Within the last week I have, in a certain way, crossed over. I’ve resisted digital downloads on my ’50” monitor (not sharp enough, too VHS-y) and I’ve never considered watching films on anything smaller. But I’m now down with watching Netflix and Amazon Prime films on my recently bought iPad 3. Their apps allow for easy choosing and watching without any bothersome bullshit and the iPad3 resolution is excellent.

A week ago trailers for Premium Rush were being laughed at by audiences and Sony wasn’t expecting much of a reception. Then the critics weighed in and the majority liked it — a Road Runner movie, etc. So how did it play with ticket buyers this weekend? How did the rooms feel? And why has it died so decisively (an estimated $6,300,000 in 2255 screens) with the word-of-mouth being rather good?

That double-breasted, peak-lapel suit recently worn by Leonardo DiCaprio during filming of Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street is…what’s the precise term? Vulgar? Grossly dated? Too much? “Yecch”? David Letterman wore these awful suits on his show for years and years, and I used to say the same thing when he came onstage… “good effing God.” They were popular during the Clinton era, I realize, but moviegoers want magic, not realism…and there are very few things less magical in 2012 than gray double-breasted suits with peak lapels.

If I was Scorsese I would can the costumer right now, just to be safe. Costumer: “But Marty, this is what they were all wearing back then! I’m just following the styles of the ’90s.” Scorsese: “I don’t care. You’re making my star, Leo, look like a schmuck, and I can’t have that. Sorry but you’re done.”

Why has Leo dyed his hair black? Because the guy he’s playing, “Wolf of Wall Street” author and former financial scammer Jordan Belfort, had dark hair. Got it!

Late last night I revisited one of my all-time favorite ’90s films — John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s beautifully written, superbly acted Mad Dog and Glory (’93). Shot by Robby Muller and cut and scored to perfection. And the kind of movie, to re-state the obvious, that big studios abandoned ages ago — the intelligent, adult-angled, middle-budget dramedy. Smooth and handsome with stars and finesse and a discernible theme that’s been developed and rendered just so…bingo.

I recorded two scenes from this mini-classic this morning and uploaded them to YouTube, and Universal’s brilliant legal department defaulted right in and blocked their usage. Really smart, guys. I’m just trying to give a little friendly attention to a forgotten Universal film.

Everybody looks so young in this thing. Robert De Niro, 49 during filming but looking more like 40, is Wayne, a.k.a. “Mad Dog” — a timid, lonely Chicago cop who specializes in forensics and crime-scene photographs. Bill Murray, 42 at the time, is Frank “the money store” Milo, a Chicago mob guy who becomes a big brother and “friend” of Wayne’s after the latter saves his life. David Caruso, 36, was never better as Mike, a fellow cop and Wayne’s best friend. And Uma Thurman, 22, delivered one of her best early-phase performances as Glory, a cocktail waitress who falls in love with Wayne (and vice versa) after Frank (“the expediter of your dreams, pal”) brings them together.

Here’s how I put it ten years ago, give or take:

Murray is settled and confident in the skin of his very unhappy bad guy. Frank is a tough loan shark who’s a lot like Murray in many ways, except he’s not. He’s lonely and doesn’t really like himself or his friends or his life. He wants to be somewhere else. He’s seeing a therapist to try and deal with his hostility issues, and he performs a stand-up comedy routine at a place called the Comic-Kaze Club, which he owns. But he doesn’t want to lose the gangster life either.

Frank and Wayne’s connection begins when Wayne — joshingly called “Mad Dog” by his cop pals due to his passive nature — saves Frank’s life during a grocery store holdup by calming down a jittery holdup man and sending him away without risking bloodshed.

Frank is initially appalled (“You’re a cop?” he says to Wayne right after the incident). But the next evening, realizing what Wayne actually did and starved for a friend, Frank tries to reciprocate by getting friendly over drinks. The next day he sends Glory, a pretty working-class girl who works at the Kamikaze Club, over to Wayne’s place, the idea being for her to stay with him and take care of whatever for seven days.

The wrinkle comes when Wayne and Glory fall in love, and Wayne decides he doesn’t want her being Frank’s “favor girl” any longer. But Frank won’t let her go (Glory has offered her services in order to save her brother from being killed over a debt) unless Wayne coughs up $40,000….which Wayne can’t raise.

The theme of the film is, basically, “no guts, no glory.” That sounds like macho crap, but it’s well sold, believe me.

