Post-SAG Nomination Depression, the 32 Finest Films of 2015:

2015 Features: 1. Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight, 2. Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant; 3. George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road; 4. Cary Fukunaga‘s Beasts of No Nation; 4. Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy, 5. Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul; 6. John Crowley‘s Brooklyn; 7. Todd Haynes‘ Carol, 8. Baltasar Kormakur‘s Everest; 9. Peyton Reed‘s Ant-Man; 10. Adam McKay‘s The Big Short, 11. Ridley Scott‘s The Martian, 12. Asghar Farhadi‘s About Elly, 13. the last 25 minutes of The Walk, 14.  James Vanderbilt’s Truth; 15. Sarah Gavron Suffragette; 16.  Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck;  17. Noah Baumbach‘s Mistress America, 18. Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson‘s Anomalisa, 19. David O. Russell‘s Joy; 20. Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina.

My decision to re-assess and re-post HE’s Best of The Year plus yesterday’s surfacing of an “Honest Ant-Man trailer” has led me to repost my original 7.9.15 review: I went into last night’s Ant-Man screening with an attitude, but it surprised the hell out of me. It’s basically a dry, highly disciplined, emotionally grounded, bang-on comedy. It doesn’t try to sell or invest in the usual Marvel fantasy fizz — it fucks with it, turns the whole thing into a joke. It’s so much better than I expected that you could call me flabbergasted. Surprising as this may sound (especially to me), Ant-Man is my favorite Marvel film yet.

I know — I lack the authority to judge Marvel films because I’m too much of a comic-book-movie hater, right? What I really am is an Avengers and Iron Man-sequel hater, an enemy of glum superhero angst, and definitely a Robert Downey loather. All I know is that I didn’t frown or moan once last night. I grinned, chuckled, felt more or less delighted. I loved the visual roller-coastery, sudden-size-shift stuff…the swooping down from life-size to micro-size and back up again — a game that basically unfurls an entirely new micro-realm. No mood pockets, no prickly detours…pretty much all pleasure.

Yes, Ant-Man is “silly” but it embraces that. It’s sharp and fast and disciplined as a Marine. It takes itself seriously in terms of its own efficiency and (I’m serious) its own emotional undercurrents. So call me turned around and converted.

Take no notice of the piss-heads who are saying “if only original director Edgar Wright hadn’t bolted!” These guys are coming from an obsessive geek-wanker place and are not to be trusted. They’re just standing behind Edgar and against Marvel/Disney for loyalty’s sake. I realize that Wright bailed due to Marvel intransigence or Disney-level meddling. And I’ll allow that Shaun of the Dead showed that he has a flourishy attitude and a certain auteurist panache, but, unlike a few geek-influenced critics I could name, I don’t think he’s God’s gift because Scott Pilgrim vs. the World made me want to jump off a 15-story building.

It’s a little strange that someone on the Hollywood Reporter digital team has very slightly speeded up Scott Feinberg’s intro and subsequent discussion with Charlotte Rampling….just a little bit. It’s definitely been accelerated. The patter sounds too fast, too hurried. Not quite natural seeming. Sidenote: I’m still reeling from Rampling’s shocking exclusion among this morning’s SAG nominees. Is it because they perceive her as being too European or too Parisian…not really part of the Hollywood schmooze mob? Whatever the motive, what they did, or more precisely failed to do, is nothing short of an aesthetic crime.

I’ve been so dismissive of The Martian all along (not as a smart, satisfying commercial film but as an Oscar nominee) that somehow its omission among this morning’s SAG nominations didn’t register. Physiologically I read and heard that it was not nominated for a SAG ensemble award and that Matt Damon had been blanked as a Best Actor nominee, but psychologically and emotionally I had rejected it as an Oscar contender last September so, you know, it didn’t make much of a dent. But it sure as shit made an impression upon Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, an unabashed Martian supporter for the last 11 or 12 weeks. She wrote this morning that Ridley Scott‘s “completely shut out” film has unequivocally been “taken out of the race.” (Unless, she qualifies, “it can Braveheart its way to an Oscar win” — forget it.) Her basic post-SAG conclusion is that “probably no other film can win Best Picture except Spotlight…it’s the only one that can build any sort of momentum with the larger industry.”

The 22nd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards Nominations have ignored the two most widely praised, awe-inspiring, levitational performances of 2015 — Charlotte Rampling‘s delicate but depleted wife-of-Tom Courtenay in 45 Years and Paul Dano‘s Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy. That pretty much says it all about this organization. They have their odd moments but they’re just not very attuned. They’re basically sheep who live in their little wine-buzz realm and chit-chat with each other at studio-funded parties and respond only to the obvious stuff that doesn’t require a great deal of thought or examination or inwardness. For the most part, I mean.

And so they’ve nominated Black Mass‘s Johnny Depp because he’s loaded and wore a heavily hair-sprayed wig and Alaskan husky contact lenses and acted psychopathically tough, and they’ve nominated Eddie Redmayne because he gave 110% in playing a transgender pioneer, and they’ve nominated Helen Mirren TWICE (once for a lead performance in a film that nobody thought was very good, and for her Hedda Hopper in Trumbo) and ginger-haired Michael Fassbender because he plays a hammerhead genius who constantly goads, berates and barks at colleagues and makes his daughter feel like a conundrum.

I’m sorry but these are not what the Webster’s Dictionary guys had in mind when they defined the term “best.”

SAG Rule #13B: Salute what’s good whenever convenient or when the mood strikes, but mostly champion what you “like” and especially whom you enjoyed talking to at parties. Ignore subtlety, ignore grace, ignore performances that will last through the decades and just nominate the usual political favorites.

