A sage but familiar observation was repeated during last night’s Virtuosos panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Selma star David Oyelowo was asked by Fandango’s Dave Karger about his reactions when both he and director Ava DuVernay failed to snag nominations for Best Actor and Best Director, which many felt were due. The fact is that 2014 was a brutally competitive year in the Best Actor category, and the bottom line is that Oyelowo, who delivered a forceful and impassioned performance as Dr. Martin Luther King, was (a) simply out-flanked by the four locks (Birdman‘s Michael Leaton, Theory‘s Eddie Redmayne, American Sniper‘s Bradley Cooper, The Imitation Game‘s Benedict Cumberbatch) and (b) failed to elbow aside the weak wildebeest in the pack, Foxcatcher‘s Steve Carell, apparently because Carell’s prosthetic nose trumped Oyelowo’s oratorical panache. And also because of the hoo-hah that broke out in December when it became clear that DuVernay had mischaracterized the actions and initiatives of President Lyndon B. Johnson during the months leading to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But Oyelowo ignored all that and instead repeated a generic observation from the Hollywood Racism rulebook, which is that until recently the Academy has been more supportive of black performers who play kindly, acquiescent, put-upon characters rather than ones who’ve played forceful leaders and steely, stand-alone guys who don’t back off, like Denzel Washington‘s revolutionary in Spike Lee‘s Malcom X or Sidney Poitier‘s tough, principled detective in Norman Jewison‘s In The Heat of the Night. And yet among all of Morgan Freeman‘s Oscar nominated performances, his first was for playing the distinctly malevolent, non-kindly “Fast Black” in Street Smart (’87)

Today is the 100th birthday of the great actor-producer Norman Lloyd, whom I had the honor of interviewing at his home a little more than nine years ago. At the time I was hopping up and down over Lloyd’s smallish but eloquent and quite stirring performance in Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes. Two or three years ago I ran into Lloyd again when he was being honored in Cannes. Here’s a Todd McCarthy tribute that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter a week or so ago, and here’s a piece from Variety‘s Scott Foundas that posted yesterday. Scott Feinberg‘s two-part, two-year-old video interview with Lloyd is after the jump, ditto my ’05 interview. If there’s any kind of gathering for Lloyd today or tomorrow I’d sure like to drop by and pay my respects. Wells to Kenny: Norman Lloyd is another guy you wouldn’t want to describe as “really nice.” He is that, of course — one of the most kindly and gracious men I’ve ever spoken with — but there’s so much more to him that calling him “really nice” would almost sound like a kind of banal dismissal.

Former Cannon Films co-owner Menahem Golan, the flamboyant instinct mogul who paid me a half-decent salary when I worked as a Cannon press kit writer from mid ’86 to early ’88, has died in Israel at age 85. What a character, what a personality. A large, bagel-and-cream-cheese-eating man who lived large, if not with a great deal of strategic or artistic precision.

Menahem never really embraced the Movie Catholic faith. He lived for the hustle and bustle of making and selling movies, but…well, let’s give him a friendly send-off for now. The slings and arrows will be felt soon enough when Mark Hartley‘s Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, a doc that allegedly presents an honest, no-holds-barred account of the Cannon Films heyday, has its big debut at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival.

As I hear it, Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys — a largely sympathetic, warm-hearted documentary about former Cannon honchos Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — was made to counterbalance the impact of a forthcoming, less-compassionate doc about the Israeli-born moguls from Mark Hartley called Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. I was therefore expecting an overly fawning portrait from Medalia’s doc, which I saw last night, and it does constitute a charitable view. It looks the other way at loads of lively material that could have been used. (Having worked for Cannon as a press kit writer during ’86 and ’87, I know whereof I speak.) But as obliging portrayals go, The Go-Go Boys is a reasonably accurate and fair-minded one. It feels as if it was made by an intelligent member of Golan or Globus’s inner family — intimate, admiring and even faintly critical from time to time.

