Tonight is quiet but tomorrow evening is the first press screening of The Hateful Eight (in 70mm). Wednesday evening is a second look at Joy (followed by a Michael Keaton Spotlight dinner in Century City). And Thursday evening is a re-encounter with The Revenant. Steady as she goes. The embargo-ending review date for The Revenant is Friday, 12.4. Joy‘s review date is on Monday, 12.7 — the same date as the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere in Hollywood (i.e., two theatres, I’m hearing, and possibly even three — El Capitan, Chinese and/or Dolby). The Hateful Eight‘s embargo-release date is Monday, 12.21. And oh, yeah — the National Board of Review votes tomorrow and the New York Film Critics Circle votes on Wednesday. At least one of these groups will probably choose Spotlight as the recipient of their Best Picture award. Guesses?

I stay away from soft drinks as a rule except when I order Diet Coke at parties. The only time I’ll bring some home from Pavilions is when I happen to find supplies of Coca Cola Life — the reduced-calorie green label brand that I’ve told myself is somehow preferable to Diet Coke and certainly less toxic than Coke Zero. The other day I bought a six-pack of small glass bottles of Coca Cola Life. As I was unpacking the bags I put one into the freezer before drinking it 10 or 15 minutes later. Five or six hours later I opened the freezer door and of course the fucking bottle had exploded like a grenade. Gobs and gobs of honey-brown Coke snow splattered all over the inside, covering everything. It took too long to clean it up and it was sticky and messy to boot. It wasn’t a huge deal but on the other hand it was one more thing on top of everything else, and all because I couldn’t repress this thing I have about hanging on to Coca Cola (i.e., a metaphor for my childhood experience) in some fashion.

Frogs and their cigarettes — a cultural interweaving that will never be diluted or compromised, much less rubbed out. Case in point: Olivier Sarkozy, the inhaling French banker, 46, who married Mary-Kate Olsen, 29, during a private ceremony in Manhattan last Friday. It’s one thing for this or that person to light up on a balcony or otherwise outdoors…whatever. But Sarkozy and Olsen put out “bowls and bowls filled with cigarettes, and everyone smoked the whole night,” according to an 11.29 Page Six story by Lindsay Putnam. Can you imagine the kind of people who were lighting up? Can you imagine the stink? What’s the difference between offering bowls of cancer sticks and having waiters hand out little glassine packets of heroin on fine china plates?

Please, for once, sidestep the usual family-friendly corporate product…the same old mainstream animated factory features that win the Best Animated Feature Oscar each and every year, and give it instead to an animated film that did it the hard, hand-painted, step-by-grueling-step way…frame by frame, ennui moment by ennui moment…the most craftsman-like, organically assembled animated flick since Wes Anderson‘s The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

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Love & Mercy is arguably the richest and most innovative musical biopic ever made. Really. Ever. And easily one of 2015’s best films. No debate. And when it was released…do I really have to explain that release dates should never mean a damn thing to anyone? Great is great, timeless is timeless.

Do I sound lecturing? Okay, maybe I do. But it’s time to re-charge the Love & Mercy award-season batteries and do a little soft-shoe schooling all the same. Time to dial it down and gently re-explain what a major mold-breaker and a deep-down thing this film is. It’s a musical-mystical-psychological biopic…too complex? Okay, it’s a “rescue me” love story and a journey into the ways of an unstable, heaven-touching genius that has pretty much levitated everyone who’s seen it and inspired more than just your basic thumbs-up reactions and…what, something closer to love?

And yet a few prognosticating blowhards have continued to say that Love & Mercy is not a real award-season thing because it came out last June. Please! There are two phenomenal 2015 films that opened before Labor Day — Love & Mercy and Mad Max: Fury Road, and release dates couldn’t matter less. Oh, wait…they do matter. Because the award whisperers say so. Right.

Listen to this — the first dialogue you hear in the whole film. And then this. “Who are you, Mozart?” Yeah, Mike…exactly. How’d you figure that?

An Academy member I know wrote me after a Samuel Goldwyn screening and said Love & Mercy “is so unlike every other musical biopic ever made…there’s hardly a trope in it. Which may hurt it at the box-office in the end. No big set pieces, no moment where we discover ‘the singer can sing’, no final musical triumph. It’s so much deeper than that.”

