Right away I sensed that Neil Blomkamp‘s Chappie (Columbia, 3.6) was a likely no-go. I could smell the old “ghost in the machine” notion of a robot having a semblance of a human heart and perhaps even a soul, and decided I wanted nothing to do with it. So I had my own reasons for really not looking forward to seeing today at 5 pm, but now reviews from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and Variety‘s Justin Chang have filled me with even more trepdiation. Chappie “represents a further downward step for Blomkamp in the wake of the highly uneven Elysium,” McCarthy has written. Chang has similarly warned that “intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is one of the major casualties of Chappie, a robot-themed action movie that winds up feeling as clunky and confused as the childlike droid with which it shares its name.” It suffers from “a chaotically plotted story and a central character so frankly unappealing he almost makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like tolerable company by comparison“…hah!

“A large portion” of the Academy’s board of governors has been pushing for a return to five Best Picture nominees, according to a piece filed last night by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway. A “high-level source” is quoted saying the Academy “tried” the current system of allowing up to ten nominees “but it didn’t do us any good.” What an idiot. The point of allowing for more Best Picture nominees is to include a people’s favorite or two. If you nominate American Sniper or The Dark Knight or The Blind Side you’re presumably engaging a wider audience…right?

You don’t want to just nominate the kind of high-calibre films that Hollywood Elsewhere readers prefer or…you know, elitist foo-foo movies. You have to strategically lower or democratize the real-estate value and try to liberally redefine the idea of “best” (at least for appearances’ sake) if you want to keep the riff-raff in the pen.

The underlying reality is that cultural devolution will continue regardless of how many Best Picture nominees are allowed. The cinematic interests of Joe and Jane Popcorn have never been very sophisticated, but they’re even more degraded now with most of them agreeably submitting to soul-suffocating big-studio franchises and the indie sector pretty much generating all the Best Picture nominees. The whole idea of average mainstream ticket-buyers hankering to see quality-level films has been gradually losing currency for at least the last 20 to 25 years. But on other hand how can it not be good for ratings if one or two Best Picture nominees offer at least some general appeal?

The hip thing was to visit Cuba when it wasn’t that easy. It’s still fairly cool now but in three or five or seven years you’ll start to see American corporate franchises pop up here and there, and while I’m sure the Edsels and cheap hotels and native food stands will hold their ground that old romantic Havana thing that Graham Greene used to write about and Wim Wenders captured in Buena Vista Social Club and which you can sense and almost smell if you watch Carol Reed‘s Our Man in Havana…that thing will eventually start to disappear. So get down there soon before MacDonald’s does. Who am I to talk? I’ve never even been.

On 2.24 I wrote that I was settling into HBO’s Togetherness and starting to feel good about all the characters except for Melanie Lynskey‘s awful, draggy, down-headed Michelle. My heart has been aching for her miserable, screwed-down husband Brett (Mark Duplass), who’s been at least making an effort to pull things together but who naturally feels alienated by her lack of sexual interest in him, and by her blooming platonic relationship with David (John Ortiz). It’s a San Quentin marriage with occasional furloughs. I’ve been sitting in the lotus position in front of the Samsung and pleading with Brett to “give it up, man…move out or move into the garage but cut the cord and let your soul breathe…Melanie is trying to get to a good place like the rest of us but she’s almost Margaret Hamilton.” No, that’s harsh. She’s not a witch. But everything she touches turns to glum.

And then on last Sunday’s “Party Time” episode…breakthrough!

On 2.22 Brett ran into an older hippie check named Linda (Mary Steenburgen) and right away felt a certain spiritual connection, and so last Sunday night he decided to duck out of a charter-school party Michelle was giving and visit a party at Linda’s commune instead. Right away he meets a hippie-cat guy who gives him some psychedelic tea, and not long after Brett starts to hang with Linda the elevator in the brain hotel starts to rise and rise and rise, and before you know it he’s spaced and dreamy and totally tripping.

I need to correct previous reporting about the reason for the glorious absence of the CinemaScope mumps on Criterion’s Bluray of Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (’61), which was released on 9.23.14. I finally bought (or more accurately store-traded for) this disc two days ago. It’s the best rendering of this horror classic mine eyes have ever beheld, but I noticed there’s no mention of any kind of mumps correction in the pamphlet notes…and I wondered why. My 9.4.14 piece was written with the understanding that the original film was mumps-afflicted due to distortions brought about by Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lenses. These lenses were discontinued in the U.S. around 1959 but used here and there on European productions into the early ’60s. One of these, I understood, was The Innocents.

