Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher opened limited this weekend. Responses from HE readers are hereby sought. Here’s a re-post of my Foxcatcher review out of Cannes: “Speaking as a devoted admirer of Bennett Miller‘s Capote and Moneyball, it gives me no pleasure to admit that I feel less enthusiastic about Foxcatcher.

“There’s no doubt that Foxcatcher is strong and precise and clean, especially as crime dramas tend to go. And I respect the fact that it contains undercurrents that stay with you, and I certainly respect and admire what Miller has done in his usual deft and subtle way. But the obviously intelligent Foxcatcher is a relentlessly bleak trip that, accomplished as it is, isn’t especially likable or enjoyable. Okay, I ‘liked’ it or…you know, I didn’t ‘dislike’ it because it’s so well-made and refined, etc. But it’s basically a grim study of a dark tale about victims and affluent malevolence and corrupting wealth, and about fate surrounding the characters like tentacles and sucking them down the drain.

I’m sorry I missed Liv Ullmann‘s Miss Julie at the Toronto Film Festival, but I’m even more sorry that I can’t watch the trailers for this mixed-response film without wondering what’s up with poor Samantha Morton. She’s only 37, and over the last four or five years her head, neck and body have seriously ballooned. An unkind remark, you may say, but do you think Average Joe audiences are going to ignore this fact? Her appearance has significantly changed. Certainly since she was in Anton Corbijn‘s Control. Colin Farrell plays Jean, the fiance of Morton’s Christine, in this adaption of August Strindberg’s 1888 play. You look at Morton and then Jessica Chastain, and you can’t help but partially sympathize. Miss Julie may (I say “may”) open in the U.S. sometime in December.

Sexual assault accusations have been raining down on Bill Cosby over the last week or two, above and beyond a 2006 out-of-court payoff to alleged victim Andrea Constand. 13 women have reportedly accused the comedian of intimate transgressions of one kind or another. Last Thursday the Washington Post published a piece by alleged Cosby victim Barbara Bowman. In response to which Cosby cancelled an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman and refused to discuss the issue with NPR’s Scott Simon in an audio interview posted on 11.15.

I’m recapping the basics because an old friend, former actress, music industry publicist and journalist Joan Tarshis, has decided to share her own, heretofore private story about her unfortunate encounter with Cosby back in 1969. She had opportunities to spill to the tabloids a few years back but she didn’t want to go that route. The flood of recent Cosby coverage has changed her mind. She got in touch this morning and sent me the following:

“I was 19 years old in autumn of 1969. I had flown to Los Angeles from New York to work on a monologue with Godfrey Cambridge. Two women I was staying with were friends of Bill Cosby, and they took me to have lunch with him in his cottage at Universal Studios, where he was shooting The Bill Cosby Show. He was always generous with his food and drinks, though he never drank alcohol. But he always topped my Bloody Mary’s with beer, which he called a ‘redeye.’

Two days ago I riffed about the relative lack of calming shade and big towering trees in the Los Angeles area. Another thing we’re short of is rain, of course, and particularly torrential downpours, which I love standing in the middle of as long as I’m under an umbrella or shelter of some kind. I experienced an awesome cloudburst last year at this time (on 11.19.13) in Vietnam, in a forested area outside of Hue. The sound alone was fantastic. How many of these have I sampled since moving to Los Angeles in ’83? Damn few. I remember another really good one in Paris about 11 years ago. Rivers were raging in the gutters of narrow cobblestoned streets.

Last night I finally watched Marshall Curry‘s Point and Shoot, which won the Best Documentary prize at last April’s Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a handsomely captured, smoothly edited doc about the Middle-Eastern adventures of Matthew VanDyke, an enterprising, financially fortified, highly educated guy who went on a manly motorcycle journey of self-discovery throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East between 2007 and 2009. His most significant stopover during that trip was in Libya, where he made friends and discovered special feelings of kinship for that country’s culture. VanDyke went back to the States but returned to Libya in 2011 to join the fight against Muammar Gaddafi.

I’m a big fan of the word “finality,” which I never seem to hear in everyday conversation. I’m an even bigger fan of movies that use it. I’m thinking of exactly two that have. In Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd (’62), able seaman Melvyn Douglas is asked by a naval officer why he’s using the past tense in referring to Claggart (Robert Ryan), the ship’s master-at-arms, and the grim-faced Douglas says, “I look around and sense finality here.” In Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick (’73), Joe Don Baker chuckles after Sheree North hands him Walter Matthau‘s business card. “Charley Varrick, Last of the Independents,” he reads. “I like that. Has a ring of finality.”

10 bonus points to anyone who can name another significant film that has used the word, 25 bonus points if they can post the exact quote, and 50 bonus points if they can honestly cop to having used the term in conversation.

