Another superhero-vs.-superhero dukeout movie, arriving a little less than two months after Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Warner Bros., 3.16)? If anyone can pull this kind of thing off it’s the Russo brothers, who seem to be the best thing to happen to superhero movies in a dog’s age and are, in my eyes, antidotes to the Zack Snyder virus. But I’m dreading the prospect of watching Robert Downey, Jr. doing his Tony Stark/Iron Man sardonic multi-billionaire quipster bullshit for what feels like the ninth or tenth time. Please kill this guy off. Enough.

None of the distributors want to police or restrict category fraud (i.e., running Carol‘s Rooney Mara as a Best Supporting Actress contender) because they all want to keep the option open because sometimes you can get away with it and, you know, win

But if they did want to correct things, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has offered a suggestion that makes basic sense. Feinberg proposed a uniform 50% rule — “If you’re onscreen for 50 percent or more of a film’s running time, you’re a lead, and if you’re onscreen for less than 50 percent, you’re supporting,” as he puts it. Feinberg adds that in the matter of the Oscars these designations would be open to appeal to the three representatives of the acting branch serving on the Board of Governors.” 

But of course with the 50% rule Anthony Hopkins could have never won Best Actor for his performance as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (’91) because he was only on-screen for 16 minutes. So nothing’s going to change. Our brand is fraud or at least occasional fraud…and we like it that way.

A friend tells me that Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of The Sea (Universal, 12.11) is a decent scary-whale movie that is all but drowned in CG, but on the other hand is no disaster. Everything would have been fine if they’d stuck to the original March 13th release date because this is apparently one of those movies that screams late winter or early spring. But for some ill-considered reason they shifted the release to December 11th — one week before Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens, and they’re obviously going to get killed. Plus there’s no award-season chatter at all. This is a movie that can’t wait to die but why? Why commit box-office hari kiri by sending out signals for months that something’s sorta kinda wrong, and then open it one week before the biggest four-quadrant movie of the year?

In The Heart of The Sea had its New York City junket was last weekend and no one seemed to notice. (Okay, I did.) Los Angeles all-media schlubs like myself will see it at the Grove on Monday, 12.7 — four days before it opens.

All along it’s been clear that Howard had decided to make a Joe Popcorn-level adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s respected historical saga…60% to 70% scary whale CG stuff plus narrative bookends (Ben Whishaw‘s Herman Melville hears the Moby Dick tale from Brendan Gleeson‘s old Thomas Nickerson), preliminaries and survival-at-sea aftermath covering 30% or 40%…something like that.

In The Heart of The Sea began shooting in September 2013 (a Variety casting story projected that start date), began the research screening process the following summer (an early rough-cut version screened in May, another happened in late July). Warner Bros. decided against releasing it in ’14 and opted instead for the 3.13.15 date. And they dropped that and bumped it into early December, presumably, everyone thought, out of a belief that the film had some kind of award-season potential. Obviously not.

The bottom line is that Warner Bros. marketing has done a brilliant job of convincing everyone that In The Heart Of The Sea is (take your pick of briney metaphors) a dead fish or beached whale or what-have-you and yet, to hear it from this guy who saw it last weekend, it’s not all that bad.

168 film critics have voted for what they consider to be the year’s finest film achievements in the 2015 Sight & Sound/BFI poll, and the results are about what you might expect. I partly admire this crew and am partly shaking my head at the ivory-tower-ishness of their choices. No Spotlight, Revenant, Love & Mercy, Brooklyn? The Assassin is their top dog followed by Carol (HE-approved), Mad Max: Fury Road (HE approved), Arabian Nights (what?), Cemetery of Splendor (come again?), No Home Movie (haven’t seen it), 45 Years (HE approved), Son of Saul (totally HE approved), Amy (entirely decent but calm down), Inherent Vice (absolutely not HE approved…hated it), Anomalisa (fine), It Follows (HE approved), Phoenix (still haven’t seen it), Girlhood (haven’t seen it), Hard to Be a God (come again?), Inside Out (good film but calm down), Tangerine (included mostly because it was shot on an iPhone 5), Taxi Tehran (seeing it soon), Horse Money, The Look of Silence, et. al.

Sasha Stone and I recorded an Oscar Poker chat three or four hours ago. We began by discussing the big, ridiculous Twitter blow-up over my posting of those four horrible words (“Forget women seeing this”) at the end of an otherwise laudatory tweet about The Revenant. I let go with a fair amount of anger about this episode, but at least it’s real. After hashing this out we began discussing Best Picture contenders with a special focus on Creed, Joy and The Hateful Eight. The general assumption is that if the Joy consensus is exuberant seven days hence then the Best Picture Oscar contest will basically be a Joy vs. Spotlight thing with Creed and The Martian duking it out as the populist popcorn favorites. Again, the mp3.

I for one have never seen an Ultra Panavision 70 film projected correctly (i.e., 2.76:1) inside a theatre in my entire life. I saw a restored version of Ben-Hur (which was shot in Camera 65, the exact same process) at the 2011 New York Film Festival, but they showed it within a 2.55:1 aspect ratio. I’m not persuaded that Ultra Panavision 70/Camera 65 flicks that played in the ’50s and ’60s (Raintree County, Ben-Hur, How the West Was Won, Mutiny on the Bounty, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Fall of the Roman Empire, etc.) were shown in 2.76:1. I suspect that they were mostly projected at 2.55:1 except at the Cinerama Dome, which of course was built to project extra-wide Cinerama films. 2.76:1 is really, really wide. I’m familiar with the full-width Ben-Hur and Mutiny on the Bounty only from looking at the DVD/Blurays. So when I see an Ultra-Panavision 70 version of The Hateful Eight early next week, it’ll be my first encounter with this process on a big screen.

