From 4.22 review by THR‘s Frank Scheck: Mr. Church “is a touching coming-of-age tale and an even more touching account of an unlikely friendship marked by love and respect. Director Bruce Beresford, working with material that inevitably recalls his Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy, never lets the overt sentimentality become too schmaltzy, even if he’s a bit hampered by the sometimes melodramatic plotting and schematic characterizations.

“The film is emotionally manipulative, to be sure, but it’s ultimately hard to resist, especially given the quality of the lead performances.

“Eddie Murphy is a revelation. He doesn’t seem quite right for the role at first, his blazing charisma ostensibly at odds with his character’s unassuming, dignified demeanor. But he tamps it down just enough to be fully plausible, and he adds quiet grace notes, both comic and dramatic, that make his Mr. Church just as captivating for us as he is for the people around him. And as the character ages a couple of decades, his performance becomes all the more effective, subtly revealing the vulnerability underneath the smooth facade.

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I’ve said the following two or three times, but here goes again. One, if the Titanic had turned around and sailed back to the fatal iceberg before stopping engines a couple of hundred passengers could have been ferried from the sinking ship to the iceberg to wait it out until the Carpathia arrived. Yes, it would have been cold sitting on the iceberg but they would’ve survived. And two, if the crew had thrown the large banquet tables from the first-class dining room into the sea they could have been used as life rafts for those who couldn’t fit into the lifeboats. The first-class area of the Titanic was full of wooden furniture that would’ve floated. Armoires, bureaus, etc.

I’m in NYC for a few days starting next Saturday morning, and so I suggested to Jett and Cait that we might want to catch a Mets-vs. Giants game at Citi Field next Sunday at 1:10 pm. I don’t like to spend an arm and a leg for seats right next to the field but I prefer to sit not too far from the first- or third-base line, or in Citifield terms in the Metropolitan boxes.

Do they serve hot dogs in Citi Field’s left-field section, or do you have to bring your own?

Watch any baseball film (i.e., The Stratton Story, Angels in the Outfield, The Natural, Fear Strikes Out) and the main characters are always sitting near the first- or third-base lines…always. In Spotlight‘s Fenway Park scene the Boston Globe guys are sitting a few rows back from the first-base line — that‘s where you always want to be.

Jett was good enough to take the time yesterday to book our Stubhub seats for $192 (three seats at $60 each plus tax), but I had a heart attack when I realized that they’re in Section 134 — way the hell out in left field. Yes, they’re close enough to the grass so you can smell it (that’s essential to me — if you can’t inhale that damp-grass aroma what’s the point?) but I’ve never watched a game from left field in my entire life. Would the Boston Globe guys ever consider sitting in left field when they watch the Red Sox? Yes, it’s near the field and it’s just a baseball game but it’s still the pits.

Jett insisted that the above photo is misleading, that everything is smaller-scaled when you actually get there, that you can see everything from left field, and that I’m being a diva for complaining. I grumbled a bit more but okay, fine…left-field Siberia, here I come.

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I’m not sure how far along Loving Vincent is, but I’m guessing it’s not yet completed. The site calls it the first fully painted feature film…ever. It’s being directed and composed in a studio in Gdansk by Polish painter and director Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, winner of a 2008 for Best Short Film Animated Oscar for Peter and the Wolf. The film is produced by Breakthru Films (Ricki Stern, Annie Sundberg) and the London-based Trademark Films. Things apparently began with a Kickstarter campaign in early 2014.

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Once a month I sleep in on Sundays. Last night it was around midnight, which is early for me, until just after 6 am. Nothing unusual, always up early. I read for 100 minutes and then returned to the cave for three and a half. It feels kind of wonderful to get nine. I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it, although I expect Arianna Huffington would approve.

The early wakeup may have…no, probably was due to having had a dream that included Joel Edgerton. He only appeared in a fragment, but he was definitely wearing that same awful three-piece blue suit he wore in Black Mass. The dream happened back east somewhere, in the cold. No leaves. It was a sign, I suspect, that I’m fretting too much about Edgerton’s performance in Jeff Nichols‘ Loving, which will screen during next month’s Cannes Film Festival.

I’ve been more specifically concerned about the combination of Edgerton’s Southern accent (which I dread like Banquo’s ghost) compounded with the bassy echo sound problems in the Grand Lumiere, which last year made it all but impossible to understand Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth and Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario.

Last night around 7:30 pm I experienced something close to a spiritual revelation, except it arrived in purely visual terms. I’d bought a pair of Warby Parker prescription reading glasses two or three months ago, but they were too good in that regard as they made everything outside of whatever I was reading look blurry. So yesterday I bought a pair of tinted bifocals. Almost as an afterthought the guys at Lens Crafters had tested my long-distance vision, which I’d never had a problem with. Everything five or 100 feet or a block or two away had always looked clear enough, I thought. Then I put these babies on last night…heavens! Everything outside my immediate reading realm was suddenly razor sharp. It was like I was suddenly living in a Lucy in the Sky realm in which everything outside of my 18-inch sphere was crystal clear and focused with an Alexa 65 lens by Emmanuel Lubezski. In fact my distance vision had softened a bit over the years but I just hadn’t noticed it. Quite a change.

