Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper is a first-rate visceral combat flick — definitely a ride and a half in that respect — with a slight melancholy undertow and a not-so-hot domestic subplot. The several Iraq War combat sequences are major heartbeat accelerators — nervy, rousing, exquisitely shot and cut — and yet, oddly, Sniper never quite lifts off the pad. Well, it lifts off but then it comes back down. Up, down, steady as she goes, less up, down, up again. There’s something a bit rote and at times even flat about portions of it, and that means, no offense, that altogether Sniper is not quite blue ribbon. But it’s certainly good enough if you adjust your expectations and you’re not expecting something, you know, Oscar-baity.

I live in West Hollywood and TheWrap‘s Steve Pond lives a little northeast, about two miles away, but I can nonetheless hear him right now, telepathically if you will, the sound of his keyboard-tappings and his mildly disappointed thought streams…”It’s good but it’s not The One…Academy people are looking for deliverance, for The One, for the big bountiful year-end payoff…and this is just a very good film and in fact one of Clint’s best of the 21st Century. But a hot award-season banana it’s not.”

Sniper is basically one of those “our man grew up this way and then he met this girl and joined the military after 9/11 and then this happened and that happened” films. The subject is a guy — the late, legendary Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle— who lived quite large in a sense, which is to say mythically by killing 160 enemy combatants during his four tours in Iraq. It tells an intriguing and at times suspenseful tale but not my idea of a great one, and while it ends on a tragic note it doesn’t deliver anything you could call a knockout finish — it doesn’t hit you on the side of the head like a waffle iron, which is how I felt at the end of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.

But it’s solidly assembled and restrained and unfettered and Clint Reborn as far as it goes — his best work since Letters From Iwo Jima. There are only two things about it that drove me nuts, and that’s not bad considering my contrarian nature.

I did a brief phoner yesterday afternoon with The Babadook director-writer Jennifer Kent. We danced around and touched on the usual stuff. Friendly, convivial, not exactly profound but whaddaya want from a 13-minute chat? A brilliant, Polanski-level exercise, The Babadook (IFC Midnight, 11.28, theatrical/VOD) is currently at 90% on Metacritic and 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. “It’s one of those restrained, character-driven, less-is-much-much-more horror films that pop up once in a blue moon,” I wrote on 11.1. “A mix of Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby plus Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage. And significantly more effective than Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining in telling a story of dark spirits overtaking the mind and soul of a parent.” Again, the mp3.

Less than three hours hence the first-anywhere screening of Ava Duvernay‘s Selma begins at the Egyptian at 6 pm, and then the AFI Fest “surprise” screening of Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper at 9 pm at the Dolby. And probably a Selma q & a in between the two. Busy venue, media urgency, will-call tables, converging of Warner Bros. and Paramount staffers. Sniper showed to trade critics earlier today on the Warner Bros. lot. Earlier announced plans for a screening of 30 minutes of Selma footage were apparently a dodge. Paramount intended all along to show the whole film but wanted it to be a surprise.

The other night Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer passed along a good Al Pacino story. It happened fairly recently although I forget where. The 74 year-old Pacino, who’s now doing press for Barry Levinson‘s The Humbling (Millennium, 1.23.15), was about to participate in some q & a appearance at a hotel or cinema, and while he waited he was sitting on a bench and reading a new script. (Or something like that.) And a couple of women came over and one said, “I’m very sorry but could you please do us a big favor?” Okay, said Pacino. “Could you please take our picture?” she said, referring to herself and her friend. Beat, beat. “Uhhm, okay!” said Pacino. He took the shot, the women thanked him and we went back to his script.

I know what this sounds like but Rupert Wyatt, William Monahan and Mark Wahlberg‘s The Gambler isn’t as interesting or eloquent as Karel Riesz, James Toback and James Caan‘s The Gambler (’74). It deals faster, flashier cards, but it misses the meditative soulful aspects of the Reisz-Toback version, which is partly to say it takes no pleasure in occasional wins and the power and glory of that. The new Gambler is almost entirely about staring into the abyss. Character-wise it delivers a relentless obstinacy and a smug-punk attitude in Mark Wahlberg‘s gambling-addicted character, and story-wise it furnishes a constant cycle of losing and doubling down and then losing a whole lot more, and then borrowing from ugly Peter to pay even-more-terrible Paul and so on. And it blows off those charming tidbits of Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s philosophy that lent a certain spiritual élan to the ’74 version.

This sounds like I’m going “oh, the older version is better because everything older is better” but it’s not that. The 40 year-old Gambler is a very fine film but it’s not perfect. My attitude going into last night’s AFI Fest screening was that the newbie might be a bump-up. All Monahan had to do, I told myself, was take what was jolting and mesmerizing about the ’74 version and then build upon it…all he had to do was reach into his soul and add a few things, and in so doing inspire Wahlberg and Wyatt and make a better film. That didn’t happen. They made another film, which is basically a smart, ultra-cynical jizz-whizz thing.

What Monahan’s screenplay and the film are basically saying is “we’re doing two things here — we’re ignoring a good part of what was sobering and haunting about the ’74 version, and at the same time we’re going to skate figure eights around it and generally kick ass with the usual stylistic flourishes that everyone wallows in these days.”

This is not to say The Gambler is a bad film. It just should have (and definitely could have) been a lot better.

