Atlantic critic David Sims posted a rave review of Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project on 10.5.17. He gave special props to Willem Dafoe‘s performance as Bobby, the ocasionally flustered but fair-minded proprietor of Orlando’s Magic Castle motel, in part by saying “it might be the finest role of Dafoe’s storied career.”

A24 marketers promptly made Sims’ quote sound more definitive by removing the “might be,” but they all remove modifiers.

It goes without saying that Dafoe’s lead performance in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (’88) is far and away the finest of his career, not to mention his greatest role. There’s not even a debate about this…c’mon. Sims got carried away (as we all do from time to time) but he shouldn’t have even said “might,” which is the same as saying “possibly” or “arguably.” The “father, can you forgive me?” passage at the very end of Last Temptation blows Baker’s entire film to smithereens, and if Sims doesn’t know this he should.

On 1.31 I posted a qualified capsule rave of Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther (Disney, 2.16). More precisely I raved about the final hour while lamenting that the first 75 minutes are largely lacking in narrative tension and are mostly about set-up, diversion, pageantry and obligatory battle and car-chase action sequences for their own sakes. All through the first hour-plus I was worried. I was asking myself “when is this film going to get it together and start moving purposefully in a direction that we all want it to go in?”

And then it finally does that, and it’s all exuberant, pedal-to-the-metal, forward-motion engagement. But you’ll need to scrutinize the recently-posted Black Panther reviews with a fine tooth comb to find even a hint of acknowledgment that it waits and waits and waits to really rev up the T-bird and put the rubber to the road.

TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde mentions “the film’s occasional pacing lapses” but calls them “forgivable.” Screen International‘s Tim Grierson allows that the story is “a little plodding.” The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez says that while certain “expounding preludes are flat and patchy, once Black Panther [finally] gets out of its crouching position and goes on a sprint, it’s an engaging ride that rarely lets up.”

Alluding to the faintly noddy, waiting-for-full-engagement section, Time‘s Stephanie Zacharek asks, “What would this film have been like if its action scenes had been cut cleanly and clearly, instead of chopped into the usual wasteful, visually confusing slice-and-dice mashup?”

See what I mean? They’re afraid to quibble or complain for the most part. They know Black Panther is going to be super-huge and they don’t want to seem as if they don’t get it or are in any way reluctant to celebrate this. Most critics are cowards. Have I been an occasional coward in the past? Yes. Have I ever sidestepped or diluted my real, deep-gut reactions to this or that film? I regrettably have from time to time. But so far I’m the only one to declare plain and straight that Black Panther, good as it ultimately is, doesn’t really get going until after the one-hour mark.

A 15 year-old discussion about Roman Polanski‘s 1977 statutory rape episode has come back to bite Quentin Tarantino in the ass. The chat was between QT, Howard Stern and Robin Quivers, and of course was aired on Stern’s show. In early ’03 Tarantino’s remarks were obviously beyond the pale, but in today’s atmosphere…? Forget it.

Earlier this morning there were YouTube captures of the actual verbal discussion, but Sirius XM has had them removed. Here are portions from a Variety transcript:

Tarantino: “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape. That’s not quite the same thing. He had sex with a minor. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word ‘rape,’ you’re talking about violent, throwing them down; it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world. Throwing the word ‘rape’ around is like throwing the word ‘racist’ around. It doesn’t apply to everything that people use it for. He was guilty of having sex with a minor.”

Quivers: [the sex wasn’t consensual.]

QT: “No, that was not the case at all. She wanted to have it and dated the guy.”

Quivers: “She was 13!”

QT: “And by the way, we’re talking about America’s morals, we’re not talking about the morals in Europe and everything.”

Stern: “Wait a minute. If you have sex with a 13-year-old girl and you’re a grown man, you know that that’s wrong.”

QT: “Look, she was down with this. She’s talked about it since, ‘No, he didn’t really do anything to me. It was a technicality for being 13.’”

We all feel good and fortified when lights are flashing and guys like Scott Feinberg are hovering and things are going well, but award-season contenders are obliged to be so relentlessly and buoyantly alpha that they must be going crazy inside. Is there some kind of secret award-season detox-therapy center that contenders can go to, a place where they can drink beer and behave like drunken sailors or at least in a borderline rude way, venting hostility and insulting their peers and/or their least-favorite red-carpet interviewers? I for one get headaches after alpha-vibing for more than an hour.

Greta Gerwig on writing @LadyBirdMovie: "If you stop any woman on the street and say, 'How's your relationship with your mother?' It's never going to be a one sentence response … it's a big, complicated thing." #NomineesNight pic.twitter.com/2aEnLBI8lh

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 6, 2018

Lady Bird is real-deal naturalism, a kind of 400 Blows-level vision of mother-daughter sturm und drang. Unfettered American heartland realism, no bullshit, perfectly performed, edgy but open-hearted, unsullied by magical realism, no script problems to speak of, and beautifully shot with blue-ish, stressed, film-like colors.

Why are you undecided, Academy? Is this or this is not The Year of the Woman? This is your default, your compromise, the movie you’ll proudly stand by five or 20 years hence. A little local movie that is actually “big” in a kind of Delbert Mann Marty sense — a movie that tells the truth, owns its own turf, doesn’t play games.

