Yesterday Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler celebrated its 60th anniversary. It opened on 9.25.61.

All the principals except Piper Laurie are long dead — director Robert Rossen, costars Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Michael Constantine, dp Eugene Shuftan, editor Dede Allen — and it’s still a thing of ripe beauty in many respects.

And yet for decades I’ve felt irked by the script’s nagging moral undertow, voiced by Laurie’s Sara character. In an Act Two scene (a picnic), Sara marvels at Eddie Felson’s gift for pool-shooting (“Some men never feel like that”), and yet she berates him for playing for money. What’s Eddie supposed to do, become a bus driver or short-order cook and play for free on weekends?

And I’ve always been irritated by the grim expressions of McCormick’s Charlie. Once Felson starts playing Minnesota Fats in the temple of Ames Billiards, Charlie seems intimidated and bummed out by the stakes, the vibe…by everything. Shuftan’s elegant cinematography tells you what a joy the game can be, but Sara and Charlie do nothing but groan and lament. They’re a drag to be around.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 9.26 Variety piece about Dune‘s day-and-date, theatrical-plus-HBO Max opening on 10.22:

“3. It’s going to play a lot less well on television. Growing up, I once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on a 16-inch black-and-white TV set, and it actually worked. That’s how great a movie it is. Dune is a lot less great. I would argue that it’s a reasonably commanding sci-fi parable that begins to run out of gas in its last hour. That’s because Frank Herbert, in the Dune books, may have been a better world-builder than he was a storyteller.

“The world of Dune, like the world of Lawrence of Arabia or the original Blade Runner, needs to overwhelm and envelop you. But if you watch it at home, the film’s narrative — is Paul Atreides the Messiah? Watch the House Atreides go down to defeat, and look out for that sandworm! — is going to stand revealed as the rather patchy affair it is. When you shrink the grandeur of Dune, you shrink its appeal.

HE comment: I appreciate big-screen grandeur as much as the next guy, but given the high likelihood that the content of Dune (story, dialogue, pacing) is going to make me miserable and moaning and writhing in my seat, it might be a more interesting thing to watch it on a 16-inch black and white TV. Okay, I’m kidding. 16-inch black and white TVs no longer exist.

In 2012 I saw the digitally restored Lawrence of Arabia projected at the Salle du Soixentieme in Cannes, and it looked beautiful. Four or five years ago I saw a 70mm Lawrence on a moderately large screen at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre, and it didn’t look all that great — half the time I was thinking how much better my digitally streamed 4K Lawrence (issued around ’16 or thereabouts) seemed. After I watched Sony’s 4K UHD Bluray version in June ’20, I called it “the most exciting and orgasmic home video experience of my life — a mind-blowing eye bath.”

What am I saying? That 70mm isn’t what it used to be, that a big-movie presentation has to be a first-class, technically flawless thing or nothing, that watching a film without Millennial mongrels eating pizza and cheese nachos nearby can be a blessed thing, and that seeing a big movie like Dune on a 65-inch 4K HDR screen isn’t necessarily a tragedy.

Four days ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg posted his first forecast about the Best Picture Oscar race, and he put Reinaldo Marcus Green, Zach Baylin and Will Smith‘s King Richard at the top of the list.

Feinberg was completely correct in doing so for a simple, undeniable reason. Of all the contenders seen so far King Richard is the only one that is (a) exceptionally well made, (b) perfectly acted and (c) makes you feel good in an honest, fully earned, non-pandering way.

There are no other Best Picture hopefuls that have even come close to managing this feat. No other 2021 film so far has delivered this kind of effective emotional pizza. Plus it’s a mostly all-black sports film** (the saga of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams) about a super-competitive family from Compton, and in particular about a thorny, whip-cracking dad (i.e., Smith’s Richard Williams) who was far from perfect.

Smith is a Best Actor lock; ditto Aunjanue Ellis as his combative wife + mother of phenomenal daughters.

King Richard delivers a metaphor that everyone will understand and relate to — if you want to win, you have to be hardcore.

