Last night Deadline‘s Anna Lisa Raya quoted American Hustle producer Richard Suckle, who attended Saturday afternoon’s Deadline Contenders event at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, that David O. Russell’s film “was locked down today.” Which means that the visuals are finalized but that the music and mixing aren’t done yet. Five days from now (or on Friday, 11.8 at 9:30 pm) Russell will sit for an AFI Film Fest q & a tribute consisting of clips from Hustle as well as previous D.O.R. films. I’ve been told that Hustle won’t screen for press until 11.22 or thereabouts, but it seems a bit odd to have Russell do a big tease presentation inside the Egyptian and not give fans a special treat. But Russell can’t, I’m told. The film won’t be fine-tuned and screenable for another two weeks after the AFI thing. AFI programmers have no film due to screen after the Russell talk and this will be a Friday night so something could be screened…theoretically, I mean. It just won’t be American Hustle.

Before reading a piece called “Bresson Gone Bad” by FilmKrant‘s Adrian Martin, I had never contemplated that Only God Forgives director Nicholas Winding Refn might be some kind of watered-down or, more to the point, deranged aesthetic descendant of Robert Bresson…the thought!

“Refn is surely a curious case,” Martin writes. “He joins Carlos Reygadas and Gaspar Noe (whose Enter the Void is clearly the Big Brother of Only God Forgives) in a loose grouping of filmmakers who try to marry a certain contemplative or ascetic legacy, on one side — that means, especially, the legacy of Robert Bresson and, and in a slightly different vein, Jean-Pierre Melville — with lurid, sensational, decadent, violent content on the other side.” Wells insertion: Let’s not forget Heli‘s Amat Escalante!

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Kerry Washington‘s Oprah imitation in last night’s opening SNL skit is/was, for me, the single best thing she’s ever done. That includes her supporting performance in The Last King of Scotland and especially her turn in the absolutely dreadful Django Unchained, which she actually lost points for appearing in.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has just advised me to be more vigilant in policing ugly comments on this site. Well, I do get rid of people who won’t stop with the personal insults or obnoxious scoldings, but I guess I need to ask again for a little more civility or at least for more effort in the parsing or shading or careful phrasing of sentences. I’ve been writing about the need to cut down on the piss-spray element for about five years. I would love it, believe me, if I could raise the intellectual water levels or at least attract some Cambridge don-like commenters who might….aahh, what’s the use? I’m a broken record on this topic. Things never change around here.

“Interesting, thoughtful, well-phrased opinions of any kind are eternally welcome here,” I wrote three or four years ago. “I believe in beauty, redemption, catharsis and the daily cleansing of the soul. I live for the highs of the mind — for the next nervy retort, impertinent crack, witty turn of phrase, turnaround idea or wicked joke. And I know — we all know — that blunt-gruff reactions and persistent ideological ranting works against the flow of such things. I will not permit the infinite array of reflections about life, movies and politics that could and should appear on Hollywood Elsewhere to be suppressed or pushed aside by the relentless hammerhead barking of a small cadre of ideological Mussolinis, tough guys and hardballers.”

I can’t be led around on a leash during the mid-November Vietnam visit. It was okay last year as I didn’t know anything, but not again. I’ve told the Vidotour guys that I want my freedom for at least one day, due respect. “The basic idea is that I do not want to fly from Danang to Nha Trang on Thursday, 11.21,” I told the chief rep. “I want to either drive or at least take a train between Hoi An/Danang and Nha Trang.

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Sandra Nettelbeck‘s Last Love is a gentle, agreeably low-key relationship drama, set in Paris, about a platonic affair between a widowed, 80-something professor (Michael Caine) and a younger French lady (Clemence Poesy). Nettelbeck directed and adapted Francoise Dorner‘s “La Douceur Assassine” into a screenplay. Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson play Caine’s somewhat snide and snippy kids, and Jane Alexander plays his deceased wife (i.e., she pops in for an occasional ghost scene). Being a fan, I called Nettelbeck in Berlin yesterday morning to chat for a bit.

Last Love director-writer Sandra Nettelbeck.

