“We’re really moving along…we’re bringing back our jobs…we’re making American great again…ending the war on coal…no more easy welfare for immigrants,” etc. What’s a nice, concise term for beyond toxic, world-class contemptible, nauseating, forehead-slapping, rhetorically suffocating?

Last August I reported that Chappaquiddick (dated 5.11.16, 131 pages), a blistering Ted Kennedy melodrama written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, would begin filming just after Labor Day. It did so. John Curran directed with a cast that toplined Jason Clarke (as EMK), Kate Mara (Mary Jo Kopechne), Ed Helms (Joe Gargan), Bruce Dern (the immobile Joseph P, Kennedy), Jim Gaffigan and Taylor Nichols.

I figured Chappaquiddick might turn up at Toronto in search of a distribution deal, but it wasn’t included in the first batch of titles. A friend who’s seen it says it’s “good…Jason Clarke really captures the Teddy vibe of that era but it’s Bruce Dern that is the power of the film as father  Joe.”

Maybe it’ll be announced as a Toronto title in a week or so, and maybe it’ll open commercially sometime in the late winter or spring of ’18. I know a good script when I read one so here’s hoping.

The other qualifier has to do with Stephen Chbosky‘s Wonder (Lionsgate, 11.17). The trailer suggested it might be a tad cloying, but you can never tell anything from a trailer. I reported on 3.30 that a Lionsgate spokesperson had told the Cinemacon crowd “that Wonder has gotten the highest test scores of any Lionsgate film ever.” And so the original release date, 4.7.17, was changed last February to 11.17. 

But that didn’t mean that Lionsgate believed that Wonder has the Oscar nuts. All it meant, I’ve been told, is that Lionsgate knew they had a strong family film and so they wanted to open it near Thanksgiving to capitalize on that.  Make of this what you will.

As I understand it, working-class Mexicans and residents of Spain speak the same language in the same way that natives of rural Arkansas and Cambridge-educated Brits both speak English. I wouldn’t know, but street-level Mexicans allegedly speak Spanish with mumbled, guttural inflections. Long ago I read that the word huevos (eggs), which Spaniards pronounce as “WAYvos”, is pronounced as “werewolves” in non-tourist regions. So the next time you’re ordering breakfast in Monterrey or Vera Cruz you need to say “werewolves rancheros.”

I mentioned this a couple of years ago in a piece about the Riviera Maya Film Festival. I first learned about real-deal Mexican pronunciations in Robert Sabbag‘s “Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade,” which I read…oh, probably around ’77 or thereabouts. (The hardbound edition popped in ’76.) Sabbag’s dealer character, Zachary Swan, mentions that a Mexican waiter didn’t understand him when he ordered “dos huevos,” and a friend explains he would’ve been perfectly understood if he’d said “dos werewolves.”

If an engrossing, well-made film contains a theme or side-plot that I find tedious or distasteful, I’ll simply erase it in my head. Or, you know, I’ll put it into a box, and then put the box under the bed — problem solved. Example: I completely ignored the allegory about faith in M. Night Shyamalan‘s Signs (’02) and just concentrated on the excellent direction of the scary alien scenes (on the roof, in the cornfield, in the pantry).

Mel Gibson‘s Graham Hess had renounced God and the priesthood after his wife was killed in an auto accident, and I brushed that shit off like dandelion pollen. Hess’s faith is restored at the end after his asthmatic son (Rory Culkin) has been spared and the aliens have been vanquished, and I couldn’t have cared less. I remember a dispute with David Poland about this. He was saying “but it’s a religious allegory…it’s all about God and faith,” and I would say “if that’s what defined the movie for you, knock yourself out, but for me the faith stuff was like a fly buzzing around the kitchen…swat, swat.”

Signs was an absolutely top-tier alien movie, period. End of discussion group.

I’m finding it vaguely alarming that Eyes Wide Shut opened 18 years ago. I clearly remember seeing the unrated, uncensored-orgy version out at the Warner Bros. lot, and then being shown the censored version and producer Jan Harlan taking questions about this. I swear that didn’t happen more than 13 or 14 years ago, despite what the calendar says. Time seems to be rushing along at greater and greater speeds.

Diana, the former Princess of Wales, died on 8.31.97. I was attending the Montreal Film Festival when the news broke. I remember talking it through with colleagues and then retreating to my hotel room and tapping out a reaction piece for my L.A. Times Syndicate column. The next day Rod Steiger, a guest of the festival, delivered a rant about how the papparazzi had killed her. Which they did in a way. But the primary villain was Dodi Fayed, the millionaire asshat whom Diana had been fucking for a few weeks.

I was working at People when Diana began seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man. And yet Diana overlooked this or didn’t want to know. And that’s why she died. She orchestrated her demise by choosing a profligate immature asshole for a boyfriend.

