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Re–shuffling of tweets posted an hour ago: Hugh Hefner peaked as a progressive cultural figure sometime between the late ‘50s and the mid ’60s. Hef’s brand was over by the mid to late ‘70s, but respect must be paid on the occasion of his passing. Hefner was one of the key agents (if not the key agent) in the sexual-attitude liberation of Eisenhower-era America. Playboy, Hef’s brainchild, arguably did more to loosen the strings on the straightjackets that were being worn (or more accurately submitted to) by middle-class American males than any other cultural factor, and that was no small feat. Hefner is dead, but his legend — intense, pipe-smoking, white-collar guy ignites a libidinal revolution — will never die. Only in America.

When I read that Sony Pictures Classics had acquired The Wife, which a few of us flipped over after seeing it in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, I naturally figured they’d platform it sometime in late December and then launch a Best Actress campaign for Glenn Close in January along with a modest commercial opening.

Well, they’re not doing that. SPC has decided to open The Wife sometime in 2018 (probably next fall), and in so doing has forfeited what could have been a legendary Best Actress Oscar contest between two grand dames, Close and Meryl Streep, who will almost certainly be nominated for her performance as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in The Post.

Close’s performance as Joan Castleman, an under-appreciated wife of a best-selling, somewhat imperious author (Jonathan Pryce), would be a Best Actress shoo-in, trust me. She could even become the front-runner as no one wants to give Streep another Oscar. A nomination, okay, but not a win. Three Oscars on Streep’s mantle are enough.

SPC’s decision to withdraw Close from this year’s Best Actress contest has to be one of the most disappointing award-season calls of all time. They’re shutting down one of the hottest Best Actress contenders of the year in order to…what, save money? To give a better shot to Annette Bening, whose performance as Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool has a dicey chance of being nominated, at best?

Close can win, guys! 70 years old and Oscar-nominated six times (The World According to Garp, The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Albert Nobbs) but never a win. That’s called a compelling narrative and a strong reason to vote for her. Who in the Academy is clamoring to give Streep her fourth Oscar? Frances McDormand, Saoirse Ronan and Sally Hawkins give award-calibre performances in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird and The Shape of Water, respectively, but Close would out-point them, and not just because of her age and history.

She’s playing a steely, classy, soft-spoken lady who’s bitten her tongue and quietly endured career frustration so that her husband can play the role of the big swaggering author. This is a character and a situation that taps into the feelings of God knows how many women out there, middle-aged and old, who’ve had to cope with an unwarranted lack of respect or opportunity or lower wages their whole lives.

This plus Close’s personal narrative would strongly favor a win, and yet SPC is turning tail and giving up without a fight. What Academy or guild member will feel big excitement about Close this time next year? Everyone will be saying “oh, now they’re finally releasing the film and pushing Glenn? Where were they last year?”

The biggest winner in this decision is I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie, who might be able to snag the fifth slot now.

Brett Morgen‘s Jane (National Geographic, 10.9), a doc about famed primatologist Jane Goodall, recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival. No offense but I didn’t think it mattered enough to squeeze it into my brutal schedule. I was going to see it eventually out of respect for Morgen, but now I’m suddenly revved. That’s because I’ve been invited to a special 10.9 Hollywood Bowl screening that will feature a live orchestral performance of Phillip Glass’s enchanting original score. The film is mostly composed of recently discovered footage of Goodall finding her way into the study of chimpanzees in the early ’60s. The footage was (a) shot in Gombe, Tanzania by her then-future husband Hugo van Lawick, and is (b) intercut with interviews of present-day Goodall, who’s now 83.

Between the Cinefamily allegations, the Devin Faraci scandal and now the Harry Knowles Alamo Drafthouse controversy, a deeply stamped association between jowly, bearded movie geeks and creepy-pervy sexual behavior has been embedded. And now fresh torches are burning down in Austin and all across the twitterverse, and a sizable crowd is suddenly thirsting for the blood of a carrot-haired fat man.

