I’m feeling so intimidated by HE’s recent sexism debate and particularly the accusatory positions of Melissa Silverstein, Sasha Stone and Glenn Kenny that I was having second thoughts about looking up Marilyn Monroe‘s skirt. I was exiting the Four Seasons hotel, having attended Saturday’s The Giver press conference and done a one-on-one with director Phillip Noyce, when I suddenly decided to snap a couple of shots of the mini-version of Seward Johnson’s Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch sculpture. Which I did quickly enough. Then I realized I’d been looking at photos of the inspiration for this sculpture (i.e., Monroe’s skirt being blown upward by a gust of air through a Manhattan subway grating) since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but I’d never had a chance to “be the grating,” so to speak. No biggie, I told myself. Thousands of Chicagoans have surely done the same thing with the 26-foot-tall version of Johnson’s sculpture. But I still felt it would be somehow “wrong” of me to do this. What would Silverstein think? Or Kenny, a reigning uber-feminist if there ever was one? Then I broke free of that politically correct muck in my head and went behind and stood down and snapped the shot. A Four Seasons parking attendant gave me a look but I stood up like James Cagney and looked him right in the eye, steady and calm and centered, and he quickly looked away.

Outside the Four Seasons hotel — Saturday, 8.3, 2:25 pm. Johnson’s Monroe sculpture is very exacting in every respect.

I was sitting in the Giver press hospitality room on the 12th floor of the Four Seasons hotel earlier today, and I struck up a conversation with a guy I won’t describe except to say he’s a junket regular. I was talking about significant problems I’d had with a recently-viewed film. I said that these problems, in my mind, made it seem like “it’s one of the most bizarre and nonsensical films I’ve seen this year.” He looked at me quizzically and said, “Really? In what way doesn’t it make sense?” I had just explained my issues but I laid them out again.

“Have you seen any films this year that really add up?,” he replied. “I mean, have you seen any film this year that doesn’t make you say ‘what the fuck?’ about something?” Yeah, I’ve seen several films this year that haven’t made me say that, I said, and then I thought about naming a few. Then I figured “fuck this junket guy.” If he hadn’t seemed so uninterested in my answer I would have said Boyhood, A Most Wanted Man, Leviathan, Foxcatcher, Edge of Tomorrow, Locke, Omar, Whiplash, Laggies, Ida, Wild Tales, The Skeleton Twins, etc. The guy had probably only seen Edge of Tomorrow and Boyhood and maybe one other, I reasoned. Smug attitude, doesn’t do festivals, etc.

Then he reiterated his view that all movies deliver problematic speedbumps. He didn’t exactly say it wasn’t right for me to single out the film I had mentioned earlier, but that’s what he meant. He also seemed to be saying that they’re all a bunch of escapist horseshit so whaddaya whaddaya?

Which seemed to me like a rationalization that some junket journalists tell each other, i.e., “We all see horseshit films or films that are at least a little bit horseshitty, and then we write horseshit copy about them or do horseshit TV interviews and then eat the free horseshit junket food and attend the junket horseshit parties,” etc. A lot of junket journalists think this way. Entitled, glib, world-weary. Not all of them but definitely some. It’s a racket and we’re just riding along in grand style, etc.

I said to the guy, “Well, if you want to be that cynical there’s no point in talking” and got up from the table.

I don’t think there’s much point in discussing today’s Giver press conference without posting a reaction to the film, but the embargo doesn’t lift for another few days. It was a friendly enough occasion on a social basis. It hit me halfway through that while Katie Holmes has staggeringly beautiful eyes and world-class gams, she’s not the most intellectually confident celebrity I’ve ever heard speak…but that’s okay. She’s fine. It also occured to me that the film’s star, Australian-born Brenton Thwaites, has truly beautiful medium-brown hair. Present: Thwaites, director Phillip Noyce, producer/costar Jeff Bridges, costars Holmes and Odeya Rush, screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert Weide, book author Lois Lowry, producer Mikki Silver. Absent: Costars Meryl Streep, Taylor Swift and Alexander Skarsgard.

(l. to r.) Giver star Brenton Thwaites, director Phillip Noyce, costar Katie Holmes at start of Burton Room press conference in Four Seasons Hotel — Saturday, 8.2, 12:25 pm.

