If you know Mad Men, you know the first episode of a new season never does anything especially head-turning or eye-opening. First episodes just quietly amble along, taking their time, no big hurry, at most planting seeds that might pay off four or five episodes down the road…if that. Mad Men guru Matthew Weiner doesn’t believe in keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. He believes in keeping them slumped in their seats and moderately engaged as far as the general scheme allows. He believes in peeling off artichoke leaves one by one…one leaf and then another and then another…whoops, out of time. Well, there’s always next week!

Those square, somewhat older sports fans (i.e., guys over 35) didn’t show up for Ivan Reitman‘s Draft Day this weekend. The Kevin Costner-starring ensemble piece “underperformed” with a three-day haul of just $9.8 million anticipated. This despite a B-plus CinemaScore rating. So what happened? It couldn’t have been the reviews as nobody reads them. Reactions from HE regulars are hereby requested.

Last night I attended the 9:15 pm TCM Classic Film Festival screening of William Friedkin‘s digitally remastered Sorcerer (Warner Home Video, 4.22). I’ve seen this film six or seven times now, and I was just as absorbed as ever. It’s a near-great movie. But during the finale I was remembering why Sorcerer choked at the box-office when it opened on 6.24.77. It went down because it didn’t deliver a fair and just ending.

I’ve never bought Friedkin’s theory that Sorcerer died because the hugely popular Star Wars, which opened on 5.25.77, had ushered in a sudden sea-change in mainstream cinematic appetites — i.e., a new comic-book, popcorn-high attitude plus a corresponding diminished interest in gritty, low-key, character-driven adult dramas. Sorcerer, of course, was never going to be a hugely commercial film. It’s a fairly downbeat, men-against-the-elements adventure flick made for guys. Women don’t go for sweaty, atmospheric, end-of-the-road Latin American fatalism. But I suspect that Sorcerer would have been at least a modest success if it had delivered a sense of justice in the case of Roy Scheider‘s character, a wise guy on the run from the New Jersey mob.

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Last night the largely undiminished Jerry Lewis, 88, sat down with Ileana Douglas for a tribute interview organized by the TCM Classic Film Festival. Lewis and Dean Martin, his legendary partner for ten years (1946 to ’56), made 16 films together. Douglas said that The Stooge (’52) is the Martin & Lewis flick that best conveys the essence of their act. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never even decided against seeing it. It’s never come up. To be honest I’ve only seen two Martin & Lewis movies in my life — At War With The Army and Hollywood or Bust. In “Dino: Living High in The Dirty Business of Dreams,” Nick Tosches wrote that their films never quite captured the uproarious manic flavor of their legendary live act. Lewis’s solo films (i.e., The Nutty Professor, etc.) are the keepers.

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William Friedkin‘s long-awaited, digitally-remastered Sorcerer (’77) screens tonight at the TCM Classic Film Festival. The Warner Home Video Bluray streets on 4.22. What is Sorcerer about? Four guys on two trucks carrying nitroglycerin through the South American jungle. I’ve always admired the exceptionally long time (i.e., 70 minutes) that Friedkin devotes to (a) the various back-stories and (b) the reasons and preparation for the dangerous trip. The journey itself only takes about 45 minutes of screen time, maybe a touch more.

If you speak ‘strine‘, the title of Phillip Noyce‘s upcoming film (due on 8.15.14) is pronounced “the Givaah.” For whatever reason this is how I say it whenever the subject comes up…”the Givaah!”. Boilerplate synopsis: “The haunting story…centers on Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), who lives in a seemingly ideal, if colorless, world of conformity and contentment. Not until he’s given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory does he begin to understand the dark secrets behind his fragile community.”

