Why is the highly perceptive Michael Musto predicting Manchester By The Sea to win the Best Picture Oscar, and not the blogaroo-adored La La Land? Because “there’s nothing there” inside La La Land, Musto claims — thematically it’s merely saying “follow your dreams” — while Manchester is made of the same family-rooted, finely-wrought stuff that led Ordinary People (’80) to a Best Picture win. Those who feel Manchester is too gloomy will probably do what they can to pooh-pooh this prediction, but the combination of both Musto and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson betting on Manchester means something. HE position: As one who adores La La Land, I would be delighted if it wins the Best Picture Oscar. But honestly? I love and respect Manchester a bit more.

Director Joe Dante recently forwarded my 12.20 riff about the curious absence of William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars (’53) to rights holder Wade Williams. Dante posted Williams’ reply a few hours ago in the comment thread, and Williams has forcefully explained that the rights-squatter allegations are a bad rap or a thin beef, or both.

The basic reveals are that (a) over the last 12 months Williams has had “offers” on Invaders From Mars from Criterion, Kino, Arrow, Twilight Time, Olive and Shout Factory but “none have come through” (whatever that means), and (b) Williams nonetheless believes that “after the first of the year we will either restore [Invaders From Mars] or a new licensee will come forth.”

Williams’ email to Dante: “Invaders From Mars has been available from licensee Image Entertainment for nearly a decade,and before that via Rhino, Englewood Entertainment, Nostalgia Merchants, Starlog Video and the usual pirates.

“Image had access to the negative, separations, trailer and Cinecolor prints. The Image license just expired last January and they had a six-month sell off period. The film has only recently reverted back to me.

“Since last December I have had offers on Mars and other titles from major distributors — Criterion, Kino, Arrow, Twilight Time, Olive and Shout Factory. None came thru. I am not personally set up to manufacture, restore/rescan and distribute DVD’s at this time.  I am selling off the leftover ‘overstock’ from Image on Ebay.

“The YouTube/Amazon piracy of uploaders have dampened the desire for classic films on every level worldwide and discourages any worthwhile distributor from investing in new masters for new releases.

“I have attempted for many years to explain why a mint-perfect release on Mars is a problem and I will say it one more time.

Based on conversations with Oscar voters, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson suspects that Manchester By The Sea might be the stronger Best Picture contender than La La Land. She also believes that La La Land‘s failure to win a Best Ensemble SAG nomination might turn out to be a significant uh-oh. (She’s not the only one.) She also sees Natalie Portman‘s BFCA Best Actress as possible cause for concern among Emma Stone‘s handlers. (On the other hand Stone has lately been surging with critics groups, not just winning a Best Actress award from the Utah critics but also from critics in Detroit and Phoenix, which also indicates that the Isabelle Huppert steamroller effect has come to a halt.) At the same time Thompson believes that 20th Century Women‘s Annette Bening is pretty much locked for a Best Actress nomination.

Movie actors either magnetize, neutralize or leave you cold. Charlie Hunnam has always made me feel…not that much. I didn’t even notice him in Cold Mountain (’03) and Children of Men (’06). He popped through to some extent, I guess, in Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim (’13) and Crimson Peak (’15), but I was still left wondering what it was that Hunnam supposedly had. I didn’t feel anything special, whatever it was.

Then I caught his performance as legendary explorer Percy Fawcett in James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z, maybe nine or ten weeks ago at the New York Film Festival, and I said to myself, “Okay, that’s it…I really don’t like this guy…I don’t like his voice, his hair, his stiff manner of speech, the absence of magnetism, the deadness in his eyes.”

I began saying this to myself around the 25-minute mark. At the same time I was starting to feel concerned about how much longer The Lost City of Z would last. I looked at my watch….Jesus God, almost another two hours! 

I was sitting in a rear-center seat in Alice Tully Hall, and for some wimpish reason I didn’t want to get up and risk stepping on 15 or 16 pairs of feet on the way out so I figured, “Stop it..be a man and stick this out…you can do it.”

I made it to the end but it was brutal, dawg. By the time The Lost City of Z I had concluded that I really, really don’t want to watch another movie with Hunnam in the lead.

