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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.

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[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.

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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.

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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.

The headline sounds a tad cynical but I mean it. Variety‘s Guy Lodge is right on top of what’s happening right now, and hats off for his being first. Because Dunkirk, a long-presumed Best Picture nominee, suddenly seems to be faltering and wobbly-kneed, and the great-guns assumption that Gary Oldman‘s broadly actorish performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour is locked to win is suddenly in question. It may be, in fact, that Oldman isn’t the front-runner any more, and that Call Me By Your Name‘s Timothy Chalamet might be elbowing him aside. Maybe.

That, at least, is what Lodge seems to be suggesting and what HE’s insect-antennae are conveying as we speak.

Today was the day I realized that Dunkirk, which almost everyone has had at the top of their Best Picture roster since last July, isn’t happening any more. The complaint about Dunkirk lacking a traditional arc and not delivering anything in the way of affecting mainstream emotion has always been out there, but now the critics aren’t standing up for it either. It may eventually be Best Picture-nominated (it seems inconceivable, still, that the Academy would brush it aside in this respect) but winning is out of the question. That much is certain, and what a shock to confront this.

Because in the back of my mind I’ve always been saying, “How can a film like Dunkirk, a film that delivers such amazing scope and intensity and you-are-there realism, and which swan-dives so grandly and decisively into a groundbreaking, time-flipping narrative approach…voters will have to come back to it in the end. It’s too powerful, too overwhelming to be dismissed.” Now I’m starting to realize that the Dunkirk current isn’t there, and that perhaps it never was.

It also hit me today that Chalamet is arguably more of a Best Actor frontrunner than Oldman, at least among the somewhat younger and more progressive, alive-in-the-present-tense crowd. The older, better-safe-than-sorry contingent has been hearing “Oldman, Oldman, Oldman” for several weeks now, but Chalamet has won Best Actor trophies with the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and that really means something. At the very least the Best Actor situation is now a horse race.

Lodge appears to believe that Chalamet is to the 2017 Best Actor race what Isabelle Huppert was to the 2016 Best Actress race — the most frequently awarded contender before Emma Stone came along and took the Best Actress Oscar. Maybe so, but at least things are suddenly more interesting.

Lodge responds: “Not saying that at all — just that the faction most inclined to vote for Oldman, as with Emma Stone last year, hasn’t chimed in yet.”

Luca Guadagnino‘s Call My By Your Name was the big winner in today’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards, taking the Best Picture trophy, splitting the Best Director trophy between Guadagnino and The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro, and with Timothee Chalamet taking the Best Actor prize. On top of which The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe won LAFCA’s Best Supporting Actor prize, and Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf won the Best Supporting Actress trophy.

Call Me By Your Name has now won two Best Picture trophies (LAFCA, Gotham Awards), and is likely to win the same trophy from the 2018 Spirit Awards, which has nominated Guadagnino’s film for six awards. Chalamet has won Best Actor from both LAFCA and the New York Film Critics Circle, plus a Breakthrough Actor award from the Gothams. Dafoe seems all but unstoppable with Supporting Actor trophies from LAFCA, NYFCC and the National Board of Review. Metcalf has taken the Best Supporting Actress awards from LAFCA and the National Board Of Review.

Earlier: I was talking to a friend last night about this morning’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association voting, and he went “Yeah, well.” What, you don’t think they’re influential or at least interesting? “I don’t know that anyone cares all that much,” he replied. “They always seem to go with off-the-wall picks. We’ll see.”

Talk about flaky — the LAFCA website has a LATEST NEWS crawl on the top, and one of the headlines says “LAFCA names Moonlight as Best Film of 2016.”

10:57 am: They’re voting right now, the bagel-and-cream cheese-and-onions gang, and the first winner is…

11:13 am: Best Cinematography: Dan Laustsen, The Shape of Water. (Runner-up: Roger Deakins, Blade Runner 2049.) HE comment: What about Dunkirk‘s Hoyte von Hoytema?

11:25 am: Best Music/Score: Johnny Greenwood, Phantom Thread. (Runner-up: Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water.) HE comment: 1st runner-up support for Desplat plus dp Dan Lausten‘s win obviously suggests strong current for The Shape of Water. Will Guillermo’s erotic-aquatic fable take the Best Picture prize?

