I know Leonard Bernstein‘s Oscar-nominated On The Waterfront score backwards and forwards. (Especially the main-title portion.) It would be nice, I agree, to hear the score performed live by the New York Philharmonic while the film plays on a big screen. The performance is slated for 9.18. But it’s still the same Bernstein score I’ve been listening to all my life, and the idea of plunking down $95 or $200 and change if you’re taking a date seems a bit much. N.Y. Philharmonic fans can afford it but Average Joes will hesitate. I’ll be in Toronto, in any event, from the 9th through the 18th, and then straight back to L.A.

Last night’s Alberquerque-to-JFK flight wasn’t pure adulterated hell, but like all red-eye flights it was fairly miserable. Sitting in your seat and trying to sleep but unable to really sink to the bottom of the pond. The flight was only three and a half hours, and I guess I “slept”…oh, maybe 90 minutes or so. I finally couldn’t stand the fake-sleep purgatory and decided to just wake the hell up, and at that very moment I looked out the left-side window and there was sprawled-out, golden-glowing Philadelphia, which meant only another 20 or 25 minutes before freedom. Whenever I suffer through a particularly unhappy red-eye and want to feel a sense of relief or deliverance after landing at JFK, I get out the headphones and play “Our Prayer” from the Smile sessions.

I’ve read a draft of the Bryan Sipe script that Jean Marc Vallee‘s Demolition (Fox Searchlight, 4.8.16) is based upon. The film looks and sounds somewhat more appealing than the movie I was seeing in my head as I read the script, but it’s odd that the trailer pays a helluva lot more attention to Heather Lind, who plays Jake Gyllenhaal‘s late wife and mostly appears in flashbacks, than Naomi Watts, whose character (a customer service rep for a vending machine company) is very alive and central to the story. (Watts is seen/heard saying a single line in the trailer — “Do you miss her?”) This in itself feels like a weird call.

Demolition costar Judah Lewis.

You know who’s got the heat in this thing besides Gyllenhaal? Judah Lewis, who plays Watt’s teenaged son. You can tell right away. He tested for the latest Spider-Man reboot, costars in the forthcoming Point Break remake.

The Toronto International Film Festival (starting in two days) will open with a screening of Demolition, even though Fox Searchlight decided late last July to remove it from award-season consideration by giving it a release date of 4.8.16. Vallee’s Dallas Buyer’s Club and Wild were in the Oscar derby in 2013 and ’14, but not this time. At the very least the opening-night Toronto booking has people scratching their heads and going ‘what the…?’

Martin Milner passed yesterday at age 83. Sincere condolences to family, friends and fans. Milner was a nice guy and, I’m sorry to say, an Orange County-residing Republican for most of his life, but we all have our paths to follow. The red-haired, freckle-faced actor was known for playing decent, middle-of-the-road whitebread guys who always respected like-minded milquetoasts and had reasonable, fair-minded things to say about any situation. Average Joe obit writers are all saying that Milner was best known for his lead roles in Route 66 (CBS, ’60 to ’64) and Adam-12 (’68 to ’75). But they were both flotsam. Okay, Route 66 had a mildly cool escapist attitude with a few angles but Adam-12 was essentially rightwing propaganda.

Adam-12, exec produced by Dragnet‘s Jack Webb, was basically a show about conservative, Orange County values (i.e., respect and allegiance for traditionalism and authority) in the face of the convulsive changes of the late ’60s and early ’70s. It always bothered me that my younger brother, a pseudo-libertarian leftie who passed under tragic circumstances in ’09, always used to mutter “one-Adam-12” whenever the subject came up at the dinner table. Will somebody please tell me what’s so cool about L.A. cop lingo? My brother wouldn’t leave it alone.

Route 66 was an intriguing little relationship series about a couple of mild mannered lightweights (Milner, George Maharis/Glenn Corbett) roaming around and catching glimpses of the existential void in American life.

If you ask me Milner peaked with two performances from the second Eisenhower administration — Steve Dallas, a decent if somewhat priggish jazz guitar player who got smeared as a commie pot smoker because he fell in love with J.J. Hunsecker‘s younger sister Susie (Susan Harrison) in Sweet Smell of Success (’57), and Paul Grinstead, an amiable young guy who happens upon Vera Miles‘ Millicent Barnes in an upstate New York bus station in “Mirror Image,” a Twilight Zone episode (aired in February ’60) about Barnes being convinced that a duplicate clone is trying to take over her life.

