Last night I attended a screening of Alan and Gabriel Polsky‘s The Motel Life (Front Row, 11.5), a gentle lower-depths drama about a couple of loser brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee Flannagan (Emile Hirsch, Stephen Dorff), whose morose, hand-to-mouth life goes from bad to worse when Jerry Lee accidentally kills a kid with a hit-and-run. A sad but sensitive thing, Life (which was first reviewed 11 months ago at the Rome Film Festival) is better than decently directed, and Dorff and Hirsch’s performances are undeniably skillful and well measured. Supporting players Dakota Fanning and Kris Kristofferson are memorable also. The great Werner Herzog, who bonded with the Polsky brothers when they produced his Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, introduced the film (which is based a Willie Vlautin novel) and moderated the post-screening discussion.

(l. to r.) Emile Hirsch, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, Werner Herzog, Stephen Dorff following last night’s Academy screening of The Motel Life.

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With word starting to circulate about David O. Russell‘s American Hustle (Sony, 12.13), I asked a colleague why he believes Russell’s film is the most likely Best Picture champ. Here’s his reply: “I suspect that 12 Years a Slave is this year’s Brokeback Mountain and Social Network — a film that will probably sweep the critics awards, but will have a hard time with the Academy’s passion-driven Phase 2 voting system, which rewards the movie that the most people enjoy. The alternative could be Gravity, a brilliant technical accomplishment which is [mainly] just a fun trip to the movies. So I think the most likely alternative is American Hustle based on (a) things that I’ve heard and (b) the fact that Russell is clearly on a hot streak after The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook.”

Whoa, wait…now that we”re hearing that Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street will most likely be out by mid or late December, isn’t that back in the ring as a possible hot contender?

Hustle has been test-screening in the L.A. area over the last two or three weeks. (Another screening is happening later this week.) I’ve read two positive non-professional reviews so far. One that I’m not quoting from (don’t ask) calls it Russell’s “most ambitious film.” What follows are reshuffled and slightly edited excerpts from a four-day-old AICN review from a guy called Mitch McDeer…I’m sorry, I meant Mitch Henessey, who thinks it may be Russell’s “masterpiece”:

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If anyone can send me a copy of Russ & Roger Go Beyond, Christopher Cluess‘s screenplay about the making of Russ Meyer‘s Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, I’d be grateful. I never saw this 1970 schlocksploitation parody. Perhaps the main thing that dissuaded was that young Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay. I always wondered what Ebert — fat, brilliant, bespectacled, desk-bound — could have possibly known about hot lascivious chicks and the charged sexual atmosphere of the late ’60s. Imagination obviously counts for a lot, but you have to…look, I don’t know what Roger was up to in the ’60s but I don’t believe he was up to very much, okay? No offense.

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In my previous post about the death of Stanley Kauffmann I wrote that movies are still humming and crackling for the most part, but “you could certainly argue that the arrival of the post-cinematic, sub-literate, sensation-and-explosion-seeking, digitally-attuned generation of jizz-whizz moviegoers (by far the least educated and most reality-averse in Hollywood history) and the filmmakers in their midst has brought things to an all-time low.” And I’m wondering if we can put a list together of under-40 filmmakers who are not in this bag?

I don’t think I’m being too dismissive or pessimistic to say that generally speaking the under-40 generation of filmmakers (mostly born between the mid ’70s and mid ’80s although there are some arrested-development types between 40 and 50) are inclined tward cinematic imaginings that have clearly been more influenced by their online and gaming experiences as teens and 20somethings than by real-life experiences, and who are more or less committed to composing and presenting stories, activities and images that reflect digital as opposed to organic realms. Filmmakers, in short, who are more or less opposed to the idea of making films about the actual world. When I say this I mean scripts that are (I know it’s a pain but bear with me) based on actual, first-hand-observations of human behavior and the real-world physical laws that govern things like running, falling, fist fights and the like. In both the dramatic and comedic realms, I mean.

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The legendary film critic Stanley Kauffmann, whom I didn’t read with any regularity until the mid ’70s (which is when I started to really pay attention to movies and began to try to separate the few stalks of wheat from the bales of chaff), passed this morning at age 97. He kept writing (and very beautifully at that) right to the end. Kauffmann was devoted to the art of clean, complete sentences. Within two or three paragraphs (and more often within one or two), his reviews always got down to the meat. Along with Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, John Simon and six or seven others, Kauffmann was one of the kings of my realm when I was started out as a deeply insecure freelancer in ’77. And I never even met the guy. (I never met Kael either although I spoke to her once on the phone — she seemed guarded and aloof and a bit snooty, but I’m presuming she had her warm side.)