One of my earliest big-league Manhattan interviews was with director John Carpenter. He was plugging The Fog so our chat happened in early 1980, at which point Carpenter had recently turned 32 and more or less looked it. (One of the publicists on that film, by the way, was Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson.) Now the semi-retired Carpenter is in his mid 60s and looks at least 80. To me he strongly resembles Charles Boyer‘s High Lama character in Ross Hunter‘s Lost Horizon (’73), who is 300 years old but looks good for his age. Burbank’s Hyaena Gallery begins a Carpenter tribute tonight.

(l.) director John Carpenter; (r.) Charles Boyer as the High Lama in Lost Horizon (’73).

Corrected with apologies: Birdman falling out of Cannes wasn’t enough. Now it’s all but certain that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice won’t be going there either. This morning I spoke to an industry friend who’s seen Vice and who thinks it’s brilliant and mesmerizing in an atmospheric, non-linear sort of way. He says that Anderson, currently doing the sound mix, doesn’t really want to subject Vice to Cannes and would rather take his time and tinker around over the summer and then unveil it in Telluride/Venice/Toronto.

This follows what a friend told me a week or two ago, which is that Cannes topper Thierry Fremaux “has been courting and wooing PTA like mad to get Inherent Vice to Cannes, and that PTA has been telling him since January that it would be very tight for him to get post-production done in time and that he wouldn’t show it to Thierry until then. Perhaps PTA would privately like to go to Cannes, but I’m also told that Warner Bros. is against the idea, considering it too early given its December release date. If PTA insists and finishes the film to his satisfaction over the next couple of weeks, he could probably prevail over WB, but the latest I hear is that everything is still very much up in the air.”

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The furniture movers were done by 4 pm so I had plenty of time to bop over to the TCM Classic Film Festival by dinner hour. The initial plan was to see Harold Lloyd‘s Why Worry at what everyone still calls the “Egyptian” (i.e., the Lloyd E. Rigler theatre at the American Cinematheque). But first I slipped into the TCL Chinese to see how Universal Home Video’s DCP of Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity (i.e., a close relative of the new Bluray) looked on the big screen. Knowing of Universal’s delightful tendency to tastefully DNR black-and-white films (as they did for their Psycho and Cape Fear Blurays) I was optimistic. But what I saw exceeded my hopes.

It was beautiful. It was heaven. It was silvery and satiny and gloriously free of the digital mosquitoes that are all over the Masters of Cinema Bluray version. For the first time in my life I saw a Double Indemnity that looked like monochrome candy — an all-but-grainless version that will hopefully make grain monks seethe. I don’t know what was more enjoyable — looking at the exquisite velvety tones of this 1944 classic and the entirely acceptable waxy complexions of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, or imagining the discomfort of guys like Pete Appruzzese and Glenn Kenny and DVD Beaver‘s Gary. W. Tooze and Robert Harris and the grain devotees at the Criterion Collection.

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I’m so on top of the latest curve that it took me three days to link to Ross Marquand‘s Matthew McConaughey-in-True Detective riff, which went on up on April 9th. Marquand is spoofing those AT&T True Detective spots. A joke we call reality. Time is a flat circle. Grapple with it.

My beloved Birdman, which I haven’t seen a frame of but have really wanted to see for a long, long time, will not debut in Cannes next month. It’ll most likely have its first screenings in Venice and/or Telluride instead. I have to be honest and say that I’m very disappointed and more than a little sad…but I guess I can adapt.

(l. to.) Edward Norton, production assistant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Michael Keaton during filming of Birdman in New York last winter or early spring (i.e., jacket and scarf weather).

I’ve been presuming for eight and a half months now that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s midlife-crisis comedy, which is about a former superhero actor (Michael Keaton a la Robert Downey ten years from now) trying to produce a stage play, would turn up at the Cannes Film Festival. Why? Because Inarritu screened a cut of Birdman last July for friends, and soon after one of them shared the following: “I know you and I know your taste, Jeff. And I am telling you this [film] is a mind-blowing exercise in pure cinema…it puts AGI in a different league. I was humbled, moved and full of love in seeing him bloom into an artist of a massive calibre…transforming, evolving.

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