If you’re at all familiar with this site you know I hold HBO’s The Wire in the highest regard. I believe that anyone who has failed to see even one of the 60 episodes broadcast between ’00 and ’08 has to answer for that. I also feel that anyone who fails to express sufficient enthusiasm for the series has an enzyme deficiency of some kind. But I’m honestly confused about the remastered-aspect-ratio brouhaha that erupted a couple of days ago. An HBO marathon of all 60 Wire episodes in a remastered high-def formt begins on Thursday, September 4th, but some are alarmed about the remastering process. It is feared in some quarters that the Wire‘s original aspect ratio (i.e., the show was originally broadcast in a standard boxy 4:3) has been cleavered on the tops and bottoms to render a 16 x 9 high-def version. Others believe that the show was originally shot at 1.85 and that the sides were cleavered in order to present the show at 4:3 between ’00 and ’08. I honestly don’t know the answer.

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Wow…I’ve never posted just one article in the course of a day but it had to happen sooner or later. My LAX to Toronto flight (Air Canada) taxi-ing as we speak. Arriving 11-ish. I like setting up early.

Yesterday Deadline’s Pete Hammond praised Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes, a moral-outrage drama about a couple of guys (Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon) making good but smelly money by evicting working-class Floridians from their homes roughly two years after the 2008 meltdown. Dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, no room for compassion, etc. Pete is usually a shrewd assessor of award-season contenders but this time he’s way off. I saw 99 Homes in Telluride a couple of days ago and it was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud. Just because a film is portraying real- life realities and has its heart in the right place doesn’t mean it’s good, much less an awards hottie.

Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon in Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes.

99 Homes is a close-up portrait of the real-estate trauma that’s been happening in middle-class communities all over the country for the last five or six years, and is about the willingness of a regular guy to whack regular folks -— to serve as a kind of foreclosure hit man — in order to save his own neck.

Then again the evictees aren’t blameless. They aren’t exactly “deadbeats” but they are out of work and behind on their mortgage payments, and are probably over-extended in terms of income vs. debt. I was saying to myself, “Too bad, chubby…but did you ever imagine this might happen when you signed that bank loan?” A lot of out-of-work people have had their homes seized by bankstas over the last three or four years. And guys like Shannon’s Rick Carver are paid to be their muscle on the street.

Carver is technically a realtor but is really the Tony Montana of foreclosures and evictions. It’s the return of The Ice Man in suburban Florida and dressed in nicer duds. But at least he’s giving Garfield’s Dennis Nash, a single construction-worker dad whom Carver evicts from his modest Orlando-area home (along with his son and mom) as the film begins, a chance to stay afloat. Garfield has moved his brood to a motel and is panicking over his inability to cover expenses, and so he naturally says “damn right” when Shannon offers work.

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With Focus World having acquired David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars for an early 2015 release , there is speculation that they may not want to spring for a Julianne Moore Best Actress campaign, which of course would require an L.A. and N.Y. platform release in late December plus the usual ad coin commitment. The talk stems from Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh and Brent Lang having written that Moore “could be sitting out awards season.” If so, odd. Moore is madly, blazingly “on” as a fading film star. She hits exactly the right notes in a film that itself is quite a careful dance — dryly farcical, creepy hah-hah, deadpannish. Easily an award-calibre performance. Here’s my 5.18 quickie Cannes review.

Maps to the Stars will open in “early” 2015, Variety says, which of course means late January, February or early March. The only reason Focus wouldn’t give Maps to the Stars a qualifying run in support of Moore…well, there is no logical reason. They have to go there. If they don’t they’ll be cultivating a bad rep with talent — a distributor that doesn’t step up to the plate during award season.

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The sound completely sucks (forget it you’re not listening with earphones) on this video of Anne Thompson‘s Telluride chat with Birdman director/cowriter Alejandro “G.” (i.e., no more Gonzalez) Inarritu. But the printed q & a is pretty good. Read that at least.

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During last Thursday’s drive from Durango Airport to Telluride, I stopped at Zuma Natural Foods in Mancos. I ordered a delicious cappucino from storekeeper Mo (a.k.a. Maureen) while tapping out a couple of emails. And then I left. It wasn’t until this morning that I remembered I’d forgotten to pay for the cappucino. So today I decided to hit Zuma on the way back to Durango and square myself. Except that took longer than I figured, and by the time I’d gotten Mo’s attention and asked what I owe (she insisted the cappucino was free) I’d been there a little over ten and closer to twelve minutes. I peeled out of the lot and drove 80 mph trying to make my 3:20 pm US Air flight from Durango, but I missed it by — you guessed it — about ten minutes. No good deed. So I drove back to Mancos, a cool little town that’s a bit more appealing than Durango, which is too industrial and Starbucky. I’m now chilling in room 26 at the Mesa Verde Motel. My rescheduled flight leaves at 6:30 am. I have to get up at 4:15 am to be at Durango Airport by 5:45 am.

