Boilerplate: “Set shortly before the events of A New Hope, Rogue One will center on a group of Rebel spies on a mission to steal the plans for the Galactic Empire’s new weapon, the Death Star.” Cash grab, rescramble, milk it dry. Heavy paychecks all around — Felicity Jones as Another Rey, Jiang Wen (sword stylings for Asian market!), HE’s own Ben Mendehlson as (let me guess) another bad guy. But it has Imperial Walkers — no cynical response to this. Forrest Whitaker, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, et. al. We’re not Avis (hey, hey, we’re the Re-Treads!) so we try harder. Opens on 12.16.16.

I’ve paid $1600 for a nice two-bedroom Telluride condo (9.1 thru 9.5) at 350 South Mahoney, Telluride, CO 81435. Looking for someone with the right vibe to share. Please pass the word around — this is a very well-located, very nice place…can’t beat it for the price (you pay $750, I’ve got the rest). Why do I have to hustle this thing? If you know anything about Telluride Film Festival rentals this is as cheap as it gets.

Over the last decade or so I’ve been sensing chilly, corporate vibes from Warner Bros. A kind of top-down, less-personable, Death Star-meets-garrison state attitude. And now, in the wake of a disappointing performance by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, there’s talk about the studio shutting some gates and releasing fewer films. Excerpts from Kim Master‘s 4.6 Hollywood Reporter piece: (a) “Several sources say Warner Bros. executives were convinced they had the goods with BvS and were shocked when negative reviews began pouring in“; (b) “Many top industry executives believe the troubles with BvS are the latest sign of the instability created when Time Warner chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes promoted Kevin Tsujihara to the top Warners job and created a committee to run the film studio that includes president Greg Silverman and marketing and distribution chief Sue Kroll…it’s fair to say things haven’t gone so well since“; (c) “Several executives and agents say Warners seems to be greenlighting fewer homegrown movies as it focuses on silos (DC Comics, Lego and a planned franchise spun off from the Harry Potter series)”; (d) “Overall, sources say there is an understanding Warners is aiming to release fewer homegrown films…the studio still will make some movies from ‘family’ directors including Ben Affleck, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Nolan and Todd Phillips. But the emphasis is elsewhere.” (e) “A person who does extensive business at WB says ‘they were always filmmaker-driven…that might now not be the case as much…they had a bad 18 months. How could there not be some kind of reaction to that?'”; (f) Nonetheless “the studio says it will release 18 movies this year and is projected to release 19 in 2017.”

Congrats to top Variety film critic Justin Chang on being hired as a senior L.A. Times critic, presumably with a long-term eye to Chang becoming the new Kenneth Turan in a decade or so. (Turan will probably start to think about downshifting his work load sometime during the 2020s.) Chang and his wife have a kid on the way, and you know he’s getting a significant salary bump out of this. TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider has speculated as to whether Variety and Indiewire owner Jay Penske might want to shift top Indiewire editor/critic Eric Kohn into Chang’s slot. Is that what the just-announced hire of David Ehrlich was about — i.e., replacing Kohn as the new top Indiewire guy?

You can see the formulaic scheme in an instant, and you have to wonder why it didn’t debut at a more prestigious venue than the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where it popped last July. Nonetheless something tells me it might not be half bad. Excerpt of review from guy who saw it at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival earlier this year: “Dough is a dramedy about shared values…story’s about a small baker (Jonathan Pryce) fighting a losing battle for survival against a corporate giant and how a young assistant (Jerome Holder) comes up with a solution. You’ll find yourself cheering them on….loved it!”

Why have Netflix and director David Wain suddenly announced plans to make a movie based on a decade-old biography of National Lampoon co-founder/editor Doug Kenney (i.e., Josh Karp‘s “A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever“)? Doug Tirola‘s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, one of 2015’s most under-appreciated docs, is why. Wain saw it, loved it and a light went on. Obviously. Trust me — a deal to adapt Karp’s book didn’t just happen to come together ten years later. Will Forte will play Kenney (fine) and Domnhall Gleason will play Lampoon editor Henry Beard (not a shred of physical resemblance — they couldn’t at least find somebody who hails from a vaguely similar gene pool?). John Gemberling has reportedly been cast as John Belushi; ditto Joel McHale as Chevy Chase.

The final episode of The People vs. O.J. Simpson (i.e., lead-up to and the aftermath of the “not guilty” verdict) aired last night…wham. All hail director Ryan Murphy and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewki. Each and every episode has hit the spot — no one has disputed this — and it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that a pile of Emmy nominations (especially, I’m guessing, for Sarah Paulson, Courtney B. Vance and John Travolta along with the creators) will happen.

But as much as I enjoyed and admired the finale, it couldn’t stand up to my recollections of the real thing on TV and particularly that nauseating feeling that settled in among whites when they realized that 95% of the black community cared more about sending a fuck-you message to racist police regimes than accepting the obvious in terms of Simpson’s guilt.

