Fox Searchlight will release Michael Roskam and Dennis Lehane‘s The Drop (formerly known as Animal Rescue) on 9.12.14, or right smack dab in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival. I don’t know if anyone’s seen or reviewed this Boston-set crime drama, but the trailer is selling a variation on the old Charley Varrick formula (mob money stolen by cowboys), etc. It’s also about a bartender (Tom Hardy or James Gandolfini?) who rescues a puppy found in a garbage can, which of course results in all kinds of bile and rage from the dog’s abusive and mentally unstable former owner (played by…?). Costarring Noomi Rapace, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz and James Frecheville.

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I saw Roman Polanski‘s Venus in Fur at the tail end of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. It finally opened two days ago (6.20) via Sundance Selects. “Spoken in French, it’s a one-set, two-character piece that’s set inside a smallish theatre in Paris during an evening rainstorm, and which began as an English-language play by David Ives,” I wrote on 9.24. “It was re-written by Ives and Polanski for the screen. It seems to mirror on some level the relationship between Polanski and his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, who costars along with Mathieu Almaric, who portrays the Polanski stand-in, a stage director, and who vaguely resembles the younger Polanski of the ’80s. Other than that it’s…well, I don’t want to abruptly dismiss any work by a great filmmaker but it really does feel like a minor work in a minor and restrictive key. Seigner delivers a snappy, saucy, highly-charged performance — I’ll give her that.”

Yesterday’s trailer posting for The Good Lie prompted a friend to remind me that this Imagine/Alcon/Warner Bros. release (opening on 10.3) would most likely be collecting dust at Paramount if it hadn’t been for the efforts of screenwriter Margaret Nagle. Nagle wrote the script roughly ten years ago, or in the wake of Megan Mylan and John Shenk‘s The Lost Boys of Sudan, a 2003 documentary. (Nagle’s script was allegedly referred to in development circles by the same title.) The project sat at Paramount for five years without a discernible pulse, and then Nagle took advantage of a WGA regulation that allows writers of projects that have languished in development to reclaim them after five years. Dallas Buyer’s Club screenwriter Craig Borten revived that project the same way, saving it from development tedium at Universal. Nagle eventually set Lost Boys up with the fellows at Imagine and Alcon, which gradually led to Reese Witherspoon‘s coming on board in July 2013. “Sometimes the writer matters,” my friend says. Yes and good for that, but if Nagle really did rescue the Lost Boys project from a flatline situation at Paramount and then re-launch it with Imagine and Alcon and so on, why doesn’t she have a producer credit? Doesn’t that seem like a fair thing, that she would get a producer credit? Mainstream Hollywood answer: Sorry but no. You don’t get a producer credit because you’ve been tenacious and resourceful. You get a producer credit by fighting or muscling your way into the inner production circle and then baring your fangs and claws just as fearsomely as the other guys.

Snapped on Fifth Avenue during the summer of ’09. (I think.) I honestly feel this is among the best midtown Manhattan shots I’ve ever taken.

The guy with the sharply-chiselled features in this 56 year-old one-sheet for Jailhouse Rock (’58) has an Elvis Presley-like appearance, but he never looked like Presley himself. Presley had a sultry, slightly more feminine face. You know who this guy DOES resemble, and I mean closely? Jersey Boys costar Vincent Piazza, who plays Tommy DeVito.

New Year’s Eve in Times Square, going into 1964. Notice that Otto Preminger’s THE Cardinal is occupying the big DeMille theatre corner billboard at B’way and 47th.

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First came Megan Mylan and John Shenk‘s The Lost Boys of Sudan (’03), a doc about the struggle of two Sudanese youths to adapt to U.S. culture after fleeing civil war in their country. Then came Christopher Quinn‘s God Grew Tired of Us (debut at 2006 Sundance, released a year later), a “lusciously photographed, exquisitely edited documentary about John, Daniel and Panther — three young Sudanese men, all refugees from their country’s ongoing, utterly devastating civil war — who escape to America to start new lives only to encounter profound longings for home and family, and no small measure of guilt.” And now, finally, The Good Lie (Warner Bros., 10.3) — a presumably heart-tugging Reese Witherspoon narrative version from director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) and producer Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Reese plays a humanitarian worker who helps four orphaned men (Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jal, Nyakuoth Weil) find a place to live, some working income and a way to bring the rest of their families to the States. Corey Stoll costars.