11:40 am: Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe‘s harried, exasperated but altogether decent motel manager in Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project. Runner-up: Sam Rockwell‘s effed-up deputy sheriff in in Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri. HE comment: Okay, fine.

11:51 am: Best Production Design: Blade Runner 2049‘s Dennis Gassner. Runner-up: The Shape Of Water‘s Paul D. Austerberry. Excerpt from my BR49 review: “Deakins has done his usual first-rate job here and everyone knows he’s well past due, but the real whoa-level work is by production designer Dennis Gassner and supervising art director Paul Inglis.” HE comment: Another Shape of Water runner-up vote! Clearly there’s a hardcore contingent that will vote for Shape of Water in any category, come hell or high water.

12:01 pm: Best Editing award goes to Dunkirk‘s Lee Smith. Runner-up: I, Tonya‘s Tatiana S. Riegel.

12:06 pm: Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf win LAFCA’s Best Supporting Actress award. Runner-up: Mudbound‘s Mary J. Blige.

12:17 pm: Winner of LAFCA’s Documentary/Nonfiction award is Agnes Varda and JR’s Faces Places. Runner-up: Brent Morgen‘s Jane, a doc about chimpanzeetarian Jane Goodall, which had its big L.A. premiere at the Hollywood Bowl.

[Brunch break] [HE nap break]

2:09 pm: For LAFCA’s Foreign Language Film award, a tie between Robin Campillo‘s BPM (Beats per Minute) and Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s utterly brilliant Loveless. LAFCA’s animated feature award went to The Breadwinner and not Disney’s Coco. The Best Screenplay award was won by Jordan Peele‘s Get Out. Runner-up: Martin McDonagh‘s screenplay for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.

3:15 pm: LAFCA’s Best Picture of 2017 is Luca Guadagnino‘s Call me By Your Name — all is forgiven, no more bagel and cream cheese jokes until next year. Runner-up: The Florida Project. The Best Director Award is a tie between CMBYN‘s Luca Guadagnino and The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro. Best Actor is CMBYN‘s Timothee Chalamet (runner-up: James Franco, The Disaster Artist). The Best Actress award has gone to The Shape of Water‘s Sally Hawkins

Earlier: If I was there voting with Bob Strauss, Myron Meisel, John Powers and the rest of them, I would toast my bagel just so, going for a nice light brown color. Then I’d add a schmear of Philadelphia 1/3 Less Fat Cream Cheese, a few slim rings of red onion, a thin slice of lox, some diced Roman tomatoes.

What kind of oddball, left-field choices will the Los Angeles Film Critics Association share tomorrow (i.e., Sunday, 12.3)? If past award picks are any guide LAFCA will probably vote for someone or something of an eccentric cast. If nothing else LAFCA members will want to live up to their well-earned reputation as the quirkiest and foodiest of all the major critic groups.

As noted last year, LAFCA is the only prestigious film critic group that notoriously interrupts its voting process halfway through so the members can chow down on toasted bagels, scrambled eggs, potato salad, lox, cream cheese, cole slaw and red onions. Bon appetit! But LAFCA members have another reputation to live up to, and that is a determination to choose way outside the realm of semi-conventional, emotionally-centered thinking.

A nominee or two, I mean, that will win an award because of some kind of arbitrary, socially progressive, possibly Jen Yamato-endorsed notion or belief scheme of the moment. A choice, I mean, that will feel like the right kind of politically correct fulfillment or projection — a choice that will point the way and especially defy the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby-ites. Has LAFCA’s eccentricity reached a point of self-parody? Could some members be fearful of letting people down if they don’t give an award to at least a couple of unlikely contenders? Sure seems that way.

Last year, for example, the Yamato cabal brought about a decision to give the org’s Best Supporting Actress award to Certain Women‘s Lily Gladstone, mainly because Gladstone was playing a lesbian Native American (two p.c. check marks) who was obsessively in love with Kristen Stewart. Another what-the-eff was LAFCA handing its Best Actor award to Adam Driver for his portrayal of a quiet, poetry-loving bus driver in Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson. Driver had delivered a gentle, honestly spiritual vibe, but the main reason that LAFCA voted for him was that they were psychologically and constitutionally incapable of voting for Manchester By The Sea‘s Casey Affleck, the front-runner by a country mile.

