I was going to say I’m as pleased with Ridley Scott‘s The Martian as the next guy. It’s fine — a smart, well-jiggered, studio-formula rescue movie. It’s basically Argo in space with a brainier script and a welcome emphasis on nerd science and good botany. Except I’m bothered by the over-praise from nearly every journalist who attended last night’s L.A. screening. Every so often a smart, classy, satisfying entertainment will come along — a movie that gives you a perfectly good handjob — and for whatever reason it makes perceptive, emotionally balanced critics wet themselves. These guys know better but they lose their bearings and drop to their knees and go all falsetto on their readers.

I didn’t flip out when I saw The Martian in Toronto, but I liked it as far as it goes. I called it a “seriously enjoyable, technically satisfying and emotionally inspiring big-studio rescue + popcorn movie that’s about as deep as a jacuzzi. And it’s fine for that. It’s aimed at the people who really love halftime shows at the Super Bowl. And it’s very amusingly written and rank with pop-music usage and smart-ass commentary — it’s almost a Tarantino movie in some respects.”

On top of the handjob this thing is looking to give you a backrub. It uses formula-uplift plotting all the way. That and the same kind of cleverly written stock dialogue and stock characters you’ve seen in a dozen escapist films like this. The same kind of chops, in fact, that were used in those Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action ensemble films from the ’90s or early aughts. It’s great when a film like this assumes that you’re smart enough to get all the terminology and whatnot. And at the same time assuring you that nothing too crazy will happen.

Two days ago I sank into a depression pit following Room‘s big audience-award win at the Toronto Film Festival. Then I was slammed by HE commenters and on Twitter for being a  sexist curmudgeon. And then I felt even worse after reading Katey Rich‘s Vanity Fair piece about how Lenny Abrahamson‘s film is now looking like a game-changer in the Best Picture race. But then shafts of light pierced through the clouds, and now it appears as if the beginnings of a nascent counter-movement among free-thinking XY-chromosone types may be forming. The comfort of fraternity, of siding with like-minded fellows! I don’t like Room at all, and therefore I am.

First, Time‘s Rebecca Keegan tweeted that she “can’t figure why Room has made some dudes so angry.” My heart skipped a beat. “Dudes” as in plural? Keegan pointed to a tweet by Mashable‘s John Lincoln Dickey in which he called Room “an awful, joyless, airless experience.” Thank you, God! I knew then and there that an army of Room haters were out there. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Then I heard from a big-league film critic who said that while Room “is an improvement over Abrahamson’s excruciating Frank, simply because [it has] realistic people and emotions and is therefore somewhat credible and relatable, I am [nonetheless] much closer to your view than to the film’s lovers, as I’d have to be led on a leash to ever see Room again. The TIFF award startled me as well, as it’s hard to believe people loved it that much.”

The consensus is that Scott Walker has suspended his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination because he did lot of things wrong. The bottom line is that Walker (a) never even began to ignite in the polls and (b) ran out of money. One of the factors, according to New York‘s Jonathan Chait, is that “wealthy New York donors came away from discussions with Walker concerned that he actually believed what he said in public about same-sex marriage.” He just never seemed like much of a vision guy. He was never able to shuck that Wisconsin governor comfort-zone attitude. The only time he really stepped up to the plate was in his quitting speech, when he urged other weak sisters to get out of the race so that somebody strong can defeat Trump.

Then again many voters (especially Republicans) decide who they like based on primal gut reasons. The one thing I liked about Walker was that he’s a big Harley Davidson guy, and the one thing I really didn’t like about him (apart from his being an anti-union servant of the Koch brothers) was his bald spot. This may sound silly to some, but I suspect that this physical shortcoming did him no favors. Think about it — Americans haven’t elected a President with even a slight balding issue since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 — 60 years ago. Every elected President since John F. Kennedy has had a full head of hair. I’m not suggesting that Gerald Ford‘s bald spot meant all that much to voters in ’76, but I think it might have been a marginal factor in his loss to Jimmy Carter. I’m only saying that the Samson rule of thumb (i.e., hair = virility, potency) still has a residue of traction.

