Halfway through last January’s Sundance Film Festival (i.e., seven and a half months ago) I was talking to Guardian critic Jordan Hoffman about Jim Hosking‘s The Greasy Strangler (FilmRise, 10.7). Hoffman and his Sundance “boner buddies” (i.e., nerdy film festival elites who get off championing icky cult films that will probably have trouble attracting Average Joes in the commercial arena) were giggling about it, and although I was sensing difficult if not grotesque subject matter I was nonetheless wondering if I should see it. “Don’t,” said Hoffman, shaking his head and suppressing a grin. “You’ll hate it.” So I ducked it at Sundance, but Hoffman’s words would’t leave me alone. Last week I watched it on my computer. Started to watch it, I mean. AarrghhHH! Long-haired, saggy-bod fat guys in their underwear. Not to mention a fat girlfriend. Either you embrace this kind of thing or you don’t. Or can’t. I lasted about 25 minutes. Hoffman’s review called it “a welcome oasis of filth, depravity and shock in a culture that too often thinks merely being a little weird passes muster.”

I was thinking this morning about Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar, which I gradually came to dislike more and more as the weeks and months rolled on. I hated, hated, hated the bassy, muddy sound mix. Now, 21 months after it opened wide on 11.5.14, I can say unequivocally that it’s one of my all-time shit list films, and that watching it twice in November 2014 delivered such a terrible injection of lead mercury poisoning that to this day I feel very reluctant to let Nolan into my system again.

I’ve started to think about Inception also, and I think…well, that hasn’t aged well either. I’m not sure I ever want to see it again. I don’t own the Bluray, have never streamed it, don’t miss it in the slightest. I’m completely at peace with the notion of erasing it from my memory except for the Paris cityscape folding up and over…but that’s a cliche now so who cares?

When I hear Nolan’s name or think about Dunkirk, I think “ugh, no, please…not again with the stately, overblown pretension.” And I felt the exact opposite about the guy after Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins and even The Dark Knight.

What tore it for me was that 11.14 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carolyn Giardina, the one in which Nolan basically said that Interstellar‘s soupy, bass-heavy sound mix was intentional, and that viewers aren’t intended to hear all the dialogue, and that they should try and roll with that instead of complain. In short, Nolan said “too bad but that’s the way it is.”

When I read that interview I said to myself, “All right, that’s it…Nolan has played his last holier-than-thou, Moses-down-from-the-mountain cinematic contempt card…with me at least…eff him and the horse he rode in on.”

So Variety‘s Kris Tapley recently told Meryl Streep that her Bridges of Madison County costar Clint Eastwood said he’d vote for Donald Trump. “I didn’t know that,” a “visibly surprised” Streep said. “I’ll have to speak to him. I’ll have to correct that! I’m shocked. I really am. Because he’s more…I would have thought he would be more sensitive than that.”

Clint “down with the pussy generation” Eastwood, director of Sully (Warner Bros., 9.9).

Actually, Clint didn’t endorse Trump in that Michael Hainey Esquire interview. When Hainey asked him point blank if he’s endorsing Trump, Clint responded in the negative. “I haven’t endorsed anybody,” he said. “I haven’t talked to Trump. I haven’t talked to anybody.”

6:02 pm update: When Hainey pushed Eastwood later in the chat to choose between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Eastwood said he’d have to “go for” Trump. But he was being goaded. Hainey was testing Eastwood’s mettle. He was saying to him, “Are you a man or a mouse? Are you going to stand by your crusty, old-guy, Walt Kowalski-ish conservative principles or fold like a wuss and vote for Clinton?” Eastwood had to man up and say “Trump” but he didn’t mean it. And I didn’t really believe it.

Back to original piece: If Clint endorsed anyone he endorsed Sully, the real-life airline pilot played by Tom Hanks in Clint’s forthcoming film (Warner Bros., 9.9). Esquire quote: “It’s a madhouse out there. You wonder, what the hell? I mean, Sully should be running for president, not these people.”

