A succinct capturing of the degraded state of American cinema has been provided by a Forbes article announcing that Dwayne Johnson was the highest paid actor between mid-2015 and ’16, raking in $64.5 million samolians. There’s something really wrong with the world when a guy whose most dependable trait is starring in shitty movies becomes the highest paid. Seriously.

From 6.28 HE piece, “Drawn To The Stink“:

“When Dwayne Johnson is starring in a film, you know there’s a decent chance that Johnson’s character will smash through a plate-glass window and drop three or four stories to the ground without injury. You know the film will be crude, submental, loud, never good enough. Every single film he’s starred or costarred in over the last 15 years has been the stuff that headaches are made of.

“Be Cool (’05) was half decent, but Johnson’s casting in that F. Gary Gray film was a cosmic accident. Since then he’s shown an instinct for shit that few have even approached, much less rivalled.

Earlier today Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh reported that Denzel Washington is “eyeing” the lead in Dan Gilroy‘s Inner City, which is “being billed as a character study in the vein of Paul Newman’s performance in The Verdict,” Setoodeh wrote, especially given that Washington will play a lawyer “in an ambulance-chasing firm.” I’ve since been told by an insider that while Inner City may be Verdict-like in this or that regard, the ambulance-chasing description is “inaccurate.”

I’ve noted before that while the Telluride Film Festival (9.2 thru 9.5) is billed as a four-day festival, it’s really a three-day thing. They always wait until 3 pm or thereabouts on Friday afternoon (i.e., after the picnic) to kick things off, and they know that many people are gone by Monday lunch or early afternoon, so it’s (a) a half-day on Friday, (b) two full days over the weekend, and (c) a half day on Monday. If you have to file and pack on Monday morning it’s more like a 2 and 1/2 day festival.

If the Telluride fathers wanted to make it more time-efficient, they would start with a screening or two on Thursday night (when most people arrive) and then jump right into the first showings on Friday morning.

Approximately 20 films will play within this three-day time frame, which means even if you can hit four per day (if you hit five you’ll have no time to file) you’ll only catch about twelve. HE Priorities: Arrival (d: Denis Villeneuve), La La Land (d: Damian Chazelle), Neruda (d: Pablo Larrain), Bleed for This (d: Ben Younger), Moonlight (d: Barry Jenkins), Manchester by the Sea (d: Kenneth Lonergan), Una (d: Benedict Andrews), Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (d: Joseph Cedar), The B-Side (d: Errol Morris), Into the Inferno (d: Werner Herzog), Frantz (d: Francois Ozon) and Fire at Sea (d: Gianfranco Rosi).

Plus there’s a slot for a major American film showing that isn’t on anyone’s list right now, or at least none that I know of. But it’ll be there.

I’m sorry but I’ve heard that Garth Davis‘s Lion (Weinstein, 11.25) may be a little too cloying for judgmental types like myself. Which doesn’t mean that it’s not a half-decent film or that others might not find it nutritional. True-life saga of an Indian dude, Saroo Brierley, adopted by Aussies after being lost to his family at age five, reconnects with his parents at age 25 via Google Earth. Screenplay by Luke Davies, based on Brierley’s book “A Long Way Home.” Costarring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara, David Wenham, Nawazuddin Siddiqui.

Jerry Lewis brought an imaginative, surreal sense of humor to the table when he began directing. This is what the Cahiers du Cinema gang loved about his signature, and the reason his early to mid ’60s films — The Bellboy, The Ladies Man, The Errand Boy, The Nutty Professor, The Patsy — are currently respected. This bongo drums bit in Visit to a Small Planet, directed by Norman Taurog just before Lewis directed The Bellboy, was a typical Lewis creation. Different and innovative, certainly for its time.

Why am I mentioning this? Because tonight is Jerry Lewis night at the Aero. The 90 year-old legend will sit for a post-q & a following a special screening of Daniel Noah‘s Max Rose.

Notice Stanley Kubrick favorite Joe Turkel (Paths of Glory, The Shining) as a generic Beatnik type. Turkel isn’t listed in the credits, but it’s him.