An obsessive who wound up tramping through the Brazilian jungle on seven different expeditions in order to find a lost civilization, the 58 year-old Fawcett disappeared on the final trek, which ended sometime in late May of 1925. The Lost City of Z is about Fawcett’s numerous jungle explorations, which began in ’06 and ended, as noted, some 19 years later.

I’ve never watched a film about exploring exotic realms that has had less energy, less excitement, less of a pulse. I was just watching the damn thing and hoping against hope that Hunnam would be killed by a native spear or a wild animal or by falling off a cliff into raging rapids. I knew he wouldn’t die until the end of the film, but I wanted blood all the same. I started imagining ways to kill him. Anything to take my mind off the film.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called Gray’s film “Apocalypse Now meets Masterpiece Theatre,” except there’s no Kurtz and certainly no payoff at the end. It’s not exactly torture to sit through, but it’s pretty close to that. 

If you’ve read this column for any length of time you know about the “James Gray cabal,” and that these guys will pretty much worship anything Gray does. I swear to God there’s something wrong with these cabal guys but let’s not get hung up on this one point.

Gray’s film is based upon a 2009 book of the same name by David Grann. Maybe that’s the best way to go — read Grann’s book and then wade through the film. All I can say for sure is that I was dead fucking bored.

Yesterday I learned that Sundance Film Festival media relations guy Jason Berger has taken away my beloved Express Pass, which I was honored to carry for five straight festivals (’12 thru ’16) and by which I had easy access to screenings and therefore some extra, extremely valuable writing time.

I feel heartbroken, to put mildly. And angry. Anyone would be. I’m still a member in good standing but my Sergeant stripes have been torn off. I’ve been asked to turn in my key to the executive washroom.  I don’t think it’s excessively prima donna-ish to say that I feel as if I’ve been kicked in the privates.

For five years Hollywood Elsewhere strolled side by side with the Sundance Film Festival elite, getting right into Eccles, MARC, Library and Prospector screenings like a hotshot, and now that chapter is over. Even with an Express Pass covering Sundance was always an endurance test, but at least it softened the experience to some extent.

The result is that barring an act of mercy from some higher power (God, Robert Redford, someone), I’ll be back with the grunts for the 2017 festival, which starts in four weeks. Back in the mosh pit, waiting in lines, requesting tickets in advance from the press office, bumming tickets from publicists, forced to hit the Holiday Cinemas pass-holders tent at least 45 minutes or an hour before a given screening, etc. And my access to public Eccles screenings, where a lot of the action often takes place, will be catch-as-catch-can.

Which means I may or may not get into the first showing of a hot Eccles premiere, and may have to write about it two or three days later. Is that an absolute tragedy? No, but I was right there and filing like a hammer when Manchester By The Sea and The Birth of a Nation had their first big screenings. I was right on top of these events, and I may not be next month. Or maybe I’ll get in anyway — who knows?

But it’ll definitely be harder and take longer and involve more sweat and strain. Maybe with all the standing around my plantar fasciitis will start acting up again.

Anyone who says they haven’t considered an oft-mentioned analogy between Adolf Hitler and a certain sociopathic, egoistic, climate-change-denying, shoot-from-the-hip bigot politician who’s about to assume high office is lying. Which leads to a question I’m not asking which someone might be pondering after they see this trailer. You know what I mean. Boilerplate: “Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s 13 Minutes is about a working-class family man who became so infuriated at the Nazi party that he secretly constructed a time bomb and placed it under a stage where Hitler was scheduled to deliver a speech. Ultimately, Hitler cut his speech short by 13 minutes and had left the building before the bomb went off. Elser was eventually found, arrested, mercilessly interrogated for days, and thrown in a concentration camp.” 13 Minutes will open in select U.S. theaters on 3.17.17.

Every now and then you look back at this or that Oscar winner and ask, “What was the Academy thinking?” Or, if you’re someone like myself, you ask yourself “What was I so excited about? Why didn’t I just man up and express respectful disagreement instead of going along with the pack mentality?”

My current object of Oscar remorse is the Best Actor trophy that Jeff Bridges won for Crazy Heart in early 2010. I never really liked that film or even Bridges’ performance. I respected the chops — he was real, honest, un-actorish — but I never really liked the guy he was playing (too grizzled and pot-bellied, too many cigarettes, too much booze) or the film, for that matter. I just went along with the gladhanders who were saying “Jeff!…Jeff Bridges, what a great guy!…and what a great career!….Oscar, Oscar….show Jeff the love!”