Last night at 6 pm I caught a junket screening of Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver, and then I saw about 40% of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller‘s jazzy but dreadful Sin City: A Dame To Kill For. I was glad, however, for the shadowed but but abundant nudity that Eva Green agreed to do for the latter film. This is good, I told myself. I’m glad I’m watching this. Uh-oh, wait…now I’m in even more trouble with Melissa Silverstein! Is it sexist to say “yes, it’s pleasing to look at a beautiful naked woman”? Possibly but if there’s a real sexist in the room it’s Rodriguez, whose female characters are almost always portrayed as sexually tantalizing, emotionally vulnerable but often treacherous vamps. Plus he always gets his female performers to wear skimpy underwear or stripper outfits or do a topless scene, or a combination of all three. The man is clearly uninterested in other aspects of the female condition, and don’t even get me started on Miller, the Godfather architect of this creaky, anachronistic, sexist-dog realm.

Anyway, before Sin City began I was speaking to Collider‘s Steve Weintraub (a.k.a. “Frosty”) and I was talking about really needing to catch Guardians of the Galaxy except I was fearful of the crowds because it’s expected to nudge $100 million by Sunday night, etc. The answer is simple, said Weintraub– the AMC 16 in Burbank. Because it doesn’t accept seat reservations and so it’s anybody’s game if you get there early enough, and because it’s apparently been upgraded in terms of projection and sound, and because no less a personage than James Cameron once told Weintraub that the AMC Burbank 16 is the only way to go, and that this is “not even a debate.” So I walked out of Sin City and hopped on the bike and managed to get into a 3D showing that began at 9:50 pm.

Guardians is the same old commercial space-fantasy crap on one level, but it really, really entertains when it steps off the traditional genre treadmill, which is quote often. The only bad parts are those involving that awful fucking Ronan, the big hammy villain with the flamboyant and termite-ants-eating-a-Kiss-face makeup.

Some of Guardians is quite delightful. James Gunn‘s ’70s mix-tape idea was inspired. The opening musical dance number (i.e., Chris Pratt bopping to the sounds of Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love”) is pure ecstasy. It’s obvious why Guardians — a hip, cleverly amusing, loose-shoe comic riff on classic CG spaceball adventures — has been so well reviewed and is making historic coin this weekend. It’s far from a great film but it hits all the right buttons and it benefits from a lot of hip argumentative dialogue along with that oldies sound track. I never quite levitated out of my seat but some of it — okay, a lot of it — is a huge kick in the pants.

If there’s anything wrong with Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s that it isn’t crazy enough. It still sticks to the basic Marvel template and that hapless hero scheme that are part of many Marvel movies (“We’re losers, guys, but if we pull together we can be winners!) with that awful Ronan villain straight out of central heroin-overdose casting — the movie is a complete drag when he’s on-screen. At times Guardians almost feels like Masters of the Universe, that late ’80s Cannon cheesball space epic. It could have possibly been that awful film in the wrong hands, but Gunn and Pratt and the snappy dialogue save it and then some.

Imagine if Gunn had really cut loose and just made this film about crazy loopy shit all the way. What if he’d turned it into a story of a space garage band composed of impudent, immature misfits who zoom around the galaxy playing gigs and doing drugs and fending off pirates and…well, like that? To hell with all of that routine, cookie-cutter, superheroes-vs.-supervillains crap with stupid-ass Rodan and the other scowling, pusturing bad guys. The worst moment in the film is when Ronan suddenly turns up again at the very end, after you thought he was dead. Oh, no…him again! Asshole!

But the music and the above-average FX and the snippy dialogue and Chris Pratt bring it home. Not to mention Bradley Cooper‘s voicing of the pissed-off raccoon.

Pratt is fascinating. A really likable and good-looking guy who’s right on the edge of fat in this film — he’s really quite overfed. And yet he used to be much fatter. I was accustomed to the way he looked in Moneyball when he was relatively trim, and then he turns up in Guardians maybe, what, 25 or 30 pounds heavier? After losing 60 pounds beforehand? Pratt is very winning and personable is a charmingly brawny and open-eyed sense (i.,e, “Han Solo plus Marty McFly”), but he’d better watch it if he wants to be a big movie star.