Cruddy reviews (27% Rotten Tomatoes, 35% Metacritic) and infantile, submental, nose-picking humor (which of course is precisely the point) is no impediment to box-office success these days. The Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber To, or the reuniting of Jim Carrey‘s Lloyd and Jeff Daniels‘ Harry, will end up with roughly $38 million for the weekend.

I was planning to attend the all-media but the AFI Fest interfered, so perhaps those who’ve seen it will answer a question. Did Carrey and Daniels being a bit older get in the way of the humor to any degree? In a 9.25.13 piece called “Long of Tooth,” I noted that “dumbasses in their 30s vs. dumbasses in their 50s are different equations…you can fall into dumb-shit situations when you’re youngish but guys with creases on their faces are supposed to be craftier and less susceptible.”

In the opening moments of Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O’Toole‘s T.E. Lawrence extinguishes a lit match with the tips of his fingers. When a friend, William Potter, does the same he cries out, “Awww, it damn well hurts!” “Certainly it hurts,” says Lawrence. “So what’s the trick then?” Lawrence: “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.” The point is that Lawrence is eccentric but also an interesting man of unusual character. The same story is told to Robert Redford‘s Bob Woodward by Hal Holbrook‘s “Deep Throat” in All The President’s Men, except this time the extinguisher was Gordon Liddy. The CREEP operative performed the stunt at a party, says Holbrook, and then gave the same answer when people asked if it hurt. But this time the point was that Liddy was an unsavory wackjob. Everything is context.

For another example, consider the segment in Woody Allen‘s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (’72) in which Gene Wilder, a doctor, falls in love with a sheep named Daisy. A good chuckle in that context, but consider another after the jump.

In an 11.14 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carolyn Giardina, Interstellar director Chris Nolan has essentially said “too bad but that’s the way it is” to those who’ve complained about not being able to hear Interstellar dialogue as clearly as they wanted to. Because it was very carefully and deliberately mixed that way, says Nolan, and viewers should, you know, try to get with the program.

Nolan quote #1: “I’ve always loved films that approach sound in an impressionistic way and that is an unusual approach for a mainstream blockbuster, but I feel it’s the right approach for this experiential film.” Nolan quote #2: “I don’t agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue. Clarity of story, clarity of emotions — I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal, picture and sound.” Nolan quote #3: “Broadly, speaking there is no question when you mix a film in an unconventional way as this, you’re bound to catch some people off guard, but hopefully people can appreciate the experience for what it’s intended to be.”

My view of Ava DuVernay‘s Selma (i.e., a respectable mid-range historical drama but too slow and a bit too self-regarding) is, I recognize, a minority opinion. TheWrap critic James Rocchi recently called it “perhaps the best” American film of the year. Sure enough, the recently posted Gurus of Gold Best Picture chart shows Selma is now in the Best Picture conversation, but not all that strongly with a sixth-place ranking. Who are the friends, fence-sitters and not-so-friendlies regarding this Paramount release? Well, so far Selma‘s Guru heat is really all about three people — Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Variety‘s Tim Gray and Rogertebert.com and USA Today contributor Susan Wloszczyna, who’ve given Selma their #2, #3 and #4 rankings, respectively.

Remove these three from the equation and Selma is coping with six less-than-ardent handicappers. Fandango‘s Dave Karger, known for his safe, middle-of-the-road, conservative-default predictions, has Selma ranked at #11 — not a good sign. MCN’s David Poland and critic Thelma Adams have it ranked in twelfth place, and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, almost never an outlier, has it ranked as a #10. TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, a moderate fellow and almost an unofficial spokesperson for soft, slouchy, conservative-minded Academy members who are always on the proverbial hunt for “the one,” has it ranked in ninth place, and L.A. Times critic/reporter Mark Olsen has it in eighth place. Note: “The Gurus re-voted on Best Picture only after the screenings of Selma and American Sniper on Tuesday, 11/11/14. Five Gurus chose not to offer a re-vote: Hammond, Olsen, Pond, and Whipp.”

I’d been telling myself all along that the first reactions to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken would be posted after the 11.30 WGA screening and certainly after the 12.1 press screening at the Arclight. But no — the very first reviews will pop two days from now (around L.A.’s lunch hour on Monday, 11.17) following the Australian premiere of Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken on Monday evening, 11.17, at Sydney’s legendary State Theatre. This special benefit showing is a gesture of thanks for the generous financial assistance (as much as $20 million, I’m told) given to the Unbroken production team by the Australian government. Which is well and good, but when’s the last time a major Best Picture contender (it’s the #1 Best Picture pic by Fandango’s Dave Karger on the latest Gurus of Gold chart) had its big world premiere overseas? The view on Universal’s end, I gather, is that nobody is “hiding” Unbroken (as MCN’s David Poland suggested this morning), and that maybe I should wait and see the film first.