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Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that Paramount and Skydance execs are “sweet” on Attack The Block‘s Joe Cornish to direct the third Star Trek film. A great payday for Cornish if it happens, but the the ability to be a kind of visionary traffic cop on a costly, CG-laden Trek film is exactly what Cornish has shown he’s not adept at doing. He’s looking for a big-time career and that’s fine (he co-wrote fucking Ant Man), but when I think of Cornish I think of a guy who was clever enough to make a good monster-invasion film on a nickle-and-dime budget.

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I’m about to sit down with a screener of Dheeraj Akolkar‘s Liv and Ingmar: Painfully Connected, which was first seen 13 months ago at the 2012 New York Film Festival. The doc is set to open on 12.13 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe on 65th Street in Manhattan and in Los Angeles at Landmark’s Nuart. I have to say that the gentle piano music on the trailer soundtrack has me worried. Akolkar “directed” and “wrote” but the film is obviously Liv Ullmann‘s recollection of her long relationship with Bergman and not, say, some impartial God’s-eye view. A woman’s film, in short, about one of the most worshipped filmmakers of the 20th Century who…oh, yes, that’s right, was quite depressed and gloomy and neurotic for much of his life. And he liked the ladies.

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The general attitude is that you don’t want people watching your film at home if you can help it. Too many distractions, too easy to pause or fast forward. You want them fully engaged in a theatre, staying with it, in it. But I felt a bit distracted when I saw In A World in a theatre, and I’m wondering if this is the kind of film that almost plays better on a disc because you can cantake a short break when a sluggish moment happens and then come back to it 20 or 30 minutes later without losing anything. Lord knows that are films that have to be seen in a theatre (Gravity, All Is Lost, 12 Years A Slave), etc. You know that when older Academy members pop in 12 Years A Slave at home they’re just going to fast-forward through the rough parts.

All I do with this column, day after day after effing day, is lay it out there as honestly and openly as I can. Knowing full well that the p.c. brownshirts will be after me with baseball bats for a good portion of whatever I post. It goes in waves and cycles. Sometimes I just shrug it off and other times it gets to me. Lately I walk around in fear. I’m so terrified of the next trauma that I’m almost wimpishly polite with everyone. If I can order a cappucino at Le Pain Quotidien and pay for it without somebody looking at me cross-eyed I almost weep with relief. If I have to step around a dog I say “excuse me.” I don’t step on cracks in sidewalks or on rocks of any kind because they could be land mines or camoflauged anacondas or boa constrictors.

I’m getting really sick of arguing all the time with guys like Kris Tapley. (Tapley is the new David Poland these days — surly, dismissive, knows it all.) Last night two friends of that gay guy who lives upstairs and loudly giggles and cackles every morning like clockwork around 7 am called to complain that I had hurt his feelings. “But I didn’t identify or even vaguely allude to who he is,” I replied. “I just wrote that the giggling was incessant and that it was driving me nuts.” That awful, awful episode when I reported about that kid with some kind of debilitating condition who couldn’t control himself in that Manchester, Connecticut theatre…it took me two or three days to recover from that one. If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have used the word “platypus” in the comment thread but otherwise I was simply stating that theatres are churches and movie-watching is like Holy Communion and that everyone needs to respect that. The mob hate…Jesus!

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Corey Feldman has written a tell-all book called “Coreyography.” About halfway through his HuffPost chat with Ricky Camilleri, Corey Feldman responds to his reputation as a “Poster Boy For Fallen Child Stars.” Quote: “I don’t blame anybody. I don’t blame myself. Life is what life is. Things happen the way they’re meant to [happen]. And at the end of the day, I’m eternally grateful that I’m still here, that I’m still working [and whatnot]. I’m eternally happy. I feel like a blessed man. You have to keep moving forward, keep reinventing yourself, keep recreating yourself.” It gets better around the 15-minute mark. “Michael Jackson [wasn’t] a child molester”? Really?

Earlier this year Charlie Countryman (Millenium, 11.15) was called The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman — a film festival title that was zotzed for obvious reasons. Right now is has a 33% Rotten Tomatoes rating. “A gripping, violent film that owes an unabashed debt to the Tarantino-penned love-in-low-places story True Romance,” wrote Empire‘s Damon Wise. Variety‘s John Anderson stated that the film contains “barely a serious moment…with the actors offering up vaguely tongue-in-cheek portrayals of characters either too cliched or unpleasant to deserve much else [while the] ending will have viewers shaking their heads in dismay.”