It’s certainly not a burn. Not by my yardstick. Not if you accept and understand that a 40 year-old franchise can’t really go home again. Engages, strives, tries like hell. Draws a bead, hits the mark often enough. Aimed at families, sure, but in a way that doesn’t strenuously alienate. A diligent, crafty, resourceful attempt to wow fanboy dads who were 13 when The Empire Strikes Back opened in ‘80. Sticks to formula expectations as far as it can without seeming overly desperate. Plays the game like a spirited opportunist. A visual tribute to Empire‘s noirish lighting scheme. Perhaps a tad too jokey here and there. Tries your patience to a certain extent, okay, but whaddaya expect? A well-worn franchise is being re-milked, re-baked, re-fried, re-seasoned and vigorously stirred in order to turn a profit. A good looking-to-future-generations ending. Rian Johnson is an honorable tactician, an architect with a plan, an above-average engineer, a good fellow.

As the largest voting bloc within the Motion Picture Academy, members of the Screen Actors Guild have a big influence upon the Oscar race. It is generally presumed, therefore, that nominees for SAG’s Motion Picture Ensemble Award (i.e., “Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture”), which were announced this morning along with other nominees, are indicators of significant strength in the Best Picture competition.

And so today’s Ensemble Award nominees — The Big Sick, Get Out, Lady Bird, Mudbound and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — are sitting pretty. It also means that six other leading Best Picture contenders that weren’t nominated — The Post, Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, The Florida Project, Darkest Hour and Phantom Thread — might have something to worry about.

And I mean especially The Post. This morning’s SAG nominations were like an impact grenade upon that Steven Spielberg film. Smoke, chunks of plaster on the floor, ringing in the ears.

No significant support for a tale of 1970s journalists in Nixon-era Washington, D.C. — too long ago, right? No love or allowances for the exquisite acting delivered by some fine, laid-back people in the sunny, far-away Lombardy region of Italy in the early ’80s. Not enough interest in Londoners facing the threat of Nazi Germany in mid 1940, No particular affection for struggling underclass types in an Orlando hotel. No particular affection for neurotic fashion-world elites in mid ’50s England.

Four of the five ensemble nominees are small-town American stories, self-enclosed and unto themselves, suburban or rural-ish. The only cosmopolitan big-city flick is The Big Sick.

Was identity politics a factor in the decent-but-no-great-shakes Mudbound and the horror genre comedy Get Out making the cut? Of course not. They were selected by merit and merit alone.

SAG nominees for Best Actor: Timothee Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name), James Franco (The Disaster Artist), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq.). Likeliest winners: Oldman or Chalamet.

HE comment: Kaluuya? For playing cool, anxious and freaked in a horror comedy? SAG members honestly believe that Kaluuya’s performance was craftier and more planted or affecting than The Post‘s Tom Hanks, Stronger‘s Jake Gyllenhaal and Phantom Thread‘s Daniel Day Lewis? They really think that, or they want to think that? C’mon!

The year’s first holiday-vibe moment happened last night at the Smoke House, where Tatyana and I went after the 7pm Disney lot screening of The Last Jedi. Nice-smelling wreaths, soft amber lighting, twinkly Christmas lights, carols playing softly, friendly vibes.

French champagne received today from friends at Amazon…thanks!

Holiday greetings from Pete and Madelyn Hammond.

Tatyana and I have fallen in love with these little amber-tinted table lamps at Smoke House.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Disney, 12.15) is a tip-top thing in many respects, a nicely baked, smoothly assembled serving of corporate-brand entertainment that millions upon millions of Star Wars nerds and American families are going to lap up like starving puppy dogs. It’s not a bad film, fast and fleet and well-layered and handsome to boot.

I felt it was too long, for sure (152 minutes), and a little meandering, but I found it reasonably okay. I wasn’t irritated or annoyed. I was genuinely intrigued from time to time.

But Jedi is still (and this really can’t be said often enough) a corporate-stamped, carefully calibrated Disney entertainment, made for the pudgies and the schmudgies, the passives and the 13-year-olds and the obsessives and the fatties and the hordes of middle-aged, T-shirt-wearing, sneaker-wearing bulkies and their families. And aging Empire devotees like myself.

