I’ve always loved this One, Two, Three gag. Billy Wilder‘s 1961 comedy screened last Sunday at the American Cinematheque Egyptian, but I couldn’t attend because it was projected in 35mm. A friend swears it looked great but I’m not changing my DCP-only policy because of an exception to the rule. 94% of the time 35mm is the pits. Okay, 90% of the time.

Five and a half weeks after opening theatrically, Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy has announced its home video & streaming plans. 40 days hence (8.25) it’ll be available on Digital HD (what does that mean exactly? Amazon or Vudu or what?). And then on 9.15 it’ll arrive on Bluray, DVD and On Demand. At least more people will catch it this way, and those Academy and guild members who still haven’t watched it will receive screeners in the mail. One way or another it’ll gradually sink in that (a) this is the leading token Best Picture contender from the indie ranks, (b) Paul Dano and John Cusack are the Bobbsie Twins of the 2015 Best Actor race, (c) Pohlad deserves an attaboy Best Director nom for transitioning so successfully to the DGA ranks, and (d) Oren Moverman‘s screenplay deserves a Best Original Screenplay nom. Really.

Until today it looked like Jake Gyllenhaal would give noteworthy performances in three major 2015 films, portraying a troubled boxer in Antoine Fuqua‘s Southpaw, a mountain-climber in Everest and an investment banker recovering from the death of his wife in Jean Marc Vallee‘s Demolition. My insect antennae were telling me, actually, that Jake’s Demolition performance (grieving widower + romantic rebound) might be his best shot at award-season accolades. I’ve been too lazy to read the Demolition script, of course, but maybe.

It made sense that the solemn-sounding Demolition would open later this year and maybe kick up a little dust. Vallee’s Dallas Buyer’s Club and Wild were in the derby in 2013 and ’14, respectively, so it added up. But then Fox Searchlight, the distributor of Demolition, never announced a 2015 release date, and this made some of us go “hmmm.” Now the other shoe has dropped. Demolition has been drop-kicked into a 4.8.16 release. Au revoir, Telluride and Toronto and all the giddy award-season razmatazz. Hello, April opening and some people paying respectful attention but with the electric-charge element sorta kinda missing. The film has now been officially classified as…well, let’s not jump to conclusions.

How many times have I written about the ongoing visual tragedy of Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks? For too many years the 8-perf VistaVision splendor of this classic 1961 western, shot by Charles Lang, has been unviewable due to the film rights having lapsed into public domain, which has resulted in several atrocious-looking DVD dupes (largely sourced from a decent-looking Paramount laser disc issued in the ’90s) flooding the market. Well, this nightmare is finally at an end with Universal and Martin Scorsese‘s The Film Foundation having recently agreed to join forces on a 4K “restoration” of One Eyed Jacks.

A Universal Q2 report divulged the basics earlier this month, and this morning Film Foundation managing director Jennifer Ahn confirmed that the One-Eyed Jacks project is a definite go.

Yes, Universal and not Paramount, the original distributor. I’ve assumed all along that Paramount had retained rights but apparently not. The rights issue turned out to be “much more complicated than it seems,” Ahn says, “but ultimately we figured out that they belonged to Universal.” The Q2 report divulged that Universal and the Film Foundation have “begun film element research and scan tests” with an assessment report to follow, and then it’ll be off to the races. If all goes well (and it should) the One-Eyed Jacks Bluray will probably be released sometime next year.

If the ghost of F.W. Murnau could provide a quote about the thieves who dug up his coffin and stole the head, it would be something along the lines of “little minds will have their distractions.” I immediately thought of Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist who removed the brain of Albert Einstein during an autopsy on or about 4.18.55 (i.e., the day after Einstein died). The great Errol Morris has long wanted to make a fictitious riff called Einstein’s Brain, and I was thinking how Morris would have fun with a doc about the Murnau beheading, if the morons behind the deed are found. At the very least a few more people will now be buying the Sunrise Bluray.

(l.) Sunrise director F.W. Murnau, who died in a car accident near Rincon Beach on on 3.11.31, during a drive up to Santa Barbara (r.) Albert Einstein.

A knockout teaser from David O. Russell‘s Joy (20th Century Fox, 12.25) to start the day! A voice is telling me this is going to be a huge, across-the-board hit. (Okay, maybe not with the Marvel crowd.) The undercurrent, obviously, is about frustration, rage, coping with heavy burdens. The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” says “settle, Zen out, accept life’s natural limitations” but the shotgun finale (which by the way is fanfuckingtastic) clearly says “fuck that Zen.” Jennifer Lawrence is playing the real-life Joy Mangano, inventor of the self-wringing Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangers and a regular on the Home Shopping Network. Featuring the Silver Linings Playbook trio (JLaw, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro) plus Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen (finally in another good movie after 11 years of hunger after Sideways!), Isabella Rossellini and Elisabeth Rohm, Joy opens on 12.25. Bring it to Telluride!

I’m sorry but any film that uses the old “sparks flying out of juncture boxes on telephone poles” effect gets an immediate fail. To me those sparks are a forecast for a thousand hack elements yet to come. A superhero movie has to be whipsmart and dryly self-parodying (Ant-Man) or extra-fleet and super-stylish (the Captain America films) or there’ll be resistance from this corner. The trailer for this August 7th release, which was shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is suggesting the presence of generic goods and numbing familiarity.

