A brilliant, highly likable, bespectacled Brit with greatness inside him lucks into marriage with a pretty, utterly devoted wife and then wham…a debilitating disease, death looming, all seemingly lost. But the spirit will not buckle under, technology and medicine find a way and the guy fulfills his destiny at the end and becomes a best-selling author and the subject of an Errol Morris doc. Are you kidding me? Best Picture nom, James Marsh for Best Director, Eddie Redmayne for Best Actor….slamdunkaroonie. Oscar bells! Warning alarm heard over at Universal this morning….brrrnnnggg!….brrnngggg! Goddam it, “triumph over terrible crushing adversity” was supposed to be owned by Unbroken this year, and out of the effing blue we get elbowed aside on our own thematic turf from sister Focus? Brad-vs.-Angie on the Best Picture racetrack is a fun angle, but this…this is serious!

Listen to that haunting-but-uplifting score by Johann Johannsson. I guarantee you that when he was hired, it was conditional upon Johannsson’s pledge to emulate James Horner‘s Beautiful Mind score.

Sidenote: The catastrophically balding Simon McBurney, whose sparse thatch was hanging on for dear life in Magic in the Moonlight but who nonetheless wore a black baseball cap to the recent L.A. premiere, wears a rug for his role in The Theory of Everything.

A color version of Nebraska is showing this Sunday night (8.10) on EPIX, and I for one wouldn’t miss it for the world. Online voices are claiming that the EPIX showing will be some kind of travesty, but don’t you believe it. In an interview last year with Fade In‘s F.X. Feeney, director Alexander Payne said that while a color palette is “not right for the film,” he “saw the color version once” and “liked it. It was really pretty. Some shots look even prettier in color. We made it look like a color from about 1970 or ’71, like the colors in Five Easy Pieces, for example.”

In an 11.20.13 Variety piece, the Nebraska director was quoted saying he hopes “no one ever sees” the color version of Nebraska, which he was contractually obliged to deliver so Paramount wouldn’t lose money on certain markets –“several,” Payne apparently said — that have color-only stipulations.

“’I’ll…give you a colored version for those specific TV outlets in Moldova and Sierra Leone and Laos or wherever,’” Payne told Paramount execs. “So I made a color version. I hope no one ever sees it.”

This scene, I submit, contains one of Henry Fonda‘s greatest acting moments. It’s from William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident, of course — a 1943 film, set in 1880s Nevada, about a lynch mob looking to avenge an uncomfirmed killing of a well-liked local rancher. Fonda plays Gil Carter, the former boyfriend of Rose Mapen (Mary Beth Hughes) who has recently married a snooty San Franciscan named Swanson (George Meeker). Watch Fonda’s gradually shifting reactions to Swanson, particularly starting at the 1:40 mark. That very slight tilt of the head at 1:45…perfect! Fonda was 37 at the time of filming. Jane was about five; Peter was two or three.

James Corden, the relentlessly spirited pudgy guy who played Paul Potts in One Chance (which the Weinstein Co. still hasn’t released after a year in stir) and who costars in Begin Again and the forthcoming Into The Woods, will probably succeed Craig Ferguson as host of CBS’s Late, Late Show. If it happens a Brit will succeed a Scot and Corden will become the first corpulent male to host a late-night talk show. (Am I wrong? Every late-night talk show since Steve Allen has been in shape.) From my perspective Corden’s on-camera personality always seems to be happy, full of mirth, serene, always smiling. He doesn’t seem to know from glum or moody. He was put on this earth to spread cheer. One of those guys who always seems to be saying, “Oh, I love this…that’s funny!…I’m having so much fun…hee-hee-hah-hah!”

So last spring Vince Vaughn shot Term Life, a noirish crime pic for Universal distribution, and now he’s reportedly in talks for a major role in season #2 of HBO’s True Detective. In the view of HuffPostLive‘s Ricky Camilleri, the latter may prove to be Vaughn’s biggest shot in the arm since The Wedding Crashers. Because right now Vaughn is really hurting — more or less in the same spot Matthew McConaughey was in (i.e., “King of the Empties“) before he turned things around three years ago.

