George Clooney‘s Suburbicon (Paramount, 10.27) is no Fargo. But it should have resembled Joel and Ethan Coen‘s 1996 classic at least somewhat. The original Suburbicon script, written by the Coens in ’86 and set in the mid ’50s, was their first stab at a Fargo-like middle class crime noir. Nine or ten years later the Coens went back to the same James M.Cain well and created Fargo, and the rest is history.

In Suburbicon, Clooney and producer and co-screenwriter Grant Heslov have reworked things, keeping the Fargo noir stuff but also, it seems, diluting or ignoring that sardonic deadpan wit that we all associate with the Coens, and deciding to paint the whole thing with a broad, bloody brush.

When it comes to tales about greed, murder and doomed deception, there’s nothing duller than watching a series of unsympathetic, unwitting characters (including the two leads, played by Matt Damon and Julianne Moore) play their cards like boobs and then die for their trouble. There’s just no caring for any of them.

Most significantly, Clooney and Heslov have added a side-plot about how Eisenhower-era white suburbanites were racist and venal to the core, and how things really aren’t much different today.

The Suburbicon victims are the just-arrived Meyer clan (Karimah Westbrook, Leith M. Burke, Tony Espinosa), and from the moment they move into their new, ranch-style home in a same-titled fictitious hamlet (i.e., an idyllic real-estate development right out of Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment) their cappuccino skin shade incites ugly pushback from just about everyone. But the situation doesn’t develop or progress in any way. The Meyers keep absorbing the ugly, and that’s pretty much it.

Remember how those small-town citizens greeted the arrival of Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles? Nearly the same broad-as-fuck tone prevails here. There isn’t a single non-racist white adult in Suburbicon. With the exception of Noah Jupe‘s Danny, who’s about ten, and the Meyers clan everyone in Clooney’s film has horns, hooved feet and a tail.

I’m behind in my noteworthy foreign-film viewings, but what else is new? Here’s a rundown of the allegedly hot titles that I’ve seen (listed in order of preference) and haven’t seen. If there’s an exceptional foreign-language title that I need to catch, please advise.

Seen:

1. Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless (Russia). HE’s 5.17.17 review.
2. Sebastian Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman (Chile) — Haven’t seen it, planning to.
3. Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father (Cambodia) — Obviously focused on recent Cambodian history (Khmer Rouge brutality) but can a film made by Angelina Jolie really be called “Cambodian”? Here’s my brief Telluride Film Festival review.
4. Samuel Maoz‘s Foxtrot (Israel)
5. Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (Germany) HE’s 10.4.17 review.
6. Robin Campillo‘s BPM: Beats Per Minute (France) — HE’s May 2017 (Cannes Film Festival) review.
7. Michael Haneke‘s Happy End (Austria) — HE’s 5.22.17 review.

Unseen:

8. Petra Biondina Volpe‘s The Divine Order (Switzerland)
9. Hussein Hassan‘s The Dark Wind (Iraq) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reseba:_The_Dark_Wind
10. Ildiko Enyedi‘s On Body and Soul (Hungary)
11. Michael R. Roskam‘s Racer and the Jailbird (Belgium)
12. Agnieszka Holland‘s Spoor (Poland)
13. Jang Hoon‘s A Taxi Driver (South Korea)
14. Joachim Trier‘s Thelma (Norway)
15. Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson‘s Under The Tree (Iceland)
16. Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult (Lebanese)

Last night I finally saw James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1), which has generated pseudo-hip excitement since debuting at last March’s South by Southwest. It’s basically an amusing-but-never-hilarious thing — it never bored me but it never quite lifts off the ground either. But it’s worth catching, I’d say. It falls under the heading of “necessary viewing.”

On the other hand a lot of cognoscenti who should know better have gone apeshit over The Disaster Artist (what award-season handicapper suggested it might even be worthy of inclusion on a best-of-2017 list?), and I’m telling you right now that it’s time to calm down. It’s fine for what it is, but take it easy.

It’s basically a flat but unaffected true-life saga of the making of a notoriously awful indie-level film called The Room, which, after opening in ’03, gradually acquired a rep of being so bad it’s hilarious and perhaps even brilliant in a twisted-pretzel, ice-cream-cone-slammed-into-the-forehead kind of way.

Based on Greg Sistero‘s same-titled memoir about the making of The Room and his bromance with the film’s vampirish director-writer-star, Tommy Wiseau, The Disaster Artist is basically a curio, a diversion. It generates a kind of chuckly vibe on a scene-by-scene basis, but that’s all.

Why? Because watching a clueless asshole behave like a clueless asshole isn’t all that funny if you’re watching what that’s like on a line-by-line, incident-by-incident, humiliation-by-humiliation basis from a comfy seat in a screening room.

It might seem a bit funnier if you’re watching it ripped or better yet ripped with your friends during a midnight show somewhere. Or if you’re watching it ripped with producer-costar Seth Rogen and producer Evan Goldberg in a private screening room. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been high in a long time, but I bet it would help. All I can tell you is that the Academy fuddy-duds I saw it with last night at the London Hotel screening room were chortling from time to time, but no one was howling with laughter or rolling in the aisles.

The Disaster Artist is basically a one-joke thing that says over and over that having no talent and being a total moron is no hindrance to making an attention-getting film if — a really big “if” here — you’ve got a few million to throw around and you’re willing to spend it freely on production and marketing and so on. It also says that if you’re a profoundly stupid actor and generally beyond redemption in terms of knowing how to produce, direct and write it can be “funny” for people to watch you struggle and fail in your attempt to make a shitty little indie drama that no one will pay to see, etc.

But if your film turns out to be “so awful it’s astounding,” the film says, you might have a shot at a certain kind of notoriety.

In the old days the notion of an old man in a wheelchair pawing a young nurse was regarded as a comic cliche. This behavior is actually glimpsed during a scene in a Mar Vista retirement home in Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown…oh, wait! But in today’s environment, such behavior falls under the heading of sexual assault, and is therefore regarded with gravity and alarm, especially when the dirty old man in question is former President George H.W. Bush, who’s now 93.

Yesterday Heather Lind, a 34 year-old actress, reported that Bush, 90 at the time, “touched” her twice during a 2014 photo op. “He didn’t shake my hand,” Lind wrote in an now-deleted Instagram post. “He touched me from behind from his wheelchair with his wife Barbara Bush by his side. He told me a dirty joke. And then, all the while being photographed, touched me again. Barbara rolled her eyes as if to say ‘not again.’ His security guard told me I shouldn’t have stood next to him for the photo.”

A Bush spokesperson apologized for the former Commander in Chief while adding that Bush “would never, under any circumstance, intentionally cause anyone distress.” The word “intentionally” was apparently used because Bush 41 allegedly suffers from Vascular Parkinsonism, a condition which “often necessitates use of Levadopa/carbidopa, a drug with side-effects that include gambling addiction, sexual misconduct, and other impulse control issues.” I don’t know how reliable this information is, but it appears on Lind’s Wikipedia page.