The Scott Foundas quote used in the Foxcatcher one-sheet tells you that if you look closely enough and think hard enough about the observations in this film, you will find a large-scale portrait of a certain cultural malignancy. Or something like that. I have long worshipped Miller’s touch and technique and stylings and I respect this film enormously, but I didn’t derive as much from the film as Foundas did. That said I remain ready and willing to give it another shot.

In deciding to open the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! on Friday, February 5, 2016, Universal Pictures is telling us to relax and go easy with this “all-star comedy set during the latter years of Hollywood’s Golden Age.” That it’s basically a smart, very dry, typically perverse Coen Bros. entertainment and that’s all. That it’s a Burn After Reading-type deal, an Intolerable Cruelty thing, maybe some kind of Hollywood Ladykillers…whatever. Just leave us alone and we’ll bring the movie out in the final stages of the 2015 Oscar season and you’ll like it or you won’t or whatever. We don’t care. Well, we care but we’re doing what we’re doing because we feel like doing it this way. Principal photography begins in November or fairly soon. It’ll probably finish principal by sometime in January, and then the Coens will have months and months and months to fiddle with the editing.

“We don’t get many smart big movies. I understand why movies are big, but not why they’re not smart. And by smart, I don’t mean opaque or unavailable. But even as machines these movies are not smart. I did like X-Men: Days of Future Past, but, really, comic-book movies have destroyed the foreign-sales market. But the people want it. It’s an efficient market. That’s why I wish something like The Matrix would come out now — that was an extraordinary film. We need something like that to remind people that they can have a big movie that’s also smart and exciting.” — Director (Michael Clayton, Duplicity, The Bourne Deception), screenwriter and Nightcrawler producer Tony Gilroy in a conversation with Marshall Fine.

Wells response: Correct me if I’m wrong but “big” movies are “not smart” — i.e., fairly primitive with the exception of a relative few — because they’re (a) greenlighted and overseen by studio zombies and (b) primarily aimed at under-35 mainstream moviegoers, the majority of whom are generally understood to be the most video-gamey and comic-book-minded, the most ADD-afflicted, the least dialogue-tolerant and the most under-educated viewing audience in the history of human civilization, going back to the Greeks.

Due respect to A24 marketers but the slogan that appears on the new poster for J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year is a bit of a head-scratcher. Obviously the result of any earthly endeavor is always in question, depending in part on the particular path (method, approach, strategy, technique) chosen by the players. One assumes, therefore, that the “result” alluded to is death and therefore “the path you take to get there” is the only thing that matters. In other words, it’s not who wins but how you play the game. But death is not a “result” of a life — it’s simply a biological inevitability. A “result” always alludes to an end-game payoff or consequence that comes at the end of a practical endeavor — a winning of an election or a woman, the obtaining of a contract, the paying of a parking ticket when you park illegally, a fatal overdose when you shoot extra-strong heroin, the winning of a world series, etc. But as noted, these things are never done deals until they happen. So the slogan, no offense, doesn’t quite add up. For me. Maybe someone can help me out.

After leafing through Shawn Levy‘s “De Niro: A Life” last night I dropped in on Levy’s “Junk Drawer of Shawn’s Mind” page and copied a few snaps. The exception is the shot (right below McQueen) of Birdman cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Michael Keaton in Birdman costume and director Alejandro G. Inarritu. All the rest originate (so to speak) with the Levy page:

Diahnne Abbott, Robert De Niro in 1982

The legend of Inspector Javert, the dogged hard-ass in Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables, has nothing on the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, which has again reportedly tried to extradite director Roman Polanski to the U.S. in order to face charges over having jumped bail in early 1978 regarding the Samantha Geimer statutory rape case. The guy who tried to have Polanski flown back in handcuffs last time was L.A. County district attorney Steve Cooley, a Republican, but he left the office in 2012. The current L.A. County district attorney is Jackie Lacey, the first woman and first African-American to serve as Los Angeles County District Attorney since the office was created in 1850. I don’t know if Lacey is behind this latest Polanski maneuver or not, but if she is…brilliant! This is rabid-dog behavior. Obviously there’s no end to the obsessions of the Polanski pitchforkers. These people really and truly need counseling. Along with a leash.

Way back in early February I tapped out a rave review of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. I did so from my room at Berlin’s Grand Wyndman Hotel during a Fox Searchlight junket for the film. The piece is fairly well written if I do say so myself. It also seems appropriate in this, the height of Derby season, to remind everyone what a superb film Budapest is, was and always will be because…you know, films released in February are sometimes presumed to be not as good as those released between Labor Day and late December. Here it is again:

Rest assured that while Budapest is a full-out ‘Wes Anderson film’ (archly stylized, deadpan humor, anally designed) it also delights with flourishy performances and a pizazzy, loquacious script that feels like Ernst Lubitsch back from the dead, and particularly with unexpected feeling — robust affection for its characters mixed with a melancholy lament for an early-to-mid 20th Century realm that no longer exists.

