The great Steven Soderbergh is back from his Frank Sinatra-styled retirement, which was basically a recharge. In a chat with Entertainment Weekly‘s Kevin P. Sullivan he talks about Logan Lucky (Bleecker, Fingerprint Releasing, 8.18) and his plans to self-distribute:

Logan Lucky costars Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, Adam Driver.

“On the most obvious level, Logan Lucky was the complete inversion of an Ocean’s movie,” Soderbergh says. “It’s an anti-glam version of an Ocean’s movie. Nobody dresses nice. Nobody has nice stuff. They have no money. They have no technology. It’s all rubber-band technology, and that’s what I thought was fun about it. It seemed familiar to me, but different enough. The landscape, the characters and the canvas were the complete opposite of an Ocean’s film. This is a version of an Ocean’s movie that’s up on cement blocks in your front yard.”

I’m betting that a majority of your megaplex douche nozzles want people in a heist film to dress nice, have nice stuff, nice technology, be flush, drive cool cars, etc. They like their meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Not me — I love what Soderbergh is describing here — but nothing makes mainstreamers more uncomfortable than originality.

I’ve mentioned two or three times that back in the early ’70s I played drums in a band that was alternately called The Golden Rockets, The Sludge Brothers, Dog Breath and Blind Pig Sweat. At the very best I was semi-competent. Style-wise I used to remind myself of Doug Clifford, the Creedence Clearwater drummer. I never got beyond that, and I tended to drag at times. I never took drumming lessons and could never even do a roll. To this day I can’t manage this with sticks, and that’s very irritating.

If only I’d taken lessons as a kid, but either way I was a mediocrity and knew it. It was always a little painful when we did a gig because I knew that a certain percentage of the crowd would be shaking their heads and muttering “whoa, that guy isn’t too good.” But I’ve always been a better-than-decent thigh drummer. No shame in that regard. I use dimes and quarters in my right pocket so simulate a high-hat sound. 

If I lived in a big soundproof McMansion I’d buy one of those electronic silent drum sets that you can only hear with earphones and wail away at odd hours.

The best gig of my life has been writing Hollywood Elsewhere for the last 12 and 2/3 years, and especially since I adopted the several-posts-per-day format in April ’06. The second best was tapping out two columns per week for Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com and Kevin Smith‘s Movie Poop Shoot (’98 to ’04). General entertainment journalism for major publications (Entertainment Weekly, People, Los Angeles Times, N.Y. Times), which I did from ’78 to ’98, ranks third. But my fourth all-time favorite job was driving for Checker Cab in Boston. Seriously. The only non-writing gig I ever really liked.

The gig only lasted eight or nine months. I was canned for driving a regular customer off the meter up in Revere. But God, I felt so connected and throbbing and all the other cliches. Buzzing around one of the greatest cities in the world each night, learning something new every day, meals on the fly, incidents and accidents, hints and allegations.

At the end of every shift I was so revved that it always took a good hour to crash when I got home, which was usually around 1:30 or 2 am. And every night I had a new story to tell my girlfriend, Sherry McCoy, with whom I was sharing a nice little pad on Park Drive.

Back then the Checker garage was on Lansdowne Street, or right next to Fenway Park. I remember to this day my Motorola two-way radio with the cord-attached mike. One of the dispatchers was called Tiny (a white-haired fat guy); there was another older gent with a kindly face and gentle voice. After I had gained a little seniority I was given a slick new Checker cab (#50), which I always kept whistle-clean. At the end of every shift I had a new story to tell.

Story #1: A youngish woman who got into the back seat near Boston Garden found a full wallet with no ID or anything — $400 and change, which was a fortune back then. We split the dough 50-50 — luckiest score of my young life.

Story #2: An attractive, slender, frosty-haired woman in her mid to late 40s started chatting about this and that, and before you knew it were were flirting and talking about erotic chemistry and whatnot. As I was dropping her off she opened the cash slot and we gently kissed goodbye. We never got out of the cab, never shook hands — all in the eyes. I saw her on Newbury Street three or four months later…”Yo!”