The problem is that The Go-Go Boys won’t acknowledge the elephant in the Cannon room. The reason Menahem and Yoram made almost nothing but crap is that they loved the action and the chutzpah in their veins (winning awards, making money, signing big names, the crackling excitement of “being there”), but they never really got it. Their affection for movies was enthusiastic but primitive. An under-educated rug-merchant mentality could never really fit into a business that is also, at heart, a kind of religion. The best filmmakers have always operated on a devotional Catholic principle. I believe that Menahem and Yoram were never devoted enough to the faith and traditions of great, soul-stirring cinema. They never really respected the idea of wearing cinematic monk robes.

Here’s a one-hour BBC doc about Cannon Films, apparently lensed around ’87 or ’88…but it’s hard to tell. “I worked as a Cannon staff press-kit writer for much of ’86, all of ’87 and into early ’88, so I know whereof I speak,” I wrote in August 2010. “I know all about that operation and the mentality behind it. There were quality exceptions here and there (which I was very grateful for), but the films were mainly schlock. Which fostered a certain atmosphere among Cannon employees. ‘Fatalism mixed with humiliation resulting in gallows humor’ is one way to describe it.”

I’m getting sick and tired of HE commenters saying I’m such a Steven Spielberg basher that I have no credibility when I write about his films — that I’m blinded by some blanket aesthetic contempt or whatever. Even Sasha Stone has suggested this. An hour ago I answered a couple of guys who threw this charge at me (“you have zero credibility when it comes to judging a Spielberg movie”) as follows:

I have no credbility because I’m convinced that Spielberg is a high-end journeyman hack with an all-but-incorrigible sentimental streak? There is ample…make that mountains of evidence to back up that view. He’s probably the only hack in Hollywood history with a personal net worth of over $3 billion, but that’s an asterisk, not a disqualifier. He loves what he’s doing and so do tens of millions of viewers, but he’s essentially a showman — an impersonal ringmaster in the Ringling Bros. tradition. He’s not quite the Cecil B. DeMille of our time, but he’s in that realm.

I’ve been grappling with Spielberg and his films for 40 years now (starting with the televising of Duel in ’71) and I feel I really know the man inside and out.

Almost all of Spielberg’s movies have been about the fact that he’s a skilled, highly gifted filmmaker who likes to “get” audiences and sell tickets. The charge that was first thrown at him back in the late ’70s and early ’80s (along with DePalma and Lucas) is that he’s a middle-class, not especially worldly or well-read kid from Arizona who likes to make movies about other movies, and that he’s not exactly swept away or lifted up with great feeling or conviction about the world outside the Hollywood realm.

Spielberg hasn’t really grown out of that. He still lives in his own world. War Horse is the latest of his films to make that abundantly clear.

With the exception of Schindler’s List and E.T. — arguably the only two films in his canon that have delivered truly personal, deep-down convictions and emotions (as opposed to generic sentimentality about family, tradition, the American way of life, the U.S. military during World War II, the paintings of Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, etc.) — Spielberg’s filmmaking passion has mostly been about being nothing more or less than commercially successful filmmaker.

Spielberg’s mission has always been about making Joe Popcorn enthralled and amused and soothed and entertained, and he’s always done this by showing us how happy and soothed and entertained Steven Spielberg is while making a film. He loves wearing that red coat and top hat and shouting “ladies and gentleman!” through a megaphone and bringing out the dancing elephant and the trapeze artists and the lion and the lion tamer with the boots and the whip and the chair.

Few have his naturally strategic directorial eye, or his special compositional instincts and intelligence. He’s always delivered that special mise en scene excitement, that snap-crackle-popcorn, but he’s never been a serious filmmaker who engages with the world he lives in and/or his own personal core issues (other than his love of cinema).

Spielberg never puts any intimate issues and passions into movies, probably because he doesn’t have any intimate issues and passions (other than his love of cinema). He’s about the cinema of impersonal passion and conviction, about his worship of movies that turned him on as a kid and of great influential directors and great classic films, and of solid craftsmanship and cool smash cuts and great rollercoaster chase sequences and all that.

