John Ford‘s sentimentality has always been his aesthetic Achilles Heel. I’ve mentioned the permutations before but here goes again. The “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. The old-school chauvinism and racism, the thinly sketched women, the Irish affection for loutish boozy behavior. I’m especially irked by Ford’s fondness for sappy-sounding ballads sung by male choral groups like Stan Jones and the Sons of the Pioneers. Ever time I watch (or try to watch) Ford’s The Searchers Jones’ music devalues it just a little bit more. I remember watching a laser disc of The Searchers with Guillermo del Toro in ’96 or thereabouts and flinching when Jones’ music began playing during the opening credits. Imagine if Ford had decided to avoid Jones’ balladeering and just let Max Steiner‘s score stand alone. This 1956 classic would seem a lot less problematic by 2014 standards.

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N.Y. Times columnist David Carr has done more than just write about Jon Favreau, the director, producer, writer and star of Chef (Open Road, 5.9). He’s also eaten a Favreau-prepared meal. Chef is currently enjoying a 91% Rotten Tomatoes rating but it’s opening in less than two weeks and I’ve received no screening invites. (I couldn’t attend the 4.22 Tribeca Film Festival showing.) I’m on a plane to NYC next Thursday night and then I have a week at my Brooklyn rental before leaving for France. Friend to HE: “Dude, Open Road has had a TON of L.A. Chef screenings. I saw it here a month ago. I don’t think you are on their press list if you have missed it. Betting there’s probably another next week, Plus it’s really a fun movie. Best food shots ever!”

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I generally steer clear of docs that appear to be blowjob profiles of showbiz types, but Mike Myers‘ Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon seems amiable enough, and perhaps a bit more than what I’m expecting. (I should have tried harder to catch it at last September’s Toronto Film Festival.) The only grating part arrives at the end. The trailer has sold us on the idea that Gordon is this likable, spiritual, trustworthy heavy-cat manager, and then a prolonged loop of Gordon’s heckle-and-jeckle laughter kills the mood.

2014 is all but one-third over, and by my yardstick there have been ten commercially-released films thus far that have definitely cut the mustard (Locke, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ida, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Noah, Omar, Only Lovers Left Alive, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, Tim’s Vermeer, Fading Gigolo). To these you need to add nine film-festival stand-outs — Yann Demange‘s ’71 (which I saw in Berlin) along with eight from the Sundance Film Festival for a grand total of 19 — par for the course for any January-to-April season.

The Sundance picks, once again, are Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash, (2) Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins, (3) Steve James‘ Life Itself, (4) Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, (5) Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies, (6) James D. Cooper‘s Lambert & Stamp, (7) Charlie McDowell‘s The One I Love and (8) Chapman and Maclain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball.

What other films should I have included? And don’t mention The LEGO Movie. I don’t want to to know about that film, ever. However rich and spiritual it may be, its success has lowered the bar in the Hollywood mainstream industry and made it cool for any puerile kid-distraction concept to be made into a film. It might be cool on its own terms but it has polluted the waters. In my mind it’s a chemical plant dumping toxic substances into the Hudson.

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Now that Steven Knight and Tom Hardy‘s Locke has opened in four NY/LA theatres (Lincoln Square and Angelika in Manhattan, Arclight and Landmark in Los Angeles), there are HE regulars to be heard from. How did the room feel? How was the lobby after-chatter? Is Hardy the year’s first significant Best Actor contender?

In the middle of shooting one of his all-time worst films ever, Otto Preminger gambled that a little provocative symbolism might at least get people talking. It did. How different is this clip from, say, the train going into the tunnel shot at the very end of North by Northwest? Not very. The same question comes to mind whenever you watch a striking, decades-old clip. Does this kind of thing happen anymore in mainstream cinema? Or has straight-dealing erotic symbolism (as opposed to its use in a comedic or satiric vein) been pretty much tossed out?

I posted this same clip on 6.18.13. I’m assuming a certain percentage of the readership missed it. I may decide to re-post this clip every year at this time. It’s soothing and nurturing to watch this shot every so often. When’s the last time a long dazzling uncut shot like this was the talk of film buffs the world over? 95% of those who live for CG-driven films would never even watch a film like The Passenger and therefore never contemplate a perfect scene like this, but if they did most would sit there like metal lawn furniture and go ‘uhhm, okay…so that’s it?’ But these same spiritual journeymen would sit through the forthcoming movies based on Peeps and It’s A Small World and Barbie.

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We’ve all vented about the Barbie, Marshmallow Peeps and “It’s A Small World” projects that were announced a couple of days ago. And so the Jeff Sneider/”What’s The Deal?” remark that really pops out comes at 1:06, to wit: “Disney is also very worried about the Angelina Jolie movie, Maleficient (Disney, 5.30). Which I hear has everybody on the lot muttering under their breath, ‘Thank God for Frozen.'”

I wanted a little bit of a Bluray enhancement “bump” from the just-released Warner Home Video Bluray of Mike Hodges‘ Get Carter (’71)…and I didn’t get it. That’s because the WHV technicians who did the remastering said “to hell with it…this is a gritty, low-budget ’70s film, and the best we can do is basically replicate the look of the DVD but with enough of a bit-rate upgrade so it’ll look suitably filled-out on a 60- or 70-inch screen.” What I was looking for was a little sweetening — the kind of tasteful DNR finessing that the guys at Universal Home Video would have applied if Carter had been their film. The Carter Bluray looks fine, mind. It just looks the same as the 2000 DVD, and I wanted more than that.

Steven Knight‘s Locke, which I creamed over earlier this month, has a 79% rating from Metacritic and a 100% Rotten Tomato rating if you isolate the top critics. It also seems clear that Tom Hardy has made his bones sufficiently to be in the running for a Best Actor nomination eight and nine months hence.

For the most part the Rotten Tomato and Metacritic scribes despise Nick Cassevetes‘ The Other Woman, having given the 20th Century Fox release a 24% and 38% rating, respectively. The only guy who shares my view, which is that Woman is no classic but on the other hand isn’t too bad, is Boston Herald critic James Verniere. Regardless of all this, Box-Office Mojo is predicting a half-decent $15 million weekend, so the Other Woman trailer that I disliked for making a reasonably engaging, not-too-bad comedy seem a lot dumber than it is, is apparently doing its job.

Incidentally: I’m told by a Fox source that nobody made the trailer I was beefing about, which came out last December. Departed Fox marketing chiefs Oren Aviv and Tony Sella were gone when it was released (Sella apparently never even saw the film) and current marketing boss Marc Weinstock hadn’t really arrived and settled in. So the trailer kind of…I don’t know, manifested on its own volition? Something like that.

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Gene Fowler, Jr.‘s I Married a Monster From Outer Space (’58) is a typical ’50s sci-fi invader-metaphor flick in the vein of Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56) and Invaders From Mars (’53). But if you (a) consider that star Tom Tryon (who later became a successful author) came out of the closet in the late ’60s and (b) momentarily regard homosexuality as a metaphor for the social convulsions of the ’60s and ’70s, I Married A Monster From Outer Space could be interpreted as being about the unravelling of staid middle-class normality and the coming of social upheavals that would begin to disturb American culture around ’63, or five years after its release.

Wiki synopsis: “The story centers on freshly married Marge Farrell who finds her husband Bill strangely transformed soon after her marriage: He is losing his affection for his wife and other living beings and drops various earlier habits. Soon she finds out that Bill is not the only man in town changing into a completely different person.”

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