About eight days ago (or or about 7.24) a pirated copy of The Expendables 3 (Lionsgate, 8.15) began to be offered as a free download from various piracy sites including Asswipe.com, Billionuploads.com, Limetorrents.com, Played.to, Swantshare.com, Dotsemper.com and Hulkfile.eu. Today Lionsgate filed a lawsuit against “10 anonymous individuals” believed to be responsible for illegally sharing the swaggering all-action-star film (i.e., Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Mel Gibson, Antonio Banderas, etc.) Lionsgate is looking for unspecified monetary damages as well as looking to stop the bad guys from distributing. At least 2 million people have viewed the film illegally since 7.24. One question: how did Kelsey Grammar get to be an Expendables guy? Whose ass has he ever kicked?

Here’s a copy of an email I’ve just sent to Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and Hollywood:

“Melissa — As you may recall, on 7.17 Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a passionate, thoughtful, first-rate piece about the hurdles that women directors face and go through in getting due or fair recognition for their work. It’s my understanding that despite the quality of the piece and the obvious synchronicity between and it and Women and Hollywood, you declined to link to it because she mentioned me in a somewhat (mostly?) favorable way. You ‘took exception’ to my being mentioned as a friend to women directors, I’m told, and so you did what you could in your own little way to limit the exposure and readership that Sasha’s piece deserves.

“Here’s the paragraph (or rather the portion of the paragraph, split into two graphs) that led to your decision not to link to Sasha’s article: ‘The world of film criticism is changing by the second. While I constantly bemoan the old guard of film critics being ousted — a lot of the new guard are aware of the state of things for women. What women haven’t had all of these years is advocacy. Since I’ve been online and aimed my own coverage more at advocacy, I’ve noticed subtle changes here and there. Many of the very loud voices out there keep the subject on women filmmakers — Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci, for instance, or Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells.

“‘Wells specifically champions the work of female filmmakers on his site. Wells is a controversial person to name here [as] he is so often labelled a sexist by the often hateful posts about women on his site — worse is the den of misogyny in his comments section) but I also must acknowledge that he is one of the few who goes out of his way to support women filmmakers. He has also been generous to me for years, which is more than I can say for others in our industry. Mark Harris has been a champion for women and so has Anthony Breznican at EW. David Poland at Movie City News does this as well. And many female movie writers have their eye on this topic as well, like Thelma Adams, Carrie Rickey, Anne Thompson, Susan Wloszczyna, Katey Rich and most especially Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood, who is tirelessly waging a war against the clear oppression we see around us every day.’

During August or September of 2013 Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater (set to premiere next month in Toronto, possibly also in Telluride) shot footage in Jordan, and in preparation for this costumer Phaedra Dadaleh, a well-established professional in that region, was hired. On 9.11.13 Dadaleh told a Rosewater promotional site that she was “nervous” meeting Stewart, but her concerns quickly evaporated. “He’s just the most amazing, friendly, down-to-earth kind of guy,” she said. “He just got up, gave me a big hug and immediately made me feel at ease.”

Rosewater director-writer Jon Stewart, costumer Phaedra Dahdelah during filming in Jordan last year.

That’s cool, Phaedra, and good for you, Jon. But people on movie sets have been saying the exact same thing about major above-the-line types for at least a century if not longer, and they never get tired of saying it. Time marches on and they just won’t stop wetting their pants when name-brand people are as kind and gracious and friendly to them as regular Joes are to each other in the outside world. It’s always “I was afraid this famous hotshot might be brusque or snide or otherwise a dick or a bitch, but he/she was totally the opposite…and he/she made me feel so good.” I know the feeling, and I’m not saying that that many bigtime above-the-liners — Jon Stewart among them, I’m sure — aren’t really nice to begin with. But one of the main reasons that bigtime showbiz types have made it to the top is that they’re really good — practiced — at putting on that warm, kind and affectionate face when the situation calls for it.