He’s a jumble of talent and pizazz and a grab-bag of influences without any real core of his own. He’s Mr. Americana, Mr. Hook, Mr. Always (“It’s England, man!”), a money machine, and the most successful shallow filmmaker in motion picture history.

And for 13 years I’ve hated, hated, hated the fact that Spielberg cheated when he went in tight on the old grieving man’s eyes in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan and then cut to Tom Hanks and his comrades on the landing craft about to land at Omaha Beach. That was a wildly dishonest cut (or transition), and for me it brought the whole film down a notch or two.

Spielberg was a golden boy and a filmmaking dynamo operating in the exact right moment in time from Duel through E.T./Poltergeist, although I became convinced when I saw 1941 (which included an hommage to Jaws, four years after that film came out) that he was quite the egotist, and that he didn’t have the outside-the-Hollywood-realm experience or bull-headed integrity to be John Ford or Howard Hawks.

And then he resurged with the third Indiana Jones film (which I genuinely love on a chapter-to-chapter basis).

And then he found Schindler’s List, a story and a subject he deeply cared about and brought his core convictions to, and almost a total abandonment of his usual look-at-how-clever-and-enthused-I-am devices (except for the little red-tinted girl in the ghetto) and sentimentality (except for Liam Neeson weeping with guilt at the end).

Believe it or not, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a six-day tribute to Cannon Films from 11.19 to 11.24. What’s next — a black-tie tribute at Alice Tully Hall to Elie Samaha? From the online program guide: “Israel’s answer to Simpson and Bruckheimer, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and their production and distribution company, Cannon Films, bestrode the 1980s with gleeful exploitation-movie schlock and quality auteur cinema from Godard, Cassavetes, Mailer and Ruiz.”

The idea, I’m guessing, is to stay away from the films of Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris, Albert Pyun and Charles Bronson and crap like Masters of the Universe, Superman IV and Over The Top and focus on the small handful of semi-decent flicks that Cannon cranked out — i.e., Barbet Schroeder‘s Barfly, Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train, Richard Franklin ‘s Link, Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance and — if you want to be extra-accomodating — Tobe Hooper‘s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Forget Jean-Luc Godard‘s King Lear, which I dismissed as a masturbatory time-waster and, as a senior Cannon employee put it at the time, “a total fuck-you letter to Menahem.”

Here’s that piece I ran last August about my experience as a Cannon staff writer from ’86 to ’88, called “That Cannon Stamp.”

I’ve read more than one description of The Expendables as a kind of ’80s action film. Director-cowriter-star Sylvester Stallone has not only paid tribute to his action-star heyday, but resuscitated the look and style of Reagan-era action flicks (including, to some extent, the calibre of special effects as they existed back then). But there’s a better, simpler shorthand: The Expendables is a 1986 or ’87 Cannon Film. It feels cut from the same cloth as Cobra and Over The Top.

The trick or attitude with The Expendables (or at least one that I suspect was in Stallone’s head when he made it) is that it’s an ’80s action flick in quotes. The fighting and gun battles are staged with vigor and meant to be taken as semi-serious high-throttle diversion, but also with a self-referential nudge. Stallone and Willis and Lundgren and the rest doing the old half-chuckle and saying “remember this shit when it was fresh, or at least fresher?”

Cannon-produced action pics never winked. For all their relentless mediocrity, they all had a fairly solemn tone. But The Expendables summons the Cannon spirit by being fairly cheeseball. It seems to have been made with an assumption that its audience doesn’t want anything too shaded or subtle or deeply felt — that they would actually be unhappy if it went in those directions.

With the exception of Runaway Train, Cannon action flicks were always boilerplate and frequently awful. Anyone who’s ever seen Down Twisted (’87), directed by Albert Pyun, knows what I’m saying.

