I saw Ridley Scott‘s All The Money in the World (Sony, 12.25) for the second time last night at a big Academy premiere — talent, producers, actors, publicists, below-the-liners, people like me, etc. Scott and some of the cast attended (Mark Wahlberg, Christoper Plummer, Michelle Williams, Charlie Plummer, Timothy Hutton), and there was a big party afterward with loads of great-tasting food by Wolfgang Puck caterers.

All The Money is about a true-life event — the 1973 Rome kidnapping of John Paul Getty III and the laborious, months-long negotiations between the kidnappers and the young Getty’s tightwad grandfather, oil baron and billionaire J. Paul Getty, that followed. Scott doesn’t fool around with the story beats, and has made a stylish, well-finessed thing, jarring and intelligent and always believable.

Prior to last night’s Academy screening of Ridley Scott’s All The Money In The World — Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Williams, Scott.

The film is actually about tycoon vs. people values — a rumination about the real price of meat in the market, about how cold things can get when a capitalist emperor like Getty Sr. (chillingly played by Plummer) has been told to cough up or else when it comes to life of one of his own (Charlie Plummer, no relation), and how thorny and malignant life can be when hard bargainers are sparring over the size of a ransom. It’s a film about icy, eyeball-to-eyeball behavior on all sides.

Except, that is, when it comes to Gail Harris (Williams), the mother of the kidnapped scion who, as you might expect, doesn’t see the situation in monetary as much as human terms. And also, come to think of it, when it comes to Cinquanta (Romain Duris), a member of the Red Brigade kidnapping gang who becomes the young Getty’s closest captor and “friend”, in a manner of speaking. At the end of the day Cinqunata is almost as much on the human side as Gail.

In the Scott canon, All The Money in the World isn’t as cruel and ruthless as The Counselor, the 2013 drug-dealing drama that is arguably Scott’s finest 21st Century film, but it operates in the same chilly ballpark. Scott isn’t commonly associated with straight-talking dramas about upfront realism, but when he decides to settle down and make films for adults (i.e., stories about how things really are out there), there’s no one better.

We’ve all been impressed, I think, by Scott’s recent herculean re-filming of all the J. Paul Getty scenes (re-performed by Plummer when it became apparent in early November that the disgraced Kevin Spacey had to be jettisoned) between 11.20 and 11.30. Scott was given a longish standing ovation when he took the stage before the show began.

It’s been nearly 11 months since I first saw Call Me By Your Name at Sundance ’17. Like everyone else, I was floored by that quietly climactic father-son scene between Michael Stuhlbarg and Timothee Chalamet. Even before it ended I was dead certain that Stuhlbarg would become one of the five contenders for Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and perhaps even the likeliest winner.

But then, of course, The Florida Project premiered in Cannes four months later and then Willem Dafoe began to happen in the early fall, and now there’s not even an element of doubt about his winning, despite strong competition from Sam Rockwell‘s performance in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Stuhlbarg’s performance, jewel-perfect as it is, never lifted off the award-season runway. The unfairness of life amazes me, and it never stops.

From Brett Easton Ellis’s 12.18 Out piece: “In terms of plot nothing much happens on the surface of Call Me By Your Name, but of course something monumental is happening because what we are witnessing is the erasure of innocence — this affair will kill that. On a second viewing the gay vibe** from Elio’s father (Stuhlbarg) is clearer, and in a very moving scene near the end he gives a speech to Elio (Chalamet), devastated over the loss of Oliver and flooded with the pangs of first love’s disappointments.

“The speech is culled from the book where the father tells his son that he knew what was happening between him and Oliver and that he has nothing to be ashamed of and to cherish the pain he’s feeling and that he’ll always be there for him. This scene could have been nearly insufferable in its noble ‘progressive’ virtue-signaling: if only we all had fathers this wonderful and warm-hearted and accommodating, who can console their sons with lines like ‘When you least expect it nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot,’ and ‘Remember, I’m here.’

