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The Black Panther sartorial thing is not for guys like me, and by that I mean X-factor movie guys. To me a movie is a movie is a movie — it’s not any kind of statement about representation or cultural celebration or any of that. It’s all about structure and believability and planting the seeds and delivering the right kind of third-act payoff, and that’s all.

Okay — if I could somehow buy an exact duplicate of Cary Grant’s three-button Savile Row suit from North by Northwest, I would wear it to a special screening at the Aero or Egyptian, but that’s as far as I could go.

The North by Northwest suit looks gray but is actually a kind of faintly blue-ish gray plaid. It was designed by Arthur Lyons at Kilgour, French & Stanbury.

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Alex Garland‘s Annihilation (Paramount, 2.23) is “trippy,” all right — a visually imaginative, microbe-level, deep-in-the-muck monster-alien flick. And it will bring you down, down, down. It will drop you into a stinking, crawling-insect swamp of your own regrets and fears and lethargies and nightmares, and will make you long for the glorious release of shooting yourself in the mouth.

It’s mainly a CG/FX show with creatures and Spielbergian space aliens and dynamic production design. It’s “inventive” in terms of the day-glo tree tumors and in a generally fungal, micro-bacterial, fiendish-mitosis sort of way, but it makes you feel like shit. It’s unrelentingly grim — basically a film about lambs to the slaughter.

Annihilation is based on a trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer that I will never read, but more precisely on the same-titled book that launches the tale.

It’s focused on Area X, a creepy, muddy lowland area somewhere in the Southern U.S. that’s been invaded and biologically inflamed by aliens. It’s surrounded by a kind of psychedelic wall made of some kind of blow-bubble liquid.

Five well-armed soldier women — a biologist played by Natalie Portman plus Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Tuva Novotny — enter this realm on foot, hoping to figure out the root of it all and at the same time save the life of Portman’s husband (Oscar Isaac) who has escaped Area X but is all fucked up…lethargic, no memory, spitting blood, ridden with disease.

In the book it’s a team of four, not five, that goes in, and the women represent the twelfth such expedition. The eleven previous expeditions have all ended in death or erasure for all the participants. Who would be stupid enough to join the twelfth expedition under these circumstances?

Annihilation is imaginative in ways that might feel vaguely new if you haven’t seen Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Stalker (’79) or, more to the point, read “Roadside Picnic,” the 1972 Russian horror novel by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky that inspired the Tarkovsky film. Or seen the two American-made sci-fi thrillers — John McTiernan‘s Predator and James Cameron‘s Aliens — that came in their wake.

So it’s not precisely “new”, but it’s definitely a grade-A, above-average haunted horror film for sci-fi dweebs. But Joe and Jane Popcorn? Not so much.

“This is imaginative, that’s imaginative,” I muttered to myself last night. “Not that I give that much of a shit, but it’s imaginative.”

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90th Oscar Awards co-producer MIKE DELUCA sitting at his desk in a moderate-sized office. Nicely decorated, delicate delighting, a tropical plant. DeLuca’s phone buzzes. It’s his assistant, LORNA DOONE.

DELUCA: Hey.
LORNA: Mike? Warren Beatty on two.
DELUCA: (beat) Really?
LORZNA: On two.

DeLuca hits flashing button.

DELUCA: Warren!
BEATTY: (To someone else) Hah, okay. (into phone) Mike!
DELICA: So what up?
BEATTY: Look, Mike, I want another shot.
DELUCA: (grimacing) Aww, come on, Warren.
BEATTY: I don’t mean presenting the Best Picture Oscar again. I’d just like to present another award for dignity’s sake. Actually, Faye and I together.
DELUCA: (uncomfortable) I…I don’t know.

BEATTY: We’d just like to come on, present some minor award, clean and neat, a couple of bon mots and exit stage left.
DELUCA: You feel bad about last year. I hear you.
BEATTY: I have almost 60 years in this business, Mike. Faye has over 55. Millennials and GenZs don’t know us, but the over 40s do. Okay, the over-50s. We have some standing in this industry. We just don’t want to go out like a couple of clowns.
DELUCA: I don’t think you flubbed it.
BEATTY: Remember what Kimmel said?
DELUCA: It wasn’t your fault, dude.
BEATTY: Kimmel said, “Warren, what did you dooo?” We just wanna come out and keep it simple and dignified. You and Suzanne can check the copy.
LORNA (obviously listening in) I think it’ll take strain off the show, Mike.
DELUCA: (caving) All right. But no hemming and hawing at the lecturn, Warren!
BEATTY: No hemming and hawing.

