Paul Verhoeven‘s Showgirls opened and crashed on 9.22.95. I’d attended a press screening a week or two before and figured that was enough, but I manfully sat through it a second time a couple of weeks after it opened, or sometime in early October. Reason? Jack Nicholson. Yeah, yeah, I’ve told this story a couple of times before but indulge me…

I was having dinner that night with Robert Evans in his combination rear bungalow and screening room. It was (and as far as I know still is) a cozy little abode located behind his circle-shaped pool in the backyard of his French chateau-styled place on Woodland Avenue. And the guests that night were Bryan Singer, Chris McQuarrie and Tom DeSanto. And we were all enjoying the great food (served by Alan, Evans’ good-guy butler) and a nice buzz from the excellent wine.

I was Evans’ journalist pallie back then.  I had written a big piece about Hollywood Republicans earlier that year for Los Angeles magazine, and Evans had been a very helpful source. As a favor I’d been arranging for him to meet some just-emerging GenX filmmakers — Singer, McQuarrie, Owen Wilson (who had come over a week or two earlier), Don Murphy, Jane Hamsher, et. al. — so that maybe, just maybe, he could possibly talk about making films with them down the road.

During the dinner Evans was doing a superb job of not asking Singer, McQuarrie or DeSantos anything about themselves. He spoke only about his past, his lore, his legend. But the vibe, to be sure, was cool and settled and almost serene. And then out of the blue (or out of the black of night) one of the French doors opened and Nicholson, wearing his trademark shades, popped his head in and announced to everyone without saying hello that “you guys should finish…don’t worry, don’t hurry or anything…we’ll just be in the house…take your time.”

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I saw Kent Jones‘ Hitchcock/Truffaut in Paris on 5.11.15, and posted a review the next day: “This 80-something-minute doc is a sublime turn-on — a deft educational primer about the work and life of Alfred Hitchcock and, not equally but appreciably, Francois Truffaut. Efficient, well-ordered, devotional. The bounce, if you will, comes from the talking heads — David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Olivier Assayas, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, James Gray, Arnaud Depleschin, one or two others — each enthused and semi-aglow in their own way. Memories, associations, gratitude.

“To me Hitchcock/Truffaut seems good and wise enough to seduce the novice as well as the sophisticated cineaste. It’s a fully absorbing, excellent education. As you might expect, it made me want to read the book all over again.

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From The Guardian‘s Nigel Smith: “The Walk more closely resembles The Polar Express and Beowulf — Zemeckis’s patchy, uncanny-valley explorations into motion-capture — than Flight. For there is no semblance of reality here. As a live-action film, The Walk rings wholly false. For the whole of its two-hour running time, it plays like a Disney cartoon.” Or, as I wrote two days ago, “The first 100 minutes are like watching Ratatouille. If you’re a fan of dumbing stuff down for whatever reason, you’ll love The Walk. For Zemeckis has taken the real-life, inspirational saga of wire-walker Phillippe Petit and turned it into cliched, manipulative, family-friendly oatmeal.” And yet for voicing this and similar impressions, Glenn Kenny tweeted that my Walk review reveals me as “a puckered-up, joyless, vindictive miserabilist.”

A successful, genius-level guy loses it all due to drugs or alcohol or bad behavior, and then hits bottom and gets sober and gradually re-establishes himself with the help of a good team, and he ultimately re-ascends. That was more or less what Jon Favreau‘s Chef was about…right? I’m not particularly interested in the angry, alcoholic self-destructive period in the life of the egoistic Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper), and that I hope it’ll be over and done with within the first ten minutes of John Wells‘ Burnt (Weinstein Co., 10.23). Because self-destruction is dull and boring. Best line: “”If you were my girlfriend we would have gotten into an argument in the taxi…we wouldn’t even be talking.” The best chef-foodie movie is still Sandra Nettlebeck‘s Mostly Martha (’01).

Matt Damon has stepped into it again. He’s pissed off the LGBTs for saying it’s better for an actor to maintain a certain vague mystery about his/her orientation. Which is somewhat true, I feel. If you want to gossip about Cary Grant or Kevin Spacey‘s alleged liasons, fine, but I prefer not to think of them as sexual beings at all — I prefer to think of them as personalities and attitudes with hugely enjoyable skill sets. I don’t want to know who Grant might have been fucking. But the LGBTs are interpreting Damon’s views as supportive of closeted lifestyles, and are voicing disdain. In a 9.27 interview with The Guardian‘s Elizabeth Day, Damon says that “I think you’re a better actor the less people know about you, period. And sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether you’re straight or gay, people shouldn’t know anything about your sexuality because that’s one of the mysteries that you should be able to play.” He acknowledges how times have changed but also notes how “it’s tough to make the argument that Rupert Everett didn’t take a hit for being out.”

