“A sloshed Chet Huntley speaking to an equally hammered David Brinkley during New Year’s Eve coverage in 1966: “You know, David…sometimes I wish I was single. I’m fairly wealthy, I’m famous and there are all these women around. I’m telling you it’s a tragedy. And my wife and I…all right, I won’t go there. But God, would I love to sow a few wild oats before it’s too late! I mean, let’s face it, David…we’re both gonna be dead some day.” — from HE’s 1.1.17 coverage of Don Lemon’s inebriated New Year’s Eve coverage in New Orleans.

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Air has a two-day tally of “just under” $6 million, having earned $2.4 million yesterday (Thursday, 4.6) and $3.2 million on Wednesday, 4.4. To me that sounds more like “just over $5.5 million” than “just under $6 million.” but whatever.

Pic is expected to finish with $16 million as of Sunday night. It opened in 3500 theatres and has, so far, a per-screen average of $939 or something close to that.

Air cost $90 million to produce, but it sure doesn’t look it. It looks like a $45 million movie, if that. It’s 85% to 90% interiors (Nike Beaverton offices, Chris Messina‘s agent office, bar/restaurants, a 7/11 store, Matt Damon‘s home) plus some Beaverton exteriors, some roadways and a simulation of a Wilmington, North Carolina neighborhood plus the Jordan backyard.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro: “For the type of feel-good, inspirational, star-driven dramedy this is, many in town are rooting for this movie to do well. For if Air can leg out, it provides hope to motion picture studios for the types of movies that can work post-pandemic.”

The likely truth is that the Super Mario Bros. morons are sensing or smelling a “dad movie,” and they’re obviously not breaking the doors down to see Air. Plus three out of five Air viewers so far have been male (“59%” male, according to D’Alessandro) which means a fair percentage of women are either being dragged to it or quietly deciding to wait for streaming.

Friendo: “I don’t think anyone will dare report that this is any kind of bomb. There’s too much at stake.” HE to friendo: “It’s not a bomb — it’s just performing modestly. It was never going to be a runaway hit. What matters — this is a huge factor — is that it delivers spiritual uplift.”

As one who’s occasionally accepted and enjoyed freebies from movie studios, it’s hard for me to feel outraged about the recent report that Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas and his rightwing nutbag wife Ginni acccepted lavish favors from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow over a couple of decades.

Is Thomas guilty of a punishable ethics violation? Almost certainly, but everyone “takes” to varying degrees. It’s the way of the world among the ambitious, the well-positioned and the hungry-for-more set.

If I could force Thonas to resign by clapping three times, I would clap three times. But they all do it.

I tend to avoid or at least suffer through prison movies as a rule. To varying degrees they’re all about yearning for freedom, of course, but they always feel more confining than liberating (i.e., why does the caged bird sing?) and because life itself, for me, has always been about the defiance of suppression, confinement and regimentation so I already knew that tune backward and forward.

I don’t need and in fact have been forbidding the idea of a movie reminding me about these basic terms, and I’ve felt this way since my early teens, which is when I started to understand the degree of dull underlying horror that permeated normal middle–class life. This is how it seemed, at least, in suburban New Jersey (Westfield) and exurban Connecticut (Wilton).

As much as I admire Morgan Freeman’s performance in The Shawshank Redemption, I’ve never been able to derive any real pleasure or payoff from that film. Ditto Papillon, Birdman of Alcatraz, Bronson, Hunger, The Green Mile, Starred Up, Each Dawn I Die, 20,000 Years at Sing Sing, et. al.

Don’t even mention Oz or Orange Is The New Black.

The only prison flicks I’ve enjoyed, unsurprisingly, are about breakouts. Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz (‘79) is the champ. Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (‘67) is more about the spirit of freedom than escape, but it still qualifies. Ben Stiller’s Escape at Dannemora** (‘18) is an excellent bust-out film. I love the comical breakout sequence in Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock (‘71).

There’s one exception to my rule — a prison flick that isn’t about escape and just says “fuck it — life on the block is what it is” while staking claim to being a serious meditation on morality and jailhouse ethics: Robert M. Young and Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes (77).

A couple of months ago I visited a friend who lives near the village of Ossining, which is about 40 miles north of Manhattan and is the home of Sing Sing prison. Peter Falk grew up there, and during an interview he recalled that all the lights in the town would flicker and grow dim whenever a guy was getting fried in the chair.

Last night I caught my second viewing of Air, and it seemed to gain somewhat. It certainly didn’t diminish. My third viewing will be with subtitles, and then it’ll really gain.

I especially loved how Matt Damon‘s eloquent emotional pitch to the Jordan family near the end is off-the-cuff, and in so doing echoes the second half of Martin Luther King‘s “I have a dream” speech, which was also largely improvised, and is discussed early in the film. This is called “refrain” — one of the most solid and dependable tricks in the book.

But one minor thing has stuck in my craw.

Director Ben Affleck‘s decision not to show Michael Jordan is an understandable one. “”He exists above and around the story, but if you ever concretize him, if you ever say, ‘Yes, that’s Michael Jordan,’ they’ll know it’s not, really..it’s fake,” Affleck explained in a People interview. I thought if they bring everything they thought and remembered about [Michael] and what he meant to them to the movie and projected it onto the movie, it [would work] better.”

And so Jordan stand-in Damian Delano in only seen from the rear, and Jordan’s voice is only heard once on a phone line (“hello”). The physical Jordan/Delano presence only happens toward the conclusion (i.e., during the afore-mentioned Nike pitch meeting plus one or two others). But here’s the thing — the camera’s avoidance of Jordan’s face and Affleck not even allowing us to hear a few words from the guy also feels “fake.” The dodge feels too conspicuous. It intrudes upon the reality of that climactic moment and the overall third-act flow.

I don’t know what the solution could have been or if one was possible, but if I’d been directing I would have persuaded the present-tense Jordan, 60, to record a few lines of dialogue. Maybe a few quips, maybe a pungent observation of some kind,. Hearing the Real McCoy certainly would’ve helped.

On the other hand would it have been that hard to find a young Michael Jordan look-alike? We all know that movies are fake from start to finish — what matters is conviction and bringing your best game to the table.

It could have been argued by the producers of The Longest Day (’62) that Dwight D. Eisenhower was too big of a historical figure and that people would instantly know that Henry Grace, the set decorator who played the nation’s 34th president in an early scene, was just some joker pretending to be Ike.

Of course audiences knew that, but the second that Grace’s face appeared on the big screen, it worked. Audiences appreciated the effort and approved for the most part. Grace’s voice was dubbed by voice actor Allen Swift.

I’m sorry, but I think it should be our sworn duty to identify and shame wokester fanatics. I’m thinking particularly of Jeff Zhang of Strange Harbors, who yesterday accused Jeff Sneider of racism because a gentle mocking of “a Black It,” given that Maine (the setting of all the It adaptations) is one of the whitest states in the country.

Nobody raised their eyebrows at Ryan Coogler‘s plan for a diverse X-Files. Pretty much any classic franchise or well-known TV series can be rebooted with a Black cast, I would suppose, but for social realism’s sake it’s probably not the most persuasive idea to set the rebooted project in New Hampshire or Switzerland or the Czech Republic.

Noteworthy Zhang line: “[We should] bully these racist morons out of our industry.”