I’m not saying this was Donald Sutherland‘s best scene ever, but when I think of his 50-year career it’s the strongest recollection I have. Mr. X in JFK (’91) was certainly his best performance since his exceptional bad guy in Eye of the Needle (’81) and his big-hearted dad in Ordinary People (’80). His greatest period was that ’70 to ’73 four-year streak — M.A.S.H. (’70), Alex in Wonderland (’70), Little Murders (’71), Johnny Got His Gun (71), Klute (’71), Steelyard Blues (’72) and Don’t Look Now (’73). And to think of him lowered by a paycheck role in The Hunger Games! For actors in particular, old age is not for sissies.

Yesterday’s Best Picture assessment riff vaguely depressed me. After I re-scanned the films, I mean, and realized that an apparent majority of them seem to belong (emphasis on the word “seem”) to the pretty-good-but-no-cigar category. Which indicates, at least for now, that the forthcoming six-month award season (Labor Day to 2.28.17) may turn out to be weak or pallid, at least compared to other years. Then I asked myself, “What if this becomes a pattern? What if weak-tea fall/holiday films become the norm?”

With more and more U.S.-based directors and producers talking about how increasingly difficult it is to get funding for quality-level theatrical films because of the usual depressing reasons (i.e., the complete absence of John Calley-level thinking among studio execs, an overwhelming preference for sequels and fantasy films among the big studios, specialty distributors leaning more and more on acquisitions) and with more and more filmmakers (especially screenwriters) moving over to cable…Jesus, I don’t want to go there. Okay, I guess I have to.

All I can say is, thank God for Amazon and Netflix and Megan Ellison because at least they care about the over-30 audience, and because they’re pumping money and feeling into the form, and I don’t mean longform cable. Longform has gone to some stellar places over the last 17 years (i.e., the birth of The Sopranos) but it takes a special gift or discipline to tell your story and “say it all” in the space of 100 or 110 or 120 minutes. People who can do that are still operating on the highest level, I believe.

But with megaplex fare getting critically out-performed and out-pointed by small-screen dramas with increasing frequency, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has to grim up and ask itself a tough question, to wit: “Where, really, is the art of cinema thriving today? Because many of the truly talented people in this town aren’t working on projects that will necessarily end up in theatres, and the day is coming when it won’t be “many” but “most.”

Screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence, Jack Reacher) offers an interesting comment in this 11.15.13 Trailers From Hell riff about Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’72). Noting that Yates film is “not strictly a comedy but more of a caper film with a light touch,” Olson says that these days “Hollywood seems to have a problem with anything that combines tonality.” More than a few critics have the same aversion. Over and over I’ve read the line that “this movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a comedy or a thriller” blah blah. Another thing that’s enjoyable about The Hot Rock is that everyone — Yates, Robert Redford, George Segal, Zero Mostel, Moses Gunn — is working beneath their station. They’re doing paycheck work but giving it their full spirit. Assignment #1: Name a good 21st Century film in which everyone is slumming but fully respecting the job and bringing their A-game, and the movie succeeding because of this. Assignment #2: Name a good 21st Century film that straddles tones or genres, mixing this and that but never quite being one thing.

Tate Taylor‘s The Girl on the Train (Universal, 10.7) is being research-screened on Monday night. I wish I could attend. I’ve written before that I’ve been sensing a guilty-pleasure thing from the trailers. Everybody wants it to be Gone Girl 2. But honestly? I’ve heard otherwise from a guy who’s seen it. He’d never be impolitic enough to channel Lloyd Bentsen in a hypothetical chat with Taylor, but this is what he’d say without constraints: “I’ve worked with David Fincher. I know David Fincher. David Fincher is a friend of mine. Tate, you’re no David Fincher.”

Now that everyone has seen Suicide Squad, what of the majority critical view that David Ayer‘s film exudes soullessness and suckage? I don’t mean the first 40 to 45 minutes — I mean the rest of it. I ask this knowing that over-25s with a semblance of taste and a marketable skill will almost certainly agree that it’s putrid for the most part, and those under 25…well, we know what they’ll say.

