How do I know this? Dwayne Johnson and Lucy Liu, the king and queen of disposable paycheck garbage cinema, and the polar bear with a winning personality. All four holding their noses.

Could the general lack of excitement have something to do with the fact that Mike Flanagan, no offense, is a boilerplate horror genre guy?

Winning the TIFF People’s Choice Award used to really mean something in terms of Best Picture Oscar contention. Now, not so much. Audience taste buds have coarsened.

I knew something strange had been injected into the Toronto water supply when Taika Watiti’s Jojo Rabbit won the top prize in 2019.

Sean Baker‘s excellent Anora and Jacques Audiard‘s reasonably decent Emilia Perez were the second- and third-place choices, respectively. Or the other way around…whatever.

From THR’s Scott Feinberg:

…in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which I finally saw last night. I’d read several reviews plus the Wiki synopsis and had somehow missed spoilers about the flamboyant musical finale, which is based upon Jimmy Webb’s seven-minute 1968 hit single.

But right now HE spoiler whiners can go fuck themselves because the cat is totally out of the bag via Chris Willman’s 9.14 Variety interview with Webb. If they wanted a surprise they should have gotten off their asses and seen Beetlejuice Beetlejuice earlier. It opened on Friday, 9.6.

How good is the film itself? The MacArthur Park celebration aside, it’s basically a greatest-hits rehash of Tim Burton 1988 original, which felt a lot nervier then than Burton’s 36-years-later sequel does now. Call it a reasonably pleasant here-we-go-again thing. Not bad, lively, occasionally amusing, pricey-looking.

The people calling it better than the original are overly generous, taste-free whores, but as sequels go it’s really not bad.

The 1988 original cost $15 million or roughly $40M in 2024 dollars — the newbie cost $99 million. The oldie earned $85 million or $226M in 2024 bucks. As of today (9.15) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice had earned around $250 million worldwide.

Why did Richard Harris, who reportedly hung extensively with Webb in London during the mid-hippie era, pronounce it “MacArthur’s Park”?

My only problem with Jimmy Castor‘s “Hey, Leroy”, released in late ’66, is that it only plays for 2 minutes and 28 seconds. Castor should have recorded a 10-minute house version.

Castor, who passed in January 2012 at age 71, was a saxophonist. The Jimmy Castor Bunch included keyboardist/trumpeter Gerry Thomas, bassist Douglas Gibson, guitarist Harry Jensen, guitarist / sitarist Jeffrey Grimes, conga and triangle player Lenny Fridie, Jr., and drummers Elwood Henderson, Jr., and Bobby Manigault.

…that as you’re approaching an incline of any serious steepness (35 to 45 degrees) or height that you need to tromp on the gas…gun it!…to overcome the natural inertia effect of a severe hill. Everyone knows the basic drill. And yet there are fuddy-duddy slowboats who don’t hit the gas and, failing this, appear to even forget to shift into low gear as they’re about to make the climb. They even do this on snow or sleet-covered hills during winter. If I’ve yelled “you fucking tool!” once while driving behind these pokey types, I’ve yelled it 500 times.

…to simply state whether or not the piano has a headphone jack? Seems like a fairly obvious feature that would save parents from the annoyance factor.

When laid-back hipsters say “like”, it’s meant as a pause word, a back-off term. It’s not part of the forward narrative flow. Therefore when Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski expresses support for Kamala Harris, he needs to write “DUDES FOR, LIKE, HARRIS, MAN”…dig?

Let me count the ways.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman is reporting that if the declining Sundance Film Festival decides to keep Utah as its home base, it will primarily convene in Salt Lake City…ugghh!! Who the hell wants to spend ten days watching woke movies in that grim, godforsaken Mormon burgh?

The festival is all but dead anyway — moving it to SLC will most certainly kill the snowy-mountain, golden-Redford, ski-town vibe.

Boulder is, like, the only palatable option, man.

Posted last April: “Hey, Sundance Film Festival, are you listening? I’m shedding tears of joy over the news of your slow and inevitable demise. You’re essentially dead and nobody cares….in the words of the legendary J.J. Hunsecker, you’re a cookie filled with woke arsenic so get yourselves buried.

“Okay, that’s a little too harsh. Let me try again. How about ‘you’re Frankie Pentangeli before he opened his veins and bled to death in a bathtub’? Does that work better?

“Sundance will remain in Park City next January and in ’26, but they’re sniffing around for a new home. The festival isn’t decisively leaving Park City but something is prompting Hernandez and others to say ‘blah blah blah we’re happier and healthier than ever but we might leave,’ etc.

“If Sundance wants to extend its contract with Park City beyond ’26, the deadline is October 2024 — six months hence.

“Yes, Virginia…Sensitive Gargoyles Have Ruined Sundance,” posted on 12.27.21:

Open your veins, Sundance. Open your veins and bleed to death in the snow. You were the greatest American film festival for 30 years, but then you woked yourself to death. Nobody loves you now, nobody wants you…die, die.

“Ballet dancer Michaela Mabinty DePrince, who came to the United States from an orphanage in war-torn Sierra Leone and performed on some of the world’s biggest stages, has died, her family said in a statement. She was 29.”

What a terrible tragedy…a woman who endured so much strife and trauma during her hardscrabble childhood and yet accomplished so much and ascended to such heights in the ballet world.

Naturally no one is even speculating about what may have happened. The only clue is a passage in her Wiki bio, to wit: “In September 2020, DePrince took time off from her career to grieve and deal with her mental health through therapy.”

The apparent implication is that she died by her own hand. What a sad, sad tale.

If Kamala Harris wants to expand her lead (and why wouldn’t she?), she needs to do three things right away.

One, make clear through surrogates what too few people seem to understand, which is that she had/has no real agency as vice-president under Joe Biden — vps are ceremonial stooges who parrot what the president wants or says — the term is “strictly backup” as no vice-president except Dick Cheney has ever significantly influenced any president’s policy or decisions.

Two, admit that the Biden administration made a few mistakes (i.e., Afghanistan withdrawal, overly liberal immigration policy, too accommodating to crazy wokesters on gender stuff and pregnant men) but that she’s learned from these errors and here’s how she feels now.

Three, in line with admitting these mistakes she needs to do what vice-president Hubert Humphrey did during his 1968 presidential campaign, and that’s break with the president on this or that matter of policy. Announce that when she becomes president she’ll be going her own way and calling her own shots. Humphrey didn’t rise in the polls until he broke with LBJ over the Vietnam War. If he’d announced his differences with LBJ earlier in the campaign HHH might have prevailed over Richard Nixon.

Rosemary’s Baby aside, Mia Farrow’s finest all-time performance is in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose.