For its depiction of musical sequences as neurotic fantasies occuring in the mind of a tragic heroine (Bjork) who can’t cope with reality, and for its use of dozens upon dozens of stationary video cameras to cover the dancing and singing, Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark is one of the few groundbreaking musicals in cinematic history. (A new Bluray version is out this month.) The other biggies are (b) Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen‘s On The Town, the first musical shot in real-world locations, (c) Richard Lester‘s A Hard Day’s Night, the first semi-comical, nouvelle vague-styled rock musical featuring the first-ever MTV music video sequence; and (c) Bob Fosse‘s Cabaret, in which all song-and-dance numbers were performed on a club stage with nobody “breaking out in song” within the narrative.

Dozens of acres of tall grass and red flowers on some grand estate somewhere south of Siena, Italy. Taken in late May of 2000. I was detoxing from the Cannes Film Festival, which had screened Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark a week earlier to great fanfare.

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Sylvester Stallone‘s Expendables franchise is all but toast. Domestically for sure. The Expendables 3 flopped this weekend with a lousy $16.2 million haul, or about $10 million shy of expectations. All three Expendables films have been B-movie “product,” made with a smug and cynical attitude. “Yo! We’re just farting around here and the public is in on the joke so fuck it, y’know?…we’re all getting well paid and the chumps are lining up so why fuck with the formula?” The Expendables (’10) cost $80 million to make and it earned $241 million worldwide with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 41%. The Expendables 2 (’12) cost $100 million to produce with a worldwide gross of $311 million and a 65% Rotten Tomatoes score…getting good at this! The Expendables 3 cost $90 million but was heavily pirated (over 5 million downloads) and the word must have gotten around that it’s a piece of shit. It takes the public years to catch on. With very few exceptions (Rocky, First Blood, Copland) Stallone has doggedly starred in or directed mediocre films. That’s what he does. He’s in it for the money and the fine cigars. He had a major-league franchise that had a potential to be something more but he blew it. What’s he gonna do, create another popular franchise? He’s done.

In this third-act scene from Howard Hawks‘ His Girl Friday (’40), Cary Grant dismisses a prediction of career doom by saying “listen, the last person who said that to me was Archie Leach a week before he cut his throat.” Grant was referring to himself, of course. In a first-act scene in Warren Beatty and Buck Henry‘s Heaven Can Wait (’78), Dyan Cannon told Charles Grodin that she should be “canonized” for conspiring to kill her vile multi-millionaire husband, Leo Farnsworth. Name other films and scenes in which actors briefly stepped out of the film by mentioning their off-screen selves or reputations — anything along those lines.

For whatever reason…exhaustion?…my body decided to ignore all of the usual summonings this morning (including the kitten lying on my head and licking my ear) and sleep until almost 11 am. After crashing around 1:30 am. Nine hours and change. My normal routine is to bag maybe six hours plus an hour of Twitter before rising. It sure feels good to get more sleep than I need on occasion (my usual idea of a nice long slumber is seven to eight hours), but I’ve always fought against going to bed before midnight. I sometimes take hour-long naps around 4 or 5 pm, except they aren’t naps. When I go under I sink to the bottom of the pond. A lot of people sleep in the manner of dogs or cats — they float on the surface and are woken by the slightest ripple. Not me.

I know, I know…I posted a sleeping riff 17 months ago but what the hell.

My inability to crash before midnight or 1 am is my parents’ fault. They sometimes made me go to bed at 8 or 8:30 pm when I was grade-school age. I remember being furious about lying under the sheets when it was still light out during the summer months, especially when I could hear friends of mine still playing in the street below. I used to lie there and seethe and ask God why I had such fucked-up parents. I resolved to stay up late from those days on. I never made my kids go to bed too early when they were six or seven or eight — I didn’t have them on very many school nights (my ex had custody) but when I did they always stayed up until at least nine or so. Weekends were free-for-alls. Sometimes it was a chore to get them to crash around midnight or 1 am, especially Dylan.

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Denzel Washington‘s Creasy in Man on Fire made a big impression on me. Released in 2004 and probably hatched in ’02, it was basically a metaphorical 9/11 payback film — a violent conservative fantasia about a no-bullshit ex-CIA badass going after “the other” (i.e., third-world gangstas, creeps, monsters) and making them howl before killing them with impugnity. I’m a fair-minded, violence-averse, somewhat egotistical lefty humanist in Urban Outfitters socks but I’ve wanted more Creasy ever since. Now, finally, The Equalizer is bringing it all back home.

I caught Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days In Vietnam a couple of months ago at the L.A. Film Festival. It held me, got to me, melted me down. It’ll air next April on PBS’s American Experience but please, please see it theatrically when it opens around the country in September and October (New York’s Sunshine and Lincoln Plazas on 9.5, L.A.’s Nuart on 9.19, the S.F. Bay Area on 9.19). Trust me — it’s a truly exceptional doc. My only beef is that Kennedy should have spoken to some former North Vietnamese combatants and government guys and gotten their perspective.