There are several films I haven’t seen, but I can still tell (or make a very good guess about) which ones will meet these three criteria.

Using Feinberg’s list as a template, here are my no-bullshit assessments as things currently stand. The boldfaced titles are the only ones that stand a fraction of a chance of beating King Richard. (I’ve also boldfaced King Richard for emphasis.)

1. King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19) — The only Best Picture contender right now that looks like a real winner.
2. Belfast (Focus, 11.12) — Sentimental, cloying and manipulative family drama — an Irish Roma with an overly cute central kid character + wall-to-wall Van Morrison.
3. A Hero (Amazon) — Brilliant Asghar Farhadi film that will most likely be slotted in the Best Int’l Feature category.
4. The Power of the Dog (Netflix. 11.17) — Exceptionally well made, skillfully acted period drama about Montana ranchers writhing in denial and misery with a little touch of anthrax — makes you feel really, really bad. All hail Jane Campion, but the only time you feel good about The Power of the Dog is when it ends.
5. Dune (Warner Bros., 10.22) — Torture to sit through for some; delightful for genre geeks. Not a prayer of being nominated for Best Picture.
6. C’mon, Cmon (A24) — Haven’t seen it, but for years my basic motto has been “beware of Mike Mills.”
7. CODA (Apple, 8.13) — Appealing but not good enough — a feel-good sitcom about a hearing-impaired Massachusetts family in the fishing business, and a high-school age daughter who wants to sing.
8. Spencer (Neon/Topic, 11.5) — Not a chance. Agony to sit through. Strictly a platform for Kristen Stewart‘s Best Actress campaign.
9. The Lost Daughter (Netflix, 12.31) — Haven’t seen it but I’m told it’s somewhere between okay and not that great.
10. Cyrano (MGM/UA, 12.31) — Brilliant musical. Joe Wright‘s finest effort since Anna Karenina. Exquisite Best Actor-calibre lead performance by Peter Dinklage.

Now that Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth has opened at the New York Film Festival and drawn polite raves from 90% of the critics, it’s time to come down to earth and examine what people really think.

Friend of Jordan Ruimy: “I was very cold on this…the whole time watching I was thinking BORING. The performances are very subdued…Denzel has a couple of genuinely moving moments… but Frances McForman’s Lady Macbeth part is truncated and even the ‘out damn spot’ scene was heavily edited…the cinematography and sets have a stark theatrical look, which struck me as fake…\lots of artifice in general which I usually like but not this time…I’m frankly surprised by the over-the-top high praise…[the film] felt completely unnecessary… I’m sure the cast and crew had a great time doing it but why?”

[HE interjection: Because Frances McDormand wanted to play a 60ish Lady Macbeth, and so she asked her husband to direct a stage version and Joel, wanting to oblige, decided he’d prefer shooting it on film.]

Critic friendo responds: “What does ‘unnecessary’ mean? Why is a movie ‘necessary?’ This is a tale of corporate scheming and ruthlessness that fits very well into the spirit of our time. If this guy found it boring, so be it, but I wasn’t bored for a minute. The movie is visually transfixing. Denzel is terrific in it — emotional and alive.”

Guy who attended Tavern on the Green after-party: “Opinions were all over the map. I’d say two-fifths [or 40%] of the people I talked to were highly enthusiastic, and all in the same way — caught up in the film’s amazing look, and in Washington’s performance. Of the remaining three-fifths [or 60%]**, I’d say half of them thought it was decent but not better, and half actively disliked it. So it’s not for everyone. But I actually think it’s a commercial movie. At least, to the extent that a movie of Macbeth can be. (Even the Polanski version, I believe, was a box-office bomb.)”

** What he’s basically saying is that 30% of the people he spoke to, or close to one-third, hated it. And this was a crowd of swells, remember — invitees who probably felt it would be impolite to enjoy free food and drink while trashing the film. So you can probably raise that 30% to 40%.

I haven’t seen Erin Elders‘ The Cleaner (1091 Pictures, 10.12), but I will. It appears to be some kind of mid-range noir about a financially struggling owner of a cleaning business (King Orba) who accepts a $1K payment from a singer (Lynda Carter) to find her estranged son, but eventually gets caught up in some bad shenanigans.

