Every now and then I read another doom-and-gloom piece about the summer’s disappointing (i.e., not as good last year’s) box-office performance. “Downward spiral,” “big drop,” etc. The top ten films so far have grossed $130 million vs. $174 million last year. 2014 is down 6% from 2013. Could that have something to do with a mortifying awareness that the majority of summer movies are intended to be downmarket CG-driven shite? Not to mention that (a) ticket and popcorn prices are ridiculous, (b) many urban theatres are filled with yakking low-life apes munching on jalapeno nachos and checking their brightly glaring cell phones, (c) the varied VOD and streaming options are highly competitive and attractive plus cable dramas seem much more satisfying to anyone with a smidgen of taste. Theatrical attendance levels are presumably still dropping. Two years ago Goldman Sachs analysts Drew Borst and Fred Krom concluded that ticket buys were at a 25-year low with under-30 attendance down 40% since 2002. The theatre experience has been declining for a long while, and action movies…I don’t want to talk about it. Megaplex summer is just something to endure, get through, wait out. Life begins with Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York, and then the season begins. There are many, many good to great films about to unfurl. It’s simply a matter of ignoring the diversions made for the downmarket mob, and of course the mob itself.

On the face of it, a Bluray of a 35 year-old made-for-TV movie doesn’t sound all that essential. But David Greene and C.D.B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire may — I say “may” — be an exception. I know it got to me when I saw it in my fleabag Sullivan Street apartment in the spring of ’79, but you can’t trust an old memory. Based on a series of New Yorker articles and then a book by Bryan, it won four Emmy Awards and was nominated for several other honors. It’s basically about the pain of being lied to about the cause of a loved one’s death. Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty portray Peg and Gene Mullen, an average couple going through hell because the U.S. military won’t explain how their son (Timothy Hutton) happened to be killed by U.S. artillery fire during a Vietnam War battle. Sam Waterston plays Bryan. As many as 8000 U.S. soldiers might have been killed in Vietnam by friendly fire; many thousands more were killed by their own during World War II, World War I and other major conflicts. Friendly Fire aired on ABC on ABC on 4.22.79, attracting an audience of 64 million people. The Kino Lorber Bluray is streeting on 8.26.

James Garner‘s passing led me to a seven-week-old announcement about Kino Lorber releasing a Bluray of William Wyler‘s The Children’s Hour (’62), in which Garner plays a strong supporting role as Audrey Hepburn‘s fiance. John Michael Hayes adapted Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play; Hellman got screen credit but otherwise had nothing to do with the Wyler film (which is viewable right now on Vudu in HDX). This led to me a YouTube clip of Hellman presenting the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film at a ceremony on 3.28.77. It is very unfortunate that the editor chose to cut out Hellman’s remarks about her blacklisting, which I’ve pasted after the clip:

James Garner, 86, has left the earth, perhaps even the solar system. To many he was Maverick or Jim Rockford, but to me he’ll always be Charlie Madison, the nonchalant dog-robber and “practicing coward” in Paddy Chayefsky and Arthur Hiller‘s The Americanization of Emily (’64), which Garner often said later was his favorite performance. My second favorite Garner guy is Lt. Robert Hendley (a.k.a. “the Scrounger”) in John Sturges‘ The Great Escape (’63). My third favorite is race-car driver Pete Aron in John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix (’66). And that was it, really — a four-year streak in which Garner was peaking like a stallion and 100% in synch with America’s idea of success and masculinity — smart, laid-back, smooth, broad-shouldered, good-looking, a little scampy.

All right, if you add his three years with Maverick (’57 to ’60) plus Sayonara (’57), The Children’s Hour (’62) and one or two of his fluffly romcoms with Doris Day I guess Garner had a nine-year streak but ’63 to ’66 was when he really and truly mattered — when he was “the guy.” I know he was primarily at home on the tube for most of his career, but he owned mainstream movie potency for that four-year period.

Earlier this month I mentioned that I’d heard “convincing chatter” about Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar possibly debuting sometime during the span of the 52nd New York Film Festival (9.26 through 10.12), “although the most recent buzz says that Interstellar could play Telluride first.” Now I’m hearing that Nolan’s time-travel film, an 11.7 Paramount release, may not…uhm, let me phrase this carefully. So far, I’m told, there’s been a reluctance on Nolan’s part to screen the film for reps of at least one of the hot-shot fall festivals. That means he’s probably saying the same thing to all the other reps. Interstellar is understood to be a very effects-heavy film, but Nolan can’t play this “not ready” game much longer. Interstellar may not be ready to screen for festival programmers right now (i.e., 7.19) and it may not ultimately be ready to screen at the Telluride or Toronto festivals, which span from late August to mid September. But it would have to be ready to theoretically close the New York Film Festival on Sunday, 10.12, which would be less than four weeks before the commercial opening. Bottom line: If there was a serious interest on Nolan’s part to premiere Interstellar at one of the early fall festivals (New York being the most favorable in terms of post-production leeway), he would be playing ball at this stage by letting certain persons see it in whatever form it happens to be. But so far he hasn’t, I’m told. Read into this what you will.