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Late this morning I spoke with documentary veteran Bob Smeaton about his latest film, Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A’Comin’, which PBS will debut on November 5th. (Here’s my 10.3 review.) The first question was whether Smeaton or anyone from Experience Hendrix LLC (i.e., the notoriously conservative-minded family business that controls Hendrix music rights) has seen John Ridley‘s All Is By My Side, a kind of docudrama about Hendrix’s breakout year (mid ’66 to mid ’67) with a striking lead performance by Andre Benjamin. Sematon said he hasn’t but that he considers films of this type to be of limited interest because they tend to fictionalize and because pretending dilutes the truth.

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Studly, sword-brandishing, robe-wearing beardo: “I know what you are.” Tantalizing Lucretia McEvil: “You have no idea.” Brrrnnnggg! Any film in which a major adversarial character says “you have no idea” is instantly disqualified. Everything loathsome and detestable about 21st Century mass-moron pulp entertainment in one downmarket Asian combat film. Cartoon-level CGI. Robes. Samurai swords. Catchy macho-challenge lines (i.e., “C’mon”). Steely glares. A once-influential marquee-name actor reduced to pandering to people whose taste in movies couldn’t be more primitive or less evolved.

We all know the movie cliche about a character having a nightmare. The vibe gets more and more intense until the person wakes with a start — bolting upright, eyes wide open, damp-faced. I remember complaining about these scenes a year or two ago in the column (can’t find the link), but damned if this exact thing didn’t happen to me a couple of nights ago. I was submerged in a dream in which something scary or threatening happened (ducking an oncoming truck, trying to avoid falling off a cliff), but it happened so suddenly that I flinched. So severely that it woke me up, and so suddenly that I experienced some kind of whiplash spasm that gave me an aching neck. (What the hell just happened?) The pain subsided a few minutes later but talk about your James Stewart-waking-up-from-a-nightmare-in-Vertigo moment. I haven’t experienced anything like that since my early 20s, when I dreamt I was in a propeller airplane that had lost a wing or been hit by a missile and was tumbling in a tailspin. I remember that dream like it was yesterday.

I learned earlier today (and I’m told that some kind of statement will be forthcoming) that the currently running New York Film Festival (9.27 to 10.13) won’t be presenting a secret screening this year. As I hear it, the festival’s programming director Kent Jones had hoped to arrange a special showing of Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street, but that dream went south when a elephant-sized cut delivered by Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker failed to satisfy Paramount Pictures, the film’s distributor, necessitating their return to the editing room. For whatever reason no other unreleased film quite fit the bill. A fair-sized portion of Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel was viewed but it’s nowhere close to being completed. David O. Russell‘s American Hustle seemed like a good candidate but it’s currently going through a fine-tuning process via research screenings and isn’t quite ready to be shown. I’m guessing that the NYFF statement will say something like “with sad regret we’ve decided not to have a NY Film Festival secret screening this year but we’re having a great festival regardless,” etc.

The bottom line is that Stephen Frears‘ Philomena “despises the policies of the old-school Catholic church of Ireland and rightly so,” I wrote on 9.9. “Variety‘s Justin Chang called it ‘a howl of anti-clerical outrage wrapped in a tea cozy.'” I called it a “gentle, tender-hearted, intelligently written film about an elderly Irish mother named Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) looking for a son she was forced to surrender for a blind adoption back in the mid ’50s, and about the fiendish Irish nuns who, consumed by the belief that Philomena was an unfit mother due to becoming pregnant out of wedlock, arranged to sell the boy to American parents and kept his origins a secret, even when he returned to Ireland as a grown AIDS-afflicted gay man, trying to find his biological mom.

“The nuns, based in a convent near Limerick, refused to tell the grown son anything. Philomena had likewise been unsuccessful in learning any facts about her long-lost child (whose adopted name was Michael Hess) and didn’t come to the truth until she hooked up with author and former government guy Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), whose book, ‘The Lost Child of Philomena Lee,’ is the basis of Coogan and co-writer Jeff Pope‘s screenplay.

“These are the facts behind Sixsmith’s book as well as the film, and anyone who wants to complain about spoilers can stuff it. The story is out there, the book was published in ’09…you can’t spoil a story that’s been widely absorbed for four years, and which has been Amazon’ed and Wikipedia’ed and discussed all to hell.”