Yesterday I spoke with Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson about her new book, “The $11 Billion Year,” a story of the ups and downs and turnarounds of 2012. Thompson’s idea was to make a movie-release version of William Goldman‘s The Season (’04), a chronicle of Broadway’s trials and tribulations in 1967 and ’68. When I think of 2012 I think of the year in which Argo beat Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook in the Best Picture race, but there was more to it than that, of course. Digital encroachment. Oscar takedown campaigns. Shifting concepts of where the money is coming from, and how much and at what stage of the game. Zombie studio executives churning out dumber and dumber summer tentpoles. Greater and greater numbers of belligerent apes talking to the screen in megaplexes.

“The $11 Billion Year” author sighing books yesterday at Manhattan’s NYU Bookstore.

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I wrote about John Ridley‘s All Is By My Side, the story of Jimi Hendrix‘s career transition from 1966 to ’67 (i.e., New York-based cafe performer to London-based psychedelic phenomenon) after catching 40% of it during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’ll re-appear on Wednesday, March 12th at South by Southwest with a new title: JIMI: All Is By My Side. There’s also a scene featuring star Andre Benjamin that was posted online today.

Here are my initial remarks, posted on 9.14.13:

“Two or three minutes after settling into All Is By My Side I was feeling stirred by Benjamin’s dead-on performance. It was obvious he’d captured Hendrix’s manner, vibe, voice…that gentleness, that ambivalent but spiritually directed mood-trip thing. Plus I was feeling a certain comfort with Ridley’s script and direction. I wasn’t knocked flat but I was saying to myself, ‘This kind of works…yeah.’

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It would be great if this new Sin City movie would actually look and talk and behave like a real film noir from the early ’50s. If it would imitate the attitude and stylings of Fritz Lang‘s The Big Heat, let’s say. That’s impossible, of course, because this latest collaboration between shameless-genre-wallower Robert Rodriguez and reactionary anti-Occupy Wall Street screenwriter Frank Miller has to pander to exaggerated comic-book notions of what film noir might have been if the original purveyors were low-rent genre wallowers instead of actual filmmakers. Josh Brolin, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jaime King, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dennis Haysbert, Jamie Chung, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Julia Garner, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple, Jeremy Piven and Stacey Keach costar. Movies like this test my love for black-and-white images.

For any comedian to be hot, much less “so damn hot,” he/she has to be funny. That’s a really important trait, I think. You have to make people laugh. Well, Kevin Hart has never made me laugh…ever. He probably never will. To me he’s somewhere between the black Gallagher and the new Martin Short. Andrew Stewart’s 3.6 Variety piece proclaims that Hart has “an ability to appeal to a demographically wide audience that bridges the racial divide.” Okay, except Summit marketers clearly didn’t have that idea in mind when they assembled last summer’s redband trailer for Let Me Explain. As I wrote on 6.14.13, “There are six or seven cutaways to urban types laughing at Hart’s material…we get it, we get it.”

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Last night TheWrap‘s Lucas Shaw reported that Noah director Darren Aronofsky was “not happy” about not being consulted about Paramount’s decision to insert a “religious disclaimer” in the Noah marketing materials. The disclaimer says that “artistic license has been taken” in the making of the film. Shaw reports that Aronofsky “knew nothing about [this] and was ‘not happy’ to learn about it in the press,” according to a single source.

Shaw reported that Paramount and Aronofsky have declined requests to comment.

Wells to everyone involved with Noah and the selling of it: What’s to be unhappy about, Darren-my-man? Paramount marketers aren’t disrespecting or disassociating themselves from you. They’re simply looking to maximize those Christian dollars…big deal. Has Hollywood ever made a Bible-based film that didn’t take artistic license? Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments pissed off 1950s Biblical scholars by depicting a sexual love affair between Charlton Heston‘s Moses and Anne Baxter‘s Nefritiri, and Paramount regretted this all the way to the bank.

