Six and a half months ago I was wowed by 20th Century Fox’s presentation at Cinemacon, and particularly by the footage from Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman (12.25), a musical about P.T. Barnum. It looked and sounded like a major wow — “a big, brassy, up-spirited musical…aimed at the ticket-buyers, full of feeling, going for the gold and the glory.”

A little more than three months later (on 6.29) the trailer popped. It felt a little bit corny and obvious, but I figured Fox marketers were just trying to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator lowbrows and that the first award-season promotions would begin sometime in…oh, late October or thereabouts.

This morning I was told in so many words that Fox doesn’t regard The Greatest Showman as Best Picture material at all, and that the big Cinemacon promotion was strictly about getting exhibitors excited about selling tickets to a big, splashy, hoo-hah musical. Oh. Congrats, Fox marketing, for conning me into thinking that The Greatest Showman might be an X-factor musical that would appeal to people like me as well as the schmucks.

From a friend: “They tested The Greatest Showman last night in South Jordan, Utah. They were offering 10 dollars to any woman between 18 and 24 that would attend. I’m guessing they’re looking to attract the Zac Efron crowd.”

It sounds unkind if not cruel to say this, but the invisible subtitle of Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel, which I saw this morning, is “I got nothin’ left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.”

It’s not a substandard or dismissable film, but it’s not grade-A either. It’s basically a thrown-together stew of familiar Allen-esque elements and influences — a little Chekhov-Seagull action, a little re-frying of Blue Jasmine desperation mixed with A Streetcar Named Desire, a dash of Mary Beth Hurt‘s “Joey” character in Interiors, some gangster seasoning from Bullets over Broadway plus some onions, garlic, celery and sauteed peppers and a little Crimes and Misdemeanors.

But it has some magnificent cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro. It’s totally worth seeing for this alone.

Wonder Wheel is basically a gloomy stage play — don’t trust any reviewer who calls it a “dramedy” — about a love triangle that ends in doom and despair. For my money it felt too stagey, too “written”, too theatrical. Every doomed character seems to be saying lines, and I just didn’t believe it. I never stopped saying to myself “the writing hasn’t been sufficiently finessed.”

Wonder Wheel‘s tragic figure is poor Ginny (Kate Winslet), a 39 year-old might-have-been actress on her second marriage, living in a Santo Loquasto-designed Coney Island apartment with a pot-bellied lunkhead named Humpty (Jim Belushi), miserable as fuck with a waitress gig at a local clam house and coping with a strange pyromaniac son whom I didn’t care for and wanted to see drowned.

There are two wild cards — a Trigorin-like would-be playwright/lifeguard named Mickey Rubin (Justin Timberlake), and Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s unstable daughter who shows up in scene #1, looking to hide out after yapping to the FBI about her gangster ex-husband and concerned that friends of her ex might want to hurt her.

Early on Ginny falls for Mickey and vice versa to a certain extent. The problem is that Ginny starts to imagine that Mickey can somehow help her escape from her miserable life. But Mickey is just looking for writerly experience and not interested in being anyone’s savior, except perhaps his own. 

The second problem is that soon after meeting Carolina Mickey starts to think about easing out of his affair with Ginny and maybe….no, he doesn’t want to be a two-timing shit so he puts it out of his mind, but you know what they say about Mr. Happy. He wants what he wants.

Wonder Wheel is a lament for life’s unhappy losers — for those marginally talented people who never quite made it artistically, or who made one or two big mistakes and never recovered, and who are stuck in a dead-end job or marriage that is making them more and more miserable. It starts out saying “these people are not only unhappy, but nothing they can do can free them from the mud of misery.” It ends up saying “you thought these folks couldn’t be less happy? Well, we figured a way!”

Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of The Weinstein Company, has sought to dispel rumors about TWC shutting down or being sold with a rote gung-ho statement claiming that things are A-okay, etc. He also emphasized that he’s much more interested in low-rent mulch than TWC’s aspirational, adult-level films like The Current War, The Upside and Mary Magdelene.

