Most Americans are total rubes when it comes to respecting pronunications of foreign last names. A year and a half ago I riffed about the yokel way to pronounce the last name of Melissa “Supergirl” Benoist. Semi-cultivated types pronounce this French-origin name as “Ben-whah” while dogpatch Americans pronounce it “Ben-oh-ist” with Benoist herself pronouncing it “Ben-OYST.”

Now a “new” mispronunication has surfaced — the last name of Marvel Films honcho Kevin Feige. New to me, that is. For the last ten-plus years I’ve been saying “fayge” or “feejzh” (like the first syllable in leisure), but yesterday a Cinemacon moderator pronounced it “Fay-gee.” I jumped in my seat…what?

Feige is a German term for fig, the purple-colored tree fruit. Germans would pronounce this “Fye-guh“, which is easily within the realm of American capability.

But it also resembles the medieval term “liege” (as in “my liege”, which is pronounced like the first syllable of “leisure” and which means “my superior”) as well as the Belgian city of Liege, which is pronounced “Lee-ayge.” So for a while there I was saying “fayge” or “feejzh” — a one-syllable, soft-g pronunication. Because Feige’s last name merely reverses the order of the first two vowels (e-i instead of i-e).

But throw Feige’s name into the American cultural meat-grinder and it becomes fay-gee, or almost the same as Weegee, the New York tabloid photographer. Nobody comes up with more dumbshit-sounding pronunciations than Americans…nobody.

So how is Gary Oldman‘s performance as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour (Focus Features, 11.24)? Or, more precisely, how good or commanding does his Churchill seem in the Darkest Hour trailer that was shown today during a Focus Features presentation inside Caesar’s Palace? Oldman is very, very good. It’s not Churchill himself come back to life (the voice doesn’t quite have that trademark snap, that Winnie-tude), but a genetic splicing of Oldman, Churchill and Wright. It’s somewhere between 85% and 90% of what I’d hoped to see and hear, and considering the expectations that’s pretty damn good. Obviously a locked-in Best Actor thing. Due respect to Brian Cox and Johathan Teplitzky‘s Churchill (which will open in early June), but Oldman’s Winnie is more commanding. Ditto John Lithgow‘s Churchill in The Crown.

Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s Finest Hour (Focus Featuyres, 11.24).

Hollywood Elsewhere staggered out of Universal‘s Cinemacon presentation a little more than an hour ago. I’d still be there if I hadn’t decided to avoid watching F. Gary Gray‘s The Fate of the Furious (Universal 4.4.17), which is showing as we speak.

For whatever reason Team Universal decided to avoid even mentioning three releases that comprise their fall ’17 slate — Doug Liman‘s American Made, Tomas Alfredson‘s The Snowman (10.13.17) and Jason Hall‘s Thank You For You Service)l.

They focused instead on promoting five jackhammer, bass-thump, super-coarse, high-velocity movies opening between early April and late July — The Fate of the Furious, The Mummy (6.9), Despicable Me 3 (6.30), Girls Trip (7.21.17) and David Leitch‘s Atomic Blonde (7.28). Because slam-thunk moron movies make more dough that those aimed at 25-and-overs.

I’m not saying this is all exhibitors care about, but…well, this is more or less where they live and what seems to concern them the most. Morons and concessions.

If you didn’t know that Universal, a longstanding studio with a proud tradition, has a modest fall slate and that it’s making only the above-mentioned spring and summer movies [which it isn’t), you’d be under an impression that Universal has all but sold its soul to the devil.

Not just Universal, actually, but to a considerable extent Sony, Disney, STX and Warner Bros. Because they’re all making the same movie these days — the same assaultive, gutslamming, ear-splitting, cartoon-like experience that I’m calling generic superjizz.

And yet, curiously, Paramount is to some extent on another planet, at least as far as three of its 2017 films are concerned — Alexander Payne‘s obviously brilliant Downsizing, George Clooney‘s Coen-esque Suburbicon and Alex Garland‘s spooky Annhilation.  And don’t forget Darren Aronofsky‘s Mother, which wasn’t promoted here but will also pop in the fall.