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The trailer assures that Will Gluck, Jay-Z and Will Smith‘s Annie (Sony, 12.19) is a spunky musical-comedy by way of Manhattan wealth porn. Aimed at the squares, yes, but I like the vibe. (Or I’m in the mood for it after the sturm und drang of the just-finished Oscar season.) If Annie turns out to be half-decent you know Quvenzhane Wallis is going to be Best Actress-nominated…bank on it, Michael Musto! Jamie Foxx as Benjamin Stacks, i.e., a Daddy Warbucks for our time. Cameron Diaz as “the cruel owner of the orphanage where Annie resides”…a Dickensian orphanage in 2014 Harlem run by a neurotic white lady? Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale costarring. The screenplay is by Gluck, Aline Brosh McKenna and Emma Thompson. (Yes, the actress.)

L.A. Times reporter John Horn wrote yesterday that he’s recently spoken with “two Oscar voters [who have] privately admitted that they didn’t see 12 Years a Slave, thinking it would be upsetting…but they said they voted for it anyway because, given the film’s social relevance, they felt obligated to do so.” The morning after the Oscars I wrote the following: “[Academy voters] felt in the end that they had to go with a film that mattered, that said something, that was strong of heart. But I’ll bet a lot of people just voted for it without having seen it. They trusted, based on the strong Slave passions they’d heard or read about, that they were doing the right thing.” How representative of the Academy voters are Horn’s two sources? Two blades of grass usually suggests there’s at least a patch nearby.

Aaahh, to be a wandering American journalist in Eastern Europe in the early ’30s, running short on cash and optimism, and then to suddenly luck into a job at an English-language daily called the Trans-Alpine Yodel. And to be charged each day with reporting the occasionally threatening news of the day, to work in a large newsroom filled with the clatter of Olivetti and Underwood typewriters, to crack wise with the constantly-smoking and occasionally booze-sipping staffers and printing-press guys…what a life, never to be lived, only dreamt of.

“Writer-director Steven Knight’s Locke (A24, 4.25) is basically just Tom Hardy driving a car while making a bunch of phone calls, and yet this ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise. A finely tuned showcase for Hardy’s exceptional acting skills, Bluetooth-enabled dashboard displays and the dynamic range of the Red Epic camera, the pic tracks a dark night of the soul for a construction-site manager en route from Birmingham to London.” — from Leslie Felperin‘s 9.2.13 Venice Film Festival review in Variety.

Last weekend the Spirit Awards gang should have handed a special indie passion trophy last weekend to Jeff Lipsky‘s Adopt Films. The New York-based outfit is distributing two admired but markedly similar West Bank thrillers — Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (opening 3.7) and Hany Abu-Assad‘s Oscar-nominated Omar. Lucid, taut and suspenseful, they both regard the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a filter of double-agenting, family ties, anxiety and betrayal. And they both end in a sudden burst of violence. You have to see them both. They don’t compete with each other as much as form a greater sum.

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Remaking West Side Story for the screen is a bad enough idea on its own. The original Oscar-winning 1961 original is easily accessible, and with more and more of the viewing today happening on big-screen TVs who needs to see a new musical version in a megaplex when the old one will more or less suffice? And is the world clamoring for a Stephen Sondheim-Leonard Bernstein musical version of Baz Luhrman‘s Romeo + Juliet (’96)? True, the ’61 version seems stiff and lacquered and overly theatrical by today’s standards. The challenge, I suppose, would be to make a version that feels a bit looser and more “street” verite, and set it against a real-life culture where gang warfare, turf battles and racial animosity are regular facts of life. But of all the directors in all the world who could possibly pull this off without causing major embarassment or nausea, Steven Spielberg would have to be at the bottom of the list. Helming a new West Side Story would arouse every treacly, gooey, sentimental impulse in his system. The result would be a disaster. And yet Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that a Spielberg West Side Story is an actual possibility if DreamWorks’ Stacey Snider winds up taking the reins at 20th Century Fox.