Four and a half months before anyone besides Glenn Whipp starts to even speculate about 2017 Best Picture candidates, Hollywood Elsewhere is projecting that the following nine films (also posted in the Oscar Balloon) are the most likely contenders, and in the following preferential order:

Kathryn Bigelow‘s Detroit, written by Mark Boal; Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (Sony Pictures Classics); Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman (20th Century Fox, 12.25); Steven Spielberg‘s “Untitled Pentagon Papers’ Project” (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks — 20th Century Fox, 12.22); Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22); Paul Thomas Anderson‘s semi-fictionalized biopic about legendary egomaniacal fashion designer Charles James; Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (Weinstein Co., 12.22); Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk (Warner Bros., 7.19); and Stephen Chbosky‘s Wonder (Lionsgate, 11.17).

Are there any hints of softness or uncertainty among any of these? Yes, but I’d rather not share at this stage. I only have hunches and what are those worth? Which of the above are all-but-guaranteed locks for Best Picture noms? Detroit, Call Me By Your Name, The Greatest Showman, Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers Project (a.k.a. The Post). Everything else feels a bit shaky in this or that way.

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that 20th Century Fox will release Steven Spielberg‘s “untitled Pentagon Papers drama” platform-style on 12.22.17 with a nationwide expansion on 1.12.18 — obviously a declaration that Fox expects it to be a Best Picture contender. Lang is referring to The Post, which is what Deadline‘s Michael Fleming called the project in a 3.10 report.

Soon after I read a recent draft of Liz Hannah‘s script and posted an assessment. I called it engaging and well-written but more of a “middle-aged woman’s self-empowerment saga” than any kind of Spotlight or All The President’s Men-type deal.

Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, exec editor Ben Bradlee in the early ’70s.

Lang seems to be reporting that Spielberg, producer Amy Pascal and 20th Century Fox don’t like the title of Hannah’s script and are looking to invent something catchier. That or some kind of copyright issue has come into play.

Lang also reports that the film is “rumored” to star Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in the two lead roles — i.e., the late Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham and its scrappy editor during the ’70s heyday, the late Ben Bradlee. Fleming wasn’t ambivalent about Streep and Hanks’ participation — he said they were flat-out on the team and “clearing their schedules” in order to start production in late May.

Lang notes that the “Spielberg Pentagon Papers project” will now join other presumed 2017 Best Picture headliners like Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (i.e., Thomas Edison vs. George Westinghouse over plans to generate electricity for the public)

For whatever reason Lang decided not to include Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit and Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name in his prognosis.

For years I’ve been moaning and groaning about the James Gray cabal — a fraternity of elite critics, cultureburg foo-foos and film festival staffers who’ve sworn by Gray‘s films for years, and for reasons that to me have always seemed thin or specious. It’s not Gray’s films that have gotten in my craw as much as the constant overpraise.

James Gray (safari hat, beard, earphones) directing The Lost City of Z with Charlie Hunnam. Why isn’t Gray rocking the short sleeve T-shirted look that the crew guy is wearing? He looks like a tourist who’s been asked to step off the Jungle Safari boat in Disneyland, especially with that fanny pack and those long khaki sleeves. If you’re going to wear a safari hat you need to go cowboy style (i.e., Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now). And if not that, a standard-issue director’s baseball cap.

I was actually okay with (i.e., not disturbed or offended by) Gray’s New York-centric films for nearly 20 years — Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own The Night, Two Lovers and Blood Ties (a fraternal crime thriller written by Gray but directed by Guillaume Canet).

But The Immigrant was mostly a drag (“A well-made, respectably authentic period drama, but the pace is slow and the story ho-hums…I must have looked at my watch six or seven times”) and The Lost City Of Z was, I felt, all but impossible. I wanted to escape less than 30 minutes in but I was with a paying audience at Alice Tully Hall and felt I had to stick it out. It was hell.

Yesterday MCN’s David Poland filed a piece largely in league with my views, not just about his frustrations with Gray but also the cabal.

Excerpt #1: “I don’t get it. And now, six features into James Gray’s directing career, I think I am done apologizing for it. My experience of Gray’s films has been, consistently, ‘great acting…why doesn’t the story work?’ And yet, some of the smartest critics I know are true devotees of everything Gray does. They must be hip to something that I’m not seeing, right?”