Visit to a Small Planet Wikipage: “Gore Vidal wrote Visit as a TV play. It aired on 5.8.55 on Goodyear Television Playhouse. Vidal intended a satire on the post-World War II fear of communism in the United States, McCarthyism, Cold War military paranoia and the rising importance of television in American life.

How wondrous and satisfying that Doug Liman, whom I’ve known for 20 years and who is fully capable of and keenly interested in making sharp, real-world, balls-to-the-wall films like Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity, Fair Game, Edge of Tomorrow and the forthcoming American Made (i.e., Tom Cruise as TWA pilot and ’80s-era drug smuggler Barry Seal)…how terrific that Liman is the latest A-list director to accept a fat paycheck in exchange for contributing to the ongoing pestilence of comic-book movies, particularly one from the Warner Bros./D.C. Comics realm — Justice League Dark. All hail John Constantine, Swamp Thing, Phantom Stranger, Zatanna and Fred C. Blow-me. How wonderful, how riveting, how exciting for us all.

Captured by yours truly on 1.25.16, sitting in front row of Park City’s Eccles theatre following 3 pm screening of Manchester By The Sea:

This morning Hollywood Reporter award-season analyst and handicapper Scott Feinberg finally jumped into the Nate Parker thing (along with THR colleague Gregg Kilday) with an assessment piece that includes four quotes from Academy members about Parker and his situation. Tab Hunter and documentarian Mitchell Block want to cut Parker a break while producer Marcia Nasatir and actress Rutanya Alda (Mommie Dearest) are quite negative about the guy.

The article mostly reiterates a general feeling around town that Parker and his film are fucked as far as Academy or guild member opinions are concerned. I think it’s too late in the cycle to just repeat this by way of quotes. Feinberg should have filed right after the Deadline/Variety stories broke on Friday, 8.12, and certainly in the immediate wake of Variety‘s 8/16 report, filed by Ramin Setoodeh, about the 2012 suicide of Parker and Jean Celestin‘s unnamed victim.

Nasatir: “This is going to set off a thing in this town the likes of which we’ve never seen. I personally find it really hard to separate the man from the film when he wrote, directed and starred in it. Do I want to see a movie from someone who has committed an assault against a woman and who I do not think recognizes his guilt? Right now, based on what I’ve read, I would not go to the movie.”

When Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker go to meet the aliens (called Heptapods) in the latest Arrival trailer, we see a smokey circle form against a glass barrier. It seems obvious to me that Villeneuve chose this image because it summons memories of Gore Verbinski‘s The Ring (’02) and more originally Hideo Nakata‘s Ringu (’98). The message is clearly “watch out, possibly something malevolent.” And yet that doesn’t appear to be where Arrival is coming from. Go figure.

Heptapod smoke circle in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.

Creepy circle image from Gore Verbinski’s The Ring

A new 4K DCP restoration of Michael Mann‘s Heat will screen at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Wednesday, 9.7. I’ll be in Toronto that evening, rested and ready for the Thursday am start of the Toronto Film Festival. (TIFF had a 20th anniversary 35mm screening of Heat last year.) Christopher Nolan will moderate a post-screening discussion with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and other cast members.

This means, of course, that the 4K restoration will result in a better quality Bluray. (Sometime in the fall?) Why did the homies at Warner Home Video put out such an unexceptional Heat Bluray in the first place? It’s not “bad” looking but it’s far from a knockout. The 4K Heat was restored by Mann and Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3. The Bluray will be apparently be released by Fox Home Video.

The Birth of a Nation is not my idea of a great film, but it’s definitely see-worthy — a strong first effort, a powerful myth, an intensely powerful narrative. A month from now and two weeks after the big Birth of a Nation Toronto gala (which may or may not be tempestuous, especially with Fox Searchlight having decided that Parker will not do a TIFF press conference), the Los Angeles County Museum will screen Nate Parker‘s film for LACMA Film Club, Film Independent and N.Y. Times Film Club members. Nip that AFI shit in the bud. No turning tail and running for cover. Respect the effort, respect the achievement, respect the legend of Nat Turner. Parker made the film, yes, but he was merely the conduit, the means by which a story was told and an end was achieved. The Birth of a Nation is not about Penn State in 1999 — it’s about Southampton County, Virginia in 1831.