With today’s announcement that Alexander Payne’s Downsizing will open the 2017 Venice International Film Festival on 8.30, there’s a 95% chance that Payne and his cast (Matt Damon, Kirsten Wiig, Laura Dern, Christoph Waltz, Jason Sudeikis) will fly to the Telluride Film Festival a day or two later. In my recently posted Telluride spitball piece, I wrote that Downsizing looked like a nope — “Too late in the year, too much FX tweaking, too much finessing and re-editing.” And I was wrong. That happens from time to time.

After watching several minutes of footage from Downsizing last March at Cinemacon, I wrote that “the undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

“In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

A little more than two years ago I noted that David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), a note-perfect adaptation of Harold Pinter’s 1978 stage play, was still not available via Bluray, DVD or streaming. At the time (5.30.15) the only way you could see it start to finish was to watch a murky version on YouTube. But on 6.4.17 a Russian woman named Alexandra Alexandrova uploaded a visually tolerable version (1.37 aspect ratio, probably taken from a musty CBS Fox Video VHS) to YouTube. Who knows how long it’ll last before the lawyers pounce so if you’ve never seen a passable copy, now’s your chance. Why the rights holders have refused for 30-plus years to license this brilliant infidelity drama to distributors is beyond me.

Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, a gangster saga about the guy who allegedly iced Jimmy Hoffa, will begin shooting next month. I’m not expecting the 74 year-old Scorsese to retire any time soon, but given his appetite for varied subjects it’s all but certain that The Irishman will be his last urban crime film featuring goombah types. By my book Scorsese has directed four goombahs — Mean Streets (’73), Raging Bull (’80), Goodfellas (’90) and Casino (’95). The Departed (’06) is urban crime but with Boston micks. The Wolf of Wall Street (’13) is obviously an urban crime flick minus goombah street seasoning, and the 19th Century Gangs of New York ain’t goombah at all.

The Irishman, which will costar Robert De Niro (as Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran), Al Pacino (Jimmy Hoffa), Bobby Cannavale (Joey Gallo), Joe Pesci (Russell Bufalino), Harvey Keitel (Angelo Bruno) and Ray Romano (Bill Bufalino), will begin shooting later this month. With DeNiro, Pacino, Pesci and Keitel in their ’70s and Romano turning 60 in December, I’m calling this Oldfellas until further notice.

Hollywood Elsewhere is grateful for having been invited to see Dunkirk on Monday, 7.16, at 7pm. As it happens I’ll also be catching Detroit a few hours earlier. I’m glad that Sasha Stone and others in the elite fraternity got to see it this morning. That’s all I’m going to say.

There is still, we’re told, a contingent of old-school SAG conservatives who are again determined to ixnay a CG-augmented Andy Serkis performance in the realm of Best Actor nominations. His latest and greatest, I mean. The unqualified raves for Serkis’ Caesar in War For The Planet of the Apes make this alleged SAG recalcitrance and obstinacy seem all the more embarassing. SAG naysayers can dismiss or marginalize Serkis’s soul-stirring performance but critics and ticket buyers know the truth of it, as history soon will.

Wake up, Academy and guild members — great acting is great acting. Filmmaking in 2017 is ten times more digitized than it was ten years ago, and 50 times more than it was in ’97 and so on. The bouquet of roses and aroma of strong coffee is in the air. You can’t continue to say “what coffee smell?” year after year after year. This is reality, Greg.

“Andy Serkis’s performance as Caesar is one of the marvels of modern screen acting…the motion-captured, digitally sculpted apes [in War] are so natural, so expressive, so beautifully integrated into their environment, that you almost forget to be astonished by the nuances of thought and emotion that flicker across their faces.” — from War review by N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

“If he weren’t acting with dots on his face to be replaced by a detailed computer simulation of an upright chimpanzee, it would be all but impossible to deny Serkis an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.” — BFI critic Kim Newman.

Woody Allen‘s weeks-old decision to cast Call Me By Your Name star Timothy Chalamet and Elle Fanning in his next film was officially reported this morning by Tracking Board‘s Jeff Sneider.

The Chalamet-Woody thing was being passed around eons ago, but agents involved in the deal kept saying “not yet” and “hold your horses” and “sorry but we have to do this thing properly”…zzzzz. Woody’s casting decisions are often attuned to hot new flavors and currents, so it tells you something about Chalumet’s rising potency (and the buzz that’s been chasing Call Me By Your Name since last January’s Sundance Film Festival) that he’s the new Woody pick.

Chalamet played Matthew McConaughey’s son in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (I was too busy hating that film to notice), and then attracted modest attention with his performance in Julia Hart‘s Miss Stevens, which I thought about catching but didn’t. Then Call Me by Your Name arrived in Park City — bang! Chalumet will also be seen in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles, Plan B’s Beautiful Boy and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.

Everyone knows Elle Fanning.