CinemaDope

by Glenn Lovell

There were more reasons not to go out to the movies than ever before. And that’s what we mostly did in 2014, stayed home ‒ by the millions ‒ choosing to concentrate on quick-turnover DVDs, PPV, streaming Netflix and other online platforms.

Which may account for why the parking lot at a nearby megaplex was eerily vacant. AMC and other chains reported a 50 percent drop in attendance over the first nine months. Especially worrying: Hollywood’s usually reliable target audience, the 12- to 27-year-old set, seemed to have lost interest. It was bound to happen, no? The iPhone/Xbox demographic has never been as nostalgic as we boomers about the “movie-going experience.”

Oh, sure, we occasionally took the bait and queued for “event” pictures, such as “Unbroken” and “Interstellar.” Almost to a one, they underwhelmed. The ragtag space opera “Guardians of the Galaxy” became the summer’s surprise draw; Disney animation and Marvel superheroes like Captain America and Spider-Man joined it on the list of Top 10 money-makers. Also performing well: the rebooted Godzilla and “Planet of the Apes” franchises. They almost made up for such crash-and-burn concoctions as “The Expendables 3” and “Dracula Untold.”

The year’s big movie story was straight out of the Dr. Strangelove-ian ’60s. North Korea threatened nuclear Armageddon in retaliation for Sony Pictures’ rude buddy comedy “The Interview.” Sony and exhibitors folded. The scatological James Franco-Seth Rogan reunion was pulled from first-run houses. No matter. The cineplex’s loss was the digital world’s gain, as the film set new records for Google Play and Xbox Live. (On New Year’s Day, Comcast VOD added the title to its menu.)

No, not what you’d call a memorable year in the dark.

Still, we were able to find a handful of titles to cheer about. Not surprisingly, they were low-budget festival favorites that favored story and character over CG effects. In no particular order, last year’s standouts were:

1. “Snowpiercer.” A mash-up of “Runaway Train” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” Like the latter, this dystopian allegory imagines a futureworld in which the haves feed off the have-nots, only now the setting is a “Dune”-inspired bullet train that gives new meaning to “coach” and “first-class.” Directed by South Korea’s Joon-ho Bong.

2. “Nightcrawler.” The best Scorsese film not directed by Scorsese. Jake Gyllenhaal as you’ve never seen him before plays a freelance videographer who will go to any lengths to score the night’s top story, even if it means rearranging a crime scene. Dan Gilroy announced his arrival as a director to watch.

3. “Whiplash.” The anti-“Mr. Holland’s Opus.” An intense pocket drama about a student drummer who falls under the spell of a relentless conservatory conductor. Miles Teller plays the would-be Gene Krupa who literally bleeds for his art, and J.K. Simmons is the tyrannical teacher. Tough to watch but rewarding, especially for Simmons intimidating performance.

Teller, Simmons in “Whiplash”

4. “Birdman.” The scandalously undervalued Michael Keaton knocks it out of the park in this hard-to-categorize dramedy about a onetime box-office champ who, drowning in self-contempt, walked away from a hit franchise, much as Keaton walked away from Batman in 1992. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárittu (“Amores Perros”) directed and co-wrote the year’s most exhilarating workout, which is, essentially, an ongoing backstage debate between a tormented “artist” and his commercial-hack alter-ego. Edward Norton, Emma Stone and Naomi Watts co-star.

5. “Flamenco Flamenco.” A new film by Spain’s Carlos Saura (“Carmen”) is always an event. One shot by the legendary Vittorio Storaro (“Apocalypse Now”) is doubly so. Saura, 83, continues his love affair with indigenous song and dance (cante, toque, baile and palmas) with this blindingly beautiful mix of performance, Goya tableaux and Brechtian stagecraft.

6. “Boyhood.” Richard Linklater redefined the family/coming-of-age drama by shooting the same cast over a 12-year stretch. Little happens ‒ except a succession of minor crises . Ellar Coltrane plays the main character, from ages six to 18; Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette are superb as the loving, soon-to-be-separated parents. If ever a film could be described as a life experience, this is it.

7. “The Homesman.” Tommy Lee Jones brings home the year’s unlikeliest triumph ‒ a grim feminist Western. Jones directed and co-stars in this adaptation of the Glendon Swarthout novel about a tough spinster (Hilary Swank) and a boozy no-account who take three deranged women by wagon from Nebraska to St. Louis.

8. “The Skeleton Twins.” Don’t be put off by the opening scene ‒ an attempted suicide. This brother-sister reunion comedy co-starring Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader proved one of the year’s most rewarding entertainments. A bit like “Harold & Maude,” only more heartfelt.

