Last night I attended my second viewing of Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Short Term 12 (Cinedigm, 8.23), which I saw for the first time in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. It’s basically about a small team of 20something counselors (principally Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr. and Rami Malek) at a kind of halfway facility, doing what they can to massage or otherwise chill down a group of errant kids who’ve suffered through parental-abuse issues or scrapes with the law. Hailed at last March’s South by Southwest and the winner of an Audience Award at last June’s L.A. Film Festival, it’s a real-deal, character-driven indie that delivers a plain, no-frills current that never quite feels “acted.”

Short Term 12 star Brie Larson prior to last night’s screening at Vine Street Academy theatre.

(l. to r.) Mysterious moderator, Larson, Gallagher, Dever, Malek, Stanfield and director-writer Dustin Daniel Cretton.

Costar Kaitlyn Dever.

Read more

If George Clooney had decided to use, say, a Glenn Miller or an Andrews Sisters tune for this Monuments Men trailer, he would be indicating a certain classic approach to his telling of this, a real-life World War II saga. But no — he’s gone with “Kiss The Sky” by Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra. That plus the dry, low-key humor should tell you a lot. During last May’s Monuments Men set visit I told Clooney that I detected a jaunty tone in the script. Clooney smiled and said, “Yeah, but we’ve taken some of the jaunt out of it since.” Like I said in the piece, “Clooney likes to aim his films at places where people live, and in this context he’s looking to make a film that does the old ‘play to the smarties but also to the popcorn crowd’ routine.”

Read more

Jacob Kornbluth‘s Inequality For All (Radius/TWC, 9.27) , a profile of economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, is “clear, precise, needle-sharp…a brilliant, highly engaging, knowledge-expanding doc about a vital political topic that I really admired, was thoroughly engaged by and, to my surprise, was even emotionally moved by.” — from a couple of 2013 Sundance Film Festival posts.

The trailer for Spike Jonze‘s Her popped yesterday, and today it was announced that Her will close the N.Y. Film Festival. This has all been orchestrated. It’s all part of a grand plan. Bypass the Telluride Venice Toronto roundelay and then parachute into the NYFF. “You didn’t see us coming but we’re suddenly very much in the award-season conversation…snap!” Also today a Brian Brooks q & a with Spike, to wit: “There are so many different aspects to [Her]. Obviously technology has become such a big presence in our lives and, I definitely know, in my life. I think of how much of my daily interaction is with and through technology…and it’s an emotional experience too. It’s about love and our need to connect and our [method] of connecting. But, at its heart, it is a relationship movie.”

The N.Y. Film Festival debut of Paul Greengrass‘s reality-based suspenser is about seven weeks off, and the commercial opening is on 10.11. This is the lull before the Oscar season hubbub. Savor the relative calm and quiet of these last few weeks. Less than three weeks before the start of Telluride 2013. Free weights, breathing exercises, treadmill, zinc tablets.

“Trauma is not just the result of major disasters. It does not happen to only some people. An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster. One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us. Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it.” — from Mark Epstein‘s 8.3 N.Y. Times Op-Ed piece, “The Trauma of Being Alive”

If Gregory Peck had been clairvoyant and under the influence of a truth drug on the night he won the Best Actor Oscar for To Kill A Mockingbird in March 1963, he might have said, “Well, this is it…the peak moment. I’ve been lucky enough to play starring roles for the finest producers, directors and writers in the business for the last 18 years…Spellbound, Duel In The Sun, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Paradine Case, Twelve O’Clock High, Roman Holiday, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Moby Dick, The Bravados, The Big Country, Pork Chop Hill, On The Beach, The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear…and it’s been wonderful. I’m saying this because for the next 40 years it’s going to be all downhill. Oh, I’ll make a few interesting films over the next couple of decades but my charmed career period is over and I know it. Some actors only get lucky for ten years or so. I nearly had 20. And for that I’m very grateful to the industry and especially to the public. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

Read more

There’s one thing I’ve learned when a rich person buys a long-established company, and that’s to always ignore any optimistic, forward-thinking statements about the company’s future he/she might put out in a press release. Don’t kid yourself — Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is going to slice and dice and make a whole new kind of omelette out of The Washington Post. I’ve been hearing for years that the Post has one or two dinosaur-brain editors who can’t quite wrap their heads around the online publishing thing, so at least they’ll be whacked before long. That, as T.E. Lawrence said about General Murray’s departure in Cairo, will be “a step in the right direction.”

The descriptions of Too Much Johnson (1938), that long-lost Orson Welles “film” that’s now being restored for a 10.9 premiere in Italy and a 10.16 screening at the George Eastman House, suggest that it’s no big deal. For one thing it’s not a “film” but three shorts that Welles shot as prologues for the three acts of his adaptation of William Gillette‘s 1894 comedy. And for another the play died out of town. So we’re basically talking about an old cinematic sideshow, a diversion, a bauble.

“This is by far the most important film restoration by George Eastman House in a very long time,” said Paolo Cherchi Usai, the curator who supervised the project for George Eastman House…oh, blow it out! “Holding in one’s hands the very same print that had been personally edited by Orson Welles 75 years ago provokes an emotion that’s just impossible to describe”…oh, take it easy!

I think we all understand that Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25) is a revisiting of Cormac McCarthy‘s cutthroat drug-trade realm a la No Country for Old Men minus the sardonic refinements of the Coen Bros. and the rueful lamentations of Llewelyn Moss. Slicker, more uptown, present-day, cheetah on a leash, babes in towels and bikinis, uglier.

I don’t like the name “Theodore Twombly” — way too nerdy and fanciful — and I didn’t like the first 10 or 15 seconds of this trailer. But I fell for it the instant that Joaquin Pheonix said “hi” because it’s obvious he’s totally jettisoned his tongue-flicking alcoholic serpent personality from The Master (which I was afraid was going to pop up again and again) and is exuding a new openness and warmth and vulnerability. Spike Jonze‘s Her could be something else. I find it interesting that it’s not going to Venice or Toronto or New York, and that it’s just opening on 11.20. I think that means something. Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pratt and Scarlett Johansson costar.

Jonze hasn’t made a feature film about adult humans since Adaptation, which came out 11 years ago.

The participation of dp Hoyte van Hoytema (The Fighter) is a huge plus.

This was apparently taped ten or more years ago, but I knew right away that Steven Spielberg was again misremembering. He’s right about the vibe inside the wooden pen before Kirk Douglas‘s fight to the death in the Capua arena, but the unsettled expressions are exchanged not so much between Douglas and John Ireland, as Spielberg recalls, but Douglas and Woody Strode. Strode’s face conveys a certain dark resignation and even a kind of morbid amusement whereas Douglas…well, his expression isn’t quite as layered.