

“I thought I might at least enjoy a few shots of Paris, but Campos and cinematographer Joe Anderson are very careful to show us nothing recognizable whatsoever. When Corbet is roaming around the camera is always focused on the back of his head and the rest is always in soft focus.

“The most memorable thing that happened during the screening was when I nodded out for five minutes. I was holding a half-filled can of Monster, and as I dropped off the can slipped my grip and hit the floor…clahk!…and rolled out of my aisle and into the next, dribbling green Monster juice as it went along. Attorney Linda Lichter and L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan were sitting next to me, and I’m sure they wondered what the noise was. I avoided looking in their direction out of embarassment.”

Francis Lawrence, a proficient mid-level hack who did a decent job as director of I Am Legend (that Will Smith-kills-his-zombie-dog scene was fairly touching) and Water for Elephants and who has finished principal photography on the forthcoming Hunger Games: Catching Fire, has signed to direct the last two HG flicks — Mockingjay Part I and Mockingjay Part II.

It’s become standard corporate policy to stretch out popular franchises as long as possible by splitting or tripling the final installment. Two Mockingjay pics means doubling up on that income — shareholder cinema!

In his story about the Lawrence hiring, Deadline‘s Patrick Hipes mentions that Lawrence was chosen to direct Catching Fire “in a race that came down to Lawrence and Moneyball helmer Bennett Miller, after Juan Antonio Bayona couldn’t do it.” Nobody will ever convince me that Miller, the elegant helmer of Moneyball and Capote, was ever genuinely interested in directing The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Directing a Hunger Games movie is a way of screaming from the rooftops, “I am a marginally talented journeyman who will never be in the big leagues, but I like the warm comfortable feeling that comes from being well paid.”

Earlier today MSN’s James Rocchi posted an opinion piece that basically said corporations, which are generally sociopathic in nature and care only about profits, often finance expensive films for…well, sociopathic reasons.

“‘Shareholder Cinema,’ as I call it — moviemaking built around maximum profit first and always — is real,” he says at midpoint. “Movies have always been good and bad, money-makers or money-losers, balancing each other out with the invisible hand of capitalism smoothing out the marketplace. It’s just that, to be blunt, the way it’s all happening these days seems a little too calculated, a little too coldly executed, a little too formulaic. And the decision of what to do, at a studio level, seems less and less to be about what kind of story you can tell on-screen than what kind of story you can tell in the quarterly report or the shareholder’s brief.

“Movies have always demanded return on investment — but under the current rules of cutthroat capitalism, huge conglomerates can look wounded by money-losing divisions (or even divisions that don’t make enough money, or enough of the right kind of money) and have to focus on the consistently high quarter-over-quarter? profits and upward-ticking profitability that can encourage both gigantic pension funds and trigger-happy day traders not drop you like dead meat, which is what they’ll do in the absence of that kind of quarter-over-quarter? return.

“And if there is any death knell for a serious proposition in business, in culture, in life, it is this: When you are more concerned about money and reputation — the stock price — than you are about doing what you do — providing services to customers at a markup from cost so that you might turn a profit — you are doomed.”

Rocchi was inspired to write the piece after hearing yesterday’s news about Disney buying Lucasfilm for $4 billion and change, and announcing intentions to produce another Star Wars trilogy.

In a just-posted interview with Amour director Michael Haneke, Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil mentions a comment I recently shared that Amour can be viewed “as a horror flick.” Haneke’s reply: “If someone wants to see this film as a horror film, I’m fine with that. I don’t think of it like that. To me, the film is a love story.

“It’s a film about the difficulty and pain of watching someone you love suffer, [and] not being able to do anything about it,” Haneke explained. “If you see the film as a horror film, you’re only seeing one side of this film. To me, the other side is present as well.”

For the record, I wrote on 9.28.12 that Amour is “a kind of compassionate horror film.”

I also wrote the following: “Amour is a sad, brilliant, diamond-hard thing about aging and dying. And is about nothing if not compassion and tenderness. The diamond-hard aspects are in the fact that it’s quite spare and lean and yet it doesn’t avert its gaze when Haneke so chooses. It’s about love that won’t quit until it does, until it must.

“Instead of filling our heads with nightmares of being killed by ghouls or vampires or serial killers, Haneke is telling us ‘this is how you’re actually going to end up unless you have the courage to overdose on something or put a bullet in your head or jump off a bridge like Tony Scott.'”

I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve seen Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight (Paramount, 11.2) and they all agree that it holds the line and doesn’t mess around. But they also feel it’s a bit somber and even a downer because it’s just about a drunk (Denzel Washington) facing a situation from which there’s no good escape. That doesn’t mean the film doesn’t work or pay off on its own terms. It does. For what it is, the ending chosen by Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatins seems right. But people were still giving me these looks when I asked them about it.

“But what about Denzel?,” I said to some of them. “He’s a real drunk…he really sank into that.” Yeah, but…. “But what? You don’t think so? It’s one of the best roles he’s ever had.” And they said yeah, he’s really good, but they were feeling a little subdued. “He’s not a Best Actor nominee?,” I asked. Yeah, probably, you’re right.

Everyone knows by now that the first 25 minutes are about Denzel’s bombed, coked-up airline pilot — his name is Whip Whitaker — saving 96 out of 102 passengers from awful death when the tail flap on a jet he’s flying malfunctions and it looks like curtains until he manages to stabilize the jet into a glide by flipping it upside down. It may be that he decides to roll the jet because he’s half in the bag, or maybe he’s such a great pilot that being half in the bag doesn’t matter. But he’s a hero nonetheless. Or he is, rather, until the authorities test his blood.