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Bridges in Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart.

So I was feeling a little bummed this morning about what I failed to say (or thought I’d failed to say) in late ’09 and early ’10. And yet when I re-read my original 11.13.09 review of Crazy Heart, I realized I actually wasn’t the obsequious sell-out that I thought myself to be. The following passages restoreth my soul:

Excerpt #1: “Jeff Bridges is definitely in the Best Actor derby for his performance as a grizzled, pot-bellied, booze-swilling, cigarette-sucking ex-country music legend on the downswirl who just manages to save himself from self-destruction. It’s an honestly scuzzy performance — Bridges’ best since The Big Lebowski but tonally opposite and much harder hitting, of course.” 

2016 verdict: No ass-kissing here, but an honest assessment of what would probably happen, and I was right.

Excerpt #2: “It’s the same kind of ‘look how gross and dessicated I can be’ performance that Orson Welles gave in Touch of Evil — and I say that with genuine respect. Bridges really swan-dives into the toilet, you bet. No sweeteners, no movie-star charm moments, no winking…except when his character is on-stage.”

The Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival announced today that Jeff Bridges will be honored with the 2017 American Riviera Award on 2.9.17. Bridges is a local guy (i.e., Montecito) whom everyone knows and loves up there. The basic idea behind the tribute is to call attention to his strong-but-not-exactly-leading performance in David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water. Bridges may be Best Supporting Actor-nominated for his performance in this CBS Films release, but who knows? Some feel that HOHW costar Ben Foster is just as deserving. You tell me.

Six or seven years ago I observed that Bridges’ voice “has become less and less appealing as he’s gotten older. He opens his mouth and it’s like ‘schnawwrr-roahhrrahhr-yeahhhrrauhhp.’ His young-man voice in Stay Hungry, Last American Hero, The Last Picture Show and Against All Odds had a dynamic vitality that worked. I was even down with his going-to-seed voice in The Big Lebowski. But starting around six or seven years ago (Crazy Heart, Tron: Legacy, True Grit) Bridges began to sound like Foghorn Leghorn.”

Jeffrey Wells to Wes Anderson: “Love the Isle of Dogs promo along with the shout-out for the Film Foundation. If I can get myself over to England in late January or February could I hang on the set and do a couple of interviews and take photos? I loved doing that Great Missenden set-visit thing for The Fantastic Mr. Fox back in the fall of ’10, and would love to repeat the experience on Dogs, perhaps not in a junket sense (no Fox Searchlight to pick up expenses) but as an individual personal mission. All I would ask for when I get there (presuming you’re cool with an idea of such a visit) would be lodging. I’m guessing you’ll be filming into late February, but maybe I’m wrong.”

…or it doesn’t. And either the continuing refusal of Invaders From Mars rights holder Wade Williams to cut some sort of workable arrangement with someone that will result in a high-def remastering of William Cameron Menzies‘ 1953 classic…either this infuriates you or it doesn’t. Here’s a 2016 discussion about this ridiculous situation on Home Theatre Forum.

“The worst violent action sequences around, hands down, are always found in superhero-fantasy films because you can never believe in the physics — it’s always the same CG body-slam razmatazz in which the adversaries never get tired or confused or hurt. But when a shootout feels as chaotically real and crazy as it does in Patriots Day, it really makes you sit up in your seat and lean forward.

“Not that I’m immune to slick, well-choreographed gunplay (like that famous downtown L.A. bank robbery sequence in Michael Mann‘s Heat or that moment when Tom Cruise plugs a couple of street thieves in the space of 2.5 seconds in Collateral), but sloppy, chaotic action always feels best.

“The Watertown cops are scared and confused, especially due to the Tsarnaev’s tossing a series of grenade-like pipe bombs. Nobody knows who has the upper hand, and it’s all edge and anxiety and a lot of shouting and swearing. It’s all very random and sloppy and “what the fuck is going on…who are these guys?….yo, partner, are you okay?…somebody call for backup!” — from a 12.1.16 HE piece called “Classic Of Its Kind.”