James Gandolfini‘s final performance is in Michael R. Roskam‘s The Drop (Fox Searchlight, 9.19.14). A bar holding illegal drop money gets ripped off — doesn’t that mean the mafia or whomever will suspect an inside job? Sounds a little Charlie Varrick-y or Counselor-like, no? Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz, James Frecheville, etc. Dennis Lehane wrote the script (formerly called Animal Rescue).

Yesterday N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith noted the 15-year anniversary of Andy and Larry Wachowski‘s The Matrix, which opened theatrically on 3.31.99. I remember paying to see it at the old multiplex at the Beverly Connection, on the southeast corner of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard. I remember floating out of the theatre and listening to the chatter as the crowd trudged down the stairway exit. A visionary knockout. The first grade-A cyber adventure. Bullet time, baby! Obviously a hit.

For the next four years I was convinced that the press-shy Wachowskis, who’d also directed the brilliant and hot-lesbo-sexy Bound, were pointing the way into 21st Century cinema and that everything they would henceforth create would dazzle as much as The Matrix, if not more so.

And then The Matrix Reloaded came out a little more than four years later (5.15.03) and the millions who’d flipped over The Matrix were standing around with dazed expressions going “wait…what? ” And then The Matrix Revolutions opened on 11.5.03 and that was it…dead, finished, imploded. Larry and Andy who?

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The gist of yesterday’s A.O. Scott vs. Spike Lee contretemps, ignited by Scott’s Sunday N.Y. Times piece about the evolving gentrification of Brooklyn (“Whose Brooklyn Is It Anyway?”) , is as follows: (1) Scott suggested that Lee’s presence in Fort Greene had nudged along the gentrification of that now-thoroughly-yuppified Brooklyn nabe as much as anyone or anything else , if not more so, (2) he further implied Lee can’t really complain because he lives in a figurative “glass brownstone” on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and then (3) Lee claimed in an open letter to Scott on whosay.com that Scott hasn’t thoroughly done his homework (i.e., a reference to the fact that Lee’s dad bought a brownstone home in Fort Greene in 1968 and still lives there) and that Brooklyn is a state of mind that you carry around and that, in his words, “I can live on The Moon and what I said is still TRUE.”

Lee’s letter is absolutely terrific in its straight from the shoulder resolve. Where Scott’s prose dances and glides and riffs around, Lee speaks with a blunt street patois about heritage and community and the residue of memory and family. The piece presents his no-pretense personality, vocabulary and way of thinking. He’s an American Original. I love it when he tells Scott that his argument is “OKEY DOKE,” and I love his sign-offs — “WAKE UP” and “WE BEEN HERE.”

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“Why? Because it feels so goddam good.” But the notion of paying $57.97 for a Twilight Time Bluray of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia feels bad. Later, hombre. Drop that price down to $20something and we’ll talk.

I still can’t get over how good Jason Segel looks without the usual oppression. This is one of the most surprising physical transformations of the 21st Century. It would have been rough on audiences if he’d done these Sex Tape scenes with his This Is 40 / The Five Year Engagement / I Love You Man girth. Hats off, genuine respect, different fella. He’ll relapse, of course, but it’s nice to see a beefy guy do the hard cockatoo thing. I know I’m repeating myself.

How mystical is moviegoing? Vigorous marketing campaigns for bad or humdrum or otherwise misbegotten films never seem to matter all that much. They open and people just don’t go. Or they do. Why? Because they know. Because they can smell the hits and the tanks before they’ve read the aggregate review sites, and sometimes even before they see the trailers. A certain percentage will pay to see crap even though they know it’s crap. Why? Because wildebeests just want to see the crap that they want to see. Either way all marketers can do is fan the flames of embers that have already begun to glow on their own.

Question: Anyone can pick the big upcoming hits and misses, but which films in the 2014 Oscar Balloon will have to struggle to get off the ground?