9. “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Deadpan fantasist Wes Anderson (“Moonrise Kingdom”) returns with his best looking film yet, a quirky fairy tale-political satire set in the world’s most ornate hotel between the world wars. Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolon play concierge and protégé; Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton, F. Murray Abraham and Jude Law make up part of the familiar ensemble.

10. “Life Itself.” Steve James directed this documentary about film critic Roger Ebert’s final days battling disfiguring thyroid cancer. What could have been morbid in the extreme turns out to be a fascinating, life-affirming memoir, a tribute to both Ebert the ultimate fanboy and Ebert the unlikely real-life hero.

Year’s spookiest film: Australia’s “The Babadook”

Year’s most bizarre sci-fi’er: Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin”

Year’s best vigilante/payback thrillers: “Cold in July” and “In the Blood”

Year’s best import: Sweden’s “Force Majeure”

Year’s biggest disappointments: “The Monuments Men,” “Interstellar” and “Wild”

Lovell, former movie critic for the San Jose Mercury News, teaches film studies at De Anza College in Northern California. He has written about film for Variety, the L.A. Times and, most recently, the Boston Globe.

by Glenn Lovell

As we stop to pay homage to the film greats we lost this year — Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, among them — let’s not forget Stanford University film professor Henry Breitrose, who died in October at age 78.

Breitrose

I interviewed Breitrose numerous times over the years and served as a judge with him at a student film festival. Among his illustrious students: Oscar winners Alexander Payne (“Sideways”) and Reese Witherspoon, now in the critically acclaimed “Wild.”

An English literature major who dabbled in film studies while at Stanford, Witherspoon was torn between earning a degree and continuing to ply her craft. She already had a couple of movies and TV shows to her credit.

“I advised Reese to stop out and try an acting career on the grounds that if she didn’t, she’d never forgive herself,” he recalled via email.

Breitrose, likewise, suggested the young Payne concentrate on the more practical side of film-making. The advice, you might say, has paid dividends: After graduating from Stanford and U.C.L.A., Payne directed “Election,” “About Schmidt,” “The Descendants” and “Nebraska,” collecting two Oscars for screenwriting along the way.

“Alexander walked into my office one day and said that he wanted to learn to make movies. I asked what kind? He said fiction film. I suggested that he take any of my courses that he deemed useful, which turned out to be film history and film theory, but that he spend the bulk of his undergrad studies learning about stories and story telling, so he majored in Spanish Lit.

“When it was time for him to graduate, I made a couple of calls to UCLA and arranged for him to do a graduate degree in directing with (Hungarian emigre) Gyula Gazdag, who is arguably the best directing teacher in the U.S. He is Gyula’s prize student.

“You’ll note that I claim no responsibility for Alex’s and Reese’s success. With these kinds of students, one just stands back and lets it happen.”

by Glenn Lovell

Comics as whack-job meanies ‒ I know, I know, it sounds like an oxymoron.

Williams as Sy the Photo Guy

Think back. Some of our best bad guys have been culled from the ranks of funnymen. Just off the top of my head I can think of Mickey Rooney as the frothing title character in “Baby Face Nelson,” Second City alum Alan Arkin as the killer in “Wait Until Dark,” Jerry Lewis as talk-show host Jerry (sangfroid) Langford in “King of Comedy,” and, more recently, Albert Brooks as Bernie Rose in “Drive.”

Brooks may be the most terrifying of them all. The comic used his fussy, deadpan delivery to excellent effect, making his psycho gangster as deadly with a straight razor as a quip. “That’s it, it’s done. There’s no pain, it’s over,” Rose soothes after slicing open a character’s artery.

Most comics have a dark side. That’s why they become comics, to hide or suppress their neuroses, those feelings of inadequacy.

Carell as John du Pont

We were reminded of this in spades when Robin Williams lost his battle with depression. The former standup comic-improv genius was adept at channeling his manic behavior, using it to get inside social misfits, even killers. Who can forget Williams as the deeply disturbed drug-store employee Sy Parrish in “One-Hour Photo.”

The latest comic to shock with an abrupt about-face is Steve Carell. In the critically acclaimed “Foxcatcher,” the good-naturedly dense “Office”/”Anchorman” star dons putty nose and nubby rabbit-like dentures to become the seriously weird John du Pont, heir to the du Pont family fortune and an America First super-patriot straight out of “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Carell is creepy-plus in the role, a textbook paranoid schizophrenic who shows very little outward emotion. Indeed, he walks as if he’s dead from the neck down. Besides a nasty love-hate thing with mommy dearest, the character, like Sy Parrish, doesn’t know how to interact with people. So he buys their acceptance.

Where did Carell find this character? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he tapped into something fundamentally “off” about himself, like stage fright or a fear of not measuring up. We all have it, but comics seem to bury ‒ and eventually mine it better than the rest of us.