Did I emerge from last night’s Disney lot theatre in a state of squealing falsetto flutteration? No, I didn’t, but, as I said in this morning’s post, I at least appreciated Jedi‘s attempt to deliver a middle-chapterish, plot-thickening, Empire Strikes Back-like sense of tension and gloomy atmosphere, at least in terms of Steve Yedlin‘s richly shaded cinematography, which I described this morning as “a noir palette crossed with Vermeer, and very reminiscent of Empire‘s lighting scheme.”

Yes, they shot Jedi on film. All hail those deep inky blacks.

I’ve been dreaming of another Empire-like Star Wars film for the last 37 years, and that’s a long-ass time to be wishin’ and hopin’ without result.

I disagree with an assertion by Variety‘s Peter Debruge that despite it being entertaining, The Last Jedi may be “the longest and least essential chapter in the series,” that it “extends the franchise without changing anything fundamental,” and that nerds “could skip this installment and show up for Episode IX” — which J.J. Abrams is writing now — “without experiencing the slightest confusion as to what happened in the interim.”

Okay, I don’t strongly disagree with these statements, but Jedi at least makes Mark Hamill‘s grizzled Luke Skywalker seem like a fairly cool guy again. And it does introduce two or three new animal species (fucking porgs plus some galloping, racehorse-like, camel-coated, lion-like beasties plus…you don’t want to know). And it does introduce the idea of sending a substitute “presence” to fight a crucial battle when you’d rather not do it yourself. And it does introduce the concept of an entire planet devoted to Las Vegas-styled diversions for the wealthy.

Daisy Ridley may not have known who Cary Grant was two or three years ago (she must have an inkling by now), but she’s cool and resolute as the thoroughly force-attuned Rey. I was glad she was around, although the movie strands her on for well over an hour on Skellig Michael while she verbals and fiddles around with Mark Hamill‘s grumpy, silver-bearded Luke (“I failed,” “We need you,” etc.)

Donald Trump statement on a robocall: “If Alabama elects liberal Democrat Doug Jones, all of our progress will be stopped cold.” For the love of God and for decency’s sake, yes…please!

Do I believe there’s a chance of Jones winning? I honestly don’t. The willingness of a reportedly sizable sector of the Alabama electorate to send a child molestor to the U.S. Senate…what to do except hang our heads in despair? Alabama being a sinkhole of bumblefuck depravity, there are probably too many Roy Moore-supporting yokels in that desperately poor state. I wish it were otherwise.

From a CBS Report posted earlier today: “Just one day ahead of Alabama’s special election, different polls are yielding widely different results for who will win the Senate seat: Democratic candidate Doug Jones or Republican candidate Roy Moore. An Emerson College poll released Monday has Moore holding out with a nine-point lead, while a Fox News poll also released Monday places Jones ahead of Moore by ten points. A CBS News poll from December 3 indicated that Moore was leading Jones, 49 percent to 43 percent.”

I’d love to re-watch mother! within the scheme of this clip — a fast-moving camera following Darren Aronfosky‘s crew as they shoot the action like there’s no tomorrow and no second chance. This way you’re freed from the claustrophobic feeling of being stuck in that big house and inside the heads of Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence, but without sacrificing the story or the intensity. You’d think that being a huge Aronofsky fan and something of a hotshot columnist I’d rate a free Bluray — nope. I just bought a streaming copy.

The world is dead, gone, rotten, ruined. Nothing to do but retreat into VR realms which are much more robust, dimensional and rich with possibility. Better to live in a gleaming digital universe, full of boundless adventure and blah-dee-blah, than to face the dystopian nothingness.

This is how your typical gamer lives today, of course. Reality is for sleeping, working, inhaling junk food, exploring states of sedentary squatfuckitude and avoiding news sites, organic-world relationships and most of all exercise. Because the real “living” is done within.

Steven Spielberg‘s adaptation of Ernest Cline‘s 2011 best-selling sci-fi novel is a fantasy about dying qnd retreating — a futuristic tale about Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a dystopian-era gamer who spends most of his time in the Oasis, which is where he “joins a hunt for valuable easter egg left by the game’s now-deceased creator” — Mark Rylance — “who intends to give away his entire fortune (including the rights to the Oasis) to the first person who can find the hidden object,” blah blah.

Ready Player One opens on 3.30.18. Put a bullet in my head.

2018 will launch in 24 days, and it’s likely to be even more volatile than ’17. Certainly in terms of the Mueller investigation of Trump-Russia collusion and quid pro quo corruption, which will be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Boiled down to basics, Trump and his hooligans plotted to favor Russia on various financial and diplomatic fronts in return for Russian financial assistance for Trump’s failing empire plus providing major assistance in the cyber-takedown of the Clinton campaign. This will naturally lead to impassioned, across-the-board calls for Trump’s impeachment, but that won’t happen unless the November midterms result in significant Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which, given the alt-right racial animus in Bumblefuck regions, is less likely than you might think.

