David O. Russell‘s American Hustle opened in six theatres yesterday to the tune of $211,000, and now’s the time for the HE community to weigh in. It’s one of the year’s best but…where do I start? I’m from New Jersey and the Jersey-based characters in American Hustle aren’t from my gene pool. I felt for Jeremy Renner‘s Elvis-pompadoured mayor of Camden but even he’s not right for me — too ethnic, too many kids, too much food at the table. Yeah, I got a kick out of Jennifer Lawrence‘s spunky, braying housewife but I avoid women like her when I see them in real life. They’re nice deep down but they’re horrible to deal with on practical matters.

(l. to r.) Adams, Cooper, Renner, Bale, Lawrence.

Hustle is improvisationally alive and crackling and knowingly tacky, but for all the enjoyment it gave me and all the award-season action it’s getting, it doesn’t quite…what? Deliver my kind of emotional through-line? I didn’t quite see myself in this thing, not really. I’m one of the few New Jersey guys who writes a daily movie column that movie stars read so don’t tell me. But it’s a good film. Better than good. It’s nervy and anxious and always up to something. It might be better than I realize.

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My first thought as I clicked on this teaser for Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar? I’m a bit tired of Matthew McConaughey starring or costarring in everything. (The first stirrings of this began with that Martin Scorsese Dolce & Gabbana ad that he costarred in with Scarlett Johansson.) My second reaction was that his accent bothers me — “To break bayhhrriers, to reach for the stahhhrrs.” My third & final thought: What the eff is McConaughey saying at the very end? I’ve listened five times on earphones and this is what I’m hearing: “Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us…’cause ahh guessee…ayhs bahss.”

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I suspect that Saving Mr. Banks might have trouble landing an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Maybe. It certainly can’t win at this stage. But Hollywood Reporter award-season analyst Scott Feinberg believes it might still be a contender for a nomination. Maybe he’s right. A seasoned industry guy told me this afternoon that “it might squeak in.” But here’s what I wrote Feinberg earlier today:

“Your post boils down to a line that says ‘since 2001, 17 of the 240 acting Oscar nominees — or 7 percent — received neither a SAG nor Globe nom en route to the Big Show.’ In other words, since ’01 less than 10% of Oscar nominees weren’t first nominated by SAG or HFPA. But more more than 90% of the time, people who weren’t nominated by SAG or HFOA didn’t land an Oscar nomination. Correct?

“Are you going to sit there and tell me that Saving Mr. Banks is doing fine as a Best Picture nominee? It’s been a bit of a weak sister all along, and after the shut-out by SAG and HFPA plus that Amy Nicholson slam piece in the L.A. Weekly, I think it’s dead. Thompson and Hanks are fine as acting contenders, but the movie is finished. It might barely earn a nomination but…

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Nobody believes the official explanation of the death of publicist Ronni Chasen…nobody. The Beverly Hills fuzz decided that a no-account African-American felon named Harold Martin Smith had pedalled seven miles on a bicycle, all the way from a flophouse on the 5600 block of Santa Monica Blvd. to the corner of Sunset Blvd, and Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills, where he allegedly shot Chasen, who was driving her black Mercedes, with four bullets. On a bicycle? As part of an alleged robbery attempt? What idiot believes he could successfully rob a person who’s locked in a car while he’s sitting on or pedalling a bicycle?

(l.) The late Ronni Chasen; (r.) the late Harold Martin Smith.

Deadline‘s Anita Busch has written an intelligent analysis of the Chasen investigation in lieu of a just-released LA County Coroner’s report. It says that a police officer reported that an “unknown vehicle” had pulled up alongside Chasen’s car [before] “someone fired approximately four gunshots into her vehicle.” The eyebrow-raiser is that the “unknown vehicle” may refer to something other than Smith’s bicycle.

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It took me over an hour to fill out the ballot for the 19th Annual Critics Choice Awards. The tallies (noms or winners, I forget which) will be announced next Monday. The pain-in-the-ass minor categories (Best Female Action Star, etc.) are what caused all the trouble. I don’t care if my picks are consistent with previously posted preferences — I go with my moods. You don’t get bonus points for voting for the favorites, although there are some people who actually vote that way.

BEST PICTURE: 1. Wolf of Wall Street; 2. 12 Years A Slave; 3. Inside Llewyn Davis; 4. Her; 5. American Hustle.

BEST ACTOR: 1. Robert Redford, All Is Lost; 2. Joaquin Phoenix, Her; 3. Leonardo DiCaprio, Wolf of Wall Street.

BEST ACTRESS: 1. Adele Exarchopoulos, Blue Is The Warmest Color; 2. Julie Delpy, Before Midnight; 3. Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: 1. Jonah Hill, Wolf of Wall Street; 2. Jared Leto, Dallas Buyer’s Club; 3. Josh Brolin, Labor Day.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: 1. Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years A Slave; 2. Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle; 3. Jennifer Garner, Dallas Buyer’s Club.

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I saw Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 12.25) for the second time last night, and it felt just as wild and manic as it did the first time. (And without an ounce of fat — it’s very tightly constructed.) And yet it’s a highly moral film…mostly. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and all the rest are never really “in the room” with these depraved Stratton Oakmont brokers. They’re obviously juiced with the spirit of play-acting and pumping the film up and revving their engines, but each and every scene has an invisible subtitle that says “do you see get what kind of sick diseased fucks these guys were?…do you understand that Jordan Belfort‘s exploits redefined the term ‘asshole’ for all time?”