Nobody deserves the Best Supporting Actor Oscar more than Love & Mercy‘s Paul Dano…nobody. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. At the same time no one is disagreeing that Creed‘s Sylvester Stallone, a late arrival, is all but locked for a BSA nom. Which leaves three slots. By my yardstick they belong to Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance, either Mark Ruffalo or Michael Keaton in Spotlight (does the fact that Emma Stone is hosting a dinner for Keaton on 12.2…does this mean voters will end up voting for him over Ruffalo?), and Michael Shannon in 99 Homes/Freeheld. I agree that Sicario‘s Benicio Del Toro and Beasts of No Nation‘s Idris Elba should be in there, but there are only so many hands in a deck of cards.

A couple of days ago Jennifer Lawrence told EW‘s Sara Vilkomerson that she plans to start directing before long, and that the first project will be “about mental warfare in the ’60s, like an acid experiment gone terribly wrong.” The pic will be based on a 2012 New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian called “Project Delirium.” Lawrence adds that she’d “also like to direct a comedy.” Wells to Lawrence: Do the comedy and shelve the Delirium. Nobody wants to see another government-funded-behavioral-experiment-gone-wrong movie in the wake of Kyle Patrick Alvarez‘s The Stanford Prison Experiment and Michael Almereyda‘s Experimenter. The string is played out.

Last night I came upon a link for an L.A. Times Calendar piece that I wrote 22 years ago about Dan Richter, the ’60-era mime who played the bone-tossing Moonwatcher in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The last time I linked to this piece was in July ’08. Here are three scans of the original article — #1, #2 and #3.

My father met Dan at a Connecticut AA meeting in ’92 or thereabouts, and at my dad’s suggestion I called a while later and visited Dan at this home in Sierra Madre for an interview. I remember he was dealing with chemotherapy at the time and not walking all that well, but he’s still here and doing okay as far as I know. I didn’t know until this morning that Richter published a 2012 memoir — “The Dream Is Over” — that’s mainly about a four-year period that he spent with John Lennon and Yoko One (’69 to ’73).

The best thing about this photo, which was shot somewhere on the Lower West Side during the spring of ’77, are the folds in the woman’s stockings. That and the eye contact between us and my no-worries expression. And the cigarette. I wasn’t a constant smoker (I would guiltily indulge from time to time and then quit again) but I was definitely stinking of tobacco and nicotine when this shot was taken, and it didn’t seem like a problem. I was half-miserable at the time, but I was approaching an even more miserable chapter, which was my first three years in NYC (’78, ’79 and ’80) — restaurant jobs, freelance assignments for next to no money, a cockroach-infested apartment on Sullivan Street and then a one-room misery studio on West 4th Street near Jane, bad food (next to no vegetables, tons of sugar), getting half-bombed every other night, typewriter ribbons and white-out, a ghetto blaster and a couple of dozen cassettes for music. And yet for all the fretting and struggling and my particular form of weltschmerz, I was batting somewhere between .333 and .400 with the ladies.

The time for David O. Russell‘s Joy (20th Century Fox, 12.25) draws nigh. A flurry of press screenings will begin next Wednesday, and there are two showings for the Academy/guild crowd this weekend. It’s obviously presumptuous to talk Best Picture odds, but right now it’s still Spotlight on top with The Revenant having dropped a notch or two, basically because it’s the new 12 Years A Slave. (David Poland: “My personal take is that The Revenant will not resonate much with Academy voters…others disagree.”) If Joy turns out to be a heavy hitter it’ll be a Spotlight-vs.-Joy thing all through December, January and February. I’m persuaded that The Hateful Eight won’t seriously compete, and that Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be a huge financial hit. If there’s a Best Picture sleeper out there it’s Creed, but there’s another formulaic entertainment (i.e., The Martian) in Best Picture contention already — the only Creed contenders that seriously pop are Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor and composer Ludwig Goransson.

Repeat/collage/refining of previous turkey-day sentiments: “I don’t feel an obligation to state what I’m thankful for because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. I feel thankful 24/7/365. Mainly for my life and career having turned out fairly well. The success of Hollywood Elsewhere has been earned brick by brick, phrase by phrase, sweat droplet by sweat droplet. The talent and discipline that made this happen weren’t granted except by way of genetic inheritance, but I’m enough of a meditative mystic to understand that luck is a big part of things, and so I’m grateful, very grateful, for the luck that has come my way. And for my two sons and my friends and occasional romantic flames and my two cats, and the feeling of being loved or liked or aligning with others in whatever way. I’m hugely grateful that I wasn’t born to a middle-class, downmarket family in Nebraska or Montana or to some resigned, lethargic, drinking-class environment. I’m thankful that sobriety is now the basis of my life, and that I don’t eat turkey or mashed potatoes or yams or sweet potatoes or any orange-colored vegetable. I love Thanksgiving downshifting because it means a major Bluray and high-def submission for a day. Except I haven’t gotten around to that.”