I wasn’t invited to the Guardians of the Galaxy all-media, and I forgot to politely beg Disney to allow me to see it beforehand (they usually oblige if I get down on my knees) so I really shouldn’t say anything until I catch it this weekend. (77% on Metacritic, 92% on Rotten Tomatoes as we speak.) But the news about last night’s $11.2 million haul — the biggest pre-opening total of the year — has hit me two ways. The upside is that it’s obviously great when a movie really hits the bull’s-eye and becomes a cultural and conversational necessity to see. The downside is that American lowbrows have once again told Hollywood loud and clear to keep cranking out CG-driven, jokey-ass comic-book movies about unlikely superheroes doing spectacular things and…you know, whizzing around in CG-land. Thank you very fucking much. The downward aspirations of American mainstream cinema have just been handsomely rewarded, the non-Catholic zombies who are in the movie business for what they can siphon out of it are now cackling and flexing their muscles all the more, and the struggle to produce quality-aspiring, human-scale theatrical fare has just gotten that much harder. Congratulations, American megaplex ass-clowns, for doing your part in the great ongoing effort to nudge American movie culture in a downmarket direction and…you know, another notch or two down the reverse-evolutionary (or devolutionary) scale.

Jennifer Aniston is one of the producers of the Toronto-bound Cake, a somewhat dark-toned, lower-budgeted drama, shot last spring in Los Angeles, in which she, Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington and Chris Messina costar. It has to do with tragedy, morose moods, a pain-support group, a sudden departure, a mildly unattractive mousey appearance for Aniston and (here’s hoping) acerbic dialogue. Aniston occasionally steps outside her comedic comfort zone to make films of this sort (Life of Crime, Friends With Money, etc.), the difference being that this time she helped with the financing. Please don’t get me wrong — I admire Aniston for trying to expand her repertoire, and I intend to give Cake a chance. As much as I’m able to, I mean.

Jennifer Aniston with prosthetic cheek scar during filming of Cake earlier this year.

The problem is that I have an Aniston blockage. I’d like to submit to the idea of Aniston playing a dumpy, brown-haired downhead, but I just can’t. And it’s not because she’s worth around $150 million or something in that vicinity. Nothing wrong with Aniston being loaded, but I can’t quite do that suspension-of-disbelief thing. Not with her super-toned bod and frosted blonde hair and her SmartWater and Aveeno endorsement deals, and her unrelenting presence in the supermarket tabloids for the last…what, 15 years? And always with the hot-bikini vacations on the Mexican coast.

In my mind Aniston is right next door to Blake Lively in the soul department. She’s a personality, a light comedienne, a world-famous metaphor for the 21st Century jilted woman, a marketing concept. And I just can’t see her as a mousey depressive dealing with pain and death and trips to Mexico. I’ll follow Amy Adams or Jessica Chastain or even Anne Hathaway into this realm, but Aniston presents an obstruction. Not that I wouldn’t like to. I just feel constrained.

It would appear that Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater (Open Road, 11.7) is basically another ordeal film, perhaps not precisely in the vein of Unbroken or All Is Lost or Life of Pi as it’s about jail rather than the open sea, although it’s close enough as Unbroken also deals with agonizing conditions in a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Directed and written by Stewart and produced by Scott Rudin, pic is based on a first-hand account of BBC journalist Maziar Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal in the film) and the 118 days he spent in an Iranian prison in ’09 on trumped-up charges. Bahari’s book about the experience is called “Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story Of Love, Captivity And Survival.” Bahari’s Revolutionary Guard interrogator, a man known as “Rosewater,” is played in the film by Kim Bodnia. As Rosewater will play the Toronto Film festival as a Canadian premiere, I’m presuming it’ll appear first in Telluride.

Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams for posting an Easy Lay, Non-Discretionary List of 2014 Best Actress Contenders…31 in all. Nice effort, a good start. But let’s cut out the chaff and get real. By current HE spitball standards there are seven female performances that may potentially shake out as highly likely or distinctly possible contenders within two or three months. Topping the list are Wild‘s Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Rigby and Miss Julie‘s Jessica Chastain and Gone Girl‘s Rosamund Pike.

I obviously know next to nothing about who’s really hot-tub but (a) I do know which roles appear to be the most substantial and awards-baity on paper, (b) I would be floored if Witherspoon, Chastain and Pike are not part of the Best Actress conversation by mid-October, (c) I do know which actresses have built up good cred and are “owed,” so to speak, and (d) I do have a fairly acute intuition about which performances are almost certain to be ignored. Here’s how it seems right now:

Highly Likely: Reese Witherspoon, Wild; Jessica Chastain, Eleanor Rigby + Miss Julie; Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl.

Distinctly Possible but don’t bet the farm: Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything; Emma Stone, Birdman (supporting); Michelle Williams, Suite Française; Amy Adams, Big Eyes; Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars.