Leigh Whannell‘s The Invisible Man (Universal, 2.28) is a reasonably well-made if somewhat rote and occasionally boring horror-thriller with a feminist slant. It’s basically a serving of calculated exploitation aimed at the #MeToo peanut gallery. That’s all it is, and all it will ever be.

It’s okay to shrug and call this piece of Blumhouse sausage a half-decent if uninspired genre exercise, but any critic who gives it an enthusiastic hug is being a political whore, trust me.

Nobody wants to dismiss a B-grade thriller that takes the side of a terrified if resourceful ex-wife (in this instance the sweaty, stressed-out, baggy-eyed Elizabeth Moss) trying to survive a campaign of terror by an invisible ex-husband. The deal is this: If you don’t like it you’re somehow unsympathetic to the cause so everyone “likes” it. Safer that way.

I shouldn’t have to repeat that we’re all living in a climate of revolutionary terror, but I guess I have to. Most critics simply can’t be trusted in such an environment. This is why The Invisible Man currently has a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is a relatively okay film, granted, but calm down.

I sat in the front row during last night’s Arclight screening and went “uh-huh…uh-huh…uh-huh.” After a while I gave up and went “okay, whatever.” And then I started checking my watch every 15 minutes.

The Invisible Man is basically (a) a “terrified ex-wife is stalked by a brilliant, deranged, control freak ex-husband” flick (closely related to 1990’s Sleeping With The Enemy) mixed with (b) Paul Verhoeven‘s Hollow Man (’00).

The latter, of course, was a high-tech riff on James Whale‘s original The Invisible Man (’33) with Claude Rains.

In both the Verhoeven and the newbie the invisible bad guy is a brilliant arrogant scientist (played in The Invisible Man by Oliver Jackson-Cohen and by Kevin Bacon in The Hollow Man). Moss is basically playing an antsier, more wild-eyed version of Elizabeth Shue‘s role in The Hollow Man — the panicking ex-girlfriend whose invisible boyfriend has gone bonkers. The difference this time is that Jackson-Cohen’s character was deranged to begin with. Or he was before he “died.”

Question to Whannell: Why did Moss’s Cecilia Kass, whom we’re told to sympathize and identify with…why did she marry this super-rich psycho to begin with? Because…what, she couldn’t resist the idea of being wealthy? Or because he was completely sane and level-headed when she was first falling in love with him, and he only turned into a looney-tune when he became rich? HE calls bullshit on that.

The primary question is “will Bernie Sanders’ seemingly possibly insurmountable lead result in a McGovernesque debacle for the Democrats next November, as well as the loss of the Dems’ House majority?”

Question 2: “Can anything, anyone or any hail-Mary strategy save us from wrack and ruin?” Only Buttigieg seemed to address this head-on.

All I knew last night was that the jabbing and bickering felt repetitve and irksome.

Klobuchar has to withdraw after the South Carolina primary. Ditto Steyer. And Warren, whom I fell for after the Las Vegas debate, has to sit down and think things over.

In a 2.25 column titled “Dems, You Can Defeat Trump in a Landslide,” Thomas Friedman urges the Democratic contenders to join together and announce that they are henceforth a team and no longer a circular firing squad — a cabinet consisting of Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Steyer, et. al.

“If this election turns out to be just between a self-proclaimed socialist and an undiagnosed sociopath, we will be in a terrible, terrible place as a country,” Friedman writes. “How do we prevent that? My short answer is that the Democrats have to do something extraordinary — forge a national unity ticket the likes of which they have never forged before. And that’s true even if Democrats nominate someone other than Bernie Sanders.

“If they don’t join together,” Friedman warns, “you can kiss the America you grew up in goodbye.”

Asymmetric warfare is “war between belligerents whose relative military power differs significantly, or whose strategy or tactics differ significantly. This is typically a war between a standing, professional army and an insurgency or resistance movement militias who often have the status of [renegade] combatants.”

Credit-block-wise, top creatives should limit their name to six syllables. Because more than six sounds labored and pretentious. When Francis Coppola called himself Francis Ford Coppola, that was as far as it should have gone. I’m willing to offer a compassionate pass to Destin Daniel Cretton, director of Just Mercy, even though he’s over the mark by a syllable. But Cary Joji Fukanaga is two syllables over. Plain old Cary Fukanaga is simpler, cleaner.

No Time To Die will premiere on 3.31.20 at Royal Albert Hall. Two days later it will open commercially in Englands on Thursday, 4.2.20. It will open in the U.S. on 4.10.20.

Congrats to Bob Chapek on being named Chief Executive Officer for The Walt Disney Company, effective immediately. Chapek most recently served as Chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products. Robert Iger is now Executive Chairman and will focus on Disney’s creative endeavors through the end of his contract on 12.31.21. My first thought when I saw Chapek’s photo, no offense, was that he closely resembles Michael Chiklis. He also resembles Vince Vaughn in Brawl in Cell Block 99.

Bob Chapek

Michael Chiklis

Vince Vaughn

President Trump: "If you see what CNN, your wonderful network, said I guess they apologized in a way…What was their apology yesterday? What did they say?"

Jim @Acosta: "Mr. President, I think our record on delivering the truth is a lot better than yours sometimes." pic.twitter.com/KPKcinxdtM

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 25, 2020

And let’s not shake hands, just to be on the safe side. And don’t cough in my vicinity. But man, I really hate the idea of wearing a surgical mask. By the way: Now is the time to book airfare to and hotels in Venice, Milan, Lombardy and Veneto.

Tuesday night’s South Carolina debate will be a humdinger. Meanwhile, The State‘s endorsement of Pete Buttigieg:

Three days ago The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield passed along a Martin Scorsese / Paramount/ Netflix rumor, to wit:

“There has also been a spate of…rumors that Netflix [is] about to step in and take over the Scorsese/Leo Killers of the Flower Moon film about to start shooting [under] Paramount, or at least that Scorsese would like them to. I’ve heard that in Scorsese fashion, the budget has already soared to an amazing $225 million and Paramount is getting understandable heartburn about this.

“Scorsese for his part, having drunk (like a drunken sailor) from the cup of Netflix’s bottomless budget, is not enjoying a return to earthbound budgeting and presumably would like another slug of what they’re pouring. Will his Oscar shut-out persuade him that maybe that’s not the way to go? Will the Oscar shut-out persuade Netflix that handing Martin Scorsese a blank check for $200 million isn’t a great strategy? Or will the blinding light of Leo be too much for VCT to resist?”

Note: “VCT” is an acronym for Video City Ted (Sarandos).

How in the world could a fact-based period thriller, set in the Midwest of the 1920s without any de-aging CGI, wind up costing north of $200 million?

Logline: “Oil-rich members of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe are murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s, sparking a major investigation involving J. Edgar Hoover.”

Leonardo DiCaprio plays an investigative good guy; Robert De Niro plays the real-life William Hale, a bad guy.

Glenn Close as “Ma Bumblefuck” in Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, Oscar season). Apparently a supporting role. Her character is actually called “Mamaw”…accent on the second syllable, rhymes with Macaw. Check out the wardrobe and grooming! An oversized pink KMart T-shirt, spotted baby blue slacks, gray and white brillo-pad hair.

Close almost won the Oscar for The Wife in early ’19, and then The Favourite‘s Olivia Colman snatched it away. Close has to win this time…she has to.

J.D. Vance’s 2016 novel, a portrait of how things got worse and worse for white downmarket Americans over the last 30 or 40 years, was adapted into a multi-generation narrative by Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water).

Vance’s book is more of a personal recollection than a narrative.

“An extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strength”, said one reviewer. “A harrowing portrait of much that has gone wrong in America over the past two generations,” said another. HE plug, sight unseen: “A stirring tribute to the yokels who put Donald Trump into the White House and in so doing nearly destroyed the country…thanks!”

Costarring Amy Adams as Bev Vance and Freida Pinto as Usha Vance…can we just stop right there? Has anyone who’s visited a bumblefuck town or region (Kentucky, Ohio, Arkansas, Mississippi) ever noticed native women who look as pretty as Adams and Pinto? Drop-dead beatiful is not exactly an everyday feature of Bumblefuck culture…be honest. Beautiful eyes or wonderfully symmetrical facial features don’t come with the territory.

Costarring Gabriel Basso as J.D. Vance, Haley Bennett as Lindsaym, and Bo Hopkins as “Papaw.”

Glenn Close during filming of Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Guy Lodge‘s review of Abel Ferrara‘s “witty, woozy” Siberia tells me it’ll be hard to see. Just like Ferrara’s Pasolini took five years to turn up on DVD, and Tomasso will probably be missing in action for some time. Either I catch Siberia at next September’s Toronto Film Festival or forget it.

Excerpt: “Those who require a standard A-to-B narrative would be best advised to check out at this early stage, for Ferrara has something far more sinuous and subconscious-led in mind.

“The term ‘dream logic’ can be casually used with regard to any film that dabbles in surrealism, though Siberia, in a manner comparable to Lynch at his freakiest or Leos Carax’s admittedly more expansive Holy Motors, genuinely earns the descriptor with its irregular, shape-shifting successful of images, vignettes and occasional erotic visions that sometimes melt together in sequence, and brashly disrupt each other elsewhere.

“Dissatisfied with his attempts to find true peace in isolation, Clint hauls out his dogsled, gees up his huskies, and embarks an a journey that could be literal, metaphysical or both.” Right!

Michael Winner‘s Scorpio (’73) is a midrange, mostly unexceptional spy thriller about CIA management trying to assassinate an apparent double agent named Cross (Burt Lancaster) who, they believe, has probably been sharing information with the Russians. The would-be assassin is Jean Laurier aka “Scorpio” (Alain Delon), a Cross protege from way back.

Sydney Pollack‘s Three Days of the Condor was a much better film of this sort (i.e., amoral CIA higher-ups scheming to murder one of their own), but at least Scorpio came early in this cynical cycle. Shot in the early summer of ’72, just before the Watergate break-in. Released on 4.19.73, just as the Watergate coverup was beginning to unravel.

And yet Scorpio, for all its underwhelming aspects, has a great payback scene in which Lancaster and a couple of wily freelancers manage to quietly plug the hardnosed CIA chief (John Colicos) who’s been out to eliminate Lancaster and whose CIA henchmen have murdered Lancaster’s wife.

I like this scene so much that I’ve watched Scorpio a couple of times over the last couple of decades, despite my less-than-enthusiastic view of it. I’m even considering buying the Twilight Time Bluray, mainly because it’s ten bills with shipping. I don’t know if this is a category or not, but what other films (if any) are people soft on because one and only one scene works especially well?

Scorpio boasts a couple of scenes between Lancaster and Paul Scofield, as a kind of Russian counterpart, that aren’t too bad. It also has an amusing bit in which Lancaster slips past U.S. customs by disguising himself as a bearded African-American minister.

Post-release Lancaster said Scorpio was “nothing incisive, just a lot of action” and was “one of those things you do as part of your living, but you try to avoid doing them as much as you can.”