There’s an apparent presumption out there that when push comes to shove, the leading Oscar Discriminators (i.e., blogging mafia, SAG members, Academy rank-and-file) are going to maintain that you can assign Best Picture heat to only one World War II movie during the 2014 award season, and that means you’ll have to choose between Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, David Ayer and Brad Pitt‘s Fury and Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game. The Brad-vs.-Angie angle = Tyldum will have to struggle just to stay in the conversation. It also means that Angie’s film will be seen as the alpha-minded WWII movie with heart (he survived! life didn’t break him! let that be an inspiration to all!), Ayer and Pitt’s will be the opposite end of that spectrum (the war in Europe was a lot more savage than anything Samuel Fuller dared to show) and Tyldum’s will be the seen as half brain-teasey and half tut-tutting (i.e., why prosecute a decoding genius who shortened the war just because he’s gay?). Look, calm down…okay? Get hold of yourselves. It’s August, for God’s sake.

I’m down with the Brad-vs.-Angie meme as far as it goes but the “only one World War II Movie can be a serious contender” notion is lame. Subject matter is the least interesting aspect of a good or noteworthy film. Subject matter is simply the starting point. It’s the journey that matters. That and the way the light falls upon the characters during magic hour.

From Justin Chang‘s Variety review of The Downloadables…I mean, The Expendables 3D: “The previous two movies, although barely defensible, were at least enlivened by a sly awareness of their own awfulness, and got by on the strength of their no-nonsense, R-rated brutality. But that grisly sense of purpose is nowhere to be found in The Expendables 3, which, for clearly commercial reasons, has opted for a more audience-friendly PG-13 rating — a gutless decision that drains the action of its excitement, its visceral impact and its glorious disreputability.

“By the time the movie finally arrives at an incoherent endgame set in some fictional Middle Eastern hellhole, where editors Sean Albertson and Paul Harb try their damnedest to make sense of a whirlwind of action involving rolling tanks, speeding motorcycles and dive-bombing helicopters, it’s at once impossible to follow what’s going on and impossible to care in any event.

Speaking as a fairly resolute non-fan of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta‘s The Leftovers (HBO), I have to admit that last night’s episode, “Guest,” wasn’t half-bad — the first episode that didn’t leave me irritated or pissed off. Out of the blue I felt suddenly fascinated and even entranced by Carrie Coon‘s “Nora Durst”. I’m telling you right now that I like Coons much, much more than Justin Theroux‘s glum, unshaven, often inarticulate Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s local sheriff. I’m telling you right now I would be totally down with The Leftovers becoming The Nora Durst Show from here on. (Which of course won’t happen, although it looks like Durst and Garvey will be going out soon.) “Guest” was pretty much all about Durst, who lost her husband and both her children to “the departure” and who works for the Bureau of Departed Persons or whatever the fuck it’s called. She has two bizarre encounters in Mapleton (including a really strange one involving a prostitute, a loaded gun and a bulletproof vest) and then she attends a departure-related conference in New York City as a panelist and discovers some loon is impersonating her. Lots of strange things happen including a scene that results in Durst making out and grinding away with a combination of a fake corpse and a love doll. This is the first big-time role for Coons, who hails from the Midwest and who recently married playwright/actor Tracy Letts.

Matthew Weiner‘s You Are Here (Millenium, 8.22) was more or less killed by critics during the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. Then it became Are You Here. (What possible difference could the order of the words make? They could have just as easily called it Here You Are or Shave My Balls or anything in between.) A few days ago I finally saw it. I went in expecting a disaster but came out feeling agreeably diverted for the most part. Are You Here isn’t up to the level of Weiner’s Mad Men at all, but it’s not a calamity. It’s an experimental in-and-outer — a blend of smart, low-key humor with a faint tone of absurdity plus a mild-mannered romance plus a somber inheritance drama involving a fractured family and mental illness, and all of it mixed in with something that feels like a buddy comedy…only it isn’t.