Cannon Films was a very curious culture with an exploitation film attitude (i.e., movies regarded as “product”), but Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus threw a lot of money around and a lot of serious people took it for this and that reason.

“I had my nose pressed against the glass for 20 years,” Norman Mailer once said about Tough Guys Don’t Dance. “It took Cannon Pictures to say they believed in me to the tune of $5 million. There were nights when Menahem Golan woke up and said, ‘I’m giving $5 million to a crazy man who’s never directed a movie? I must be crazy myself.'”

I worked as a Cannon press-kit writer (staff) for much of ’86, all of ’87 and into early ’88, so I know whereof I speak. I know all about that operation and the mentality behind it. There were quality exceptions here and there (which I was very grateful for), but the films were mainly schlock. Which fostered a certain atmosphere among Cannon employees. “Fatalism mixed with humiliation resulting in gallows humor” is one way to describe it.

I had a nice little office on the fourth floor. I had a desk, phone, window, chair, two filing cabinets and a styrofoam ceiling that I used to lob sharp pencils into when I was bored. But I also got to meet and work with Barbet Schroeder on Barfly, Mailer on Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Herbert Ross on Dancers, Tobe Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Godfrey Reggio on Powaqqatsi and Richard Franklin on Link.

I barely spoke to Golan and Globus, and that was okay.

But I was in the building when Schroeder stood in Golan’s office and threatened to cut off his finger with an electric chainsaw if Golan didn’t greenlight Barfly. And I talked to Mickey Rourke over the phone once and managed to piss him off (but that was par for the course back then). And I became slightly chummy with former SNL alumnus Charles Rocket (who killed himself about five years ago). And at Schroeder’s insistence I rewrote the Barfly press kit about ten or twelve times (to the point I couldn’t read the sentences any longer), but I learned that relentless re-writing, if you’re tough enough to handle it, does result in a bulletproof final draft.

I also had to write press kits for Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Assassination, The Barbarians, Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars, Masters of the Universe, Down Twisted, The Arrogant and others I’d rather not think about.

Here’s a great Cannon website with several funny quotes.

“So old-fashioned as to look like something brand new, the stop-motion-animated Fantastic Mr. Fox is as recognizably a Wes Anderson film as any of his previous features,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “Roald Dahl‘s 1970 children’s favorite about a fox clan and friends eluding human predators has been transformed into a tale of odd family dynamics stemming from the behavior of an eccentric patriarch.

The second talking-fox picture of the year, after Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist, this one features not genital mutilation, but a leading character who gets his tail shot off. It also boasts some of the most gorgeous autumnal color schemes devised by someone other than Mother Nature herself, animal puppets festooned with actual fur, and a sensibility more indie than mainstream.

“The film’s style, paradoxically both precious and rough-hewn, positions this as the season’s defiantly anti-CGI toon, and its retro charms will likely appeal more strongly to grown-ups than to moppets; it’s a picture for people who would rather drive a 1953 Jaguar XK 120 than a new one.

“It’s a curious coincidence that Anderson and Spike Jonze, two of the more prominent musicvid-turned-feature directors, have kid-lit adaptations featuring puppets (albeit of vastly differing sizes) coming out simultaneously, and that both Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are strive for such hand-crafted, individualized looks. The films may have their problems, but the least one can say is that neither very closely resembles anything that’s come before.

“Mr. Fox is characterized by chapter headings that slide across the screen; trademark Anderson compositions that resemble storyboards and abundant lateral camera moves; a soundtrack that easily accommodates everything from The Ballad of Davy Crockett and the theme from Day for Night to the Beach Boys’ version of Ol’ Man River; and a hirsute male lead who would look right at home on the cover of GQ.

Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) wears a double-breasted, pumpkin-colored corduroy suit, a custard-hued sweater and two stylish wheat stalks peeking out of his breast pocket. His slim, trim wife (Meryl Streep) complements him perfectly, and when he tells her, ‘You’re still as fine-looking as a creme brulee,’ Anderson’s sophisticated following will nod with pleasure while their kids think, ‘What the heck?’

