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Legendary steam-of-consciousness surfer and genius director David O. Russell, who is currently Oscar-nominated for American Hustle, was tributed last night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Festival director Roger Durling tried to conduct a normal “interview” but Russell wasn’t going for it. In fact he advised the befuddled Durling to loosen up and just let it happen. Interviewers need to understand this. DOR doesn’t answer questions. Well, he does but if I’ve heard him say “I forgot the question” once I’ve heard it 15 or 20 times. All an interviewer needs to do is drop a thought or a memory byte or some fleeting observation into the vast lake of free-associating consciousness and tap-dancing, lightning-reflex improv that is Russell’s grab-bag mind and just….let him rip!

David O. Russell during last night’s tribute interview at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre.

Russell and SBIFF festival director Roger Durling.

And yet if you go on too long (as I feel Durling did last night — the interview lasted two hours or about 30 minutes more than ideal) Russell’s incandescence can burn out. SBIFF interviews are a dance but Russell’s rap is a world-class “act” and it all ended well. And yet there’s a lesson to be learned: Always leave them hungry for more.

Is Russell going to win Best Director for Hustle, having been denied a win for Silver Linings PLaybook and The Fighter? The betting seems to favor Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuaron but who knows? I love Russell. I could listen to his always perceptive but scattershot observations and recollections every day. It doesn’t matter if I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic about Hustle as I did about his previous two films. I’m in for the long haul, and so is DOR. Right now is the best time of his life (and mine). Russell is on a roll, nothing can stop him but eventually something will. It’s inevitable. But Russell has the spirit to keep punching and pitching so he’ll bounce back when that happens — no concerns on that score.

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A smug, semi-beguiling asshole radio personality (Steve Coogan) makes ratings hay out of a hostage/standoff situation after a sacked employee (Colm Meaney) loses it. I’m sensing something moderately clever and subversive as far as it goes. Alan Partridge (formerly titled Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa) earned an 84% Rotten Tomatoes score after it opened theatrically in England last summer and in Australia in the fall. A VOD debut will happen on 2.27 with a U.S. theatrical opening set for 4.4.

Maximilian Schell, the much-honored actor-director with the cultivated European air, died last night in Innsbruck at age 83. My dominant memory will always be his electrifying performance as Hans Rolfe, the clever German attorney who defended Burt Lancaster‘s Ernst Janning in Judgment at Nuremberg (’61), for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. Schell/Rolfe was a blend of crackling intelligence, necessary poise, a burning determination to be heard and a nativist resentment of American occupiers. He didn’t just hold up his end in that Stanley Kramer film — he was a virtuoso, a young actor riding a perfect storm of talent, timing and a first-rate script.

Schell’s other noteworthy performances: the larcenous, tuxedo-wearing mastermind thief in Jules Dassin‘s Topkapi (’65), a hyper and obsessive German officer in The Young Lions (’58), a Holocaust survivor with a hidden idetntity in The Man in The Glass Booth (’75), an anti-Nazi activist in Fred Zinneman‘s Julia (for which he was Oscar nominated and was given the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor) in 1977, and Tea Leoni‘s estranged father in Deep Impact (’98).

Starting in the late ’60s Schell began to direct, write and costar in several German-produced films of his own devising, almost none of which I saw or even paid attention to. But the Oscar-nominated Marlene (’84), his documentary about Marlene Dietrich, was a major standout. Schell was forced to creatively adapt to a tough situation when Dietrich changed her mind about appearing in present-tense interview footage. But he managed it well and won a NYFCC award for Best Documentary.

The Austrian-born Schell was quite the handsome continental smoothie during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. But at some point during the ’90s his eyes changed, his voice became deeper and more guttural, and he grew a beard. In one of the oddest transformations in motion picture history (particularly for a good-looking guy who began as a German-styled Montgomery Clift by way of Cary Grant), Schell more or less became a variation of Akim Tamiroff. This, at least, is how he seemed to me in Little Odessa (’94) and particularly in Deep Impact. That 1998 disaster fick was mostly ludicrous, but the “oh, Daddy” scene on the beach between Schell and Leoni was moderately affecting.

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I’ve never been that excited about Martin Scorsese‘s intention to direct an adaptation of Shusako Endo‘s “Silence,” which is set in 16th Century Japan. I’m afraid it will be a kind of Christian Kundun. I’ve always had a basic aversion to all things Christian (at least since my early 20s) and I nod out every time I see a movie about historical Japan. Is Silence going to be a solemn downer with torture scenes? A melancholy tale of martyrdom? I only know that my insect antennae are picking up signals along these lines.”

That aside, today’s announcement that Liam Neeson will star in the film is the best thing to happen to his career since he became an senior action star in ’08 with Taken. It will be Neeson’s first top-tier dramatic role (it’s presumed he’ll play a fallen Jesuit priest named Ferreira) since Kingdom of Heaven. Andrew Garfield, Ken Watanabe and Adam Driver will costar.

