“A good movie doesn’t have to go wham-bam-kaboom and make audiences go ‘holy shit!…what just happened?’ to earn a seat at the Best Picture table, and this is one such occasion. There’s a time and a place for every kind of film, and thank God an effort like Brooklyn has come along — a fine little reminder of the pleasures of emotional simplicity served up in a low-key, no-bull fashion. Cutting-edge cognoscenti might be looking for something flashier or jizzier but people who know from quality will warm to Brooklyn‘s timelessness. A Best Picture nomination seem assured, as I noted last month.

“And there can be no doubt that Saoirse Ronan‘s performance as Eilis Lacey, a young Irish immigrant torn between two nice-guy suitors, is solemn and understated and quietly mesmerizing, and therefore a near-lock for a Best Actress nomination. Ditto John Crowley for Best Director and Nick Hornby for Best Adapted Screenplay. Yves Belanger‘s elegant cinematography also warrants a nom.

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I’ve never derived the slightest pleasure from “rural”-looking actors playing lowlife redneck hicks, and so I’ve never been a fan of Walton Goggins. I realize he played Shane Vendrell on The Shield for eight years and then Boyd Crowder on Justified, and that he’s a respected actor as far as it goes. But he looks like a yokel with a nice suit — like the nephew of the guy who had his way with Ned Beatty in Deliverance. He played a submental yeehaw in Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, and now he’s playing another lowbrow, Chris Mannix, in Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.

The “great” Walton Goggins.

The reason I’m on this jag is that a director friend told me this morning that Goggins “more or less owns the film.” My friend doesn’t know that, mind — he’s just “been told” this so take it with a grain. Here’s how our conversation went immediately following:

HE: “Walton who?”
Director friend: “You’re joking, right? If not, you sure as fuck will know him by year’s end.”
HE: “I’m not joking. I’ve never watched The Shield or Justified and I’m extremely proud that I had better things to do, and I couldn’t give less of a fuck who Goggins is. I can’t even remember him from Django — if you’ve seen one lowlife rural dumbass with a shotgun and a hillbilly hat, you’ve seen ’em all.”
Director friend: “You’re serious?”
HE: “On top of which that name sounds like the name of a fucking hayseed. Walton Goggins sounds like Jethro McGillicutty or Bumblefuck Podkins or Dumbshit McCrackledoodle.”
Director friend: “That may be true. But he is also one of the most respected actors in town. He’s an adored actor. I double and triple fucking dare you to put up a column piece dismissing him. Your loyal readers will prison rape you for it.”
HE: “He’s a good-looking guy but that rural face, those chewin’ tobacco eyes. He seems to be straight out of Deliverance.”
Director friend: “Like I said, put your doubts up on your site and see what happens. He is one of our great actors although he does often play hicks — true. I’m told he has many offers now in anticipation of The Hateful Eight.”

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Everyone would be watching tonight’s Democratic debate if it was solely between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. But of course, it won’t be. It’ll be Hillary vs. Bernie vs. three superfluous candidates whom nobody wants to hear from or acknowledge — former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, former Virginia Senator Jim Webb and former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee. Go away, withdraw, get sick, nobody cares. Their presence ensures low ratings. On the other hand it’s a big opportunity for ballsy Bernie. To his immense credit he won’t bring up Eghazi. Sidenote: If Joe Biden were a man of real consequence he would either declare his candidacy or announce that he’s not running, period. If he’s running, fine…but enough of the indecision. And once again, if Biden were to run and announce that he’s committed to running with Elizabeth Warren as his vice-presidential running mate, the race would be totally transformed.

“I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable! Fuck that. I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard. It’s just heard. Jeremy Renner, Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper all fought and succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves. If anything, I’m sure they were commended for being fierce and tactical, while I was busy worrying about coming across as a brat and not getting my fair share.

“Again, this might have NOTHING to do with my vagina, but I wasn’t completely wrong when another leaked Sony email revealed a producer referring to a fellow lead actress” — Angelina Jolie — “in a negotiation as a ‘spoiled brat.’ For some reason, I just can’t picture someone saying that about a man.” — Jennifer Lawrence in a 10.13 Lenny piece “Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co‑Stars?”

To be even more fair, if you substitute “spoiled brat” for “entitled, coddled, living-in-a-luxury-bubble egotist” you’d be describing a fairly large percentage of all super-successful actors — i.e., those with managers and personal assistants and nannies who drive them around and pick up their laundry and whatnot. It’s a nice way to live but it’s only natural that the recipient of all this coddling and smoothing and honeyed caressing will eventually adopt an attitude of me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me, regardless of gender. All to say that the producer who described Jolie in the previously mentioned unflattering terms probably wasn’t, you know, imagining things.

Brian Wilson‘s ten-piece band made a lot of people happy tonight at Vibrato, the Beverly Glen jazz club. Journos, publicists and Academy members clapped, cheered, danced and whoo-hooed to a 40-minute set of Beach Boys hits. All were gathered to celebrate….okay, acknowledge the launch of Love & Mercy‘s award-season campaign. I was sitting at a center table with Indiewire‘s Bill Desowitz, Variety‘s Kris Tapley and producer Don Murphy. The high point came when Love & Mercy star Paul Dano walked on stage and joined the band for “You Still Believe In Me”…not an easy song to perform but he brought it home. What a night! (Note: The band sounded better than what these videos are conveying — the iPhone 6 Plus can only capture so much range.)

