From Owen Gleiberman‘s latest Variety essay, “Healthy Tomatoes? The Danger of Film Critics Speaking as One,” posted this morning: “Remember when film critics were obsolete? When we’d lost our swagger, our sway, our influence? When it seemed like the entire world had gone critic-proof, because we just didn’t matter anymore?

“It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, film critics attained Peak Irrelevance, but it’s starting to seem like an eon ago, because this summer a chorus of people — moviegoers, film-industry executives, critics themselves — have been singing a very different tune. It’s called: We’re back! Critics, in case you hadn’t heard, have emerged from the dark cave of our obsolescence and are once again bringing the news, keeping the studios in check, making the world safe for bad movies to die the grisly box-office death they deserve. Look out, Emoji Movie! We’re coming at you with a pitchfork.

“As someone with a vested interest in thinking that critics matter, I’d argue that our influence never totally went away. There was certainly a perception that it did, a feeling that went hand in hand with the notion that we were elitist art-head snobs who stood on the other side of a divide from the mainstream audience. Film critics have been called out for elitism ever since there were movies, but in an age when mega-budget franchise filmmaking had become a literal universe, one that dwarfs everything around it (including critics), that hostility reached a new pitch of jaded dismissal.”

HE response to Gleiberman: “I’m glad critics are back also, but there’s still an elite cadre of ivory-tower snobs who have done and are continuing to do their level best to convince Average Joe ticket-buyers to be highly suspicious of critical opinion. One result is that while every critic on RT loved Logan Lucky, for the most part Joe & Jane Popcorn stayed away in droves. A famous Samuel Goldwyn‘s statement has been quoted a million times and has never stopped being true. “If people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop ’em.”

From Snopes.com: “While we haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact origins of the colorized version of the poster, we were able to confirm that this is a genuine piece of comic book art that was originally released in 1949. According to a 2008 Hakes auction, the below-displayed comic was released as a school book cover in 1949 and was distributed by the The Institute For American Democracy, Inc.”

Everyone who saw Patti Cake$ at last January’s Sundance Film Festival went nuts for it. The after-buzz was huge, and this led to a bidding war between Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Neon, Annapurna and The Orchard. Fox Searchlight won distrib rights for $9.5 million — the second-highest movie buy at that high-altitude festival. (Amazon’s $12 million purchase of The Big Sick was the topper.) But Joe and Jane Popcorn apparently don’t care (or never bothered to read about) what the Sundance crowd thought. Boxofficemojo reports that Patti Cake$ has only made a lousy $66 grand on 14 screens this weekend. That averages out to $4711 per screen over three days of showings. What is it about “this movie is really, really likable” that Joe and Jane failed to understand? How could they fail to consider the fact that when someone like myself likes Patti Cake$, that it really means something? Why are Joe and Jane always so slow to wake up to fresh lights on the horizon and fresh scents in the air? Patti Cake$ will open on 300-400 screens over the Labor Day weekend, or two weeks hence.

After 91 and 1/2 years, the feisty and flinty Jerry Lewis is gone. The indisputable king of comedy during the Martin & Lewis heyday of the early to mid ’50s (although their partnership actually began in Atlantic City in ’46), and a boldly experimental avant-garde comedic auteur from the late ’50s to late ’60s. And a truly delicious prick of a human being when he got older, and oh, how I loved him for that. Refusing to suffer fools can be a dicey thing when you’re younger and have to get along, but it’s a blessing when you’re an old fart with money in the bank.

I know that Lewis was one of my first impersonations when I was a kid….”Hey, ladeeeeeee!” (I performed this for director Penelope Spheeris way back when, and while she could’ve gone “uh-huh” she said “hey, that’s pretty good!”)

If you were born in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s and therefore haven’t a clue who Jerry Lewis was, please, please consider reading Shawn Levy’s “The King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis,” which I’ve long regarded as the best researched, the best written and probably the most honest portrait of the occasionally contentious Lewis. If you get hold of a paperback or Kindle copy, find the passages to do with Bob Crane — hair-raising. Or the business about Levy and Lewis in the epilogue, which, Levy says, “were so infamous that I’m told Marty Short spent an evening entertaining Tom Hanks and Paul Reiser at dinner doing impressions of Jerry from it.”

You also have to read Nick Tosches‘ rhapsodic, utterly brilliant “Dino: Living High In the Dirty Business of Dreams.”

I can’t sit here on a Sunday morning and tap out some brilliant, all-knowing, heart-touching essay on what a huge electrical energy force Lewis was for 20 years in the middle of the 20th Century. So I’m just going to paste some choice HE posts, starting with an excerpt from my one and only interview with the guy at the Stein Erickson hotel during the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and on through to my last in-person encounter when Lewis did a q & a at the Aero theatre to promote Daniel Noah’s Max Rose.