Nobody remembers Richard Franklin‘s Link (’87), but it was a witty, better-than-decent genre thriller. Nicely acted by Terrence Stamp and Elizabeth Shue, fairly well written by Everett De Roche, very carefully composed. Franklin (who died in ’07) shot it with a kind of Hitchcockian discipline. I wrote the press notes and in so doing interviewed Franklin, and he worked very hard, he told me, to put Link together just so. It was filmed in Scotland but it’s certainly not a “horror film,” as the Wiki page states. It’s a tongue-in-cheek thing, clever and dry. “Link” is a chimpanzee in the film but he was played by an orangutan with a dyed coat. I helped out with Link screenings at Cannon headquarters on San Vicente Blvd., and I remember playing The Kinks “Ape Man” (a portion of which is heard in the film) as a kind of overture for invited guests. Consider Walter Goodman‘s N.Y. Times review.

There’s something almost thrilling about entering a clean and tidy hotel room for the first time. You feel refreshed, renewed — almost like starting your life over. And then you unpack and turn on the computers and the TV. You start personalizing the place in various ways. And within an hour or two the room has become almost exactly like your home. Nothing special or exotic — the toys and ornaments of your life have simply been transferred to another location. The thrill is gone. Your not-entirely-fastidious living habits are the same. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Your life is your life.

I’ve never related to Gov. Chris Christie‘s blustery pugnacious manner, but on some perverse level I don’t mind it. I’m a New Jersey guy from way back so I get that kind of personality. At least Christie isn’t a blow-dried phony — he is what he is. And he’s a kind of moderate Republican, at least compared to the Tea Party wackos. (Okay, maybe he isn’t.) I was really looking forward to a highly combustible presidential primary battle between Christie and Rand Paul, and particularly a contest between Christie and Hillary Clinton for the White House itself. I guess that’s not going to happen now.

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This Bud Light commercial is about the preponderance of empty external stimuli in the 21st Century, and how all of it culminates in a paralyzing state of ennui and nothingness that would reduce Immanuel Kant (if he could be brought back to earth and put into this situation) to tears and pleading. And I’m not making this association because a place where I’m staying in Berlin next week is located on Kantstrasse. Ian is a gleeful, highly impressionable dolt. If it had been me I would have taken one look at that wine-colored stretch limo and that DJ in the back and stopped smiling immediately.

“Take Jake Gyllenhaal‘s lonely OCD decoder in Zodiac and [then] split him in two with one version schlumpy and Adam Goldberg-like and the other like Ryan Gosling on a motorbike. Mix in Eyes Wide Shut‘s plinking/cagey ‘sex party’. [Use] talent agency and university settings as nondescript/sterile as the stockbroker firm in American Psycho. Throw a curveball with inexplicable video-store detours from ye olden times. Stir it all together for a Franz Kafka stew.

“Add a sprinkling of Isabella Rossellini and two blonde love interests — Melanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon — who are both confusingly disappointed. You’re sleeping with Gyllenhall, ladies. Cheer the fuck up!

“Do all that and you might get this eery, compelling, off-putting, possibly slight but mercifully tight (90 minutes) cinematic adaptation of Jose Saramago’s “The Double” (’02).

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Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day (Paramount, 1.31), which I saw and reviewed five months ago at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, has been all but decimated by critics. An abysmal 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, a not-much-better 52% on Metacritic. Here’s my 8.29.13 review, which was titled “Reitman’s Film Doesn’t Work”:

Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day is a decently crafted, amber-lighted period drama, based on the 2009 Joyce Maynard book and set during the Labor Day holiday of 1987, about…well, it’s hard to put into a succinct sentence. It begins as a kind of home invasion situation that isn’t quite a hostage or kidnapping thing. It’s a family love story of sorts mixed with a criminal-hiding-out-in-the-home-of-a-single-neurotic-mom-and-her-son story.

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“I asked Anne Hathaway about the Judy Garland biopic (based on Gerald Clarke’s 2000 biography “Get Happy“) that she and the Weinstein Co. have been developing for…what, three or four years? In 2010 she told a BBC interviewer that ‘it’s a very sensitive project…we’re really trying to get it right so we’re taking our time with it…very, very slow incremental steps.’ Hathaway told me that last August Harvey Weinstein told President Obama that the film would happen ‘within a couple of years.’ Hathaway is tallish (5′ 8″ but nearly my height with three-inch heels) and Garland, she said, was not quite five feet. So she’ll have to do a Marion Cotillard-in-La Vie In Rose (i.e., acting on large-scale sets with large-scale props).” — from a 12.15.12 post about a Les Miserables party at Spago.

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Following the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s opening-night screening of Mission Blue, director Fisher Stevens (r.) festival director Roger Durling (l.). I arrived a half-hour after film began, and they wouldn’t let me in — sold out. Mission Blue will also play at the Berlin Film Festival.

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