Posted from Park City on 1.26.17: Hollywood Elsewhere loves Icarus, the Russian doping doc that Netflix picked up two or three days ago. I’ve no striking observations or insights to add to the general chorus, but I can at least say that after a slow start Icarus turns into a highly gripping account of real-life skullduggery and paranoia in the sense of the classic William S. Burroughs definition of the term — i.e., “knowing all the facts.”

As noted, Bryan Fogel‘s two-hour film starts off as a doping variation of Morgan Spurlock‘s Super Size Me, and then suddenly veers into the realm of Laura Poitras‘ Citizenfour.

It doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know or suspect. The prime takeaways are (a) the use of performance-enhancing drugs is very common in sports (everyone does it, Lance Armstrong was the tip of the iceberg) and (b) there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Vladmir Putin and his top henchmen and the Al Capone mob of 1920s Chicago.

I was a little worried during the Super Size Me portion, in which bicyclist Fogel and Russian scientist Grigory Rodchenkov embark on a project with the goal of outsmarting athletic doping tests. It’s interesting at first, but it goes on too long. After a while I was muttering “so when does the Russian doping stuff kick in?”

Suddenly it does. Rodchenkov gradually admits to Fogel that he orchestrated a Putin-sanctioned doping program that gave the Russian athletes an advantage at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, which led to the winning of 13 gold medals. But in November ’15 Rodchenkov’s laboratory was suspended by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) following a report alleging state-sponsored doping in Russia, and soon after Putin and the bad guys were looking to lay the blame on Rodchenkov. (Or possibly kill him.)

Sasha Stone‘s Awards Daily is conducting a Best of 2017 poll. Critics, columnists, industry people, etc. I was asked to submit my top five or ten within a fenced-off area — i.e., a cutoff release date of July 1st, and no festival favorites that haven’t been released yet. The results will be posted sometime on Monday.

So I ignored the rules about no festival films and the 7.1 cutoff and submitted the same films I posted a couple of weeks ago — (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, (6) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (7) David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, (8) Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (even though I fundamentally regard this Paris-based ghost story as last year’s news as it premiered nearly 14 months ago at the ’16 Cannes Film Festival) and (9) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

Explanation/retort: The Guadagnino has been praised extensively. Everyone who knows or reads anything is aware that it’s a major film, so why exclude it because the megaplex knuckle-draggers haven’t seen it yet? What in blazes have they got to do with anything? Why confine your eligible films to those seen by the lowly, popcorn-munching ticket buyer?

“Hah…can I quote part of your response in the article?” the poller guy said. “By the way, I agree with you. 47 of the 48 lists thus far have had Get Out. It doesn’t look like that movie is going away come awards season.”

“It’s a good but overpraised John Carpenter film in the vein of They Live,” I answered, repeating myself ad infinitum. “Thumbs up, yes, but calm down. The Get Out praise is largely about 45-and-over white critics (and, down the road, white Academy members) wanting to seem socially attuned and benevolent. If a white guy had directed it, I doubt it would even be in the awards conversation, much less the finals.”

It was announced today that Ava DuVernay will write and direct a five-episode Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case of ’89. I don’t know, man. Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary, was one thing (i.e., not without problems but compelling). But a dramatic miniseries will be a whole ‘nother challenge.

The case was about the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female stockbroker, in Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89. Five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — were wrongly prosecuted and falsely imprisoned, only to be exonerated and freed several years later. A flat-out expression of racist hysteria and institutional corruption.

Duvernay is facing two significant problems in terms of her main characters — the five alleged assailants and Meili. If DuVernay fudges, sidesteps or fabricates (as she did with her depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma), she’s going to run into trouble.

Problem #1: The teenagers who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home.

How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Problem #2: The victim’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was almost as stupid. I lived in New York City in the early ’80s so don’t tell me — what Meili did was flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street and much less above friggin’ 100th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

How do you dramatize Meili’s late-night jogging without the audience thinking “wait…is she an idiot?

Either you’re intrigued and excited by the idea of a spooky but essentially non-scary ghost movie, or you’re not. Or you’re able to embrace the idea of a silent and passive ghost under a bedsheet, or not. 90% if not 95% of ticket-buyers prefer the dead-obvious kind of ghost flick (i.e. anything in the vein of the Conjuring series) and maybe 5% or 10% (if that) have a place in their heads for smarter, subtler variations. Which is one way of acknowledging that David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, which opens tonight, probably won’t be setting any box-office records. But man, it sure rang my bell at Sundance last January.

Please…if you’re smarter than a fencepost and can think outside the box, give it a looksee this weekend.

I’m not the first one to say this, but it could be argued that the scariest thing about A Ghost Story is Lowery himself.

From Madison + Vine’s Jake Coyle: “A Ghost Story is what it says it is, and it may well haunt you. It won’t scare you; it doesn’t even say ‘boo.’ But glowing light and ghostly soulfulness linger on like a quiet, scratching presence that won’t leave you.”

Posted last month: Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.

The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

Here’s a guy who knows how to apply smarts, logic and reliable information from the best intelligence sources to determine a likely scenario. What a moron. If Trump wanted to sidestep the Putin government’s confirmed involvement in trying to sway the ’16 election, he could have alluded to Putin’s recent comment about Russian “patriots” being behind the hacking. But that would have required a certain brain-cell count and recall capability.

My heart went pitty-pat this morning when I read the following comment from HE reader GoToSleep: “I’m not sure what the tracking is for Spider-Man: Homecoming and of course this is anecdotal as fuck, but it was way too easy to get tickets at my Brooklyn Alamo theater. The 3D screenings, as of 11AM Thursday, are wide open for seats, and you can still get tickets for most of the 2D screenings.”

I’m presuming that the jaded-Brooklyn-hipster mentality is behind the “too easy” availability of Alamo ducats. Variety is forecasting $85 to $100 million this weekend. I for one would feel a slight surge of satisfaction or even comfort if the about-to-pop Sony release would under-perform to some extent. This would indicate a higher degree of franchise fatigue than the trades are currently detecting…please!

If you and your friends believe in fairies, you have to communicate to the dark empire that (a) you’re sick of the endless MCU and D.C. sequels, revisitings and reboots, and (b) you want more semi-original, Baby Driver-type fare (even if the wheels fall off Edgar Wright‘s action-musical during the final 15 minutes). Yes, I’m dreaming. Yes, I’m nursing a dead fantasy that the corporate-think poisoning of megaplex fare could perhaps be diluted or even turn a corner.