Not too many hours ago Quentin Tarantinogot in touch with Deadline‘s Michael Fleming to discuss the Uma Thurman car crash incident on the set of Kill Bill, as passed along in a 2.3 article by the N.Y. Times‘ Maureen Dowd.

The article’s implication was that Tarantino had strong-armed Thurman into performing an unsafe driving stunt and thereby caused her much grief and pain. Except it wasn’t that simple, Tarantino explains in the transcript. He made a mistake, he says, by reversing the direction of the shot but without test-driving it himself. He knew Thurman “was a shaky driver, but she had a license,” he says. The stunt was “a little thing” but he fucked up all the same. Ever since, he says, he’s been upset and sorry that he allowed it to happen.

Here’s a key portion of what QT told Fleming:

“Watching [Uma] fight for the wheel…remembering me hammering about how it was safe and she could do it. Emphasizing that it was a straight road, a straight road…the fact that she believed me, and I literally watched this little S curve pop up. And it spins her like a top. It was heartbreaking. Beyond one of the biggest regrets of my career, it is one of the biggest regrets of my life. For a myriad of reasons.

“It affected me and Uma for the next two to three years. It wasn’t like we didn’t talk. But a trust was broken. A trust broken over a year of shooting, of us doing really gnarly stuff. Doing really big stunt stuff. I wanted her to do as much as possible and we were trying to take care of her and we pulled it off. She didn’t get hurt. And then the last four days, in what we thought would be a simple driving shot, almost kills her.

A friend who’s seen Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Warner Bros., 2.9) says it’s nothing to write home about. A brief episode inflated into an okay but no-great-shakes 94-minute film. Padding, back-story and whatnot. Starring the real-life Thalys train hero guys — Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, and costarring Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer.

The all-media screening is on Wednesday night, at more or less the same time as Universal’s Fifty Shades Freed screening.

Dorothy Blyskal‘s screenplay is based on “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Soldiers” by Jeffrey Stern, Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos. Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer costar.

23 year-old Saoirse Ronan, who was honored last night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival but is also unjustly destined to lose the Best Actress Oscar to Three Billboards‘ star Frances McDormand, is at the top of her game right now. She’s obviously got it, and is certain to fortify her Streep-like portfolio by leaps and bounds over the coming decades. Everyone at the Arlington theatre, including moderator Anne Thompson, was thinking this last night.

But for all her intensity and brilliance Ronan has chosen to star or costar in more than a few iffy films over the last decade, and when you get right down to it she’s scored big-time in a stellar, triple-A, bull’s-eye fashion only twice — as the titular character in Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird and as Eilis Lacey in Brooklyn (’15).

She made a brilliant debut at age 13 in Joe Wright‘s Atonement (’07), playing a nearly demonic provocateur, and she acted the blazes out of her Susie Salmon role in Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, but the film was too Jackson-y and CG’ed to death. And she was completely delightful in Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel (’14). And that’s as far as it’s gone so far.

Ronan has three films due for 2018 release, but the only one of real consequence will be Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, which Focus will release on 11.2. Reactions to Dominic Cooke‘s On Chesil Beach (Lionsgate, 6.15) have been muted, and her other ’18 release, Michael Mayer‘s The Seagull, was shot in the summer of 2015 — do the math.

“Pete, it’s this kooky preferential ballot…” HE to sane people: For the 47th (or is it the 48th?) time, the three best films of the year are Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird. And what about the groundswell movement for Phantom Thread? Will someone please upset the Oscars in some way, shape or form? Could the Price Waterhouse guys arrange for another envelope screw-up?

Jeff Goldblum doing the same thing to his T-Rex pursuer that Steve McQueen did to the two “organization” assassins at the beginning of the San Francisco chase scene in Bullitt. Major market TV ads (Superbowl, Oscar telecast) don’t get much better than this. On the same level as Joe Pytka’s 2005 “I’m Spartacus” Pepsi spot.

“We’re not gonna take it! / No, we ain’t gonna take it! / Oh, we’re not gonna take it anymore!” — anthem of the long-horned steers who rebel against the Westworld owners and engineers in Season 2, which launches on 4.22.18.

From “Westworld Hate Will Continue To Spread,” posted on 12.5.16: “Like many others, I’ve gone totally negative on Westworld over the last three or four episodes. The HBO miniseries finally ended last night, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a major revolt going on. I hate this series with a passion for just layering on the layers, for plotzing, diddly-fucking, detouring, belly-stabbing, meandering and puzzleboxing to its heart’s content.

Die Hard meets The Towering Inferno with Dwayne Johnson, a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 or even ’20, leaping off a construction crane 85 floors up in hopes of landing in a windowless area in a nearby skyscraper. Plus he’s wearing a prosthetic left leg. Plus he’s a family man who needs to clear his name like Denzel Washington did in The Taking of Pelham 123. And with Rawson Marshall Thurber at the helm!

With the exception of Michael Bay‘s Pain and Gain, Johnson has demonstrated time and again that he’s fundamentally opposed to appearing in films that are (a) good and (b) at least semi-believable. He makes big, dopey, adolescent cartoons. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was a perfect fit. Originally posted on 12.8.16: “If Dwayne Johnson Is Starring, It’s Probably Empty, Glossy Dogshit.”