Focus Features, which will stage a Cinemacon luncheon and presentation less than an hour from now, also resides on this planet Atomic Blonde aside, they’ll be releasing four adult-level standouts this year — Sofia Coppola‘s The Beguiled (6.23), Stephen Frears‘ Victoria and Abdul (9.22), Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour (11.24) and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s untitled fashion drama with Daniel Day Lewis (opening on or near Christmas ’17).

At best Dane DeHaan is a marginal industry star whom the public has little feeling for, much less recognition of. This alone may pose a domestic problem for Luc Besson‘s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (STX, 7.21). Besson has been trying to launch this adaptation of the French sci-fi comics series Valérian and Laureline for many years. He “reportedly scrapped an earlier version of the script after he saw James Cameron‘s Avatar for the first time.” The trailer feels generic. Clara Delevigne costars; backup perfs from Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Clive Owen, Alain Chabat, Mathieu Kassovitz, Kris Wu, Herbie Hancock, John Goodman and Rutger Hauer.

Posted from Park City on 1.19.17: I’ve just seen Al Gore, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk‘s An Inconvenient Sequel, a sequel to the nearly eleven-year-old, Oscar-winning doc that he and director Davis Guggenheim created. And I’m afraid that the general opinion is “nice film but meh…we know the climate crisis is mostly worsening, the 2015 Paris climate accords aside, so what else is new?”

That’s what a critic friend was saying at least (“I’ve seen a lot of climate-change docs, and good as this was it’s basically more of the same”), and even though I liked Sequel I couldn’t argue all that strenuously. It’s a nicely done, intelligently assembled film but it is more or less a rehash of the original brief, which is that we’re all doomed unless climate criminals (primarily the leaders of India, China and other developing countries) wake up, man up and begin the process of switching to renewable energy sources.

The difference between An Inconvenient Truth and An Inconvenient Sequel is that the latter (a) takes a fresh look at what’s going on now (i.e., things are worse), (b) provides hope by focusing on the Paris Agreement, which Gore was very much a part of, and (c) admits to a certain despair by acknowledging that a climate-change-denying beast is about to move into the White House.

Form-wise Sequel is well finessed. It’s a good thing that it was made, and that Paramount Pictures is releasing it sometime this summer, and that who-knows-how-many-thousands of more minds will probably be changed, etc.

It’s 7:45 am — been up since dawn. Next to no filing time this morning with Universal‘s Cinemacon presentation, 9:15 am to 12:15 pm (why three hours?), breathing down my neck. It’ll be quickly followed by a combination luncheon & presentation thrown by Focus Features from 12:45 pm to 2:30 pm. A two-hour break and then the 90-minute Warner Bros. presentation kicks off at 4:30 pm.

Over the last decade or so a few official Cannes Film Festival posters haven’t focused on some classic, iconic film star of the ’50s or ’60s — Faye Dunaway, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Monica Vitti, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But they’ve been in the minority. Juliette Binoche adorned a Cannes poster six or seven years ago. For the 2007 festival, which celebrated the 60th anniversary, several world-class directors (Almodovar, Inarritu, etc.) posed for a group shot. But this year, the festival’s 70th anniversary, it’s another ’60s head-turner — Claudia Cardinale. Born in ’38, her hot-career phase included Mario Monicelli‘s Big Deal on Madonna Street (’58), Luchino Visconti‘s Rocco and His Brothers (’60), Girl with a Suitcase (’61), Federico Fellini‘s 8 1/2 (’63), Visconti’s The Leopard (’63), Blake Edwards‘ The Pink Panther (’63), Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (’66 — flagrantly unbelievable as a Mexican) and Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon a Time in the West (’68).

Filed on iPhone:  Paramount and Alexander Payne’s Cinemacon preview of Downsizing was awesome, brilliant, hilarious, sad and a tiny bit scary — an obvious Best Picture contender.