What did the room feel like as you left the theatre? Were fellow moviegoers looking ill, stricken, ashen-faced? Did they seem to be questioning their lives or at least their willingness to sit through another piece of shit from the Warner Bros./D.C. Comics kingpins?

“There’s a major disconnect with what the critics are saying and the audience is seeing,” Warner Bros. distribution vp Jeff Goldstein told Variety‘s Brent Lang. “We’re resonating with a younger audience. The younger the audience, the higher the score.”

Lang reports, however, that Suicide Squad dropped 41% between Friday and Saturday, which is a much steeper decline than Captain America: Civil War or Deadpool experienced. It seems likely that Squad will drop around 70% next weekend, which is what the similarly-loathed Batman v Superman managed to do.

Keep in mind the N.Y. Times estimate that Suicide Squad cost at least $325 million to make and market, which means it has to pull down $650 million to move into profit.

Posted from Cannes on 5.20.16: “I’m crestfallen about Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog — a lurid, blood-splattered genre satire. It’s not that I don’t get the fuck-all, porno-violent attitude. I just don’t understand how or why a good fellow like Schrader would succumb to this kind of gaudy nihilism with such mystifying gusto. He’s taken a 1997 Eddie Bunker crime novel, which I haven’t read but is reputedly grounded in brutal reality, and made a dark, sloppy comedy of excess that only the animals will like and which only Cannes critics will praise with a semi-straight face.

Dog Eat Dog – Trailer [VO] by Filmosphere

“I’ll admit that Dog Eat Dog hits the amusement button maybe three or four times (Schrader’s dry performance as a crime lord is one of the few elements that satisfy) but mainly it’s a clumsy, splattery, tonally-chaotic wallow. I know it sounds unkind but the words ‘diarrhea dump’ came to mind as I sat in the balcony this morning.”

Schrader Indiewire quote: “I wanted to push the envelope, to never be boring, to take this as far as it could go without breaking the conception of the material, and I think ‘Dog’ was something that really enabled this. Every department head, we said, ‘Go for it. Take it as far as you can go’ so the movie is playing at eleven in every scene.”

Two days ago MCN’s David Poland posted his first “Blankety-blank Weeks To Oscar” piece for the 2016-17 award season.

His gut suspicion is that only three films — Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation, Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk and Denzel Washington‘s Fences — are “lock-ish” for a Best Picture nomination. I’m not disagreeing, but how Poland can half-suggest that Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea is a “could be” is…well, quizzical. Did he not see it in Sundance?

Poland’s temporary, alphabetical top ten along with my parenthetical comments:

1. Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant (HE comment: An ultra-violent programmer, I’m told, with a side serving of autism — an aggressively smart genre film, but no more than that);

2. Robert Zemeckis‘s Allied (HE comment: It might amount to something exceptional but the portrait stills (and portrait stills, of course, mean absolutely nothing) suggest a schmaltzy approach — I’d like to see something that feels lean, straight and gloss-free like Fred Zinneman‘s The Day of the Jackal but I have doubts — the ungenuine, Jiminy Cricket tone that Zemeckis used for The Walk scared me);

3. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (HE comment: Quite possibly a BP contender);

4. Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation (HE comment: Likely BP nom, no win);

5. Ben Younger‘s Bleed For This (HE comment: Another overcoming-great-adversity boxing drama — decent or better-than-decent reviews, decent business, no nommy);

6. Denzel Washington‘s Fences (HE comment: Very likely BP nom);

“Despite not being a particularly gory effort but rather a Polanski-esque film, Marcin Wrona‘s Demon (The Orchard, 9.9) shows how much Polish cinema is incomplete due to its chronic lack of solid horror productions. We truly hope that the domestic yellow press and Wrona’s aficionados alike will appreciate Demon avoiding any speculation about the causes of his suicide.” — from an 11.5.15 Krakow Post review by Giuseppe Sedia. Wrona, 42, hanged himself during the Gdynia Film Festival, on 9.19.15.