I felt more perplexed than engaged by Interstellar, much less aroused or elevated. And of course those persistent sound problems…God. But there’s no arguing with the apparent fact that three out of four critics have more or less approved (73% on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes), and it does seem as if most of the HE community plus others I’ve spoken to at AFI Fest are either accepting or seriously impressed or knocked flat. And while it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, there are people, a fair number of them, saying they had no significant problems with the sound. Whatever. So far it’s made $47.5 million domestic (a bit less than projected) and $80 million foreign over the first five days. Off the pad and on its way. Whatever happens with the Academy, happens. Time to let it go.

Mark and Jay Duplass‘s Togetherness, an eight-episode HBO miniseries debuting on Sunday, 1.11, is about “four middle-aged people reconciling their dreams with their current personal and professional lives in Los Angeles.” For whatever reason, 30something parents Brett (Mark Duplass) and Michelle (Melanie Lynskey, a constant portrayer of morose or dispirited types) invite Alex (Steve Zissis), a fat, out-of-work actor, and Michelle’s free-spirited sister Tina (Amanda Peet) to move in with them. And then the fun starts. Duplassy, desultory. I’m sure the eight hours are more intriguing and layered than what this teaser is indicating.

In an expansion from 231 to 462 screens, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman has earned $2,300,000 this weekend with a $4,978 per-screen average, and now has $8,086,000 in the kitty. That puts it above Inarritu’s Amores perros ($5,408,467) and Biutiful ($5,101,237). Indiewire‘s Peter Knegt is estimating that when all is said and done, Birdman is “all but certain” to earn more than 21 Grams ($16,290,476) but less than Babel ($34,302,837). That’s it? Obviously one of the most dazzling adult-level films of the year and arguably the best so far, and American moviegoers aren’t likely to part with anything more than…what, $25 or $27 million to see it? After being in theatres for three or four months?With Michael Keaton and Edward Norton all but certain to be nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor two months from now? And yet Big Hero 6 earns $56,200,000 in three days, and will probably hit $150 million or higher without breaking a sweat. Something is wrong here. If Jimmy Kimmel was to go out on the street and ask people to define the word “puerile,” how many would get it right?

Now I really don’t expect Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper to be Tuesday night’s big surprise screening at AFI Fest. Deadline‘s Pete Hammond has reported that Eastwood told him during last night’s Governor’s Awards ceremony that he “just put the finishing touches” on Sniper in “the past two days” and that “it’s ready to be seen now.” Even if they wanted to offer it as a surprise Warner Bros. marketers wouldn’t have discussed the possibility with AFI Fest before they absolutely knew it was fully finished and screenable, or within the last 48 to 72 hours, and it seems unlikely that AFI Fest honchos would have held out during a “well, maybe but we have to wait until Clint tells us it’s completely done” situation.

I’ve riffed on this general point before but 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Peter Glenville‘s Becket — the most covert “gay” movie ever released to mainstream America in the 20th Century. It was an Oscar-worthy, big-budget historical drama costarring two of the biggest and most respected box-office draws of the day, and both of them Shakespeare-capable — Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole…and nobody in 1964 seemed to even notice, much less write about, the subtext. It flew right by.

Thomas Becket (Burton) and King Henry II (O’Toole) were, of course, portrayed as straight, whoring, wine-guzzling hounds (during the first act, at least, as far as Becket was concerned) but apart from the lack of sexual contact Becket exuded all kinds of gay currents, so much so that many of its dramatic elements and situations re-appeared 41 years later in Brokeback Mountain, the Gone With The Wind of mainstream gay movies.

In the 12th Century men could and did profess “love” for each other without anyone thinking it was romantic or sexual, but if you put that aside and pretend that the “love” spoken of between Becket and Henry II is more than platonic, it all falls into place. Both are in love with each other, but one of them (Burtons’s Becket) loves a bit less. Their sexual drives are hetero to the core and many children are sired on Henry’s part, but nothing approaches their feelings for each other. Becket and his king are constantly pried apart by social-political concerns and things never quite mesh, but the man who loves a bit more (O’Toole’s Henry) can never quit his feelings. He doesn’t know how, and he hurts badly.

Evening dispatch from HE’s “Actionman”: “Just got back from seeing The Elephant Man at the Booth Theater with Bradley Cooper as John Merrick. AMAZING. I have a newfound respect for the guy. NO MAKE-UP OR PROSTHETICS. He makes you believe he’s disfigured just by the way he bends and contorts his body. His voice is a dead ringer for John Hurt‘s. If you’re in NYC between now and February 15th, I highly recommend it. It’s obviously a bit of a downer and it’s very spare but all of the performances are excellent, and Cooper is just fucking sensational.” Last night (11.7) was the first preview performance apparently. The show will formally “open” on Sunday, 12.7 and run through 2.15.15. What does this mean Oscar-race-wise? I’ll tell you what it means Oscar-race-wise. It means that if Cooper is really good in Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper, that plus Merrick means he’s all but a shoo-in for that fifth Best Actor slot.