“I felt profoundly moved and even close to choking up a couple of times while watching Last Days in Vietnam yesterday at the Los Angeles Film Festival,” I wrote on 6.13. “The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in Saigon during the last few days and particularly the last few hours of the war on 4.30.75 wasn’t about policy. For some Saigon-based Americans it was simply about taking care of friends and saving as many lives as possible. It was about good people bravely risking the possibility of career suicide by acknowledging a basic duty to stand by their Vietnamese friends and loved ones (even if these natives were on the ‘wrong’ or corrupted side of that conflict) and do the right moral thing.

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Yesterday a knowing, insightful and very well-written piece about Robin Williams was HuffPost-ed by screenwriter Jerry Leichtling (Peggy Sue Got Married, Blue Sky) who knew Williams as a friend for many years: “In the last two days people have said repeatedly ‘I feel like I knew him.’ My answer was ‘you did know him.’ Whenever I saw him as an actor, I always felt ‘Oh, that’s Robin.’ Christian Bale, Daniel Day Lewis — Robin wasn’t a transformer like them.” Exactly, and relatively few actors are when you get right down to it. Are you listening, Bob Strauss?

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The trouble in Ferguson last night — violence, fires, looting — was apparently a reaction to the release of that security-cam video of Michael Brown shoplifting cigars and shoving a midget storekeeper just before he was shot. The local fuzz released it, and this was seen by some in the community as an attempt by racist cops to indict Brown post-mortem. His family called the video “character assassination.” But look at the video. The guy was obviously angry, a thief, a sociopath, a wrong one. Did he deserve to die because he was an asshole? Of course not. Did he deserve to get shot? Of course not. But listen to the commentary by Da News. Stop for a minute and listen. The guy makes basic sense. Tell me he’s wrong.

I was watching CNN this morning and nobody — anchors, guests, reporters — even flirted with what Da News says here. They were afraid to get within 100 feet of it. Cowards.

David Koepp‘s Mortdecai is obviously a Mike Myers-type comedy about an effete, full-of-himself asshole. At the very least it plants a notion that Johnny Depp‘s performance might be worth the price. But why put out a trailer in August for a mid-range film that won’t open until February 2015? And the use of cartoonish CGI in the accidental shooting scene kills the joke. If the victim had realistically responded to the shotgun blast by falling to the ground and writhing in pain, Depp’s blase remark — “I think I just shot George” (or is he saying “I think I just shot Jaw?”) — would be funny. Koepp, a smart guy, directed the darkly comedic Ghost Town. I’m wondering if Mortdecai will turn out to be more perverse than the trailer is letting on. Obviously a set-up for a franchise — Eric Aronson‘s script is based on Kyril Bonfiglioli‘s quartet of Mortdecai books. It costars Aubrey Plaza, Ewan McGregor, Paul Bettany and Olivia Munn.

You know what the copy should be, given the obviously base, pants-down mentality behind Dumb and Dumber To (Universal, 11.14.14)? “I don’t want an enema, you can’t force me to have an enema…if I have a damn enema I’ll do it myself because enemas are personal!”

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There’s no question that Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies (A24, 10.12) is one of the best comedies of its type or the best…certainly the most satisfying Lynn Shelton film ever (well beyond the realm of Touch Feely and Your Sister’s Sister, and more schematically crafted and on-target than Humpday). And yet right now it has a moderately lousy 55% Rotten Tomatoes rating. That doesn’t calculate when you consider that the thumbs-uppers include Variety‘s Justin Chang, The Hollywood Reporter‘s John DeFore, Film.com‘s James Rocchi, HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny and The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez. When these minds are pleased for more or less the same reasons, a film has definitely done something right. Oh, yeah…here’s my reaction.

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In a piece posted today (8.15), HuffPost contributor and Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf has linked Philip Noyce‘s The Giver and Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz. Both transition from black-and-white into color. Both feature wicked witches (Meryl Streep‘s bitch elder, Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked With of the West) with the power to appear unexpectedly. Both title characters are mysterious older guys who may (or may not be) agents of salvation. Both are about adolescent rites of passage such as defying authority. Jonas’s journey enacts the yearning articulated in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, flying “over the chimney tops” to the forbidden “Elsewhere” of The Giver, moving ever closer to what resembles a traditional home. Favorite passage: “Perhaps both films share a questioning of what ‘home’ means. Salman Rushdie perceptively proposed that The Wizard of Oz is not about ‘there’s no place like home’ but the dream of leaving, the celebration of escape. As in that ‘road movie’ of 1939, Jonas must enact the combined courage, brains and heart to abandon the placid familiar for the dangerous unknown.” Second favorite passage: “In a very American tradition, The Giver valorizes memory and passion above serenity and predictability.” You know who will really like The Giver? Rand Paul, and that’s in no way a putdown.