I’ve never been a huge fan of CinemaCon product-reel shows. The emphasis is always on rumbling, pounding, gut-slamming wham-o-rama rather than intrigue and seduction, but big-studio trailers have been operating this way since the ’80s. They all say “we know you’re looking for a ride rather than a film, and that you’re probably ADD-afflicted and texting someone while you watch this so we’re cutting and scoring this trailer in order to snag your attention for 60 seconds or so.” This is mostly what I was feeling from yesterday’s Warner Bros. presentation at CinemaCon — a series of attempts to make you want to try this or that Magic Mountain ride rather than watch this or that movie.

I realize, of course, that Warner Bros. occasionally makes and distributes films that aren’t aimed at Shallow Hals (American Sniper, Her, Inherent Vice) but they’re not really in the business of trying to entertain semi-educated adult film mavens. That notion flew the coop a long time ago.

From my balcony seat I saw four trailers for Warner Bros. films that (a) didn’t feel theme-park-y or franchise-y or cloying or aimed at submentals and (b) appear to be about semi-adult, character-driven situations and didn’t necessarily involve monsters or supercool heroes or chase scenes or explosions.

The most distinctive seemed to be Scott Cooper‘s Black Mass (9.18), a fact-based drama about notorious ex-Boston crimelord Whitey Bulger. It was clear from the footage that Johnny Depp‘s striking, atypical performance as Bulger is going to be in Best Actor contention. Heavy makeup, a steely demeanor, a voice that I’ve never heard come out of Depp before — he’ll be in “the Derby”, for sure.

The footage for Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of The Sea (12.11) goes to the moon to make it seem like a whale-as-Godzilla film, but I’m assuming this is a standard deflection. Nathaniel Philbrick’s 15-year-old novel is mainly a survival at sea thing. WB is clearly planning a Best Picture campaign.

I don’t believe Ben Affleck was being entirely honest yesterday when he explained in writing that he asked Finding Your Roots producer Henry “Skip” Gates, Jr. to ignore the fact that one of his ancestors was a slave owner because he “felt embarassed…the very thought left a bad taste in my mouth.” That may well have been the case, but the main reason, I strongly suspect, is that Affleck feared — understandably, I would add — that the outrage culture crowd on Twitter would tar and feather him as a scion of a racist bloodline, however moronic that notion sounds.

If Finding Your Roots had decided to reveal this particular lineage, would it make a lick of sense for the p.c. crowd to scream “Affleck is descended from racists so he must be a closet sympathizer”? No, it wouldn’t. That would be a bone-dumb assumption, to say the least. But you know that at least some lefty Stalinoids would suggest this all the same. They won’t tolerate the slightest manifestation of anything that doesn’t express a morally correct, ethically forward-thinking representation of humanity or history in any film, TV show, political discussion or what-have-you. And they don’t want to know from nuance.

“Outrage culture” is running wild these days and Affleck, no dummy, is fully aware of the potential. Time and again the p.c. mob has read things in a kneejerk, cretinously simple-minded fashion and made absurdly broad conclusions as a result. For all Affleck knew, this “scion of racists” idea could become an urban legend like Richard Gere putting a gerbil up his ass, and it could affect his financial and creative future.

It’s nuts out there, really nuts. But Affleck didn’t want to characterize Twitter culture as stupid or deranged, which in itself could land him in hot water, so he decided to use the “really embarassed” line, which is true, I’m sure, as far as it goes. Who wouldn’t feel shamed by this knowledge, but then again who was walking around during the early to mid 1800s with the moral convictions of a decent 20th Century person, let alone a veteran of our own time? Not everyone, I assure you.

It’s now 11:45 pm in Los Angeles. I flew from Burbank Airport to Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport early this afternoon, arriving around 1:25 pm. A little more than seven hours later I was on an 8:45 pm flight back to Burbank. Why? Basically bad luck. A Southwest Airlines traveller innocently (and, I have to say, rather stupidly) mistook my smallish black suitcase for her own and left the airport with it, leaving hers behind. But I didn’t discover what had happened until early this evening. All day long I was considering the possibility that my bag had been stolen or perhaps sent to Baltimore or Portland or whatever, and I just didn’t want to deal with this, certainly not in godawful Las Vegas with the dregs of Middle America waddling around in their shorts and sandals and summer dresses…I despise almost everything about that town, and being without a suitcase just pushed me over the edge.

It was my fault for not standing vigilantly by the McCarran baggage carousel earlier today. I decided instead to sit down and flip through Twitter and write a couple of quick emails. And then I made the grievous error of hitting the head just before the baggage carousel began revolving. When I returned my bag wasn’t there. No trace, no clue…the fuck? I went to the Southwest baggage claim office and filled out a form, etc. The baggage ladies said they’d almost certainly find it and call me within three or four hours.

I checked into my pathetic dump of a Howard Johnson’s hotel on Tropicana Avenue and then ambled over to Ceasar’s Palace. I picked up my “Admit One” press badge (thanks Mitch!) and attended the Warner Bros. presentation, which I found numbing and oppressive and mostly depressing. (More on that tomorrow.) But when I got out of the show I didn’t see a message from Southwest. Uh-oh. I started to ask myself what I was going to do. No suitcase meant I’d have to hit a market a mile or two away and buy the usual toiletries along with a couple of pairs of socks and underwear and maybe an extra shirt and whatnot, and I really didn’t feel like doing that. I was tired and irritable and made a snap judgment to bail on the whole Cinemacon thing and just head home. Sincere apologies to Mitch Neuhauser, but I’ll probably survive without the 2015 Cinemacon experience.

