A grimy, noirish, degenerated social atmosphere — acid rain, steam clouds, digital ads flashing overhead, a general third-world vibe. Plus some Mad Max: Fury Road-meets-The Martian desert colors. Mostly the same basic atmosphere and design that made Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner a legend, and that’s cool for now. When push comes to shove director Denis Villeneuve will need to deliver more than cult nostalgia, of course, but he knows that. I give up: What’s the big, rusty, half-rotted lightbulb-shaped thing?

Everyone now knows that Passengers (Sony, 12.21) is saddled with a gnarly ethical issue. When engineer Chris Pratt is aroused from hibernation aboard a massive star cruiser in the midst of a 120-year voyage to a planet called Homestead II, he realizes he’s been accidentally revived — the other 4999 passengers will be in hibernation for another 80 years. Faced with a life of absolute loneliness and certain to die before the ship arrives, Pratt decides to wake up journalist Jennifer Lawrence, whom he’s fallen in love with after watching her video profile and reading her articles. On one hand his loneliness problem is solved — on the other he’s a creep and a kind of murderer.

HE commenter “Jeff” has mentioned that in a just-posted Fight In The War Room podcast, Indiewire critic David Ehrlich says that Passengers “would have been better served if Pratt died in Act Three and Lawrence then realized herself that she needs to wake someone up too to avoid a lifetime alone.” Good ending! Another scenario was subsequently suggested by HE commenter “Mr. Sunset Terra Cotta“, to wit: “Even if Pratt doesn’t die in Act Three, Lawrence decides she needs to wake someone else up to have an affair with when Pratt starts wearing thin.” Even better!

La La Land‘s Emma Stone, the presumptive front-runner in the Best Actress race, has won a trophy — an honor that had eluded her until today. The Utah Film Critics Association bestowed the honor. Yes, she may also snag the SAG Best Actress statuette and will certainly take the Golden Globe award for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical. But who can say about the Best Actress Oscar? Especially with Jackie‘s Natalie Portman as Stone’s chief competitor.

The UFCA also selected La La land as Best Picture, Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins as Best Director (with La La Land‘s Damien Chazelle in the runner-up slot), Manchester By The Sea’s Casey Affleck as Best Actor, Fences‘ Viola Davis as Best Supporting Actress, and a tie between Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali and 10 Cloverfield Lane‘s John Goodman for Best Supporting Actor. Last June Variety‘s Kris Tapley and Janelle Riley suggested that Goodman deserved a Best Supporting Actor prize — somebody finally went for it!

It may be that Stone will follow in the path of The Blind Side’s Sandra Bullock in ’09/’10.  Bullock was blanked in the Best Actress category by all the critics groups except the Washington D.C. area film critics org (which at least nominated her for Best Actress) but then started sweeping with the big industry awards in the final phase.

Two things before I take the rest of the day off. One, I feel no obligation to pay more than minimal attention to the fact that Zsa-Zsa Gabor — the first goddess of grasping Hollywood greed, the spiritual grandmother of the Paris Hilton-Kim Kardashian virus that has spread across our land, the oomphy blonde who became notorious for divorce settlements and nothingness and fame for fame’s sake — has passed at age 99. And two, I’m sorry to report that an Oscar Poker chat that I recorded with Jordan Ruimy a couple of hours ago just bored the pants off me when I tried to edit it down. Not Jordan’s “fault” or mine — we both just sounded under-energized or something. No depth or bounce or passion. Sometimes you strike out — it happens. Again, the mp3.

Shot in 1972, when Keith Richards was around 29.

The late Zsa-Zsa Gabor, who died today at age 99.

I have a built-in weakness as far as listing the most deplorable films of 2016 (or any year) goes because I tend to avoid the shit sandwiches, and so I didn’t even see Miracles From Heaven, Nina, The Brothers Grimsby, Alice Through The Looking Glass, Warcraft, Yoga Hosers, Bad Moms, Divergent: Allegiant, Inferno, Independence Day: Resurgence, Bad Santa 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dirty Grandpa or Zoolander 2, which others have placed on their Worst of ’16 lists.

But I saw at least a few awful-awfuls, and the two that have tied for HE’s Worst Film of the Year prize, hands down, are David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty (which I despised so much that I left a little before the one-hour mark) and Timur Bekmambetov‘s Ben-Hur.

If you want to disqualify my Collateral Beauty judgment because I bailed halfway through, you’d have to concude that Ben-Hur is HE’s worst because at least I watched it start to finish.

