Early this morning Scott Feinberg posted a Hollywood Reporter analysis piece about the Toronto-vs.-Telluride, bruised-ego, us-or-them war, which was initiated by TIFF’s Cameron Bailey and Piers Handling. The conflict began with their Al Capone-style policy, announced last January, that said (a) if producers or distributors want a prestigious slot during the Toronto Film Festival’s first four days, they can’t sneak their films in Telluride first…like it or lump it, and (b) if they do travel to Telluride first they’ll be punished by having to wait until the fifth day of TIFF (i.e., Monday, 9.8) to show their films. That or they’ll be classified as a “Canadian premiere,” which might be another kind of demotion…I think.

Feinberg is reporting that Toronto’s tough new rule has to some extent backfired, and that a lot of producers and distributors are pissed off. “Many — including even Canadian filmmakers — are calling Toronto’s bluff by heading to Telluride first and either accepting a later Toronto screening date or skipping Toronto altogether,” his story states.

“Regardless of where their films will be playing, the distributors with whom I’ve spoken agree on one thing: they are angry at Toronto for forcing a choice in the first place.

Apart from the already-announced, much-anticipated world premiere of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman, the just-unveiled films set to play the 71st Venice Film Festival strike me as interesting and well-chosen as far as they go, but where are the sexy, award-season attractions? Or at least a surprise or two that no one saw coming? It’s fine for festival director Alberto Barbera to have gone with an assortment of mostly quirky, indie-level titles, but you need a little pop-pop-fizz-fizz with your kale salad and steamed carrots or the troops will get bored. If I was press-accredited with my ticket to Venice all paid for, right now I’d be saying “that’s it? Why didn’t I choose Telluride instead?”

Competition titles include David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn (one of two Al Pacino flicks screening, the other being Barry Levinson’s The Humbling), Andrew Nicoll‘s Good Kill (I’m sorry but I wrote Nicoll off a long time ago), Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes and Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini.

Non-competing titles include the afore-mentioned Humbling (basically about Pacino, an aging actor, having an affair with a much-younger lesbian, played by the always-cool Greta Gerwig); Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way‘ Joe Dante’s Burying the Ex; a partial sampling of Olive Kitteridge, an HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand; Michael Almereyda‘s Cymbeline; Josh and Ben Safdie’s Heaven Knows What; Ami Canaan Mann‘s Your Right Mind; Benoit Jacquot’s Three Hearts; Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts…I’m almost nodding out as I type this.

The Venice jurors will include Alexandre Desplat, Joan Chen, Tim Roth…I’m getting bored again.

Who cares what someone like myself thinks about Sam Taylor Wood‘s adaptation of E.L. James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13.15)? Talk about superfluous. That said, the trailer conveys a tone of restraint…succinct, underplayed, taking its time. Seamus McGarvey‘s cinematography alone lends a veneer of class. From a purely hot-or-not perspective the good-looking Jamie Dorman has it together (i.e., sufficiently reserved and cool, nice washboards abs) but Dakota Johnson looks…can I be honest?…a bit pale and mousey. She acts mousey. She seems as if she’d be a pushover for the mailman so submitting to the b & d demands of Christian Grey doesn’t seem to deliver a lot of undercurrent. It’s too late now but Johnson’s hair should have been a bit lighter, the way it was in The Social Network.

The world is divided into three kinds of people — those who prefer to spell it “gray,” those who prefer to spell it “grey” and those who can never remember which spelling is correct and feel a bit irked every time they’re about to use it.

There’s a fascinating color illustration sitting above David Denby‘s review of Woody Allen‘s Magic in the Moonlight in the 7.28 edition of The New Yorker. It’s obviously an impressionistic drawing of the cast members (l. to r., Marcia Gay Harden, Simon McBurney, Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Jackie Weaver, Hamish Linklater), but it’s not so impressionistic that you can’t instantly recognize each actor. Not easy. The artist is Conor Langton, from Ireland. His page says he’s received awards from American Illustrator and Communication Arts, and that his clients include Rolling Stone. A few months ago he did a similar-type illustration for Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

New Yorker illustration by Conor Langton.

I don’t know about last-minute ComicCon 2014 schedulings, but the only surprise presentations that could seriously rock Hall H would be ones for Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar, Zack Snyder‘s Batman vs. Superman and J.J. Abrams‘ Star Wars: Episode VII. The only guaranteed hot ticket will be for George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road. Can you imagine anyone actually cheering Lana and Andy Wachowski‘s Jupiter Ascending? “Whoo-hoo!…delayed until February!”

ComicCon 2014 will run from tomorrow through Sunday (7.24 thru 7.27). I for one am serenely uninterested in driving down to San Diego today. I’ll probably never attend that convention ever again, and for good reason. Last year at this time I wrote that ComicCon-ers “are the aesthetic locusts of our time…the dustbowl drought of the early 1930s visited upon cinema.” No less true today, and probably more so.

Anyway, with nothing new to say at this stage here are HE’s Greatest ComicCon Hits:

It’s still Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler (Open Road, 10.17), still the same patiently-spoken, overly-controlled-sounding Jake Gyllenhaal looking for a crime-reporter gig (as I noted two days ago in a post called “Guy With Lit Fuse“). But this new trailer makes it seem more like a provocative life-in-the-big-city atmospheric thrill ride and less like a psychological profile.

