After a slow-if-not-difficult day with the column and all kinds of niggly-piggly chickenshit matters that I had to attend to above and beyond, I didn’t feel like submitting to Sharknado 2 last night. Just another cash-in — the original was the charm. I had to hop on the non-hog (i.e., Yamaha 400 cc Majesty) and buzz around town. You don’t go any one special place…that’s cornball style, you just go. Okay, I went to one special place (Amoeba) and then into the hills in order to not feel the glorious sensation of wind blowing through my hair because I’m required to wear a helmet that makes my head feel warm and somewhat damp. I’ll catch the encore showing on Saturday, 8.2. But in the meantime this extra-particular complaint by Vulture‘s John Sellers is 65% hilarious and 35% something else.

There’s no question that Chadwick Boseman‘s performance as James Brown is the best thing about Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up. The film has other pleasures but Boseman matters most. He was naturally obliged to play it solemn and reserved as Jackie Robinson in 42, but not as the late soul-funk legend, who was nothing if not irascible in a gifted sort of way. This is a snappy, raspy, rapscallion submission that never softpedals or seems to be the least bit concerned about whether whitebread types will “like” the character or not. Honestly? Boseman’s Brown is not 100% likable…and that, for me, is where the integrity comes in. Boseman has absolutely earned himself an armchair at the 2014 Best Actor table. By giving himself, monk-like, to Brown’s spirit, history and rambunctious energy, he’s gotten up offa that thing and lit some kind of fuse.

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On top of HE’s 26 “hard” picks for the Toronto Film Festival (or 30 if you want to be liberal about it) I’ll probably be adding one more — Ted Melfi and Bill Murray‘s St. Vincent (formerly St. Vincent de Van Nuys), which the Weinstein Co,. is opening on 10.24. The idea is to give the New York-based attitude comedy, which costars Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd and Naomi Watts, a gala screening during the festival’s first weekend. Earlier today Deadline‘s Michael Fleming wrote that the Weinsteiners were having trouble getting Murray to commit to the Toronto thing, presumably because Harvey sees real potential in a Best Actor campaign for Murray, who was totally shat upon 15 and 1/2 years ago when the Academy didn’t even nominate him for his legendary performance in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore. And then he lost his expected Lost in Translation Best Actor Oscar to Sean Penn in Mystic River.

Interstellar‘s trippy space-travel, visiting-Iceland footage is well and good, but, as previously noted, the cloying emotionalism in the scenes between Matthew McConaughey (whom I’ve suddenly tired of) and his teary-eyed kids as they discuss his pending voyage is really starting to grate. And I really don’t think it’s possible to roll with Michael Caine as someone else any more — he’s been imitated to death and every time he opens his mouth you can’t help but think about Rob Brydon. The key image in this brand-new trailer, which was shown for the first time three or four days ago at ComicCon, is what I’m presuming is some kind of visualization of a wormhole. It looks to me like an overhead shot of a looping Santa Monica Freeway off-ramp covered in glowing butterscotch sauce and transposed to space.

This time Ben Stiller gets to play a double role (amiable Larry Daley plus an animal-skin-wearing cro-magnon guy) and there’s a trip to London. All that’s going on here is that everyone has been well compensated…that’s it, that’s the whole deal. The original Night at the Museum (’06) pulled down $250 million domestic and $320 million foreign for a grand tally of $571 million and change. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (’09) earned $177.1 million domestic and $236 million foreign for a total of $411,755,284. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (12.19.14) will probably make…what, $300 million worldwide? The best thing in this whole trailer is teensy-sized Owen Wilson and some other guy getting splashed with monkey urine. “C’mon…that wasn’t necessary!”

Stiller really, really needs to do another dryly humorous, low-key, low-grossing film like Greenberg again. Please.

In a 6.28 piece about the arrival of Zak, an 11 week-old ragdoll kitten, I wrote that occasionally foul-tempered Mouse (a.k.a., “Fatty”) and even good-natured Aura were hissing and very pissed off about this. Well, a month has passed and two things have happened. Aura has calmed down and is more or less okay with Zak, but Mouse has turned foul. He’s impossible. He won’t stop with the growling and the hissing and has more or less turned into a complete asshole. When he’s inside, I mean. He’s warm and friendly when I see him outside but his personality flips over when we’re in the pad because of Zak’s proximity. Mouse won’t sleep or hang out here — he only comes in for food and then growls and hisses and won’t stop kvetching until I let him out. He really hates me for bringing Zak into his realm, and he absolutely refuses to chill about it. But that’s what life asks of us now and then. Bend with the wind, go with the flow. I feel badly that Mouse has become an outside cat — pretty close to feral. No comforts of home, no TV-watching, no lolling around, no purring. I’m thinking of buying him a cat igloo so he can at least sleep in it from time to time. It’s rough. I figured he’d eventually adapt but he just won’t.

