Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson and Robert Downey, Jr. appear to be two of a kind, at least in one respect. The first thing they’ve done on the very first day of a brand new year with a sense of hope and renewal in the air…the first thing these tools have done is shovel superhero product.

While I’ve been compiling a list of 2018 films that are likely to be pretty good or perhaps even award-worthy, Mendelson is continuing his tradition of forecasting the coming blockbusters. As he well knows, the majority of these 2018 films are sure to deliver profound corporate suffocation and indigestion, and in some cases head-hammering pain. But this is who Mendelson is — he lives for the next opportunity to inject CG serum into his veins. (That said, I’m still looking very much forward to Ant-Man and the Wasp.)

Downey, a Marvel shill and paycheck whore second to none, tweeted a reminder about the coming of Avengers: Infinity War on 5.4.18. (Part one, I mean — part two pops on 5.3.19.)

I was in a moderately good mood before these guys came along.

For me, the editing of this Wolf of Wall Street YouTube clip is shattering because at the very end it truncates Jimmy Castor‘s “Hey Leroy” — it cuts right into this ineffably right 1966 tune right when the song is lifting Wolf into a groove-and-soothe mode. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s inspirational howling-alpha-male speech is the brick and mortar, and “Hey, LeRoy” is the combination quaalude and back-rub that follows. “Selling Steve Madden” is easily one the greatest scenes in the canon of 21st Century art-cinema. Historians will study it a thousand years hence, but will they get where Martin Scorsese was really coming from?

In all modesty, the Get Out bandwagon was stopped in its tracks yesterday afternoon by a bold Hollywood Elsewhere one-two punch — “Twitter Mafiosos & Their Herd-Mentality Games” and “Get Out & Invasion of Brain Snatchers,” posted within three or four hours of each other.

And the two best reader comments fell under the “Brain Snatchers” piece, to wit:

(1) “I’m not sure exactly what the idiots are thinking when they use [the term ‘woke’], but the definition that seems closest to the mark is ‘woke’ = ‘white liberal who has outsourced his/her/its/their thinking to non-white liberals-in-name-only in a desperate bid for Cool Kid points.” — “Zerowing”

(2) “If [Get Out] wins Best Picture, it will cement the fact that the Oscars, especially for Best Picture, is a total crap shoot, and a political-social awareness merit badge award, and consequentially the Oscar will soon be regarded as flatly meaningless by an even larger swath of society and industry.” — “Brad“