Last night I avoided Donald Trump‘s 60 Minutes interview as his lazy brain-fart spitball thinking gives me a headache. You can immediately sense how exhausting it is for Trump to assemble coherent sentences and thoughts, which in turn fatigues the listener. I confronted the segment this morning. Slogans, promises and hyperbole aimed at dipshits. This is like Sarah Palin‘s game-changing interview with Katie Couric. The man is clearly not interested in (or is baffled by) the complexity of things. One presumes that a guy who’s done as well in business as Trump has would have, you know, a little more going on upstairs. He seems all but witless. One presumes that a captain of industry would be gifted with…I don’t know but maybe an occasionally startling insight, some kind of loopy genius element, a certain intellectual agility. Trump has none of that. This is like listening to an under-educated, intellectually challenged middle-management guy or a forklift driver from some corner of rural dumbfuck America expounding on what to do about problems that are simply beyond his intellectual capacity to even grasp the basics of. The only thing I agreed with is his rule about no cigarettes, drugs or alcohol. Otherwise he’s an embarassment.

Sasha Stone and I recorded a podcast last weekend but it wasn’t good enough so we tossed it. This week’s version cuts the mustard. The inevitability of Room, the popcorny-ness of The Martian, what Bridge of Spies may actually be, Paramount’s decision to open The Big Short in December. Sasha saw Spotlight for a second time last Friday night at a special Lisa Taback screening and believes even more strongly that it’s the likeliest winner for the time being. We discussed the shortcomings of The Walk a bit more, but agreed that the last 25 or so minutes are unmissable. Again, the mp3.

I expressed a strongly negative opinion about Lenny Abrahamson and Emma Donoghue‘s Room after seeing it at the Toronto Film Festival on Tuesday, 9.14, and again after this glum maternal instinct drama won the TIFF audience award six days later. “This can’t be happening,” I said to myself. “A film that I hated is going to be Best Picture nominated?” For a while I thought I might try and lead the troops in a grand XY-chromosone pushback campaign.

Then I spoke this morning to an Academy member who has been a kind of bellwether of industry sentiments in years past. After saying he was respectful but mezzo-mezzo on Spotlight, he mentioned that he’s seen Room and that he’s giving it a thumbs-up. He said that while Room is a tough sit, it’s nonetheless a strong film that accomplishes its goals. He actually seemed to be giving it a higher grade than Spotlight….good God.

And then he said something else that made me want to just collapse on the floor and curl up and die. He said that he stepped out into the lobby during the latter part of the Room screening he attended (or just after it ended — I forget which) and he noticed a somewhat older woman who was weeping alone. Now, she may have been weeping about something entirely unrelated to Room but what are the odds of that?

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I don’t care what anyone says about Ridley Scott‘s The Martian (20th Century Fox, 10.2) being a moderately strong Best Picture contender. I’m sorry but it’s not. It’ll make a lot of dough but it’ll never be in “the conversation.” It’s a nicely disciplined, scientific-minded, highly entertaining rescue flick with a charismatic Matt Damon doing nearly all of the heavy lifting — good for him. I’m giving it an A-minus or a B-plus but it’s a cool popcorn movie and not an Oscar contender. End of discussion.

Earlier today I reported that a New York-based female friend of an L.A. screenwriter had told him that the breathtaking wire-walking finale in Robert Zemeckis‘ The Walk gave her “motion sickness.” Now I’m reading a report from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg that says three guys were observed “simultaneously vomiting” in the Alice Tully Hall men’s room right after the climactic scene was shown.

This is good publicity for the film, of course, as younger males are sure to flock to The Walk to prove to themselves (and to their girlfriends) that they’re not like those three pathetic specimens referenced above. As Feinberg notes, the Walk climax “isn’t for everyone.”

HE to the three spewing Lincoln Center guys: Where is your manhood? Where is your honor? You do realize, I presume, that from this moment on you can no longer fantasize that you have a bit of that preternatural Steve McQueen cool…right? When you ralphed last night you gave up your membership in that club for life. The next time you watch Bullitt (’67) you can identify with Robert Duvall‘s cab driver…fair enough?  Or with Robert Vaughn‘s guy…whatsisname, Walter Chalmers.

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I wrote a couple of months ago about the forthcoming Criterion Bluray of Ettore Scola‘s A Special Day, and here’s another mention with the 10.13 street date just around the corner. It’s an exceptionally moving two-hander, and is arguably the best film Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni ever costarred in. I love the original color scheme, which is not precisely sepia but sepia mixed with faded color. DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze has posted comparisons between a 2007 DVD version and the Criterion Bluray, which was restored last year by CSC-Cineteca Nazionale at L’Immagine Ritrovata with the digital transfer supervised by Scola. The eight-year-old DVD mainly went with faded color.

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