Peyton Reed‘s Ant-Man and the Wasp (Disney, 7.6) isn’t a problem unless you’re determined to complain about it not being as good as the original Ant-Man (’15). Which it’s not. But it’s still fleet, funny, disciplined, carefully honed, occasionally dazzling, light-hearted, pleasingly absurd…112 minutes worth of cool cruisin’ as you chow down on the overpriced crap. And those 112 minutes feel like 80 or 85, by the way. There are no significant downshiftings or speed bumps, or none that I noticed.

Please don’t let me (or any other sourpusss types) stop you from seeing it, but I’m telling you straight and true that Ant-Man and the Wasp is not quite as affecting, highly charged and/or head-turning as I wanted it be. It’s fairly proficient in the ways you might expect but at the same time it’s a bit of a slight letdown. You may feel the same way when you see it, but you’ll probably survive.

Why should anyone care if Ant-Man and the Wasp registers as an entertaining but inoffensive letdown? There are bigger fish to fry and meditate upon. See it or don’t see it. But don’t weep for the Marvel and Disney empires — they’re fine. On top of which the Rotten Tomatoes whores having given it a 96% approval rating.

What exactly is missing from Ant-Man and the Wasp that wasn’t missing from Ant-Man? The dopey subversive humor in Reed’s three-year-old original felt fresher, for one thing. And the story was more emotionally affecting as far as Paul Rudd‘s Scott Lang was concerned. He was in a fairly dark and despairing place as it began — ex-con, low-rent loser, not much of a role model for his daughter — so morphing into Ant-Man by way of Michael Douglas‘s (i.e., Hank Pym’s) brilliance and reluctant largesse really meant something. This time, not so much. But at the same time I didn’t feel burned by the story or journey or whatever you want to call it. I felt placated.

Good, occasionally amusing work by Rudd, Evangeline Lilly (Hope van Dyne / Wasp), Michael Douglas, Michael Pena, Walton Goggins (fated to play pain-in-the-ass, low-rent villains for the rest of his life), Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost), Abby Ryder Fortson (Rudd and Greer’s daughter Cassie), Randall Park, Michelle Pfeiffer (Janet van Dyne — rescued in Act Three from the sub-atomic, micro-quantum realm or whatever you want to call it), Laurence Fishburne (punching the clock), etc.

The fact that Rudd is pushing 50 and Lilly is pushing 40 are not interruptions, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aware of their biological earth-time factors.

Quentin Tarantino has described the pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood as a Butch-and-Sundance, Redford-and-Newman type deal. Maybe, but the wardrobes and hair stylings tell you everything you need to know about their characters.

A dead ringer for Adam Roarke (Play It As It Lays, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry) in the late ’60s, Pitt’s Cliff Booth is a down-to-basics, rough-and-ready stuntman. DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is basically Robert Culp, a successful TV actor (I Spy) who began in the tradition-minded ’50s but struggled to find his footing when the industry pivoted toward youth fare in the late ’60s. Is that a peace medallion Leo is wearing? The mustard-colored turtleneck reminds me of a lounge shirt John Vernon wore in Point Blank (’67). If Dalton’s career was on a faster, more upward track, he might have landed Culp’s role in Paul Mazursky‘s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (’69).

Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

Natalie Wood and Robert Culp in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Movie City News seemed to stop cold (i.e., no fresh posts) after David Poland announced last week that he intends to work for “the other side.” A couple of days later MCN came alive again, Ray Pride banging out those links. Hollywood’s home zombie page. A detectable pulse. HE admires the tenacity.

I love my crazy Russian drivers. 22 minutes and 8 seconds of pure hilarity. I defy anyone to explain what they’re seeing around the 11:07 mark.

4 and 1/2 years ago I posted a riff called “Lost, Gone, Blown.” It basically repeated the old saw about “happily ever after’ finales never sticking to your ribs. If they seem to half-deliver at first, they certainly don’t last in the memory.

The best love-story endings, as Sydney Pollack pointed out time and again, are ones in which it hasn’t worked out and the lead protagonists realize it’s gone for good. Final, irreparable. My three favorites at the time were the finales of Ang Lee‘s Brokeback Mountain, Hal Ashby‘s Shampoo and Pollack’s The Way We Were.