“And yet Stuhlberg sells it with a hushed technical virtuosity that makes every word land and vibrate, even though at times he overdoes the saintly Jewish-Daddy thing. Stuhlberg makes this the real climax of the movie — it becomes a primal scene — and in the packed theater I saw the movie you could hear the gay men (at least half the audience) barely holding back muffled sobs.

The initially dispiriting thing about Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs (Fox Searchlight, 3.23) is that (a) it’s set in Japan, which Hollywood Elsewhere has never been a huge fan of, (b) it’s about a dystopian future and (c) it’s largely set on “trash island,” which seems to be all about grayish colors, rotting food and industrial waste. Which of course makes you feel sorry for the poor dogs who live there. One presumes (hopes) that the third-act involves some kind of escape and/or transformation.

Wiki boilerpplate: “Set in a dystopian future Japan in which dogs have been quarantined on the remote eponymous island due to a “canine flu”, Isle of Dogs follows five barkers — Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Bill Murray), Duke (Jeff Goldblum) and King (Bob Balaban). They’re fed up with their isolated existence until a boy named Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) ventures to the island to search for his dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber),” etc.

Neil Blomkamp‘s District 9 meets George Miller‘s The Road Warrior meets current epic sensibilities. Pure apocalyptic formula, and called Mortal Engines, you bet. “Thousands of years after civilization was destroyed by a cataclysmic event,” blah blah, same old same old. Wells to filmmakers: Huge tractor cities don’t growl like dinosaurs — they don’t go “rrrhhoowwwhhrrr.” Directed by Christian Rivers, produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, written by Jackson, Walsh and Philippa Boyens. Costarring Robert Sheehan, Hera Hilmar, Leila George, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Lang. Universal will open it on 12.14.18.

On 12.14 I made it clear that I had no problem with the Academy’s foreign-film branch leaving Robin Campillo‘s BPM: Beats Per Minute off the shortlist. I respect BPM — it’s fleet and sharp and well cut — and I admire, of course, the balls-out militancy of the ACT UP movement in the late ’80s and ’90s. But to me Campillo’s felt too strident, too hectoring and a little too Taxi Zum Klo.

Yeah, that’s right — I prefer gay movies (i.e, Call Me By Your Name) to queer cinema. I guess that makes me a bad guy in some quarters, right?

Variety‘s Guy Lodge has dutifully passed along the elitist disappointment about the BPM snub. “More conservative voters in the general branch might not warm to the film’s length, talkiness and frankly queer sensibility, it was reasoned,” GL wrote, “and when the film got frozen out of the Golden Globes last week, we were given a hint that it wasn’t a universal favorite outside the critical enclave. [For] the general verdict from onlookers was that the Academy had erred badly by passing on Campillo’s film.”

Translation: Those who didn’t vote for BPM are likely homophobes, and they need to work through that. Group therapy, night classes, etc.

Guys like Mark Harris and Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson can lament this, but there’s no law that I know of stating that you have to be moved by, say, a scene in which an AIDS-ravaged guy gets a death-bed hand job. “Reform is desperately needed here,” tweeted Harris. “And the fact that it’s a gay movie…this is a stain.”

Presumably the foreign language committee as well as the Academy at large understand that the next queer movie that comes along needs to be embraced with a bit more fervor. If not, more charges of homophobia!

The first Sundance showing of Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, about cartoonist John Callahan, is about as prime as it gets — Friday, 1.19 at 9:45 pm, Eccles. And today’s announcement about the Amazon release being selected as a 2018 Berlinale competition title completes the picture. The film is apparently a first-rater with heat, and Van Sant is looking pretty slick himself.

(l.) Jonah Hill, (r.) Joaquin Pheonix.

Don’t forget that Van Sant was all but covered in shit after the critical drubbing that his last film, The Sea of Trees, received in Cannes two and a half years ago. It just goes to show that if you keep hustling and don’t let failure get you down, you’ll eventually find yourself back on top or close to it. Maybe. If you’re X factor to begin with.

