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Yesterday “Page Six”‘s Richard Johnson reported in the N.Y. Post that a “source” is claiming that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, the likely swan song of Scorsese’s career as far as mafia wise guys are concerned, may cost $175 million, and that’s without marketing.

On 2.9.18 Deadline‘s Anita Busch reported that “we are now hearing from multiple sources that the film’s budget is well over $125M and more in the $140M range (and climbing).” In late February Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson echoed Busch’s report that the Irishman is costing $140 million or thereabouts.

Al Pacino, Robert De Niro during filming.

Add the standard marketing costs (usually $85 to $100 million for a major feature) to Johnson’s $175 million figure and the total Irishman tab is in the vicinity of $250M. Add the same to Busch/Mendelson’s $140M and you’ve got $225M or thereabouts.

Being a Netflix release that almost certainly won’t have an extensive theatrical run, The Irishman isn’t subject to the usual financial arithmetic of a typical feature from a mainstream distributor, but $175M or $225M or $250M tabs are certainly stand-outs in the realm of a non-fantasy, straight-goombah period drama.

Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel and Ray Romano are the Irishman costars. Anna Paquin is apparently the only actress of any note in the film.

Netflix is flush enough to handle the Irishman tab without breaking too much of a sweat. It’s interesting nonetheless to consider that Cleopatra‘s $31 million budget, which broke 20th Century Fox in ’63, inflates into roughly $248M in 2018 dollars. ($100 in 1963 = $800 in 2018.)

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I wanted to see Boots Riley‘s Sorry To Bother You (Annapurna, 7.6) at last January’s Sundance Film Festival because of Lakeith Stanfield, but then I began to think that a director whose first name was “Boots” might be more into diversion and razmatazz and shuffling the deck than dealing straight cards.

But The Guardian‘s Jordan Hoffman saw Sorry and said it “shows a great deal of spirit and promise” and that “it may even become a cult classic.” Those are critical code terms for “doesn’t quite do it or get there but maybe next time.”

On the other hand a 70% Metacritic score means you’ve gotten…well, a few things right.

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn said it’s “loaded with capricious details that shimmer with the exuberance of inspired social commentary at hyperspeed”….huh? Variety‘s Peter Debruge complained that “the more ridiculous Riley’s gonzo social critique gets, the more boring it becomes, to the point that its out-of-control second half starts to feel like some kind of bad trip.” Financial Times critic Damon Wise said “it has its moments…but Riley’s vision needs a little more refining.”

It is axiomatic that trade critics will be as hospitable as honesty allows when it comes to major studio releases, especially those aimed at fantasy geekboys and especially when directed by a legend like Steven Spielberg. And so Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman is most likely fulfilling expectations in his review of Ready Player One, which premiered last night at SXSW.

But even under these conditions OG offers terms like “banal” and “slippery mutating synthetic digital imagery” and — this is probably key — “more occupied than invested.” OG was gripped by RPO, but his review also indicates that the general SXSW reaction (“We’ve found God! The entire crowd was levitating…shrieking with pleasure!”) was over-the-top.

And yet I love hearing that there’s a sequence in which Tye Sheridan‘s Parzival, Olivia Cooke‘s Art3mis and a Shrek-like avatar named Aech visit Stanley Kubrick‘s Overlook hotel.

“In Ready Player One, everything you could call virtual is clever and spellbinding,” he writes, “[and] everything you might call reality is rather banal.” Spielberg’s “dizzyingly propulsive virtual-reality fanboy geek-out” is “an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie [but],” he qualifies, “you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested.”

“Ready Player One tells a breathless and relatively coherent story — essentially, the future of civilization is riding on the outcome of a video game — but the movie, first and foremost, is a coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy. Never is that more spectacularly true than in the irresistible sequence in which [three virtual leads] enter the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.

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I saw and reviewed Rebecca Miller’s Arthur Miller, Writer (HBO 3.19) last November. The HBO premiere happens on 3.19. In recognition of a just-posted trailer, my reactions once again:

“This is a highly personal project by respected director Rebecca Miller, the playwright’s daughter by his third wife. I’ve admired Miller and his plays all my life, but the doc acquainted me with a semi-intimate, unguarded version of him, which was new. Miller was a crusty, somewhat brusque fellow when it came to being interviewed — you could use the words ‘blunt’ or ‘craggy’ — but he never seemed less than wise or perceptive.

With Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Big Lebowski having opened 20 years ago (3.6.98), everyone’s celebrating the anniversary. I was an instant fan but I might be Lebowski-ed out, having seen it at least 14 or 15 times. I could still have fun with another viewing or two, I guess, but I know the dialogue and the performances too well. It’s kinda fun to watch it Rocky Horror-style, mouthing the dialogue in synch with the film, but everyone does that, right?

I first heard about the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the same Sundance Film Festival (January ’98) that Lebowski had its big sneak preview at. I felt awful about missing that screening; didn’t see it for another three or four weeks.

I’m starting to think that my favorite stoner comedy might be Curtis Hanson‘s Wonder Boys (’00). Back in my pot-smoking days I used to prefer what I called a nice “light stone” as opposed to being totally ripped. This is what Wonder Boys is — a subtle pot high laced with middle-aged whimsy and meditation. It’s goofy and trippy but embroidered with an aura of accomplishment or at least ambition, and therefore a whole different bird than Lebowski.

And it sure has its own atmosphere. Each and every Wonder Boys shot, it seems, is covered in fog and murk and Pittsburgh dampness, and it contains my favorite Michael Douglas performance to boot.

Alas, Wonder Boys was a financial bust — cost $55 million to make, earned $19 million domestic and $33.5 million worldwide.

Some of the critics who didn’t quite get Lebowski‘s lost-in-the-haze, stoned-humor, where-is-this-movie-going? spirit (including senior L.A. Times know-it-all Kenneth Turan, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Edward Guthmann, The New Yorker‘s Daphne Merkin, Palo Alto Weekly‘s Susan Tavernetti, Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum, Deseret News‘ Jeff Vice (“This uneven screwball comedy — a disjointed and half-hearted attempt by the Coen brothers to return to the Raising Arizona style — is bound to underwhelm even their most fervent admirers”) and the S.F. Examiner‘s Barbara Shulgasser) have recanted. But Turan isn’t one of them. He’s told the Washington Post‘s Eli Rosenberg that he hasn’t rewatched it and is sticking with his initial reaction.

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You can make fun of the San Francisco touch-down scene in William Wellman‘s The High and the Mighty (’54), and particularly Dimitri Tiomkin‘s angelic-choir music that amplifies the emotion. You can call the Christian symbolism tacky, I mean, but I went through something similar once in a private plane as we landed in St. Louis under heavy fog, and it looked and felt exactly like this. (Yeah, I wrote about this seven years ago and what of it?)

It happened in the mid ’70s. I had hitched a ride across the country (Van Nuys to LaGuardia) in a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir, and he agreed to take me and a guy named Gary in exchange for gas money. We left in the early morning, stopped for gas and lunch in Tucumcari, New Mexico, bunked in a St. Louis airport motel that night, flew out the next morning and arrived at LGA by the early afternoon. Anyway…

The fog was so thick as we approached St. Louis that the air-traffic-controller had to talk us down. I was sitting shotgun and the air was pure soup, and I quickly fell in love with that soothingly paternal, Southern-accented voice, telling us exactly what to do, staying with us the whole way…”level off, down 500, bank right,” etc. When we finally got close to the landing strip the fog began to dissipate and the landing lights looked just like this, I swear. And the feeling was the same.

Talk about the welcoming glow of Christianity. It was almost enough, during that moment and later that night as I thought about it, to make me think about not being a Bhagavad Gita mystic any more and coming back to the Episcopalian Church.