Patrick Brice‘s The Overnight (The Orchard, 6.19), which I caught at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, isn’t exactly hah-hah “funny” but it’s definitely oddly amusing. A congenial suburban sex-kink comedy about an innocent 30something couple (Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling) being gently manipulated into sexual receptivity by a mellow predatory couple (Jason Schwartzman, Judith Godreche) looking for a little action, or more precisely to spice up their own love lives. It really does work for the most part, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my most vivid recollections of this film, which are basically two scenes in which Schwartzman and Scott go full-frontal, and one of them is hung like a horse and the other like a cashew. Anyone who watches The Overnight and says these scenes didn’t make a big impression is a liar.

It was revealed during this morning’s Paramount show at Cinemacon that footage from Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation of Tom Cruise hanging on to a Airbus A400M as it lifts almost a mile into the air is 100% real.  Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Cruise performed the stunt eight times. That’s a very ballsy stunt and full respect to Cruise for manning up, but it almost doesn’t matter because nobody believes anything they see in a movie is real so who cares? If the shot had been CG’ed and green-screened the net effect would be identical. Because, as Werner Herzog famously said seven or eight years ago, “Nobody trusts their eyes any more.”

HE’s own Guillermo del Toro has been announced as one of the jury members for the 68th Cannes Film Festival. Led, guided, goaded or in some way orchestrated by Joel & Ethan Coen, the other jurors are actresses Rossy de Palma, Sophie Marceau and Sienna Miller, singer-songwriter-guitarist Rokia Traore (who?), director-actor Xavier Dolan and actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Last year’s foo-foo-minded jury (Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Willem Dafoe, Nicolas Winding Refn, Leila Hatami, Gael Garcia Bernal, Carole Bouquet, Jeon Do-yeon) decided on a worthy but somewhat contentious Palme d’Or winner in Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep. I’m somehow sensing that whatever the ’15 jury decides upon, there will be less of a “what the eff?” reaction? These guys seem a bit less eccentric, more “open to the currents,” etc.

Since the first teaser the common consensus has been that the FX in Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland (Disney, 5.22) are state-of-the-art. This seems all the more clear now. And George Clooney‘s curmudgeonly hermit is, it appears, an action stud to some degree. The shot when they depart the current dimension for some realm beyond while lying in a bathtub reminded me, of course, of that Mamas and the Papas album jacket photo. Right?

I’ve been hearing about Jon Schnepp‘s labor-of-love doc about the Nic Cage Superman flick that never happened for…what, two or three years now? There’s been a couple of crowd-funding campaigns. In any event it’s finally completed, ready to roll and here’s hoping. Superman with ’80s rock-star hair. The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? will actually open theatrically in “select” U.S. theaters on 5.1 followed by VOD, Bluray and DVD exposure in July. Schnepp looks so nerdy, and those shirts! — why does there have to be a two-shot of him sitting next to every interview subject? And why does he nod all the time? I’ve done this for years. You don’t have to nod. Just listen and ask good questions — that’s all it takes.

Lee Marvin finally graduated out of playing bad guys with his double role in Cat Ballou, and after that he had three years in which he appeared in really good films — Ship of Fools (’65), The Professionals (’66), The Dirty Dozen (’67) and Point Blank (’67). And that was nearly it. Three years. From ’68 on Marvin started turning good stuff down (William Holden‘s role in The Wild Bunch, Robert Shaw‘s role in Jaws) or starred in not-so-hot films like Pocket Money or Hell in the Pacific or Paint Your Wagon. He appeared in one final decent film, The Big Red One, in ’80. He died in ’87 at age 63. “You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this business,” Marvin once said, “and the next forty years trying to get out. And then when you’re making the bread, who needs it?”

I don’t want to give Russell Crowe a hard time over his direction of The Water Diviner (Warner Bros., 4.24), a melancholy, handsome period drama about love, loss and grief. Okay, with pretty landscapes and occasional action scenes. I felt as if it was always trying to soak me with emotion. Or yank it out of me. I found it more meandering than mesmerizing but let’s be gracious and acknowledge that Crowe tried like hell to be Peter Weir here. Give him a B for effort at least. There’s always the next time.

On top of which Crowe gives a balmy, kind-hearted performance as an Australian farmer, Joshua Connor, who’s looking for some kind of closure over the loss of his three sons who were killed during the terrible battle of Gallipoli, which took the lives of 46,000 Allied soldiers (over 8000 Australians) and wounded 250,000.

The film is basically about Connor travelling to Turkey in 1919 to find his son’s bodies and if possible lay them to rest with a prayer, but what can happen with all three having suffered so horribly with so little to show? We know the answer from the trailer. This recently widowed man of 50 will fall in love with an alluring Turkish woman (Olga Kurylenko) who’s a good 20 years younger. But right away this feels a bit off. The problem (and I’m not trying to be an asshole here) is that Crowe has become too girthy to play a romantic lead. Maximus has morphed into Peter Ustinov in Spartacus, and grown a thatch of gray hair in the bargain. I know he wasn’t this gutty in Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah so you tell me.

I’ve never attended the opening day of Cinemacon as a rule, and tomorrow morning I’ll be missing the 9:30 am Paramount presentation…sorry. My flight from Burbank arrives in Las Vegas around 1 pm so I’ll have my “Admit One” pass and be inside Caesar’s Palace in time for the Warner Bros. presentation (Tuesday, 4:30 pm). I’m also committed to sampling the 4DX experience as well as IMAX laser projection, Dolby Vision and Barco DP4K-60L laser projection. I always love my first 24 hours in Vegas but can’t wait to escape after 48.