Fayed was just foolish and insecure enough, jet-setting around with his father’s millions and looking to play the protective stud by saving Diana from the paparazzi, to put her in harm’s way. It all came to a head on that fateful night in Paris. Fayed told his drunken chauffeur to try and outrun a bunch of easily finessable scumbag photographers on motorcycles, and we all know the rest.

Deep down in the mineshaft pit where his darkest nightmares slither around, this is Donald Trump at his most naked and peeled away and vulnerable, the essence of the man without the bluster and bullshit and the expensive dark-blue suits. Or forget about Trump and just re-absorb perhaps the most intensely honest, stripped-down agony moment in cinematic history. What other great scenes in which the armor fell away and only the weeping child remained, begging for forgiveness? Anthony Quinn‘s on the beach during that final minutes of La Strada. Thomas Haden Church crying and pleading in Paul Giamatti‘s hotel room in Sideways. Others?

Remember that hot Icarus buzz during last January’s Sundance Film Festival? It was the Russian doping doc you had to see. It was electric, brilliant, a real-life thriller…all hail Bryan Fogel!  Here’s what I posted on 1.26.17. I sensed that Icarus would probably shake things up when it opened down the road, and that it would almost certainly land on the shortlist for the 2017 Best Feature Doc Oscar.

Well, Icarus “opens” today on Netflix with a 90% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and the buzz is almost nonexistent. Because a Netflix debut means almost nothing when it comes to the blogosphere and the pulsebeat on the street. A Netflix debut is tantamount to a kind of burial. It’s streaming, yes, but buzz-wise it’s like a tree falling in the forest 20 miles away.

From my 1.26.17 review: “I’ve no striking observations or insights to add to the general chorus, but I can at least say that after a slow start Icarus turns into a highly gripping account of real-life skullduggery and paranoia in the sense of the classic William S. Burroughs definition of the term — i.e., “knowing all the facts.”

As noted, Bryan Fogel‘s two-hour film starts off as a doping variation of Morgan Spurlock‘s Super Size Me, and then suddenly veers into the realm of Laura Poitras‘ Citizenfour.

It doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know or suspect. The prime takeaways are (a) the use of performance-enhancing drugs is very common in sports (everyone does it, Lance Armstrong was the tip of the iceberg) and (b) there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Vladmir Putin and his top henchmen and the Al Capone mob of 1920s Chicago.

I was a little worried during the Super Size Me portion, in which bicyclist Fogel and Russian scientist Grigory Rodchenkov embark on a project with the goal of outsmarting athletic doping tests. It’s interesting at first, but it goes on too long. After a while I was muttering “so when does the Russian doping stuff kick in?”

Last night Paul Schrader posted a Facebook lament about Detroit (i.e., the Algiers Motel brutality goes on forever). It drew the following reply from Tony Joe Stemme: “It’s an oddly structured movie. The first 20 minutes or so lead the viewer to believe they are going to see an overview of the Detroit riots. Then we are plunged into the horrid events at the Algiers for at least an hour (might even be longer if you add the intros leading up to it). And then we get another half-hour of the aftermath including trials. Sadly, I don’t think it works, but it’s a daring strategy.”

The best reply came from Savas Alatis: “The Passion of the Detroit.”

One of the basic rules of movie plotting demands that just desserts be served. Movie justice can be subtle (Michael Corleone‘s barren solitude at the end of The Godfather, Part II is one manifestation), but one way or another a principal character must face it. If there’s a proverbial bad guy causing harm and pain during Act One and Act Two (and I’m referring to Barbara Stanwyck‘s Phyllis Dietrichson as much as anyone else), he/she must be somehow punished or brought down in Act Three, period.

Alas, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit refuses to provide justice in the case of Will Poulter‘s “Phillip Krauss”, a racist, belligerent, beetle-browed fuck cop who causes the death of three innocent black dudes during the Detroit riots, and it’s infuriating. Yes, Bigelow and Boal are sticking by the historical facts, but I’m sitting in my ninth-row aisle seat with my small popcorn and coke and I don’t want “facts”. I want that asshole dead or beaten badly, or condemned to a hellish prison term with regular anal invasions.

This is why Detroit will fail with Joe and Jane Popcorn this weekend. Because it refuses to do the thing that audiences want their movies to do. You take a ticket-buyer’s money, you have to do the thing. If you don’t do the thing, the ticket-buyer will recoil and rebel and tell his friends to stay the fuck away.

Paul Newman was a shit to the end in Martin Ritt‘s Hud. He never repented, never softened, never apologized. And at the end of Act Three he was the owner of a ranch with plenty of oil beneath. But he was also completely alone, and all he had in that final scene was a lit cigarette, a fresh beer and a sneer. That was justice, and was all the audience needed.

Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti didn’t know what was up or down at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura. They were still hovering in the same affluent, spiritually resigned atmosphere that the film began with, and that was a form of justice. The “no exit” kind reserved for lost souls.