The jury didn’t want to find him guilty and so they didn’t. And so they embraced denial like a life preserver and freed a rich Brentwood murderer who once said “I’m not black, I’m O.J.” Brilliant, guys.

The night of the verdict (or was it the following night?) Julia Phillips and I took part in a N.O.W. candlelight parade that went from San Vicente and 26th down to the late Nicole Brown Simpson‘s condo on Bundy. And then everyone sang “Amazing Grace.”

A couple of weeks ago Variety‘s Kris Tapley posted an intelligent opinion piece about Sean Parker and Prem Akkaraju‘s Screening Room, a start-up that would offer $50 living-room downloads of brand new films. Tapley’s view is basically that the theatrical experience has been taken over by the mongrels and that people of taste and refinement prefer to duck it as a result, and that it would probably make sense to offer Screening Room to this crowd rather than restricting them to standard multiplex degradations.

Gary Musgrave illustration that first appeared in a 3.15 Variety story about Screening Room.

Populist, reach-out filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Peter Jackson and Ron Howard like the Screening Room concept while those who continue to cherish the notion of theatres as havens for Movie Catholic worship — Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, M. Night Shyamalan, Roland Emmerich — are against it. The issue is sure to be topic #1 during Cinemacon (4.11 thru 4.14), the annual Las Vegas exhibitor gathering that I for one will be ducking this year.

Most exhibitors believe in the revenues they’ve enjoyed in the past. Like most people they want the past to be present, the good times to continue. The past, of course, didn’t include revenue reducers or diverters like Screening Room. They will therefore express anger and opposition to Screening Room at Cinemacon.

“Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in Wisconsin does not significantly dent her comfortable lead in the race for the 2,383 delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination. But the loss underscores her problems connecting with young and white working-class voters who have gravitated to Mr. Sanders’s economic message — a message he will now take to economically depressed parts of New York State ahead of the April 19 primary there.” — from Amy Chozik‘s 4.5. N.Y. Times story, “Bernie Sanders Wins Wisconsin Democratic Primary, Adding to Momentum.”

Critic David Ehrlich adored Room, called Hail Caesar! “one of the Coen brothers very best”, called Clouds of Sils Maria “great art”, said that Aaron Sorkin‘s script for Steve Jobs “outdoes his work on The Social Network” and was tickled pink by The Hateful Eight, and for these five reasons he will always be regarded askance in this corner. He’s a very bright guy but also one of those critics who seem to live, breathe, assess and write inside their own secular caves, in the tradition of Richard Brody and Armond White. I’m not saying I live by “if Ehrlich likes it, there’s probably something wrong with it” but I am saying that “if Ehrlich likes it his reasons will possibly make no sense to me or I will strongly disagree with them.” He is one of those critics who’s done a lot to convince Joe Popcorn that critics are dweeby weirdos who never take the temperature of the room and write only about themselves and their colleagues and the scent of their own wind. It was announced today that Ehrlich has joined Indiewire as a senior critic — congrats.

For some reason the words “Big Friendly Giant” never kick in when I hear/read the title of Steven Spielberg‘s big family fantasy. That’s because I’m averse to the words “friendly” or “gentle” — it it okay if I refer to the film as “Big Effing Giant”? Disney will open the film on July 1st and may, God help me, have arranged to show it at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. If that happens I’ll be stuck — I’ll have to sit through it. An adaptation of Roald Dahl‘s 1982 children’s book by the late Melissa Mathison, The BFG is about a young orphan girl (Ruby Barnhill) transported to a storybook realm after meeting a gentle giant who’s not only voiced by Mark Rylance but obviously resembles him. Costarring Rebecca Hall, voiced-acted by Bill Hader and Jemaine Clement.

Starting next Tuesday (4.12) former Chicago Tribune film writer Mark Caro will be hosting a Music Box film series called “Is It Still Funny?” The idea is to screen a comedy that was considered hilarious at the time and see how it plays by today’s sensibilities. Caro will moderate a post-screening discussion. The first four films are National Lampoon’s Animal House (4.12), Blazing Saddles (4.19), Duck Soup (4.26) and There’s Something About Mary (5.3).

HE’s No Longer Funnies: Ghostbusters (NEVER funny), The Blues Brothers (NEVER funny), Mrs. Doubtfire (NEVER funny), Coming to America (NEVER funny), Three Amigos (NEVER funny), none of the Pink Panther comedies, Porky’s, The Philadelpia Story, Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back (Rock Hudson, Doris Day sexual comedies stopped being funny once the sexual revolution took hold in mid ’60s), none of the ZAZ comedies, Howard Hawks‘ Monkey Business, the broader sexual jokes in Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three, Irma La Douce and Kiss me Stupid, The Golden Child (NEVER funny), Withnail & I (NEVER funny).