Tickets to Monday’s premiere screening of Dumb and Dumber To (Universal, 11.14) are at a premium, but at least I’m on the waiting list. The Farrelly Brothers comedy was set to screen at the Virginia Film Festival but Universal yanked it a couple of days ago. They somehow got it into their heads that the comic sequel would screen only for University of Virginia students and not reviewing press. When someone tapped them on the shoulder and reminded them that any film screening at a film festival is fair game for review, they went “what!?” and pulled the plug. I really loved the Farrelly’s Three Stooges movie and I’m almost certain to like this one, despite the “younger dumb guys tend to be a bit funnier” consideration. Carrey to Letterman: “Once you’ve done a couple of press tours, you welcome death. And I’ve been married a couple of times so it takes a lot to scare me, Dave.”

My Delta flight from Atlanta landed last night around 7:45 pm. I picked up my luggage (a single leather bag) and went to the curb and got a cab. Which is what I always do. And then I piddled around at home and crashed early (10:30 pm), and then got up late (9 am). I worked a bit and then went to the Theory of Everything luncheon and came back and filed three stories. And then a half-hour ago I went downstairs to drop some trash into the bin and I looked over and noticed that my car is missing. Wow. I tried to remember if I’d dropped it off with my local mechanic before leaving….nope. What could’ve happened? I was about to ride my bike to the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station and file a stolen car report when it hit me. I drove down to LAX early Friday morning and parked my wheels in one of those $15 per day lots. Of course! Well, at least I don’t have to buy a new car now. Zoning out on stuff like this used to happen every so often when I was imbibing, but things have been really clean and clear since the sober thing began 31 months ago. Famous last words. Now I have to cab all the way down to LAX for another $45 plus pick up the car. The things I do.

Some instinct told me right away (and quite a while ago) that Susanne Bier‘s Serena, a rural period drama with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, was a wrong one. It was shot two and half years ago (March to May 2012) and then it took Bier 18 months to finish it, and then it got killed a few days ago at the London Film Festival and via general British release, and now it’s being VOD released by Magnolia on 2.26.15. Bier’s had a tough time recently, but she seemed unable to do wrong from ’02 through ’07, at least in my eyes — Open Hearts, Brothers, After The Wedding and the brilliant Things We Lost In The Fire.

Glenn Kenny did a first-rate job of analyzing the life and work of Robert De Niro in that Cahiers du Cinema book he wrote which came out last summer. But the book-publishing world can be a brutal, dog-eat-dog one, and now, alas, it’s time for Glenn’s tome to take a farewell strut and defer to Shawn Levy‘s “De Niro: A Life,” which came out yesterday — Tuesday, 10.28. I haven’t even skimmed through Levy’s biography yet. It was lying on my doorstep when I returned last night from Savannah. But I know his Jerry Lewis and Paul Newman bios, and whatever’s there Levy tends to uncover. Plus he’s an eloquent writer. On the other hand…De Niro again! What is new to say or learn? Same story, same trajectory — Mean Streets/Godfather Part II breakthrough, peaking into the mid to late ’80s (Raging Bull, True Confessions, Falling In Love, Cape Fear), resurgence in the early to mid ’90s (Goodfellas, Casino, Heat), and then the late 90s-post millenial sell-out downturn. I’ll read Levy’s book this weekend.

(l.) Shawn Levy’s “De Niro: A Life“; (r.) Glenn Kenny‘s Phaidon/Cahiers Du Cinema’s “Anatomy of an Actor” book about Robert De Niro, which came out last July.

Earlier today Focus Features hosted a press luncheon at Lucques on behalf of James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything (11.7.14), the rapturously received drama about the life of celestial physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne), his wife Jane (Felicity Jones) and their struggle with Hawking’s ALS disease, not to mention their extra-marital intrigues. Redmayne, Jones, producer Lisa Bruce and screenwriter Anthony McCarten took turns speaking with journalists at five (or was it six?) different tables. It was all so civilized and convivial. Everyone conversed, listened, minded their manners, laughed but not too loudly, enjoyed the excellent food, etc. Nobody spilled their drink or behaved like a gorilla or said the wrong thing.

The Theory of Everything star Eddie Redmayne during today’s luncheon at Lucques.

(l. to. r.) a portion of Variety‘s Tim Gray, back of Pete Hammond’s head, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, back of some guy’s head, Eddie Redmayne, back of another guy’s head. MCN’s David Poland is at far right.

My table included In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond and Variety‘s Tim Gray. (The table next to us included MCN’s David Poland and Deadline‘s Pete Hammond.)

Theory opens in nine days. The big premiere happened last night at the Academy. Focus’s big mission, it seems to me, is to underline the notion that (a) Theory is indeed a Best Picture contender (most pundits agree) and (b) to convince the guilds and the Academy that it’s a better “eccentric British genius copes with a serious personal problem” movie — richer, trippier, more soulful — than Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game (Weinstein Co., 11.21).