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I’ve said two or three times before that any action- or FX-driven thriller using an overhead shot of the lead protagonists (i.e., characters who probably won’t die) jumping off the top of a building or out of a high window almost certainly sucks. It means that the director is either too stupid to realize what a whorey visual cliche this is (skyscraper-jumping first appeared 25 years ago in Tim Burton‘s Batman) or he/she doesn’t give a shit. I’m not exaggerating — a jumping or falling scene in the year 2013 really is a mark of mediocrity. So you can probably rely on Neil Burger‘s Divergent (Summit, 3.21.14) sucking eggs to some extent.

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I was thinking this morning about the influence of the late Elmore Leonard, particularly the way the late crime novelist would occasionally put the article or main object at the end of a sentence. Which seemed odd to English composition teachers and…well, to me also, at first, but then I got used to it. And then it seemed a little odd when dialogue didn’t do that.

I’m mentioning this because it was almost exactly a year ago (i.e., at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival) when I noticed an Elmore sentence in Silver Linings Playbook.

Neurotic dad Robert De Niro is pleading with local cop Dash Mihok to not escort manic-eccentric Chris Tucker “back to Baltimore” until the Eagles game is over. “What’s the problem?,” De Niro says, clutching his green Eagles handkerchief. “He’s not goin’ anywhere. Just let him finish the game, that’s all. The handkerchief is working. We’re killing the Seahawks, twenty-seven-ten. What’s the matter with you? Let him stay, please!” And Mihok says, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief’. And I’m glad that the Seahawks are losing and we’re winning, but I gotta take Danny McDaniels back to Baltimore, alright? He can contest his case from Baltimore.”

I believe that without Elmore Leonard, Mihok would have used a more conventional sentence structure and said “I don’t know what your handkerchief has to do with it” or “What do you mean ‘handkerchief?'” or something along those lines. Screenwriter David O. Russell would not have put the article at the end — “I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘the handkerchief.'” Just saying.

The responses to this riff, I realize, will have nothing to do with Leonard and everything to do with how much this or that pisshead hates Silver Linings Playbook. But that rant is history now. It was a peculiar thing to feel or say in the first place. SLP was and is brilliant. It resonated all over the place with sophistos and Average Joes alike, and it made $132 million theatrically — fuck-you money as far as the naysayers are concerned. It should have won the Best Picture Oscar, and it would have if hadn’t been for the votes taken away by the respectable but tedious Lincoln.

An 8.25 N.Y. Times story by Michael Cieply and Julie Bosman passes along information that “at least five additional books” by the late J.D. Salinger, “some of them entirely new, some extending past work,” will be published beginning in 2015. The reclusive Salinger, who died in 2010 at age 91, stopped publishing new material in the early ’60s. The information about the new writings is contained in Shane Salerno‘s Salinger (Weinstein Co. 9.6), a documentary that no one I know has seen or has even been invited to see. What’s up with that?

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I don’t have the experience to eulogize the great Julie Harris, who died yesterday in West Chatham, Massachusetts at age 87. I never saw her once on the New York stage, where she shined the brightest and most consistently, and haven’t seen that many of her films. For decades I’ve associated Harris with only three screen performances: Abra in Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden (one of my favorite female characters of all time), the neurotic, spinsterish Eleanor in Robert Wise‘s The Haunting and Grace Marsh (i.e., Anthony Quinn‘s friend and supporter) in Ralph Nelson‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight. Three films in a seven-year stretch — ’55, ’61 and ’62.

Julie Harris with James Dean during the ferris-wheel scene in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden.

Harris in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (which will be released on Bluray on 10.15).

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I’ve always loved Larry Cohen‘s Q, The Winged Serpent (’82), which is out on Bluray on 8.27. I love the jazzy hipster attitude, the flagrantly insincere tone and especially the cheesy special effects. Michael Moriarty‘s performance as a scat-singing eccentric is surreal at times, and let’s not forget the great David Carradine. I’d been an admirer of Cohen’s stuff (God Told Me To and It’s Alive were my favorites) but Q is the film that finally allowed me to understand and embrace the term “Cohen-heads.”

