Roman Polanski-philes now have James Greenberg‘s Roman Polanski: A Retrospective to add their biographical collection. I’ve torn through about half of this 287-page book since returning from New York on Thursday night, and I can say without question that Greenberg’s essays on Polanski an∂ his films are as authoritative, perceptive and well-finessed as F.X. Feeney‘s in his 2006 Polanski book, and that the photos in this coffee-table hardback are second to none. It’s both easy to read and easy not to read, but you’ll want to read it.

Greenberg and I did a phoner this morning around 10:30 am — here’s the mp3.

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Yesterday morning Deadline‘s Mike Fleming quoted Monuments Men director-star-cowriter George Clooney about Sony shareholder Daniel Loeb, who recently ripped into Sony honchos Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton for the tanking of After Earth and White House Down: “I’ve been reading a lot about Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund guy who describes himself as an activist but who knows nothing about our business,” Clooney began, “and he is looking to take scalps at Sony because two movies in a row underperformed? When does the clock stop and start for him at Sony?

“Why didn’t [Loeb] include Skyfall, the 007 movie that grossed a billion dollars, or Zero Dark Thirty or Django Unchained? And what about the rest of a year that includes Elysium, Captain Phillips, American Hustle and The Monuments Men? You can’t cherry-pick a small time period and point to two films that didn’t do great. It makes me crazy.

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Having missed last Tuesday’s screening of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons at the Walter Reade, I finally caught it yesterday afternoon on my Macbook Pro while waiting at Newark Airport for my Virgin America flight to LA. Obviously it’s not that great but it’s not that bad either. Or at least it didn’t seem that bad after reading all those shitty reviews. The characters couldn’t be chillier or more spiritually vacant, but that’s the idea, right? It’s present-day Los Angeles as a kind of Dante’s Inferno. Everyone lies, nobody trusts anyone, a rancid scene every which way. The film has issues (including technical ones) but I got through it. I wasn’t greatly offended.

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The best films always start off impressively or at least respectably, and then they get better (i.e., richer, deeper, more dazzling) with each successive viewing. Kubrick’s films always do this. In this sense Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango In Paris is an exception as far as my own reactions are concerned. I was so knocked out by my first viewing that I wound up seeing it five or six times within a two- or three-month period, but over the last couple of decades (and especially during my most recent viewing via Bluray) it’s been falling off and generally losing its potency. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen it too often, but portions of this landmark film almost irritate me now. I can’t stand those scenes between Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud, for example.

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With the exception of a 24-hour visit to George Clooney‘s Monuments Men set in rural Germany roughly three months ago and then a two-day visit to Lauterbrunnen in early June I’ve been living in intense, thundering, big-time cities over the last three months — New York, two weeks in Berlin, 10 days in Cannes, 20 days in Paris, five or six days in Prague, back to Paris and then a straight 40-day bunkdown in New York’s financial district (i.e., since 6.20) with the highly significant girlfriend.

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The best elements in Billy Bob Thornton‘s Jayne Mansfield’s Car “are the performances from Robert Duvall and John Hurt,” London Evening Standard critic Derek Malcom wrote last February from Berlin. “To see these two pitted against each other is sheer cinematic joy. To watch Billy Bob, Kevin Bacon and Tippi Hedren too is an additional pleasure.”

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The 86th Academy Awards will be hosted by Ellen DeGeneres…okay. She’ll be fine. EDG was nominated for an Emmy after emcee-ing the Oscar telecast in ’07 so whatever. The song-and-dancey, Vegas-minded Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will again executive produce. The show will air on Sunday, March 2nd — seven freaking months from now. And the 2013 Oscar season begins less than 30 days hence with Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York…bang, bang, boom. Get ready, cadres. It’s gonna be a long bumpy ride. Well, a long one anyway.

When it comes to Machete flicks, slapdash genre-wanker Robert Rodriguez — a man who has lived in torment for 20 years over his inability to make another movie as good as El Mariachi, his debut film which cost $7000 — morphs into Zucker Abrahams Zucker. Amusing as a trailer (the Charlie Sheen menage a trois gag works), probably very trying as a feature. You can’t sustain this kind of tonal attitude over 95 or 100 minutes — it turns into cottage cheese. No name-brand director is as deeply opposed to infusing his films with thematic or spiritual content as Rodriguez. He would sooner slit his throat than have one of his films deliver subtext (except for his “let’s have fun with this or that exploitation cliche by overcranking it” bullshit). You’ll never get more than what you see when you watch a Rodriguez fick.

I need to speak to someone who can tell me how to pronounce David Oyelowo‘s last name. I hesitate every time I try to say it. My tongue shrinks from the challenge. Oh-yay-low-woe? My inner ten-year-old wants to say oh-yellow.

The Shane Bluray is “simply astonishing,” Blu-ray.com’s Michael Reuben wrote on 7.30. “Details, densities, black levels, textures and colors are all revelatory. I literally felt that I was seeing a film I had never seen before.

“It’s not just in the obvious scenes, such as the mountain vistas around the Starrett farm. It’s also in the subtler shadows of the day-for-night sequences (what director George Stevens called the ‘Rembrandt lighting’), such as the encounter between Ryker and Joe Starrett after the Fourth of July celebration, where the shadow detail is just sufficient and the shades of black and blue layer over each other in just the right proportions to create the sense of depth and danger that Stevens and dp Loyal Griggs intended.”

“J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost has completely blown everyone away at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s a knockout — a riveting piece of pure, almost-dialogue-free cinema, a terrific survival-on-the-high-seas tale and major acting triumph for Robert Redford, who hasn’t been this good since…what, Brubaker? All The President’s Men? A long time.

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I have to fly back to Los Angeles this evening. I’ll return to New York after Telluride (9.2) and stay until flying to Toronto on 9.5, and then I might return here again. (Or not.) But that’s not the issue. The issue is whether or not to re-launch an L.A. screening series that I ran in the late ’90s, which I called Hot-Shot Movies. It would be no different than all the other screening series around town. $175 or $180 bills for nine sessions consisting of a new un-opened film plus the director or one of the stars doing a short q & a (i.e., no longer than 30 minutes).

I have a relatively high profile these days and a bit of a following. Plus I have good talent relations (especially with directors), and I’m guessing I’ll have a pretty good shot at getting guys like Alfonso Cuaron and George Clooney and other big dogs to drop by. Hopefully. Maybe.

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