Last night I went to see Carol Reed and Graham Greene‘s Our Man in Havana (’59) at the Aero. A dryly amusing, mild-mannered timepiece. Intelligently written by Greene, pleasantly assembled. Handsomely shot in widescreen black-and-white (those old cobblestoned streets of Havana look wonderful under streetlights), although everyone is unfortunately affected with the CinemaScope mumps. It was filmed in Havana two months after Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. (Warning: Trailers From Hell tour guide John Landis says it was shot during Batista’s regime and that Batista visited the shoot — in fact Castro and Che Guevara visited.) Alec Guinness in his prime, Ernie Kovacs, Noel Coward, Maureen O’Hara, Ralph Richardson, Burl Ives, etc. The sort of light-hearted, old-school, mid 20th Century film that was all but eradicated by the cultural upheavals and radical passions of the ’60s and all that followed.

A fair-sized percentage of the New Yorkers and Los Angelenos who will pay to see Ira Sachs‘ Love Is Strange (Sony Pictures Classics) this weekend will be doing so, I’m guessing, because it’s racked up a 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a Metacritic rating of 85%. That averages out to 90.5, which pretty much means “whoa…let’s definitely see this before Sunday night!” And then they’ll see it and most, I’m presuming, will emerge moderately pleased, although others, I’m fairly certain, will be feeling a bit confused and perhaps even frowning. I can imagine some guy saying to a friend, “It was nice but a little…what’s the word? Enervating? It doesn’t have much of a pulse. Why did the critics get so excited? Is it me? Do I lack sensitivity or something? Because from my perspective it was almost a meh. A nice sensitive meh.”

The reason Love Is Strange has done so well among N.Y. and L.A. critics is because a private memo was sent around two or three weeks ago. I won’t say who wrote it and I can’t even quote directly, but it more or less said the following: “This is a nice, low-key, sensitive little Sundance movie, possibly autobiographical to some extent, from an admired, openly gay New York filmmaker, and we don’t want to be anything but gentle and admiring in our responses. No snark, no snippy-ass remarks, no put-downs…Love Is Strange is an opportunity for all of us to to open our pores and show the world how enormously sensitive we are when given half a chance and to show our respect and affection for gay people who marry and also to show how humanistic and 21st Century our attitudes are. Plus it pushes back, deftly but forcefully, against anti-gay discrimination by Catholics and other religious organizations. So be nice, and if you want to play it extra-safe, be really nice.”

Yesterday Little White Lies, a British film magazine, published a q & a between correspondent David Jenkins and directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose Two Days, One Night will play the Toronto and New York film festivals before opening stateside via Sundance Selects. I respect the film but I’m calling it a “ploddingly earnest line-drive single.” I’m mentioning the Jenkins piece because of (a) a forehead-slapper of a question (i.e, “Why did you decide to make a movie which is essentially the same scene played over and over?”) and (b) an even bigger forehead-slapper of a response from Luc Dardenne (i.e., “Why not?”). Even if I was hostile to the film (which I’m not) and wanted to give the Dardennes a hard time, I wouldn’t have the balls to ask this question. Jenkins is an admirer, just to be clear.

A hunch just slipped into my bloodstream that Jean-Marc Vallee, Reese Witherspoon and Nick Hornby‘s Wild (Fox Searchlight, 12.5) will be the first film to be shown at the Telluride Film Festival, or around 2 or 3 pm at the Chuck Jones Cinema (i.e., right after the picnic). No one’s told me anything — I’m just hearing a little voice, or more precisely a ping. All prophetic, telepathic and/or inspirational messages are always received as little taps on your shoulder or ping tones in the back of your head.

Telluride is technically a four-day festival (Friday, 8.29 through Monday, September 1st) but it doesn’t really start until Friday afternoon, and for industry visitors is all but over by early Monday afternoon so call it three days.

Incidentally: Everyone travels to Telluride on Thursday, of course. My Burbank-to-Durango flight arrives around 2:30 pm. I’ll pick up the rental car right away and drive to Telluride, which takes a little over two hours. If anyone wants a lift in exchange for gas money, get in touch. I’m heading back to Durango around 1 pm on Monday.

I really hate spitballing this early on potential Oscar nominees but Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil insisted. Wait until after Telluride or better yet after Toronto. I have to say again that I feel a teeny bit irked by the default favoritism being shown to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken. A movie about a guy who had run-ins with the law, competed in the 1936 Olympics and then survived two horrible ordeals (one at sea, the other in a Japanese P.O.W. camp) and then went on to live a full life is not enough. “He survived!” ain’t my idea of profound. Everybody goes through hard times, some harder than others. Some make it through, some don’t…big deal. It may be there’s a lot more to Unbroken than just that, but I’m telling you right now I don’t like the way all the lemmings are going over the cliff for it already. Boyhood, fine, but not Unbroken. Or at least, not yet.