Tony Zhou‘s video essay about Martin Scorsese‘s fine use of silences ignores — naturally! — that his next film, which begins shooting next month in Taiwan, is an adaptation of Shusaku Endo‘s Silence. From the moment I first heard of it the concept of Scorsese’s Silence (i.e., son of Kundun mixed with a parable about today’s wacko Christians and Islamics?) has filled me with dread. I don’t want Scorsese guiding me into the gloom of 17th Century Japan. I want him taking me into 21st Century Newark or Oakland or some other den of iniquity and laying on the gangster shit.

When director Raoul Walsh allegedly “borrowed” the body of the recently deceased John Barrymore and then “left his corpse propped in a chair for a drunken Errol Flynn to discover when he returned home from The Cock and Bull Bar,” it was obviously an exercise in macabre humor. The “fun and games with a stiff” concept was used more flamboyantly in Ted Kotcheff‘s Weekend at Bernie’s (’89). But now, according to a 6.22 N.Y. Times story, this shit is happening for real — not humorously but earnestly, respectfully, lovingly. Are these people deranged? Why stop at placing the dearly departed in a sitting position at a dinner table? Why not stand the corpse up with a steel rod, put it on a platform with wheels and give various mourners a chance to waltz with it around the dance floor? Why not put a microphone in the corpse’s upraised hand and play the deceased favorite songs and pretend that the corpse is singing to them karaoke-style?

My initial viewing of James Byrkit‘s Coherence was on my Macbook Air, so I decided to catch last night’s 9:45 pm show at the Los Feliz 3. Almost as engrossing, definitely worth it, big-screen detail, etc. Emily Baldoni was chatting with admirers in front of the plex when I got there. Coherence is almost certainly the coolest low-budget flick playing anywhere right now, but that doesn’t imply it’s anything but a very creepy little mindfuck. Wells to Byrkit #1: Forget the Manohla Dargis pan — everyone has their blind spots and she has hers. Wells to Byrkit #2: After reading about the Twilight Zone influence, I naturally assumed that the specific trigger was “Mirror Image,” the 1960 Vera Miles-Martin Miler episode that most closely resembles your film. I was more than a bit surprised, therefore, when you said in an interview with Complex.com’s Matt Barone that “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” “is definitely the biggest influence on the movie, no question.” May I respectfully disagree? Never trust the artist — trust the tale.

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Something got my attention when those new photos from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman appeared on Entertainment Weekly‘s site on 6.19. That marquee shot informs that Michael Keaton‘s actor character is named Riggan Thomson, and right away it hit me that I’d never once heard or read about a guy named Riggan in my entire effing life. Not even when I visited Ireland in ’88. So I ran it by pokemyname.com, and here’s what they had to say:

“In order of popularity in the U.S., the name Riggan ranks at 30,487. In other words, there are 30,486 names that are more popular than Riggan. One in every 702,203 Americans is named Riggan. For every million people in this country, 1.42 persons are named Riggan. As of 6.21.14 there are 456 people named Riggan in the United States and the number is increasing by 4 people every year. The use of Riggan as a middle name is more common than its usage as a first name.”

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I can’t say anything until the 7.18 embargo date, but Woody Allen‘s Magic in the Moonlight deserves a much better poster than this. It gets the basic idea across, at least regarding what Emma Stone‘s character is about. But the expression on Colin Firth‘s face is impossible. What’s he looking at, a squirrel climbing up a nearby tree? Someone or something other than Stone. The quality of the design reminds me, no offense, of some early ’80s one-sheets for Cannon or Crown International films.

“Last fall, Gravity director and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu pal Alfonso Cuaron told Capture Mag, ‘Next year, you’ll see a film shot in one continuous sequence, and it’s a masterpiece.” Then this spring over at Redditian, a user claimed ‘the cinematography [in Birdman] is done by Emmanuel Lubezki and the entire film is going to be one continuous shot, like Rope.’ This dude says he’s seen an early cut of the movie and says it has “an awe-inspiring 40 minute tracking shot.” — from a 6.20 Kevin Jagernauth Indiewire piece.

Earlier this afternoon I recorded a 39-minute chat with Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet about the likeliest-seeming Best Picture contenders as of now. Early summer Best Picture projections are purely about spitballing, of course, but after that they’re about (a) recognizing possibly profound thematic elements that certain films appear to contain (or at least might contain), and also (b) what appear to be emotionally crowd-pleasing elements that will probably resonate with not-very-hip Academy members. Here’s the mp3.

Nobody really knows anything at this stage, but right now I’m having trouble understanding the presumed inevitability of Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken. As Spencer Tracy said at the end of Judgment in Nuremberg, “You’re going to have to explain that one to me. You’re going to have to explain it very carefully.”

At this juncture I would call myself a Birdman man — Birdman, Interstellar, Wild, Gone Girl, A Very Violent Year and Selma. Or something like that.

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