Scott Cooper‘s Black Mass (Warner Bros., 9.18), which I caught early Sunday morning at the Tellluride Film Festival, has been called The Depp-arted, but I would call it The Departed‘s just-as-authentic, equally hard-edged…uhm, kid brother? Cousin? The real deal but somewhat more modest, certainly less stylized and with a bit less swagger. Intentionally, I mean. Cooper stuck to his own scheme, knew what he was doing, and brought it home. For comparisons aside this is a flavorful, well acted, well-written Boston crime film — straight and hard and cold as the wind that skirts around Southy in January. I have no significant issues with it except for Johnny Depp‘s slicked-back Whitey Bulger wig, which always seems to be lacquered with a quarter-pound of hair spray with never so much as a single hair out of place. I also felt a wee bit irritated by Joel Edgerton‘s performance as John Connolly (i.e., the now-incarcerated FBI guy who recruited old pally Bulger as an informant but also tipped Bulger off to finks and enemies and wound up getting convicted of aiding and abetting in murder). It felt too broadly “acted” and unsubtle within the realm of the tale. Yes, Depp delivers his best work since Donnie Brasco, and will probably be Best Actor-nominated. If only his hair was a little bit scragglier…

Last week I saw Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario at the CAA screening room in Century City. It played a whole lot better than it did in Cannes, entirely due to the CAA facility’s perfectly tuned sound and the fact that it’s not overly bassy and echo-y, as is the case in the Grand Lumiere. I understood each and every line, and the difference was significant. I now regard this drug-war flick as an above-average mood piece about the near-futility of going by the book in fighting (i.e., trying to contain) the Mexican drug lords. I still have a problem with Emily Blunt‘s DEA agent, who is forever behind the eight-ball — struggling to understand the nature of the game, doing something stupid (i.e., picking up a Latin-looking guy at a honky tonk) or saying something tedious. But I no longer have Sicario on my black list.

From my 5.19.15 Cannes review: “Sicario is basically about heavily militarized, inter-agency U.S. forces hunting down and shooting it out with the Mexican drug-cartel bad guys, and also flying here and there in a private jet and driving around in a parade of big black SUVs. It’s a strong welcome-to-hell piece, I’ll give it that, but Sicario doesn’t come close to the multi-layered, piled-on impact of Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic, which dealt with more or less the same realm.

Last year I missed by Durango-to-Phoenix flight by ten minutes, which forced me to stay in the area in order to grab a flight the next morning, etc. I didn’t miss the flight itself but I failed the 30-minutes-before-the-flight rule that Durango Airport are the FAA insists upon. Well, I missed the same damn deadline today, but this time only by five minutes. 300 seconds earlier and everything would’ve been fine.

My fault, of course — I felt I had to finish that Beasts of No Nation review in a way that I was fully satisfied with. But then I tore out of Telluride and sped like a motherfucker, passing car after car over those winding mountain roads, risking life and limb.

I arrived breathless at the US Airways desk at 3:15 pm, or 25 minutes before the flight was due to leave. “Sorry but you’re too late,” the US Air clerk said. Durango Airport is a small operation, remember, and I was there with 25 minutes to spare. I begged, whined, cajoled. I also offered to pay him a “late penalty fee”…nope. A little lenience wouldn’t have hurt anyone and I doubt if FAA would have given a damn, but the guy wouldn’t budge. (He would have made an exception if I’d been a hot blonde in her mid 20s, trust me.) This meant I’d be stuck in Durango again as there are no flights out until early tomorrow morning.

I just couldn’t settle for that plus I’m determined to stick to my plan (i.e., spending Tuesday and Wednesday morning in Manhattan before flying to Toronto) so I swore, gritted my teeth, slapped my thigh, swore again and booked a flight to NYC from Alberquerque ($600 and change, arrives at JFK around 5:45 am). And then I rented a gray Toyota from Budget for the drive south. Durango to Alberquerque is 215 miles or roughly four hours.

