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Earlier today the London Film Festival and the Disney people laid down an 11 pm embargo for Sunday’s Saving Mr. Banks screening, which will screen at 10 am Sunday at the Odeon Leicester Square. They didn’t say anything about tweeting but formal reviews won’t pop until 6 pm New York time and 3 pm L.A. time. They’re requiring critics to sign an embargo form prior to the screening.

“It’s almost becoming an open secret in Hollywood about how good Banks is,” writes Hitfix‘s Greg Ellwood in a piece called “Will Saving Mr. Banks Crash The Best Picture Race?” Ellwood says he’s “talked to a number of people who’ve seen it (cough, long lead my eye) and it’s continually described as a tearjerker with praise not only for Emma Thompson‘s [lead] performance, but supporting players Tom Hanks (long assumed), Colin Farrell and even Paul Giamatti, who plays Travers’ Hollywood driver. Could Banks split the votes between Gravity and 12 Years A Slave and sneak through for the win? That would certainly be a nice spoonful of sugar in Disney’s cap if it did.”

HE congratulates Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci for going semi-cockatoo (i.e., Weight Watchers) and dropping 50 pounds. The main thing, he says, not to eat “like such a fucking fat pig all the time. It’s as simple as that. I’ve been on Weight Watchers for the last year and a half, and that’s about it. I’m not looking for congratulations. I’m trying to tell you this is something you can do too. I have no willpower. I have bad habits and I’m lazy as hell. My job involves getting out of bed and walking to my computer and sitting in front of that computer all day long. I love lots of bad food. But if a jerk like me can lose 50 pounds (and counting), you should have no problem at all.”

After Five Easy Pieces (’70) it was presumed that director Bob Rafelson held mountains in the palm of his hand. Then he made the moody and meandering (if curiously brilliant) The King of Marvin Gardens (’72) and a lot of people said “uhm, wait…what?” Rafelson never fully recovered, but at least Bruce Dern, 35 at the time, delivered a career-high performance as Jason, a vaguely deranged, self-destructive con man and the brother of Jack Nicholson‘s David, a gloom-head Philadelphia radio talk-show personality, and, in the view of Jason’s abused girlfriend Sally (played by Ellen Burstyn), “full of shit!” In one pithy moment, Scatman Crother‘s Lewis character says, “Jason talks and Lewis knows.” But that seedy, chilly, desaturated Atlantic City delivers a hell of a metaphor (and almost a kind of backstory). Gardens is part of a ongoing Bruce Dern series at BAM.

This trailer suggest that Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel is another consummate visit to Andersonville, a place as distinct and precisely ordered and unto itself as Tati-land or Kubrickville or Capraburgh, only this time with 1930s period trappings + waistcoats and pomade hair stylings, etc. Aside from the silly notion of a high-end hotel making a lobby boy wear a hat that says LOBBY BOY, it looks perfect.

Michael Bay’s own account of the Hong Kong attack, lifted from his website: “Yes, the story is being passed around is not all true! Yes, some drugged-up guys were being belligerent asses to my crew for hours in the morning of our first shoot day in Hong Kong. One guy rolled metal carts into some of my actors trying to shake us down for thousands of dollars to not play his loud music or hit us with bricks. Every vendor where we shot got paid a fair price for our inconvenience, but he” — the air-conditioner guy — “wanted four times that amount. I personally told this man and his friends to forget it [and that] we were not going to let him extort us. He didn’t like that answer. So an hour later he came by as we were shooting, carrying a long air conditioner unit. He walked right up to me and tried to smack my face, but I ducked [and] threw the air unit on the floor and pushed him away. That’s when the security jumped on him. But it took seven big guys to subdue him. [He] was like a zombie in Brad Pitt’s World War Z — he lifted seven guys up and tried to bite them. He actually bit into one of the guard’s Nike shoe…insane. Thank god it was an Air Max — the bubble popped but the toe was saved. Then it took fifteen Hong Kong cops in riot gear to deal with these punks. In all, four guys were arrested for assaulting the officers. After that, we had a great day shooting here in Hong Kong.”

