When the world premiere of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind didn’t happen in Cannes two months ago, the likelihood of a big splashy debut at either the Venice or Telluride film festivals (or perhaps at both) became a fait accompli. I’m now hearing a rumor that TOSOTW will open the Venice Film Festival…fine. If this doesn’t happen it’ll almost certainly be screened there, and then at Telluride a few days later with Toronto to follow. How could these festivals not be on the first-viewing list?

“Seamless Wind Assessed,” posted on 1.19.18: “The first-ever screening of a full-boat version of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind happened last Tuesday night (1.16) at Santa Monica’s Ocean Ave. screening room. The reconstituted, inside-the-industry, early ’70s montage-hodgepodge will presumably be further refined before debuting at a forthcoming 2018 film festival.

HE to friend who attended Tuesday’s screening: “Is it…what, a fascinating but surreal early ’70s timepiece? Is it a slipshod, free-associative whatsit without a narrative spine, or does it sorta kinda have something going on? Orson was a near-genius at times, and he obviously did his very best and worked his fingers to the bone, but be honest — is it some kind of visual dazzler, an interesting piece-of-shit or a major discovery or what? Can you give me a hint or two about how it plays?”

Cruddy, bleachy image of scene from The Other Side of the Wind with costars Peter Bogdanovich, John Huston.

Dwayne Johnson and Rawson Marshall Thurber‘s Skyscraper (Universal 7.13) has been assessed as a serious box-office shortfaller, if not a calamity. Yesterday it made a lousy $9,268.000 on 3782 screens for an average of $2451, and will end up with an estimated $24 to $28 million by Sunday night — a third-place finish behind Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation and Disney-Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp.

“Skyscraper Falls,” a Variety headline announced; “Skyscraper Up In Flames,” proclaimed Deadline.

Could it be that audiences are finally waking up to Hollywood Elsewhere’s longstanding assessment of Johnson, which is that he’s fundamentally opposed to making good films and that his default instinct is to topline high-concept action flicks that are relentlessly stupid and implausible? Did audiences steer clear because critics are saying that Skyscraper is so bone-dumb it’ll turn your brain into a volley ball? Are they finally starting to realize that Johnson has repeatedly shown contempt for audiences by making nothing but crap?

Not so much, says Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro. “There [are] a few reasons why Skyscraper is in shambles,” he wrote this morning, “but chiefly Johnson’s family crowd here is being swallowed up whole by both Hotel Transylvania 3 and the second weekend of Ant-Man and the Wasp.”

AD also said something about Johnson’s brand being over-exposed with the recent release of Jumanji and Rampage, i..e, “where’s the fresh face?” He quotes a RelishMix observation about Skyscraper “literally [looking] like a Die Hard update, but with a hero challenged by a prosthetic.” But shouldn’t the fact that Skyscraper is a shitty film…shouldn’t that at least be factored in? Quality counts for a little something…no?

It’s ironic that on a day that everyone is talking about Johnson’s first significant box-office stumble, The Guardian‘s Steve Rose has posted a “yay, Dwayne!” piece called “Let’s Rock! Why Dwayne Johnson is the new Schwarzenegger.”

Posted on 12.8.16: “With the exception of Michael Bay‘s Pain and Gain, Johnson has demonstrated time and again that he’s fundamentally opposed to appearing in films that are (a) good and (b) at least semi-believable. He makes big, dopey, adolescent cartoons.”

I noticed three culturally significant things during my second visit to London in early December ’80. I was there to interview Peter O’Toole for GQ magazine, but it was also quite the jarring moment when I awoke one morning to learn that John Lennon has been killed hours earlier in New York City.

One, I noticed how almost everyone using the up escalator in the London Underground always stands to the right to allow others to pass. The only ones who didn’t seem to understand this system, to go by a 40ish business-suited guy who was standing in front of me one day, were American tourists. Americans (pudgy couples in particular) love to stand and block escalators or travelators. Especially in airports and on New York subways. I’m into walking and stair-climbing, so every time I travel I’m constantly saying “sorry…excuse me”, over and over. Standing to the right is totally a British thing, or so it seemed at the time.

Two, for the first time in my life I heard my last name pronounced correctly, or at least in a richer, more tonally satisfying way than I myself had ever pronounced it. It’s an English name, of course, so no surprise that I experienced my “woke” moment when a British Airways attendant said “Mr. Wells?” He said it with a zesty, just-right emphasis on the “ell” sound. The best way I can describe his pronunciation is that he said it vigorously where I tend to use an “euhll” sound, and with an air of near-resignation. The British Airways guy made me feel proud of my heritage.

Three, I got into Bow Wow Wow. Their music was blasting at every party I attended. I bought a cassette that had a different, much better mix of “Louis Quatorze” than the one commonly played. And then I lost it.

Fox News reporter John Roberts is calling out Trump’s vicious attacks on CNN and NBC News at the UK press conference pic.twitter.com/M81LXzdrOm

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) July 14, 2018

The premiere of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Who Is America? pops tomorrow night on Showtime. Seven satirical half-hours about pranking conservative lunatics and one or two liberals, including Bernie Sanders. SBC’s return to series television for the first time in more than a decade. (I’m not finding any reviews.) Should four-year-olds carry firearms to pre-school and perhaps undergo anti-terrorist training on weekends? No, but what happened to former tea-bagger Joe Walsh is amusing. Satisfying, I mean.

On this, the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman‘s birth (7.14.18), I am holding to my conviction that the darkest, hottest and most despairing Bergman film of all time is The Silence (’63). And therefore my favorite, in part because it’s so crystalline and unified — a perfect distillation of a sensual gloomhead mentality.

A ten year-old boy (Jorgen Lindstrom, who’s now 67) travelling with his ailing mother Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and her younger sister Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) through a grim Central European landscape, and then renting a couple of rooms at an old-world hotel. The boy watches as Anna settles into a kind of scowling sensual abandon. As always, Sven Nykvist‘s black-and-white cinematography is exquisite, and his capturings of of the sultry, vaguely self-disgusted Anna in various states of undress in that hotel room and bathroom are the stuff that lifelong dreams are made of. For me anyway.

I’m mentioning The Silence because you can’t buy a stand-alone Bluray version, not from Criterion or anyone else. You can watch it on Filmstruck and The Criterion Channel but I’m not yet a subscriber. (For whatever reason my initial reaction to Filmstruck was “a bridge too far” — lame, I realize.) It’s included in Criterion’s $239 Ingmar Bergman Bluray box set, and you can buy a DVD version in a 2003 Bergman trilogy package that includes Through A Glass Darkly and Winter Light. So right now it’s FilmStruck or nothing. Bummer.

In a 5.27.13 Criterion-posted essay, David Blakeslee wrote that “as significant as The Silence was in Bergman’s development as a filmmaker and person, there’s no doubt that it marked an even bigger advance in terms of expressive freedom in dealing with human sexuality, especially as it involved both nudity and the portrayal of women in pursuit of their own erotic fulfillment rather than as passive sex objects.

“With the Palme d’or winner Blue is the Warmest Color and Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, we can trace a tangent that didn’t necessarily begin with Bergman’s 1963 masterpiece but is clearly continuous in using on-screen sex to drum up interest. And it works! Through its lasting influence and continuing beguilement as to what it’s all about, The Silence still makes a lot of noise.