Pic stars Joaquin Phoenix as Callahan, and costars Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Mark Webber and Udo Kier. Amazon will open the period drama stateside on 5.18.18.

I wouldn’t call President Trump’s statement about not planning to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller…I wouldn’t call that comforting because you know he wants to. He just doesn’t think he can fire Mueller without making things worse for himself. If Trump were otherwise persuaded he’d go for it. He’s unhappy about Mueller for gaining access to all transition those emails. “My people were very upset about it,” he said — right. Mueller’s spokesman claimed that the email-obtaining methods were totally legit.

Owen Gleiberman‘s latest Variety essay, “Four Reasons Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi Isn’t One for the Ages“, is (what else?) highly perceptive and sharply written. If you haven’t time to read the whole thing…

Excerpt #1: “Something happens” at the end of a climactic lightsaber duel in Jedi “that echoes a famous death from the original 1977 Star Wars. It’s a ‘whoa!’ kind of moment, but…turns out to be merely the set-up for a much bigger ‘whoa!” moment.

“That mega, super-ultra ‘whoa!’ is designed to blow our minds, and in one sense it does. It leaves the audience with popped eyes and dropped jaws, going ‘Geez, I didn’t know the Jedi could do that!’

“But approximately two seconds after you’ve taken the moment in, it also leaves you with the feeling that the reason you didn’t know they could do that is that the film is making up its rules as it goes along. The moment is arbitrary, breathless but superimposed — spectacular in a monkeys-might-fly-out-of-my-butt sort of way. It seals the experience of The Last Jedi, a movie in which stuff keeps happening, and sometimes that stuff is staggering, and occasionally it’s quite exciting, but too often it feels like the bedazzled version of treading water.

“Yet you hang on and go with it, because you’re yearning for something great, and this is what the Star Wars universe, in its sleek retro-fitted corporate efficiency, has come down to: Making stuff up as it goes along.”

Tatyana and I were waiting in line on the Disney Burbank lot for last Monday’s 7 pm show of The Last Jedi. Waiting and waiting. 6:25 pm, 6:30 pm, 6:35 pm…what’s going on? Suddenly the 4 pm show broke around 6:42 pm, and I knew there wasn’t a chance that they’d start again at 7 pm.

I happened to mention to Tatyana that Jedi lasts around 150 minutes, and a minute later she decided she didn’t want to stay. We agreed that she’d meet me outside the main Alameda gate around 9:45 pm. But we’d have to stick to this plan come hell or high water as we’d left our phones in the car in the parking garage, per Disney orders.

Sure enough they started the film late; it ended around 9:42 pm. I sped-marched out of the main theatre and up to the main gate. I knew the metal gates would be locked but presumed they’d have those special one-way doors that allow people to leave but not enter. Nope. Then I figured “okay, I’m agile, I’ll hop the fence” but I soon realized that was easier said than done.

It was now 9:47 pm but I didn’t see Tatyana. I walked down to the Buena Vista gate — same deal, no exit. The place is a fortress! I started to feel a little creeped out by those damn Mickey Mouse heads atop the green metal fence. Mouse heads…mouse heads everywhere.

Then I walked down to the Riverside Drive gate…another locked gate. You’re staying the night! I walked across Riverside on an elevated pedestrian bridge and down behind an animation building, and finally I came upon a driveway gate with access to the street. Disney security doesn’t fool around.

Two minutes later Tatyana showed up at the corner of Riverside and Buena Vista. She’d driven around the lot three times and was about to start on the fourth.

Obviously Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a huge hit. Sometime tonight domestic earnings are expected to hit $220,047,000 plus $230 million foreign for a worldwide haul of $450,047,000, and that’s after three days in theatres.

Obviously everyone wanted to see it this weekend, but what about those shitty “user” (i.e., ticket-buyer) ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (56% with 97,121 respondents) and Metacritic (4.9% out of 10)?

