Two days ago the Indiewire guys posted a part-fantasy, part-real Wish List of 50 films they’d like to see turn up at the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals in late August and September. All goodies, high nutrition. But an overabundance, I think. I’ve trimmed some of the dicey-sounding titles and brought the number down to 36. Simpler that way. And if you include likely festival repeaters like Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan, Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies and Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins, it comes to 39.

1. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice; 2. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman; 3. Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar (word around the campfire is that it’s an actual possibility for Telluride); 4. Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Wild; 5. Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes (I’ve heard a couple of things); 6. Stephen Daldry‘s Trash; 7. J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year; 8. David Fincher‘s Gone Girl (will Fincher follow the same break-out strategy he used for The Social Network?); 9. Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young (New York Film Festival?); 10. Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special; 11. Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women & Children (is Reitman on some kind of who-knows streak?); 12. Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater; 13. Saul Dibb‘s Suite Francaise; 14. Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far from the Madding Crowd; 15. Todd Haynes‘ Carol (I don’t even know what this is); 16. Fatih Akin‘s The Cut; 17. Liv Ullman‘s Miss Julie; 18. Daniel Espinosa‘s Child 44; 19. Anton Corbijn‘s Life; 20. Dylan Kidd‘s Get A Job; 21. James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour; 22. Werner Herzog‘s Queen of the Desert; 23. Stephen Frears‘ Untitled Lance Armstrong Project; 24. Alex Garland‘s Ex Machina, 25. Christian Petzold‘s Phoenix (likely Telluride); 26. Michael Roskam‘s The Drop; 27. David Gordon Green‘s Manglehorn; 28. Ramin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes; 29. Tom McCarthy‘s The Cobbler; 30. Rupert Goold‘s True Story; 31. John MacLean‘s Slow West; 32. Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler; 33. Kevin McDonald‘s Black Sea; 34. Michael Cuesta‘s Kill The Messenger; 35. Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth; and 36. Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette.

I saw Rob Reiner‘s And So It Goes (Clarius, 7.25) last night at a KCET screening at the Aero. What do want from me? You want me to say I was knocked out, delighted, turned around? I wasn’t. Mark Andrus‘s screenplay is drawn from the same well as As Good As It Gets (snippy, selfish misanthrope grows a heart) with a little sprinkling of Heidi, and is therefore way too predictable for my tastes. But some of it works. It’s amiable enough and…well, somewhat better than I expected. Aimed, yes, at 60- and 70-somethings. Delivers some above-average insult humor. Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton score every now and then.

Reiner strode down the aisle and spoke with moderator Pete Hammond when it ended, and reminded everyone that he’s definitely sharp and attuned and alive on the planet. The boomer target audience is “100% into seeing the film and 40% able to get to the theatre,” he quipped.

Leaving aside Jeff Sneider‘s perplexing if not appalling admiration for Neighbors and 22 Jump Street as the two finest comedies of 2014 so far, I’m down with his view that the two best male performances have come from Locke‘s Tom Hardy and The Skeleton Twins‘ Bill Hader. Along with Miles Teller in Whiplash, Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Steve Carell in Foxcatcher and Andre Benjamin (a.k.a. Andre 3000) in Jimi — All Is By My Side.

“Men acting idiotically and fearfully while planning to kill bad bosses just isn’t funny,” I wrote in my 7.6.11 review of Horrible Bosses. “Sneaking into the homes of would-be victims without wearing shoe gloves and hair bonnets and rubber surgical gloves is absolute idiocy and therefore not funny. Jennifer Aniston playing a small business owner (i.e. a dentist) who’s an intemperate sexual predator in a dark wig and who flashes portions of her hot bod and risks years of struggle to get through medical school in order to satisfy passing fancy is degrading and ridiculous and not in the least bit funny. It’s doubly unfunny when the object of her lust is little male hygienist with a high-pitched voice who probably has a schlong the size of a rook on a chess board. I could go on and on and on.

“I sat there like a tombstone, studying the screen like a cop studies a suspected felon during a late-night grilling at a grimy downtown precinct and not even tittering (okay, I inwardly tittered) until one partiuclar joke came along, which I really did laugh at. But even then I didn’t go ‘haaaah-hah-hahhh-hah-ahhh-hah…whoa-ho-ho…gee, whoo!’ I just went ‘hah-huh.’

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Six years and four months ago, Vanity Fair contributor Sam Kashner interviewed the extremely press-shy Richard Lester. It happened “on a chilly morning at a gastropub near a marina in Chichester, England,” Kashner writes. One of the topics was Lester’s two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (which opened on 7.6.64, or almost exactly 50 years ago) and Help!. In honor of the HDN anniversary or the recently released Criterion Bluray or both, VF has published an article by Kashner about the ’08 encounter. The piece also contains references to the here-and-now.

Richard Lester, now 82, in a still from the website of 2013 Febio Fest, which Lester attended.

Lester might be interview-averse with journalists, but he visited the 2013 Febio Fest in Česke Budejovice, a mid-sized city in the Czech Republic.

Kashner’s article deals with Lester’s decision to quit directing due to the death of actor and longtime Lester friend Roy Kinnear, who suffered a fatal heart attack during the filming of Lester’s The Return of the Musketeers (’89). This was preceded by a performing accident in which Kinnear was “thrown from his horse, fractured his pelvis and suffered massive internal bleeding.” The 54 year-old Kinnear died the next day.