Why, then, did I say that Wolf is “mostly” moral? Because there’s a subcurrent that revels in the bacchanalian exploits of Belfort and his homies. It broadly satirizes Roman-orgy behavior while winking at it. (Or half-winking.) Unlike the Queens-residing goombahs in Goodfellas, whom he obviously feels a mixed affection for, Scorsese clearly doesn’t like or relate to the Stratton Oakmont guys. But the 71 year-old director also knows first-hand how enjoyable drug-abuse can be for cocky Type-A personalities in groups, and he conveys this in spades.

Wolf is clearly “personal” for Scorsese. Like everyone else who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, he is believed to have “indulged” to some extent. (Whatever the truth of it, 1977’s New York, New York has long been regarded as a huge cocaine movie.) One presumes that Scorsese is living a sensible and relatively healthy life these days, but boy, does he remember!

And it hit me last night that The Wolf of Wall Street is going to be enjoyed by audiences as a rollicking memory-lane drug party. Anyone who lived any kind of Caligula-type life in their late teens and 20s is going to get off on it. Because as deplorable and outrageous as the film’s party behavior seems, it’s also oddly infectious.

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Earlier this year I marathoned through all 13 episodes of Season 1 of House of Cards. I intend to do the same with Season 2 when House of Cards re-launches on 2.14.14.

My “smart movie-guy friend” just told me that the “phantom-like Oscar oddsmaker” who was predicting only a week ago that Saving Mr. Banks looked like the most likely Best Picture winner…this same guy spoke today to my movie pal and reversed himself: “Banks is done,” he allegedly said. “Over. Won’t win. Not nominated for SAG or Golden Globes. Stick a fork in it.”

A friend has seen Wes Anderson‘s Grand Budapest Hotel, which will debut at the 2014 Berlinale before opening stateside on 3.7 via Fox Searchlight. “Very Wessy from start to finish, but still very special, very touching and with a little more oomph than standard Anderson,” he begins. “Ralph Fiennes gives it a gravitas that Anderson’s movies have sometimes lacked. I’d rate it way above Moonrise Kingdom, which I quite liked also.

“Grand Budapest Hotel has all the playfulness and detached air that you’d expect from Anderson,” he explains, “but at the same time I felt he’s pushing himself a little more, perhaps not out of his comfort zone but at least he’s stretching within his realm.

“The specter of 1930s fascism looms over the whole affair. Most of the film plays in a fantasy Europe of the early 30’s, but Anderson addresses fascism and impending war without making a film about it. (The ‘S.S.’ is called ‘Z.Z.’ as in ‘zig-zag organization’, for example.) The film is a flashback within a flashback within a flashback — a strategy which gives Anderson the opportunity to show how the once grand hotel has gone to the dogs under communism over time.

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The Golden Globes and SAG-influenced shifting of favorites in the latest Gurus of Gold posting is nothing short of pathetic. David Poland himself tweeted that he is “stunned, though not really surprised, how much weight my esteemed fellow Gurus give SAG and GG noms in guessing Oscar noms.”

It’s a given, I think, that the mushy-minded Academy won’t support anything nervy or ballsy or envelope-pushy, like American Hustle, or some piece of jolting social criticism like 12 Years A Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street. It’ll be Banks or Gravity or…you tell me. I hate myself for having just written that. I just gave a slight assist to the bad guys!

I wrote the following on 8.24.11: “Every year I ask what could be more worthless or contemptible in the eyes of any fim lover with the slightest trickle of blood in his or her veins than a group of online journos saying, ‘What we might personally think or feel about the year’s finest films is not our charge. We are here to read and evaluate the feelings and judgments of that crowd of people standing around in that other room…see them? Those older, nice-looking, well-dressed ones standing around and sipping wine and munching on tomato-and mozzarella bruschetta? Watching them is what we do. We sniff around, sense the mood, follow their lead, and totally pivot on their every word or derisive snort or burst of applause at Academy screenings.’

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Frank Sinatra‘s Upper East Side Manhattan penthouse is for sale. The only aesthetically tolerable area in the entire crib is the upstairs loft bedroom with the dark gray rug. Otherwise the place is a nightmare. Those floors with the godawful copper-colored squares, the Invaders From Mars metal artwork on the wall near the kitchen, the rosey tones in the other bedroom, the general atmosphere of ’60s kitsch. The only reason I paid attention is that I’ve despised and refused to use the term “horny” my whole life, but last night I fell in love with the term “horny as Frank Sinatra.” It was used in Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car.

“Everyone knows that sex sells,” writes Indiewire‘s Boyd von Hoeij in a 12.12 post. “Lars von Trier‘s latest film, Nymphomaniac, has a lot of it. So one might assume its box-office potential is pretty big. But it might not be that cut and dried. With von Trier, it never is.” Von Hoeij notes that Nymphomaniac “screened for the press for the first time last week in Copenhagen. BVH presumably attended this screening, and yet he waits until Thursday of the following week (i.e., today) to post a vaguely worded reaction? Did he have the flu?

“For starters, there’s sex on film and then there’s explicit sex on film — more often called porn,” he writes. “Except this is auteur porn and though there’s a lot of sex, there’s even more time dedicated to character, story and countless intellectual digressions. Not a lot of curious horndogs looking to get off on their favorite stars having explicit sex (via body doubles) are likely to sit through an arthouse film that’s at least double a regular feature’s length. Or are they?

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