Posted on 5.1.13: “Jerry Lewis has long been regarded as a difficult man, but listen to him at this recent Tribeca Film Festival appearance. He’s 87 and yet he seems more engaged and feisty and crackling than the vast majority of his contemporaries. There’s something about old show-business buzzards. The scrappy survival instincts that helped them make it when young are the same qualities that keep them sharp in their doddering years. You don’t have to be a prick to be intellectually focused and alert (the elegant Norman Lloyd is in his late 90s and a beautiful man to speak with) but if given a choice between a state of advanced vegetation and being a Jerry Lewis type of old guy, I’d definitely go with the latter. I suspect that Lewis biographer Shawn Levy will go ‘hmmm’ when he reads this.”

I can understand AMC’s alarm about Moviepass dropping its monthly fee to $9.95, which would theoretically allow subscribers to see one movie per day at participating theatres for…what, 34 cents per show? When Movie Pass began the monthly cost was $45. AMC is looking to bail out of its partnership with Moviepass, calling the cheaper fee a harbinger of “an unustainable business model.” I’m presuming that 97% of Moviepass holders only see two or three films per month. The Moviepass come-on is roughly analogous to a restaurant offering one of those “eat all you want, stay as long as you want” buffet for a flat fee.

Dick Gregory was a brilliant comedian, social critic and health nut, but my primary impression is that he was wise and droll. He saw and raged against it all, but he never let his anger gain a foothold. His book, “From The Back of the Bus“, put the hook in when I was a kid. He was a Zen cat first and a contrarian foot soldier second. Always admired him, thought he was sharp and cool and sly.

During the second Clinton term I used Gregory’s Bahamian Diet powder to lose weight. I first learned about it in Jerry Stahl‘s “Permanent Midnight“, which stated that junkies were known to live on Gregory’s BD powder because it provided all the necessary nutrients without having to eat regular foods. When I was working at People in the late ’90s I heard that Ben Stiller, preparing to play Stahl in the movie version, had used the Bahamian Diet powder as part of a weight-loss regimen. Believe it or not, there was angry blowback because I mentioned this.

An old Gregory routine, posted on his Wiki page: “I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night. Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right. I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’ Then these three white boys came up to me and said, ‘Boy, we’re giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.’ So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, ‘Line up, boys!'”

I wasn’t very popular with girls in junior high and my first two years of high school. Things began to improve when I turned 17 and 1/2, but from 13 to 16 my social life was mostly miserable. Largely because I was regarded as a weirdo. Funny looking, a frowner, “different.” But I was good with my guy friends. I could be funny when the mood struck.  I was irreverent, did imitations of teachers.

On a warm night there was a party thrown by one of the many tenth-grade girls who wanted nothing to do with me. I hadn’t been invited, of course, but around 9:30 pm a convertible full of beer-guzzling guys pulled up in front of my home with a screech. “Hey, Jeff!  Jeff!” They wanted to take me to the party, which had been underway for an hour or two. “Nope, wasn’t invited,” I said. “Thanks but naah, don’t think so.” But they all insisted so I climbed into the car. Fuck it.

Ten minutes later we all strolled into the big party through the rear kitchen door, and almost immediately the blond hostess said she wanted me to leave. Like I had the plague or something. The feeling that began to flood through my lungs and heart and stomach area was horrible. Inwardly I was trembling with humiliation, but outwardly I shrugged and left. 

I was thinking on the way home that I was like Trevor Howard‘s character in Carol Reed’s Outcast of the Islands.

It all worked out in the end, of course. I went on to live a really great life as a movie journalist, and the blonde who told me to leave the party lived an okay, so-so life when she was younger, had a couple of kids, etc. But then she divorced, developed a drinking problem, gained a lot of weight. Or so I heard.

Donald Trump knows how to spell “heal.” He wrote “heel” earlier because he’s an authoritarian Mussolini, and he wants the country to “follow closely behind its owner.” Call it a Freudian slip if you want.

Early this morning I re-read a 7.24.16 piece that riffed on Michael Moore‘s “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win,” and the nightmare of those days suddenly rushed back in. The debates hadn’t happened and the election itself wouldn’t be for another three and a half months, and somehow Moore knew. And as I read his words along with my own, long-buried feelings of irritation and even loathing for Hillary Clinton began to fill my chest. She orchestrated it all. She brought hell into our lives.

The graying and complacent Democrats and centrists who nominated Clinton and then ignored everything that was happening out there, brushing aside all of the fervor and passion churned up by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders…these people are the authors of our present nightmare. I get the willies when I re-live it. I didn’t realize it at first, but the summer of ’16 was a truly terrible period in American history. Not as terrible as now but close.

“I’ve been split on Hillary Clinton since she vanquished Bernie Sanders,” I began. “Half of me accepts that I have to vote for her sensible, pragmatic, Obama-continuing wonkery (along with her hawkish foreign policy instincts), and the other half can’t stand her — her cautious sidestepping of the Bernie revolution, that cackle, the Wall Street ties, the testy substitute-teacher vibe, her liberal-leaning but weather-vane-ish political values, the just-revealed DNC connivance against Bernie, the eye bags, the eff-you to the Berners with her selection of Tim Kaine, her compulsively secretive nature.”

There are three things about Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Warner Bros., probably sometime in late November or December) that scare…okay, concern me. I didn’t moan or roll my eyes but I did go “hmmm” when I read about them. My brow was furrowed, and I say this with all due respect for Eastwood’s celebrated fast-shoot, fast-cut approach to making features.

