I sat down next to a know-it-all couple before this morning’s press and industry screening of Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women & Children. Late 40s, early 50s. A bit aloof and snooty, but I can roll with that. They either knew everything or were curious about everything…chattering away and vibrating with the spirit of journalistic engagement. When I heard her talk about Birdman I asked if she’d seen it locally, and she said she’d just come back from the Venice Film Festival. “Oh.” Anyway, around the hour mark they abandoned the Reitman film. They bolted, scrammed, ducked out like thieves. I’m presuming it wasn’t because one of them had a doctor’s appointment and the other wanted to offer comfort.

Ansel Elgort, Kaitlyn Dever in Jason Reitman’s Men, Women and Children.

I stayed but I’m afraid I agree. After the collapse of Labor Day Reitman needed at least a critical hit, but Men, Women & Children ain’t it. It probably won’t be much of a commercial hit either. It’s an evils-of-the-internet movie…the absorption, the screens, the banality, the sense of drifting, the absence of vitality…except it reflects the banality too well. Is is what it’s lamenting. It’s a relatively empty flick about several distracted, lazy, delusional people sitting around texting each other and talking selfies and surfing porn sites. New title: “Screens, Texts & Aridity of Existence.”

Your empty, passive life is reflected in your empty, passive texting and contemplation of screens, screens and more screens. Is that all there is, Peggy Lee?

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I’ve slightly overslept (i.e., seven instead of five hours) but the schedule demands that I catch Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women and Children at 9:15 this morning instead of at a 6 pm public screening at the Ryerson…always see ’em sooner rather than later. I next have a 12 noon showing of Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent, a.k.a., the Bill Murray dramedy. The point is to clear the decks so I can see Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young at 7 pm rather than wait for a Monday press screening. It’s bad when things start piling up but it’s worse if you just slump and succumb. This is a metaphor for life and survival. Man up or get eaten.

Yesterday I re-saw Wild Tales for the fun and pleasure of it (yes, I indulged…sorry). Then came Michael Roskam‘s The Drop, a low-key neighborhood crime drama which struck me as agreeably flavorful and well-acted , especially by the always impressive Tom Hardy as an unassuming, seemingly-none-too-bright barkeep named Tom who surprises the audience but particularly Matthias Schoenaert‘s bullying bad-guy character in Act Three. It’s a somewhat…no, earnestly above-average, Friends of Eddie Coyle-ish crime drama that I’m looking forward to seeing a second time with subtitles as I was able to catch maybe 60% or 70% of the dialogue. Strongly accented Jersey-speak + slightly whispery, miscalibrated sound system at the Princess of Wales = give it another shot.

Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler was the somersault head-turner of the evening. The Reitman screening starts in 33 minutes so I’ll just re-post the tweets. It’s a chilly, highly original urban psychodrama about a beyond-creepy sociopathic news video shooter who fits right in. The brazen, reckless, manic-wacko quality of Nightcrawler is what makes it cool and cultish — I was fascinated, appalled, thrilled. It’s strikingly soul-less, cold, creepy…and quite respectable for that. A news-video thriller with ice in its veins. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a modern-day antithesis of Travis Bickle on adderall. An uber sociopath, triple creepy, manic and very, very controlled and controlling. And yet Bickle had a lot of soul and sadness while Gyllenhaal’s cranked madman, by contrast, hasn’t a kernel of common humanity.

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St. Vincent star Bill Murray before entering after-party on West King Street

The Nightcrawler guys (l. to r.) director-writer Dan Gilroy, Jake Gyllenhaal, Renee Russo, Riz Ahmed.

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Three years ago I tried to explain the reasons why I hated the original Horrible Bosses. And now this new trailer for the sequel is renewing my loathing, or rather reminding me how much I despise Charlie Day‘s voice. Three years ago I described his character as “a little male hygienist with a high-pitched voice who probably has a schlong the size of a rook on a chess board.” I can’t roll with and certainly can’t laugh at puny, unmanly, pencil-dick guys. I have to believe or at least be effectively sold on the idea that they’re at least somewhat manly in all the usual ways. Short guys (example: Peter Dinklage) can be manly as hell. It’s all in the mind and more particularly “the size of the fight in the dog.”

With Robert Zemeckis‘s Forrest Gump opening on IMAX screens today (9.5), it’s been re-assessed by four critics — Ben Mankiewicz, Rotten Tomatoes’ Matt Atchity, TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde and Christy Lemire — in a What The Flick? episode. Old news ’round these parts. I’ve been dumping on Gump for years, the last time in a 7.10.14 post called “How Do Those Chocolates Taste Now?”

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A little less than three months ago I wrote a short wish piece about Criterion’s forthcoming Bluray of Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (’61), or more precisely about how sublime it would be if Criterion was to do to The Innocents what Disney did with its Bluray remastering of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, i.e., eliminate the CinemaScope mumps effect. For years I’ve been lamenting this face-broadening, weight-adding syndrome that was caused by the use of old-style anamorphic CinemaScope lenses between ’53 through ’60. And now it appears that Criterion has stepped up to the plate and actually de-mumpified this horror classic. Screen captures provided by DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze make it clear that they’ve not only de-mumpified but added extra information to the framings. Hats off to Criterion’s Peter Becker and his team. This is the noblest and coolest thing they’ve done since releasing that triple-aspect-ratio Bluray of On the Waterfront, which pointed out the general wrongness and fraudulence of Bob Furmanek‘s 1.85-favoring theology once and for all.