HE commenters mentioned Vertigo, Lost in Translation, Now Voyager, Casablanca, In the Mood for Love, Brief Encounter, A Star is Born, Annie Hall, Husbands & Wives, The Rapture, Monsieur Hire, White Men Can’t Jump, 500 Days of Summer, Up In The Air, Remains of the Day, The Graduate, Age of Innocence and House of Mirth.

What about films within the last four years? Manchester By The Sea and Call Me By Your Name, certainly. What others?

There’s a reason that the near-great Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Columbia, 6.29) has a 69% and 61% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively. That reason is critics who don’t get it — specifically six who are strangely blind to the fact that this admittedly violent Mexican cartel film is not about nihilism and brutality as much as — hello? — parenting.

Which is why Soldado is not about unrelenting bleakness because it’s a film about a possibly better future, about Benicio del Toro‘s Alejandro Gillick influencing a pair of young Mexican teenagers who’ve been corrupted by the drug trade but might (one can hope!) be led in another direction.

Taylor Sheridan‘s story focuses on Isabela Reyes (Isabela Moner), the 15-year-old daughter of a drug cartel kingpin, and Miguel Hernandez (Elijah Rodriguez), a border-residing youth whom one of the cartels hires to be a “coyote” — a border-crossing guide for illegal Mexican immigrants. Both are forced to witness hellish scenarios throughout the film, and both arrive at a weary, contemplative finale. The viewer can reasonably infer that they’re both having serious second thoughts about living on cartel money. The agent behind this possible conversion is Gillick, a Mexican father figure of sorts. He’s certainly convinced Isabella to think twice about her father’s profession, and as the film ends he’s just beginning to influence Hernandez.

How the naysayers — Screen Daily‘s Tim Grierson, Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, Movie Minute’s Joanna Langfield, N.Y. Daily News‘ Stephen Whitty, A.V. Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, TheWrap’s William Bibbiani — can watch Soldado and totally miss this teach-the-children aspect is beyond me.

While researching a 1995 Los Angeles magazine piece called “Right Face,” the late L.M. Kit Carson told me that he sensed a while back that David Lynch was an offbeat conservative. “He’s kind of like Jimmy Stewart on the surface, all golly-gee-gosh,” Carson said, “but dark and creepy underneath.”

I thought of Carson’s observation last weekend when I read Lynch’s oddball, left-handed praising of Donald Trump. I’m not sure Lynch was actually calling Trump a great president as much as a bull in a china shop.

Tuesday, 4:40 pm Pacific: A few hours ago Lynch posted a message to Trump on Facebook.

“Both the Breitbart article and Trump’s retweet show how hungry the Republican right is for acceptance by Hollywood. They are so famished for celebrity praise that they’ll even take it in the form of [a] very ironic and slippery statement from a film director who loves to cultivate an air of mystery.” — posted yesterday by New Republic‘s Jeet Heer.

Sydney Pollack passed just over a decade ago. He came to mind a few hours ago when an HE commenter dismissed Pollack’s The Interpreter (’05) as “lame’ and “out of touch.” I reminded that The Interpreter has a bomb-in-a bus sequence that’s fairly brilliant. Otherwise it’s an above-average, reasonably engaging drama of its type. (Consider this Desson Thomson review.) Not a perfect film, but an above-average, reasonably decent one.

Pollack made a lot of films that fell under this category, but I’ve know very few filmmakers who worked harder at getting it right. Each and every time he really sweated bullets.

From my Pollack obit: “If you had told me 18 months ago that Pollack and Anthony Minghella, partners in Mirage Enterprises who worked together on The English Patient, Cold Mountain, The Quiet American and several other quality films…if you had told me then that both of these guys would be lights-out by May 2008, I would’ve said “what…?” Both of them were too active and alive. They had too much talent and know-how, too many miles to go.

People always bring up Out of Africa (’85) and Tootsie (’82), the hugely successful comedy with Dustin Hoffman as a straight cross-dressing actor, as Pollack’s finest, best-known films. They’re both solid and accomplished (Tootsie especially), but the Pollack pics that I’ve most enjoyed are the genre thrillers — Three Days of the Condor, particularly, and The Firm — because they exceed their boundaries and then some. They’re about Pollack adding shrewd and surprising things rather than just meeting expectations.