Metacritic user score for The Last Jedi as of Sunday noon.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro has asked around and is reporting that while “user scores typically aren’t that far from their critical ratings,” the reason for the huge gap between critical upvotes for Jedi and negative responses from ticket buyers is due to malicious “trolling.” Additionally, he says, “there’s no way to filter on these sites whether or not the users have actually seen Last Jedi or not.”

This is why D’Alessandro trusts CinemaScore and PostTrak much more, as they “literally poll moviegoers in real time, as they’re exiting the theater.”

And yet no other films on the current Rotten Tomatoes roster are showing this kind of discrepancy — a 93% critical rating for Jedi vs. 56% user ratings from 96,829 respondents.

Ferdinand has a 73% rating and a 75% user rating. Justice League, generally regarded as a box-office underperformer, is at $40% (critics) and 79% (some very friendly users). Wonder is at 85% (critics) and 91% (users). The Disaster Artist is at 99% and 90%. Coco is at 97% and 96%.

In short, the only film beside Jedi with a serious critic-user discrepancy is Justice League, but in that case the film was much better liked by users than critics. In all other cases user and critic ratings are fairly close.

Two days ago it was reported that Dan and Toby Talbot‘s Lincoln Plaza Cinema, an arthouse sixplex and an Upper West Side cultural haven since it opened in 1981, has been given the heave-ho by its landlord, Milstein Properties. The theatre will close in January.

In an email a Milstein spokesperson told the N.Y. Times that “vital structural work” was needed to repair and waterproof the plaza around the building. “At the completion of this work, we expect to reopen the space as a cinema that will maintain its cultural legacy far into the future.” The rep added that it’s unclear “if the cinema [will] reopen with the Talbots in charge.”

This sounds like Milsteins want to sever ties with the Talbots. Maybe not.

Honestly? I’ve always kind of hated this little basement-level plex. Tiny shoebox theatres, small screens, seats mounted too close together, no leg room. The last time I saw a film there was…oh, six or seven years ago. It was raining outside (which was part of the reason I’d bought a ticket) and as I sat in one of those crummy little theatres, which felt damp and stuffy that day with the odor of soaked umbrellas and raincoats, I remember saying to myself, “What am I doing here? I don’t like the movie and the atmosphere is down-at-the-heels and the seat is too uncomfortable to take a nap in.”

But I always respected the Lincoln Plaza. A film-buff haven, a small business that has long fed the aura of Upper West Side knowingness. Every time I’d walk by I’d look up at that shitty little marquee and say to myself, “Good, it’s still there.” So the closing is a very sad thing. A shame. Diminishes the character of the city, makes the neighborhood a little less vibrant.

Smarthouse cinemas have always been good for the soul. Manhattan was a repertory cinema boom town in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. They’re all pretty much gone now, although there’s still the Metrograph, the 13th street Quad Cinema as well as the Cinema Village, the Film Forum, MoMA, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Museum of the Moving Image, BAM, et. al.

At the same time people have been lamenting for the last 20 years that NYC is becoming more and more corporate, and less and less accomodating for small- and mid-sized businesses, not to mention anyone earning less than a hefty six-figure income. Remember the death of Pearl Paint on Canal? Same kind of sadness.

On 12.14 The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit reported that Benny and Josh Safdie (Good Time) will direct a remake of Walter Hill‘s 48 HRS (’82). The original script, co-written by Hill, Roger Spottiswoode, Larry Gross and Steven de Souza, is about a racist tough-guy cop (Nick Nolte) springing a black convict (Eddie Murphy) from jail in order to gain an inside advantage in tracking down a pair of cop killers.

The problem, it seems to me, is that the racial epithets that came out of Nolte’s mouth 35 years ago will sound over-the-top horrendous by today’s cultural standards. Nolte’s Jack Cates calls Murphy’s Reggie Hammond the “n” word, for one thing, not to mention “spearchucker” and a couple of other terms that haven’t been heard in commercial films in a long time.

How to get around this? Reverse the ethnicity of the leads. Use a snarly, middle-aged black actor to play Nolte’s detective, and a younger white actor to play Murphy’s convict, except make him an under-educated alt-right guy.