My initial response to Phil Collins’ tweet earlier today was “yeah, cool…blast it out for the Times Square crowd, or the Eiffel Tower congregation in Paris” How many decades was “Auld Lang Syne” the official anthem? But read the comments. Hostility, derision, “nothing better to do but reminisce, Phil?”, etc. An ugly, seething mob.

The first full-length trailer for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again strongly suggests that Meryl Streep‘s character, Donna, is looking down at the joyful goings-on from a heavenly perch. The forthcoming musical is actually a prequel-sequel with Lily James playing Streep’s character, Donna Sheridan, in her youth.

No, it doesn’t matter that James doesn’t even begin to resemble the young Streep of the ’70s.

The Wikipedia plot summary reads as follows: “As another day dawns on sunny Kalokairi, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is now running the Greek villa. She greets Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters) at the pier and announces she’s pregnant. She admits, however, to doubts about whether she’ll be able to cope without her late mother there to help her.”

On top of which the trailer opens with Tanya and Rosie telling Sophie that “your mother is the bravest person we ever met.” Plus the footage of Streep appears to be from the original 2008 Mamma Mia.

The real corker is that Cher plays Ruby Sheridan, Seyfried’s grandmother and Streep’s mother. Born on 5.20.46, Cher is three years older than Streep.

One of my most keenly anticipated Sundance ’18 films is Paul Dano‘s Wildlife, an adaptation of Richard Ford‘s same-titled novel, published in 1990 and set in 1960 Montana.

The main costars are Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan as the married Jerry and Jeanette Brinson; the secondary performers are Ed Oxenbould as their son Joe, and Bill Camp as — here comes the rough part — an older, richer guy named Warren Miller whom Jeanette, believe it or not, has an affair with when Jerry, having lost his country-club job, leaves the homestead to become a firefighter.

Carey Mulligan and Bill Camp? The mind reels, convulses.

Carey Mulligan as Jeannette Brinson in Paul Dano‘s Wildlife, which will debut during Sundance ’18.

The official Sundance summary sidesteps the nitty-gritty. For a fuller understanding of where this film goes and what it delivers, consider a N.Y. Times review of Ford’s book by Christopher Lehman-Haupt:

“‘In the fall of 1960, when I was 16 and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.’ So begins Richard Ford‘s disturbing new novel, ‘Wildlife’. In it, Mr. Ford seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. Its action takes place in Great Falls, Montana. The theme, too, is a familiar one in Mr. Ford’s work, a love triangle involving a mother, a father and a son.

“The 16-year-old narrator is Joe Brinson. His father is a professional golfer who teaches at a country club in Great Falls. He is a natural athlete ‘with delicate hands and a short fluid swing that was wonderful to see but never strong enough to move him into the higher competition of the game.’ This is a perfect image for the searching innocence of Joe’s father, who has brought his family from Lewiston, Idaho, ‘in the belief that people — small people like him — were making money in Montana or soon would be, and wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.’

“America must make an honest appraisal: Donald Trump is a plutocrat masquerading as a populist…a pirate on a mission to plunder.” — Charles Blow, “The Great American Tax Heist,” N.Y. Times, 12.21.

Yesterday’s loathsome tax cut passage was the fourth largest in U.S. history — President Obama pushed through larger tax-cuts on 2010 and 2013, John F. Kennedy‘s tax-cut bill (passed posthumously in ’64) was bigger also, and Ronald Reagan’s 1986 corporate tax cut was also larger. And as the crash of ’87 showed, it didn’t achieve the desired result. Every single time the Republicans have cut taxes, a financial crash and economic depression have followed in fairly short order.

It goes without saying that if Norman Mailer had made it into his late 90s and was alive and lucid in 2017, there’s no way he’d be invited to present an Oscar due to his reputation for chauvinism and that one awful instance of brutality with his wife, Adele Morales, in the mid 1950s. He would, in today’s climate, almost certainly be ostracized, reviled, shunned. And if by some odd twist of fate Mailer was invited to present an Oscar anyway, that Voltaire joke he told at the Oscar podium on 3.28.77 would have never been told today, and if it had would be greeted with embarassed silence.