All drunks have the same choice, and all movies about drunks tell roughly the same story, give or take a variation. Should they keep drinking and come sooner or later to a bad end, or do they man up and accept that they have a problem and do something about it? But Denzel’s alcoholic has three choices. Keep drinking and doing lines. Openly admit that he not only has a problem but was drunk and buzzed on cocaine when he saved all those lives. Or lie his way out of any possible fines, severance and prison time and then admit he has a problem and do something about it.

In other words, the only straight-up honest, totally uncompromised, true-blue thing he can do is to admit to a crime and go to jail. How many confessed drunks in your local AA meeting have ever faced such a choice, and how many of those would take the pure, true-blue option?

Flight is a clean, direct, assured. It’s driven by character, and is not about intrigue or thrills or surprises or wild stuff except in the very beginning. It didn’t diminish at all the second time I saw it. I knew what it would be, and it did that thing. It was the first time that a very slight feeling of disappointment happened because I was expecting a little more, juice-wise and surprise-wise, than just a dynamite opener. Because the remainder of Flight, boiled down, is about when and how Denzel is going to deal with his problem…or not. The third lying option is the one I’d choose if I was in his shoes. It’s the option that anybody with half a fucking brain would choose.

I wish more films like Flight would be made. Films that care about character and don’t throw in car chases or hot sex scenes or jazzy dialogue just because they might distract audiences or give them a good cheap time. It’s a respectable film, but I don’t know how Joe and Jane Popcorn are going to react. LIke I said, there’s no good way out for Whip, and most of the time people want their lead characters to do something that they themselves could live with, or at least could accept. We’ll see what happens.

Something about this Hurricane Sandy time-lapse video soothes me out. It was captured yesterday from the N.Y. Times site by Richard Shepherd. I hate the Times policy of refusing to provide easy embed codes so congrats to Shepherd for busting through that. Here‘s the camera. Update: Here’s another one, apparently taken from the Brooklyn side of the East River.

Producer Glenn Zoller has been riding my ass to post this “Fifty Ways to Hate Obama” video, which I frankly don’t agree with. I’ve told Glenn I really don’t think it’s reflective of the current mood or zeitgeist. Obama is not in a down cycle in which people are beating him up left and right. He was during the budget crisis but that was then. I just don’t agree with it.

On the other hand Glenn has been kind enough to give me free shelter at Telluride for the last two years. And the singing is pretty good with pro-level recording. And there are millions of assholes determined to hate Obama no matter what so whatever…fine.

I saw Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson‘s Samsara the night before last. It’s a kind of ohm movie…ohhhmmm! A fixed-tripod, tableau zone-out film without any dialogue or lip movement even, but a drop-dead beautiful 70mm forehead-smacker. It premiered over a year ago at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival. Fricke has become a Zen master of movies in this vein — he co-shot Koyaanisqatsi (’82), and directed Chronos (’85) and Baraka (’92). Oscilloscope opened Samsara in August, and it might become one of the Best Feature Doc Oscar nominees.

But if you get beyond form, it’s something else. A friend asked me what I really thought of it, and I wrote the following:

“It’s stunningly beautiful, and it’s a nice concept of getting everyone in the film to just pose and stare at the camera and not move. No moving mouths, no smiles, no overt feeling. So yes, it’s very beautiful but — I’m sorry but this has to be said — an extremely cold and emotionally remote film. It gradually envelops you with its coldness, like a ghost.

“It left me with the feeling that there are way, way too many struggling third-world people in the world. What a truly miserable existence for so many hundreds of millions. The world is just swarming with millions and millions of people….millions of swarming ants… and they’re all choking on their garbage and working in soulless factories with millions of dead pig carcasses and love dolls and slaughter houses in which small chickens are suffocated and tortured and killed and cut into pieces and their guts fall in heaps on the damp cement floor.

“I’m used to a realm of my own making…we’re ALL used to that realm…in which there is space that I have carved out and decorated, and that otherwise I live in a world of hygiene and open roads and large homes and nice shoes and Oriental carpets and colorful socks and black high-thread-count T-shirts with a sense of clarity and refinement and a certain degree of aesthetic attractiveness, and a certain amount of caring and compassion and serenity and stillness.

“Samsara shattered that feeling for me. It’s a spiritual journey film but more often a tour of a massive, overcrowded garbage dump filled with human ants. It really depresses me to think that I’m an ant, but that’s what I am, I guess. That’s what you are, what we all are…we’re all fucking ants, scampering here and there. How cold, how horrid, how truly miserable, how immensely and suffocatingly depressing.

“But it’s a very handsome film. Mesmerizing, transporting, fascinating. Technical kudos to all involved. Truly magnificent photography. Beautifully scored. And welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a world of SWARMING ANTS PRAYING DURING RAMADAN and SURROUNDED BY DEAD CHICKENS & MOUNTAINS OF STINKING GARBAGE AND LOVE DOLLS and ORANGE-OUTFIT PRISONERS DOING LONG SENTENCES DANCING IN PRISON YARDS. It took me hours to recover from the depression.

“The world that once was, the Lewis & Clark world of centuries past, a How The West Was Won world of cleanliness and mountain streams and open spaces and greenery and John Colter and Woody Guthrie and Fritz Weaver and Marthe Keller and reasonable amounts of people, seems to be a memory in Samsara. What a bummer.”

For the record, Fricke didn’t shoot the other two “qatsi” movies — Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi.

Samsara is Sanskrit term that roughly translates as “all I need now a cup of coffee and a blowjob.” Seriously, it means “continuous flow” and “cycles of life.”