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.

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.