Last night’s August: Osage County cast discussion included an interesting comment from playwright/screenwriter Tracy Letts about Meryl Streep‘s Violet Weston character, an abrasive, drug-addled matriarch who is based on his real-life maternal grandmother. Since the 2007 stage debut of Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Violet has been routinely referred to as one of the most caustic and abrasive female characters ever depicted, but Letts said last night that she’s actually a toned-down version of the Real McCoy. When he first showed August: Osage County to his novelist mom Billie Letts, she told Letts that “you’ve been very kind to my mother.”

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American Hustle was screened for elite journos last night and again this morning, and the rumble so far is that Jennifer Lawrence might be a Best Supporting Actress lock, and that Amy Adams is….well, some say she’s terrific and others not so much. One viewer told me that Christian Bale pretty much owns the movie. The ABSCAM-related plot involves a lot of lying and grifting and film-flammery, and is fairly entertaining. A friend of one of my sources was laughing in the beginning but then he stopped. The source also claims that the room felt a bit flat and cold when the lights came up.

“What’s the personal or emotional through-line?” I asked this person. “What’s this film about in 25 words or less?” He/she couldn’t say. “So it’s not Best Picture material?”, I said. “Nope…it might get nominated but no way will anyone mark it down as a #1 choice,” the friend replied. “But it’s got some great performances…the actors’ branch loves this stuff…and the music is great. It’s entertaining.” This person added, “You might really like it because you liked The Counselor.” To which I said “what?” He/she also described it as “a higher quality Ocean’s 11 type film.”

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Compare the two voices of Vanessa Hudgens in this just-posted trailer for Ron Krauss‘s Gimme Shelter (1.24.14). As the troubled Apple Bailey, Hudgens not only looks but sounds like a raw, frazzled gutter rat. Her voice is somewhere between a howl and a moan. But in the introduction that begins the trailer, a prettied-up Hudgens speaks in that chirpy, “sexy baby” Minnie Mouse mallspeak voice that all young 21st Century women have been taught to adopt. I’m sorry but I can’t take any actress seriously who sounds like that. It negates whatever chops she might deliver within a performance.

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Created earlier today by HE reader “Jery October.”

Five hours before my Seoul-to-LAX flight landed at 9 am, I dropped a couple of Ambien. I think they were 10 milligrams each. I didn’t feel much at first so I eased the seat back a tad, closed my eyes and hoped for the best. The next thing I knew we had landed and people were standing up and gathering their stuff. It was all I could do to stand up. Ambien had never hit me like this before. My sense of balance wouldn’t kick in. I felt like a woozy steer being pushed through the pen. It felt like a dream. I knew we were at LAX and that that I was walking along the hallway like a drunk. I tried like hell to stand up straight and look people in the eye and think clean thoughts. Coming down the escalator and looking at that gelatinous, shape-shifting, waterfall-like object d’art didn’t help. It took me a good hour to feel awake and attuned again.

There are movies you’ll enjoy for any number of reasons and movies you may not “enjoy” but which you really need to see and will always feel grateful for having done so. Lasting, nutritious, not conventionally entertaining but a wallop all the same, good for your soul, essential viewing. These used to be known (and perhaps still are known in in some circles) as broccoli movies. I don’t feel 12 Years A Slave is a broccoli movie as much a stunning, flat-out masterpiece, but I know some people do. Anyway I’m posting because I’m looking a list of the greatest broccoli movies of all time. Naahh, let’s say the last 43 years (i.e., beginning with 1970). Movies you were maybe a little reluctant to see at first and perhaps had to be dragged to, but once you saw them you were totally sold and you’ve been glad ever since. The other question is how many times has the Academy given its Best Picture Oscar to a broccoli movie? The answer, of course, is that broccoli movies don’t win Best Picture Oscars, unless you want to count Schindler’s List or The English Patient or A Man For All Seasons. I’ve never seen The English Patient more than once, but the other two I own and have watched several times. Well, a few.

Last June I posted a couple of shots taken during my brief stint as a mediocre drummer. Okay, a fair drummer but no Ginger Baker. Anyway, the original photographer (i.e., an old friend) sent me another shot today.

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond likes to wait until mid-November to start picking his Best Picture Oscar faves (i.e., most likely to win). So I was excited yesterday when I saw he’d finally posted a 2013 Best Picture handicap piece. My pulse quickened when I read his observation that 2013 has been a high-quality year…yeah. And that the leaders of the pack right now are Gravity, 12 Years A Slave and Captain Phillips. And that the last two not-yet-seen contenders, American Hustle (which screens in Los Angeles this evening) and Wolf of Wall Street, could re-order the situation. He also said that the recent tendency to give Best Picture Oscars to softball audience movies (The King’s Speech, The Artist, Argo) over critical favorites could help mainstream feel-gooders like Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, the Weinstein Co.’s Philomena or Paramount’s Nebraska (which could turn out to be, Hammond believes, “the little engine that could for Paramount”). I’m not saying Hammond is wrong about this stuff, but I was hoping he’d stick his neck out like Variety‘s Tim Gray recently did when he declared that Peter Berg‘s Lone Survivor is looking like a big Best Picture breakout. Or something like that.

After filing this morning (which was agony due to spotty wifi) we drove out to the Cu Chi tunnels, an underground hideout and staging area that was used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. On the shooting range I put on a pair of earmuffs and fired ten rounds out of an AK-47 — they charge you about $1.50 a round. I don’t know if I hit the target but firing this legendary weapon in rural Vietnam made my day. Tonight’s activity includes a dinner at Camargue and then a drop-by at Apocalypse Now, a bar that’s been going since ’91. The plane for Seoul leaves at midnight. I’ll have a few hours of filing time in Seoul before my Los Angeles flight leaves in the late afternoon. Back on Monday morning.

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“The studios are not in the movie business anymore,” director-producer John Landis recently said during the Mar del Plata Film Festival, which I attended a few years ago. “Some of us were very lucky. I started to make movies for the studios in the ’70s. They were dying, but at least they were still studios. There are no original ideas. What there is — and this is something no one understands — is that it is never about the idea, it is about the execution of the idea.” Exactly. The monster-on-the-loose idea behind Landis’s Schlock (’72) was nothing special, but Landis used an exploitation concept to deliver dry social satire. It was as amusing in its way as Attack The Block (which made hilarious use of blatantly fake-looking aliens) was in its own.

Marshall Fine recently ran a piece that basically said there were plenty of shit-level movies released during the 1970s, which is mainly regarded, of course, as one of the most creatively fertile and exciting eras in Hollywood history. There are bad ’70s movies you can find online (The Concorde: Airport ’79 or Midas Run) and there are ’70s films so tedious and obscure that they’ve been wiped off the face of the earth — no one’s even heard of them. I’m going to stick my neck out right now and declare that I’m the first movie journalist to even mention Quentin Masters and Don Mitchell‘s Thumb Tripping (’72) in the 21st Century and perhaps for the last 30-plus years. Well, am I?

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Hats off to Paramount marketers for their brilliant Wolf of Wall Street one-sheets. They’re appealing to the empty Coke bottles out there by suggesting it’s The Hangover meets Wall Street (i.e., a rollicking, bacchanalian, ape-crazy Roman orgy of absurd wealth, blowjobs and dwarf-tossing) instead of Wall Street meets Goodfellas, which indicates a somewhat darker journey. (At least during the second half.) Not a hint of moral complexity or impending doom or Monday-morning anxiety — that‘s the way to reach the under-35s, you bet. I’m not being facetious — this is a very, very smart campaign.