In my 8.19 review I called Ben-Hur “one of the lowest, cheesiest, scurviest, lemme-outta-here films made or distributed by a major U.S. studio, ever. Almost everything about it stinks of mediocrity — the tedious writing, the grayish color scheme, the C-grade cast delivering soap-opera performances, the low-budget vibe despite a reported $100 million having been spent.

“It’s like a 1987 Golan-Globus version of Ben-Hur starring Michael Dudikoff as Judah and Chuck Norris as Messala. It’s third-tier shit, shit, shit, shit, shit on almost every level.”

Significant stinkers that I actually suffered through: Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, London Has Fallen, Man Down, Sea Of Trees, Suicide Squad, The Hollars, The Girl on the Train, etc.

I’ve said three or four times that John Lee Hancock‘s The Founder (Weinstein Co.) is one of the most fascinating ethical dramas I’ve seen in a long while, and that Michael Keaton‘s performance as Ray Kroc treads the line between opportunistic go-getterism and ruthless assholery with the skill of a mountain goat.

And now Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has more or less said the same thing in this 12.17 essay:

“The Founder is a terrific movie, and it features Keaton at the height of his powers,” Gleiberman says.

“Ray Kroc, as presented, is a noodgy gadget salesman who isn’t going anywhere; at the start, he seems like a loser. But then, in 1954, he meets the McDonald brothers, Mac (John Carroll) and Dick (Nick Offerman), who’ve launched a highly popular burger stand in San Bernadino, not just by creating succulently tasty burgers but by replacing the old ’50s car-hop drive-in with a revolutionary new system. In their custom-built kitchen, everything is part of an assembly line, with burgers and fries manufactured en masse, at lightning speed, and each tasty component made to identical specifications.

“Ray sees how this restaurant — called McDonald’s — operates, and he takes in its clean family vibe, but he really sees the light when he looks at the picture on the wall of Mac and Dick’s office; it depicts a white McDonald’s with golden arches. In fact, the brothers have already built one just like it.

Vikram Gandhi‘s Barry, which I saw and praised during the Toronto Film Festival, began streaming on Netflix on 12.16. Not just a smart, finely tooled character study but one of the year’s best indies — trust me.

On 9.16.16 I called it “a modest but sharply etched character study of young Barry Obama between ’81 and ’83, when he began and completed his junior and senior years at NYC’s Columbia University as a political science major, and more particularly when he began to grapple with his half-white, half-black identity.

“Yes — another young Obama flick on top of Richard Tanne‘s commendable and charming Southside With You. Barry is obviously smallish but quite fluid and specific — carefully made, nicely layered, more observing of small details and generally a looser, craftier film than Southside, which (don’t get me wrong) I felt respect and affection for on its own terms.

“Barry, in short, is basically a ‘who am I?’ flick about social conflict, racism (both the benevolent and hostile kinds), hesitancy and uncertainty start to finish — a whole lotta frowning and meditating on Barry’s part.

“It basically studies this athletic, mild-mannered young dude and gives him the time and the room to find his own way as he becomes friendly with a variety of black, brown and white characters on the Columbia campus and near his off-campus apartment on West 116th Street.

In late November Sasha Stone and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko told me they really liked Miss Sloane, largely because it delivered a tough, brassy female-power fantasy that suckered them in — Jessica Chastain as a D.C. lobbyist with menacing dialogue, a superior chess-playing mind, balls of steel and a killer wardrobe. And so I allowed myself to think this might turn into something — women rallying around a James Bondian superbitch — a take-no-prisoners samurai who does end-runs around opponents and leaves welts on men’s asses.

I actually didn’t think Miss Sloane was good enough to be a hit. I knew it was “very plotty, very Aaron Sorkin-esque, very Newsroomy,” as I wrote in my 11.13 review. I knew that it lacked oxygen, that it wasn’t emotionally engaging, that everything Chastain said and did in the film was cutting, slashy, ruthless, icy. And I knew it was “basically a two-hour pilot for a Showtime series about a ruthless but effective superwoman lobbyist who always aces her enemies.”

But maybe, I imagined, this is what the XX-ers might want to see. After all, Sasha and Svetlana liked it, and to me they are windows into the minds and souls of smart, creative, go-getter urbans on the other side of the aisle.

Alas, Miss Sloane has flopped. At the finish of its third weekend and having played in a maximum of 1648 theatres upon opening wide last weekend (12.9), the EuropaCorp release has earned a lousy $2,869,636 domestic and $3.2 million worldwide. Finished. No current. A dead flounder on the beach.

If Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton in the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes or a 2.1% margin but had lost in the electoral college, do you think the righties would be reacting like Democrats currently are — grimly hanging their heads, saying it’s not right, shrugging their shoulders? They would be screaming, howling, refusing to concede, calling for revolution in the streets, lock and load. Clinton’s national tally is currently 65,844,594 vs. Trump’s 62,979,616.

