I was looking to post a little side riff on Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which I saw last night. A sideshow of a sham of a side riff. It wasn’t supposed to be a review but a little tangential comment about Liev Schreiber‘s portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson and how a 22 year-old observation from former Johnson administration Roger Wilkins cast some doubt upon the accuracy of the portrayal. But I had to lay a little groundwork first, and before I knew I had written a two-paragraph assessment of the film itself, and then it grew into three paragraphs. I posted it anyway. 20 or 25 minutes later the Weinstein Co. called to remind me that the embargo date is August 12th. I took the piece down.

“When I said ‘realistic ’70s movie’ I meant one that excludes X-factor people. Nobody wants to admit this and I’m sure I’ll be called an elitist for saying so, but only semi-clueless bridge-and-tunnel people from lower-middle-class ‘meathead’ neighborhoods (i.e., those who weren’t connected to dynamic big-city culture) wore terrible hairstyles and laughably grotesque ’70s threads.

Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale in David O. Russell’s American Hustle.

“I was bopping around on the fringes in the mid to late ’70s and I never wore a fucking leisure suit or elephant collars or gaudy sunglasses or had godawful ‘big-hair.’ Okay, I wore flared jeans but I was mainly into T-shirts and Frye boots andBrian DePalma-styled khaki bush-safari jackets and that whole American Gigolo/Giorgi Armani/Milan-influenced thing (i.e., nifty sport jackets, Italian loafers, shirts with small pointed collars).” — from a 4.13.13 post called “Sartorial Nightmare.”

“‘The subject of a teacher-student affair may be tabloid fodder,’ the Sundance press notes say about A Teacher, ‘but writer/director Hannah Fidell resists sensationalism or the temptation to pathologize her protagonist.’ I just saw Fidell’s film this afternoon, and boy, was I hoping for a little tabloid sensationalism! Or a touch of pathology. Or a smattering of half-interesting dialogue between the teacher (Lindsay Burdge) and the student (Will Brittain) that might add a little flavor or whatever.

“Alas, no.

“We all know what lazy minimalism is. Especially when concerned with self-destructive, anti-social types. The director-screenwriter will (a) use only the faintest brushtrokes and (b) supply no hard info about who her characters are or what they’re running from or what they need…nothing. You have to sit there and just watch them do things that are stupid and wildly self-destructive and incomprehensible and then…you know, piece it together as best you can. Bad Lieutenant did this. Many indie films have done this. And it’s enervating and faintly boring.

“Except A Teacher isn’t completely boring because Fidell is a fairly disciplined director. She knows how to drill in tight and strip away the extraneous and make it seem as if you’re watching something that might, you know, go somewhere. And Burdge and Brittain are, I admit, fairly intriguing in their radically underwritten roles. They know how to behave.

“You know going in that the affair is going to blow up sooner or later. We’ve all read about real-life dalliances of this sort. The teacher is eventually found out, arrested and so on. So the question: what is it about Burdge’s Diana, a teacher at a high school in a semi-affluent Texas town, that will add to the basic drill? What will we learn about her that will turn our assumptions around or at least gussy them up? What will happen that will make this familiar tale seem stranger or darker or funnier than we might expect?

“Answer: nothing.

“Fidell just shows us interesting natural atmosphere and good acting chops and behavior in and of itself, and then baby, you’re on your own.

“The first thing we learn about Diana is that she’s fucking Eric (Brittain), a smooth, good-looking, rich-kid senior. They meet whenever and however, and all they do is fuck. They don’t talk, they don’t share, they don’t watch movies, they don’t cook meals, they don’t take walks…it’s all about the salami. And then we learn that she can’t stand her mother and refuses to talk with her, and that she has a strained relationship with her blase brother…blankness, blankness.

“About three-fifths of the way through she freaks when she and Eric are fucking at his father’s ranch and a foreman shows up. Out of the blue she feels concerned about the affair being discovered and losing her job. And then she starts feeling repulsed by herself and vents this by rejecting Eric, and then she wants him again and he doesn’t want her and it all goes to hell.

“Diana, in short, is a car wreck waiting to happen. Unstable, wired, crazy, not very bright, emotionally blocked, fucked up….and I’m watching a story about her because why again? Because I’m at the Sundance Film Festival and I had an open slot between 3 pm and 5 pm?” — reposting of 1.18.13 Sundance review called “Flat Teacher.”

Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips will open the 2013 New York Film Festival on Friday, 9.27. Which means…what, the press screening is three or four days earlier? Greengrass can nail this kind of thing blindfolded with one hand tied. Playing the NYFF, as always, means savoring big media attention without tons of competition. Big frog, smallish pond.

For whatever reason an early request for a press ticket to this evening’s screening of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons at the Walter Reade theatre was overlooked, and I’ve been struggling to gain admittance since yesterday. I’m told by a well-connected source that one reason for the difficulty is that Dina Lohan (Lindsay’s mom) suddenly announced yesterday that she wanted six tickets. If I don’t see it tonight then I don’t see it. I could run a link to Scott Foundas‘s respectful review or Eric Kohn‘s pan, but I’d rather absorb and consider on my own.

In Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett‘s tragic character “has lost her public identity — indeed, has become something of a pariah. She has lost her money, and she has to find something to do. Allen, of course, also endured (in the early ’90s) the shattering of his public identity and a barrage of hostility; like her, he was rejected by one of his children in the wake of scandal. (And, like her, he’s known to the world under a pseudonym.) But Allen didn’t lose his money and he didn’t lose his ability to work; he didn’t struggle and strive to recover his former status, because he was able to simply keep going forward — and the artistic results have often been wondrous.”

I was all over The Player in early 1992 and pushing it like mad with my editors at Entertainment Weekly. It took at least a couple of weeks after I first caught an early-bird screening in…what was it, mid-February?…before EW‘s “News & Notes” section deigned to run a small descriptive paragraph with an enthusiastic quote or two. My opinion (i.e., that it was a hilariously dry and biting satire that had an uncut, beautifully choreographed extended opening sequence and that it would catch on big-time and that Altman had made perhaps the biggest commercial hit of his career) wasn’t notable or newsworthy, of course. I had to find some non-vested types whose reputation mattered, and whose opinion therefore had weight. I knew and could say, in short, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t be heard because I was a freelance reporter and not a hotshot critic. Even if I was a critic I couldn’t have said anything because it was way too early in the cycle.

The 2013 Locarno Film Festival program was announced today. 2 Guns. A whole lotta George Cukor. Chinatown and Faye Dunaway. It begins on Wednesday, 8.7, and runs until Saturday, 8.17. A smart, elegant, sophisticated gathering. Locarno is in Switzerland, of course, but it’s really northern Italy in almost every other sense — culturally, atmospherically, architecturally. Scores of gelato stands and foodie joints. Pizza, pasta, etc.

I attended ten years ago with Jett and Dylan, who were then 15 and 14. Europe was suffering at the time through one of the worst heat waves in meteorological history, and I remember how we were constantly damp and sweating. (I remember Roger Ebert‘s face being all pink and sweat-beady during an outdoor discussion panel.) The guys and I took an afternoon swim each and every day in Lake Maggiore.

Reza Azlan, author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” apparently decided that the exposure from a Fox News interview was worth having to field a barrage of prejudicial, bone-dumb questions from “Spirited Debate” host Lauren Green. Azlan’s polite but appalled responses are hilarious. He knows there’s no getting through to idiotic Christians with fixed agendas. Watching him struggle to maintain a calm, even-toned composure is akin to an educator trying to explain the basics to an under-educated psychopathic teenager.

Approving reviews alone aren’t the reason for the phenomenal opening-weekend haul ($102 grand average on six screens) of Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine. It’s approving reviews plus Jasmine being the first taste of an award-calibre “fall movie” (“Okay, so it’s a little early!” as Nehemiah Persoff might have said) plus over-35s being sick to death of bullshit zombie ComicCon franchise movies plus the world-class regal swanbird elan of Cate Blanchett. Any HE regulars who’ve seen Jasmine with, you know, thoughts?

First the Saving Mr. Banks trailer, which sold the film as something jokier and more comedically cloying than Kelly Marcel‘s first-rate script. And now the one-sheet, which uses adolescent-friendly cartoon silhouettes to indicate the characters played by Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson. It’s saying to the dummies out there, “This movies will be as easy to understand and digest as an old Mickey Mouse cartoon.” I’m getting more and more worried about this thing by the minute.

I really, really don’t like it when directors use slow-mo for action scenes. They should just stage it and shoot it like it looks when it happens for real, and the audience notices what it notices. Slow-mo coolness caught on 46 years ago with the machine-gun death scene in Bonnie and Clyde and then peaked two years later when The Wild Bunch premiered. And that was that. It’s been “over” for a long time. Our observational powers are much faster now. Either you get the natural-speed coolness aesthetic or you don’t.