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I loved and respected almost everything about the late Joan Rivers except for the work she had done over the last decade or so. So I’m posting these shots as an affectionate reminder of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s Joan. Her God-given face was wonderful — anxious, open, often fraught with vulnerable emotion — and I really missed it when it went away, or more precisely was smothered under implants. Rivers had a great life but also a great face, once. No offense, just saying.

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Sometime during last night’s Toronto Film Festival after-party for The Judge (Warner Bros., 10.14), director David Dobkin told a journalist that he’d quite deliberately inserted some humor and audience-pleasing moments to balance out the somber stuff. I submitted to The Judge early last evening at a press screening, and the levity and the humor (which I knew was coming) didn’t feel all that irksome. I wasn’t enthralled by the film but I didn’t hate it either. Well, it pissed me off now and then. I particularly despised the urine-on-the-leg-in-the-men’s-room gag in the very beginning, which is in the trailer.

You always have to ask yourself “how would Robert Bresson have handled this scene?” If Bresson had been born a bit later in the 20th Century and had decided to accept an occasional Hollywood gig to help finance his French-soil art films, and if Robert Downey, Jr. had persuaded him to direct The Judge instead of Dobkin, there would been a moment when Downey asks Bresson if he’s cool with his Chicago attorney character whipping around from a urinal and peeing on the leg of the prosecutor. Bresson would have sighed and looked at Downey with a mixture of Christian pity and contempt and said, “Well, look, Bob…c’mon. We all understand shorthand, but leg-peeing by the lead character during the first five minutes? You know what coarse and unsubtle are, I presume? Why did you hire me? To obediently shoot the film you have in your head or to class things up a bit? If you want a leg-peeing scene you should have hired David Dobkin.”

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Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that while Focus World, the nickel-and-dime, straight-to-VOD division of Focus Features, will not launch an Oscar campaign for David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars or its Cannes-honored star Julianne Moore, the producers “are in the running for Golden Globes, BAFTA, film critics’ trophies, and SAG and other guild awards. In fact, discussions are currently underway with the film’s handlers and all of those awards, which are much easier to win without hefty campaign investment required at the Oscars.

“Many of the guilds like SAG have screening committees that decide nominations and are easy to access for a reasonable investment,” O’Neil explains, “and so voters in the film-critics groups can be targeted efficiently. In fact, many of them are seeing Maps today at the Toronto International Film Festival. By contrast, to launch Maps effectively into the Oscars derby could cost up to $20 million, which is what many frontrunners have spent in recent years. Technically, a film may qualify after unspooling just one week in a L.A theater just like the Globes, but it needs a fullblown campaign to bring it to the attention of lazy Academy members who insist upon private screenings, personal copies of the DVD and more.

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“Sorry Abel, but Pier Paolo Pasolini was not predictable, and Pasolini feels too much like a grab-bag of the late filmmaker’s greatest hits. There are welcome readings and dramatizations from his notes and un-filmed ideas. There are actual clips from his features. There is a beautifully shot blowjob that recalls the matter-of-fact naturalism of the sex in Pasolini’s Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. There is an OTT orgy fantasia where gorgeous lesbians make out and fondle each other before handing themselves over to equally gorgeous gay men to be impregnated. As Pasolini himself, there is Willem Dafoe, who resembles what one of Florence’s famed hundreds of street caricaturists would draw if Pasolini sat down and asked for a picture. In fact, the whole film feels like it springs from the definition of the Italian root of the word caricature: caricare, meaning to charge or load.” — from Hitfix review by Catherine Bray, who really knows how to write.

Here’s to the late, great, fearless Joan Rivers and the beautiful idea of working, striving and turning it on until you drop. And if working really hard means you leave the earth a little sooner, fine! Quality, not quantity. “What a fighter she is…God!,” I wrote on 4.18.10 after seeing Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg‘s Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. “Frank and blunt, nothing off the table, takes no guff, lets hecklers have it in the neck, never stops performing, tough as nails.

“I’m a late convert to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, having missed it at Sundance and only just seen it a couple of days ago. I had relegated Rivers in recent years to an ‘uh-huh, whatever’ status, partly because of her irksome red-carpet chatter and partly because of her 21st Century facial work, which suggests she may have been hurt in a terrible car crash (worse than Montgomery Clift) but was lucky enough to find a gifted plastic surgeon who was able to make her look as normal as possible.

“But Stern and Sundberg’s doc has wiped that image away. It shows us what a trooper Rivers is — 76 and combat-ready and slowing down for nothing. I now think of her as a highly admirable paragon of toughness and tenacity. Plus the doc deepens and saddens our understanding of who Rivers is, was and continues to be. Plus it has some excellent jokes (including one about anal sex that I laughed out loud at, and I’m basically a heh-heh type).”