But over the weekend I was told “oh, no, wait…didn’t we tell you? Innocents dp Freddie Francis used Panavision lenses and not CinemaScope lenses, and so the Deborah Kerr mumps were never contained in the original elements. They manifested, rather, in the 2010 BFI Region 2 Bluray and perhaps also in the BFI’s 2006 Region 2 DVD, but they were never in the original elements.” Update: The Panavision information is disinformation. It’s wrong. Sorry but it is. The truth is explained in this 3.5 post.

Did you know that nine years before Edward Snowden told the world about widespread NSA eavesdropping that he was Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge? Well, that’s not really true. He was a U.S. Army reservist beginning Special Forces training but he kind of looked like Eastwood and perhaps — who knows? — was lifting weights and smoking cigars and drinking Jack Daniels in the barracks after chow. This is certainly suggested in the first image from Oliver Stone‘s Snowden (Open Road, 12.25), the currently-rolling drama in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays Snowden. The shot was chosen, of course, to counter assumptions in some quarters that Snowden’s NSA revelations were unpatriotic or anti-American. I don’t need to be convinced that Snowden is made of the right stuff but apparently some do. Or so it is believed.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone’s currently-filming Snowden (Open Road, 12.25).

Snowden is shooting from a script by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald, and is based on Luke Harding‘s “The Snowden Files” and Anatoly Kucherena‘s “Time of the Octopus.” The film costars Shailene Woodley, Scott Eastwood, Melissa Leo, Timothy Olyphant, Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson. Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour, a superb you-are-there doc about Snowden’s whistle-blowing, just won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

This morning LexG/Ray Quick observed that “nobody at all has the balls to whip up a serious think piece on the interracial sex in Focus, which is maybe the first fizzy blockbuster big-studio movie in recent memory, if ever, to pair up a black superstar with the WHITEST, BLONDEST CHICK EVER having full-on sex. (I’m sure middle-aged black women in particular are delighted by this.) The movie is positively historic in this sense [except] nobody wants to comment on it.”

I suspect that everyone is stone-cold afraid to write about the Focus sex scenes, much less explore viewer reactions. Everyone, that is, except The Daily Beast‘s Jen Yamato. Last Friday the former Deadline staffer alluded to a pair of despicable racist sentiments as a way into a piece titled ‘Racists Attack Will Smith’s Focus Over Film’s Depiction of An Interracial Relationship.’

Yamato noted that “in his two decades as a bona fide leading man, Smith has never before gotten down with a white woman onscreen.” And yet he “almost did in Hitch (’05) opposite would-be co-star Cameron Diaz. [But] she was recast and Eva Mendes got the gig instead, and Smith blamed Hollywood. ‘How are you not going to consider Cameron Diaz?,” Smith told Female First UK. “That becomes massive news in the US. Outside America, it’s no big deal. But in the US, it’s still a racial issue.”

The relatively soft earnings of Focus last weekend ($18.7 million) have been interpreted as a sign that Will Smith is, at age 45, one step closer to being over. Or…you know, not mattering like he used to. From Six Degrees of Separation (’93) to Ali (’01) Smith did matter. He seemed embedded in the culture and vice versa. If Smith had declared in the wake of Ali that he would make no more films, I would have felt surprised and a bit turned around. It wouldn’t have felt right. But if Smith were to announce today that he’s retiring from acting in order to direct or produce, I wouldn’t blink an eye.

Smith is likable enough but I’ve never liked him that much. He’s more of a glib, glad-handing salesman than a real-deal actor. He seems to prefer ingratiating personality projects to movies, and has always seem too focused on being in big hits. His taste in films tends to run toward CG paycheck fantasies or sappy emotional stuff. I didn’t care for The Pursuit of Happyness and I hated Seven Pounds, and when he made After Earth I said “okay, that’s it, I’m off the boat.”

I spent a good portion of my non-working time last weekend watching the first ten episodes of House of Cards. The adventures of Frank Underwood are in no way boring, but neither do they take you anywhere. You just turn the show on and it flows along like a river and you with it, gliding along like a drugged zombie. And then the next episode starts up. And then the next. And you’re a little older at the end of each one. An acrid, agreeable, handsomely composed thing. Definitely engaging but to what end? Chess, power, occasional sexual favors, pressure, manipulation, setbacks, tough words, grim choices, fourth-wall puncturing, etc. Sometimes amusing, sometimes a bit draggy but not often. But it’s just plot. Not entirely but mostly. Gobs of it. A torrent. And I’ve got three more hours to go.