Following the 3.6 posting of “Likeliest ’18 Best Picture Contenders“, I asked five or six publicists to tell me what I’d missed or should remove. Two of them said that I need to include Black Panther as a Best Picture contender, and more than a few HE commenters said the same. I agree — Black Panther will most likely be nominated but mainly for cultural and representation reasons. Because by the measure of cinematic merit alone, it’s not good enough until the last hour.

That said, Black Panther is a stronger, more satisfying film (at least in my book) than the absurdly over-praised Get Out.

I realize that Dexter Fletcher took over as director of Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer was canned for being AWOL a few times and clashing with the cast and crew, but it would seem awfully weird for Fletcher to be given sole credit, no? Even with Singer’s hothead rep.

I am very, very disappointed that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman will, in fact, open sometime in ’19, and most likely during that year’s award season. The reason is extensive de-aging CG work. Steven Zaillian‘s screenplay (based on Charles Brandt’s “I Heard You Paint Houses“) is allegedly a series of flashbacks that will show the titular character, Robert DeNiro‘s Frank Sheeran involved in bad-guy activity over several decades. DeNiro will reportedly appear as a 30-year-old in one of these sequences.

One authority is hearing “terrific early word on Beautiful Boy — extraordinarily well done, beautifully acted.” They’re also hearing that Adam McKay’s Backseat “is going to be killer.” This same source has seen Dan Fogelman‘s Life Itself (Amazon, 9.21 — Oscar Isaac, Olivia Cooke, Antonio Banderas, Mandy Patinkin, Samuel L. Jackson, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening) and calls it “very charming” with a stellar cast and a “great” screenplay.

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The night before last I caught the “Sundance cut” of Eugene Jarecki‘s The King, which is 20 minutes shorter than the version that played last May in Cannes as Promised Land. It’s much more than just an Elvis doc. I was pretty close to knocked out — touched and shaken to the depths of whatever — and I’ll eat my black Kenneth Cole desert boots if it doesn’t become a Best Feature Documentary nominee next January. It’s that good, that bell-ringy, that profound.

Oscilloscope will open it sometime in June.

The country used to be Elvis when he was sexy and slender and now it’s all fat and Donald Trumpy. Or Elvis was eaten by the spirit of Trump or something like that.

The message partly overlaps with that George Carlin rant: “This country was nice when we stole it…looked pretty good, pristine, paradise. Have you seen it lately? Have you taken a good look lately? It’s fucking embarassing. Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits could have taken this beautiful place and turned it into what it is today…a shopping mall, a big fucking shopping mall.”

13 year-old country blues singer Emi Sunshine, who takes a ride in Elvis’s silver Rolls Royce and sings some tunes in Jarecki’s doc, and Mr. Jarecki himself — Tuesday, 3.6, following screening at UTA.

The King is a sad portrait of the way this country used to be and what it no longer is, and how the American experience has turned sour and cynical and corporate, and how our collective journey of the last 60 or 65 years mirrors that of the surly sad sack known as Elvis Presley.

The metaphor of Elvis-as-America and vice versa…a young white guy who became the king of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid ’50s with a blend of jumpy black blues and rockabilly but who never marched or spoke out for civil rights, and how he began to sell out and downswirl as the ’60s began and sank into the straightjacket of Las Vegas and drug addiction by the early ’70s, and ended up dead on a bathroom floor in August ’77. And here we are right now on the bathroom floor with Trump, because our unenlightened half-wit journey is all about despair and opioids and pushing back against the multiculturals, etc.

The King ends with one of the greatest cultural-political montages I’ve seen in a long time, a portrait of America’s ruined soulscape as we listen to fat Elvis sing “Unchained Melody” from a Vegas showroom…for this sequence alone it’ll be Oscar-nominated.