I don’t know where Price’s script ends and Murray’s improvs begin, but Mad Dog and Glory is full of little Murray doo-dads. There’s his lounge-lizard rendition of “Knock Three Times,” casually crooned at the beginning of a tense scene. His addressing De Niro as “ossifer” (“officer” with the consonants reversed…an expression I hadn’t heard since I was a kid in New Jersey). The way he holds an air bugle to his lips and does a cavalry-charge bugle sound when De Niro’s cop friends come to his rescue at the finale.

There’s a scene in a diner in which Frank’s intellectually challenged top goon, Harold (Mike Starr), who’s sitting nearby with a supermarket tabloid, points at a middle-aged man sitting at the counter and whispers to Milo, “Hey, Frank? Isn’t that Phil Donahue?” A shot of the guy in question proves otherwise. Murray half turns in his seat and says, “Put the magazine down, Harold, before you hurt yourself.”

You want pathos? Consider the melancholy in Murray’s eyes after his fight scene with De Niro at the finish. This is a bright, sometimes funny guy who wants out and knows he won’t get there. He pulls a loose tooth out of his mouth, gestures at the gaudy Cadillac he’s sitting in and the gorillas he’s riding with, and says with a look of pure disgust, “This is my life .”

And Caruso’s Mike is his best feature-film riff ever. Mike is a sarcastic hardass, but a good man and loyal to the end. He has a bravura scene in which he faces down a bigger guy in a bar over a domestic abuse issue (the basher is another cop) and makes him back off. It’s a total classic. You can see why he had a lot of heat coming off this.

The film also has a couple of great Louis Prima tracks (“Just a Gigolo,” “That Old Black Magic”) that turned me into a fan.

Wayne: It’s the first time I pulled out my gun in 15 years. I pissed on myself.
Mike: You know why? Because you’re a sensitive, intelligent indivdual.
Wayne: You ever piss yourself?
Mike: Look, I woulda walked in there and drilled the rat-eyed little bastard, and that’s just the way I am. On the other hand, if I ever had an intelligent thought it would die of loneliness so it all evens out, you know what I mean? (pause) Look, if it ever happens again…? The best thing is sex. You’re all adrenalized? You go off like a rocket. If it was me, I’d be on the phone with every girl I knew [that] wasn’t related by blood. Listen, don’t kid yourself — that was balls-up what you last night.

Either the festival fathers (Venice, Telluride, Toronto) have Brian DePalma‘s back out of age-old loyalty or Passion, his remake of Alain Corneau‘s Love Crime (2010), a corporate potboiler about rivalry between two ambitious women, is half-decent or even good. It’s very hard for me to accept that possibility. In my mind DePalma’s last decent film was 1998’s Snake Eyes.

The Passion trailer is telling us that DePalma has emphasized a lesbo current …fine.

In Corneau’s film Kristin Scott Thomas played the older, dominant, more jaded executive and Ludovine Sagnier played the young go-getter. In DePalma’s film Rachel McAdams has the Thomas role (seven years ago she was the hot new actress and now she’s playing older woman roles?) and Noomi Rapace has the Sagnier part.

I need to get rolling on a list of movies that just “are.” Movies that never tip their hand. They stand their ground and make you come to them. Movies that don’t tell stories or “pay off” or build to third-act crescendos or any of the usual stuff. Movies that lay it on the table, that show but don’t tell. Whatever they’re on about, you’ll get little if any help. Either you get it or you don’t.

Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis.

Films in this vein would be (and I’m coming right off the top of my head): There Will Be Blood, Cosmopolis, The Master (to go by all those people saying they need to see it again), Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis (the early ’60s Greenwich Village folk scene flick due sometime next year), Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura, L’eclisse…tip of the iceberg.

Yeah, I know — nobody’s seen Inside Llewyn Davis. But I read the script a few months ago and it sure seems like one.

“I loved the script…the totality of it” I wrote. “It reads like a real Coen Bros. film. When you’ve finished it you know you’ve tasted the early ’60s and that atmosphere and that kick-around way of life, and that you’ve really become familiar with Llewyn Davis’s loser lifestyle. It’s something to bite into and remember. It has flavor and realism, but it has no story to speak of, really. Shit just happens. I don’t think the Coens are trying to deliver anything message-y. The script seems to have been written with a precise intention of not ‘saying’ anything.”

There’s something vaguely analagous between take-it-or-leave-it, no-explanation films and Tom Wolfe‘s explanation of art pour l’art in The Painted Word, to wit:

“In Europe before 1914, artists invented Modern styles with fanatic energy–Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Orphism, Supermatism, Vorticism–but everybody shared the same premise: henceforth, one doesn’t paint ‘about anything, my dear aunt,’ to borrow a line from a famous Punch cartoon. One just paints. Art should no longer be a mirror held up to man or nature. A painting should compel the viewer to see it for what it is: a certain arrangement of colors and forms on a canvas. The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact.”

That’s what I’m taking about here. Movies that aren’t interested in reminding you of some basic observational truth that you’ve absorbed by reconstituting it in cinematic terms, but are just balls-out confident, if not bordering on obstinate. Standing their ground, take it or leave it, slamming it down.

Let’s take a moment and give it up for this 1975 Michael Ritchie film, an example of the kind of social satire that has pretty much disappeared from movie theatres — a kind that doesn’t exaggerate, deals plain but clever cards, favors subtlety over hammer blows and treats its characters with dignity, or a semblance of. But Karyn Kusama says it better:

In his 10.9.75 review, N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby called Smile, which focuses on an annual Junior Miss beauty pageant in Santa Rosa, California, “a pungent surprise, a rollicking satire that misses few of the obvious targets, but without dehumanizing the victims. It’s an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.”

If you were a sincere churchgoer, would you go to a Sunday service with a nice pleasant buzz-on from a glass or two of wine? The Lord Almighty would surely be offended. By the same token no serious moviegoer would want to watch a film half-sloshed or even a wee bit “happy”…right?

When I was drumming for The Sludge Brothers, a no-account Connecticut blues band, our lead singer-guitarist used to tell the crowds, “Remember — the more you drink, the better we sound.” But alcohol and cinema don’t mix. Really. You should drink a cappuccino or a Red Bull or green tea before a film. Or do Zen breathing exercises. Alcohol always takes things in a downmarket direction. It certainly diminishes the spiritual.

This hasn’t stopped Robert Redford‘s Sundance Cinemas and the iPic theatrical chain from deciding to offer alcohol in their theatres. An 8.23 Wrap piece by Steve Pond says that the Sundance-refurbished version of the old Laemmle Sunset 5 (Sunset and Crescent Heights) and iPic’s renovated theatre in Westwood (i.e., site of the old Avco) are going to serve beer and wine.

These chains are also looking to attract upscale types with plush seating and astronomical prices that will presumably discourage attendance by low-lifes.

I have a friend who’s a devoted fan of Broadway plays, and sometimes he’ll see a play or a musical after slurping down a double vodka so what do I know? I’ll tell you what I know. I know that movies theatres are not amusement environments — they’re churches, and you should hold off on the libations until after the film is over.

Roughly three weeks ago an art presentation called “Disasterland“, a series of portraits of Disney characters redefined according to our appalling and deeply flawed 21st Century culture, appeared at the La Luz de Jesus gallery on Hollywood Blvd. The artist is Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros. The show runs until Sunday, August 3rd — eight more days including today.

From the gallery’s website: “Continuing his penchant for cleverly depicting the “uncouth” customs of our dichotomous society, Rodolfo explores what would happen to our fables if they were flesh and blood and confronted with the frenetic and excessive world of fame….who among them would prove susceptible to the excesses of drugs, alcohol, harassment or vanity?”

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon and allegedly one of the dullest guys to ever do something momentous, died today at age 82. But let’s hold off for a minute or two and offer due respect for his and NASA’s brilliant achievement and for Armstrong being the super-reliable and resourceful pilot that his colleagues always spoke of.

Now that I’ve paid my respects I can say that I was always bothered by Armstrong’s historic first words after his feet touched the moon’s surface: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Obviously “man” and “mankind” are synonymous so the statement made zero sense, but it would have if Armstrong had simply said “a” man. Instead he ruined it, and that grammatical error is now etched in stone and marble for centuries to come with millions upon millions of unborn people fated to read this silly quote and scratch their heads and look at each other and ask, “What…? I don’t get it.”

Armstrong rarely spoke in public, rarely said anything, rarely shared or reflected or expounded. He was a private man who decided early on to keep to himself, and was content to simply be a skilled pilot who did the job. That’s fine in itself, but I’ll never forget Norman Mailer‘s describing Armstrong as a bit of a dolt in his 1971 book “Of a Fire on The Moon.” I particularly recall his comparing Armstrong’s responses to press conference questions to the way a cow grazing in a field deals with flies by flicking them away with its tail.

Four years ago I passed along a story about Universal’s intending to make a film out of James R. Hansen‘s “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong.” I wrote that the book “will be adapted into screenplay form by Nicole Perlman — if the poor woman manages to stay awake while writing it. For Universal is essentially going to make a movie about that cow.”