The word from the Venice Film Festival was that Cary Fukunaga‘s Beasts Of No Nation is a riveting, beautifully captured, somewhat traumatizing portrait of a child’s experience of guerilla warfare in Africa, and no one’s idea of an easy sit or an engaging exotic adventure. Well, I saw Beasts last night at Telluride’s Werner Herzog theatre, and it’s a masterful thing that demands everyone’s attention — often jarring and horrific and in very few ways “pleasant” but a churning, ravishing injection, a cauldron of mad-crazy intense, something undeniably alive and probing and deep-in-the-bush authentic. Yes, it’s horrific but never without exuberance or a trace of humanism or a lack of a moral compass.

And it’s been made, mind you, by a cultivated, cool-cat artist — a guy of moderate temperament who wears fashionable glasses and cool-looking sweaters (check the below photo I took last night of Fukunaga and Beasts star Abraham Attah at last night’s after-party) — but who holds back just enough but never wimps out, who jumped right in and shot the whole thing himself in Ghana over a mere seven weeks, a guy who knows how to whip up strange brews and visual lather.

We’ve all seen violent films that try to merely shock or astonish or cheaply exploit — Beasts of No Nation is way, way above that level of filmmaking. It’s often about cruel, horrifying acts but filtered through a series of moral, cultured, considered choices, about what to use and not use and how to assemble it all just so. And yet over half of Beasts is gripped by madness — a kind of fever known only by war veterans and particularly (as this is the specific focus of the film) by children who’ve been forced into killing by ruthless elders.

This is a major, triple-A-approved, Apocalypse Now-influenced African inferno flick — a real original, like nothing I’ve ever quite seen before, like nothing I knew how to handle. Steven Soderbergh is going to shit his pants when he sees it. Anyone who attends Sunday services at the Church of the Devoted Cinephile will have to grim up, man up and buy a ticket. (And that means women also.) It’s harsh and brutal but poetic — one of those films that’ll hold up a decade or two or a half-century from now. If you miss or avoid it you’ll be embarassed to admit this down the road.

A few days ago Variety‘s Justin Chang called Beasts “the rare American movie to enter a distant land and emerge with a sense of lived-in human experience rather than a well-meaning Third World postcard,” but to me it’s more that just a lived-in thing — it’s orchestrated and painted and cooked to a full boil. Start to finish it has a feeling of keen impulse mixed with carefully honed art.

I was on my way from the Sheridan bar after-party for Cary Fukanaga‘s Beasts of No Nation (which kicks the shit out of you but is a work of undeniable visual poetry of war and carnage — a 21st Century successor to Apocalypse Now) and had just passed Alpine Street when I ran into a 20something woman who seemed a bit unnerved. Even a bit scared. If a woman strikes up a conversation with a total stranger on a really dark street, you can assume she’s been motivated by something.

“Have you seen any bears?” she asked me. “Uhhm, no, I haven’t,” I smirked. “Seriously, I’ve been coming to this festival for five years and I’ve never even heard of bears in town.” But she was serious.

She: “I’m telling you I just saw two bears walking down this street…really, no joke.” Me: “Really?” She: “Actually walking on the sidewalk.” Me: “You’re kidding! Really? How big were they?” She: “One was bigger and the other was smaller. Probably a mama bear and a baby bear on a scavenge hunt.”

We discussed ways of scaring them off or at least, you know, avoiding getting attacked. Make a lot of noise, she said. I said I’d heard you’re supposed to be cool and stand your ground and not run. I don’t think bears are very aggressive unless a mama bear thinks you might hurt her cub, I added. But what does a city slicker know?

Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.18) has been praised over under sideways down since it premiered at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. I found it devastating along with nearly every other critic of note. “No day at the beach but one of the most searing and penetrating Holocaust films I’ve ever seen,” I wrote on 5.14.15, “and that’s obviously saying something.” Yes, a Holocaust film — one of the most well-worn genres of the last three or four decades — but one with an urgent sense of interiors and intimacy. Saul will almost certainly be among the five nominees for the 2015 Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, and I’d be more than a little surprised if it doesn’t win. It’s that kind of stand-out and a definite must-see.

Son of Saul director & co-writer Laszlo Nemes at Telluride’s Sheridan Hotel — Sunday, 9.6, 12:40 pm.

So I asked yesterday if I could speak with Nemes around lunch today. We sat down in a rear parlor at the Sheridan Hotel. Here’s the mp3. Born in Hungary, raised in Paris and an occasional childhood visitor to the U.S., the 38 year-old Nemes speaks excellent English. He seems fairly brilliant in a fair-minded, relatively easygoing way. He smiles easily. His eyes don’t look away much and they don’t seem to lie.

Shot entirely in close-ups (and occasional medium close-ups), Son of Saul is a Hungarian-made, soul-drilling, boxy-framed art film about an all-but-mute fellow (Geza Rohrig) with a haunted, obliterated expression. This titular-named survivor — a walking dead man, a kind of ghost — toils in an Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp as a Sonderkommando — i.e., prisoners who assisted the Germans in exterminating their fellow inmates in order to buy themselves time. The film is basically about Saul risking his life — foolishly, illogically — in order to properly bury a young boy who’s been exterminated, a boy he doesn’t know but whom he repeatedly claims in his son.

Why? Because Saul wants to fulfill a small act of honor before he dies — he wants to show reverence and respect for the boy, for his people, for life itself before the end.

Yesterday morning was a writing frenzy followed by three films over a ten-hour period — Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson‘s Anomolisa at 1 pm, Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight at 4:15 pm and Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin‘s Steve Jobs at 8 pm (starting a half-hour late). Each involved a longish line-wait. Then a steady downpour arrived with the darkness. And then I attended a smallish, elegant Steve Jobs after-party a little after 10 pm.  Around 11 pm I hit the Sheridan bar for about ten minutes, and then a combination of elements (spirit, energy, stamina) began to sag and collapse and I decided to march back to the pad.  Now I’m up again at 5:30 am.

This is the gig and the burden, and sometimes you just have to shake it off and man up and come up with terse, shorter-that-Twitter responses. Spotlight = total pleasure-principle moviegoing within the realm of a go-getter journalism saga.  Steve Jobs = a brilliant, bold-as-brass, somewhat arid tour de force that’s written like a play but is expertly goosed and pumped by bravura directing and editing and stellar performances, first and foremost Michael Fassbender‘s Steve Jobs but also Kate Winslet‘s Joanna Hoffman. Anomalisa = another humanistic downhead visit to Charlie Kaufmanland — an amusing, occasionally touching stop-motion piece about a pudgebod asshole visiting a No Exit hotel in Cincinatti and slowly dispensing his depression-fueled mustard-gas vibes to one and all.

I was so happy and delighted with Spotlight that 20 minutes after it began I was telling myself I want to see it again. Obviously I was debating whether I should even toy with this idea as it would interfere with the professional necessity of seeing other festival attractions like Room, Beasts of No Nation, 45 Years, Marguerite, Time To Choose, etc. But I was getting such a gripping, step-by-step, mother’s milk high from Spotlight that I really wanted to double up on it. This is what a pleasurable experience does to you. It makes you a little nuts.

This is the best pure-journalism flick since All The President’s Men, and it doesn’t have any emotional relationship sideplots or car chases or bogeymen stalking journalists in dark, rain-slicked alleys…nothing to supplement or distract from the story at hand. Spotlight is completely familiar and by-the-book — it’s certainly no ambitious game-changer like Steve Jobs — and yet it’s immensely smart and engagingly complex and quite satisfying. It runs 128 minutes, and I was feeling so engaged and fulfilled that I would have been totally okay with a three-hour running time. It’ll definitely be a hit with Joe Popcorn, critics, Academy and guild members — nothing but smooth sailing. Yes, I understood that it wasn’t delivering anything bold or brash in terms of approach or execution, and I didn’t care and neither will you.

Spotlight is a fact-based procedural (set in ’01 and early ’02) about a team of Boston Globe journalists going after a Boston archdiocese and a political network of Catholic-kowtowing flunkies who were either ignoring or protecting child-molesting priests. It’s directed in such a clean and unobtrusive manner and acted in a not-too-forced, just-right fashion by everyone top-to-bottom (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Brian d’Arcy, John Slatery, Gene Amoroso, Jamey Sheridan, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crudup…a knI ckout cast) that right after it ended I tweeted as follows: “It sounds distasteful to say this given the root subject matter, but Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight is pure pleasure…totally gripping stuff.”