An Oscar play for Judi Dench in which she gets to play spirited, spunky, scrappy. A battle of wits and personality between Dench’s character and the author-journalist played by Steve Coogan (the latter having produced and co-written the script with Jeff Pope). A mother-son “heart” movie from Stephen Frears (The Queen), but with the son, an AIDS-afflicted gay Republican named Michael Hess, missing in the trailer (except in flashbacks, as a small child). Nor is Hess listed as a character on the film’s Wiki page. Is the adult Hess some kind of ghostly phantom in the narrative?

Somehow Lee Daniels’ The Butler (a.k.a., “The Bee”) half works. To my great surprise. This decades-spanning biopic of White House butler Eugene Allen (called “Cecil Gaines” in the film) is nothing close to subtle or shaded or “sophisticated”, God forbid, but with the memory of Daniels’ The Paperboy relatively fresh I sat down expecting to be appalled or obliquely amused. But somehow it creates its own vibe and settles into a kind of earnest conviction, telling a condensed 20th Century African-American saga — era to era, administration to administration, bite-sized — in a tolerable and even affecting way. It’s not deft or clever, God knows, but it has a heart.

Karen Black has left the earth at age 74. I was told last spring that she was in trouble with cancer. Sincere condolences to her family, friends and all who knew her as a creative colleague. Black was especially gifted at playing eccentric or spirited. Her best role, I feel, was as Jack Nicholson‘s ditzy-cracker girlfriend in Five Easy Pieces. Her hot streak ran from 1969 to 1976, or rather from Dennis Hopper‘s Easy Rider, in which she played a New Orleans prostitute who does acid with Hopper and Peter Fonda‘s characters, to Alfred Hitchcock‘s Family Plot. Her second-best role during this period was the wacko peroxide femme fatale in Day of the Locust. Her other distinctive performances during this streak were in Drive, He Said, Born to Win, Cisco Pike, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Outfit, The Great Gatsby and Nashville. Black kept on working until ’09 or thereabouts. Now is not the time to lament her long allegiance to Scientology.

In the September issue of Esquire, Woody Allen coughs up some “What I’ve Learned” material. I love these articles. I buy Esquire because of them. I wrote one myself a year or two ago. Here are my fave excerpts from the Allen piece:

“What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously…but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it’s the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don’t think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I’ve said. And I laugh at it, because I’m hearing it for the first time myself.

“My mother taught me a value — rigid discipline. My father didn’t earn enough, and my mother took care of the money and the family, and she had no time for lightness. She always saw the glass a third full. She taught me to work and not to waste time.

Watch this clip of John Wayne accepting Gary Cooper‘s Best Actor Oscar for High Noon at the March 1953 Oscar awards. Wayne delivers a comic riff about being angry that his people didn’t work harder at getting him the role of Marshall Will Kane. This is outrageous bullshit. High Noon was partly a metaphor for what screenwriter Carl Foreman had suffered (and was at the time still suffering) during Hollywood’s blacklisting of certain lefty screenwriters and how so many of his Hollywood “friends” had thrown up their hands or turned tail. Wayne was a staunch anti-Communist and more or less a supporter of the blacklist so the idea of him playing Kane is absurd. Not to mention the fact that he openly derided High Noon when it came out and later got together with Howard Hawks and made Rio Bravo as a retort to High Noon‘s dark view of human nature.

Last night I attended my second viewing of Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Short Term 12 (Cinedigm, 8.23), which I saw for the first time in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. It’s basically about a small team of 20something counselors (principally Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr. and Rami Malek) at a kind of halfway facility, doing what they can to massage or otherwise chill down a group of errant kids who’ve suffered through parental-abuse issues or scrapes with the law. Hailed at last March’s South by Southwest and the winner of an Audience Award at last June’s L.A. Film Festival, it’s a real-deal, character-driven indie that delivers a plain, no-frills current that never quite feels “acted.”

Short Term 12 star Brie Larson prior to last night’s screening at Vine Street Academy theatre.

(l. to r.) Mysterious moderator, Larson, Gallagher, Dever, Malek, Stanfield and director-writer Dustin Daniel Cretton.

Costar Kaitlyn Dever.

If George Clooney had decided to use, say, a Glenn Miller or an Andrews Sisters tune for this Monuments Men trailer, he would be indicating a certain classic approach to his telling of this, a real-life World War II saga. But no — he’s gone with “Kiss The Sky” by Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra. That plus the dry, low-key humor should tell you a lot. During last May’s Monuments Men set visit I told Clooney that I detected a jaunty tone in the script. Clooney smiled and said, “Yeah, but we’ve taken some of the jaunt out of it since.” Like I said in the piece, “Clooney likes to aim his films at places where people live, and in this context he’s looking to make a film that does the old ‘play to the smarties but also to the popcorn crowd’ routine.”

Jacob Kornbluth‘s Inequality For All (Radius/TWC, 9.27) , a profile of economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, is “clear, precise, needle-sharp…a brilliant, highly engaging, knowledge-expanding doc about a vital political topic that I really admired, was thoroughly engaged by and, to my surprise, was even emotionally moved by.” — from a couple of 2013 Sundance Film Festival posts.

The trailer for Spike Jonze‘s Her popped yesterday, and today it was announced that Her will close the N.Y. Film Festival. This has all been orchestrated. It’s all part of a grand plan. Bypass the Telluride Venice Toronto roundelay and then parachute into the NYFF. “You didn’t see us coming but we’re suddenly very much in the award-season conversation…snap!” Also today a Brian Brooks q & a with Spike, to wit: “There are so many different aspects to [Her]. Obviously technology has become such a big presence in our lives and, I definitely know, in my life. I think of how much of my daily interaction is with and through technology…and it’s an emotional experience too. It’s about love and our need to connect and our [method] of connecting. But, at its heart, it is a relationship movie.”

The N.Y. Film Festival debut of Paul Greengrass‘s reality-based suspenser is about seven weeks off, and the commercial opening is on 10.11. This is the lull before the Oscar season hubbub. Savor the relative calm and quiet of these last few weeks. Less than three weeks before the start of Telluride 2013. Free weights, breathing exercises, treadmill, zinc tablets.

“Trauma is not just the result of major disasters. It does not happen to only some people. An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster. One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us. Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it.” — from Mark Epstein‘s 8.3 N.Y. Times Op-Ed piece, “The Trauma of Being Alive”

If Gregory Peck had been clairvoyant and under the influence of a truth drug on the night he won the Best Actor Oscar for To Kill A Mockingbird in March 1963, he might have said, “Well, this is it…the peak moment. I’ve been lucky enough to play starring roles for the finest producers, directors and writers in the business for the last 18 years…Spellbound, Duel In The Sun, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Paradine Case, Twelve O’Clock High, Roman Holiday, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Moby Dick, The Bravados, The Big Country, Pork Chop Hill, On The Beach, The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear…and it’s been wonderful. I’m saying this because for the next 40 years it’s going to be all downhill. Oh, I’ll make a few interesting films over the next couple of decades but my charmed career period is over and I know it. Some actors only get lucky for ten years or so. I nearly had 20. And for that I’m very grateful to the industry and especially to the public. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”