I myself have denied or dismissed the reality of what led to the bizarre Best Picture win of Around The World in 80 Days (‘56). And I think it’s time to come clean.

It wasn’t the meager cinematic merits of that Mike Todd film — a ten-ton, elephantine, all-star travelogue spectacle with Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess — as much as the impact it had & the money it made — its success as an enormous, eye-filling, big-scale, reserved-seat Todd-AO event film that TV couldn’t hope to compete with — that’s what Academy members voted for.

The realization that TV had to be fought tooth and nail had only sunk in five or six years earlier — This Is Cinerama (‘52) was the first costly attempt to win back audiences along these lines, followed by the CinemaScope (‘53) and VistaVision (‘54) processes, not to mention the flim-flam attempt to impose fake widescreen images with 1.85 aperture plates (April ‘53).

The massive competition of TV, and the possibly permanent diminishment of Hollywood’s share of the entertainment dollar —that’s what the industry had been facing since TV began to catch on in ‘48 or ‘49 and what it was still was facing in ‘56.

The Lost City (Paramount, 3.25) is a lightweight, 100% synthetic “adventure” comedy in the vein of Romancing The Stone (’84). I didn’t hate it but there was no way to engage with or get lost in it. Not a chance. It’s pure jizz-whizz, and I just sat there in the fourth row like an overripe canteloupe or, you know, a half-eaten watermelon.

It did strike me as being primarily aimed at women and gay guys. No straight male could possibly give this film a thumbs-up or even a “whatev”. Because it’s emptiness incarnate. Harmless vapor.

When the show broke at the Century City AMC plex I was walking behind a youngish hetero couple, and as we hit the lobby the woman waved at a friend and gave her a thumbs-down gesture.

Right now the Rotten Tomatoes rating is 95%; Team Metacritic has given it a 67%. Most critics are shameless whores.

Based on the trailers I expected Brad Pitt to be some kind of supporting player. The promos made it clear that the leads are Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, but the expectation was that within the film’s helium-balloon, wank-off scheme Pitt would be a steady secondary principal. Early in the Dominican Republic section (i.e., 85% to 90% of the film) Pitt and Tatum make a good team. I was saying to myself “this is good…I like Pitt’s energy and scruffy dominance…if he hangs in there I might be okay with this.”

And then he’s suddenly gone. Right away I muttered to myself “to hell with this…no Pitt, no fun…eff this movie.”

None of the action scenes pass muster; none of the running-around-and-climbing-mountains stuff is even faintly credible. Half of the insert shots look like sound-stage sets, and a lot of the images look CG-enhanced. Most of the jungle photography was shot with a drone.

Daniel Radcliffe plays the yuppie bad guy — no killer lines, no funny scenes, doesn’t hold his own, boring to hang with.

One earmark of a sucky movie is that the bad guys have no personalities — no wit or flavor or stand-out attitude of any kind. The Lost City bad guys are the same exact stooges you’ve seen in a hundred other action films. Remember Richard Masur, Ray Sharkey and Anthony Zerbe‘s bad guys in Who’ll Stop The Rain (’78)? It never got any better than that. They were darkly funny, eccentric, deranged, vulnerable, and they never once winked.

All through the film Tatum is wearing a standard flat-top haircut (i.e., a little length on top). Near the end he suddenly adopts a butch cut (i.e., just this side of a shaved-head thing). It makes no sense that he would change his hair at the very end — he just does.

Poor Da’Vine Joy Randolph, whose affecting performance as Lady Reed in Dolomite Is My Name put her on the map, plays a spunky book publicist. She’s amusing from time to time, but I couldn’t get past one of the apparent ideas behind her casting in this film — i.e., to normalize her appearance.

Repeating: I didn’t hate this film. If some ticket-buyers have a good time with it, fine. I just kept saying to myself “who could give a shit about this?”

A certain friendo re-watched Shampoo last night, and re-loved it. And he passed along an interesting political perception.

We all understand that the Democrats are going to get killed in November, in large part because they’re seen as being in the grip of progressive wokesters and in favor of teaching four-year-olds about gender fluidity and gender reassignment — average people HATE that. Plus Asian parents and Anglo parents with really smart kids hate the equity thing (i.e., show favoritism to POC students re university admissions and grades as a kind of cultural make-up exercise). They also reject the idea that European-descended Anglos are inherently evil and racist to the core, and therefore have to sit in the back of the bus for a generation or two in order to make up for past sins against POCs.

With all that said, here’s what friendo said about Shampoo….

“Shampoo was made as kind of a nod to Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (’39), which was about a frivolous society right before Hitler invaded. Shampoo has Nixon humming in the background to make the point that after the politically tumultuous 1960s the Me Generation of the 1970s became silly and frivolous in their own way, and thus lost the country to conservatives (politically).

“It could also have been a nod to Charles Manson killing Jay Sebring (one of the inspirations for Beatty’s “George Roundy” character, the other being Jon Peters) and taking away Sharon Tate (Julie Christie).

“But I guess I see us in that movie: narcissistic, self-involved, not seeing the bigger picture. Focused on woke movies and tinkering with our utopian dioramas and not thinking about what is coming next. Which could be really really, really bad.”

2270 Bowmont Drive, by the way, is the address of the Beverly Hills home resided in by Christie’s “Jackie” character and paid for by Jack Warden‘s “Lester” character.