People all over town who know from movies have spoken. People like Jane Fonda, Paul McCartney and Cameron Crowe swear by Love & Mercy. (Go ahead, ask them.) And the Movie Godz bestowed their blessings, of course, after those first 2014 Toronto Film Festival screenings. And all those California girls, man, in their French bikinis.

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My primary complaint about Brian Helgeland‘s Legend, as noted in a 9.12.15 Toronto Film Festival review, was that I could only understand a fraction of it. This was due, I said, to “the Swahili-like working-class London accents, which are always a problem for me in any film, and the bassy-boomy sound system at Toronto’s Princess of Wales theatre.” Well, hold that. I saw Legend again tonight on a DVD screener with subtitles, and reading each and every line and realizing it’s essentially a dry, ultra-violent absurdist comedy made quite a difference. This might be a bit late but while I was dismissive in Toronto, I’m hereby upgrading Legend to a passing grade. But it’s still too long.

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Six days ago the N.Y. Times posted a video of David, a 46-year-old Parisian nurse, recalling his experience in the aftermath of the Bataclan concert hall attack (50 Blvd. Voltaire, 11th arrondisement). He was attempting to resuscitate a guy hurt during the ISIS attack, but he didn’t realize at first that the guy, who had “an enormous hole in his side,” was an ISIS fiend who had wires dangling from his chest area and was wearing some kind of explosive body pack that had malfunctioned. President Obama, in Paris for climate talks, visited the Bataclan an hour or two ago.

A director-writer told me a day or two ago (and with some anger) that there’s “no way” Creed is making it into the Best Picture conversation. Maybe, but I wouldn’t be too sure about that. There’s absolutely no question about Sylvester Stallone landing a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and right now I’m between 70% and 80% convinced he’s a lock to win.

I re-watched half of Rocky last night — hadn’t seen it since ’76. I’d forgotten that it expends over a half-hour of pure character-and-milieu exploration (i.e., the audience getting to know Rocky Balboa‘s grim, probably-no-exit life) before the inciting incident happens — before Apollo Creed decides he’d like to fight an unknown “eye-talian.” In the old days (i.e., the ’90s and before) inciting incidents happened somewhere between page 20 and 26. I haven’t done a study or poll but I’ll bet that in these ADD times inciting incidents are happening a bit earlier. Man on Fire‘s inciting incident (i.e., the kidnapping of Dakota Fanning) happens around the 45-minute mark.

Jeffrey Wells to Marc Maron: “I’m the Hollywood Elsewhere guy (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com). I’m friendly with Mike Binder, the “Keep Calm” author whom you recently interviewed. My story is somewhat similar to yours…a standup comedy career that gradually dried up and then you began wtfpod.com. I was banging around in entertainment journalism, doing well as far as it went, and then I lucked out with online journalism starting in ’98, first as a paid columnist before starting my own site in ’04. If you want to chat we could cover…whatever, the whole award-season waterfront and maybe some of my half-colorful backstory and side stories (or not). Or we could let it all go. I only know that my tale is fairly interesting and somewhat similar to yours. Let me know & be well.”

I stopped getting high as a rule in the mid ’70s, partly because I’d begun to hate the sense of weird isolation I was feeling when fully ripped. Pot is not a social drug — it’s about having giggly fits about tickly notions that are mostly in your head alone. And then it’s about spiralling down through the looking glass and becoming a flying monkey. And then about succumbing to the munchies. It was also because pot opened the door to “the fear” — that mounting panic anxiety state that led to wild inconsolate hell and nerve-jangled insanity from which there could be no return. During a visit to Cinevegas in ’02 or ’03 I stupidly ate a super-potent pot brownie and got so ripped I had to down an entire fifth of Jack Daniels to keep the anxiety at bay. But I really loved my early experiences of getting seriously baked, and particularly that odd time-loss thing that would happen every so often. I would be riding in the backseat of a friend’s car and just leave the planet for places unknown, and then I would suddenly awake and be somewhere new…how did I get here? I could have been space-tripping for five minutes or five seconds — I couldn’t tell but I had left the realm. I’ll never forget that “whoa, what just happened?” feeling.

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