Trump is facing three possible scenarios. One, he’ll decide not to run in 2020, a practical decision based on his pathetically low approval ratings plus his own lack of interest in wanting to endure a second four-year term. Two, he’ll be impeached in early ’19 and then decide to resign before a final Congressional vote, depending upon assurances from the feds that he won’t be prosecuted for treason. Or three, he’ll be impeached but not convicted a la Bill Clinton, and then will run out of dumb pride but suffer defeat due to a strong Democratic candidate.

In all three scenarios Trump is out as of 1.20.21, if not before.

The problem is that right now there’s no strong Democratic candidate, no heir apparent, no rock star. By the end of this year somebody with the chops and the nerve has to start testing the waters and coming into focus.

I would vote for Bernie Sanders in a New York minute, but I think his moment came and went in 2016. He would appeal to big-city multiculturals and progressives as well as a certain percentage of hinterland dumbshits, but low-information Southern blacks blew him off last year. I also suspect that people might feel a bit squeamish about electing a 79 year-old. (Same deal with Joe Biden, who’s a year younger than Bernie.)

I would also vote for the brilliant and ballsy Kamala Harris, currently the junior senator from California, but she needs to start conveying her intentions and making noise. Being a 50ish woman of mixed ethnicity, Harris would of course scare the wilies out of white working-class rurals and their girlfriends and wives, but these people are trash — the dregs of society. They’ll always, always vote for the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Harris might become a bolder, more exciting figure when and if she steps up to the plate. I nonetheless have a sense that swing voters may turn out to less than fully aroused by her candidacy; ditto Bernie and Joe. I have a feeling that someone else needs to emerge, and I mean no later than a year from now.

Dwayne Johnson would probably be better than Trump, but only somewhat. We could do better.

[WARNING TO SPOILER WHINERS: I decided not to bypass a certain fascinating plot point in Phantom Thread, and so at the very end of this review there are SPOILERISH observations. If you want to steer clear of the spoiler stuff, read the first 20 graphs and let it go at that. Don’t read the six-paragraph section titled THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. Do the first 20 and you’ll be fine.]

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (Focus Features, 12.25) is a first-rate parlor drama about some very exacting and demanding Type-A people — three, to be exact — going to war in mid 1950s England. Indoors, I mean. And very methodically.

It’s an absorbing, brilliantly refined drama about a bad marriage, which is to say a marriage made in hell, which is to say a marriage that should never have happened save for the influence of Satan. As with all marriages, it leads to a ghastly struggle of wills and finally, after the last futile drops of resistance are spent, to surrender on the part of the husband.

This hellish union happens because Daniel Day Lewis‘s Reynolds Woodcock, an elite London couturier (i.e., a fashion designer who makes and sells elegant clothing to rich clients), doesn’t know himself, and so he attracts and then entices Alma (Vicky Krieps), a young, off-pretty waitress, to be his lover and collaborator and eventually his wife. Woodcock thinks he’s “in love” but he really wants his dead mother to come back to life and take care of him.

The problem is that Woodcock, aided and abetted by Cyril (Lesley Manville), his Mrs. Danvers-like sister and business manager, is a control freak who doesn’t want anyone interrupting his work regimen, which is very strict and exacting. The other problem is that the willful and opinionated Alma wants what she wants. The final solution to this horrific power struggle is, of course, capitulation.

Phantom Thread is, no question, a very well-made PTA film, adult and dry and precisely measured. And decisive. I liked it enough to see it twice, and I enjoyed it a lot more than Anderson’s relentlessly hateful Inherent Vice, and I came to understand it better than The Master, which I loved for the eccentric chops but which finally left me with “what the hell was that all about besides a Scientology tale?”

And yet Phantom Thread is rather modest in scale. Two sets — a London townhouse and a country house — and three characters, and all of it about whether Alma will do Reynolds’ bidding or vice versa.

It’s very well composed, in short, and perfectly acted. But slow as molasses. Not a “date movie.” Not a thriller. Basically a perverse film about who gets to run the marriage. It’s an allegory about that. A little bit like Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! in a way, although in this scenario the wife isn’t roasted alive and an infant child isn’t passed around and devoured by a mob.