Exec producer Luke Wilson costars along with Shelley Long, Eden Brolin and Shiloh Fernandez.

I hadn’t actually heard of The Cleaner until I received an emailed invitation at 10:11 am this morning to see it this evening at the historic casino on Catalina Island, under the auspices of the Catalina Film Festival. The ferry (comped) leaves San Pedro at 5 pm, the screening begins at 7 pm, there’s some kind of after-party (although without the presence of Orba, Wilson, Carter or Long), and a ferry returns to San Pedro at 11:55 pm.

Yes, I was invited less than seven hours before the ferry departs San Pedro. “That’s insulting!” I muttered to myself. Then my mood changed.

I suddenly decided that I loved the idea of travelling 26 miles across the sea to see an iffy film noir and then returning to the mainland in the black of night…I loved the last-minute craziness, and there’s something perversely entertaining about being invited this late. I would’ve actually preferred being invited at noon or 1 pm — “please get yourself down to San Pedro in less than four hours!”

I especially loved the portion of the invite that said “we can take care of your DAY TRIP to the island via the San Pedro port,” which seemed to imply that I’d have to pay for the late-night return.

My reply to p.r. agency: “JEFFREY WELLS expressing thanks for invite & interest in seeing the film, but why am I being invited only hours before the ferry departs? Isn’t that a bit sudden? And why the Catalina Film Festival in the first place? And why are you emphasizing that the producers will cover the ‘DAY TRIP’, which seems to indicate that I’ll have to book my own passage back to San Pedro? And who’s King Orba? And how come King Orba isn’t attending the after-party, not to mention Wilson, Carter, Long and the others?”

Honestly? Orba seems like a nice guy and a reasonably appealing actor. He has a pleasing, mellow-type voice. I’m actually interested in seeing this.

I’m not sure how to process the line in which Carter offers him “one thousand dollars” to find her son. It might be a joke a la Mike Myers demanding a ransom of “one million dollars” in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (2011), or it could be sincere.

The agency has offered to send me a link for an embargoed review, available to post on 10.11.

Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal‘s The Guilty (Netflix, 10.1 — currently in theatres) is a fairly exacting remake of Gustav Moller’s same-titled original, which starred Jakob Cedergren as a suspended beat cop working as a 911 call-center responder, and dealing with an apparent abduction of a youngish mother by her ex-husband.

The Fuqua-Gyllenhaal uses almost the same story, mostly the same dialogue (written or more precisely polished by True Detective‘s Nic Pizzolato), many of the same shots, same tick-tock suspense factor.

I watched Moller’s film before the Fuqua, and I’m telling you right now that the Danish version is way better. Like Moller’s, Jake and Antoine’s version is a single-set thriller that’s all closeups and MCUs and computer screens. The Moller takes place in a Copenhagen call center; the Fuqua-Guyllenhaal is set inside a Los Angeles complex during a major fire and is constantly reaching for the big moments, and is marred by Gyllenhaal’s over-acting.

Moller’s version unfolds in a straight, matter-of-fact fashion — the story happens on its own terms and the suspense isn’t diminished by the subdued tone.

I’m sorry that Fuqua didn’t tell Gyllenhaal to turn it down and ease up. The result is too much sweating, too many hostile outbursts, and too much showboat weeping at the end.

And speaking of weeping, Riley Keough‘s voice performance as the abducted wife is infuriating as she cries and whines and moans in a one-note way. Her character has every reason to feel traumatized and terrified, of course, but the Danish actress in the same role (Jessica Dinnage) occasionally downshifts and delivers a change-up or two, and is much more interesting for that.

As the 45-minute mark in the Fuqua version approached, I was muttering to Keough “Jesus, can you deliver one line of dialogue without sounding like Minnie Mouse on a bad acid trip, fighting back the terror and the tears?”

Peter Sarsgaard, Ethan Hawke, Eli Goree and Paul Dano also do some voice-acting, but there’s no recognizing them.