Nothing says small-town, Norman Rockwell America and down-home humanistic values like corporate chain stores and the constant howl of traffic. Welcome to hell, which in this instance is Aztec, New Mexico. I crashed here last night and I’m still hanging around, sitting in a McDonald’s and grappling with wifi speeds that are slower than a horse trader’s mule. Massive parking lots, too much light, 24-hour gas stations, noise, corporate signage, limited incomes and a sense of being inside a minimum-security prison. If I was forced to live here I would become an opioid addict in less than a month.

Two days after it became apparent that the Toronto Film festival had added Dan Gilroy‘s Roman J. Israel, Esq. to the lineup, the festival has finally this. Take your time, guys!

From the release: “The Toronto International Film Festival® proudly announces the World Premiere of Academy Award® nominee Dan Gilroy’s Roman J. Israel, Esq., completing the 2017 Official Programme Selection. Written and directed by Gilroy and featuring an amazing transformation by Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq. is the newest and final addition to TIFF’s Special Presentations programme, furthering Washington and Gilroy’s collaborative relationship with the Festival.”

A couple of days ago I was chatting with a colleague about the film, and he was wondering what was up with Denzel’s Don King haircut and purple Superfly suit. “Is it a period thing?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I suspect not. You have to figure there are older guys who dress like Don King because it means something to them…it’s a statement they value.” Update: Apparently it is a period thing.

Aztec, New Mexico, 7:11 am: No Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes scores yet for Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, but reviews from the Telegraph‘s Robbie Collin, Guardian‘s Xan Brooks and The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang will do for now.

The 12.8 Fox Searchlight release screened this morning at the Venice Film Festival, and of course will play this weekend in Telluride.

Collin #1: “The Shape of Water…is an honest-to-God B-movie blood-curdler that’s also, somehow, a shimmeringly earnest and boundlessly beautiful melodrama: think Creature From the Black Lagoon directed by Douglas Sirk.”

Collin #2: “It offers what must be cinema’s uneasiest probing of the postwar American psyche since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master — and is unquestionably del Toro’s best, richest film since his 2006 Spanish-language masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth. Crucially, it’s also one that he and he alone could have dreamt up.”

Brooks #1: “I’ve been agnostic about Del Toro in the past — filing the Mexican filmmaker away as an ideas man; a director who shoots for the moon only to fall slightly short. But I really liked The Shape of Water. It feels less of a fevered artistic exercise than his other recent work; more seamless and successful in the way it orders its material.”

Brooks #2: “Yes, Del Toro’s latest flight of fancy sets out to liberally pastiche the postwar monster movie, doffing its cap to the incident at Roswell and all manner of related cold war paranoia. But it’s warmer and richer than the films that came before. Beneath that glossy, scaly surface is a beating heart.”

Collin #3: “Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.”

Kiang #1: “But as much as it has on its mind, it has even more in its happy-sad, brave and quiet heart. Without a single weak link in the exceptional cast (Sally Hawkins would deserve awards recognition if all she did was that one, unmistakably post-coital smile of carnal satisfaction in her lover’s scaly embrace), it’s a film that makes you feel a lot.

Kiang #2: “But overridingly you feel lucky — lucky to be watching it, lucky that something so sincerely sweet, sorrowfully scary and surpassingly strange can exist in this un-wonderful world, and desirous of hanging on to as much of its magic for as long as you can after you reemerge back onto dry land.”

Blade Runner 2049 runs two hours and 32 minutes sans credits, and two hours and 43 minutes with them. 152 + 11 minutes of credits = 163. Right off the bat I’ve got an attitude about this. Imagine da coolness if Denis Villeneuve’s semi-sequel ran 100 minutes or thereabouts. If Steven Soderbergh is reading, please consider one of your re-edits down the road. How long does the closing credit sequence last in Ridley Scott’s 1982 original, which runs 117 minutes? How minutes of actual screen time does Harrison Ford have in Denis Villeneuve’s semi-sequel or whatever you wanna call it? 20 or 15? Just asking. Warner Bros. opens it on 10.6.

I’m sorry but I’m in Phoenix, where the temperature is 107. The Albuquerque flight leaves at 4:50 pm, arrives an hour later. Dollar rent-a-car, three-hour drive to Aztec, flop at local dive. Aztec to Telluride will eat about three and 1/2 hours, give or take.

Houston sea, complete with waves and whitecaps.

Snapped in Venice.

Gate C7, Phoenix airport, 4:15 pm.

Hold your ground, be cool, take it like a man.

The new trailer for Lynn Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here, based on the novella of the same name by Jonathan Ames. Pic stars Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette, John Doman and Judith Roberts. It premiered at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, where Ramsay won the Best Screenplay award and Phoenix won the Best Actor award. It’s a forthcoming Amazon release, running 85 minutes.

From Kyle Buchanan’s 5.27 Joaquin Phoenix interview, titled “Joaquin Phoenix Is an Action Hero Now, But He’s Keeping His Belly“: Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here is about a hammer-wielding, battle-scarred war veteran who rescues girls from a sex-trafficking ring, but you’ll know it’s different from a traditional action thriller as soon as star Joaquin Phoenix takes off his shirt.

“In an era where most leading men have awfully similar buff bodies, the 42-year-old Phoenix stands apart: His character is covered in scars, his pecs are hardly Hollywood-chiseled, and while the actor hit the gym every day to build strong arms for the role, he’s still got a notable gut hanging over his waistband. If there’s any six-pack in sight, it’s likely getting cold in the fridge.

