Baltasar Kormákur and Jaime Primak Sullivan‘s Beast (Universal, 8.19) costars Idris Elba, Iyana Halley, Leah Sava Jeffries and Sharlto Copley.

As a tribute to the recently passed Wolfgang Petersen, perhaps Netflix would consider streaming the extra-long version of Das Boot (’81), which runs around 300 minutes? Or, failing that, Petersen’s 209-minute “Director’s Cut”?

Wiki Excerpt: “Das Boot was partially financed by German television broadcasters WDR and the SDR, and more footage was filmed than was shown in the theatrical version.

“A version of six 50-minute episodes was transmitted on BBC2 in the United Kingdom in October 1984, and again during the 1999 Christmas season. In February 1985 three 100-minute episodes were broadcast in Germany.

“Peterson then edited a 209-minute version, Das Boot: The Director’s Cut, combining the action sequences from the feature-length version with the character development scenes from the miniseries released to cinemas worldwide in 1997, also improving audio quality.”

“You’ve been took, you’ve been had, led astray, hoodwinked, bamboozled, flim-flammed, sold a bill of goods, led down a garden path, run amok, had a tin can tied to your tail.” — HE riff based on Malcolm X‘s original “we were black” speech.

Wednesday is being called a comedy-horror series, except it’s not a horror thing at all — it’s dry social satire. Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, the latest in a long line but this time with Tim Burton-level production values and a Burtonesque sense of humor.

Peter Farrelly‘s The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Apple+, 9.30) will have its big debut at the Toronto Film Festival, probably sometime between 9.8 and 9.14, I’m guessing. The trailer is excellent and so is the poster, and I’m suddenly I’m thinking “hey, wait…this might be something.”

We all know that wokester critics are going to be gunning for Farrelly in order to punish him for Green Book having won the 2018 Best Picture Oscar. Somewhere between 96% and 97% of the moviegoing world loved that film (me too) but the wokesters did everything they could to kill it, and so they’re determined to pay Farrelly back. (They’ll deny this, of course.)

We also understand that a film about a New York working-class paleface with a meathead accent travelling thousands of miles to bring beer to his Vietnam War-serving bruhs in ’67 and ’68 is going to be attacked six ways from Sunday…too white, too apolitical and not guilty enough for starters. Or so it would seem, I should say, based on the trailer and to some extent John “Chick” Donohue and Joanna Molloy’s 2020 book.

But you can also tell Farrelly’s film is a grade-A thing — first-rate writing, acting, cinematography, atmosphere, the works — and that slivers of moral ambiguity have been slipped between the story beats.

No, seriously…kidding. Nobody liked it then, and nobody but nobody wants to remember it now. It was force-fed through an elite critic pipeline — you had to watch and respect and damn well vote for Jane Campion as Best Director, and if you weren’t down with this…well, who knew? Perhaps you or your career needed to be reevaluated and perhaps not. But it was safer to go along.

Only now are people allowed to speak candidly.