During the Love & Mercy luncheon I met actor Nicolas Coster, who’s probably best known for playing Markham, the “country club” lawyer who’s persistently questioned by Robert Redford‘s Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men (’76). I also saw Coster in a 1977 Broadway production of Simon Gray‘s Otherwise Engaged, which starred Tom Courtenay under director Harold Pinter. Born in England in 1933, Coster has been working steadily since the mid ’50s. He and his lady are living on a nice big yacht in the Marina del Rey, he said. The slip rent is $900 a month. He invited me to pay a visit. I might just do that.

A small dead bird was lying on my Oriental when I returned from today’s Love & Mercy luncheon at Craig’s. Zak, my two-year-old ragdoll, was proudly sitting next to it. Cats bring their kills home as tribute, of course. So I didn’t immediately put the bird into a folded paper towel and toss it in the garbage bin. I petted Zak and told him he was a fine hunter and a good guy. Caressed and gave him a neck rub for a full minute or so, making sure that he felt loved. I removed the carcass (a little gray guy with a splotch of red above the bill) a couple of minutes later.

Now this, located in the men’s room at Craig’s, is a toilet stall! Made of fine polished wood, plenty of room inside — like something you might have found on the Titanic.

At a recent BFI London Film Festival discussion Chris Nolan was once again proselytizing for the deep blacks and (he insists) higher-quality resolution of celluloid projection, and wondering why so few others seem to be on the same page. “When you go to an art gallery you don’t look at a photograph of a painting — you look at the painting,” Nolan said. “But in the film world they’re very happy to show a DCP of Lawrence of Arabia. With the best will in the world it can only be an approximation of what the film really is, yet it’s billed as the film itself.”

Nolan and Quentin Tarantino and other film devotees are encamped on a very small Pacific island with the tide coming in. And they know it. I never want to see film “go away” entirely. We all understand the importance of preserving films on celluloid, but you can’t change the writing on the wall. Nor do I fully agree with Nolan’s quality argument.

I’ve seen 70mm mint-condition prints of Lawrence of Arabia projected five or six times in first-rate theatres (Zeigfeld, Academy, Egyptian, Aero) and while it might have generated a certain hard-to-define feeling that one can mystically derive from celluloid projection, I swear to God it didn’t look noticably “better” than the DCPs. I’m attended DCP Lawrence showings three or four times, and…okay, put me in jail but they’ve looked absolutely fabulous.

I’m okay with Han Solo biting the dust, and you KNOW Harrison Ford has been looking for this to happen since 1982, at least. (Right?) I only know that if you type “Han Solo Dies” on Twitter, you get the feeling that everyone out there is sensing what’s to come, or has been hearing it so much from others than they’re starting to believe it. One request: Please, please don’t include a third-act moment in which John Boyega or Daisy Ridley see a spectral vision of a grinning Han, Obi Wan and Annakin standing side by side next to a bonfire and waving to the mortals.

Han Solo’s defunct
who used to ride the Millenium Falcon
and break onetwothreefourfive parsecs like that on a Kessel Run
Jesus
He was a handsome man
and what I want to know is,
How do you like your Greedo-shooter
Mister Death

Martin Scorsese has told New Yorker film columnist Richard Brody that he was surprised when a few younger actors told him they weren’t even slightly interested in playing a 17th Century Jesuit priest who endures persecution and torture at the hands of foam-at-the-mouth Japanese radicals during the Edo period. Gee, I wonder why? Andrew Garfield, who outside of SpiderMan has a thing about playing conflicted, self-doubting guys who get fucked over or put through hell by powerful forces (The Social Network, 99 Homes, Never Let Me Go, Red Riding), took the role of Father Rodrigues. Adam Driver also agreed to suffer as Father Garrpe. Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusako Endo’s novel may pop at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. I’m presuming it’ll be read as a comment about ISIS and radical Islam — torture, hung upside down and bled to death, renouncing Christ, all that good stuff. Will Silence deliver echoes of the baseball bat scene in Casino or the axe battles in Gangs of New York…or will Scorsese decide to tone it down?

“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. 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.) Often jarring and horrific and in very few ways ‘pleasant’ but a ravishing thing, a cauldron of mad-crazy intense, something undeniably alive and probing and hallucinatory. Yes, it’s horrific but never without exuberance or a trace of humanism or a lack of a moral compass.

“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.

Two days ago I posted about comments from Steve Jobs screenwriter Aaron Sorkin on a recent Charlie Rose Show. I was taken by Sorkin’s view that deep down, Steve Jobs “felt flawed and unworthy of being liked, unworthy of being loved…and to compensate for that, had the remarkable ability to infuse these products with lovability.” A keen insight, I noted, but not one I remembered being voiced in the film.

I was wrong.  This morning Toronto Star critic Peter Howell pointed out that right at the end Jobs tells his daughter (i.e., Lisa) that “I’m poorly made.” Howell: “I thought that very succinctly sums up how Jobs sought the perfection in his machines that he lacked in himself.”

Also: In addition to “I’m poorly made,” there’s an exchange between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Steve Woz (Seth Rogen) from the final act: Woz: “Your products are better than you, brother.”Jobs: “That’s the idea, brother.”

Late this morning Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino joined Sasha Stone and myself for a pretty good discussion about several things, and not just the stalling of Everest, the death of The Walk and the non-interest in Pan. The initial reception this weekend to Steve Jobs and what might happen when it goes wider. The curious but undeniable popularity of The Martian — #1 for two weeks in a row. Sasha brought up the astounding popularity of Jurassic World — a bad movie in so many ways I don’t want to think about it. The re-starting of the Love & Mercy bandwagon was also mentioned. And then Sasha and I brought things home with (a) a discussion of the recent Joy research screening, (b) guesswork about the reception to four 10.16 openers — Room, Truth, Bridge of Spies and Beasts of No Nation, and (c) three or four other topics that you’ll probably appreciate more if you don’t ponder them in advance. Again, the mp3.

I drove some guy’s car across the country in ’75. I’d been “hired” in a manner of speaking by some hip-pocket transport company that was moving cars from one city to another for clients who didn’t want to pay exorbitant rail-transport fees. It was an L.A.-to-New York trip except I had to pay for all or part of the gas. (Or so I recall.) I’d run an ad looking for people to share driving plus gas expenses, and I’d chosen some Israeli guy and some dippy, under-educated girl, both in their 20s. We decided to drive straight through, night and day. It took us about 52 hours to arrive at the Lincoln Tunnel. In any event about halfway through the trip I fell asleep in the back seat around 2 or 3 am, and I remember being woken up by this song around dawn as we drove through western Kansas on some rural road.

It was not a pleasant awakening. It was actually kind of nightmarish. I was at the bottom of the pond but starting to rise to the surface — still sleeping but coming around. I could feel a sense of motion, of course, but my eyes were still closed and I was still half-dreaming. And then someone in the front seat suddenly turned up the radio and “oogah, oogah, oo-gahchaka, oogah, oogah, oo-gahchaka” jolted me in some kind of primal way. In my near-dream state it sounded like a bunch of gorillas had gotten inside the car and were about to pounce on my ass…”the fuck!” Then I sat up, rubbed my face, collected my senses and realized where I was and what was happening.

It’s been commonly assumed for months that Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant and David O. Russell‘s Joy, 20th Century Fox releases that will open side by side on 12.25.15, will probably be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. But now it’s becoming more and more accepted or presumed that Ridley Scott‘s The Martian is a serious contender also. Three big-deal, year-end movies from the same studio vying for Best Picture — only the third time in Hollywood history.

Grantland‘s Mark Harris reminds that Paramount was in the same position in ’74 (or actually early ’75) — The Godfather, Part II, Chinatown (tied for the most nominations) and The Conversation were all nominated for Best Picture.  Joshua Rothkopf points out that Fox also pulled this off in 1979: All That Jazz, Breaking Away & Norma Rae.

The Inarritu seemed like a foregone conclusion after the first trailer popped but expectations about the Russell have surged in the wake of reactions to a Joy research screening that happened last Wednesday, one of those being that Joy is not a spirited dramedy a la Silver Linings Playbook but more or less a straight drama in the vein of The Fighter. And now everyone seems to be saying that The Martian, which opened nine days ago, will become a Best Picture nominee also.

The latter won’t won’t win because you can’t give a Best Picture Oscar to a scientific-minded Jerry Bruckheimer ensemble rescue movie, but it’ll probably be nominated.

The result is that 20th Century Fox is now obliged to contend with a historically unusual situation. It’s been 41 years since Paramount had three of its films nominated for Best Picture, as noted. When was the last time that a distributor even had two of its own films vying against each other, so to speak? Answer: See Kris Tapley‘s post below.

It’s even more interesting when you consider that The Revenant, Joy and The Martian are three different kettles of fish.

I’ve been wanting to feast my eyes on a high-def version of Robert Zemeckis‘ Used Cars (’80) for a long while, but the last time I checked (i.e., about 18 months ago) the only option was a Twilight Time Bluray on Screen Archives for $29.95. And that price was too fuckin’ high! But now you can buy a high-def version on Amazon for only $12 or rent it for only $4. That works.

“Easily one of the funniest and most pungent social farces ever cranked out by semi-mainstream Hollywood. Written and created in the tradition of the great Preston Sturges. Zemeckis in his early glory. World-class performances by Kurt Russell, Jack Warden, Frank McRae (i.e., the Inflation Monster in the clip below) and the legendary Gerritt Graham.” — posted in April 2014.