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I happened to listen to the Russian National Anthem a couple of times during the recent Winter Olympics, and for whatever reason I found myself kind of melting into it. It got me, and got me again. Very full-hearted and whatnot. Obviously I’m influenced by being married to a passionate Russian, but only, I think, in the sense of being willing to really listen to it. Which I wasn’t before, largely due to the usual circumspect attitudes about crazy, vodka-drinking Russians blah blah. Plus I like the melody and the lyrics more than Francis Scott Key‘s “The Star Spangled Banner,” which is basically about perseverance during an arduous military battle and is hard to sing besides. Listening to the Russian anthem is like being hugged.

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I’ve been missing screenings of Armando Ianucci‘s The Death of Stalin (IFC Films, 3.9) for the last six months, but I finally saw it last night. I’ve no argument with the critics who are doing handstands and cartwheels except for the fact that it’s more LQTM funny than the laugh-out-loud kind. There’s nothing wrong with LQTM humor, which I’ve also described as no-laugh funny — you just have to get past the idea of expecting to go “hah-hah, ho-ho, hee-hee” because that never happens.

Iannucci’s script is about top-tier, real-life Communist scumbags (Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Zhukov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Svetlana Stalina) scrambling for position and power in the wake of Joseph Stalin‘s death in March 1953. It’s based on Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin‘s graphic novel “The Death Of Stalin.”

I’ve been spitballing 2018 releases for several weeks, but now I’m attempting to focus on films that will probably stand out in terms of great reviews, Best Picture nominations and award campaigns.

It’s now March 6th — less than six months away from the start of the ’18/’19 award season. And right now (stop me if you’ve read this before) eight films are the leading Best Picture hotties — Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Adam McKay‘s Back Seat, Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody, Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife, Mimi Leder‘s On The Basis of Sex, and Josie Rourke and Beau Willimon‘s Mary, Queen of Scots. (8)

Tell me which others should be included….please. Richard Linklater‘s Where’d You Go, Bernadatte? Terrence Malick‘s Radegund? Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner? Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy? Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite (reign of Queen Anne in early 17th Century)? Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased starring Lucas Hedges? (6)

Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (Netflix).

Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots.

Director Barry Jenkins (l.) during filming of If Beale Street Could Talk.

Felicity Jones (l.), Armie Hammer (r.) during filming of Mimi Leder’s On The Basis of Sex.

Upmarket Genre: 1. Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria (Dakota Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth); 2..Steve McQueen‘s Widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Andre Holland, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell); 3. Ron Howard‘s Solo — A Star Wars Story (Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton); 4. Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here; 5. 20. Stefania Solluima‘s Soldado (Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener — Columbia, 6.29.18).; 6. Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One (Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T. J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance); 7. Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale (19th Century Australian revenge saga) w/ Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr, Sam Claflin, Damon Herriman, Ewen Leslie. (8)

Likeliest Best Foreign Language Feature Contenders: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Yalitza Aparicio, Daniela Demesa, Enoc Leaño, Daniel Valtierra); Asghar Farhadi‘s Todos lo saben (Spanish-language drama w/ Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Barbara Lennie, Ricardo Darin, Inma Cuesta, Eduard Fernandez Javier Camara);Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset (a young girl grows up to become a strong and fearless woman in Budapest before World War I), w/ Susanne Wuest, Vlad Ivanov, Björn Freiberg; Paolo Sorrentino‘s Loro (life of Silvio Berlusconi); Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s The Wild Pear Tree, and Olivier Assayas‘ E-book. (6)

Possible Strongos: Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Rutger Hauer, Riz Ahmed, John C. Reilly); Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy with Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet; Xavier Dolan‘s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates); Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Corey Hawkins — Focus Features). (4)

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I can’t express sincere enthusiasm about a film directed by Rob Marshall, who has given me so much pain over the years. And I’m already having trouble with the idea of the Puerto Rican-descended Lin-Manuel Miranda playing a “lamplighter” (and apprentice to Dick Van Dyke‘s “Bert” from the original 1964 version) in 1930s London. But I love watching Emily Blunt‘s Mary Poppins descend from 5,000 feet in the foggy overhead, and I admire the damp outdoorsy atmosphere conveyed by John Myhre‘s production design and Dion Beebe‘s cinematography. So there’s hope.