The unstoppable Michael Bay on set of Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, presumably just after altercation with Mak brothers.

One of the Mak brothers (or possibly their pally Chan) being led away by Hong Kong police.

A new Criterion Bluray of Jules Dassin‘s Rififi will street on 1.14.14. I already own the French-language-only Gaumont Bluray, which I bought in Paris two years ago, so the Criterion (created from a2K mastering) is only an interesting buy because of the English subtitles. They’ve also included “an optional English-dubbed soundtrack”…what? The point of the Criterion brand is to sell or pass along that feeling of being a cultured film snob (“Hey, is that Dennis Lim checking out the new Ozu?…he’s a cool guy, Dennis…we talk from time to time”) so what Criterion fan would watch…choke, gag…a dubbed Rififi? But Tang Yau Hoong‘s cover art is perfect.

A guy who gets around saw John Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks this afternoon, and says the following: “I don’t like to say things like ‘this is best film I’ve seen all year’ but this is the best film I’ve seen all year.” I was relieved to hear this. I’m flying all the way to London this weekend to see it. I don’t give political blowjobs — a movie really has to be good for me to write that — but at the same time I don’t want to tap out a tepid response if I can help it.  But I might be forced to.  Even though I’m a fan of Kelly Marcel‘s script, there’s always the chance that Banks might not live up to expectations. But apparently it will. At the very least it sounds pretty good. Banks will debut at AFI fest on 11.7, and then open on 12.13.

A Criterion Bluray of Michael Mann‘s Thief (’81) will street on January 14th, or right before the start of the Sundance Film Festival. Thief has only been available has been a not-that-great, close-to-shitty-looking DVD for years so I’m expecting a huge “Bluray bump” from this. There will be hell to payif Criterion makes it look too grainy, but I’m sure it’ll be fine. How can this not be an improvement? Just watch the grain — that’s all I’m saying. Night shots tend to show grain, and Thief is full of them.

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This morning film reporter and essayist Lewis Beale sent me a 10.16 CNN.com piece he’s written about why people should see 12 Years A Slave. It’s a good article and well worth reading, but I told Beale that the most interesting part is the following: “12 Years A Slave tells us how we got to where we are today racially. It is not a story that Confederate flag wavers, states’ rights advocates, talk-radio stalwarts and all too many other Americans want to entertain. I can just hear them saying ‘slavery ended 150 years ago…get over it.’ It did and it didn’t. And that’s the point.”

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Fox Searchlight will open Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel on March 7, 2014. Ralph Fiennes has the lead role (a legendary concierge) in this 1930s period piece. All Anderson films are about sublime style (directorial, sartorial, production design, cutting, music) and that special serving of deadpan Andersonian coolness. Plus he almost always sticks with his stock company of refined, cultivated, X-factor hipster types (i.e., people with opaque or watercolor personalities and manners who “get” the Anderson thing). This time it’s F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson and Owen Wilson. (Anderson would probably never cast Jason Statham or Mo’Nique or Charlie Hunnam.) It’ll probably play the Berlin Film Festival in February, I’m guessing. Check out the mountains and the waterfall behind the hotel — pretty much the exact same landscape that towers over Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, which I’ve visited twice. A Grand Budapest Hotel trailer will pop sometime tomorrow morning.

Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

An industry gadfly and Academy member who’s seen 12 Years A Slave wrote this morning and said three things: (a) “I am putting it at the top or near the top of my Best Picture nominations,” (b) “Boy, are you ever correct about Lupita Nyong’o” [being the leading Best Supporting Actress contender]…I can’t imagine any performance this year that will deny her that Oscar,” and (c) “Off the record, I talked to two fellow Oscar voters who’ve said they couldn’t stomach 12 Years. Another two walked out of it. Thought it was brilliant, but too much to bear. They all adore Gravity.”

I wrote right back and asked, “Can you tell me what these four do? What branch are they in? Writers, craftsmen, lighting guys…what? Break it down for me.” And he responded, “Two are in the writer’s branch, two of them are producers — all over sixty.”

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