There’s an anecdote in David Handleman‘s 1985 California piece about Terrence Malick (titled “Absence of Malick“) that has always amused me. It’s a brief recollection about Malick having landed a New Yorker assignment in the late ’60s to write a piece about Che Guevara, and his having travelled to Bolivia to research it. But he over-researched it, Handleman wrote, and “got drowned in it, and never turned [the piece] in.”

The story actually comforted me because I did the same damn thing in ’85. I had pitched an article to an American Film editor about the inner lives of film critics — who they were deep down, what had lit the initial spark, what drove them on and so on. I was calling it “The Outsiders.” And I knew it had the makings of something really good. So I talked to many, many critics and transcribed the interviews and wound up with at least 25 or 30 pages of single-spaced pages, all typed out and corrected with side notes and thoughts about structure and whatnot.

And I got into it more and more, and it became a small mountain. And then a big one. And then it became quicksand and I slowly sank into it, knowing I’d gotten myself into trouble and unsure whether to keep trying or to forget it and walk away. I felt like I was covered in glue or tar. I finally gave up. The guilt was awful. I’d never worked so hard on something to no avail. But it taught me three things.

One, never churn out that much research about a single topic ever again without writing anything down — write as you go along. Two, forget about big subjects and grand designs — always choose a topic that appears to be small or smallish and then make it bigger or richer with your interpretation of it. And three, always listen to what people say and let that material point the way.

My next whopper-sized article was a 1995 Los Angeles magazine piece called “Right Face,” about the struggles of conservative-minded writers and actors in the film industry. I did almost as much research on this as I did on “The Outsiders,” but somehow I pulled it together and turned a pretty good piece. And then Lew Harris, my Los Angeles editor, gave me dirty looks for years after that because he felt my research hadn’t been quite thorough enough. Or so it seemed from my end. Dick. But the piece was well received. It was labor well spent.

I’m adding Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out to my list of Toronto Film Festival essentials. To go by Thom Powers‘ description on the TIFF website, Zenovich’s film — the second Polanski doc unveiled this year (the first being Laurent Bouzereau and Andrew Braunsberg’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir) and a kind of sequel to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired — is at least partly about guilt.

“What happens when an award-winning documentary intended to highlight a legal injustice comes back to haunt its maker?,” Powers writes. “In 2008, director Marina Zenovich’s Emmy Award-winning film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired brought a radical new understanding to the circumstances surrounding Roman Polanski’s 1977 statutory rape case. Interviewing key participants from both the prosecution and the defense, Zenovich detailed how Polanski couldn’t get a fair trial, prompting him to flee the United States. Even Polanski’s victim, Samantha Geimer, said he was treated unjustly and deserved to have the case dismissed. But these views didn’t stop others from vilifying Polanski. The film’s notoriety seemed to make him even more ‘wanted and desired’ by the authorities.

“When Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 and threatened with extradition to the United States, Zenovich felt she was partly to blame. Her new film, Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, revisits this endlessly controversial case from several new angles. What possessed the Swiss government to arrest Polanski? For years, he had vacationed in Switzerland and even bought a home there. Was the Swiss government trying to distract attention from an American investigation into its banks? Was the Los Angeles District Attorney grandstanding for his own political ambitions? How far had Zenovich’s own work as a filmmaker unwittingly contributed to Polanski’s arrest?

“Zenovich applies her insider’s knowledge and dogged research to the process of investigating what took place in Switzerland. (The subtitle Odd Man Out refers to the 1947 fugitive drama that Polanski has cited as a favorite.) Whether or not you’ve seen her previous film, this work stands on its own as a shrewd commentary on the collision of life and cinematic art. When it comes to Polanski’s case, opinions have always been more prevalent than facts. An esteemed journalist is caught in an unguarded moment saying, ‘Just take him out and shoot him.’ But Zenovich unearths fresh perspectives and new questions. The film leads us to think about broader questions of legal manipulation, media distortion, and power politics. No matter how much you think you understand this case, you have a lot to learn.”

I wrote the following to Polanski this morning: “Roman — I’ve been friendly with Marina Zenovich for many years, and I intend to see her documentary, Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, at the Toronto Film Festival. I just heard from her via email (she’s in France now) but forgot to ask her if you and she have corresponded to any degree over the last few years. Have you ever had any contact with Marina? Did you speak with her while she made this film, or while she was cutting it? Have you seen her Odd Man Out doc? By the way, have you seen the British Network Bluray of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out? Quite beautiful.”