The first burst of Downsizing reviews from the Venice Film Festival are averaging 90% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. There are four or five quibblers. Screen International‘s Lee Marshall says “there’s something for everyone in Downsizing, just not a full meal.” While praising director Alexander Payne as “the closest thing we have to a studio-system classcist,” Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman says it’s “more amusing than exhilarating, and what should be its emotional payoff hinges too much (for my taste) on the director’s apocalyptic vision of climate change. Downsizing turns into a movie about saving the human race. But it’s most fun when it’s about saving one man whose life turns out to be bigger than a hill of beans.” The biggest naysayer is senior Daily Beast entertainment editor Marlow Stern, who tweeted this morning that “the effusive Venice praise for Downsizing is festival hysteria, plain and simple. It’s not good, unfortunately.” But a 90% Metacritic rating ain’t hay, and don’t forget Todd McCarthy’s rave.

From a 4.1.17 post titled “Middle Americans May Not Like What They See in Downsizing“, which riffed on my reactions to a 10-minute Downsizing clip shown at Cinemacon and particularly a conservative Arizona woman’s reaction to it:

“Yes, Downsizing is ‘comedic’ but a long way from lighthearted. For all the humor and cleverness and first-rate CG it feels kind of Twilight Zone-y…a kind of Rod Serling tale that will have an uh-oh finale or more likely an uh-oh feeling all through it. The undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

“In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

“A day after Cinemacon’s Downsizing presentation I was chatting with a bespectacled heavy-set female who works, she said, for an Arizona exhibitor (or some exhibition-related business) in some executive capacity. She struck me as a conservative, perhaps one who processes things in simplistic ‘like/no like’ terms, definitely not a Susan Sontag brainiac.

“I shared my impression that the Downsizing clip was brilliant, and asked what she thought of it. Her response: ‘I don’t know what I think of it.’

“HE translation: ‘No offense but I don’t want to spill my mixed feelings with some Los Angeles journalist I’ve just met. I didn’t like the chilly feeling underneath it. It didn’t make me feel good. My heart wasn’t warmed by the idea of working people shrinking themselves down so they can live a more lavish lifestyle. I have to work really hard at my job and watch my spending and build up my IRA, and I didn’t appreciate the notion that I’m just a little struggling hamster on a spinning wheel.'”

Above-average bathroom montage, posted four years ago by Blow Up ARTE guys. Just happened upon this, nice work, nothing more.

As a longtime fan of Bertrand Blier‘s Going Places (Les Valseuses), I’ve been hoping that someone would attempt an American remake. A tricky task, for sure, as the 1974 original, a French road flick about random lawlessness and impulsive debauchery, had a curiously disarming chemistry. As it turns out John Turturro has directed a Going Places remake with the same title, and one that has the “same spirit” as the Blier filmm at least according to an Indiewire interview that Turturro gave earlier this year.

Turturro’s Going Places costars himself, Bobby Cannavale and Audrey Tatou as “sexually depraved misfits,” according to the Indiewire description. The interesting part is that Turturro’s character is Jesus Quintana, the perverse, purple-suited bowling enthusiast from The Big Lebowski (’98).

“Blier’s [film] is like a sex comedy about how stupid men are, basically,” Turturro said. “His movie was more edgy, but this is [about] a different time. Audrey Tautou is more empowered. [Plus] it’s more sexual, and you find out that Jesus was framed as a pedophile.” Susan Sarandon plays a woman just released from prison, or the part that the late Jeanne Moreau played in the original. Sonia Braga also costars.

Can I say something? You have to be younger and fresh-faced and full of beans and hormones to play a sexually depraved misfit. Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Deware were 25 and 26, respectively, when they made the original French-language version. Turturro will always own “the Jesus,” but he was born in February 1957. Cannavale is 47, and Tatou, born in ’76, is no spring chicken either.

But I want to see Turturro’s Going Places anyway.

From Todd McCarthy‘s Venice Film Festival review of Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing: “[This] is a wonderfully outsized movie for these times if there ever was one. Alexander Payne has taken a conceit heretofore used for gag-oriented sci-fi and comedy, that of shrinking human beings down to the size of a finger, and breathtakingly transformed it into a way of addressing the planet’s overriding long-term issue.

“Captivating, funny and possessed of a surprise-filled zig-zag structure that makes it impossible to anticipate where it’s headed, this is a deeply humane film that, like the best Hollywood classics, feels both entirely of its moment and timeless. It was a risky roll of the dice, but one that hits the creative jackpot.

“The rare director who has never made a bad film, Payne has now arguably created his best one with a work that easily accommodates many moods, flavors, intentions and ambitions.

“At its core, Downsizing grapples head-on with the long-term viability of humanity’s existence on this planet, but with no pretension or preachiness at all, while on a moment-to-moment basis it’s a human comedy dominated by personal foibles and people just trying to get by in life. It’s also a science-fiction film that not for a second looks or feels like one.

“As such, this is a unique undertaking, one centered on an unexceptional Everyman character who unwittingly embarks upon an exceptional life journey; in that sense, Matt Damon’s Paul Safranek is like the hero of a Frank Capra or Preston Sturges film of 75 years ago, an ordinary man who has a certain sort of greatness thrust upon him. At the same time, the movie is a highly sophisticated creation that, due to its off-hand, underplayed presentation of the future, essentially seems to be taking place in the present day.