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When George Lucas passes on and his ashes are deposited in a plot with a tombstone, the epitaph should read “Inventor & Destroyer of the Star Wars series” but also “Inventor of the Light Sabre.” Even I, a Lucas hater going back to Return of the Jedi (i.e., for the last 31 years), will admit that the light sabre is perhaps the greatest weapon ever invented for a motion picture. The coolness of it (particularly the sound of it) will live on through the millenia. That said, the Darth Maul variation (i.e., two light sabres shooting out in opposite directions from a single handle or power generator) was a cheap movie whore’s idea for an improvement in the basic design. The essence of a light sabre is simple elegance — the Darth Maul sabre was comic-book bullshit.

One of the reasons everyone’s excited about Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (Universal, 12.25.14) is that the script was written by Joel and Ethan Coen (apparently after earlier versions had been penned by Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson). But there are no guarantees in life, even for the Coens. Remember that they wrote an allegedly above-average script for Gambit, a remake of a 1966 Michael Caine-Shirley Maclaine cat-and-mouse thriller, and it turned out horribly. It earned a 19% Rotten Tomatoes rating when it opened in England in the fall of 2012, and then disappeared stateside. To my knowledge you can’t even stream it on VOD. It’s purchasable as a PAL DVD/Bluray, but who cares? Just don’t count those Unbroken chickens before they’re hatched — that’s all I’m saying.

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Not so long ago Colin Firth was on top of the world. At the very least he enjoyed a remarkable three-year hot streak between 2009 and 2011. His sad but dignified performance as a suicidal gay professor in Tom Ford‘s A Single Man (’09) resulted in critical huzzahs and award-season accolades. His stuttering King George VI in The King’s Speech (’10) led to several Best Actor prizes, including an Oscar. And his performance as the treacherous Bill Haydon in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (released in early ’12 but viewed at major festivals in late 2011) was seen as nearly equal to Gary Oldman‘s George Smiley and at least at par with Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Peter Guillam.

Colin Firth in the duddish, faint-pulse romantic drama Arthur Newman

But right after Firth won his King’s Speech Oscar in February 2011, his luck changed. Or perhaps he was infected with a slumber virus. Or he decided to snag a few paychecks while the getting was good. I only know that his last four films over the past three years — Gambit, Arthur Newman, The Railway Man and Devil’s Knot — have been critically panned as inept or lackluster sleepathons. Suddenly Firth became renowned for going into his “repressed British clod mode,” as Empire Kim Newman put it a couple of years ago, regardless of the role or the film. It now appears that Firth’s next film — a Rowan Joffe-directed thriller called Before I Go To Sleep, costarring Nicole Kidman and Mark Strong — is a B-level distraction, at best.

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In this “Trailers From Hell” tribute to Sudden Impact, Alan Spencer decides to omit that the most legendary Clint Eastwood line of all time — “Go ahead, make my day” — was written by the great John Milius. This is more or less common knowledge, of course, but it can’t hurt to underline. Note: if you’re any good at doing Eastwood imitations, the best way to say this line is to imagine you’ve been forced to say it over and over for hours on end, and that you’re sick of the sound of it. If you have to say it one more time you’ll vomit on the sidewalk. But you say it anyway.

The definitive scene from Ken Russell‘s Savage Messiah (’72) was highlighted by the one-sheet. It was more of a brief sequence than a scene, not lasting more than 10 or 12 seconds…a snippet. Wielding a jackhammer on a London street, sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brezka (Scott Anthony) completes a pavement etching as a crowd of passersby cheer and applaud. I’ve seen Messiah only once (and many moons ago), but this moment never left my head. That’s filmmaking — the art of penetration and lifelong embedding.

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“Y’know a scary thing about ‘um? They dohn need powuh…” Which male, raspy-voiced costar of Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 7.11) is saying this line? I’ll tell you this much — the actor (or the character he’s playing) wasn’t reared by upscale, well-educated parents, and he damn sure didn’t attend a Connecticut prep school or an Ivy League university. If Reeves had hired me to play a guy somewhat like myself and I had the same line, here’s how I’d say it (after a rewrite session): “You know what’s threatening about all this? They don’t need electricity or warmth or grande cappucinos or Gap stretch T-shirts or any of the usual comforts. They’re animals. They’re fucking animals.”