“This is not just an election loss — it’s like a death” — Beverly Hills resident Eve Rodsky quoted in 11.10 L.A. Times piece by Alice Walton.

My election-night view hasn’t changed — Trump taking the Presidency is the worst thing to hit this country since 9/11.

Posted on 12.12.16: “I haven’t posted any opinions about Gold (Dimension, 1.27.17), but I’m not in the least bit surprised that Matthew McConaughey‘s performance as ‘Kenny Wells’ (a gold-prospecting character based on the real-life John Felderhof, who figured prominently in the Bre-X financial scandal of the ’90s) is being bypassed for awards action. For McConaughey’s performance is the most annoyingly actorish he’s ever given, crammed with makeup and affectations — a bulky weight gain, a mostly bald head, fake teeth, an attitude of oily greediness and the relentless smoking of cigarettes in every damn scene. The only thing McConaughey doesn’t do makeup- or affectation-wise is (a) walk with a pronounced limp or (b) wear a Quasimido-like hunchback prosthetic. The McConnaissance was over after Sea of Trees, but his Gold performance made me want to run and hide — no offense.”

I’ve been hinting for months that an element in the general marketing push for Morten Tyldum‘s Passengers (Sony, 12.21) has been misleading. The trailers have understandably been hiding The Big Secret (i.e., the fact that only Chris Pratt‘s character is accidentally woken up from hibernation) plus the fact that Pratt and costar Jennifer Lawrence have been flat-out lying about the basic set-up.

FAIR WARNING: A spoiler awaits…

Well, now that the film has been press-screened and two significant articles — one by The Telegraph‘s Rebecca Hawkes, another by L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss — have discussed the aforesaid element, the Passengers cat is totally out of the bag (along with the Peter Cushing thing in Rogue One).

And I mean especially with the Telegraph having asked its readers to take part in a Passengers poll, to wit: “If you were faced with living out your life alone on a cruise ship in space, would you wake up another passenger?”

SPOILER: This is what Pratt’s character does after a mechanical malfunction rouses him from hibernation after 30 years of slumber, and he realizes he can’t go back to sleep. The rest of his life will be spent completely alone on a huge space cruiser. (Except for the empty company of a robot bartender, played by Michael Sheen.) After a year he decides he can’t take the loneliness, and so he wakes up Lawrence’s character, a New York journalist.

In so doing Pratt condemns Lawrence to the same life-imprisonment terms, and an absolute certainty of death in space — no more terra firma, no more oceans or lakes or streams, no more community, no more internet, nothing except hanging with Pratt on a corporate luxury cruiser for the next 60 or 70 years, depending on the breaks.

When she learns the truth Lawrence exclaims that what Pratt has done is “murder,” and it is. But guess what? As of this afternoon only 41% of the Telegraph readers who’ve voted in the Passenger polls agree with her, or at least have a problem with Pratt waking her up. 33% think it’s okay to wake someone up on such a voyage (“Yes, why not?), and 26% have said it’s okay but “only if I really, really fancied them (and if I’d stalked them a bit first).”

A certain percentage are probably goofing on the Telegraph, but 59% have nonetheless stated for whatever reason that Pratt’s hibernation wake-up isn’t so bad given the lifetime of loneliness he’s looking at. In short, “murder” is okay.

Every so often I’ll write about the average person’s strange inability (refusal?) to sing the “Happy Birthday” song on key. It happened again last night at the home of director Phillip Noyce. 30 or so guests wished a good one to his beautiful wife, Vuyo Dyasi, but the singing hurt. And some of them were showbiz people, whom you might think would have some respect for the idea of hitting notes. Listening to that song being murdered is awful. I was standing next to two of the assassins, and I couldn’t even imitate how horrendously off-key they were. Imagine a Vietnamese water buffalo groaning while being repeatedly stabbed in the chest.

That aside, it was a lovely holiday gathering. Great people, good food and real Chicago-like temperatures (as it was partly happening in the back yard). Thanks for inviting me, guys.

Posted on 7.31.13: “I can’t sing like a professional or even a gifted amateur, but I can definitely sing ‘Happy Birthday’ on-key. Which is more than 97% of your Average Joes and Janes can manage. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to a table of restaurant revelers try to sing it and not hit a single true note. It’s pathetic. We’re not talking about singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ here. Bad singing is all about emotional timidity. Singing on-key takes a certain open-heartedness. You can’t be covert about it. All I know is that every time a table launches into ‘Happy Birthday’ I grimace and go “oh, God…here we go.”