I’m not saying that Karen Leigh Hopkins‘ Miss Meadows is crap but the cutting of the trailer feels off — mistimed, lacking an elegant rhythm. And the darkly comic material feels like something New Line Cinema might have exploited in the mid ’80s. So it may just be a cruddy trailer but if the movie sucks (as the Hollywood Reporter believed in a Tribeca Film festival review), why did Holmes agree to star in it? Reason #1 is that she’s probably not getting first picks at the choice stuff. Reason #2 is that she feels that playing a character with a dark edge might enhance her profile, and that playing a small town version of Charles Bronson in Death Wish or Zoe Tamerlis in Ms. 45….maybe. If I were Holmes I would do New York plays or make a classy film in Europe or something. She’s 35 and loaded. She can afford to be picky. And she’ll be attractive well into middle age. In eight or ten years she can play cougars. Miss Meadows opens sometime in November via Entertainment One.

Two days ago I wrote about having “ignored the math” when I tapped out an 8.14 riff about the BFI London Film Festival showing of David Ayer‘s Fury (Sony, 10.17). The BFI calling the 10.19 LFF showing a “European premiere” means “that some U.S.-based festival will be also be showing the Brad Pitt-starring WWII combat film before it opens on 10.17,” I wrote. (L.A. Times columnist Steven Zeitchick came to the same conclusion on 8.14.)

Yesterday morning Variety critic Scott Foundas shared a little skepticism: “I wouldn’t get too hung up on that ‘European Premiere’ language,” he began. “Last year the London Film Festival kept calling Saving Mr. Banks a ‘European Premiere’ too, leading all of us at Variety to panic and think that surely it was going to have an official ‘world’ premiere somewhere else before, but in the end it didn’t. I was later told by someone at Disney that [the ‘European premiere’ stipulation] was done out of deference to the AFI Fest, which was then hosting the North American Premiere, so as to not make it seem like London was one-upping them too badly.

Tomorrow night I’m catching the updated, remastered, 16 x 9 version of Thom Andersen‘s Los Angeles Plays Itself at Cinefamily, where it will also screen on Saturday, Sunday and next Wednesday. Finally! 11 years after catching the first version at the Toronto Film Festival and almost a year after reading about the new version in a 9.20.13 article by Robert Koehler. It was announced last month that Cinema Guild will distribute.

I couldn’t find an embed code for Sarah Palin’s rave review of Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver, but at least I watched and recorded it — here’s the mp3. Will all the right-wing pundit love for The Giver (“A Glimpse of Progressivism Gone Wrong”) deliver a box-office boost? So far it’s at $16 million and change, but it’ll face stiff competition for the Christian dollar this weekend from When The Game Stands Tall, a Christian football movie from Sony Affirm. Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino doesn’t see much happening. “The Giver didn’t come out of the gate strongly so there’s not a lot of momentum,” he says. “It might get a tiny bump from Palin and the others but When The Game Stands Tall has the edge right now.” On top of which, he claims, “There’s a YA dystopian fatigue factor out there.”

Still, The Giver is at least the recipient of some fresh rightwing oxygen, and this might at least translate into added coin from the home video, VOD and Bluray realm…no? I wonder how the ardently liberal Noyce and Harvey Weinstein feel about this? They may not relate to rightwing theology but at least the conservative wackos are true believers and they’re really pushing their flock to see it. Check out these rightwing praise pieces — article #1, article #2, article #3 and article #4.

I’ve been wondering if James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything (Focus, 11.7) intends to sugar-coat the actual story of the relationship between theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) and former wife Jane (Felicity Jones), in the same way that A Beautiful Mind overlooked some of the less appealing aspects of John Nash‘s life? Perhaps not. Jane, bless her, stuck by Hawking and got him through his trials with ALS and depression, but in 1977 she met “organist Jonathan Hellyer Jones when singing in a church choir…and by the mid-1980s, he and Jane had developed romantic feelings for each other,” acccording to Hawking’s Wiki bio. “According to Jane, her husband was accepting of the situation, stating ‘he would not object so long as I continued to love him.'” Precisely how the film will deal with this chapter is yet to be known but I know the IMDB lists Jones as a character and that he’s played by Charlie Cox.

The anti-police rhetoric and street fervor in Ferguson has reached such a pitch over the last several days (and not without dozens of belligerent provocations from the authorities) that it doesn’t seem possible that the “Michael Brown got shot by a racist cop because he was black” crowd can ever consider much less accept a different scenario. But recent reports from St. Louis Post Dispatch crime reporter Christine Byers and Foxnews.com’s Hollie McKay seem to be puncturing the anti-cop, Brown-basically-died-from-brutal-attitudes narrative. I’ve assumed all along that Darren Wilson, the Ferguson beat cop with a reportedly blemish-free record who shot Brown six times and wasted him with a shot to the head, almost certainly fired in a state of fear and possibly panic. Does it make any sense at all that he’d fire six times while Brown passively stood or kneeled with his hands up?