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A gathering of the friends, fans and colleagues of the late Jeffrey Ressner will happen on Tuesday, July 8th, at 11 am at the Burbank branch of Forest Lawn (6300 Forest Lawn Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90068). It’s definitely in Burbank but the Forest Lawn hustlers are calling it the “Hollywood Hills” branch. That strikes me as a rather phony and pretentious claim. Oh, by the way: there was a mistake in the obit that was sent out yesterday to Variety. Ressner passed last Saturday night, 6.28, so the whole L. Ron Hubbard announcement riff no longer applies.

Jeffrey Ressner, 1958 — 2014

I may as well admit that I played a very small role in the publicity effort behind Rambo: First Blood, Part II (’85). No, I didn’t work for TriStar or Carolco but for temporarily partnered publicists Dick Delson and Bobby Zarem, who were working for Sylvester Stallone himself. I spent some time around Sly, of course. He wasn’t unfriendly but I wouldn’t call him gregarious. A bit sullen, a man of fewer words. We were visiting our client at his Pacific Palisades home one night, and as we were leaving I noticed an original Francis Bacon painting in the foyer. “Wow, Francis Bacon!,” I exclaimed. “You got it,” Stallone replied.

It feels like Anton Corbijn‘s A Most Wanted Man (Lionsgate/Roadside, 7.25) has been around forever. Lionsgate acquired the rights a year ago. It played Sundance last January but I couldn’t get to it. Now it’s opening limited in three weeks or so. Not the last big-screen performance from the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman but the last one that anyone with taste will want to see. The trailer tells you Philly’s German accent owns this thing, at least as much as his screen time allows. Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Daniel Bruhl, Robin Wright, Grigoriy Dobrygin, Homayoun Ershadi, Martin Wuttke, etc.

Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent de Van Nuys (Weinstein Co., 10.24), which shot last summer in various New York-area locations, is about a rootless young guy with just-divorced parents befriending a “misanthropic, bawdy, hedonistic war veteran” played by Bill Murray. Costars include Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd, Naomi Watts. This looks like the same trailer they showed at Harvey’s annual preview event in Cannes in mid-May.

Jeffrey Ressner, a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist pal whom I first met when we worked together at the Hollywood Reporter back in ’83 and ’84 and whom I considered an actual, real-deal friend, has died of a heart attack. He was only 56, for God’s sake. I’m sure his friends would like to gather and share stories and raise a glass. Update: A memorial service for Ressner will be held on Tuesday, 7.8 at 11 am at the Burbank branch of Forest Lawn Mortuary.

The late Jeffrey Ressner, probably sometime in the late ’80s.

Jeff would call every so often or I would invite him to a screening or we’d do an occasional lunch. He was cautious, a stay-at-homer. He never wanted to drive east of the 405 and I started to give up inviting him to screenings because of this. But he read the column all the time, and we would talk about women a lot. The last time we met he slipped me some prescription pain pills. Jeff travelled to Asia quite a lot. After my initial trip to Vietnam in 2012 we compared extensive notes on the region. The last time I went to Vietnam (i.e., eight months ago) he asked me to buy him some coffee and cigars and bring them back. I told him to flat-out forget it — I wasn’t going to lug boxes of coffee and cigars through customs for him.

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The great Paul Mazursky has died at the age of 84. For eight or nine years Mazursky’s films seemed to understand the half-comedic, half-bittersweet backwash of the ’60s and ’70s better than any other filmmaker except perhaps Robert Altman. Mazurksy was the reigning Woody Allen figure — the guy whose films were connected with the moods and meanderings and what modern hipster relationships were really about back then — before Allen found his voice and took the crown away from Mazursky with Annie Hall in ’78. Mazursky’s New York roots went into Next Stop, Greenwich Village (’76), An Unmarried Woman (’78) and Moscow on the Hudson (’84) but there was always something more knowing and intimate about his Los Angeles-based films. From ’69 to ’78 Mazursky held mountains in the palm of his hands, or something close to that.

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Uh-oh…another Melissa McCarthy movie! I’d better say the right things or, more to the point, not say any bad things or Judd Apatow and the armed Sunni p.c. police squad will kick the shit out of me, especially on Twitter. I need to get my attitude adjusted and crank up the denial or I’ll be in big trouble. Okay…go! McCarthy’s schtick of playing a coarse, angry, under-educated, junk-food-inhaling, lower-middle-class instinct animal is…hilarious! And it’s totally common when thin, nice-looking guys (in this instance an ex-hubby and a possible new boyfriend) are depicted as being (or having been) sexually interested in her. One reason for this curious state of affairs is an understanding that morbid obesity isn’t a life-shortening affliction but…kinda cute! And a drop-dead hilarious comic device. When McCarthy tries to leap over a fast-food counter during a robbery but can’t manage it…gasping for breath! Did I mention that morbid obesity has become a kind of metaphor for serenity and self-acceptance?

Wait…should I run this by Apatow first before publishing? Maybe I haven’t expressed my views in the right way? Aaahh, too late now.

Tammy (Warner Bros., 7.2) is a husband-and-wife enterprise — directed by McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone, and co-written by Falcone and McCarthy. Creative collaborations between married or otherwise intimately entwined couples often don’t work because they’re not blunt with each other. If an idea is shit or not quite good enough, you have to be able to effing say that instead of “yeah, honey, that’s a really good bit except…well, it’s not that I don’t respect your idea or you for that matter but I just think if we massaged it a little bit more and doubled down on the love we might have something a little bit better.” Do you think Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond talked that way to each other?

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