A scrappy, seriously liberal Democrat has to run against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries and put her feet to the fire. She can’t be allowed to just coast her way to the nomination by saying (a) “it’s time for a woman in the Oval office,” (b) “I’ve waited for years and now’s the time” and (c) “I’m a tougher, more McCain-like right-center Democrat than President Obama.” If Elizabeth Warren (my personal preference) won’t run against Hillary and if the electorate feels that Bernie Sanders is just a bit too old (if he was 20 years younger it would be a different story), Minnesota’s just re-elected Senator Al Franken would fill the bill and then some. He’s whip-smart, funny, ballsy (i.e., offers no equivocations at all about despising right-wing loons) and walks the walk. Yesterday’s Esquire‘s Charles Pierce put it thusly: “Given the choice between the coronation of Hillary Clinton and the suddenly desiccated range of options, it’s hard not to see a space for Franken to run. The fact that this would cause Bill O’Reilly‘s head to detonate in a gorgeous orange fireball is merely a bonus.”

The HE-favored Leviathan and Ida have tallied four and five European Film Award nominations, respectively. Over the past two years the EFA Best Picture winner (Amour, The Great Beauty) has gone on to win the Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar so there you go. Leviathan was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Andrey Zvyagintsev), Best Actor (Alexey Serebryakov) and Best Screenplay (Zvyagintsev, Oleg Negin). Ida‘s five noms include Best Picture, Best Director (Pawel Pawlikowski), Best Actress (both Agata Kulesza and Agata Trzebuchowska) and Best Screenplay (Pawlikowski & Rebecca Lenkiewicz). Other significant EFA nommies include Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Parts 1 & 2, Ruben Ostlund‘s Force Majeure and Steven Knight‘s Locke. The slow-on-the-pickup, not-that-hip members of the AMPAS foreign language committee are now boxed in. They pretty much have to nominate Ida and Leviathan for the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. Well, they can be their occasionally obstinate selves and blow them off, I suppose, but they’ll look like fools.

“Look at the picture. Where are my eyes? I’m staring at her nipples because I am afraid they are about to come onto my plate. In my face you can see the fear. I’m so frightened that everything in her dress is going to blow — BOOM! — and spill all over the table.” — Sophia Loren speaking to Entertainment Weekly‘s Joe McGovern in an 11.3 piece that I ignored until Vanity Fair‘s Joanna Robinson posted a link piece two days ago, and even then I dilly-dallied.

Batman can huff and puff and roar around in his Bat-cycle and in his fucking Batmobile and jump off skyscrapers and yaddah-yaddah but he can’t kick Superman’s ass because he’s mortal and quite vulnerable while Superman is — hello? — a super-stud extra-terrestrial who’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, can hurl an about-to-detonate atomic device into space and reverse the earth’s rotation if it comes to that. Superman can kick Batman’s ass while taking a nap or a bath or having a manicure so just shut up. The idea is fundamentally stupid.

Today is the 100th birthday of the great actor-producer Norman Lloyd, whom I had the honor of interviewing at his home a little more than nine years ago. At the time I was hopping up and down over Lloyd’s smallish but eloquent and quite stirring performance in Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes. Two or three years ago I ran into Lloyd again when he was being honored in Cannes. Here’s a Todd McCarthy tribute that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter a week or so ago, and here’s a piece from Variety‘s Scott Foundas that posted yesterday. Scott Feinberg‘s two-part, two-year-old video interview with Lloyd is after the jump, ditto my ’05 interview. If there’s any kind of gathering for Lloyd today or tomorrow I’d sure like to drop by and pay my respects. Wells to Kenny: Norman Lloyd is another guy you wouldn’t want to describe as “really nice.” He is that, of course — one of the most kindly and gracious men I’ve ever spoken with — but there’s so much more to him that calling him “really nice” would almost sound like a kind of banal dismissal.

I posted this two and a half years ago, and am re-posting today in honor of the 100th birthday of the legendary Norman Lloyd: “If right now wasn’t the best time of my life — financially, spiritually, emotionally, health-wise — I probably couldn’t write this, but there are four acts or phases in the life of a gifted or at least driven samurai-poet-artist, and two of them are hell. Well, one and a half.

The first is called “my life hasn’t quite kicked into gear yet but it hopefully will, and if it doesn’t I’ll be flirting with varying degrees of misery for the rest of my life.” (A LexG subcurrent reads the same but has this addendum: “And I so can’t stand not being there that I’m going to drink/compulsively chase girls/smoke pot/gamble/shoot heroin to narcotize the pain.”) I was in this phase until I was 25 or 26, and even after I started to climb out of it things weren’t so great. It didn’t really get good until the late ’80s (when I got married and had kids) and early ’90s.

The second is called “it’s happening and it’s great, but I know it could all slip away if I don’t stay on the stick and work hard and eat right and stay away from the bad habits…I know things’ll be hard anyway from time to time, but I can roll with a downturn or two.”

The third phase is called “yep, this is really working out pretty well…steady as she goes, good writing happening, business is somewhere between plugging-along and thriving, sons are doing great, nice comfy abode, travel year round, cats are healthy, terrific motorcycle-sized scooter to buzz around on, booze is history, good eating habits, enjoying great-by-U.S.-standards wifi (which is substandard by South Korean or Japanese standards), anger issues at their lowest levels ever, great-quality streaming on 60″ Samsung, relatively lean, no pot belly and most of my hair hasn’t fallen out,” etc.