In a nutshell, Sean Spicer‘s Hitler gaffe was a claim that Nazi Germany’s immortal monster “was not using the gas on his own people” like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad “was doing…[not] in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down [on] innocents…in the middle of town.” Remember that everyone is calling this much-apologized-for statement a gaffe — an accidental, inappropriate slip of the tongue that either reveals something truthful or (in this case) the mindset of the speaker. For what Spicer meant (and is now very, very sorry for having said) is that European Jews were not Hitler’s people, that they were the subversive, non-patriotic “other”, as Hitler and his Third Reich henchmen repeatedly described them in the ’30s. This indicates that Spicer himself, speaking from his 2017 Trumpian perspective, has bought into the same notion about European Jewry not being real Germans. He can apologize, but he can’t un-say what he said.

We’re approaching (i.e., are five months away from) the fifth anniversary of Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237. I don’t know what it’s earned on video/streaming since, but the fact that it only made a lousy $296,359 theatrically indicates hundreds of thousands if not millions of X-factor filmgoers never gave it a tumble. And it’s one of the best LQTM movies I’ve ever seen. Not “no laugh funny” like Ishtar but genuinely hilarious — just not in a way that makes you slap your thighs as you go “hah-hah.” Why such a small audience? Because (and I’ve heard this over and over) the people who saw it told their friends that it was bullshit — that Stanley Kubrick never faked the moon landing and never intended to insert all of those veiled allusions in The Shining and therefore the doc was a waste of time — an interpretation that is truly staggering in its stupidity. I just re-watched the below clip, the first time since mid ’13, and was chuckling all over again.

Paramount’s Cinemacon presentation included a 15-minute-long sampling of Michael Bay‘s Transformers: The Last Knight (6.23), and the general reaction was (a) “whoa, complex…intense post-apocalyptic dystopia meets some kind of time-trippy Knights of the Round Table scenario shot in England,” (b) “nice effects” and (c) “this is gonna be a long-ass film…140, 150 minutes, something like that.” Neither the just-released trailer not the previous assemblies tell the tale as clearly as the Cinemacon reel, and that in itself wasn’t entirely clean and concise. Ambitious, obviously, but with layers upon layers upon layers. Not a sandwich or fast-food meal, but what felt to me like a potentially exhausting 10-course banquet. Mark Wahlberg, Isabella Moner, Anthony Hopkins, Laura Haddock, Stanley Tucci, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, et. al.

A couple of weeks ago three beautifully-cut assemblies of a select roster of Annapurna films were posted. “America”, “Photograph”, “Hustle” — to which I only paid attention this morning. They should have included clips from Detroit, Downsizing and the Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson fashion-in-the-’50s film, but otherwise very nice. Annapurna (along with Amazon, Netflix and Scott Rudin) believes in ’70s films made for 21st Century moviegoers, and thank God for that. Lawless, The Master, Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty, Her, Foxcatcher, Joy, Everybody Wants Some!, Wiener-Dog, Sausage Party, The Bad Batch, 20th Century Women, et. al.

50 years later, the fire that time. Memory detour, flashpoint, cuts and close-ups, an inferno rekindled. A jarring, presumably riveting descent into hell. Directed in the usual bracing, deep-dive fashion by Kathryn Bigelow. Written by the intrepid Mark Boal. Shot by the legendary Barry Aykroyd (The Hurt Locker, United 93). Edited by the masterful William Goldenberg (Zero Dark Thirty, The Insider). A possible…call it a presumed award-season headliner that dares to open on August 4th. Go bold, break the mold.

“One of the bleakest chapters in American history — four days that stunned a nation and left scars on a great city that are still seen and felt today.” — from a 7.22.12 Time.com article showcasing the Detroit riot photos of Lee Balterman.

From Wiki page: “The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a violent public disorder that turned into a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan. It began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, just north of the corner of 12th Street (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount Avenue on the city’s Near West Side.

“Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in the history of the United States, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot.

Wikipedia and other sources are reporting that the title of what used to be known as Kathryn Bigelow’s Untitled Detroit Riots Project (Annapurna, 8.4) will be…uhm, Detroit. The first teaser-trailer pops tomorrow (Wednesday, 4.12). Blogaroos are still scratching their heads over over that curious early-August release date, but I’m sure it’ll work out in the long run.

TOMORROW. pic.twitter.com/9Pwav0eKLq

— Annapurna Pictures (@AnnapurnaPics) April 11, 2017

Update, clarification: My initial reaction to yesterday’s United Airlines bloody-beat-down episode (which happened in Chicago on Sunday evening, or the night before last) was not that David Dao, the bespectacled Vietnamese doctor, wasn’t entitled to keep his seat, but that he became a screaming two-year-old once the security guys tried to throw him off. And that his bizarrely repeated chant of “I have to go home, I have to go home, I have to go home” indicated some kind of obsessive, primitive mentality.