“Nobody played the role of movie star in the 1970s with more confidence than Burt Reynolds. Even as his choice of vehicles grew so indiscriminate as to gradually erode his box office appeal, he still radiated swagger, that ever-present smirk suggesting he — and we — knew it was all a put-on anyway.

“Perhaps the problem was that it was just too good an act: Burt Reynolds gave such excellent ‘Burt Reynolds’ on talk shows, in interviews and other forums that the public saw little point in continuing to fork out cash money to see him do the same thing in yet another mediocre, derivative big-screen comedy or thriller. He didn’t take enough risks, and the few times he did were misfires or weren’t appreciated enough. Few stars achieved such massive popularity while retaining a sense of unrealized potential.

“It’s a bittersweet legacy that writer-director Adam Rifkin aims to pay affectionate tribute to in The Last Movie Star (A24, 3.30) which has been retitled by U.S. distributor A24 after playing initial festival dates as Dog Years.

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I always knew Marlon Brando indulged in same-sex intrigues from time to time (eons ago the late Dennis Wilson told me that Brando once suggested a little hotel-room action) but for some reason I can’t handle the idea of Brando doing Richard Pryor. It just hasn’t gone down well. I think it’s more about Pryor as a lust object than anything else. Or Pryor undressed, to be honest. It just doesn’t feel right. So I’ve been watching a series of Brando YouTube clips to try and, no offense, flush out certain images.

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When I first learned to shoot pool I used the standard left-index-finger-over-the-cue-stick method. 90% or 95% of players do the same. Obviously because the left-finger wraparound keeps the stick steadier and the aim more precise. But somewhere along the way I decided to become a flathand player, mainly because I thought it looked cooler. I haven’t played with any regularity since my early 20s, but since I became a flathand guy my playing has been somewhere between mediocre and embarassing. I was a better pool player when I was 18 (I used to play with my friends all the time) than I am today. When I think of what I could’ve become…

Same thing with drawing. I used to be a half-decent sketch artist from age 8 or 9 until I was 15 or 16, but then I stopped developing. Today I’m no better at drawing faces or figures than I was in mid teens. If you’re half-decent at something when you’re fairly young (piano, dancing, acting, violin, gymnastics, painting), you have to stay with it in order to become better and better. Failing to do so is a shame. Hell, it’s a sin.

via GIPHY

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Never in Oscar history has a director-writer written an Oscar-winning original screenplay (as a solo writer) that has also won Best Picture…never.

Reworded: If the director-writer of a Best Picture contender is the sole author of a Best Original Screenplay nominee and that screenplay goes on to win an Oscar, the film will almost certainly not win Best Picture.

That, at least, is what 89 years of Oscar history tells us. Yes, the screenplay for Annie Hall won Best Original Screenplay, but that was co-authored by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman. Spotlight won for Best Original Screenplay also, but again, it was co-authored. Any exceptions?

The solo-authored nominees for Best Original Screenplay are Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird, Jordan Peele‘s Get Out and Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (The Big Sick and The Shape of Water were co-authored.) So if Martin McDonagh wins the Oscar, you can pretty much count on Three Billboards not winning for Best Picture.

Three Billboards director-writer Martin McDonagh.

I’m not sure if Three Billboards or Get Out will win Best Original Screenplay. Is anyone? An Oscar-handicapping friend believes that McDonagh has it in the bag, and that Get Out, which he regards as little more than a racially-themed knockoff of an Ira Levin Stepford Wives deal, will go home empty-handed. If this happens, the “woke” crowd will be staggering around in a state of shock.

We all know that The Shape of Water will win the Best Picture Oscar, and that Guillermo del Toro will take the prize for Best Director. Fine with me, go with God, everyone loves Guillermo, etc.

But if you apply the Howard Hawks rule of film excellence (three great scenes and no bad ones), there’s no getting around the fact that 70% of Michael Shannon‘s scenes are “bad ones” — darkly obsessive, fiendishly sadistic, unfocused. My favorite scene, which I’ll gladly call a great one, is the black-and-white, 1930s-style dance number between Sally Hawkins and gill-man. And the underwater lovemaking scene with Sally in a red dress — another goodie. But what’s the third?

Both Lady Bird and Get Out have no below-the-line nominations. For a Best Pic winner with no BTL nominations, you’d have to go back 37 years to a Best Picture winner, Ordinary People, with that handicap. On top of which neither Lady Bird nor Get Out are up for Best Film Editing and again, you need to go back 38 years for that winner.

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Karen McDougal, Stephanie Clifford aka Stormy Daniels, Alana Evans, Jessica Drake, Summer Zervos…I’m starting to get confused. Let’s just focus on Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker piece about Donald Trump’s thing with McDougal (or vice versa), which lasted from June 2006 to April 2007. The proof was an eight-page handwritten “document” that McDouglas wrote about her relationship with Trump, and which was fed to Farrow by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. But that handwriting! I got a headache just from reading a few lines.

Excerpt: “’I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man. We talked for a couple hours – then, it was ‘ON’! We got naked + had sex.’ As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something that surprised her. ‘He offered me money,’ she wrote. ‘I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks — I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you because I like you — NOT for money’ — He told me ‘you are special.’ ”

The first term that comes to mind when thinking of Francis Lawrence‘s Red Sparrow (20th Century Fox, 3.2), which I saw last night, is “ice-cold,” and I don’t just mean the simulations of snow-covered Russia. (The film was shot in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and, very briefly, London.) Almost everything that happens in this 139-minute, Americans-vs.-Russians spy thriller is coated with malice and arctic frost — just about every line, expression, motivation or attempt at manipulation, and every act of sadistic brutality, sexual or otherwise.

No one expects a film about a beautiful, poker-faced Bolshoi ballerina (Jennifer Lawrence‘s Dominika Egorova) being forced, after a horrid physical injury, to enroll in “whore school” (Lawrence’s term) to become a government-controlled seductress or “red sparrow,” and then graduate into the realm of double agentry, to provide any kind of emotional balm. But for the most part Red Sparrow goes out of its way to avoid even a faint hint of humanity.

Except, that is, for a couple of brief scenes between Dominika and Joel Edgerton‘s Nathaniel Nash, a CIA agent with a semblance of a heart. (The story begins with Nash on the outs with his bosses for behaving stupidly during a nighttime incident in a Moscow park, and then he attempts to redeem himself by recruiting Dominika into working for the Americans.) There are two or three scenes of domestic bonding between Dominika and her irritatingly dependent mother (Joely Richardson), but honestly? I was kind of hoping mom would get rubbed out as all she does is sit around and serve as a kind of albatross.

This is not, to put it mildly, a double-agent film with the finesse and subtlety of, say, Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (’65), which was regarded as a rather cold-hearted piece when it opened a half-century ago. The focus on cruelty in Red Sparrow makes that John Le Carre adaptation seem rather mild in this regard. At every turn Sparrow says “try a little heartlessness.”

Red Sparrow is more in the realm of Atomic Blonde, the period (late ’80s) spy film with Charlize Theron, minus the gymnastics. It’s an aggressively sexual thing, I mean, but is mainly about all kinds of physical brutality, including a pair of attempted rapes and two especially savage beating-and-torture scenes that would, in the real world, result in God-knows-how-many-weeks in a hospital.

Most of the violence, sexual and otherwise, happens to poor Dominika, and after the third or fourth assault I was asking myself, “Is this a movie for the #MeToo era?” I suppose it is, in a way, as it does allow for a form of satisfying fuck-him revenge at the finale. But in my seventh row seat in a 20th Century Fox screening room, I was as much of a recipient of the brutality as Lawrence, and after a while I felt covered with bruises. Sorry but I empathize. It’s in my nature.

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Yes, we know — winning an Oscar is about class, honor, pride, accomplishment. Or at least the illusion of same. About notching a moment in history and saying “Yes, I did that” or “I was a part of that, and therefore my life has a measure of value and meaning.” This kind of thing means more to serious filmmakers than, say, costarring in the latest Dwayne Johnson movie and saying “whoa, people really paid a lot of money to see this piece of shit!” Because one day they’ll be dead, and they can’t take it with them.