“As in Dahl’s 81-page yarn — whose pencil-sketch illustrations by Quentin Blake (in some editions) could not be more different from Anderson’s fastidious visuals — Mr. Fox’s pelt is desperately desired by three nasty farmers whose produce he regularly poaches. Boggis and Bunce and Bean, “one fat, one short, one lean,” launch all-out war on their adversary, digging down into his lair before recruiting snipers to shoot on sight.

“The geological precision with which Fox and his friends’ great escape is presented reps one of the film’s visual highlights, as they furiously dig through layer after layer of earth to stay ahead of their enemies’ onslaught. Along the way, Fox burrows up into the three men’s properties, from which he pilfers enough to prepare a giant feast, while the war continues to the point of becoming a televised siege.

“But the overarching drama doesn’t interest Anderson and fellow screenwriter Noah Baumbach nearly as much as the family issues. In contrast to the book, in which the Foxes have four largely undifferentiated kids, here they have but one son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), who isn’t sure he can meet his father’s expectations. Joining them in flight are unassertive cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), opossum Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) and lawyer Badger (Bill Murray).

“Plainly set in England, the film maintains a linguistic divide between British-accented humans and American-accented animals.

“The thematic thread here pertains to the maintenance of one’s true personality and character strengths. When they have a child, Mrs. Fox gets her husband to promise to cease being a wild thing (apologies to Jonze) and become respectable. When he subsequently reverts to his old, buccaneering ways, Mr. Fox must do so surreptitiously, and when he’s caught in a lie, his wife is deeply distraught that he hasn’t really changed.

“But it’s his true character that wins the day, and it’s a trait Anderson clearly advocates through his own choices.

“Employing a deliberately unpolished, herky-jerky style that traces back specifically to Ladislas Starevich‘s 1941 The Tale of the Fox but also variously recalls the imperfect but imperishable stop-motion techniques in the silent The Lost World, the original King Kong and the work of Ray Harryhausen, Norman McLaren‘s A Chairy Tale and many others, the film achieves a feel that is at once coarse-grained and elegant, antiquated and the height of fashion.

“That said, individual scenes often go off in irritatingly self-indulgent directions, especially when they brush upon lifestyle issues, meditation timeouts and too-cute observations.”

“A sort of let’s-put-on-a-show summer-camp lark for director Ang Lee after the dramatic rigors of Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution, Taking Woodstock serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen,” declares Variety‘s Todd McCarthy.

“Given the film’s vast canvas and ambition to provide a kaleidoscopic portrait of a generational movement, the personal issues of Demetri Martin‘s Elliot Tiber — his feelings of responsibility to his immigrant parents, closeted gay status and general behavioral uptightness — seem unduly magnified in relation to everything else that’s going on.

“Elliot (who in real life was 34 at the time, older than the ‘generation’ in question) is a mild-mannered, unassertive guy without much electricity as a central screen presence. In the role’s conception and casting, Elliot is clearly patterned after Dustin Hoffman‘s Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, but the effect isn’t remotely the same.

“Despite being temporally defined by the run-up to the fest and the weekend itself, the pic has a formless, unstructured feel, as its attention jumps from incident to incident in almost random fashion. Some distantly heard music serves notice that Woodstock itself has begun, but the stage is only ever glimpsed from atop a faraway hill. The musical performances are clearly not the subject of the film, but there’s no denying that their absence makes Taking Woodstock feel oddly incomplete; the table is set, but the meal never gets served.

“Other than the oddly extended attention devoted to the harsh irascibility of Elliot’s unbendingly greedy mother, pic is pleasant enough on a moment-to-moment basis, but the separate sketches never coalesce into anything like a full group portrait.”

