New Yorker film critic Richard Brody has written another eloquent explanation-and-defense of Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street. Read the whole piece, of course, but my favorite paragraph is at the end: “The movie’s detractors will, in the light of history, look as ridiculous as those who, in the early nineteen-thirties, decried Howard Hawks’s Scarface, requiring that it be released with a didactic prologue, a didactic insert, a didactic ending, and a subtitle (‘The Shame of a Nation’).”

There are several producers and distributors who are true Movie Catholics — who really believe in movies as a delivery device for excitement, opening minds, spreading wisdom, spiritual transportation, etc. Two of the best, surely, are producers Scott Rudin (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Captain Phillips, Frances Ha, Margaret, Moneyball, The Social Network) and Annapurna’s Megan Ellison (Her, American Hustle, Foxcatcher, Zero Dark Thirty, Killing Them Softly, Spring Breakers, The Master). These two have to be regarded as Kings of the Hill.

Down half a notch are Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner (Rush, Les Miserables, Anna Karenina, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, A Serious Man, United 93).

Production and distribution-wise, of course, there’s the Weinstein Company (August: Osage County, Killing Them Softly, Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, 20 Feet from Stardom, Fruitvale Station, The Butler) and Fox Searchlight (Birdman, 12 years A Slave, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Sessions, The East, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dom Hemingway), Sony Classics, IFC Films, Magnolia and so on.

As I noted a couple of days ago, there are seven 2014 releases with a high-profile pedigree: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice, Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, Ridley Scott‘s Exodus, Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes, David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar. I guess I should add Jean Marc Vallee‘s Wild (i.e., the Reese Witherspoon hiking drama), Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel for an even ten.

I’m going to re-scramble the Next Tier of Promising Films in order of highest quality (presumed or expected): George Clooney‘s The Monuments Men, Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah, Richard Shephard‘s Dom Hemingway, Ted Melfi‘s St. Vincent, Craig Gillespie‘s Million Dollar Arm, Doug Liman‘s Edge of Tomorrow, Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys, Andy and Lana Wachowski‘s Jupiter Ascending, Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver, Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen), Jason Bateman‘s Bad Words. (11)

The fact that John Wells‘ August: Osage County has won four awards at the just-concluded Capri Film Festival probably means something. Maybe not in a Scott Feinberg statistical sense but it’s probably an omen of some kind. Maybe. David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook was the big winner there last year and it became one of the three hottest contenders for the Best Picture Oscar. (It also snagged a few Spirit Awards.) The Capri jurors handed awards to the Weinstein Co. release for (a) Best Film of the Year, (b) Meryl Streep as Best Actress, (c) Best Ensemble Acting (Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, Sam Shepard, Misty Upham) and (d) a Life Achievement Award for Cooper.

Again — I’m not saying this necessarily means something but it definitely might. Spirits swirling around, voices of the sirens, community mood swings, etc. I’ve never felt that August: Osage County was anything less than a very well-written, well-acted adaptation. I’ve seen it with an Academy audience. It “plays.” You never know.

The Smoking Gun has posted a Los Angeles coroner report that says Roger Rojas, the financial advisor and car-shop owner whose faulty driving killed Paul Walker on November 30th, was driving over 100 mph. Not on a highway but on a two-lane public road where the speed limit was something like 45 mph. In a high-torque Porsche notorious for being difficult to handle at high speeds. Rojas was different, you see. He was special and cool, a God at the wheel, an immaculate reincarnation of Steve McQueen. Brilliant. Enjoy eternity, pal.

The Nymphamaniac Berlin Film Festival situation is a bit confusing. It’s also a little maddening in terms of scheduling. On one hand the two-part theatrical release version now showing in certain parts of northern Europe (and due to open in the U.S. in March) runs four hours, but the Guardian and other news orgs reported on 12.17 that a more explicit five-and-a-half hour version will premiere at the Berlinale. At the same time the Guardian quoted festival director Dieter Kosslick as saying that Berlinale audiences “will be the first to see the long uncut version of Nymphomaniac Volume I.” This obviously suggests that Part II won’t be shown, however long that may be. (Right?) So the uncut Part I is five and a half hours and Part II is God knows how long, which means the whole magilla will actually run…what, eight hours?

The following is posted on the Nymphomaniac Facebook page: “I see there is some confusion here so let me break it down: Nymphomaniac has been split into 2 parts. There is a version, the ‘Lars version’ if you will, that runs 5 and 1/2 hours. This has been split into 2 parts will be 2 and 1/2 hours for part 1 and 3 hours for part 2. The first part of this version is the one being screened at the Berlin Film Festival.”

Anton Corbijn‘s A Most Wanted Man will have its first Sundance Film Festival screening on 1.19. The lead actors are Grigoriy Dobrygin, Robin Wright, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Willem Dafoe and Daniel Bruhl. “Based on the John le Carre novel, the story follows a love triangle between a half-starved Russian man (Dobrygin) secreted into Hamburg, an idealistic German civil rights lawyer (McAdams), and a sixty-year-old man (Philly) inheriting a failing British bank,” etc. (Hat tip to Dark Horizons.)

The Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival announced today that Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese and producer-star Leonardo DiCaprio will sit for a q & a on Thursday, February 6th at the huge Arlington Theatre. I may not be able to attend as I’ll probably be leaving on Wednesday, 2.5 for a two-day Grand Budapest Hotel press event in Berlin. I’ll also miss the SBIFF tribute to All Is Lost star Robert Redford on Friday, 2.7. I will, however, be catching the more-than-five-hour version of Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac at the Berlinale (2.6 to 2.16), for which I’ve been press credentialed. If the SBIFF had stuck to their usual schedule of starting right at the tail end of Sundance, they would begin on Thursday, 2.23 and there wouldn’t be any Berlin conflict at all.

A shallow CNN report about the Wolf of Wall Street controversy aired an hour ago. Anchor Jake Tapper mentioned the usual surface-skimming references — Christina McDowell piece in L.A. Weekly, some bloggers “calling on people for boycott the film,” Hope Holiday, Leonardo DiCaprio video praising Belfort, etc. I for one was hugely irked by the “industry perspective” provided by TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman, who said that Wolf “clearly does not come down in judgment upon Jordan Belfort…at the end of the film he gets off, he’s teaching seminars.” Really, Sharon?

Earth to Waxman, Tapper: Wolf doesn’t “judge” Belfort in the Stanley Kramer sense of that term, but you’d have to be a drooling moron not to perceive where DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese are coming from. Not once did Waxman mention the drop-dead-obvious fact that the film is a metaphor for flamboyant 1% greed, or that it clearly portrays Belfort and his cronies as arrogant degenerates. Nor did she mention the final shot of the Aucklanders raptly listening to Belfort’s lecture about selling techniques. She just played right along with the report’s “oooh, controversial movie!” theme.

I watch HBO, mainly. Occasionally. Bill Maher, a film now and then. I watched Mad Men on AMC, of course. I watch MSNBC and CNN occasionally, but not that much. I loved watching House of Cards on Netflix. But mainly I watch movies on Bluray and DVD, and I love watching high-def films on Vudu. I naturally want my high-speed Time Warner wifi plus my digital land line. But I’m really not interested in 95% of cable programming. I find it stupid, pandering, soul-sapping. It’s mainly aimed at ADD people with limited education and simplistic attitudes. What I’d like to do is not subscribe to anything (including basic cable) and just pay for the stuff I watch on a piecemeal basis. I’m guessing I would wind up paying a lot less. Time Warner, my provider, is an old-model provider. It’s selling programming I ignore for the most part. The game has to change.

It’s great to hear that unemployed film critic Craig D. Lindsey (cut loose from the Raleigh News & Observer in 2011) has been sent $4 thousand by supporters after lamenting his sorry state on Indiegogo. “There are several things I’ve learned during this whole thing,” Lindsey wrote. “For one, I’ve learned that people aren’t awful. Secondly, while no one wants to be seen as a pitiful charity case, sometimes you need help.” Indeed. I’ve been there. I was in a terrible spot in the mid ’90s and didn’t know what to do. Then a screenwriter pal (Robert Towne if you must know) lent me a grand (which was worth a lot more in ’96) and it got me through the rough patch. I was going to give Lindsey some money myself but then I saw a photo of him. My honest reaction? He might be in dire financial straits, but he doesn’t seem to have cut back on food. Or whatever it is that has led to his bulky appearance.

Craig D. Lindsey

The Producers Guild of America (PGA) announced their feature film and long-form TV nominees about an hour ago, and most of their ten movie noms are right-on. They actually included the brilliant but heavily besieged Wolf of Wall Street! Cojones! But there’s a problem with (a) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis being blown off and (b) Saving Mr. Banks being included.

Banks is a corporate-fellating, pro-Disney propaganda fantasy piece that maligns the memory of P.L. Travers by mis-portraying her as a clenched and joyless scold. And Davis is a note-perfect, multi-layered (if melancholy) period art film of the absolute highest order.

Why did the PGA wave it off? One theory is that the struggle of a somewhat asshole-ian artist to survive is not exactly a relatable subject. Producers have never been fans of sardonic despair — they believe in go-go-go. Remember, also, that the only producer type in the whole film is F. Murray Abraham‘s Bud Grossman (based on Bob Dylan‘s real-life manager Albert Grossman), a blunt and somewhat chilly-mannered sort. I’m not saying this is the whole magilla, but on some level I suspect that the PGA didn’t vote against Inside Llewyn Davis as much as vote against this sort of characterization, which reiterates the cliche that producers and managers and money men are basically pricks. Okay, “practical-minded businesspersons” who don’t bullshit around, but not exactly radiators of warmth.