I’ve never been much of a fan of John Ford‘s Monument Valley westerns. I “respect” them as far as it goes but I’ve never been able to get around the fact that it’s completely ridiculous for a community of any kind (settlers, soldiers) to be living in a place about as life-nurturing as the surface of the moon — no river or grass so you can’t raise cattle or grow crops or do anything except savor the scenery. (I’ve been to Monument Valley so don’t tell me.) On top of which I’ve never really cared for Ford’s collaborations with Henry Fonda — My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, Young Mr. Lincoln — as they’ve always seemed…I don’t know, kind of smug and even lazy on some level. Fonda always seems to be posing in these films. Plus I’m generally sick of the Earps vs. the Clantons…I just don’t want to do that whole O.K. Corral thing again, no offense. So if it’s okay I’ll be taking a pass on Criterion’s forthcoming Clementine Bluray, 4K digital restoration or not. I’d pay $6 bucks to stream it but Criterion doesn’t offer that stuff…will they ever?

It was announced yesterday that Angelina Jolie‘s next directing project will be By The Sea, a smallish relationship drama costarring herself and husband Brad Pitt. It shoots next month (partly in Malta) with Universal distributing. Last May The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit wrote that “some insiders [are speculating] it could be a relationship drama that Jolie wrote several years ago, [about] a couple with issues who take a vacation in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage.”

Well and good, except with one or two exceptions husband-and-wife collaborations have not worked out. At the very least they’re spotty. All good films come about through creative collaboration and, to a certain extent, conflict. But the best ones are almost always the result of a single, all-powerful director being the absolute boss — a creative dictator whose vision and control is mostly unchallenged. (Or at least is not strongly interfered with.) It follows that this dynamic can’t prevail when a husband and wife make a film together as all successful, healthy marriages rest upon an understanding that they have a partnership to maintain, and that this means showing mutual respect and some deference and that neither party is the CEO…well, that’s not really true, is it?

In the five-year-old view of New Yorker book critic Louis Menand, Thomas Pynchon‘s Inherent Vice is “a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch Gilligan’s Island instead of sitting around a nightclub knocking back J&Bs. It’s The Maltese Falcon starring Cheech and Chong, The Big Sleep as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it’s funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It’s funnier than Raymond Chandler, anyway.

“The twist is the time period. The events in Pynchon’s story take place in the spring of 1970, something we can infer from frequent references to the Manson trial and the N.B.A. finals between the Lakers and the Knicks. And the book is loaded — overloaded, really, but Pynchon is an inveterate encyclopedist — with pop period detail: Dark Shadows, Marcus Welby, M.D. and Hawaii Five-O; Blue Cheer, Tiny Tim, and the Archies; Casey Kasem, Glen Campbell, Herb Alpert. There are some local Southland references — the used-car dealer Cal Worthington — and a few bits of rock-and-roll esoterica. There are a lot of drug jokes, and there are a lot of drugs (though, strangely, little reference to the antiwar movement: the bombing of Cambodia, mentioned in passing, took place in the spring of 1970). Nixon has been President for a year. The sand is running out on the counterculture.”

“Mr. Putin gave some delinquent children a can of gasoline and a pack of matches, and he’s now shocked to see that they’ve started a fire.” — assessment offered yesterday during ABC News report about Thursday’s Malaysian air massacre in East Ukraine.

Director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, the long-awaited, buzzed-about adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s period crime novel, will be world-premiered on Saturday, October 4th, at the 52nd New York Film Festival. Hollywood Elsewhere will be there with bells on. The Warner Bros. release will open theatrically on 12.12.14 so this is a big deal — a look at a presumably major film 10 weeks in advance. Set in Los Angeles in 1970 (and not 1969, which is what I’ve been erroneously saying all along), pic is about Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a pot-smoking, space-case private dick involved in a complicated effort “to prevent his ex-girlfriend’s current lover being committed to a mental asylum”…or a plot to kidnap the guy or something like that. (The Manson Family murder trial was a backdrop in Pynchon’s novel so it presumably flashes in and out of the film also.) Costarring Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Jena Malone, Katherine Waterston and Maya Rudolph.

Inherent Vice costars Joaquin Phoenix, Martin Short during filming.

Nationally syndicated columnist and Washington Post op-ed contributor Michael Gerson has written an impression of Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver (Weinstein Co., 8.15), which he recently saw. He calls it an “updated but respectful re-telling” of Lois Lowry’s slim 1993 book about totalitarianism, euthanasia, suicide, sexual awakening and infanticide, and “clearly the labor of someone’s love.” He also calls it “an odd candidate for a blockbuster,” as much of what happens in the book and the film is “an interior moral struggle.” But he predicts it will “provoke political commentary” as The Giver‘s main point is that pain is a difficult but necessary component in any meaningful life as “the very things that make us vulnerable to loss — choice, emotion, desire — also make us human.” This, says Gerson, is “fairly serious stuff for a summertime movie. But it is precisely what causes Lowry’s book to transcend the genre of teen literature it created.”

I’ve just been disinvited from participating in next week’s Magic in the Moonlight press junket in Los Angeles. No biggie, no sweat…but I’m wondering who pushed the button. I’m guessing it was Colin Firth‘s publicist. On 3.31 I wrote a piece called “Repressed British Clod,” about Firth’s downward career trajectory following a remarkable three-year hot streak from ’09 to ’11 (A Single Man, The King’s Speech and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), so perhaps they’re afraid I might get into that. (As Firth himself did, prophetically-speaking, when he accepted his Oscar.) I wouldn’t, of course. Firth’s performance in Magic in the Moonlight is his best since The King’s Speech, and that’s the current reality. Or was I deep-sixed because I recently lamented that crude-looking Magic in the Moonlight one-sheet? It can’t be because of today’s review, which was mostly positive.