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1. Are you named after someone? / JW: “Yeah, some character in a novel. My mom told me the particulars once, forgot ’em.”
2. When’s the last time you cried? / JW: “Nine months ago. The first time I watched Manchester by the Sea. I didn’t exactly cry but I got a little misty.”
3. Do you like your handwriting? / JW: “Like it? I can’t even read it.”
4. What is your favorite lunch meat? / JW: “Spicy Italian salami.”
5. Do you have kids? / JW: “Two sons.”
6. If you were another person, would you be friends with you? / JW: “Certainly.”
7. Do you use sarcasm? / JW: “Infrequently. Only when it’s right. Which is rarely.”
8. Do you still have your tonsils? / JW: “The fuck?”
9. Would you bungee jump? / JW: “I’m past that point.”
10. What is your favorite cereal? / JW: “Open Nature strawberry vanilla granola with vanilla yogurt.”
11. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? / JW: “Is this a trick question?”
12. Do you think you are strong? / JW: “Emotionally, not as strong as I could be. Physically, yeah, as far as it goes. I’m not weak.”
13. What is your favorite ice cream? / JW: “Cookies and cream.”
14. What is the first thing you notice about people? / JW: “Whether or not they look me right in the eye and hold it for two or three seconds when we first say hello.”
15. Red or pink? / JW: “Neither. Okay, red.”

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Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper had its NYFF press screening this morning, and will screen for public festivalgoers tomorrow night. By which time I’ll be in the city and hobbling around. Critical and public acclaim for one of the coolest and most unusual films of the year, five months after debuting in Cannes and five months before it finally opens next March.

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What besides Mike Pence‘s reference to Mexican genitalia was the stand-out line or moment from Monday’s Vice-Presidential candidate debate? I’m asking. Nothing else I can think of.

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Due respect to Matt Reeves, whose direction of 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was as good as it could have been, but this mini=teaser for War of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 7.4.17) in no way heats the blood. The plot seems to promise the last half-hour of Full Metal Jacket except with apes. Personality- or charisma-wise it’ll be Andy Serkis (Ceasar) vs. Woody Harrelson (Colonel Horseshit). Sorry, that just popped out — Harrelson’s character is actually unnamed..

Hurricane Gloria came roaring across lower Fairfield County in the wee hours of 9.28.85, and I was there, man, standing in my parents’ front yard in Wilton, Connecticut, sometime around 1:30 or 2 am. That howling sound, 90 mph winds, huge trees bending. The full force of it ebbed after ten minutes or so, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling, that energy. Not to sound like an asshole, but if I was on the Atlantic coast of Florida right now I would be doing two things: (1) huddling inside a safe underground or brick-fortified shelter of some kind, but also (b) looking to safely absorb what I could of Hurricane Matthew’s raw ferocity, you bet. Give it to me! Incidentally: If I was determined to run for it, I definitely wouldn’t hit the highway in the daylight hours like all those tens of thousands of schmucks were doing yesterday — I’d make a point of leaving at 2 or 3 am.

More than a few have been posting breathless articles and tweet-gasms about Denis Villenueve‘s Arrival (Paramount, 11.11). Due respect but this situation needs clarification by way of a contrasting opinion (filed from Telluride on 9.4.16):

“Arrival lost me because it unfolds in the manner of some science fiction tales, starting off with a highly intriguing premise but then kind of levitating and leaving the planet around the midway or two-thirds point, flaking and spacing and dispersing into fragments of time and memory and inconclusive what-the-fucky.

“After the first 45 minutes or so it starts to feel slow and repetitive and, yes, boring. I personally found it increasingly irksome.

“Like any arresting science-fiction tale, Arrival challenges you to stretch your cognitive processes. It’s a workout.

“It also has a great set-up — a visiting (not an invasion) of earth by 12 super-sized alien vehicles, in various locations around the globe. And a linguistic professor, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), who has raised and lost a daughter to disease, tasked by the government (primarily represented by Forrest Whitaker in military fatigues) to somehow communicate with the alien pilots, called Heptapods, to learn where they’re from and what they want.

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Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson is reporting that Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049 (Warner Bros., 10.6.17) features Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard “with Ryan Gosling and Jared Leto along for the ride.” I’m presuming Mendelson meant to say that Ford is along for the ride with Gosling and Leto in the lead roles…no?

(l. to r.) Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villenueve, Ridleyt Scott, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling.

There’s only one thing that worries me about Blade Runner 2049, and that’s what Villenueve might see in it. Or more precisely do with it. If you don’t share this concern, go see Arrival.

I’m not sure how impressed I am by that title. There’s something about it that sounds (feels?) vaguely Philip K. Dick-ish. Does the ’49 refer to the year in American cinema when film noir was at its peak, or have I crawled too far into my own cavity? I don’t think I’ve even seen the final 2007 Director’s Cut Bluray of Ridley Scott‘s 1982 original.