I’m an occasional jaywalker. I’ll alway use the crosswalk if it’s there, but if it’s more than a half block away or if I’m in a serious hurry, I’ll take my chances with the traffic. But when I jaywalk I always do it carefully, like a hawk or a deer. I never run out into traffic with a wing and a prayer with my fingers crossed. I spot the approaching gaps between cars and make my move, one lane at a time. I’ve been jaywalking since I was ten, and I’ve never had a close call. Not once has a car slammed on its brakes and dramatically squealed to a stop, and I’ve never had a “Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy” moment with a cab — not a single damn time.

All to say that I’m sick and tired of movie characters running out into traffic and always causing cars to screech to a halt or, worse, dodging the car like a ballet dancer and maybe rolling over the hood when the car has stopped eight inches shy of hitting him. This happens twice in The Post and I’m sick of it, sick of it, sick of it! From now on any movie that pulls this crap gets an automatic demerit. Same as when characters stare at their front-seat passenger as they’re driving — watch the damn road!

Speaking as one who’s had problems with Steven Spielberg films (or at least with the manipulative lather and chain-pullings that Spielberg has insinctually applied) for the entire 21st Century and a good part of the 20th, The Post, a smartly written, well-performed tale of how and why Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) decided to man up and a grow a pair in the thick of the Pentagon Papers episode of June 1971, is far and away my favorite Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan, which opened 19 and 1/2 years ago. Call it Spielberg’s best, certainly his least problematic, in two decades.

The critical verdict hasn’t been unanimous but I fell for it, and I mean all the way through and not just during the manipulative third act, which, if you have any stored-up sentiment about the glory days of 20th century print-and-ink journalism, will definitely melt you down. I knew I was being sold a Spielbergian bill of goods but I bought it anyway.  I gushed out some thoughts the day after, and a New York friend replied, “Calm down, Tonto…it’s very good but not great.”

The Post is a real “Spielberg film” in some ways, but it’s much smarter, better written (cheers to Liz Hannah and especially Josh Singer, who, I’m told, did a page-one rewrite of Hannah’s original spec draft), more persuasive and much more compellingly performed than Lincoln or Bridge of Spies or anything else Spielberg has made this century. 

As much as I tend to resist Spielbergian devices (including his frequent habit of leaning on a swelling John Williams score), this one caught me. I knew I was being sold a bill of goods, that I was being asked to submit to an emotional tale about good-guy journalists in the tradition of Newsfront, Deadline USA and Jack Webb’s -30-, but I bought it. 

There’s a third-act moment on the steps of the Supreme Court when Streep walks down into a crowd of gazing, admiring women…I’m not going to describe it any further but it really works, and (honestly?) it even made me choke up a bit. I’m naturally inclined to like any rigorously realistic film about good-guy journalists, but The Post delivered the strongest emotional experience I’ve had with any ’17 film since my initial Sundance viewing of Call Me By Your Name and my early September viewing of Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird.

This is why I think the Best Picture Oscar is going to come down to a choice between one of these three. I’m in the tank for Luca Guadagnino, of course, but if the Academy goes for The Post or Lady Bird, I will at least understand.

When it comes to passionate love stories, there are two laws or conditions that make them seem especially memorable or magnetic. One, the best love stories are those which don’t end happily. (The late Sydney Pollack pointed this out time and again.) And two, love stories seem more passionate if the lovers never get around to actually doing it.

I’m not about to invest hours of research, but I’ll guess that a majority of anyone’s favorite love stories, from Wuthering Heights to Brief Encounter to Once, have been unconsummated. I would further guess that a list of popular love affair movies that have included actual sex would probably be fairly short.

I dove into this because it hit me this afternoon that one of the craziest and most erotically charged on-screen love affairs, the one between James Stewart‘s Scotty Ferguson and Kim Novak‘s Judy Barton (a.k.a. Madeleine Elster) in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo, never included the nasty. They made out under the Muir redwoods and along the Pacific coast and yes, Scotty did undress Judy/Madelyn after she passed out following a drowning attempt, but they never got down.

Who else abstained? Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, of course in Brief Encounter, as well as Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep in that 1984 remake, Falling In Love. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (’57). Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson in Lost in Translation. Humphrey Bogart‘s Phillip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall‘s Vivian Rutledge in The Big Sleep. Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn in The Rainmaker (’56). Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. Michael Caine and Julie Waters in Educating Rita.

Others? Does it matter? I could go on and on.