Excerpts from my 5.15 Taking Woodstock review: “It too often feels ragged and unsure of itself…Elliot’s story comes through but [it seems analagous] to a story of the D-Day Invasion that focuses on Francois, a closeted young man in his 30s who doesn’t want to work at his parents’ Normandy bakery any more…Elliot was a man of 34 who’d been around a bit — Martin plays him like Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock…no Woodstock concert footage is mixed into Lee’s movie, and [while] I kept telling myself that it’s Eliot’s story, not Woodstock II, I wanted glimpses of the real thing…the story is weakened, in my book, by Imelda Staunton‘s strident and braying portrayal of Tiber’s mother-from-hell…[the film] doesn’t coalesce in a way that feels truly solid or self-knowing.”

For the second time in two days, Hollywood Elsewhere is raising a glass and offering a hearty pat on the back to Ryan Gosling — first for delivering a supple and layered-enough performance in Lars and the Real Girl to persuade Huffington Post guy Nick Antosca that Gosling’s Lars may be a serial killer in sheep’s clothing, and secondly for exiting the set of Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones one day before the start of principal photography over “creative differences.”

Ryan Gosling; Peter Jackson

The story obviously won’t be complete until somebody divulges the particulars, but anyone who tells the notoriously unrestrained and full-of-himself Jackson to go fly a kite gets a thumbs-up from this corner on general principle.

Mark Wahlberg has replaced Gosling; shooting starts today in Pennsylvania.

Slate‘s Kim Masters is reporting that the Gosling walk-off “may lead to litigation, though it’s still unclear what the fight was about.” She also speculates that the incident may be “worrisome” for Gosling, what with ticking off Jackson and DreamWorks honcho Steven Spielberg simultaneously. Ryan, you have earned the loyalty and respect of untold multitudes by telling Jackson where to shove it, including, I’m sure, many people in the industry. Good fellow!

In the view of Huffington Post contributor Nick Antosca, Lars and the Real Girl is “the newest entry in a small subgenre of recent movies: the Endearing Potential Serial Killer Comedy.

“The only other entry in this subgenre is The 40 Year Old Virgin. I laughed about one and a half times when I watched [that film]… the jokes seemed lame and forced and the writing was amateurish, but the big problem was that Steve Carell‘s character just seemed so fucking creepy. That weird, strained stare…that rabbity way of speaking… those little dolls all over his room. I had the distinct feeling that if he got pushed just far enough, he’d snap and put someone in a crawlspace.

Same with Ryan Gosling‘s moustachioed, vaguely greasy lead character in Lars and the Real Girl. “So Lars is so uncomfortable with human contact that he buys a life-size sex doll made of silicon and weighing as much as a real human to be his girlfriend? Okay. And he brings it to dinner and props it up at the table and calmly talks to it as if it’s talking back, to the alarm of the other dinner guests? Okay. And everyone in the small town decides to pretend that the doll is a real person, because they love Lars so much and humoring his delusion is therapeutic?

“The movie treats Lars if he’s just a little shy, but the hilarious thing is that he’s clearly insane and dangerous. If you’re unhinged enough to believe that a mannequin is actually a human, then you’re probably unhinged enough to convince yourself that a human is actually a mannequin. And then what would be the problem with, say, chopping its head off?

Lars is “the more extreme version of the suspension-of-disbelief problem, already written about pretty much everywhere, that plagues a lot of recent comedies,” Antosca writes. “Catherine Keener and Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin? Dimly plausible…but a stretch. Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up? Good movie, but no way. Emma Stone and the obese, sociopathic Jonah Hill character in Superbad? Never.

“Judd Apatow…please, no more.”

A voice is telling me Antosca is onto something here. Could this be the beginning of the “Make Lars into a Serial Killer” online movement? Look at that face…look at that moustache. The guy’s a sick deranged fiend. Satan in a flannel shirt! Give him an axe and set him loose upon the town.

If anyone wants to Photoshop any horror film posters with Ryan Gosling front and center, I guarantee I will post them with full credit acknowledgement.