Owen Wilson delivers another one of his laid-back, smooth-ride guys — a booze-reliant, pot-savoring TV weatherman — but he reaches in a few times and digs down and touches bottom here and there. Wilson has been playing this guy for almost 20 years now but I found this permutation to be one of his most likable and poignant ever. (His best since Dignan?) But oh, God…more agony from Zach Galifianakis! I have loathed and despised this fucking animal for years, and it’s profoundly agonizing to sit through another one of his man-diaper performances as a bearded bipolar low-life who comes into a family inheritance. I’ve never found ZG funny, I hate that smug-anal-retard expression he always uses, and I find him physically repulsive. So much so that when he “gets lucky” in Act Three (don’t ask) I made an “ugghh!” sound in my screening-room seat.

A little more than five years ago Fox Home Video released a handsomely restored DVD of Fritz Lang‘s Man Hunt (’41). Fox’s Schawn Belston made this spooky World War II noir look terrific, and the DVD included a short doc called “Rogue Male: The Making of Man Hunt” plus a commentary track by Patrick McGilligan, a stills gallery and a before-and-after restoration comparison. (My favorable review posted on 4.17.09.) The worth-its-weight-in-gold DVD is selling for $10 on Amazon as we speak, but Twilight Time is charging $30 dollars for a brand-new Bluray version, or a simple high-def rescan of the materials that Belston rendered with such care. That’s what TT does, I realize — charges an arm and a leg for limited-edition Blurays and sometimes with no extras — but fuck them anyway. I bought the damn thing on Screen Archives, but I really resented doing this. I would go for $20 or thereabouts, but $30 effing dollars? Is a 73 year-old thriller that most film scholars regard as somewhere between good and pretty good (but far from Foreign Correspondent-level great) worth all that much? The title, by the way, should be spelled Manhunt — I don’t care how they spelled it in ’41.

What’s wrong with a 78 year-old ex-movie star running a South Florida arts institute and teaching acting? Nothing. It’s better to teach in the here-and-now than to sit around on a sundeck and say “I used to be big.” Or “I am big — it’s the pictures that got small.” In a piece called “Professor Burt,” Grantland‘s Gaspar Gonzalez describes one of Reynolds’ classes at the Burt Reynolds Institute in Lake Park, Florida (just south of Jupiter, where Reynolds has lived for the last 30-something years), and…well, the particulars speak for themselves.

Last Thursday TheWrap‘s Steve Pond asked if Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, which has been celebrated industry-wide as novel and striking and even masterpiece-y (and earnestly praised on this site), can leapfrog the Spirit Awards moat and become a Best Picture nominee at the Oscars. I think it can and most likely will be nominated, as long as the Oscar-blogging mafia (less than 15 people when you boil it down) keeps pushing it as Best Picture-worthy over the next five and a half months.

Pond even went so far as to say “it could actually win.” Because, if I’m following the thinking, no other film (a) took twelve years to make and (b) follows a family of characters as they age and trudge through their dramas and find their paths and survive with their spirits not only intact but in some cases afloat. A win is certainly possible — not likely but certainly possible — because Boyhood does seem to be the one film that has that all-encompassing, life-embracing sprawl or theme that the other presumed hotties seem to lack in this or that way. It seems to have the biggest heart, at least from the vantage point that we’re all currently sharing.

“If enough of the major [critics] groups come out for Boyhood, it’ll essentially force Academy members to come to terms with it,” Pond writes.

To put an end to the bullshit and as a sop to the Stalinists who live for the dream of sentencing this or that free-thinking columnist to a term in a Siberian gulag, I am informing the only two serious sexists within the HE commenting community — LexG and Dulouz Gray — that if either one taps out one more remark that I consider to be cruel and unduly dismissive or hateful towards women, they are absolute toast on this site. I don’t think anyone else has posted comments that could be called consistently ugly towards women, but I will henceforth monitor the HE comment community like a hawk.

