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.

I’ve missed episodes #3 and #4 of Feud, but will catch up this week. I’m not even sure if Susan Sarandon‘s brilliant mimicry of Bette Davis‘s performance of the “Baby Jane” song, which happened on a 12.20.62 airing of The Andy Williams Show, was in episode #3 (“Mommie Dearest”) or #4 (“More or Less”). What struck me about this is that almost no one saw this in color. Yes, televised color broadcasts began in ’58, JFK’s inauguration was captured in living color and some network shows began to colorcast in the early ’60s, but color TVs didn’t start to enter the American home en masse until ’64 and actually more like ’65. This coincided with Hollywood’s decision to phase out black-and-white films, which were all but extinct by ’66.

Cinemacon 2017 kicked off last night with footage of some noteworthy directors (including 13th helmer Ava Duvernay, Logan‘s James Mangold and Wonder Woman‘s Patti Jenkins) talking about how transporting the cinematic experience can be when the right film is showing. (When Jenkins said that the ending of Moulin Rouge always melts her down, I said to myself “Really? I’d forgotten that but okay, whatever.”)

Cinemacon director Mitch Neuhauser then took the stage and reiterated the same — i.e., the excitement, wonder and spiritual current of seeing a brilliant, touching film with an engaged audience is why we all love the theatrical experience. Me too — all my life.

But it’s all about movies and not the venue, and the films that Neuhauser, Mangold, Duvernay and Jenkins spoke of were real-deal, deep-current, finely crafted soul films. We’ve all been to certain plays on Broadway that truly connect and lift people out of their seats, and every year a few movies do this also. All hail the theatrical experience, but with the exception of the Blade Runner reel, which really got me going, last night’s Sony presentation was mostly composed of “product” — movies for families, teens and garden-variety primitives. CG oompah, razzle-dazzle, Barnum & Bailey, etc.

Which made it all the more clear that the spiritual current and real-life intrigue — the finely sculpted material that channels the way life actually feels and behaves along with those undercurrents that really hit home — is the kind of thing that SONY product isn’t even thinking about trying to capture, with the possible exception of Blade Runner 2049.

Back in West Hollywood I’m always in the groove — settled, loved/hated, driven, committed, on the stick. I’ll feel the same way in New York, Paris, Telluride, Prague, Hanoi, Wilton, Savannah, Key West…you name it. But Las Vegas feels like an empty place, and it’ll give you the virus if you let it. All those tourists without a compass or a clue. “Help…we need to party and indulge ourselves because we don’t know what else to do…whoo-hoo! We’re impressed with super-sized hotels and paying way too much for dinners!” I was contemplating the pre-dawn gloom from my 23rd-floor perspective, and for the first time in a long time I felt the blues of it all. The emptiness seeped in. This place is so not cool.

I emerged from last night’s Sony Pictures Cinemacon presentation with two positive impressions — one, Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049 (10.6) is going to be a wowser noir sink-in and a serious visual knockout, and two, Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman knows from catchy punchlines — “Netflix, my ass” and “cool as shit.”

Rothman was referring to the Blade Runner 2049 footage, which is cool as shit, but also his presumedly fervent belief that Sony/Columbia/Tristar is in the real audience-pleasing, whoo-whoo movie business — delivering that rock ’em, knock ’em flat stuff like the greatest show on earth. Well, yeah, to some extent it is, okay, but in other ways, it isn’t. At all. But more of that in my “Letter to Mitch” piece that follows.

The rest of the presentation…ehhh, not bad, “diverting”, yeah yeah, whatever.

Wait, I take that partly back: the promo for Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver (Sony, 6.28), which kicked things off, got me going also to some extent. The sardonic action comedy fared pretty well at South by Southwest, as we all know. Director Edgar Wright (who is really short — I hadn’t realized that until last night) and costars Ansel Elgort and Jon Hamm showed up on the Collisseum stage. Good stuff.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Sony, 7.7)….please. We’re supposed to be excited because 20 year-old Tom Holland, the third and latest Spider-Man, is front and center? That’s what Marvel president Kevin Feige was saying last night. Holland is the keeper of the golden fleece because he stole Captain America: Civil War, or words to that effect. On top of which Homecoming is set entirely within Peter Parker’s high-school realm, Feige added. It looked like the same old Marvel jazz to me. The endlessly glib Robert Downey, Jr.…again. We saw the first footage of Michael Keaton’s Vulture villain….meh.