Mutt-and-Jeff comedies are always a little funnier, I think, when the characters are older than usual unless, of course, they’re playing serious dumbasses, in which case it’s not as funny as it could or should be. But what works, I think, is when one of the characters is in the grip of genuine self-loathing, and yet the kind of self-loathing that’s been pushed so far down that he’s not even aware that it’s there. Jason Bateman and Billy Crudup appear to be in their mid 40s or thereabouts. In ten years we’re going to see comedies about guys in their 50s still trying to grow up and act like adults.

An excerpt from Glenn Kenny‘s Phaidon/Cahiers Du Cinema’s “Anatomy of an Actor” book about Robert De Niro. Except that…well, the portion I’m interested in is lifted from the N.Y. Times. No biggie. Just saying.

“It was understood [during the shooting of Midnight Run] that Charles Grodin might have some opportunity to improvise. The ‘night boxcar scene,’ as Grodin calls it, was, he said, improvised entirely. The situation begins with Grodin shutting a boxcar door on De Niro’s face in an effort to escape him. De Niro, in the role of Jack Walsh, promptly boards the car from the other side — enraged.

“But, Grodin said of the scene, ‘We knew it had to end with De Niro revealing something personal about himself’ — the history of a wristwatch that has sentimental value. ‘How do you get to that point in a couple of minutes where he’s going to reveal himself? What do you say?’

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Leaving aside the uninspired-bordering-on-cheeseball cover design of those Cahiers du Cinema “Anatomy Of” profile books (tinted and bendayed closeup of actor/actress’s face with ransom-note lettering on upper-left portion), where does the art director find the arrogance to paste the author’s name in a point-size so small you can’t even read it if the image is reduced? The author worked his or her ass off for two or three or four months to deliver a definitive study of this or that actor, and Cahiers du Cinema’s cover design seems to almost say to the reader, “The writer…okay, we have to put the writer’s name on the cover, fine, but he/she is a minor cog in our mechanism.” What is that, nine- or eight-point bold? Why not make it seven- or six-point? If you’re going to try and diminish the value of the writer, why not go all the way? Why put his/her name on the cover at all? Why not just mention it inside somewhere?

Michael Egan’s sexual-abuse case against director Bryan Singer has all but collapsed over dumb pride. Egan’s attorney Jeff Herman has apparently washed his hands of the guy because he wouldn’t agree to a $100 grand “take-it-and-shut-up” deal offered and signed late last month by Singer and his attorney Martin Singer. A couple of hours ago Buzzfeed reported that as a result of Egan refusing the deal, the specifics of which are viewable via an apparently legit “Memorandum of Settlement” obtained by Buzzfeed and verified by Herman, Herman’s firm is “in the process of withdrawing from representing Mr. Egan in all his cases and [has] no further comment concerning his matters at this time,” according to a statement given to Buzzfeed.

Way to go, Egan! Your claims again Singer may be truthful but they’ve been portrayed as questionable at the very least, and you’ve already dropped three sexual abuse or exploitation lawsuits against three other guys — producer Gary Goddard and TV execs David Neuman and Garth Ancier — so you’re not exactly looking like a pillar of reliability or stability. The only thing you could have gotten out of this whole mess was a cash payoff and now you’ve apparently blown even that…brilliant.

I don’t mean to sound aloof or unaffected by the carnage that’s currently engulfing Gaza, but I was startled this morning by Wissam Nassar‘s photo of a firefighter reacting to a huge inferno. It’s included in a 7.29 Times story about Israel’s latest barrage (“Israel Broadens Targets in Gaza Barrage; Power Is Out” by Ben Hubbard and Jodi Rudoren). The photo looks like something out of a Ridley Scott or Oliver Stone film. Composed rather than caught on the fly.

Snapped for N.Y. Times by local photographer Wissam Nassar.

I’ve already got 21 Toronto Film Festival films on my priority list so there’s not a lot of room to jam in selections from this morning’s announcement of fresh titles. I’my definitely adding four or five but I can’t fool around. I can’t be whimsical or open to exotic experiments. Well, I usually wind up succumbing to precisely those experiments due to occasional scheduling gaps and pocket-drops but for the most part I have to be hard and mean.

I’m definitely adding Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel because it’s Winterbottom doing a real-life, Italy-based murder tale “inspired by” the Amanda Knox case (i.e., Kate Beckinsale and Daniel Bruhl as journalists looking into the case, Cara Delevingne as the femme fatale). MW’s last real-events recapturing, A Mighty Heart, was quite good. Pic is more or less based on “Angel Face,” a 2010 investigative study.

I’m expecting to catch my second viewing of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan in Telluride (following my first immersion in Cannes two and a half months ago) so there’s no need for a third go-round in Toronto, but it’s an absolute must-see for anyone who hasn’t yet had the pleasure.

Mark Hartley’s Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is a definite add-on. I’ve been hearing all along that Hartley’s doc is tougher and snarkier than Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys, which I saw and reviewed in Cannes last May. (Medalia’s doc was produced, I’m told, to counterbalance the expected impact of the Hartley.) I’m also invested as I worked as a Cannon publicity press-kit writer in in ’86, ’87 and early ’88.

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