If you want a simian type with a look of beady-eyed menace….a guy who smokes and glares and wolfs his food and pounds the table…a lowlife with nothing on his mind except finding new ways to communicate the greasy, slimey, low-life mentality of a muscular, high-testosterone thug….Jon Bernthal is your man. Best known for portraying Shane Walsh in AMC’s The Walking Dead and for stand-out roles in Fury, The Wolf of Wall Street, Sicario, The Accountant, Baby Driver and Wind River. He will never, ever portray a nice suburban guy who’s been to college. Or a guy with a mellow attitude. He’ll never play a mild-mannered employee of an ad agency or a real-estate company, or a guy who teaches grade-school kids or works at a small-town hardware store. The man is a predator, an animal — he spits and slurps and chews food with his mouth half-open.  He only conveys animal vibes.

If you leave aside the horrid issue of sexual assault and focus solely on matters of taste and aspiration, it is entirely fair to describe Bob Weinstein as a bottom feeder and Harvey, for all his detestable private behavior, as a guy who at least understood and respected smarthouse cinema. But not Bob. In their heyday Bob was Irwin Yablans to Harvey’s Frank Yablans. Bob has never given a shit about quality — he’s an exploitation guy who just wants to sell tickets.

So when I read yesterday that Bob is bumping Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War into 2018, I knew it was tantamount to a burial. It wouldn’t have done well commercially anyway, but now it’s “a cat in a bag with the bag in a river,” as Sidney Falco might’ve said.

And that’s really too bad. The Current War is weird and slow but an interesting film, and a highly unusual and eccentric one by visual standards alone. It’s a cerebral, vaguely boring Terrence Malick thing mixed with How The West Was Won. Every scene, line and frame tells you it was made by talented, forward-thinking cool cats trying to be different and distinctive, and now it’s probably going to be thrown into the bin. A shame.

My Toronto Film Festival review: Thomas Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War (Weinstein, 11.24) is an eccentric, visually unconventional period drama — that much is certain. 

The movie is basically an AC/DC thing — the battle between direct vs. alternating currents of electricity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, or a stab at creating compelling drama out of a battle of opposing modes and strategies for providing electricity to the public. 

This in itself, especially in an era of increasingly downscale if not submental approaches to mass entertainment, is highly eccentric. But the tone of inspirational strangeness doesn’t end there.

The DC team was led by genius inventor Thomas A. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) while the AC approach was steamrolled by engineer-businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) with a late-inning assist from genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).

This is fine as far as histrionic line readings, personality conflicts and eccentric facial-hair appearances are concerned, but an especially striking visual style from South Korean dp Chung Hoon-Chung (It, The Handmaiden, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) compounds the fascination.

In an attempt to reflect the unusual, headstrong mentalities of Edison and Westinghouse, Gomez-Rejon and Chung have gone with a kind of early ‘60s Cinerama approach to visual composition — widescreen images, wide-angle lenses and a frequent decision to avoid conventional close-ups and medium shots in favor of what has to be called striking if not bizarre avant-garde framings in which the actors are presented as smallish figures against dynamically broad images and vast painterly landscapes.

The look of The Current War, in short, closely resembles the extreme wide-angle compositions in 1962’s How The West Was Won.

I usually have a quibble or two with any Kyle Buchanan Oscar Futures column, but I’m almost 100% on board with his latest, which is mainly an expression of profound disappointment with Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel. I do, however, believe that Kate Winslet will snag the fifth Best Actress nomination slot. Winning is out of the question — it’s a McDormand vs. Ronan vs. Streep thing with Sally Hawkins snagging slot #4. Battle of the Sexes‘ Emma Stone is not happening.

If you were to levitate five or six miles and then hover and look down at the human race and all its troubles — millions of angry, fearful ants throwing spears and lobbing Twitter grenades, crippled by the viruses of fear, cruelty, ignorance, selfishness, aggression and hostility — you might be moved to say “wow, things are really sad down there…a lotta people hurtin’ and it really scares me.” But if you say the same words to the BBC from your Manhattan apartment, you’re a Harvey Weinstein apologist. Warning: You’re probably still allowed to think such things, but vocal expression is not a good idea in the current climate.

Woody clarifies: “When I said I felt sad for Harvey Weinstein I thought it was clear the meaning was because he is a sad, sick man. I was surprised it was treated differently. Lest there be any ambiguity, this statement clarifies my intention and feelings.”