Knowles, founder of Ain’t It Cool News, was accused two days ago of two instances of inappropriate contact and asshole-ish groping in ’99 and ’00. His accuser, Jasmine Baker, presumably waited nearly two decades for the same reason that Bill Cosby‘s accusers said nothing for so many years. Knowles has “categorically” denied Baker’s claims and also denied them in a tweet on Saturday, calling the allegations “100% untrue.”

Obviously many are assuming otherwise, or are convinced of same. Three AICN regulars — Steve Prokopy (“Capone”), Eric Vespy (“Quint”) and an as-yet-unidentified contributor known as “Horrorella” — have quit Knowles’ site. Maybe they have information above and beyond what Baker has stated, or maybe they’re terrified of being branded as allies or sympathizers and for safety’s sake are looking for tall grass. I know that right now the Twitter wolves are describing Knowles as a serial assaulter; a few seem to regard him as a fiendish life form second only to Bluebeard and Ed Gein.

Has anyone besides Baker accused Knowles of sexual assault? (I’m just asking.) Maybe Knowles is guilty of all kinds of things. Maybe what’s happening now is the beginning of some kind of justified mass payback for God knows how many sexual abusers who’ve over-stepped their bounds for God knows how many years. Or maybe two incidents of (alleged) reprehensible behavior shouldn’t quite earn Knowles the same condemnation that has justifiably been thrown as Cosby.

“You think of that young kid, sneaking his way into a studio and manifesting his own destiny…it’s a pretty fantastic Hollywood story” — Leonardo DiCaprio quote from Susan Lacy‘s Spielberg, an HBO doc that will begin airing on Saturday, 10.7. He’s referring to an oft-told story about the teenaged Spielberg flim-flamming his way around the Universal lot in the mid ’60s, pretending to belong, sneaking around, etc.

Lacy talked to Spielberg for 30 hours while collecting insights and recollections from J.J. Abrams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Dreyfuss, Ralph Fiennes, Harrison Ford, David Geffen, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Holly Hunter, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ben Kingsley, Kathleen Kennedy, George Lucas, Liam Neeson, Martin Scorsese, Oprah Winfrey and Robert Zemeckis. 

Saying it again:  Spielberg’s ass has been steadily smooched by every Tom, Dick and Harry in this town for the last 40 years. What are the odds that Lacy will attempt even a slight variation on this?

Posted on 7.13.17:  “I’m not saying the point of Lacy’s doc is to warm up the atmosphere and fluff up the bed on behalf of Spielberg’s The Post (20th Century Fox, 12.22), but it certainly won’t hurt in this regard.

“Imagine if Lacy’s doc was given to brutal honesty and was titled Super-Hack, and was basically about selling the idea that throughout his life Spielberg’s default instinct has never been anything more profound than wanting to get a rise out of Joe Popcorn, and that aside from E.T., Schindler’s List, Lincoln and maybe four or five other exceptions to the rule, there’s nothing wrong with banging out commercial movies or being the most talented and financially successful hack in Hollywood history.

“From ’75 through ’82 Spielberg was regarded by everyone (myself included) as a consummate filmmaker. He seemed to have an extraordinary ability to make his movies jump through the scrim — stylistically vivid, often entertaining, frequently impressive and, of course, financially successful.

“Spielberg knows his craft like few others, but 85% to 90% of his films have mostly been free of any kind of singular passion or deep-rooted beliefs about human nature and how the world works or an underlying current of any kind. Spielberg is a Capra-esque suburban sentimentalist who believes in the goodness of American families, small-town neighborhoods, emotional moms, chubby kids, aliens cute and ferocious, happy endings, carefully choreographed action and wow-level spectacle.

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Jett Wells and Caitlin Bennett tied the knot around 4:25 pm today. Beautiful ceremony, warm weather, heartfelt vows, serene vibe, sniffles and hugs…the day couldn’t have been more note-perfect. Including the dinner, dessert, champagne for those who were drinking, etc. Congrats to the newlyweds and anyone else who had anything to do with this atmosphere of balm and cheer. Yes, thanks…another piece of wedding cake!

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Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s The Battles of the Sexes (opening today) is fine as far as it goes. And I’m not saying “fine” as a dodge. It really is an acceptable, good-enough thing.