I’ve read a synopsis of the final three episodes and have therefore discovered there’s at least another whole season of House of Cards yet to go. I don’t know where I got the idea that Season 3 would wrap things up.

On Friday night I watched that BFI Bluray of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (’64). It was my first time. I know the Antonioni milieu and had read a good deal about Red Desert over the years, so I was hardly surprised that it has almost no plot. It has a basic situation, and Antonioni is wonderfully at peace with the idea of just settling into that without regard to story. And I’m telling you it seemed at least ten times more engrossing than House of Cards.

It was amusing to read over the weekend that the guy who stole Lupita Nyong’o‘s allegedly-super-expensive ($150K), allegedly all-pearl dress from the London West Hollywood hotel last Wednesday had returned it on Friday after being told by a jewelry appraiser that that the pearls were phony. The thief then called TMZ to announce the return and to complain about “Hollywood’s fake bullshit.” After which a source connected with Calvin Klein’s Francisco Costas said to TMZ, “Did anyone ever say they were real from Calvin Klein? I always assumed everyone knew they were fake, but I guess not.” I’m mentioning this because it seems curious that a story filed late Friday night (2.27 at 9:31 pm) by Vanity Fair.com‘s Julie Miller doesn’t even mention the fake-pearl angle despite the Guardian having filed a story an hour later (10:35 pm) that led with that apparent fact. All Miller wrote was that “the sheriff’s department has confirmed to Fox LA that the gown returned was indeed the same dress worn by Nyong’o on Oscar night, but has not confirmed any of the additional details reported by TMZ.” It’s now a bit after 4 pm in New York. Miller couldn’t re-research and file an update?

Avengers: Age of Ultron star Robert Downey, Jr. is trying to raise money for Julia’s House, a children’s hospice located in Dorset, by persuading fans to drop $10 on a chance at a lottery drawing that will result, if they win, in “the best night of your life…on earth…yet.” Hanging out at a pre-premiere party with Downey, being specially fitted for a tuxedo or dress, riding in a chopper over the Hollywood sign, etc. In the video Downey makes the pitch with his usual arch speaking manner, but he nonetheless conveys a sincere tone of condescension. Translation: “I don’t know what kind of nocturnal fun you guys get into, but I’m presuming it’s the usual stuff…movie-watching, bar-hopping, an occasional camping trip or a weekend in Vegas or Cancun. Well, for once in your life you can have some real fun by hanging in my orbit, and I’ll even consent to chat with you for four or five minutes at the party. You’ve never had this kind of experience before and after it’s over, you’ll probably never taste it again. Because you’re living on bum paychecks. But at least you’ll know what it’s like, for one night only, to swagger around in faux-first-class style at the top of the world. But you need to drop $10 to be in the running.” Click here to enter.

I’m a little concerned about Variety‘s Justin Kroll having just announced that touch-feely Ethan Hawke will reteam with Training Day costar Denzel Washington in that Antoine Fuqua-directed remake of John Sturges‘ The Magnificent Seven (’60). Hawke can play traumatized writers or detectives or younger brothers or vampire hematogloists in an action or supernatural realm, but he’s never been a Sammy Stud type and never will be, and he therefore can’t fan a six-gun with any degree of conviction. He’s too anguished, too sensitive. You can’t spend a whole career playing open-pored poetic types and then turn around and play a lethal Johnny Cool. At best Hawke can handle the Charles Bronson role, a haunted, mournful ex-gunslinger who’s looking to live a less mercenary life. I don’t even think Hawke is even cool or cat-like enough to play the James Coburn role (i.e., the knife-thrower).

I’ve been assuming all along that Washington will play the Yul Brynner role and that Chris Pratt would be playing a well-fed version of Steve McQueen. I don’t know who Haley Bennett will play but what’s a girl doing in this thing in the first place? Who’s she playing, an Annie Oakley type who’s fallen on hard times? Between Bennett and Hawke this movie is feeling kinda wussy. The legend of The Magnificent Seven (and Akira Kurosawa‘s The Seven Samurai before it) is first and foremost about the existential coolness of the guyness, and secondly about the anguish of lonely mercenaries who are good with a sword or a gun but have no lives. A gun-totin’ redhead like Bennett and an aging girlyman like Hawke spoils the brew.