“It is untrue that the company or board is exploring a sale or shutdown of the company,” Weinstein said earlier this afternoon. “Our banks, partners and shareholders are fully supportive of our company. Polaroid is moving forward as planned with a release date of November 22, followed by Paddington 2 on January 12. The first Paddington grossed over $75 million and we expect even greater success for Paddington 2. Test screening scores are through the roof. War with Grandpa starring Robert De Niro is scheduled for February 23, 2018. Business is continuing as usual as the company moves ahead.”

In other words, Bob’s attitude about Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (11.24.17), Neil Burger‘s The Upside (3.9.18) and Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene (3.30.18) is “tough shit, fellas…I’m running the show now, not Harvey, and I’ve never much cared for upscale movies aimed at people who read reviews. I’m a bottom-feeder, which means that with Harvey gone you guys are shit out of luck.”

Polaroid is a horror film, Paddington 2 is an semi-animated family film and The War With Grandpa is a coarse, low-rent comedy.

Tingling with anticipation while preparing to drive down to a 10 am screening of Wonder Wheel on Wilshire Boulevard. The fate of Kate Winslet‘s Best Actress campaign will be known by day’s end.

“You are a bloated narcissist whose Presidency is a knife in the moral heart of America, a wound in our national soul that will take generations to heal, if ever.” — Stephen Colbert to Donald Trump in latest whatever.

Assaultive behavior is about assertion of dominance, and it can’t happen without an absolute indifference to the feelings of the recipient of said behavior. Any sort of indifference to feeling is essentially cruel. As a victim of unwanted sexual attention** when young, I have abhorred cruelty all my life. I am no less repelled by reports of Harvey Weinstein‘s behavior toward women than anyone else. What’s happening now is a combination of a clear-light moment for women everywhere blended with a realization that Harvey is but the tip of an iceberg.

You can’t play a convincing mafia-allied bad guy if you look like you’re almost ready to move into Assisted Living. You have to look young and fit enough to roll around and wrestle on the pavement and then clock your opponent with your sub-nosed .38. You have to look and sound like a mean snarly dog.

Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.

Variety is reporting that Michael Mitnick, the screenwriter for The Current War (Weinstein Co., 11.24), has dropped out of a New York Film Festival panel slated for tonight, titled “Real to Reel: Dramatizing True Stories” and moderated by Thelma Adams.

Mittnick didn’t explain his decision, but he apparently doesn’t want to promote a film being distributed by The Weinstein Co. because he feels this would in some way constitute an oblique approval of Harvey Weinstein, who has recently become the most despised industry pariah in the history of the motion picture industry due to numerous legit claims of sexual assault.

Mitnick wrote the script for The Current War several years ago. A story about the “War of Currents” between electricity titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse that occured in the 1880s and 1890s, the film took five years to make it to the screen.

Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and produced by Timur Bekmambetov and Basil Iwanyk, the period drama costars Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison, Michael Shannon as Westinghouse and Nicholas Hoult as Nikola Tesla.

My incomplete understanding is that the the Weinstein Co. had nothing to do with the creative creation of The Creation War. The company simply acquired the distribution rights…correct?

If I was Mitnick I would attend tonight’s panel discussion and read the following statement early on: “I feel terrible that our film, which I worked on for many years and which I’m deeply proud of, has been stained by association due to Harvey Weinstein‘s company having acquired the distribution rights.

“I feel sick about what Harvey is accused of having repeatedly done, and I greatly admire the brave women who have come forward and told their stories about his behavior.

“On the other hand it feels wrong to just throw the baby out with the bathwater by disassociating myself from a creative venture on which I worked and slaved and sweated so hard to get right. I’m sorry that The Current War is a Weinstein Co. release — who wouldn’t be? — but Harvey Weinstein had nothing to do with the making of this film, and I’m here to talk about the effort to write it well and get it made.”

Tonight’s discussion will feature Adams and panelists Emily Gordon (The Big Sick) and Michael Koskoff (Marshall).