Last January I wrote that with Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling costarring, Plan B’s big-screen adaptation of Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short” “could be an award-season contender when it pops in ’16 or ’17. Margin Call, Wall Street, Boiler Room…that line of country. But not — I repeat not — with Adam McKay, by any standard a low-rent comedy guy and commercial opportunist, directing and writing.” I still maintain that McKay’s earlier films (the two Anchorman flicks, Talledega Nights, Step Brothers) were crude and unfunny and aimed at animals, but I was apparently wrong about what he might do with The Big Short. Paramount has decided to release it platform-style on 12.23.15, which means they’re confident it’ll end up on a few Ten-Best-of-the-Year lists and perhaps even figure in serious Best Picture contention. (I still say McKay’s lowbrow aesthetic will get in the way of this.) With Short having taken the place of Oliver Stone‘s Snowden, which has been bumped into ’16, there are still four heavy-hitters opening in December — The Revenant, Joy, The Big Short and The Hateful Eight, not to mention Concussion, In The Heart of the Sea, Son of Saul and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Sasha Stone‘s “if it hasn’t been seen in the early fall festivals it probably won’t be in Best Picture Contention” theory is being put aside for the time being.

Who wouldn’t invest a great effort to haul off something big that falls into your lap? The pizza slice could be a beautiful woman, a bag of cash left on a park bench…anything. This enterprising rat is doing nothing you or I or Glenn Kenny wouldn’t do in a similar situation. So I’m not understanding the huge viral response.

J. Davis‘s Manson Family Vacation (Netflix, 10.6) is about how a Los Angeles family man (Jay Duplass) not only plays host to his no-account hippie-weirdo-dipshit brother (Linas Phillips) but gets dragged around to all of the significant Manson murder sites. Well, I don’t how to say this but this is precisely what I did when I first came to Los Angeles back in the ’70s. I visited the Polanski-Tate house (a beautiful Robert Byrd-designed ranch house which stood at 10050 Cielo Drive before it was destroyed in the  mid ’90s), the LaBianca house (3311 Waverly), the Spahn ranch (23000 Santa Susanna Pass Rd., Chatsworth), etc. Three years ago I revisited the Polanski-Tate abode to contemplate the throughly disgusting McMansion erected in its place, and owned by Full House producer Jeff Franklin. Note: The IMDB says that the film was written by J. Davis and J. Davis.

Before you see Robert Zemeckis‘ The Walk, rent James Marsh‘s Man On Wire. Please. It’s been five or six years since I’ve seen this Oscar-winning doc, but I definitely intend to re-watch it this week. The Zemeckis film has been shown to select L.A. press and will screen here concurrent with the 9.26 New York Film Festival press screening. By the way: I don’t recall anything about the wire strung between the two World Trade Center towers suddenly slipping or re-adjusting while Phillippe Petit was walking on it. I’m mentioning this because we see this happen in the Walk trailer. Did this really occur or did Zemeckis throw it in to jack up the thrills?

There’s no question in my mind that James Vanderbilt‘s Truth (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.16) is Best Picture material. It’s brilliantly acted, tightly assembled and cut from the same thematic cloth (i.e., corporate-minded news org dilutes or dismisses important news story) and shaped with the same finesse that produced Michael Mann‘s The Insider. But it’s already taken a torpedo in the form of an unusually early opinion piece posted last Thursday by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, and if a couple more attack articles from reputable journos come out between now and mid-October Truth will almost certainly come to be regarded by the rank-and-file lazybrains as controversial or damaged goods — a movie that might have a loose screw or iffy content or whatever.

The argument against Truth is not, of course, about how smartly assembled or engagingly complex it is. It is aces in these respects, trust me. The film is especially riveting in its layered, detailed portrait of big-time television news culture — the personalities and priorities of news reporters and stringers vs. corporate overseers. The argument will be that Truth, which is based on Mary Mapes‘ 2005 book “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power,” seeks to whitewash or exonerate Mapes for her disputed reporting on that September ’04 60 Minutes segment that explored ex-President George Bush’s performance in the National Guard in the early ’70s, and that exoneration is not appropriate.