“Vaughn’s comic shtick” — Delivery Man, The Internship, Couples Retreat — “has grown tired for audiences in the same way it grew tired for McConaughey’s shirtless, lady-charming leading men of 2003 to 2010,” Camilleri declares. “McConaughey needed Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf Of Wall Street and, of course, True Detective, in the same way Vaughn now needs True Detective. The difference now is that this HBO show is already an established hit that can have the stars of its choosing. McConaughey helped make it that by lending his name, performance and Oscar win to the first season of the show. If Vaughn lands True Detective he can rebrand himself as a viable and layered movie star with mystery and wit.”

There’s an apparent presumption out there that when push comes to shove, the leading Oscar Discriminators (i.e., blogging mafia, SAG members, Academy rank-and-file) are going to maintain that you can assign Best Picture heat to only one World War II movie during the 2014 award season, and that means you’ll have to choose between Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, David Ayer and Brad Pitt‘s Fury and Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game. The Brad-vs.-Angie angle = Tyldum will have to struggle just to stay in the conversation. It also means that Angie’s film will be seen as the alpha-minded WWII movie with heart (he survived! life didn’t break him! let that be an inspiration to all!), Ayer and Pitt’s will be the opposite end of that spectrum (the war in Europe was a lot more savage than anything Samuel Fuller dared to show) and Tyldum’s will be the seen as half brain-teasey and half tut-tutting (i.e., why prosecute a decoding genius who shortened the war just because he’s gay?). Look, calm down…okay? Get hold of yourselves. It’s August, for God’s sake.

I’m down with the Brad-vs.-Angie meme as far as it goes but the “only one World War II Movie can be a serious contender” notion is lame. Subject matter is the least interesting aspect of a good or noteworthy film. Subject matter is simply the starting point. It’s the journey that matters. That and the way the light falls upon the characters during magic hour.

From Justin Chang‘s Variety review of The Downloadables…I mean, The Expendables 3D: “The previous two movies, although barely defensible, were at least enlivened by a sly awareness of their own awfulness, and got by on the strength of their no-nonsense, R-rated brutality. But that grisly sense of purpose is nowhere to be found in The Expendables 3, which, for clearly commercial reasons, has opted for a more audience-friendly PG-13 rating — a gutless decision that drains the action of its excitement, its visceral impact and its glorious disreputability.

“By the time the movie finally arrives at an incoherent endgame set in some fictional Middle Eastern hellhole, where editors Sean Albertson and Paul Harb try their damnedest to make sense of a whirlwind of action involving rolling tanks, speeding motorcycles and dive-bombing helicopters, it’s at once impossible to follow what’s going on and impossible to care in any event.

Speaking as a fairly resolute non-fan of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta‘s The Leftovers (HBO), I have to admit that last night’s episode, “Guest,” wasn’t half-bad — the first episode that didn’t leave me irritated or pissed off. Out of the blue I felt suddenly fascinated and even entranced by Carrie Coon‘s “Nora Durst”. I’m telling you right now that I like Coons much, much more than Justin Theroux‘s glum, unshaven, often inarticulate Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s local sheriff. I’m telling you right now I would be totally down with The Leftovers becoming The Nora Durst Show from here on. (Which of course won’t happen, although it looks like Durst and Garvey will be going out soon.) “Guest” was pretty much all about Durst, who lost her husband and both her children to “the departure” and who works for the Bureau of Departed Persons or whatever the fuck it’s called. She has two bizarre encounters in Mapleton (including a really strange one involving a prostitute, a loaded gun and a bulletproof vest) and then she attends a departure-related conference in New York City as a panelist and discovers some loon is impersonating her. Lots of strange things happen including a scene that results in Durst making out and grinding away with a combination of a fake corpse and a love doll. This is the first big-time role for Coons, who hails from the Midwest and who recently married playwright/actor Tracy Letts.

Matthew Weiner‘s You Are Here (Millenium, 8.22) was more or less killed by critics during the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. Then it became Are You Here. (What possible difference could the order of the words make? They could have just as easily called it Here You Are or Shave My Balls or anything in between.) A few days ago I finally saw it. I went in expecting a disaster but came out feeling agreeably diverted for the most part. Are You Here isn’t up to the level of Weiner’s Mad Men at all, but it’s not a calamity. It’s an experimental in-and-outer — a blend of smart, low-key humor with a faint tone of absurdity plus a mild-mannered romance plus a somber inheritance drama involving a fractured family and mental illness, and all of it mixed in with something that feels like a buddy comedy…only it isn’t.

Owen Wilson delivers another one of his laid-back, smooth-ride guys — a booze-reliant, pot-savoring TV weatherman — but he reaches in a few times and digs down and touches bottom here and there. Wilson has been playing this guy for almost 20 years now but I found this permutation to be one of his most likable and poignant ever. (His best since Dignan?) But oh, God…more agony from Zach Galifianakis! I have loathed and despised this fucking animal for years, and it’s profoundly agonizing to sit through another one of his man-diaper performances as a bearded bipolar low-life who comes into a family inheritance. I’ve never found ZG funny, I hate that smug-anal-retard expression he always uses, and I find him physically repulsive. So much so that when he “gets lucky” in Act Three (don’t ask) I made an “ugghh!” sound in my screening-room seat.

A little more than five years ago Fox Home Video released a handsomely restored DVD of Fritz Lang‘s Man Hunt (’41). Fox’s Schawn Belston made this spooky World War II noir look terrific, and the DVD included a short doc called “Rogue Male: The Making of Man Hunt” plus a commentary track by Patrick McGilligan, a stills gallery and a before-and-after restoration comparison. (My favorable review posted on 4.17.09.) The worth-its-weight-in-gold DVD is selling for $10 on Amazon as we speak, but Twilight Time is charging $30 dollars for a brand-new Bluray version, or a simple high-def rescan of the materials that Belston rendered with such care. That’s what TT does, I realize — charges an arm and a leg for limited-edition Blurays and sometimes with no extras — but fuck them anyway. I bought the damn thing on Screen Archives, but I really resented doing this. I would go for $20 or thereabouts, but $30 effing dollars? Is a 73 year-old thriller that most film scholars regard as somewhere between good and pretty good (but far from Foreign Correspondent-level great) worth all that much? The title, by the way, should be spelled Manhunt — I don’t care how they spelled it in ’41.

What’s wrong with a 78 year-old ex-movie star running a South Florida arts institute and teaching acting? Nothing. It’s better to teach in the here-and-now than to sit around on a sundeck and say “I used to be big.” Or “I am big — it’s the pictures that got small.” In a piece called “Professor Burt,” Grantland‘s Gaspar Gonzalez describes one of Reynolds’ classes at the Burt Reynolds Institute in Lake Park, Florida (just south of Jupiter, where Reynolds has lived for the last 30-something years), and…well, the particulars speak for themselves.

Last Thursday TheWrap‘s Steve Pond asked if Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, which has been celebrated industry-wide as novel and striking and even masterpiece-y (and earnestly praised on this site), can leapfrog the Spirit Awards moat and become a Best Picture nominee at the Oscars. I think it can and most likely will be nominated, as long as the Oscar-blogging mafia (less than 15 people when you boil it down) keeps pushing it as Best Picture-worthy over the next five and a half months.

Pond even went so far as to say “it could actually win.” Because, if I’m following the thinking, no other film (a) took twelve years to make and (b) follows a family of characters as they age and trudge through their dramas and find their paths and survive with their spirits not only intact but in some cases afloat. A win is certainly possible — not likely but certainly possible — because Boyhood does seem to be the one film that has that all-encompassing, life-embracing sprawl or theme that the other presumed hotties seem to lack in this or that way. It seems to have the biggest heart, at least from the vantage point that we’re all currently sharing.

“If enough of the major [critics] groups come out for Boyhood, it’ll essentially force Academy members to come to terms with it,” Pond writes.