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During the Love & Mercy luncheon I met actor Nicolas Coster, who’s probably best known for playing Markham, the “country club” lawyer who’s persistently questioned by Robert Redford‘s Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men (’76). I also saw Coster in a 1977 Broadway production of Simon Gray‘s Otherwise Engaged, which starred Tom Courtenay under director Harold Pinter. Born in England in 1933, Coster has been working steadily since the mid ’50s. He and his lady are living on a nice big yacht in the Marina del Rey, he said. The slip rent is $900 a month. He invited me to pay a visit. I might just do that.

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A small dead bird was lying on my Oriental when I returned from today’s Love & Mercy luncheon at Craig’s. Zak, my two-year-old ragdoll, was proudly sitting next to it. Cats bring their kills home as tribute, of course. So I didn’t immediately put the bird into a folded paper towel and toss it in the garbage bin. I petted Zak and told him he was a fine hunter and a good guy. Caressed and gave him a neck rub for a full minute or so, making sure that he felt loved. I removed the carcass (a little gray guy with a splotch of red above the bill) a couple of minutes later.

Now this, located in the men’s room at Craig’s, is a toilet stall! Made of fine polished wood, plenty of room inside — like something you might have found on the Titanic.

At a recent BFI London Film Festival discussion Chris Nolan was once again proselytizing for the deep blacks and (he insists) higher-quality resolution of celluloid projection, and wondering why so few others seem to be on the same page. “When you go to an art gallery you don’t look at a photograph of a painting — you look at the painting,” Nolan said. “But in the film world they’re very happy to show a DCP of Lawrence of Arabia. With the best will in the world it can only be an approximation of what the film really is, yet it’s billed as the film itself.”

Nolan and Quentin Tarantino and other film devotees are encamped on a very small Pacific island with the tide coming in. And they know it. I never want to see film “go away” entirely. We all understand the importance of preserving films on celluloid, but you can’t change the writing on the wall. Nor do I fully agree with Nolan’s quality argument.

I’ve seen 70mm mint-condition prints of Lawrence of Arabia projected five or six times in first-rate theatres (Zeigfeld, Academy, Egyptian, Aero) and while it might have generated a certain hard-to-define feeling that one can mystically derive from celluloid projection, I swear to God it didn’t look noticably “better” than the DCPs. I’m attended DCP Lawrence showings three or four times, and…okay, put me in jail but they’ve looked absolutely fabulous.

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I’m okay with Han Solo biting the dust, and you KNOW Harrison Ford has been looking for this to happen since 1982, at least. (Right?) I only know that if you type “Han Solo Dies” on Twitter, you get the feeling that everyone out there is sensing what’s to come, or has been hearing it so much from others than they’re starting to believe it. One request: Please, please don’t include a third-act moment in which John Boyega or Daisy Ridley see a spectral vision of a grinning Han, Obi Wan and Annakin standing side by side next to a bonfire and waving to the mortals.

Han Solo’s defunct
who used to ride the Millenium Falcon
and break onetwothreefourfive parsecs like that on a Kessel Run
Jesus
He was a handsome man
and what I want to know is,
How do you like your Greedo-shooter
Mister Death

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Martin Scorsese has told New Yorker film columnist Richard Brody that he was surprised when a few younger actors told him they weren’t even slightly interested in playing a 17th Century Jesuit priest who endures persecution and torture at the hands of foam-at-the-mouth Japanese radicals during the Edo period. Gee, I wonder why? Andrew Garfield, who outside of SpiderMan has a thing about playing conflicted, self-doubting guys who get fucked over or put through hell by powerful forces (The Social Network, 99 Homes, Never Let Me Go, Red Riding), took the role of Father Rodrigues. Adam Driver also agreed to suffer as Father Garrpe. Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusako Endo’s novel may pop at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. I’m presuming it’ll be read as a comment about ISIS and radical Islam — torture, hung upside down and bled to death, renouncing Christ, all that good stuff. Will Silence deliver echoes of the baseball bat scene in Casino or the axe battles in Gangs of New York…or will Scorsese decide to tone it down?

“This is a major, triple-A-approved, Apocalypse Now-influenced African inferno flick — a real original, like nothing I’ve ever quite seen before, like nothing I knew how to handle. Anyone who attends Sunday services at the Church of the Devoted Cinephile will have to grim up, man up and buy a ticket. (And that means women also.) Often jarring and horrific and in very few ways ‘pleasant’ but a ravishing thing, a cauldron of mad-crazy intense, something undeniably alive and probing and hallucinatory. Yes, it’s horrific but never without exuberance or a trace of humanism or a lack of a moral compass.

“We’ve all seen violent films that try to merely shock or astonish or cheaply exploit — Beasts of No Nation is way, way above that level of filmmaking. It’s often about cruel, horrifying acts but filtered through a series of moral, cultured, considered choices, about what to use and not use and how to assemble it all just so. And yet over half of Beasts is gripped by madness — a kind of fever known only by war veterans and particularly (as this is the specific focus of the film) by children who’ve been forced into killing by ruthless elders.

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