Death knows no timetable. It takes actors when they’re just gaining traction and more often when they’ve long since passed from public scrutiny. Death took Philip Seymour Hoffman, 46, in his prime from what is being reported as a heroin overdose. The Oscar-winner for “Capote” was branching out with each new film and, indeed, had plumbed new depths as the charismatic cult leader in “The Master.”

 I sat down with Hoffman a couple of times and was, at each meeting, impressed by how low-key and self-effacing he was. What follows is a conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival, before he broke out with mainstream roles in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Charlie Wilson’s War” and the latest “Hunger Games.” We would talk again a year later at the Sundance Film Festival when he was promoting “Love Liza” written by his older brother. In that downbeat drama he played a guy dealing with the loss of his wife by getting high — on airplane glue and gas fumes.

by Glenn Lovell

In a span of just under three years Philip Seymour Hoffman has been an obscene phone caller (in “Happiness”), a New York drag queen (“Flawless”), a preoccupied male nurse (“Magnolia”), an obnoxious playboy (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”), an underground rock critic (“Almost Famo0us”), and, most notably, a painfully needy gofer for a San Fernando Valley porn merchant (“Boogie Nights”).

The New York-born, stage-trained actor has been so convincing in these beyond-the-fringe roles that his success has sort of backfired: Filmgoers don’t realize it’s the same Philip Seymour Hoffman in each role.

Hence, despite growing critical acclaim, Hoffman, 33, remains, to borrow the title of one of his vehicles, “almost famous.”

Pale and doughy-faced, he’s definitely not mainstream Hollywood’s idea of the classic leading man. But in David Mamet’s good-natured Hollywood-in-the-hinterlands lark “State and Main,” Hoffman is finally the “normal” guy who gets the small-town girl (Rebecca Pidgeon).

He plays Joseph Turner White, a timid but staunchly principled screenwriter who’s reluctant to participate in a Hollywood director’s cover-up, which has something to do with an amorous leading man (Alec Baldwin) and an underage local (Julia Stiles).

“That subplot probably won’t go over in some circles,” acknowledged Hoffman, nodding as he reached for his second cigarette of the interview. “But there is so much of this movie that’s so innocent ‒ like my story line.”

Which is a 180 for Hoffman, who heretofore has specialized in, well, more flamboyant personalities.

“I know, I know,” he agreed in that half-staccato, half mumble that has become his trademark. “This is your basic boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-fumble-over-each-other, boy-and-girl-eventually-kiss type of story. It’s really so sweet, so basic.”

Was this a conscious career move, to distance himself from those more oddball characters?

“Well, no,” replied Hoffman, who will next be seen in brother Gordy Hoffman’s “Love Liza,” about a man who copes with his wife’s death by sniffing airplane glue. “I’ve always felt the less recognizable you are, the better it is. Being a celebrity can be a good thing to a certain point. But, after a while, it can backfire.

“After a certain point, you don’t want your personality to precede you.” Hoffman figures that after nine years and approximately 60 films and plays, he’s now semi-recognizable. “I get recognized a helluva lot more now. That’s definitely changed. I deal with a certain loss of anonymity in my life, but it’s not so much that I don’t still have a life.”

For Hoffman, the bottom line remains: Serve the material, not your ego. Anything else, he sniffed, is “personality acting.”

“I think people have trouble attaching me to a particular performance because I try very hard to put the character who is on the page first, and try not to be myself I the film,” he explained.

“The approach is obviously working. No one would ever confuse his tornado-tracker in “Twister” with his pompous American abroad in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” or with his portrait of “Creem” rock critic Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical “Almost Famous.”

“I really loved playing Freddie Miles in ‘Mr. Ripley,’ “ he said. “Freddie’s kind of an ass in the way he behaves, but he also is incredibly savvy and loyal to his friends. But I’ve been really lucky to play a lot of parts like that. They’re not big parts, but they’re nice parts, and there’s a lot you can do with them.”

As the upstairs drag queen in “Flawless,” Hoffman plays speech therapist to stroke victim Robert De Niro. It was a gutsy career move. Did agents and friends wave him away from the role, given the dangers of typecasting in the still relatively homophobic movie industry?

“No, I was the one waving me away from ‘Flawless,’ “ he replied. “I was cast in the part without even reading for it. Director Joel Schumacher said De Niro didn’t want to see me read, either. I was like, ‘There’s something wrong here.’ Because I wasn’t sure I could do the part. But I kept reading and re-reading the script and eventually I felt, ‘This is something I can do.’ So I went for it. I worked my buff off. It was scary.”

Most established actors would have shied away.