It’s well acted, earnest, scientifically palatable as far as it goes, emotionally honest, fascinating and darkly funny.  And the visual & practical effects are top-notch.  It’s going to be great — you can tell.

The title refers to shrinking people down to five inches, reducing their needs (less food, smaller houses and cars), expanding their purchasing power and generating a much, much smaller carbon footprint.  Makes sense, good move, your banker and accountant approve.

Downsizing is going to be the shit — I only saw ten minutes worth and I just knew. We all did. It was obvious.  A metaphor about totalitarianism, dehumanization, submission — it’s the new Metropolis.  Wow.

Payne’s Downsizing, George Clooney’s Coen-esque Suburbicon, Darren Aronofsky’s un-screened Mother, Alex Garland’s Annhilation   — Paramount’s four critical winners in ‘17, I’m thinking.  

I didn’t go to this morning’s STX Cinemacon preview presentation (sorry), but TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman is reporting that footage from Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game was screened. “While star Jessica Chastain ably takes the lead, some notable stars were missing,” she writes. “Like the real-life men (like Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck) who were implicated in the true story of Molly Bloom — the arranger of high-stakes pokers games in Hollywood. Maguire was even fined $800,000 for his participation in the games. A rough trailer screened at CinemaCon did not specifically call out any of the famous people that were pegged to the illegal ring.”

A trailer’s one thing, but a movie’s another. Or a script is, at least. A year ago I snagged a 12.29.15 draft of Sorkin’s Molly Game script, and knew within 40 pages that Sorkin had at least created a stand-in for Maguire — a character called “PLAYER X”.

How do I know this? There’s a great story about Maguire that appears in Molly Bloom‘s “Molly’s Game,” which is the basis of the Sorkin script. Passed along by the New York Observer‘s Ken Kurson in a 5.22.14 post, the excerpt reads as follows:

“Maguire was in a big hand that had come down to himself and one other player. The other player wondered aloud if Maguire might be bluffing, but Maguire said, ‘I swear on my mother’s life I have you beat.’ [Which was] a way of saying, ‘I actually do have the nut hand in this deal.’ The other player folded. Then, instead of just throwing his cards into the middle face down and taking his winnings, Maguire showed his hand to the table to reveal that despite the maternal oath, he had indeed been bluffing and wanted the table to know it.”

A very close facsimile of this scene appears on page 40 and 41 of Sorkin’s script.

From “Odd, Minimalist, Engagingly Trippy Ghost Story“, posted on 1.25.17: “David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story (A24, 7.7) lives on the opposite side of the canyon from Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart‘s Personal Shopper. It has to be said upfront that Lowery’s film isn’t all that scary. Okay, two or three moments put the chill in but this isn’t the game plan, and that’s what’s so cool about it. Really. Either you get that or you don’t.

“For this is basically a story about a broken-hearted male ghost (or formerly male) who doesn’t know what to do with himself, and so he mopes around and says to himself ‘Jesus, I feel kind of fucked…where am I?…what’s happening?…am I gonna stand around watching humans for decades or even centuries? I don’t know what the hell to do.’

“In life Mr. Confused was a married musician (Casey Affleck), and now, post-mortem, he’s returned to the home he shared with his wife (Rooney Mara). I guess all ghosts are unsettled spirits who just can’t surrender to the infinite, right? And so they hang out, looking or waiting for God-knows-what. 

“Affleck’s ghost watches his sad, suffering widow for a while (there’s a great extended scene in which Mara eats almost an entire pie while sitting in the kitchen floor), and then he gets pissed off when he sees that Mara has gone out with some guy, and then he gets even angrier when she leaves and a Latino family moves in.

“And then the film moves on in all kinds of trippy (not to mention time-trippy) ways. I love that it’s more of a metaphysical meditation flick than one trying to give you jolts. A Ghost Story even goes into the relatively distant past (the mid 1800s) at one point until it finally circles back to the present and in fact the very beginning, if that’s not too confusing.