Note to Twitter banshees: I happened upon this clip a half-hour ago and was simply struck by the stark differences in the socio-political climates of 1977 vs. 2017. I didn’t post this to indicate any sort of admiration for Mailer’s chauvinism, which was difficult to process even back in the day, or to suggest that his Voltaire joke is amusing to me today. I’m just saying “wow, things were really different back then” — nothing more.

[Note to A24: I haven’t posted the following because I’m not an admirer of Willem Dafoe‘s performance in The Florida Project, or because I disagree with the likelihood of his winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I’m just trying to explain why I think his performance is by far the most popular of all the 2017 contenders in his category.]

Make no mistake — Willem Dafoe is going to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as a harried building manager in The Florida Project. Everyone “knows” or assumes this because he’s won this prize from eight critics groups (NYFCC, LAFCA, BSFC, National Board of Review, San Francisco, NYFCO, Detroit, Atlanta). Aaaah, but why have the elite know-it-alls chosen Dafoe? I’ll tell ya why, and it ain’t deep. Because he’s this year’s Mahershala Ali.

Supporting performances generally win awards not because of sustained inventiveness but because the character does one thing that the audience really likes, and because people tend to remember that one thing when they vote. Sometimes the performance will make that one thing feel extra-powerful or extra-resonant (i.e., Beatrice Straight‘s big moment in Network), but Academy and guild members primarily vote for what a character does or says at a crucial juncture in a film.

Dafoe is way ahead this year because his character, Bobby Hicks, does one righteous and compassionate thing that everyone loves — he saves a group of little kids from being preyed upon by a creepy child molestor. That’s it, the whole thing.

Dafoe plays a middling low-life character with conviction and compassion, but when you boil it all down what else did Dafoe actually do in that film? What major crescendo or galvanizing moment did he otherwise deliver or take part in? Nothing. He reminded deadbeat tenants to pay their rent, tolerated the kids’ raucous behavior, painted the apartment walls, etc.

Last year Mahershala Ali‘s performance in Moonlight won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar because his character, Juan, did one righteous and compassionate thing — he taught “Little” to float and maybe swim around in the Atlantic Ocean. That was it, the whole thing.

I knew early on that I wouldn’t want to see David Ayer‘s Bright (Netflix, 12.22), much less review it. An obvious conceptual ripoff of Graham Baker‘s Alien Nation, I knew it would put me through anguish, frustration, irritation. I knew this, in fact, because of four factors.

Reason #1: Will Smith, whose movies always either suck eggs or try my patience. I haven’t really liked a Smith film since Six Degrees of Separation.

Reason #2: “Antagonistic cop partners getting to know, respect and like each other as they investigate a crime or crime wave”…same old same old.

Reason #3: The script is by formula-roulette screenwriter Max Landis, whose ideas and writing style — “a pop-culture savant who synthesizes everything from pulp-fiction fantasy to Shane Black action-comedies into a kind of wild and witty blockbuster super-weapon,” according to Variety‘s Peter Debruge — represent the bane of my moviegoing existence.

Reason #4: Ayer has been off his game since End of Watch — Fury disappointed and Suicide Squad was mostly appalling. That was enough to stop me right there.

And now the reviews are in — 27% Rotten Tomatoes, 29% Metacritic. Case closed, end of story. Wait….Debruge likes it? “The best Netflix original movie to date”?

I’d be lying if I said I’m sorry that Emily Blunt isn’t costarring in Soldado, the upcoming Sicario sequel that opens on 6.29.18. Badass Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin will do the job fine, thanks. I’m not interested in watching Blunt deliver her looks of horror at all the carnage, no offense. If you have fast eyes you’ll spot a glimpse in the trailer of Catherine Keener. Who’s the woman who dives under the truck? Isabela Moner? Matthew Modine also costars.

A damning portrait of arrogant male power and the ultimate abuse of a female subordinate, Chappaquiddick (Entertainment Studios, 4.6.18) is obviously its own raison d’etre. The story of the 1969 Chappquiddick tragedy is well-known and has been well-investigated, but producers Mark Ciardi, Chris Fenton and Campbell McInnes, screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan and director John Curran wanted to deliver a concise but take-no-prisoners version of this cold, tragic tale in a narrative theatrical form.