“Yeah, yeah ‒ I know. But being ‘typed’ wasn’t even a thought. I know who I am as a person. Who I am as Phil is extraordinarily clear to me. That all that matters ‒ my work, my art form.”

by Glenn Lovell

Judging from the latest batch of 10-best lists, the year in film began less than a month ago. Most of the wrap-ups from the big dailies are padded with late 2013 releases. Once again, the media played into Hollywood’s hands by lauding the last-minute arrivals, which had to be superior because they were held until the fall, i.e. “awards season.” This strategy, of course, stems from the (not unfounded) belief that Academy voters and film critics have worse memories than the Bruce Dern character in “Nebraska.”

This time that thinking boomeranged. Several worthwhile winter-spring releases such as “42” and “Side Effects” went all but overlooked, while a number of the arty, desperate-to-please holiday arrivals ‒ “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” for starters ‒ monopolized the year-end critics awards and Golden Globe nominations.

With this in mind, I purposely sorted through the entire year for my favorites. The movies that stood out, in no particular order:

1. “Side Effects.” Part medical exposé, part labyrinthine whodunit, this slow-boil thriller had us hooked from the crime-scene opening. Credit Steven Soderbergh, who also scored with “Behind  the Candelabra.” This is his best since “Traffic” ‒ and another reason why he should rethink those early retirement plans.

2. “The Great Gatsby.” I’ve never been what you’d call a fan of Baz Luhrmann’s hyperbolic brand of filmmaking. (His “Moulin Rouge” topped my 10-worst list.) This time, however, Luhrmann’s signature razzamatazz (kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley meets Beyoncé meets hip-hop) provided a daring new take on Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic. Leonardo DiCaprio, sans Quaaludes, was a good choice for the fatally smitten Jay Gatsby.

3. “All Is Lost.” Robert Redford in a late-career triumph as an old man adrift in the Indian Ocean ‒ without an engine or a scrap of dialogue. Pure cinema!

4. “Don Jon.” A foxy, fast-paced screwball comedy about a working-class stiff who’s addicted to porn. Joseph Gordon-Levitt directed, wrote and starred in this unexpected charmer.

5. “The Hunt.” A Danish-Swedish import about a diffident daycare worker wrongly accused of sexual misconduct. Mads Mikkelsen gave one of the year’s most sensitive performances as a good man-turned-town pariah

6. “Simon Killer.” Antonio Campos (“Afterschool”) directed this startling psychological thriller, a hip blend of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Last Tango in Paris.” Brady Corbet, who also co-scripted, played the creepy title character, an American abroad with definite personality issues.

7. “12 Years a Slave.” At last, an antidote for Tarantino’s cartoonish “Django Unchained.” Steve McQueen directed and Chiwetel Ejiofor starred in this grim but unshakable adaptation of the Solomon Northup memoir about a “free man” bound into slavery ‒ and suffering not only soul-shattering degradation and whippings but also survivor’s guilt.

8. “Dallas Buyers Club” / “Mud.” Matthew McConaughey seemed to be everywhere this year. He deserves an Oscar nod for his good-ol’-boy con artist who, after contracting the AIDS virus, wheels and deals his way to a new self-awareness. Jared Leto scored the year’s most amazing transformation as a woman biding her time in a man’s body.

9. “Blue Is the Warmest Color.” A 3-hour lesbian romance from France that, despite some lip-smacking reviews, is about a whole lot more than graphic sex. Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a high-schooler who falls under the spell of  an artist ( Lèa Seydoux) and loses more than her heart. At times you want to look away, the soul-baring is that intense.

10. “Nebraska.” A quixotic road picture. Bruce Dern, never better, plays a wily old-timer who, with feckless son (Will Forte) in tow, aims to collect on his birthright, a “winning” sweepstakes number. Another wry, meandering winner from Alexander Payne (“Election,” “Sideways”).

Best Animated Feature: “The Wind Rises,” Hayao Miyazaki’s magnum opus.

Best Exploitation: “The Conjuring,” the spookiest haunted-house chiller in years and James Wan best since the original “Saw.”

Year’s Most Overlooked: “To the Wonder,” a floating, free-form recitation on amour fou from the suddenly prolific Terrence Malick.

Among the year’s worst: “The Counselor,” “Man of Steel” (all CG, no substance), “World War Z,” “Meet the Millers,” “The Lone Ranger,” “The Hangover Part III,” “Grown Ups 2” and — somehow from the folks who brought us “Drive” — the blood-soaked “Only God Forgives.”

Worst Exploitation: “Maniac” and “You’re Next.” In the latter, a soon-to-be-skewered woman screams, “Why are they doing this to us?!” Why? Because you’re too stupid and unpleasant to live.