In David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia, Jose Ferrer portrays a Turkish Bey who feels alone and isolated in the remote city of Daraa. At one point Ferrer looks sadly at the stupid Turkish solders under his command and sighs to Peter O’Toole‘s Lawrence, “I am surrounded by cattle.”

Peter O’Toole and Jose Ferrer during the Daraa garrison scene in Lawrence of Arabia.

Today Hollywood Elsewhere readers can say the same thing with even greater conviction and melancholy. Who among them would argue that they’re not surrounded by tens of millions of primitives whose ADD appetites are incapable of processing anything outside the fantasy escapist woo-woo realm, at least as far as theatrical viewings are concerned?

Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, a Best Picture nominee, was the best-reviewed, the artiest, the most visually distinguished and thoroughly believable action-driven film of 2017. So far Dunkirk has made a fair amount of coin — $188,045,546, which is $12 million more than the $176 million earned domestically by Get Out, another Best Picture nominee.

But the megaplex morons paid much more to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($617,116,708), Beauty and the Beast ($504,014,165), Wonder Woman ($412,563,408), Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 ($389,813,101), Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle ($367,410,756), Spider-Man: Homecoming ($334,201,140), It ($327,481,748), Thor: Ragnarok ($314,352,974), Despicable Me 3 ($264,624,300), Justice League($228,585,922), Logan ($226,277,068), The Fate of the Furious ($226,008,385) and Coco ($206,323,103).

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Joseph Mankiewicz‘s Suddenly Last Summer is good for one thing — the stills of 27 year-old Elizabeth Taylor that were taken during filming. She was still slender back then, or a couple of years away from that Cleopatra-era plumpness (heavy drinking + pasta) that began to overtake her features in ’61. Taylor was always a well-respected actress (Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8), but she always seemed to be conspicuously “acting.” I always found her voice shrill and grating on some level, especially when called upon to show anger or outrage and emotional distress. But from the early to late ’50s she was quite the visual package.

Suddenly Last Summer ends with a shocking revelation about Taylor’s mentally unstable character having witnessed her gay cousin, Sebastian Venable, being eaten alive — cannibalized — by a pack of feral young boys.

The bizarre finale was obviously intended as some kind of metaphorical condemnation of gay sexuality. Sebastian’s rich mother (Katharine Hepburn) is so appalled and disgusted by suspicions of Sebastian’s lifestyle that she wants Taylor lobotomized in order to suppress any notion that the cannibal incident happened. It’s quite ugly and joyless, this film. Rage, repression, self-loathing.

From Wikipage: “Following A Streetcar Named Desire (’51) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (’58), Suddenly, Last Summer was the third Williams film that dealt with the subject of homosexuality, although it was far more explicit in its treatment than either of the previous films were allowed to be under the Motion Picture Production Code. Working in conjunction with the National Legion of Decency, the Production Code Administration gave the filmmakers special dispensation to depict Sebastian Venable, declaring, ‘Since the film illustrates the horrors of such a lifestyle, it can be considered moral in theme even though it deals with sexual perversion.”

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Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has questioned an Academy-member friend (i.e., an older liberal-minded white woman) about her Oscar preferences. She’s not that bright or hip, this woman, but she likes what she likes. For those who weren’t paying attention six or seven weeks ago, here are two Hollywood Elsewhere interviews — #1 and #2 — along similar lines.

Quote #1: “I don’t really understand the preferential ballot. But I prefer it when there are fewer choices. If there are too many choices, it waters everything down. Plus there are rarely more than five movies I really like in a year (not including foreign films).”

Wells reaction: This woman sounds quite lazy. Too many Best Picture nominees dilutes the field? Every year I compile a list of 15 or 20 films that I’ve categorized as excellent, very good or at least commendable, and she rarely likes more than five? This is a woman who feels overwhelmed by life, and who likes to nap in the late afternoons.”

Quote #2: “I had an odd experience with Darkest Hour. I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but afterwards, when I found out the subway sequence was totally invented, it diminished the whole movie for me.”

Wells reaction: What difference does it make if a scene has been invented or not? If it works, it works. I am among those who feel that the subway scene, imagined as it is, is hands down the most rousing and emotionally affecting scene in Darkest Hour. Without question. This woman doesn’t have to agree with me, of course, but to say it didn’t work for her after she discovered it was made up? What an idiot.”

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