What’s the most memorable moment in Blade Runner? When Rutger Hauer‘s Roy dies and the dove flies away.

Either you know these six scary words like the back of your hand as well as what movie they’re from and what they mean, or you don’t.

In a 10.5 piece about the Best Feature Documentary Oscar race, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond has listed what he suspects are the presumed front runners: Amanda Knox, Cameraperson, Fire at Sea, Gleason, I Am Not Your Negro, Into the Inferno, Life, Animated, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, Miss Sharon Jones!, O.J.: Made in America, 13th, The Ivory Game, Trapped and Weiner.

Speaking as BFCA member whose ballot will help select the winner of the first Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, which will happen on Thursday, 11.3 in Brooklyn, I’m thinking that the hotties, in this order, are O.J.: Made in America, Weiner, Amanda Knox, Life Animated, The Ivory Game, I Am Not Your Negro, and 13th. I”m basing this assessment on a combination of buzz plus my own opinions. Then again I haven’t yet seen Gleason (which I’ve despised since catching the initial trailer), Fire at Sea, Into The Inferno and Trapped. Yes, I need to get on it.

In a 10.5 post, Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan has offered five reasons why Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation was embraced with such excitement and became such a huge Sundance sensation.

One, “the premiere was highly emotional.” Two, “#OscarsSoWhite was the talk of the town.” (Minutes after the big Eccles screening I declared on Twitter that the emotional response was largely because of #OscarsSoWhite pushback — “We ain’t ‘white’, we get it, we’re the first to feel the love!”) Three, “black films are acquired, not developed” because distributors are usually afraid to stick their necks out by financing films about racial subjects. Four, “we’re in a new era of bidding wars” due to Amazon and Netflix. And five, “no one wanted to rain on Parker’s parade.”

Buchanan’s explanation of the last point is interesting: “I talked to plenty of people at Sundance who felt the film was just okay or even mediocre,” he writes. “but they weren’t eager to share their reactions at the time, lest they step on Parker’s moment.” Except for Hollywood Elsewhere, that is. “Don’t kid yourself about how good and satisfying this film is,” I wrote two or three hours after the Eccles debut. “It’s mostly a mediocre exercise in deification and sanctimony.”

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Ava Duvernay‘s 13th (Netflix, 10.7), which I saw last night, is a brilliant whack across the chops — a ranty, studious, well-ordered indictment of the evils of racist incarceration and profiteering by white culture, particularly by the governmental, corporate and law-enforcement branches. It lays it all down, makes the case, tough as nails, bang.

But at the end of it I felt a bit distanced. I’m not arguing with any of the doc’s observations for a second, not a one. But I am a white motherfucker and therefore one of the bad guys…right? Or my parents or grandparents were. (And my dad was a hard-core liberal.) Yes, they were racists and in their own ways reflected, fortified or contributed to cultural attitudes that caused a lot of pain among people of color. There’s no skirting or shaking this off.

So how, apart from acknowledging the quality of 13th, am I supposed to respond to it? I nodded glumly and soberly as I watched it. I nodded glumly and soberly as I discussed it with a couple of friends in the aftermath. Is there anything about American white culture that gets a pass? Probably, but 13th is only concerned with the exactitude and comprehensiveness of the indictment. Which, again, is of a high order.

Is there another doc about racism and the general divide that I didn’t feel distanced from? Yeah — Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America. This sprawling ESPN doc covers a lot of the same territory in a roundabout way. I had lived through it, after all, and felt that Edelman offered real insight into the various whys and wherefores, and particularly why the infamous “downtown” jury found O.J. innocent in less than two hours.

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The only thing that seriously irritates me about Jackie (Fox Searchlight, 12.2) is the fact that every time the actor playing John F. Kennedy (i.e., Caspar Phillipson) appears, he looks like a nobody coping with a hopeless task. Which is all the more striking given that Natalie Portman impressively pulls off her Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Even today, 53 years after his murder, JFK’s looks and manner are simply too distinct and well-known to be convincingly replicated. On the other hand they don’t need to be. Because we’ve reached a stage in filmmaking which famous folk don’t have to be impersonated by anyone, or so I gather. It’s been 22 years, after all, since the crude CG pastings of Forrest Gump.

If I’d been a major Jackie financier I would have leaned on director Pablo Larrain and producer Darren Aronofsky to go to the archives, spend a shitload of money and use a digitally reconstituted version of the actual guy. JFK appears in…what, six or seven scenes at most, and briefly at that? It would have been expensive and arduous (i.e., Portman and others performing scenes with an actor covered in a green body stocking) but if at the end of the day Jackie had featured the Real McCoy…wow.

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