A few days ago Esquire‘s Nick Schager posted his Top 25 Films of 2017. There is no correct or incorrect way to feel about any film, but what is Schager trying to get across when he calls Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja the year’s third best so far and James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z the fifth best? He also has Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant in eighth place, Chad Stahelski‘s John Wick: Chapter 2 in 13th place and Benny and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time in 15th place.

Sorry, brah, but these picks strike me as ridiculous. You can describe these films as guilty pleasures or quirky outliers, but you can’t say they’re among the top 15. Okay, you can but it seems awfully damn weird.

If you want a Best of 2017 you can take to the bank, consider HE’s tally as of 10.12.17 (and in this order): (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me My Your Name, (2) Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, (3) Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird, (4) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (5) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (6) Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, (7) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (8) Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, (9) Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver, (10) Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project, (11) John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick, (12) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (13) Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, (14) David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, (15) David Gordon Green‘s Stronger, (16) David Michod and Brad Pitt‘s War Machine, (18) Joseph Kosinski‘s Only The Brave, (19) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out and (20) Denis Villneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049.

Excerpted HE reactions to Schager favorites:

Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja — “[a} dreadful, cliche-ridden, Spielbergian thing…splashy, showoffy kid-mulch.”

James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z — “I’ve never watched a film about exploring exotic realms that has had less energy, less excitement, less of a pulse. I was just watching the damn thing and hoping against hope that Charlie Hunnam would be killed by a native spear or a wild animal or by falling off a cliff into raging rapids. I knew he wouldn’t die until the end of the film, but I wanted blood all the same. I started imagining ways to kill him. Anything to take my mind off the film.”

Ridley Scott‘s Alien Covenant — “I didn’t dislike Alien: Covenant — I hated it. And I’m not saying that out of some lazy-wrath instinct or pissy posturing or what-have-you. I’m talking about serious stomach-acid sensations here. Then again I mostly despised Prometheus so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to come to this. If Prometheus rang your hate bell, you’re going to despise this one also. For Alien: Covenant, which runs 121 minutes but feels like 150, is truly a spawn of that awful 2012 film. Is it ‘better’ than Prometheus? All right, yeah, I suppose it is. Is it therefore worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you like watching films that make you resent everything on the face of the planet including yourself.”

Chad Stahelski‘s John Wick: Chapter 2: “What a drag it was last night to catch this last night at the Fiesta plex. Me and roughly 25 or 30 wage-earning lowlifes. Baggy pants, hoodies, etc. ‘What a way to live and think!’, I muttered as I sank into my seat. With all the wonder and excitement of life outside, we few have chosen to watch a shitty Keanu Reeves action flick in a crummy megaplex on a rainy Friday night…welcome to the dungeon!

“I was half-okay with the original John Wick but this thing…God. There’s a cool, efficient way to assemble programmers of this sort, but the evidence suggests that Stahelski, a former stunt man, and screenwriter Derek Kolstad just don’t have the skill or the smarts to improve upon the 2014 start-up. There’s a vapor cloud of stupidity hanging over the film at every turn. The fairly applied adjectives include ‘dull, poorly written, lazily acted, predictably plotted,’ etc.

Benny and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time: “Yesterday nearly every Cannes critic went apeshit over [this] visceral, high-crank crime drama about a couple of low-life, bank-robbing brothers, Robert Pattinson‘s Connie and Benny Safdie‘s Nick, running around Queens. Nick is basically Lenny from Of Mice and Men, and right away I was going ‘oh, Jesus, I have to hang out with some stammering…I’m sorry, challenged guy for the next 100 minutes? This guy can’t put two sentences together without sweating from the mental strain.’”

Every few years I’ll post a list of the best inside-Hollywood books and then ask for titles I’ve missed. Which is what this is. What’s the next great topic for a Hollywood expose or tell-all? How about “Super-Vomit: How Hollywood Infantiles (i.e., Devotees of Comic Books and Video Games) Degraded Theatrical and All But Ruined The Greatest Modern Art Form”? Which others? An inside saga of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s pussy posse years?