What else could the Academy have done? Issue a statement saying “Harvey’s a bad guy but let’s let byones be bygones”? Of course he got kicked out.

If I were Harvey (the thought!) I would do everything I could to cleanse my soul and body and try to start anew. Maybe I could never succeed, but at least I could try — at least that. I would remove my clothing and lash myself with birch branches. I would grow a white beard and become a devout Buddhist. I would pray and meditate. I would enter a mountain monastery and take a vow of abstinence and silence for 365 days. I would wear robes and sandals and eat nothing but fruit and wheat grass and steamed vegetables, and drink nothing but purified water and green tea.

Then I would move to Vietnam, buy a first-rate Harley Davidson and become Lord Jim. I would live in modest abodes and do volunteer work at hospitals, or better yet at hospices. I would work for free for rice farmers, seeking only rice bowls and a place to sleep. I would get on the bike and rumble across Asia and into India and Pakistan, and then join the fight against ISIS. I would become a Zen poet warrior, dressed in black Viet-Cong pajamas with an AK-47 strapped across my back. I would continue to pray and meditate. And if I get killed by ISIS, I would at least die clean.

“Giving Trump a pass is…well, it’s not what I do but on the other hand I don’t feel comfortable giving him shit about his crazy, loose-cannon behavior. It’s not what I do as a rule. I love pop culture more than politics. Colbert can take shots at Trump…he’s good at that. You have to understand that I’m more popular with rural dumbshits than Colbert or Kimmel. I’m not exactly a conservative guy but they have it in their heads that I am. Why would I want to dissuade them of that opinion?”

The Guardian‘s Emma Brockes has posted an interview with Tom Hanks about “Uncommon Type,” a collection of short stories written by the 61 year-old actor and former superstar.

Hanks is one of the best-liked guys in this business, in part because he’s always been delicate and diplomatic in airing opinions about this or that. But he ignored this social discipline when Brockes asked him about career limitations or hindrances.

Tom Hanks, the blunt-spoken author of “Uncommon Type.”

Brockes: “What’s the male equivalent of the Hollywood actress considered too old for a lead?” Hanks: “Unfairly, I don’t think there is one.” Brockes: “You don’t age out of some genres?” Hanks: “No. But here’s what you can do: you can fat yourself out. If you’re fat, you can’t play an astronaut. Take a look at the guys who are still working; they’re in really good shape. Otherwise, they become character guys. So that’s possible.”

First of all, you’re not allowed to say “fat” any more. Hanks surely understands that anyone who uses this word is a fat-shamer. In today’s p.c. realm there are no fat people — just cool people of different shapes and sizes. (Unless you’re talking about Donald Trump.) So right away Hanks has violated a major p.c. no-no.

Secondly (and I’m sure Hanks gets this also), fat actors might not be able to play an astronaut but they can definitely play a thinner person’s lover or fiancee. It used to be that corpulent actors were used only as comic relief types or the second-best friend of the handsome lead. Nowadays fat actors actually get laid in features and TV series, which never would have even occured to directors and screenwriters 25 years ago.

Within the last five years we’ve seen (a) the Santa Claus-sized Michael Chernus play the lover of a hot married woman in People, Places, Things, (b) the girthy Mel Rodriguez play a guy with an active love life in Will Forte‘s The Last Man on Earth series, (c) Forte’s character in Nebraska looking to keep a sexual relationship going with Missy Doty (who was described by Thomas Haden Church‘s character in Sideways as “the grateful type”), (d) the bulky, nearly bald Steve Zissis connecting with Amanda Peet on HBO’s Togetherness, and (e) the rail-thin Mamoudou Athie do the deed with Danielle McDonald in Patti Cake$.

Six and a half months ago I was wowed by 20th Century Fox’s presentation at Cinemacon, and particularly by the footage from Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman (12.25), a musical about P.T. Barnum. It looked and sounded like a major wow — “a big, brassy, up-spirited musical…aimed at the ticket-buyers, full of feeling, going for the gold and the glory.”

A little more than three months later (on 6.29) the trailer popped. It felt a little bit corny and obvious, but I figured Fox marketers were just trying to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator lowbrows and that the first award-season promotions would begin sometime in…oh, late October or thereabouts.