Chappaquiddick has the cojones to call a spade a spade about a late, much beloved political figure, a respected liberal deal-maker and the most powerful and longest serving representative of what was, for decades, American’s premiere political family — the closest thing we ever had to a version of the British royals.

But over the last couple of months, Chappaquiddick has unwittingly slipped into the here and now. Without design or anticipation, what Chappaquiddick said last year during its making, the portrait it created of a world-famous power abuser and blame-shifter suddenly fits right into what’s happening now with this and that alleged sexual abuser being taken to task and made to walk the public plank.

There’s no question that the film is dealing straight, compelling cards, and that it sticks to the ugly facts as most of us recall and understand them, and that by doing so it paints the late Massachusetts legislator and younger brother of JFK and RFK in a morally repugnant light, to put it mildly.

All along I’ve been hoping that Curran would just shoot the script efficiently, minus any kind of showing off or oddball strategies that might diminish what was on the page. This is exactly what he’s done. Curran has crafted an intelligent, mid-tempo melodrama about a weak man who commits a careless, horrible act, and then manages to weasel out of any serious consequences.

I tried to pick 20 or 25 of HE’s best 2017 photos. Not every shot was taken with my iPhone 6 Plus, but 97% were. Anyway, I couldn’t do it — had to go for 39.

I’m afraid that Ridley Scott‘s All The Money In The World is one of my picks of the litter, and so HE’s Best of 2017 roster has to be once again recalculated:

Top ten: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, (3) Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird, (4) Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (7) Oliver Assayas‘ Personal Shopper [2016 holdover], (8) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (9) Steven Spielberg‘s The Post, (9) Ridley Scott’s All The Money in the World, and (10) Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation [2016 holdover].

Honorable fraternity: (11) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless; (12) Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, (13) Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver, (14) Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project, (15) Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, (16) David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, (17) David Gordon Green‘s Stronger, (18) Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade, (19) Brad Pitt‘s War Machine, (20) Joseph Kosinski‘s Only The Brave, (21) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread, (22) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, (23) Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049, (24) Patti Jenkins‘ Wonder Woman, (25) Taylor Sheridan‘s Wind River, (26) Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky, (27) Geremy Jasper‘s Patty Cake$ and (28) John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (saw it in Toronto, opening in April ’18).

By the way: I didn’t know until today that All The Money stars Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams worked “for free” when Ridley Scott flew back to England and Rome to re-shoot 22 scenes with Kevin Spacey replacement Christopher Plummer. You can bet, however, that their travel, hotel and per-diem expenses were covered.

Wells to Lodge: “So I can’t voice a distaste for Japan (actually Tokyo) without being slagged by the likes of yourself? My reservations about this or that city, region or culture are about tradition, aesthetics, architecture, atmosphere. I said in one of my Japan riffs that I found Tokyo lacking in character and personality for the most part. (Though not entirely.). I said it reminded me of Cleveland or Houston; I also said Seoul reminds me of Newark.

“On the other hand I adore Hanoi and much of Vietnam. But not Nha Trang (impersonal, overbuilt, Cannes without the personality) or the overdeveloped, skyscraper-heavy Ho Chi Minh City. I’m told that much of Bangkok has fallen to the same corporate influences.

“All in all my objections are about certain standards and appreciations for native flavor and urban design that I’ve developed over the decades. Racial animus has never once entered into it. I don’t even know what it is. How dare you accuse me of anything in this realm…how fucking dare you?

“You’re a brilliant critic who knows his stuff, and then you turn around and tweet like the lowest troll. And you also eat up my time as I have to rebut your sloppy tweet darts. Don’t be an ass.”

Lodge responds: “When you boil it down to ‘I’m not a fan of Japan’, that says something far less specific to me, as does your routine dismissal of most Asian cinema, for example. So maybe choose your words more delicately.” Wells to Lodge: “What I wrote was that I’ve ‘never been a huge fan of’ Japan.” which can be translated as ‘while I haven’t seen that much of Japan, the small section of Tokyo that I’ve seen has not enthralled me.’ I didn’t say that I dislike the whole country, which would be pretty close to ridiculous.