Anybody who describes the ComicCon experience in any negative light gets my vote, and so Jesse Eisenberg is Hollywood Elsewhere’s New Best Friend. I got it when he said it was “horrifying” to be “shouted at by thousands of people,” but I didn’t understand his comparing it to “some kind of genocide.” What Eisenberg should have said is that the Hall H experience is some kind of banal. Can we just say he doesn’t like big, emotionally animated crowds and let it go at that?

I know that the people putting Eisenberg down for these remarks need to understand that not all of the filmmakers and actors who come down to San Diego and wave and shout “ComicCon, we love you!” are being 100% sincere. They like the applause, of course, and the fact that fanboy love has always been a bountiful box-office factor, but deep down many of them are circumspect or even sardonic about the experience. It’s a gig for them, an act, a thing they need to do. 

Mid-July means it’s time to spitball the Telluride Film Festival, which this year will happen later than usual — Friday, 9.4 to Monday, 9.7. A lot of heavy-hitter titles in play so expect a stronger-than-usual slate. We’re talking four categories here — all but locked (i.e., if they don’t turn up I’ll fall over in my desk chair), likely spitballs (playing Telluride would be logical, strategic & smart), bizarros and wishy-wishies.

I know next to nothing in terms of absolute certainty but c’mon…

All But Locked (6): Todd Haynes‘ Carol (Weinstein Co., 12.18), Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth (Fox Searchlight, 12.4), James Vanderbilt‘s Truth (Sony Pictures Classics, sometime in October?); Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, domestic release uncertain); Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23); John Crowley‘s Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, 11.6).

Toronto Favoring, Telluride Avoiding?: Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight (Open Road, 11.6).

Logical Spitballs (5): Jay Roach‘s Trumbo (Bleecker Street, 11.6); Scott Cooper‘s Black Mass (Warner Bros., 9.18 — only 11 days after Telluride ends); Brian Helgeland‘s Legend (Universal, 10.2 — too gangsterish for Telluride?); Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash (Fox Searchlight, release date unknown); Barry Levinson‘s Rock the Kasbah (Open Road, 10.23 — too much fooling around?).

A guy who caught last night’s research screening of Danny Boyle, Aaron Sorkin and Scott Rudin‘s Steve Jobs (Universal, 10.9) says it’s an Oscar-level knockout — sharp, fast-paced, whammo. And yes, it brings it home emotionally in Act Three. Best Picture, Best Director (Boyle), Best Actor (Michael Fassbender, who starts off as Fassy, he said, but grows into and physically becomes Jobs), some kind of Best Screenplay nomination for Sorkin (will it qualify as original or an adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s book?). And very high marks for Seth Rogen‘s punchy performance as Steve Wozniak and Kate Winslet‘s as Jobs lieutenant Joanna Hoffman.

The screening at Leows Lincoln Square began at 7:32 pm. Pic ran a bit more than two hours (maybe 128 minutes), the guy said, and it just nails it. A Rotten Tomatoes score in the 90s, he predicted. “The clarity, the lines, the delivery…everything is swift, fast and on point,” he said, “and the whole audience was really laughing. I haven’t seen an audience laugh that much in a long time.”

Boyle, Sorkin and Rudin attended, he said.

Everyone understands by now that the film unfolds in three acts as Jobs is preparing to introduce three revolutionary products — the original Macintosh in 1984, the NeXTcube in ’90 and the iMac in ’98. Boyle told this guy that the ’84 scene is shot on 16mm (really looks like the mid ’80s), the NeXT scene on 35mm, the iMac scene on digital.

I was seriously impressed by Carey Mulligan‘s Bathsheba Everdeen in Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far From The Madding Crowd (“A woman of passion and steel spine”). I was floored by her sad soulfulness in David Hare‘s Skylight, which I saw on Broadway nine or ten weeks ago. And now I’m feeling a certain gravitas-plus from her upcoming performance as Maud in Sarah Gavron and Abi Morgan‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23), which will naturally play Venice/Telluride and probably Toronto. It’s her lower-class accent, actually; there’s something almost musical about it. And that rock-steady gaze of hers, those shrewd, evaluating eyes, that patiently simmering undercurrent. I can’t be the only one sensing a Best Actress headwind. If, that is, Suffragette turns out be an 8.5 or better. I don’t know how much campaigning she’ll be able to do considering her pregnancy, but the stars seem to be aligning in her favor.

“In one single movie, Amy Schumer elevates herself from being a sketch-show maven to a bonafide comedy queen — and this is coming from someone who doesn’t really care for Inside Amy Schumer. Ironically, Trainwreck lets us far deeper into Schumer than her show ever does, and it’s that brutally honest energy that Judd Apatow feeds off of as a filmmaker. There’s nothing better than a mainstream comedy with soul, and that’s what you’ll be getting with Trainwreck — heart and soul. Plus an admirable amount of crude sex jokes, Schumer’s confident sexuality and a Tilda Swinton performance for the ages. I’m not saying it’s the best comedy of 2015, but I am saying there’s a good chance that it will be. And you can quote me on that.” — from a 7.14. review by We Got This Covered‘s Matt Donato.