(1) David McClintick‘s “Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street,” (2) Stephen Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate,” (3) Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution,” (4) Julia Phillips‘ “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” (5) John Gregory Dunne‘s “The Studio,” (6) Leo Braudy‘s “The World in a Frame,” (7) Thomas Schatz‘s “The Genius of the System” and (8) Lillian Ross‘s “Picture.”

Not to mention (9) Otto Freidrich‘s “City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s“, (10) Julie Salamon‘s “The Devil’s Candy,” (11)Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss‘s “The Cleopatra Papers,” (12) David Thomson‘s “Suspects“, (13) “The Whole Equation and (14) “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” (15)William Goldman‘s “Which Lie Did I Tell?” and (16) Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and (17) “Down and Dirty Pictures.”

As well as (18) Charles Fleming‘s “High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess,” (19) William Goldman‘s “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, (20) the audio version of Robert Evans‘ “The Kid Stays in the Picture”, (21) Christine Vachon‘s “Shooting to Kill” and (22) “A Killer Life“, (23) James B. Stewart‘s “Disney War“, (24) Peter Biskind‘s “Seeing is Believing,” Richard Corliss‘ “Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema,” (25) Thomas Doherty‘s “Hollywood’s Censor” (the book about Joe Breen), (26) Jake Ebert and Terry Illiot‘s “My Indecision Is Final,” (27) Stephen Farber and Marc Green‘s “Outrageous Conduct” (John Landis and the Twilight Zone tragedy), (28) Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters‘ “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood“, (29) Bruce Wagner‘s “Force Majeure“, and (30) David Thomson‘s “Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story“.

I didn’t mention Nathaniel West‘s “The Day of the Locust” as that would have pushed the total to 31.

Originally posted on 7.19.08, reposted on 5.30.12: David Carr‘s “The Night of the Gun” reminded me of my own “farewell, my dignity” aspect of drug use. Constant humiliations, assaults on your self-esteem, stains on your sheets and your soul. One way or another, if you do drugs you’re going to be dragged down and made to feel like a low-life animal. Because that’s what you are as long as you let drugs run the show.

Recreational drugs didn’t exactly “run the show” when I was 22 or 23, but they sure were my friends. I saw my life as a series of necessary survival moves, spiritual door-openings, comic exploits, adventures, erotic intrigues — everything and anything that didn’t involve duty, drudgery, having a career and mowing the lawn on weekends. Pot, hashish, mescaline, opiates, peyote buttons, Jack Daniels and beer were my comrades in crime.

The opiate thing was about opium (the black gooey kind that you smoked) and, believe it or not, heroin. The way we saw it, smack was much hipper than your garden-variety head drugs. Opiates were more authentic, we figured, because guys like William S. Burroughs and Chet Baker did them. Where today I see only the danger, the depravity and the recklessness, back then we saw only the coolness.

I was never much of a user, but I did flirt from time to time. I was a candy-ass in junkie circles because I confined myself to snorting and smoking the stuff. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that “chippers” (casual users) have to be careful because heroin will make you throw up if you smoke or snort too much because your body isn’t used to it. Which mine never was because I wasn’t, you know, dedicated.

I was living in a crash pad in Southport, Connecticut. My sole source of income at the time was working part-time for a guy who ran a limousine driver service. The clients were business guys looking to go to Kennedy or LaGuardia or Newark airports. They’d call and I’d come over and drive them to the airport in their car, and then drive it back to their home. Doesn’t sound like much of an idea, but there were definitely customers calling from Westport, Weston, Easton, Wilton, Georgetown, Redding, Southport and Fairfield.

My deal with my boss, Peter, was to be on call at all times. A guy leaving for the airport in a couple of hours would call Peter, he’d call me, I’d drive over and so on. So one afternoon — a Sunday, possibly — a friend and I happened to have some of that snort-smoke stuff, and had retired to a barn out back for a little indulgence. We rolled a nice fat joint and soon I was royally Baker-ed. But just as we got back to the house the phone rang. It was Peter telling me to dress nicely and be at a certain client’s home in 45 minutes if possible, certainly no later than an hour. A trip down to Kennedy.