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“Popularity is the slutty cousin of prestige.” Hang onto that. It’s 12:10 pm, my plane to Los Angeles leaves from Durango at 3:30 pm and that’s two hours from here. Later.

Alan Spencer‘s recently-posted Trailers From Hell tribute to Peter Sellers and his performance in Hal Ashby‘s Being There (’79) is well deserved. But there’s a reason I haven’t re-watched Being There over the last 30-plus years, and that’s because it’s basically one very dry joke played over and over and over. But I’ve re-watched Sellers’ Claire Quilty performance in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (’62) a good ten times, at least. Quilty is a throughly perverse and quite venal character, but it’s all but impossible not to laugh with him in every scene. I love the fact that Sellers used Kubrick’s Bronx-accented voice to play Qulity, and the fact that much of his performance is done off the cuff.

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I got up early Sunday morning and sat down and chatted a bit at the kitchen table, and then I slowly tapped out a longish, decently-phrased review of Birdman. I didn’t feel like writing about anything else because nothing else had really knocked me out except for The Imitation Game, but that operates on a much more conventional (and yet wholly satisfying) level than Birdman. I finally finished and was ready for my screenings around 1:30 pm. But my energy was really flat. The switch that was on during my Thursday travels and Friday and Saturday screenings, filings and schmoozings was suddenly sitting in neutral, and I couldn’t get going again. I went through the motions like a zombie. On top of which stiff winds were blowing and I hate having to grim up when wind assaults my face and blows my hair all over the place.

I’m sorry but I was just feeling pissy about everything, although I repressed that for the sake of social serenity and harmony with the people I ran into. But I strangely wanted to escape from Telluride and all this sparkling mountain air. I wanted to be on the streets of Manhattan or Toronto or Los Angeles…odd.

I saw Ramin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes, a passable if occasionally tedious drama about the oppression and exploitation of middle-class people who’ve lost their homes. I have plenty of sympathy for everyone who took it in the neck when the economy collapsed in late ’08 but I felt next to nothing for the folks in this film. Never borrow big-time to live in a place you really can’t afford and which is much bigger and splurgier than you really need. Too many Americans don’t get the value of spartan, spiritually-oriented lifestyles. They want indulged, abundant, pig-out diets and lives. They want their big pots of food and spending binges at the mall and big SUVs and all the rest of it.

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I didn’t see all Xavier Dolan‘s Mommy at the Cannes Film Festival (roughly 75 minutes worth) but enough to understand two things. One, it’s a highly original, presumably personal dysfunctional-family-combat movie, primarily distinguished by Anne Dorval‘s performance as the feisty titular character, a woman of unflagging tenacity who’s burdened with a hyper-manic teenage son from hell (Antoine-Olivier Pilon). And two, I had to see the whole thing (114 minutes) sooner or later, even though I didn’t particularly look forward to suffering through Pilon’s bullshit a second time.

Well, I saw all of Mommy last night in Telluride, and I have to be honest and say I think less of the film now. I’m just going to cut to the chase and post a conversation that transpired this morning between myself and a female Mommy admirer.

Me: “Not that great in the end, too long, story doesn’t build to any kind of finality or profound thematic resolution except for the cliche about how we all gave to keep going and have hope blah blah. Mom has hope while the kid makes a break for it inside a mental hospital?”

Her: “It’s not your thing. Still a great flick.”

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A very happy (one could even say giddy) Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director and co-writer of Birdman, during last night’s Fox Searchlight party at the Sheridan bar — 11:40 pm.

Mommy director Xavier Dolan at Fox Searchlight party.

Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum and wife Janne in Sheridan bar back room.

Red Army‘s Gabe Polsky during last night’s Sony Pictues Classics dinner at La Marmotte.

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Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman (Fox Searchlight, 10.17), an audacious, darkly hilarious serving of snap-crackle brilliance and psychological excavation par excellence, blew the roof off the Werner Herzog theatre last night. I was giddy, ecstatic, swooning as I half-stumbled into the night air…so was almost everyone I spoke to about it over the next two or three hours. Okay, not everyone but those who were hungry and adventurous and receptive enough to revel in a work of reaching, swirling genius…pig heaven!

Like I said on Twitter last night, it’s an all-but-guaranteed Oscar nominee in several categories — Best Picture, Best Director (Inarritu), Best Actor (Michael Keaton), Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Edward Norton), Best Supporting Actress (Emma Stone), Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki), Best Editing, etc.

Birdman is not just a visual groundbreaker — not actually a single seamless, roving Steadicam shot from start to finish but a wonderful illusion of this. It’s more profoundly a searcher, reacher and a mad leaper of a film with one live-wire, mad-rodent performance after another. Everyone sings and dances and somersaults in this tag-team circus but Keaton is the leader and the daddy. He opens himself up and slices in like a surgeon in an awesome, at times unsettling tour de force. Whether he wins the Best Actor Oscar or not, you can absolutely call him the Comeback Kid.

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