This morning I was told in so many words that Fox doesn’t regard The Greatest Showman as Best Picture material at all, and that the big Cinemacon promotion was strictly about getting exhibitors excited about selling tickets to a big, splashy, hoo-hah musical. Oh. Congrats, Fox marketing, for conning me into thinking that The Greatest Showman might be an X-factor musical that would appeal to people like me as well as the schmucks.

From a friend: “They tested The Greatest Showman last night in South Jordan, Utah. They were offering 10 dollars to any woman between 18 and 24 that would attend. I’m guessing they’re looking to attract the Zac Efron crowd.”

It sounds unkind if not cruel to say this, but the invisible subtitle of Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel, which I saw this morning, is “I got nothin’ left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.”

It’s not a substandard or dismissable film, but it’s not grade-A either. It’s basically a thrown-together stew of familiar Allen-esque elements and influences — a little Chekhov-Seagull action, a little re-frying of Blue Jasmine desperation mixed with A Streetcar Named Desire, a dash of Mary Beth Hurt‘s “Joey” character in Interiors, some gangster seasoning from Bullets over Broadway plus some onions, garlic, celery and sauteed peppers and a little Crimes and Misdemeanors.

But it has some magnificent cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro. It’s totally worth seeing for this alone.

Wonder Wheel is basically a gloomy stage play — don’t trust any reviewer who calls it a “dramedy” — about a love triangle that ends in doom and despair. For my money it felt too stagey, too “written”, too theatrical. Every doomed character seems to be saying lines, and I just didn’t believe it. I never stopped saying to myself “the writing hasn’t been sufficiently finessed.”

Wonder Wheel‘s tragic figure is poor Ginny (Kate Winslet), a 39 year-old might-have-been actress on her second marriage, living in a Santo Loquasto-designed Coney Island apartment with a pot-bellied lunkhead named Humpty (Jim Belushi), miserable as fuck with a waitress gig at a local clam house and coping with a strange pyromaniac son whom I didn’t care for and wanted to see drowned.

There are two wild cards — a Trigorin-like would-be playwright/lifeguard named Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake), and Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s unstable daughter who shows up in scene #1, looking to hide out after yapping to the FBI about her gangster ex-husband and concerned that friends of her ex might want to hurt her.

Early on Ginny falls for Mickey and vice versa to a certain extent. The problem is that Ginny starts to imagine that Mickey can somehow help her escape from her miserable life. But Mickey is just looking for writerly experience and not interested in being anyone’s savior, except perhaps his own. 

The second problem is that soon after meeting Carolina Mickey starts to think about easing out of his affair with Ginny and maybe….no, he doesn’t want to be a two-timing shit so he puts it out of his mind, but you know what they say about Mr. Happy. He wants what he wants.

Wonder Wheel is a lament for life’s unhappy losers — for those marginally talented people who never quite made it artistically, or who made one or two big mistakes and never recovered, and who are stuck in a dead-end job or marriage that is making them more and more miserable. It starts out saying “these people are not only unhappy, but nothing they can do can free them from the mud of misery.” It ends up saying “you thought these folks couldn’t be less happy? Well, we figured a way!”

Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of The Weinstein Company, has sought to dispel rumors about TWC shutting down or being sold with a rote gung-ho statement claiming that things are A-okay, etc. He also emphasized that he’s much more interested in low-rent mulch than TWC’s aspirational, adult-level films like The Current War, The Upside and Mary Magdelene.

“It is untrue that the company or board is exploring a sale or shutdown of the company,” Weinstein said earlier this afternoon. “Our banks, partners and shareholders are fully supportive of our company. Polaroid is moving forward as planned with a release date of November 22, followed by Paddington 2 on January 12. The first Paddington grossed over $75 million and we expect even greater success for Paddington 2. Test screening scores are through the roof. War with Grandpa starring Robert De Niro is scheduled for February 23, 2018. Business is continuing as usual as the company moves ahead.”

In other words, Bob’s attitude about Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (11.24.17), Neil Burger‘s The Upside (3.9.18) and Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene (3.30.18) is “tough shit, fellas…I’m running the show now, not Harvey, and I’ve never much cared for upscale movies aimed at people who read reviews. I’m a bottom-feeder, which means that with Harvey gone you guys are shit out of luck.”

Polaroid is a horror film, Paddington 2 is an semi-animated family film and The War With Grandpa is a coarse, low-rent comedy.