For the last 40 years posters for Woody Allen movies have mainly looked…well, fine but minimal. The idea, it always seemed, was to agree with or certainly not challenge the generally austere, less-is-more Allen aesthetic, which has most consistently manifested in the bare-bones, white-on-black style of his opening credit sequences. Simple, direct, tasteful…but never much in the way of flair or stylistic pizazz. This has all changed with the cool new poster for Allen’s Cafe Society (Amazon, 8.12.16). You have to assume this idea came from the advertising guys working for Amazon, the film’s distributor. I’m not saying previous Allen posters were dull or listless or lacking in merit, but none of them looked as sexy-cool as this newbie. Nothing, at least, is leaping out from my memory.

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During last night’s Tribeca Film Festival q & a with John Oliver, Tom Hanks said flat-out what anyone will tell you but which stars like Hanks are often loath to admit. He said that he “peaked in the ’90s.” Gold star for candor.

Except I partially disagree. I would say that Hanks peaked from Splash (’84) to Road to Perdition (’02), or a run of 18 years. Okay, 14 years if you feel that Hanks’ career really took off with Big in ’88. And yes, I would say that since Perdition luck was not really been with him except in the case of Charlie Wilson’s War (’07) and Captain Phillips (’13).

Once your cards have gone cold, it’s awfully hard to heat them up again. There’s nothing more humiliating than for a man who once held mountains in the palm of his hands having to push his own cart around the supermarket as he buys his own groceries and then, insult to injury, has to wait in line at the checkout counter. Then again he’s stinking rich.

Hanks’ finest early-career-building films: Splash (’84), Dragnet (’87), Big (’88), Punchline (’88).

Hanks’ amazing six-year, nothing-but-pure-gold period: A League of Their Own (’92), Sleepless in Seattle (’93), Philadelphia (’93), Forrest Gump (’94), Apollo 13 (’95), Toy Story (’95), Saving Private Ryan (’98), You’ve Got Mail (’98), Toy Story 2 (’99).

Hanks’ first big-time stinker — a movie I’ll hate with every fibre of my being for the rest of my life: The Green Mile (’99).

Commendable:  Cast Away (’00)

Hanks’ last, best serious role after his ’90s kissed-by-God period: Road to Perdition (’02).

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“Being a regular-ass white guy of English, French and Welsh heritage, something in me wants to push back against this shite. White-shaming has been going on since the late ’60s (the 1972 National Lampoon article ‘Our White Heritage’ was one of the first expressions of this self-loathing). I guess I’m feeling vaguely annoyed with this general attitude out there that there’s something vaguely wrong with being a white guy. I’m fairly liberal to a degree. I want everybody to be free. But I also reserve the right to be white, see white-people movies, eat white, put mayonnaise on sandwiches, dress white, party white, fuck white, talk white and indulge in everything else that flows from my natural whiteness if I fucking feel like it.” — from “The Whiteness, or Why The Old ‘Birds of a Feather’ Rationale Doesn’t Cut It Any More and Why Mixed-Culture Characters Are Better Than European Anglo-Germanic Types,” posted on 5.28.15.

Since the beginning of 2010, or the start of the 21st Century’s second decade, roughly 54 films that are really, really good have opened commercially. Add to these HE’s best of the first decade, which number 42, and you have 96 films since the dawn of this century. If you haven’t seen all of these you need to seriously recalculate and make an effort to do so:

Best of 2016 (So Far): Manchester By The Sea, A Bigger Splash, The Witch, Eye in the Sky, The Confirmation, The Invitation. (6)

Best of 2015: Spotlight, The Revenant; Mad Max: Fury Road; Beasts of No Nation; Love & Mercy, Son of Saul; Brooklyn; Carol, Everest, Ant-Man; The Big Short. (10)

Best of 2014: Birdman, Citizen Four, Leviathan, Gone Girl, Boyhood, Locke, Wild Tales. (7)

Best of 2013: The Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis, Her, Dallas Buyers Club, Before Midnight, The Past, Frances Ha (8).

Best of 2012: Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Barbara, The Grey, Moonrise Kingdom (7).

Best of 2011 (ditto): A Separation, Moneyball, Drive, Contagion, X-Men: First Class, Attack the Block (6).

Best of 2010: The Social Network, The Fighter, Black Swan, Inside Job, Let Me In, A Prophet, Animal Kingdom, Rabbit Hole, The Tillman Story, Winter’s Bone (10).

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I’m not trying to be picky but Gen. Robert E. Lee and President Abraham Lincoln are too young and pretty here. A more realistic, harder-core version of this skit would have used middle-aged, 50something actors with creased faces to play the Civil War-era leaders.  

About a month ago Warner Bros. announced that Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night, a 1930s gangster drama based on a Dennis Lahane novel, would open on 10.20.17, or roughly two years after it began shooting. (Sasha Stone and I visited the set during last October’s Savannah Film Festival.) I figured they might need a little time for extra shooting or whatever, and that they needed to accommodate Affleck’s super-busy schedule. So it seems odd that they’re having a research screening on Tuesday, 4.26, in Pasadena. Odd that it’s showable already (Affleck wrapped principal last February) and a little odd that they’re test-screening a film not slated to open for another 18 months. But whatever.