You just know it’s a smartypants box–office trade term that will stick like glue. (Credit to HE’s Daniel Zelter for spotting Barber’s article early.)

Could this possibly have something to do with…I don’t know, concerns about stuff being taught in schools that Average Joe & Jane parents don’t agree with? And other stuff like…I don’t know, maybe drag queen performances?

For a hinterland-focused Jim Caviezel movie like Sound of Freedom — a grassroots thing, not much mainstream media publicity — to come out on top on Tuesday, July 4th…this means something. Mira Sorvino and Bill Camp costar.

Few critics have angered me more over the years than David Ehrlich, but when he’s right, he’s right:

“The frantic and extremely funny mid-film chase through the streets of central Rome, during which Hunt is handcuffed to the sexy pickpocket (franchise newcomer Hayley Atwell) who might be able to lead him to the MacGuffin. A jaw-dropping ‘how the fuck did they do that?’ mega-flex in an age when movies are seldom magical enough to beg that question, the city-wide jailbreak combines artfully destructive slapstick with the loudest car crashes you’ve ever heard to create the kind of cinematic euphoria that still can’t be faked or forged at home. VR headsets might allow rich people to enjoy IMAX-sized screens on their living room couches, but Dead Reckoning is a bone-shaking reminder that sound is the real secret weapon of the theatrical experience.

“Not since La Dolce Vita has a film more effectively transformed ancient Rome into a modern playground, a fitting touch for a blockbuster so desperate to squeeze a few new dollops of joy from the ruins that surround it.”

When it opened on 12.25.06, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men (’06) was a dystopian foretelling of social breakdown and urban degeneration 21 years hence. The opening scene is captioned “16th November, 2027,” and the general London atmosphere (are we looking at Regent Street?) instantly tells us that this once-great city — once a nourishing spiritual watering hole for Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Alfred Hitchcock, Tony Richardson and The Beatles — has become a bit bedraggled and third-worldish, air-polluted and populated with riff-raff…over-crowded, cacophonous and generally down-at-the-heels.

Not all of it (there are still pockets of order and tranquility with green-lawned parks and red-coated king’s guards marching along) but London is clearly edging toward some kind of ruffian, seen-better-days anarchy.

As we speak 11.16.27 is only four years hence or just around the corner, and I have to say that as I was walking east on 42nd Street last week in the mid-evening (following the AMC Empire all-media screening of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One) I was glancing at the overweight, sandal-wearing, presumably under-educated animals and feeling the general decay and lack of couth and even fraying civility and saying to myself “Jesus, this is almost like Children of Men…not classically dystopian in a Cormac McCarthy or Mad Max sense but drifting in that direction…even when 42nd Street was a grindhouse rathole in the ’60s it had a certain regimented order and aspirational vibe….no longer.”

Initially posted on 9.19.21: As most HE readers know, I got “Scarlet Letter”-ed in March ’21 when Critics Choice honchos Joey Berlin and John DeSimio booted me out of their organization after being pressured by hysterical wokesters.

It all stemmed from my having posted a sentence written by someone other than myself — a statement which sat on HE for an hour or less before I took it down.

The sentence alluded to the Atlanta massage parlor killings (the victims of which were Asian woman, although Robert Aaron Long‘s motivation wasn’t racial as much as an “intersection of gender-based violence, misogyny and xenophobia,” according to state Rep. Bee Nguyen) and how this tragedy might have affected Oscar voter sentiments.

The sentence read as follows: “If there was one millionth of a chance in hell that Chloé Zhao and Nomadland weren’t going to win Oscars, the Atlanta massage parlor killings just snuffed out that chance.” Not my thought and or a view I believed in or cared about, but for one fleeting moment I thought “wow, that’s a hot-button statement that readers might want to kick around.” Throw him to the wolves!

Certain publicists who didn’t like me to begin with for my bluntly worded opinions seized upon the CCA eviction as an excuse to take me off their screening invite lists, etc. Six weeks ago I wrote Joey Berlin and John DeSimio a letter about this incident and gave them what-for.

Not long after the article appeared HE regular Bobby Peru posted the following:

I’ve pointed this out before, but three similar incidents (tragic news affecting Oscar fortunes) happened within the last nine years.

1. In Boris Kachka’s 2.25.14 Vulture piece about Oscar bloggers (in which I was prominently covered), THR‘s Scott Feinberg was referenced doing the same thing.

Kachka: “Every controversy is quickly spun into the 24-hour Oscar cycle. A few short hours after Dylan Farrow renewed her molestation charges [against Woody Allen], there was Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter’s tireless columnist (and this year’s most accurate predictor so far) authoring a piece titled “Dylan Farrow’s Op-Ed Targets Woody Allen, But Could Hurt Cate Blanchett More (Analysis).”

2. Right after the Ferguson Grand Jury report came out on 11.25.14, I tweeted that a possible “strike a match rather than curse the darkness” response to this otherwise tragic event might be a surge of industry Best Picture support for Selma. Yup — another instance of the wrong HE tweet at the wrong time. But all I said was that symbolically lighting a candle rather than lamenting the ugliness might be a good thing in the end.

The Twitter community didn’t dig it. I was all but roasted alive for saying this. Many people tweeted that I sounded like an insensitive asshole. How dare I suggest, after all, that there was (or might be) linkage between Ferguson and Selma‘s Oscar chances.

But at heart I had tweeted a positive sentiment. I was thinking, you see, of Martin Luther King’s words about how only love can eradicate hate. I was thinking that standing by a film about human dignity, compassion and human rights would serve as a positive response to the Ferguson situation.

3. A couple of days later Selma director director Ava DuVernay pointed out a direct connection between her film and what had happened in Ferguson.

She did so in an Eric Kohn Indiewire interview with herself and Fruitvale Station director-writer Ryan Coogler, the main subject being their support of the Black Friday Blackout.

For me, the stand-out portion was when Kohn asked DuVernay if she saw “any direct connections between today’s climate in the immediate aftermath of Ferguson in the story of Selma.” DuVernay responded as follows: “Yes, absolutely. It’s the same story repeated. The same exact story.

“An unarmed black citizen is ‎assaulted with unreasonable force and fatal gunfire by a non-black person who is sworn to serve and protect them. A small town that is already fractured by unequal representation in local government and law enforcement begins to crack under the pressure. People of color, the oppressed, take to the street to make their voices heard. The powers that be seek to extinguish those voices.”

Feinberg, Kachka, DuVernay, Kohn…they saw a real-life tragedy in the real-news world, detected an Oscar-reflecting narrative and jumped right into it. And nobody said boo. I posted a real-lfe-tragedy-meets-Oscar-odds comment that someone else had written (and which I posted for a mere hour), and I was sent to the guillotine. If there was a God, my head would be seamlessly re-attached and others (many others) would be facing the kiss of steel in my place.