If you have any kind of hunger for real-world adventure or if you’re any kind of gearhead, James Cameron‘s Deepsea Challenge 3D (Disruptive, 8.8) is an essential — a fascinating, highly intelligent, smartly assembled doc (co-directed by John Bruno, the late Andrew Wight and Ray Quint). Definitely catch it in IMAX if you can. The subject, of course, is Cameron’s solo seven-mile descent to the bottom of the Mariana trench — 35,787 feet — on 3.26.12. He did this inside a privately-designed, funded and constructed submarine called the Deepsea Challenge, and all the time I was watching the doc I was saying to myself, “Amazing, I love this, Cameron and his team are so hard-core…but why the fuck is Jim making three Avatar sequels? Isn’t a trilogy enough, for God’s sake?” You get the idea that he’s making three because he wants a lot more money — i.e., our movie money — so he can self-fund even more undersea explorations.

What Saving Private Ryan did for D-Day in terms of gorey combat realism, David Ayer‘s Fury does for the grueling experience of Brad Pitt‘s tank crew during the last weeks of World War II. Or so says N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply, who has apparently seen Fury (Sony, 11.14) and has been given free rein to (a) prepare the cognoscenti for the cinematic carnage to come as well as (b) start the conversation that may — I say “may” — result in Fury becoming a serious Oscar hopeful.

I’m theoretically down with that notion as long as nobody pulls out a baseball bat.

Fury “promises to be one of the most daring studio movies in an awards season that will bring several World War II films,” Cieply states, by delivering “relentlessly authentic” depictions of the combat realm that “the popular culture has rarely seen.”

Cieply emphasizes that Pitt’s “Wardaddy” character uses his knife on enemy soldiers in particularly savage ways. This footage “may shock viewers who have watched American soldiers behave brutally in Vietnam War films at least since Apocalypse Now,” Cieply writes, “but have rarely seen ugliness in the heroes of World War II.” Wardaddy “crosses lines, both legal and moral…not even Lee Marvin’s Sergeant Possum in Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One, another knife killer, went quite so far.”

Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat) is looking to reboot the long-dormant Ghostbusters franchise by using female leads — i.e., an ectoplasmic Bridesmaids. Deadline‘s Michael Fleming feels “slimed” by the news but I’m just…I don’t really feel anything, to be honest. Vague stirrings of contempt are lurking somewhere but mainly I feel sorry for Feig. The guy who redefined women’s humor in mainstream cinema, who uncorked a new female comic sensibility by adopting the bawdy, low-rent riffs and coarse loser attitudes that had more or less been the exclusive province of male-starring comedies….this is the best he can come up with? I don’t know anything but I wouldn’t be surprised if Feig has been having difficulty finding an original female-comedy project that the studios will greenlight. I do know that he’s going with an easy cash-in — a reboot of one of (a) the most popular 20th Century comedies every made that is nonetheless (b) one of the emptiest, most over-produced pieces of effects-reliant swill ever served at the multiplex. Feig is just trying to stay afloat in the Colorado rapids — I get that — but he’s also helping to deplete, degrade and corporatize mainstream cinema.

I’m feeling so intimidated by HE’s recent sexism debate and particularly the accusatory positions of Melissa Silverstein, Sasha Stone and Glenn Kenny that I was having second thoughts about looking up Marilyn Monroe‘s skirt. I was exiting the Four Seasons hotel, having attended Saturday’s The Giver press conference and done a one-on-one with director Phillip Noyce, when I suddenly decided to snap a couple of shots of the mini-version of Seward Johnson’s Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch sculpture. Which I did quickly enough. Then I realized I’d been looking at photos of the inspiration for this sculpture (i.e., Monroe’s skirt being blown upward by a gust of air through a Manhattan subway grating) since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but I’d never had a chance to “be the grating,” so to speak. No biggie, I told myself. Thousands of Chicagoans have surely done the same thing with the 26-foot-tall version of Johnson’s sculpture. But I still felt it would be somehow “wrong” of me to do this. What would Silverstein think? Or Kenny, a reigning uber-feminist if there ever was one? Then I broke free of that politically correct muck in my head and went behind and stood down and snapped the shot. A Four Seasons parking attendant gave me a look but I stood up like James Cagney and looked him right in the eye, steady and calm and centered, and he quickly looked away.

Outside the Four Seasons hotel — Saturday, 8.3, 2:25 pm. Johnson’s Monroe sculpture is very exacting in every respect.