Baltasar Kormákur and Jaime Primak Sullivan‘s Beast (Universal, 8.19) costars Idris Elba, Iyana Halley, Leah Sava Jeffries and Sharlto Copley.

As a tribute to the recently passed Wolfgang Petersen, perhaps Netflix would consider streaming the extra-long version of Das Boot (’81), which runs around 300 minutes? Or, failing that, Petersen’s 209-minute “Director’s Cut”?

Wiki Excerpt: “Das Boot was partially financed by German television broadcasters WDR and the SDR, and more footage was filmed than was shown in the theatrical version.

“A version of six 50-minute episodes was transmitted on BBC2 in the United Kingdom in October 1984, and again during the 1999 Christmas season. In February 1985 three 100-minute episodes were broadcast in Germany.

“Peterson then edited a 209-minute version, Das Boot: The Director’s Cut, combining the action sequences from the feature-length version with the character development scenes from the miniseries released to cinemas worldwide in 1997, also improving audio quality.”

“You’ve been took, you’ve been had, led astray, hoodwinked, bamboozled, flim-flammed, sold a bill of goods, led down a garden path, run amok, had a tin can tied to your tail.” — HE riff based on Malcolm X‘s original “we were black” speech.

Wednesday is being called a comedy-horror series, except it’s not a horror thing at all — it’s dry social satire. Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, the latest in a long line but this time with Tim Burton-level production values and a Burtonesque sense of humor.

Peter Farrelly‘s The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Apple+, 9.30) will have its big debut at the Toronto Film Festival, probably sometime between 9.8 and 9.14, I’m guessing. The trailer is excellent and so is the poster, and I’m suddenly I’m thinking “hey, wait…this might be something.”

We all know that wokester critics are going to be gunning for Farrelly in order to punish him for Green Book having won the 2018 Best Picture Oscar. Somewhere between 96% and 97% of the moviegoing world loved that film (me too) but the wokesters did everything they could to kill it, and so they’re determined to pay Farrelly back. (They’ll deny this, of course.)

We also understand that a film about a New York working-class paleface with a meathead accent travelling thousands of miles to bring beer to his Vietnam War-serving bruhs in ’67 and ’68 is going to be attacked six ways from Sunday…too white, too apolitical and not guilty enough for starters. Or so it would seem, I should say, based on the trailer and to some extent John “Chick” Donohue and Joanna Molloy’s 2020 book.

But you can also tell Farrelly’s film is a grade-A thing — first-rate writing, acting, cinematography, atmosphere, the works — and that slivers of moral ambiguity have been slipped between the story beats.

No, seriously…kidding. Nobody liked it then, and nobody but nobody wants to remember it now. It was force-fed through an elite critic pipeline — you had to watch and respect and damn well vote for Jane Campion as Best Director, and if you weren’t down with this…well, who knew? Perhaps you or your career needed to be reevaluated and perhaps not. But it was safer to go along.

Only now are people allowed to speak candidly.

Regrets and condolences over the passing of Wolfgang Petersen, but when I heard earlier today I nodded and thought a bit about his career accomplishments, but nothing erupted. First-rate fellow, efficient action and thriller chops, respected and admired. I had a good time with In The Line of Fire and portions of The Perfect Storm, but the only Petersen film that really knocked me flat…

Before 2017 I felt a fairly profound social kinship with 95% of film critics out there. Socially, I mean. Parties, lunches, late-night cafe hangs at film festivals, etc. Except for the dicks, phonies and elitists, which you’ll run into in any profession.

But since ‘17 a new breed of critic has come into being — SJWs, virtue signalers, representationals, safeties. Radicals with a woke axe to grind. I see them at screenings and mutter, “Oh, Jesus…keep your head down.” No talking to them, no trust or relaxation, no respect…fuck that noise. They’re almost the enemy. They certainly aren’t true-blue movie Catholics — they’re like the McCoys to my own crew, the Hatfields. Or something like that.

Why would 78 year-old Robert DeNiro play a pair of legendary 20th Century mafia bosses, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, in the same film? To what end? It can’t work. I’m thinking of Kissin’ Cousins, a 1964 Elvis Presley film…same action.

Rep. Liz Cheney will go down to defeat this evening in Wyoming. We’ve understood this for many months. She’s toast. But ask yourself — when was the last time that a nationally known politician stood up and said, “I’d rather take a bullet in the neck than compromise on my basic principles”?

On Monday, 8.15 Rebecca Sun posted a THR story about the Academy’s recent decision to apologize to Sacheen Littlefeather, 75, for the abuse she suffered after announcing to an audience of Academy members in the spring of 1973 that Marlon Brando was politely declining his Best Actor Oscar over the industry’s dismissive, disrespectful treatment of Native Americans.

As a result Littlefeather, an aspiring actress, was blackballed — one of the earliest cases of Hollywood cancel culture, albeit at the hands of mainstream centrists and conservatives. (The wokester left wouldn’t own cancel culture for another 45 years.)

Sun’s is a sturdy, well-written piece, and yet she waits until paragraph #13 to announce what may have been a deciding motive on the Academy’s part to publicly apologize and also announce a special Sacheen Littlefeather tribute in September.

Littlefeather, she writes, is coping with metastasized breast cancer. This may or may not indicate an imminent situation (I’m deeply sorry if that’s the case), but it was almost certainly read by the Academy as a timetable message — that if they wanted to make amends with Littlefeather, soon would be a better time than later.

As mentioned yesterday, Sacheen Littlefeather is an adopted, self-invented name — her original name is Marie Louise Cruz.

Another take on Littlefeather’s life is offered in Lisa Snell’s Native Times interview piece [10.26.10].

What sensible, fair-minded person would look you straight in the face and insist that Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut is the best film of the ’90s? Think about that.

EWS is many things — curious, dreamlike, flat, anti-realistic, visually commanding, mesmerizing in its own weird way. But a film this clenched and constipated and covered in starch cannot sit at the top of anyone’s best of the ’90s list…no! Only a critic who believes in fuck-you eccentricity for its own side would stand by Kubrick’s final film.

And yet this, I regret to report, is what IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich has done.

The EWS celebration is part of “The 100 Best Movies of the ’90s” (8.15), an exhaustive rundown by Ehrlich, Eric Kohn and Kate Erbland — three-fourths of Indiewire‘s virtue-signalling quartet (Anne Thompson being the final member). Their top ten, and in this order: Eyes Wide Shut, Close-Up, Schindler’s List, Beau Travail, Hoop Dreams, Goodfellas, After Life, Titanic, The Long Day Closes and Safe.

But Ehrlich is to be saluted for including Titanic among the top ten. James Cameron‘s epic has been a very unfashionable film to celebrate over last couple of decades. I only put it at #30 on my list, and qualified things by stating that I was primarily enthusiastic about the final hour and especially the last ten minutes. Ehrlich doesn’t pussyfoot around — he praises the whole thing…intimacy, lead performances, extras, VFX and all.

In IndieWire‘s view Pulp Fiction ranks 14th, Malcolm X is 16th, Clueless is 20th, Unforgiven ranks 26th and Fargo (HE’s pick for the decade’s best) is 31st.