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There’s no question that certain currents in my life have been neurotic or obsessive. Perhaps the strongest neurotic theme has been a lifelong tendency (and I mean going back to my early childhood) to feel greater emotional attachments to movies and movie stars than to my own family members. Aside from my mother, whom I loved start to finish, I’ve always thought of my family relationships as unremarkable, and at times trying and downish. Certainly when it came to my father, brother and sister.

I first realized this when my father, with whom I had a conflicted relationship, passed in June 2008. (Here’s what I wrote the next day.) I realized then and there that I felt much sadder after the passing of Cary Grant, whom I’d long regarded as a kind of family member in a sense. I choked up when I heard about Grant’s passing on 11.29.86, and I remember feeling a pall in my soul for a day or two after. All my life he’d been my pal, my debonair uncle, my role model, a guy I’d always admired.

Snapped outside my parents’ home in Wilton, Connecticut, sometime around ’85.

Off-screen Grant was no day at the beach. I’d read that he could be a mood-swinger and a neurotic prick on a certain level, but that wouldn’t have dimmed my feelings if I’d tasted this first-hand. I felt a blood bond with the guy.

But when I heard about my dad’s death 22 years later (on 6.20.08) I felt…well, not a great deal. A little misty but only that. I felt relief for the poor guy, as he’d been seriously unhappy with the deteriorating quality of his life over the previous two or three years. And I felt a bit glum, of course, about his testy, often crabby manner when I was a kid, and how he’d inspired me to join Al Anon in the mid ’90s, but also how he’d inspired me to take a crack at writing and, later on, to embrace sobriety. Jim Wells was a fine, honorable fellow whom I admired and respected when I began to find myself in my mid 20s, but Cary Grant was kin.

I managed to shake Grant’s hand in early ’84 during an Academy after-party for George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. Too many people were crowding around so a couple of pleasantries was the sum of our exchange. There was so much I could’ve said and shared.

I’m an odd duck and I know it, and my weirdnesses are my own. I’m presuming that few out there have felt a greater emotional alliance with this or that actor or musician or politician, even, than he/she felt for someone of their own blood or tribe. But if anyone has, please share.

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I don’t know what’s behind Bryan Singer‘s absence from the London-based Bohemian Rhapsody shoot over the last week or so, but I strongly suspect that it’s not due to a “personal health matter,” which is how a spokesperson has explained the situation.

Rhapsody, which will tell the saga of Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) and Queen and which is already being eyed as a 2018 award-season hopeful, has been temporarily shuttered due to Singer’s diverted attention, according to a 20th Century Fox statement released Friday. The term “unexpected unavailability” was also used to explain Singer’s situation.

via GIPHY

The 52 year-old director reportedly hasn’t shown up since the end of the Thanksgiving holiday, or over the last five days. It’s obviously possible that some health issue is a factor, but something doesn’t sound or smell right. Something else seems to be going on. There are rumblings…who knows?

Variety has reported that “a representative for the director said the halt was due to a personal health matter concerning Bryan and his family,” and that Singer “hopes to get back to work on the film soon after the holidays.” Okay, here’s hoping.

Bohemian Rhapsody director Bryan Singer.

Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury.

It doesn’t matter to me if Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene, which is slated to open domestically on 3.30.18, goes out as a Weinstein Co. or Focus Features release. The movie’s the thang, not the distributor. (There’s no Weinstein Co. logo at the end of this trailer, but a Focus Features logo does appear.) Davis’s film is presumably a feminist slant on the New Testament legend, written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, with Rooney Mara playing the reformed harlot Mary Magdalene.

It’s also a slightly revisionist take with Jesus Christ, who died at age 33, being portrayed by a 43 year-old Joaquin Phoenix, who actually looks like he’s 54.

It’s fascinating to contemplate a scene in which Jesus and Mary Magdelene (Rooney Mara) are chatting on a hilly Italian coastline (pic was shot in Matera, the Puglia region, Napoli and Sicily) and looking out at the Mediterranean. On top of which you can’t hear the dialogue. I defy HE readers to tell me what Mara and Pheonix are saying to each other starting at the 56-second mark. Mara: “Pisahtla minnup-minnupah kaht?” Phoenix (at 1:00 minute mark): “Nuhnwah sinkdat bad pitnyah puhtohit.”

Costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Apostle Peter and Tahar Rahim as Judas Iscariot. Pic will probably be released on 3.30.18.

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