Worry #1: Eastwood’s decision to cast the real-life heroes of the 2015 train attack in France — Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone — as themselves. You know that’s a dicey call, and that the best we can expect from these guys will be “not bad but somewhat self-conscious” performances. You know their best won’t be good enough. No one will make a big deal about it, but deep down people will be muttering.

Worry #2: The decision to tell the story of the friendship of these guys when they were kids. There’s no way of exaggerating how little I care about this aspect. Didn’t I just finish explaining that back-stories and origin stories are a pain in the ass, and that all a really good film needs is a gripping capture of the way things really are when stuff starts to happen?

Worry #3: The dopey-sounding title. Firstly the “The” is completely unnecessary. Delmer Daves‘ 3:10 to Yuma (’57) and James Mangold‘s 2007 remake, both based on a 1953 Elmore Leonard short story, didn’t see the need. Secondly, only military people use military time; everyone else uses the common colloquial. The title — hello? — should obviously be 3:17 to Paris. Keep it straight, simple.

The 15:17 to Paris was announced in April, and began shooting last month. It’s already damn near close to wrapping.

What about creating a small but distinctive and attractive certification stamp that would be roughly synonymous with a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval…a stamp could that could be shared by da coolest Hollywood sites as a badge of honor?

I’ve previously floated the idea of Hollywood Elsewhere being a kind of Charley Varrick site. Myself and Sasha Stone vs. the big combines and the measured, cautious, status-quo mush (trade announcements, hires, pitch deals, tediously “thoughtful” analysis of sequel earnings, trends, inventory assessment, bean-counting, reviews, steady as she goes) that they tend to churn out.

Yesterday’s MTMP discussion with Tracking Board‘s Jeff Sneider, or a portion of it rather, inspired a notion about how this romantic allusion (“last of the indie crop-dusters”) could include not just Hollywood Elsewhere and Awards Daily, but also Richard Rushfield‘s The Ankler plus another site I’m not allowed to mention.

Each site is obviously about their particular content and brand, but at least they’re all pointed and independent-minded — a quartet of distinctive, singular-voice platforms that any industry, especially one so closely entwined with dreamscapes and metaphors and cultural reflection as the entertainment industry, needs to stay healthy.

Back in late ’01 or early ’02, in the doldrums of the dot.com bust, David Poland and I tried to get a discussion going about creating a super-site of indie Hollywood voices — myself, Poland, Anne Thompson and Nikki Finke, believe it or not. I can’t recall if Sasha Stone was involved or not. It obviously never came to anything, but his idea was to merge four or five niche voices into one Big Niche Voice location. One-stop shopping for people looking for a little extra punch & personality instead of standard status-quo journalism.

My lone wolf instincts are too well-ingrained to talk about merging with anyone or anything, but a few select sites sharing a badge of honor…that could work. I’m thinking of a distinctive logo of some kind (like an MPAA PG-13 or R rating logo) that says “this is a cool site…a place you should visit…one of the few special places where precise and particular individual voices can be found…you can trust this site not to bullshit or bore you or cause your eyelids to droop a bit.”

Whaddaya think?

I wouldn’t see Patrick Hughes‘ The Hitman’s Bodyguard with a knife at my back. Mostly shitty reviews, Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson, same old action crap, 40% Rotten Tomatoes score…forget it. And yet it’ll earn over $20 million this weekend on 3377 screens. If it makes $21 million it will have averaged around $6200 per screen — not bad.

There’s irony in the fact that Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky, a smart, agreeably mellow heist film that’s allegedly better and smarter and generally more of a pro-level thing, isn’t doing as well. Yesterday it took in a lousy $2.8 million from 3,031 locations for a projected $7.7 million haul by Sunday night — nearly a third of what the Reynolds-Jackson film will make. 

Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Riley Keough, Seth MacFarlane, Katie Holmes and Hilary Swank…good cast, and all of them mouthing smart lines in just the right away.  In my book Logan Lucky, which cost $29 million, is just as satisfying as any of the Ocean’s heist films, if not more so.

By yesterday morning Joe Popcorn had obviously decided to blow the Soderbergh off. Whyyyyeeeeeeeeee?

What did shitkicker types think? Did anyone see it last night in some Bumblefuck plex? HE tech guy Dominic Eardley caught a matinee in Louisville earlier this afternoon, and reports the theatre was nearly empty except for himself and a small group pf middle-aged women who came for Channing Tatum.

HE’s Logan Lucky problem: Tatum, Driver and Craig are much smarter than the guys who pulled off the Rififi or Topkapi heists, but they and others like them were dumb as fenceposts when it comes to making a common-sense choice as to who would make the best U.S. President, or at least not destroy the concept of basic sanity in terms of serving in the Oval Office. I just didn’t believe that Tatum and Driver and Craig could ever be as brilliant as all that. If they were truly brainy fellows they wouldn’t be doing time in jail, roaming around in pickup trucks, getting laid off, tending bar, driving forklifts and all the rest of it.