During my one-and-only Telluride viewing I never once said to myself “this isn’t working” or “why isn’t this better?” I was engaged in the true story as far as it went. I never felt bored or irked. Okay, perhaps a little let down when I began to realize that it wouldn’t be delivering any big knockout moments and that it was basically an acceptable, competently made sports drama with five or six good scenes. But I was always “with” it. No checking the watch, no bathroom breaks.

I wasn’t knocked out by Emma Stone‘s performance as tennis great Billie Jean King, but neither was I disappointed. I believed her; she’s fine. Ditto Steve Carell‘s performance as the occasionally clownish, gambling-addicted Bobby Riggs. Honestly? The performance that touched me the most was Austin Stowell‘s as Billie Jean’s husband, Larry, who shows grace and kindness as he realizes that his marriage is on the downslope due to his wife’s emerging sexuality, and that there’s nothing to be done about it.

Nobody at Telluride was over the moon about Battle of the Sexes, and a few were underwhelmed. But nobody put it down either. There’s nothing wrong with a film that rates a solid 7.5 or thereabouts. I wish more films were as moderately satisfying. I am not damning with faint praise here. Not every worthwhile film has to be brilliant.

“mother! is Darren Aronofsky’s Stardust Memories, his vehemently exaggerated satire on the burdens of fame. And for anyone who thought that Woody Allen’s 1980 film looked a gift horse in the mouth, critiquing fame from within its comfortable confines, mother! tops it — it’s a cinematic version of an equine root canal. The films’ similarities in intent and differences in degree emerge in one aspect in particular: while Stardust Memories doesn’t exactly flatter Allen’s character, in Aronofsky’s film the artist — freed from direct identification with Aronofsky’s own persona — comes off as an ingratiating monster.

“mother! is the story of a mid-career male artist — a writer, played by Javier Bardem — whose conjoined qualities of celebrity and vanity give rise to a uniquely destructive power. For Aronofsky, the calculus is cruel: the adoring crowd is motivated by a greedy and cavalier selfishness that is sought, enabled, nourished, sustained, and encouraged by the artist himself. His film flirts with the ridiculous and sometimes falls into it — though to ridicule it, or Aronofsky, for doing so is to miss both the point and the pleasure.” — posted by The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody on 9.18.

I’m kind of fed up with traumatic recovery movies. Hard-knock tales about the resilience of the human spirit, I mean. Protagonists walloped and nearly destroyed by some godawful tragedy only to gradually fight their way back to a semblance of a normal life. 

And so I sat down to watch David Gordon Green and Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Stronger (Roadside, 9.22) with a guarded attitude. Here we fucking go again, I told myself — the story of real-life Boston bombing victim Jeff Bauman (played by Gyllenhaal) overcoming the loss of his legs and becoming a hero of perseverance. This is certainly what’s been sold by the trailer, which is full of rah-rah uplift.

Well, guess what? Stronger includes a few inspirational moments in the third act, but mostly it’s a darker, grimmer and more despairing thing than you might expect. It’s been shot and cut in an intimate, off-angled way, and it certainly doesn’t unfold in the usual manner, at least in terms of rousing third-act recovery music and scenes designed to tug at your heartstrings. And Gyllenhaal, it must be said, really drills into Bauman’s pain, shock and despair, and I mean in a Robert De Niro-as-Jake LaMotta sort of way.

Is this Gyllenhaal’s most award-worthy performance ever? That’s a tough call for a guy who’s slammed it out of the park four or five times over the last dozen years (Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, Nightcrawler, Demolition, Nocturnal Animals) but I honestly think it might be.

Augmented by some first-rate CG that totally convinces you that his legs are truly absent, Gyllenhaal’s Bauman is certainly more intense and blistering than Gary Oldman‘s Winston Churchill, I can tell you that. And I really admire that he never seems to be trying to charm the audience into liking him. That’s partly an aspect of John Pollono‘s script, which is based on “Stronger,” a personal recollection book by Bauman and Bret Witter, but it also comes from Gyllenhaal’s bravery.  

The overall emphasis is a lot more on “fuck me” and “this really sucks” than “I not only have the strength to improve my life and make things better all around, but I will make you, the popcorn-munching audience member, feel better about your own life in the bargain.”