Tonight is Gambler night at the Dolby. Can’t wait, has to be better than “good,” etc. I’ll be shocked if it isn’t at least an 8 or an 8.5. Particularly Mark Wahlberg‘s performance as James Caan in a manner of speaking, John Goodman‘s as Paul Sorvino (ditto) and Jessica Lange‘s as Jacqueline Brooks, etc. This afternoon I spoke with James Toback, exec producer and author of the original screenplay of The Gambler (’74), which is a blend of the Dostoevsky original plus his own experiences with games of chance. He’s seen the newbie a couple of times and is particularly enthused about Wahlberg. He’s in the middle of penning a Vanity Fair Hollywood issue piece about being adapted twice — this plus Fingers (’78) being adapted into Jacques Audiard‘s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. He told me a great story that I’ll pass along tonight — have to get down there now.

People tend to think of cats as generally contented as long as they have plenty to eat and get their usual 18 hours of daily shut-eye. But half the time Zak, my seven-month-old ragdoll, tells me that he’s bored stiff and wants to go out and look at the sky and smell the air and run around. He looks at me several times a day with an expression that says, “Are you kidding me? You’re serious? This is my life, just sitting around and plotzing?” And so we go out. A lot. We’ve been to a certain Indian restaurant on La Brea a couple of times. Zak is like a dog with a fairly high IQ. He’s totally cool sitting in a moving car — he actually likes staring out the rear window as we buzz around. Sometimes I’ll take him with me while shopping at Pavillions or getting gas or whatever. Last weekend I took him to an afternoon lunch at a friend’s place and he spent a couple of hours roaming around a huge back yard. Loud cars freak him out but he loves staring at people and generally absorbing new aromas and environments. He really, really doesn’t like sitting around. Like me his philosophy is “life is short.” He doesn’t need to intellectually know that — he just instinctually knows this is the only attitude worth having. A regular “go for the gusto” type.

If you know Michael Mann‘s Thief you know there’s a first-act scene in which James Caan sits down at a diner with Tuesday Weld, whom he’s getting to know, and halfway through the conversation he takes out a postcard-sized collage of photos and pasted magazine clippings and shows it to her, and thereafter explains that the images sum up his life, loves and aspirations. This was my first thought was I saw this Judd Apatow collage on Twitter this morning. To me these words and images are the loves, memories and aspirations of a fairly happy guy. Not to mention a guy with excellent taste in movies (“Why aren’t you at Birdman?”) I could put together a collage like this. Maybe when I get better on Photoshop.

There was a nice, low-key, no-big-deal 100th birthday gathering for Norman Lloyd yesterday afternoon in Pacific Palisades, at the home of Norman’s neighbors Linda Daly and husband Michael Alexander. It pains me to admit that while I managed to get myself invited, I wasn’t able to make it. A friend’s report: “It began around 1 pm, and Norman was in great spirits, as you might guess. Plenty of friends attended, none of them nearly his age. Judd Apatow (who directed Norman in the forthcoming Trainwreck) hung around a long time, very approachable. Elliott Gould, Tom Luddy, Gary Meyer, Todd McCarthy, Allan Arkush (who directed Norman on TV) and many others. You and Quentin Tarantino were the only no-shows I know of. We left when Norman did around 4:30 pm.”

So much for the less-than-likely prospect of Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper being the AFI Fest’s “secret screening” on Tuesday night. AFI Fest has just announced that American Sniper will in fact fill the slot at 9 pm tomorrow. The tragic biopic of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) will play directly after the special AFI Fest screening of Ava Duvernay‘s Selma at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre.

With Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army opening in New York this Friday (11.14, expanding in January), here’s the tightest assessment I’ve written this far (posted in Cannes on 5.16): “Red Army is a soulful humanistic doc about Russian hockey, struggle, destiny, love of country, recent Russian history and the things that matter deep down, which is to say the things that last. In a marginal or tangential sense you could also call Red Army the flip side of Gavin O’Connor‘s Miracle, the 2004 sleeper about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Russians at Lake Placid in 1980. In that film Russia’s Olympic hockey team was a gang of formidable ogres — here they’re revealed as men struggling with loves and longings like anyone else. The central figure is Vyacheslav Fetisov, the Russian hockey superstar who reigned from the mid ’60s to late ’90s, initially as a Russian player and then with the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings. His story is the story of Russia from the bad old Soviet days of the ’70s to the present. The film is crisply shot and tightly cut — it moves right along with efficiency and pizazz, and is augmented by Polsky’s dry sense of humor and a general undercurrent of feeling. Cheers to Polsky, Fetisov, producers Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub and the two dps — Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko.

Tonight I happened to visit the Wiki page for Warren Beatty‘s still-untitled Howard Hughes movie, which shot for 74 days between February and June of this year. And it links to an IMDB page that has a release date — May 21, 2015. Which means that if the date is legit and if Fox and Beatty want a nice press bounce from all the serious hepcats, the Hughes pic will play the 2015 Cannes Film Festival (5.13 to 5.24). Sometime early in the festival but not opening night. (Never allow your film to open any film festival — it sends the wrong message.) Before principal photography began Beatty’s Hughes project was probably the longest creative gestation in Hollywood history, having initially hatched (at least in verbal kick-around terms) in 1973, according to Peter Biskind‘s “Star” (page 406). Beatty is the director, star, producer and writer, according to the Wiki page and the IMDB. The story deals with some kind of affair Hughes (Beatty) had with a much younger woman (Lily Collins…I think). Pic costars Alden Ehrenreich, Taissa Farmiga, Matthew Broderick, Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen. Cinematography by Caleb Deschanel.