Sid Bernstein, the New York-based concert promoter who booked the Beatles into Carnegie Hall in February 1964 and for two big concerts at Shea Stadium in the summers of ’65 and ’66, died three days ago at age 95. As far as I’ve read or heard Bernstein was known as a smooth, soft-spoken gentleman and a man of honor. There was another New York-based hustler of the Hebrew persuasion who was heavily involved with the Beatles — his rep was a little more mixed.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is #1 for the second week in a row, obviously because people like it (and that’s fine) but also because there’s no real competition, right? The Weinstein Co. was smart to open this modest little film in early August. The shocker, for me, is that Warner Bros/New Line’s We’re The Millers is second this weekend and actually approaching $100 million domestic. This obviously means people are telling their friends that it’s good enough to see in a theatre and don’t wait for Netflix, etc. What solar system are these people living in? I was okay or at least mezzo-mezzo with the first act but I felt stuck in hell for the remainder. I called it a “vulgar, sloppily written, oppressively unfunny road comedy about a ‘typical Middle-American family’ involved in a Mexican drug-smuggling charade” and “a lampoon of suburban families and the hellish, self-loathing lives they presumably lead as they tow the ‘normal’ line.”

Like it or not, Zack Snyder‘s Batman vs. Superman (Warner Bros., 7.15) will star Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Henry Cavill as Superman. But lost in the Batfleck hubbub is a question of basic plot dynamics. The title indicates the superheroes at cross purposes, but what kind of misunderstanding could result in these Dudley Do-Rights going up against each other? (The Superman-Batman comic book series, launched in ’03, “explored the camaraderie, antagonism, and friendship between its titular characters,” says one description.) And what kind of mano e mano tension can result from a mortal crimefighter duking it out with an extra-terrestrial with super-powers? One presumes that David S. Goyer‘s script will divest Superman of his spectacularness.

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In years past a good percentage of that gang of smoothies known as the Movie City News’ Gurus of Gold have voiced mainstream Oscar sentiments. Many seem to have a liking for those stodgy, politically-correct, right-down-the-middle, conventional-sentiment choices of your average 63-year-old Academy member. And so it’s significant, I think, that when recently asked to pick the top 15 most likely Best Picture contenders, the groovy Gurus put Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (Fox Searchlight, 10.18) right at the top — i.e., tied for first place with David O. Russell‘s American Hustle and Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

So this is it, fellas — the Gurus are making room for the McQueen because it’s the “right” movie, the politically noble film to get behind this year…c’mon. That’s the early sentiment, at least. There’s a readiness to accept that, to let it in. The upcoming Toronto Film festival showings will provide a significant reading, needless to say.

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The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted a piece that supports my 8.21 view that Bruce Dern‘s “Woody” role in Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska screams “snarly eccentricity for its own sake”, and that the smartest strategy on Paramount’s part would be to campaign Dern not as Best Actor but as a Best Supporting Actor contender. I laid out my case in a piece called “Can Dern’s Woody Get Traction As Best Actor?”. Hitfix/In Contention’s Kris Tapley and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone disagreed and sent along their arguments, which I posted with their permission.

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As I’ve said for many, many years, the inspiration, tenacity and toil that go into winning any Oscar will always warrant honor and admiration, but it’s not the win-or-lose aspects of the Oscar race but the award-season arguments that provide the real pleasure and uplift. Community-wise, I mean. Because these arguments serve as a kind of communal therapy session or Socratic dialogue about who and what we are — as individuals, as a culture — and why. It was certainly a form of self-expression to say that you were a fan of The King’s Speech or even to predict in a wink-winking Dave Karger sort of way that it would win the Best Picture Oscar. If you went for The Kings Speech you were with the Soviets in an August 1968 kind of way, and if you stood with The Social Network guys you were more of a Prague Spring kind of guy.

So with award season about to commence with the start of the Telluride Film Festival six days hence, what will this year’s arguments be about?

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I spent an hour this morning putting up a metal hanging bar between a living-room doorframe. Some call it a chinning bar, but it’s for my lower back. The idea is to hang from it for 45 or 60 seconds with no support from my legs. It’s a horizontal black cylinder thing encased in a rubber pad and held up by two round, hard-plastic anchor cups. The first thing was to make sure that I screwed in the cups in precisely the same spot on the opposite sides of the frame, and just getting that part right was a bitch, let me tell you. I drove nails into the spots where the Phillips-head screws would go to pave the way, but three of these little guys refused to screw all the way in. I tried and tried and started quietly swearing after a while. I finally took a chisel and tried to just hammer them in, which I sorta kinda succeeded at. I’m not too bad at carpentry but I’m impatient. I get mad at things. But it’s up now, thank God, and it really does make my lower back feel pretty great after hanging from it.