The United guys obviously caused the trouble and are taking the hit, but at the same time I can’t throw in with people who howl like bobcats. The entire twitterverse has condemned United — 100% agreement. But nobody will acknowledge, much less react to, Dao’s primal screaming.

Until this morning, Adam McKay‘s Dick Cheney biopic was presumed to be a possible end-of-the-year award-season release. Four and a half weeks ago L.A. Times industry columnist Glenn Whipp included the forthcoming film as one of “ten movies we could be talking about at the 2018 Oscars.”

Now the N.Y. Times‘ Brooks Barnes is reporting that Paramount Pictures and Plan B Entertainment “hope to begin shooting in September,” which almost certainly means a 2018 release.

Barnes’ story conflicts with a 4.5 report by Variety‘s Justin Kroll, which states that “the studio and producers [are] aiming to shoot the movie in the spring for an awards-season push, similar to The Big Short.”

The fastest turnaround in Hollywood history was Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder, which began shooting on 3.23.59, wrapped on 5.15.59 and opened on 7.2.59 — three and a half months between the start of principal and the theatrical debut. The Cheney biopic would have to be even faster on the draw if it begins in shooting in early September, especially considering the demands of having to (a) issue screeners of Best Picture contenders and (b) screen them for critics groups in early December.

So which reporter is dead wrong, Kroll or Barnes?

Last Tuesday all the Cinemacon journos went apeshit after seeing ten minutes of footage from Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22), myself especially. Yes, it’s “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.

Last Tuesday I wrote that 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 the 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 told her that I thought Downsizing 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.”

Again — my initial reaction to the footage.

If nothing else, Cinemacon 2017 persuaded me that three previewed films may well become finalists in the 2017/18 Best Picture race — Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing, Steven Chbosky and Steven Conrad‘s Wonder (this year’s Lion-like contender) and The Greatest Showman, an apparently sumptuous musical biopic about the legendary P.T. Barnum with Hugh Jackman in the title role.

Pic costars Zac Efron, Rebecca Ferguson, Michelle Williams, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Zendaya. It’s been directed by Australian commercial director and (uh-oh) “visual effects artist” Michael Gracey and written by Michael Arndt, Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon. A handsome, spirited trailer (pic’s dp is Seamus McGarvey) was screened.

Showman‘s musical numbers were composed by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the lyricists for Justin Hurwitz‘s La La Land tunes.

The Greatest Showman has been in the planning stages for several years. Gracey was hired to direct in August 2011. Principal photography began on 11.22.16.

Jackman’s presentation of the forthcoming 12.25 release was the highlight of the 20th Century Fox Cinemacon show, which was easily the finest and grandest of all.

Earlier this month a research-screening veteran conveyed measured enthusiasm about Joseph Kosinski‘s Granite Mountain (Lionsgate, 9.22), a Peter Berg-style firefighting melodrama based on the real-life Yarnell Hill tragedy of 2013 in which 19 elite firefighters (all from nearby Prescott, Arizona) bought the farm. The worst firefighter tragedy since 9/11.

Pic costars Miles Teller, Ben Hardy (who?), Taylor Kitsch, Jennifer Connelly, Jeff Bridges, Andie McDowell and Josh Brolin.

I half-trust this “measured enthusiasm” guy because he loved Call Me By Your Name, which he saw at Sundance at the same Eccles showing I attended, and because we sat down in Las Vegas couple of days ago and talked about the whole realm.

“It’s average Peter Berg fare in most respects, but emotionally it hit harder than your normal fact-based epic,” he opined. Take this with a grain but he claims that Teller delivers his “best work, a mature and nuanced performance.” (MT is portraying Brendan McDonough, the one member of the 20-man Granite Mountain Hotshots who didn’t die in the blaze.)

“Bridges keeps it going with his underbitten West Texas accent from Hell or High Water, and it never gets old. Jennifer C. has some awesome scenes when she yells and cries…pretty heartbreaking.

It’s not the humans per se who will suffer a final defeat at the finale of War of the Planet of the Apes, but an army of aggressive dicks led by Woody Harrelson‘s Trump-like Colonel. Which of course makes the Ape victory palatable to the likes of you and me. Matt Reeves is a sharp, quality-level filmmaker, and this trilogy finale, obviously, is going to be a strong, well-made film.

Finely shaped and timed as this trailer is, it played a helluva lot better on the huge screen inside the 4000-seat Caesar’s Palace Collisseum than it does right now on my Macbook Air.

By the way: I felt extra-thrilled when a brief clip from John Huston‘s The Maltese Falcon was shown one or two days ago. As great as this 1941 classic looks when I watch the Bluray seems when I watch it on my 65″ 4K screen, seeing it in the big Collisseum screen was a lot better. I’d pay serious money to watch it on a huge super-screen with super-amped sound some day.