Tatiana Maslany earns respect and points as Erin Hurley, Bauman’s girlfriend who later became his wife.

Maslany is not…how can I put this?…she’s not exactly my idea of an actress I’d like to hang with for long periods of time or, you know, have a couple of drinks with or whatever, and she’s certainly not the birds-of-a-feather equal of Gyllenhaal in terms of basic attractiveness, but she  knows how to make difficult situations and emotions play in relatable dramatic terms. (Last February’s announcement that Bauman and Hurley intend to divorce is ignored by the film.)

The degree to which Stronger is not a formula recovery flick can’t be over-emphasized. The trailer makes it seem like an uplift thing but the trailer lies.

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I’ve chatted with Alicia Vikander at a couple of social events. She’s a fine actress (loved her to death in Anna Karenina and Ex Machina) but she’s no more of a muscular, martial-arts badass than Angelina Jolie was when she made Salt. Like Jolie, Vikander is wirey and slender and on the petite side. Unlike Gal Gadot or Gina Carano, she’s no one’s idea of an Olympian, Amazonian badass. So that’s an instant “no sale” on her Tomb Raider, which will on 3.16.18.

I am Yul Brynner‘s Ramses, standing in my gleaming blue-and-white chariot and holding three golden arrows above my head as I attempt to rouse the fighting spirit of the Egyptian army: “Death to Tomb Raider! Death to the executives who pushed this through the Warner Bros. bureaucracy! Death to any and all attempts to make super-muscular action heroes out of 110-pound actresses whom I could personally take with one hand tied behind my back!”

I suffered through a few recurring-theme nightmares in my early childhood. Gorillas, drowning in quicksand, boxer dog chefs walking around on their hind legs and wielding carving knives, frying in the electric chair. But none of these generated the feelings of dread and terror that I developed in my teens and 20s over the prospect of a blue-collar, wage-earning life.

For many years I was absolutely horrified by the idea of having to get up at 6 am and report to work by 8 am or earlier, and being stuck with a physically demanding manual-labor job, especially in cold weather. My father was an advertising guy who always wore a suit. He commuted on a train and was never expected at the office before 9 or 9:30 am. That, to me, was a civilized, managable approach to work and earning a salary. Grunt-level blue-collar work always struck me as a brutal, punishing activity — the kind of work that was guaranteed to make you feel miserable and frustrated and drive you to drink in your off-hours.

I was stuck with miserable jobs in my late teens and early to mid 20s (working for a furniture company, driving a delivery truck for a lumber yard, chain-link fence, tree surgery). I was finally freed from that treadmill when I broke into New York journalism in the late ’70s. If I’d never broken out of that blue-collar cycle…I don’t want to think about it. But it would’ve been awful.

On 11.21 Kino Classics will release a Bluray of David O. Selznick and John Cromwell‘s Since You Went Away (’44), a domestic wartime drama that runs nearly three hours. The Bluray contains the 177–minute roadshow version while Wikipedia lists a general release version running 172 minutes.

I can watch The Best Years of Our Lives over and over, but I can’t invest in watching a nearly-three-hour woman’s film starring Claudette Colbert. She was mildly alluring in the ’30s (Cleopatra, It Happened One Night, Midnight) but something intensely stodgy and conservative overtook her in the ’40s. Plus she was a Republican and a Reagan supporter, and she had a short neck.

Since You Went Away is famous for a sentimental railway station goodbye scene between costars Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker, who’d been married for four or five years at the time of filming. But Jones had been having an affair with Selznick since ’43, and the couple was going through a bitter divorce; they parted soon after Since You Went Away was completed. The farewell scene was parodied in Airplane! (’80 — clip after the jump)

The father of actor James Cromwell, the elder Cromwell was a kind of house director who churned out audience movies in the ’30s and ’40s (The Prisoner of Zenda, In Name only, Abe Lincoln in Illinois) before shifting into film noir (Dead Reckoning, The Racket). The poor guy was blacklisted from ’51 through ’58. His last significant film was The Goddess (’58), which was thought to be based on the unhappy personal life on Marilyn Monroe.

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