Feinberg and others I’ve spoken to believe that Mapes messed up, plain and simple. They correspondingly seem to believe that approving of Vanderbilt’s film is tantamount to approving of Mapes’ reporting, and therefore Truth must be given the cold shoulder. Which of course would be redundant as Mapes and Rather were already given the cold shoulder 11 years ago. Truth is about looking more closely at the reasons why they were thrown under the bus.

Condolences to the family, friends and fans of actor, playwright and librettist Jack Larson, who passed two days ago at age 87. I didn’t know him outside of party encounters and a one-hour phone interview we did six and a half years ago, but Larson was always a spirited, good-natured guy who often wore yellow and whose role as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the 1950s Adventures of Superman series did him no favors in the long run as it typecast him as a naive dork. I’m sorry for that unfair association, but if I’d called this post “Adieu to Jack Larson” no one would read it.

Larson was the partner of director James Bridges for 35 years (’58 until Bridges’ death in ’93), and before that was involved in some kind of semi-regular thing with Montgomery Clift. (Larson-Bridges photos abound but I can’t find one of Larson-Clift.)

My world came crashing down in a heap when I realized today that Room would most likely be a persistent contender throughout Oscar season. I don’t merely think this is a strained, stifling, suffocating thing to sit through — I know that by any seasoned, fair-minded, been-around-the-rodeo standard it’s at least that if not worse. I know what I damn well felt and thought when I watched Room a few days ago in Toronto, and I don’t want to go through that experience ever again. It’s like sitting in a holding tank. And yet so many Toronto viewers (primarily women as the film preys upon maternal feelings) were taken with it. It feels bad to be alone, to stand against a mob that not only thinks but insists otherwise. It hurts. On top of which I’ve probably lost any shot I had at landing a Phase One Room campaign from A24. This is what integrity amounts to every so often. You write a few words that you feel are necessary and true, and the next day five or ten grand flies out of your pocket.

I posted a rave of Baltasar Kormakur‘s Everest two and a half weeks ago, and then did Telluride-Toronto for two weeks. Everest opened two days ago. It does a lot right and almost nothing wrong, and yet it wound up with a mystifying 73% Rotten Tomatoes rating and an even stranger 64% on Metacritic. All interested parties (i.e., those who saw it) are asked to respond to the following statements in my 9.2 review:

(1) “Everest is realism at its most immersive and forbidding, and a very strong docudrama with several actor-characters you get to know and like and care about, and edited with exactly the right amount of discipline (there’s no padding or deadweight) and clarity and feeling. It delivers real sadness but it doesn’t squeeze it out because it doesn’t need to. It doesn’t cheat or exaggerate or use CG that you can spot very easily, and because it puts you right into the grim horror of what happened to eight climbers trying to ascend Everest on May 10th and 11th of 1996.”

(2) “This is easily the most assaultive and intimidating (and yet oddly thrilling) recreation of the Everest environment I’ve ever seen or felt, and a riveting drama about guys who didn’t have to die but did, mainly because the commercial expedition leaders wanted their client’s money (each climber paid about $65K) and because they wanted their clients to feel satisfied, and because they chose to ignore warnings about developing bad weather.

I know what brilliant, gripping, well-crafted cinema feels like, and I’ve come to recognize the strategy of selling a bag of emotional goods to a particular audience, and I’m telling you like I’ve never told anyone in my life that Lenny Abrahamson and Emma Donoghue‘s Room (A24, 10.16) has been way over-praised by invested women and feminized critics, mainly because it pushes certain maternal buttons.

That’s the only reason it has won the Grolsch People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival — the women’s vote pushed it through.

Key passage from my TIFF review: “Room is agony. The story sucks and the emotional currents, while strong, just fret and shudder and play out in a vacuum. It’s a film about confinement, confinement and more confinement. Okay, with a nicely delivered spiritual uplift moment at the very end. But the feeling of physical and psychological entrapment is nothing short of lethal. I for one felt like a dog in an airless box.”

Brie Larson might land a Best Actress nomination, okay, but I will take $100 bets right now against anyone who says it’ll be Best Picture-nominated. Update: I’ve thought about this a bit more and have decided against taking bets. Bizarre as this seems, it’ll probably be nominated — a notion I find extremely depressing. I feel awful about this. A movie I know is very unpleasant to sit through is being embraced big-time.