Both have melancholy emotional currents — feelings of loss and regret — and some graceful resignations, courtesy of the wry and understated dialogue by David Rayfiel, Pollack’s pinch-hit rewrite guy for decades. Plus they’re both driven by character as much as plot.

Gene Hackman‘s confession to Jeanne Tripplehorn in The Firm that he plays around “because my wife understands me.” (Too well, he meant.) European Condor assassin Max Von Sydow working with miniature models in his New York hotel room. Condor CIA guy Cliff Robertson asking his superior, played by John Houseman, if he misses the “action” he encountered during the World War II years, and Houseman responding, “No, I miss that kind of clarity.” Both films teem with this kind of stuff.

After these my favorites are (a) Sketches of Frank Gehry (Pollack’s wise, affectionate, layman-level appreciation of our greatest architect), (b) Jeremiah Johnson, (c) the final voice-over moment in Havana, (d) the first half of Random Hearts, (e) all of The Yakuza, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Castle Keep, (f) the bomb-on-the-bus scene in The Interpreter and (g) portions of The Way We Were, particularly the final scene.

And, of course, there were Sydney’s first-rate performances — the divorcee in Husbands and Wives, that red-felt pool table scene with Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, a pair of cynical and corroded seen-it-alls in Changing Lanes and Michael Clayton.

A friend just sent me a love-story script that he describes as “Brokeback Mountain meets Jarhead.” Gay love stories have only had a foothold since the beginning of the century, or maybe a little later. They were a relative rarity when Brokeback came out 13 years ago. Nowadays they’re all we’re seeing, it seems, in a romantic context. Certainly in my realm.

Not that many haven’t been good or generally made the movie universe a more intriguing or open-hearted place, but we’re basically living through an era in which the romantic and sexual lives of 96% of the population — am I allowed to say this? — are being elbowed aside. Partly because the 4% side of things feels fresher, more interesting, different and more politically correct, and partly because screenwriters these days seem to believe that the straight side of the aisle is fairly boring. Right now, in terms of green-lightable love stories, the 4% equation is pretty much everything. And yet the 96% must be experiencing some intense or certainly unusual times these days, no? Some of them good enough to turn into a film?

You know what would be really shocking right now? A movie like The Way We Were. I know how sappy that sounds, but never forget that Sydney Pollack‘s film has, at the very least, a great ending. A film like that could never happen now, of course, in part because we’re living in a realm in which 96% of the population is being commonly referred to by the politically attuned (and for the first time in the history of civilization, and somewhat derogatorily) as cisgender. 2018 to the ghost of James Stewart: “Did you know that during your time on earth you were a cisgender person?” Stewart to 2018: “I didn’t know that.”

I’m probably going to get killed for saying this.

Awards Daily‘s half-year poll, announced earlier today, has Paul Schrader’s First Reformed at the top of the list, followed closely by Ari Aster’s Hereditary.

114 film critics, journalists, bloggers and entertainment reporters participated in the poll, which was compiled by Jordan Ruimy. Responders included Stephen Witty, Katie Walsh, Peter Travers, Claudia Puig, Ray Pride, Steve Pond, Amy Nicholson, Joana Langfield, Tomris Laffly, Pete Howell, David Edelstein, David Ansen, Matt Zoller Seitz and yours truly. More than 70 movies (mostly English-language) were mentioned. Six of the top 30 were foreign-language films.

1. First Reformed (Paul Schrader, U.S.) (71 lists)
2. Hereditary (Ari Aster, U.S.) (65)
3. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, U.S.) (64)
4. Annihilation (Alex Garland, U.S.) (61)
5. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, U.S.)( 61)
6. The Rider (Chloe Zhao, U.S.) (54)
7. A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, U.S.)(49)
8. Paddington (Paul King, U.K.) (49)
9. Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson, U.S.) (40)
10. Won’t You Be My Neighbor (Morgan Neville, U.S.) (34)

HE’s Ten Best So Far (revised today): Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, Ari Aster‘s Hereditary, John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, Stefano Sollima‘s Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Eugene Jarecki‘s The King, Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here, Tony Zierra‘s Filmworker, Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, Tony Gilroy‘s Beirut, Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs.