Set in the shag-ruggy ’70s and based on J.G. Ballard’s novel, Ben Wheatley‘s High-Rise is a creepy thinking man’s comedy that you don’t exactly “laugh” at. Call it a perverse social dreamscape, a nightmarish macrocosm of the things that afflict anyone with a hunger for the usual empty comforts. Oddly humorous, bizarre, fetishy. It reminded me of Lindsay Anderson‘s Brittania Hospital (’82) in some respects. I caught it last September in Toronto; it opens in England on 3.18. Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy.

The BAFTA nominations pop tonight just after 11:35 pm Pacific (i.e., tomorrow morning in London at 7:35 am. The lastwordonearth guys are tipping the following: (a) “The big local players are 45 Years and Brooklyn” — shocker, (b) Charlotte Rampling, Saoirse Ronan and Maggie Smith will nab Best Actress nominations, (c) The Fucking Martian‘s Matt Damon will go head to head with Leonardo DiCaprio but lose in the end, even if no one really loves The Revenant, and Ridley Scott (a.k.a. “Sir Ridders”) is in the lead position in BAFTA’s Best Director competish, (d) Alicia Vikander will land a Best Supporting Actress nom for The Danish Girl, which no one loves, (e) Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance has the Best Supporting Actor award in the bag; (e) Lenny Abrahamson‘s Room “isn’t being discussed much around the scene” (it’s dying everywhere), (f) reactions to The Big Short have been “muted, (g) Kate Winslet is a “lock” for Best Supporting in Steve Jobs with Carol‘s Rooney Mara her toughest competitor, etc. I’m sorry but the BAFTAs have never accelerated my pulse rate.

Ten years ago I felt suitably stirred by Stephen Frears‘ The Queen and particularly by Helen Mirren‘s Oscar-winning performance as Elizabeth. The royals returned four years later with The King’s Speech and four more Oscars were claimed, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Colin Firth). Now they’re back again via Netflix’s The Crown — six seasons worth at ten one-hour episodes per season, each spanning a decade in Elizabeth’s 62-years-and-counting reign. Budgeted at $165 million, created/written by Peter Morgan and directed by Stephen Daldry. (All 60 episodes?) Claire Foy as Princess Elizabeth, Matt Smith as Philip Mountbatten, John Lithgow as Winston Churchill, Greg Wise as Lord Louis Mountbatten, Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret (great lookalike), Jared Harris as George VI, etc. Best wishes to Netflix and the team. Quite a commitment.

In a sense my late mom has treated Jett, Cait and myself to a 10-day Vietnam visit in late March. Bicycles, scooters, street food, earthy aromas, exotic atmospheres, helmet GoPro, etc. Hanoi, Dong Hoi and Paradise Cave, Hue, Hoi An, My Son. Anthony Bourdain will be…well, one of our spiritual guides.

Nine business days before everyone leaves for Sundance and there are still no screening opportunities to see Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail Caesar! (Universal, 2.5). Or at least none I’ve heard about. Everyone returns from Park City by the weekend of 1.29 to 1.31, leaving only five days before the opening. Here’s hoping for a screening next week or at least on Monday, 1.18 or Tuesday, 1.19. Yes, I’m being repetitious, even tedious.

Two days ago W Magazine and The Film Stage posted a series of video clips in which several award-season headliners — Cate Blanchett, Paul Dano, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jake Gyllenhaal, Alicia Vikander, Rooney Mara, Bryan Cranston, Benicio del Toro, et. al. — describe their favorite all-time sex scenes. HE’s favorite sensual intimacy scene is mentioned by Dano — that Notorious classic between a standing-and-fully-dressed Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman when they’re more or less glued and never stop kissing and nuzzling. HE’s all-time favorite sex scene is the one between Tom Cruise (by anyone’s measure an unlikely participant in this realm) and Rebecca DeMornay in Risky Business. It’s perfect because like any transcendent sexual encounter it feels levitational — orchestrated, finely tuned, rhythmic, musical. It multiplies and compounds the sexual train metaphor that Alfred Hitchcock created in that last shot in North by Northwest, and it ends with that perfect (i.e., very subtle) electric train-track spark.

I’m as amused as the next guy by the news about Trigger Street partners Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti being tapped to run the new, restructured, post-chapter 11 Relativity Media. We all love the idea of Buddy Ackerman actually running a real movie company, etc. But can I ask a question? Why is Relativity even in business? Who cares? The company went totally bust last year under Ryan Cavanaugh, trapped in a muddy, 75-foot-deep sinkhole and finally forced to face reality. Nothing against Spacey and Brunetti but what magic, exactly, are they expected to create? I know as much as they do, my gut instincts are just as well attuned and I’m more free-form and fuck-all in my thinking. You know what I would do if I ran Relativity? I would hire LexG as vp creative affairs. (I would greenlight films with a potential to compete during award season and Lex would advise about which stupid movies to make.) Over the last year has anyone said to anyone else over a drink, “You know, I’m really upset that Relativity went bankrupt…I know if they could just hire the right people to run things correctly that Relativity could really make a difference to the average moviegoer…I hope they get it together….we need companies like Relativity to brighten and enrich our moviegoing lives.” Newsflash: Nobody gives a shit. But with Wells and LexG calling the shots, electric bolts of excitement would be pulsing through the Hollywood bloodstream.

If Joel Edgerton has a significant role in an unseen film, I know I’m going to have at least a moderately difficult time with it. I’m sorry but he rubs me the wrong way. His vibe, those little pig eyes, his actorishness. Edgerton was cool in Animal Kingdom (’10), Warrior (11) and Zero Dark Thirty (’12), and I admired his on-stage performance as Stanley Kowalski in a 2009 BAM production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which he costarred with Cate Blanchett. But I started to develop prickly feelings after seeing him portray a lying, squirrelish husband in 2013’s Wish You Were Here. And then three recent performances turned me flat-out against him — his eye-linered Ramses in Exodus: Gods and Kings, Gordo the weirdo in The Gift and especially his dirty FBI agent John Connolly in Black Mass. Edgerton’s Bahstun accent, his ’70s hair, those light blue three-piece suits…torture.

Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton in Jeff Nichols’ Loving.

My spirit sank yesterday when I noticed Edgerton is costarring with Ruth Negga in Jeff Nichols‘ Loving, a fact-based period drama about a once-controversial interracial marriage between Mildred and Richard Loving, which resulted in the couple being sentenced to prison in Virginia in early 1959. The conviction was argued through the courts in the mid ’60s, and was finally overturned by the Supreme Court in June 1967. I’m thinking this over and I know that Edgerton (who’s wearing a ’50s flattop and has dyed his hair blonde for the film) is going to make me sigh and grumble and shift in my seat. I dread grappling with his Southern accent. If only Nichols had cast Joaquin Phoenix or James Marsden or even Casey Affleck instead.

Just received: “The Creative Coalition has 1 room available to sell within TCC’s discounted hotel room block at the Doubletree by Hilton (formerly The Yarrow Hotel), 1800 Park Avenue, Park City, Utah during the Sundance Film Festival. Five nights — Thursday, 1.21 thru Tuesday, 1.26 — for $2,990.” Hollywood Elsewhere’s suite at the Park Regency cost less than two-thirds that amount for an entire two weeks (1.16 thru 1.30), and it has a full kitchen, fireplace, bedroom plus bunk beds, ideal location, nearby convenience store, etc.

“I wouldn’t say that Westerns were a big influence on The Revenant at all, really. I was looking more toward things like Dersu Uzala by Kurosawa, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev — which is maybe my favorite film ever — Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, even Apocalypse Now. These are movies that are epic, that have spectacle and are very grand statements, but are informed by the crazy fucking theatrical show that is the human condition. The beauty and harshness of nature impacts your state of mind in these movies. There’s a very intimate point of view from one single character in each. That’s the challenge. Anyone can film a beautiful landscape. Unless you have an emotionally grounded story in there, it’s all just fucking sorcery.” — Alejandro G. Inarritu speaking to Film Comment‘s David Fear in the February 2016 issue.

Cheers and salutations to The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang and Oliver Lyttleton for having posted the most comprehensive list of 2016 films that I’ve seen anywhere. I’ve been updating my own 2016 rundown (the most recent re-edit appeared on 12.30) so I’ve isolated 31 of Kiang and Lyttleton’s titles that I’ve previously ignored. Several are intriguing; about half seem minor-ish or less than fully wowser but let’s not pre-judge. I’ve listed them in order of highest HE interest. All synopses written by Kiang/Lyttleton. A reposting of most recent 2016 summary follows:

The Salesman (d: Asghar Farhadi) Cast: Sahahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti. Synopsis: Two actors perform in Arthur Miller‘s Death Of A Salesman.

The Discovery (d: Charlie McDowell) Cast: Rooney Mara, Nicholas Hoult. Synopsis: A love story set a year after the existence of the afterlife has been scientifically proven.

American Pastoral (d: Ewan MacGregor). Cast: Ewan MacGregor, Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Connelly, Uzo Aduba, Rupert Evans, Molly Parker, David Strathairn. Synopsis: Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Philip Roth, this is the story of Seymour “The Swede” Lvov, a successful businessman, former high-school sports star and scion of a Jewish upper-middle New Jersey family, whose life gradually disintegrates in the politically turbulent 1960s.

Loving (d: Jeff Nichols) Cast: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Michael Shannon, Marton Csokas, Nick Kroll. Synopsis: The true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple sentenced to prison in Virginia in 1958, and then exiled from the state for the crime of getting married, and their nine-year fight to be able to return home as a family. 

Salt And Fire (d: Werner Herzog) Cast: Michael Shannon, Gael García Bernal, Werner Herzog, Veronica Ferres. Synopsis: Two men on opposite sides of a clash over an ecological issue in South America must put aside their differences and work together to avoid disaster when a nearby volcano presents eruption signals.

Julieta (d: Pedro Almodóvar). Cast: Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte, Inma Cuesta, Rossy de Palma, Nathalie Poza. Synopsis: The life of the titular woman, told between two time periods, 2015 and 1985.

Jackie (d: Pablo Larraín) Cast: Natalie Portman, Greta Gerwig, Peter Sarsgaard, John Hurt, Max Casella. Synopsis: The story of Jackie Kennedy in the first days following the assassination of JFK.

Certain Women (d: Kelly Reichardt) Cast: Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Jared Harris. Synopsis: The story of the intersecting lives of three women in present-day Montana.

The Neon Demon (d: Nicolas Winding Refn) Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcoate, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks. Synopsis: An up-and-coming model in Los Angeles becomes prey for a gang of beauty-obsessed peers who wish to drain her of her vitality and beauty.

20th Century Women (d: Mike Mills) Cast: Elle Fanning, Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Alia Shawkat. Synopsis: A story of three generations of very different women living in 1970’s Santa Barbara.

James “Jimmy” Shaw, Jr., a moron, posted this accident video on his Facebook page two days ago. Carman Tse posted it a couple of hours ago on laist. It happened just over a year ago on the Angeles Crest Highway. Who speeds through a tunnel without knowing what the road will do once the tunnel ends? Shaw lucked out but what an asshole.