Critic-bashing!
Big Eyes, Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Birdman, Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) and Chris Rock’s Top Five all feature newspaper critics who act churlishly or downright cruelly toward their noble heroes, who only want to make art and release it into the world. If it’s any consolation, I was sick of Birdman well before the critic character arrived.
Length doesn’t matter!
Now that it’s possible to play the same movie on every screen of a digital megaplex, the old idea of “spill and fill” – keeping a picture short in order to pack five or six shows into a single-screen theatre on a given day – is less of a factor in box office returns. Thus, movies can now be as long as an auteur wants! Of course, running time is no guarantee of quality. Both Boyhood and Transformers: Age Of Extinction run two and three-quarter hours one is a masterpiece, the other masturbation. And speaking of directors who’ve lost themselves to self-pleasure, don’t get me started on the eight hours I’ve spent watching The Hobbit.
Monsters can be heroes, too!
Universal’s Dracula Untold was the first salvo in the studio’s plan to “reboot” its classic monsters as quasi-superheroes in a shared universe, along the lines of Disney’s Marvel movies and Warner’s post-Man Of Steel strategy for its DC characters. What the hell, right? The Hulk is basically a werewolf story anyway. I want to see how they shoehorn the Mummy into a Batman-style vengeance picture.
Movies you don’t get to see
We already know about The Interview being terrorized off the screen, but The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Them was yanked from its scheduled release literally hours after its Toronto press screening. It hadn’t done anything wrong – this was just the latest slap in the face for writer/director Ned Benson’s remarkable romantic drama, which had already been trimmed by more than an hour from the amazing two-part Him and Her that screened at TIFF 2013. Canadian distributor eOne will release Them on VOD and disc sometime in the new year, but as for seeing Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy’s career-best performances on a big screen? Not gonna happen.