At least they’ve shown proper respect for Leonardo DiCaprio‘s suffering survivalist performance in The Revenant, not to mention his 23 years of knockout bravado and numerous Oscar noms. And they’ve nominated the deserving Michael Shannon for his performances in 99 Homes and Freeheld. And they’ve embraced the Beasts of No Nation guys with an ensemble acting nomination and BSA nom for Idris Elba. And they stepped out of the box by nominating Rachel McAdams for her intrepid Spotlight reporter and Sarah Silverman for her addicted-mom performance in I Stand Alone.

On the other hand the SAGsters have ignored the determinations of critics groups and dutifully submitted to the Weinstein Co,. dance card by nominating Carol‘s Rooney Mara for Best Supporting Actress and the always on-target Cate Blanchett for Best Actress — no independent thinkers, they!

And Jennifer Lawrence‘s Joy performance didn’t make the cut, largely, I’m guessing, because too many SAG members were somewhat divided about David O. Russell‘s film. And they waved away Mr. Holmes‘ Ian McKellen and Youth‘s Michael Caine. Caine’s costar Jane Fonda didn’t get the love either. And they blew off Sylvester Stallone‘s Creed performance. Sly to SAG members: What’d I do?

Satisfactory helmet-lift moment, better-than-decent CG hologram stuff at the very end….”Noooo, that’s impossible!”

Customer: “I’ll take both pairs, I guess.” Salesperson: “And would you like us to raise the cuffs a bit?” Customer: “No, two inches of exposed sock is fine.” Salesperson: “Very well.” Customer: “Are you saying the cuffs should be higher? Is that where things are heading? I don’t want to look like some guy stuck in 2014.” Salesperson: “Two inches is fine.” Customer: “Those guys who wear their pants lower than the boot line…those are the ones I feel for.” Salesperson: “There’s no hard rule. To each his own.”

Banana Republic fashion, snapped the night before last in the Grove.

In the old days epic movies had a standardized accent system — American accents for the good guys, cultured British or mid-Atlantic accents for the bad guys. This was how it worked in many ’50s and ’60s sword-and-sandal epics (Spartacus being one, except when it came to John Gavin‘s Julius Caesar). It was also how it worked in 1977’s Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and Uncle Owen all sounded like they’d grown up in Montana or Oregon or Southern California, and Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader, Peter Cushing‘s Grand Moff Tarkin and other officers of the Empire all spoke with Cambridge accents or…you know, some kind of crisp upper-crusty diction.

Audiences accepted this symbolic system without complaint because it was more or less uniform. Everyone understood that the accents meant something in terms of character and allegiance, and that was fine.

But in Star Wars: The Force Awakens the system is no longer in place. It sounds like a crazy accent salad. Daisy Ridley‘s Rey speaks with an English accent that’s part university and part Soho retail (and most definitely not Cary Grant-ish), and John Boyega‘s Finn, a south-of-the-river guy, speaks with an “acted” American accent. And yet Adam Driver‘s Kylo Ren has an American accent so what the eff?

Initially posted on 2.26.13, re-posted today over something that happened last night: There are three kinds of pain-in-the-ass parking-lot drivers out there. I hate them with every drop of blood in my heart, and I’m just trying to decide which is the worst.

Is it (a) the person who eases into a space and yet doesn’t turn their car off for some reason and just sits there idling, which indicates to others that he/she may be pulling out and which sometimes creates parking-lot jams because people stop and wait when they see a car just sitting there with the effing tail lights on? These stationary idlers are perfectly aware of the trouble they’re creating, and they do it anyway.

Is it (b) the person who walks up to their car, gets in, turns it on and does absolutely dead fricking nothing for two, three or four minutes? Just sitting there endlessly, pondering life and death and the whereabouts of Godot as they try to remember if they need to buy more cat litter?

Or is it (c) the person who parks in a space and then, instead of turning the car off, just chills like a department-store dummy and then, after sitting there for 45 or 60 or 120 seconds, very slowly backs out about six to eight feet — ahhh, they’re leaving! — and then drives back into the space again because — ohh, I see! — they wanted to park a bit more precisely parallel to the white lines.

Once you’ve parked your car, turn it the hell off. And if you’re getting into your car to leave, turn on the ignition and then carefully but expeditiously pull the hell out without any of that “middle-aged lady sitting there and checking her phone messages for two or three minutes” crap. I swear to God people should be given tickets for pulling this stuff.

Two days ago I did a 20-minute sitdown with Hateful Eight director-writer Quentin Tarantino at the Four Seasons. Just a mild little lunch chat. I’d decided in the wake of Saturday’s Kurt Russell contretemps (his, not mine) to not voice any criticism and just cruise along as it were. If you want to characterize my end of the conversation as “obsequious” or “ass-kissing,” go right ahead. But when you’re sitting down to lunch you don’t want to start any shit. Life is good, enjoy the vibe.

Quentin Tarantino — Sunday, 11.6, 12:40 pm during Four Seasons restaurant patio lunch.

We talked about Quentin’s New Beverly and particularly his love for 35mm viewing vs. my concerns about same. I mentioned how Pete Hammond told me that a recently screened print of The Bravados was totally spotless, and Quentin mentioned how he’s been getting mint-condition archival prints. Quentin says he’s down with 35m even when prints have a certain degree of wear and tear (scratches, skips, dirt marks) because, he feels, old prints carry a certain residue of all the performances they’ve given, and therefore a residue of all the emotions they generated.

He also mentioned that the New Beverly will be showing Man in The Wilderness, a lower-budgeted 1971 version of The Revenant with Richard Harris as Leonardo DiCaprio, on December 9th and 10th.

I mentioned the vague kinship I feel over Tarantino having admitted to not paying parking tickets when he was young and poor, as I’ve also done.