I’m sorry but this feels a little gooey to me. A little too earnest and manipulative. Obviously The Lovely Bones by way of a coma rather than the Big Sleep. I loathe the idea of a songwriting, guitar-playing boyfriend serenading his sleeping (or comatose or whatever) girlfriend in a hospital room…hate it! And I hate the line “staring down the barrel of greatness.” The greatest achievers in the world never looked down that effing barrel — they just did what they were doing as best they could and with as few distractions as possible. Proclamations of greatness are for tribute dinners when you’re 78, or for obituaries.

You can sense discipline over, under, around and through this international trailer for Liv Ullman‘s Miss Julie, which will screen during the 2014 Toronto Film Festival. Discipline on Ullman’s part, but also, obviously, on the part of Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton. Mikhail Krichman‘s cinematography is obviously quite handsome and Barry Lyndon-ish. (Krichman also shot Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan.) Playwright August Strindberg, the author of the original 1906 play, had his issues with women. At least part of his prolific output is thought to be colored by misogyny. The above quote is from Woody Allen‘s Manhattan: “When it comes to relationships with women I’m the winner of the August Strindberg award.” I know that poor Morton suffered a stroke eight years ago and that it took her a while to recover, but why at age 37 is she turning into Tyne Daly?

In a sense Luc Besson‘s Lucy (Universal, 7.25) is a brighter, crazier, grabbier version of Under The Skin as it basically gives Scarlett Johansson another turn as a dangerous alien of sorts — a blank-faced lady with exceptional, unearthly powers who gives everyone and everything an odd, head-tilted look…pretty much the same routine (“Hmmm, what is this odd phenomenon? I need to study it more closely”) that Jeff Bridges used in John Carpenter‘s Starman. Towards the end she’s also playing, in a certain sense, the cyber-being she voice-acted in Spike Jonze‘s Her in that she eventually becomes strongly focused on the Great Spiritual Beyond.

ScarJo starts out as an average, none-too-bright American, living for some reason in Taipei and terrified half to death when Taiwanese (or are they Korean?) gangsters nab her when she delivers an attache case on behalf of some greasy sleazebag she’s idiotically chosen to be a friend. They anesthetize her and surgically insert a bag some kind of blue-crystal stuff called CPH4 into her stomach. But when the bag inevitably breaks open (you were expecting otherwise?) ScarJo becomes a kind of T-1000 superwoman. The CPH4 has unlocked her brainpower and given her greater and greater physical abilities, almost Neo-like.

Once she’s broken away from (i.e., wasted) her Taiwanese captors she’s off to Paris, largely because Besson lives there but also because genetic scientist and scholarly backstory-explainer Morgan Freeman is based there. Then we’re in for some more hyper-drive action sequences and visually nutso (i.e., far-reaching) CG delirium.

Lucy’s T-1000 abilities (she can’t turn herself into gelatin or assume the appearance of others but otherwise she’s quite formidable) means she’s now an unstoppable killing machine as well as a growth-obsessed go-getter who needs to ingest more and more of the CPH4…forget it, doesn’t matter.

If any recent movie is CG-driven, Lucy is. Besson and his homies want to show us a lot of “ooh-wow” stuff, and so they put it into the script at every opportunity. I’m presuming they constructed a whammy chart while writing the script. It’s that kind of movie. It’s a movie that says “you can take a bathroom break whenever you like.”

On one hand Lucy is the kind of tediously frenetic CG action exercise that Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth or any fan of super-hyper violence would fall for in a New York minute. But on the other hand it occasionally veers into trippy-ass visual realms that…well, at least they make the watching less arduous. And at least it’s relatively short (i.e, 88 minutes). You sit down with your popcorn and your lethargy and it’s like “oh, God, oh Jesus, here comes the same old bullshit” but then you start saying to yourself “but at least with a few trippy dipshit diversions along the way!”

Movies like this were made for the Drew McWeeny mature-fanboy mentality. (Quote: “I am in the tank for the way Besson tells stories…he’s got a knack for detail that wouldn’t occur to anyone else…he’s got a signature, one of the things that I love most about filmmakers, and I’ve missed it.”)

Joe Swanberg may be reluctant to acknowledge the word “alcoholic,” but he isn’t the least bit reluctant to cut Jake Kasdan‘s Sex Tape into ribbons. A filmmaker friend sent this along with the following: “Here’s something you don’t often see — a filmmaker taking the time to write an article shitting on somebody else’s film.”

Try imagining yourself in a thirtysomething hipster marriage, and living in a house in Chicago. You look like Joe Swanberg and your wife looks like Melanie Lynskey, and you have an infant son. Along comes your younger sister, a dead ringer for Anna Kendrick, to stay in the guest room while she looks for a job. It’s soon evident that she’s some kind of alcoholic. When she drinks she gets completely wasted and passes out…obviously self-destructive and almost sure to get worse. But your creatively stifled wife has been enjoying some creative sex-book-writing sessions she’s been having with your sister and a friend who looks like Lena Dunham. And then your sister gets really drunk again and forgets to take something out of the oven and damn near burns the house down. Smoke everywhere. When your wife asks you about your sister, do you say “yeah, I’d say she has a serious drinking problem”? Of course not! Why would you ever say something like that? All you say is that she’s “really immature.” The words “alcohol” or “alcoholic” never cross your lips or anyone else’s. And your wife is so taken with your sister and those creative bull sessions that she figures “what the hell…your sister might succeed at burning the house down when she gets bombed again and wind up killing us and our baby but I really like the feeling of being creative again so…you know, let’s just take it one day at a time.” Is that cool?