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Morgan Freeman deserves to be the the next recipient of the SAG Life Achievement Award. The trophy will be presented at the 24th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on 1.21.18. But when I think of Freeman I think “immaculate actor, major brand, beautiful voice but for the last 17 years has mostly taken paycheck work.” How lucky or choosy has Freeman been in terms of scoring good roles in top-tier or reasonably decent films? Starting with his breakout role in Street Smart (’87), Freeman has a total of ten films on his serious honor roster: Clean and Sober, Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, Unforgiven, The Shawshank Redemption, Se7en, Amistad, Million Dollar Baby (Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor), The Bucket List (okay, a so-so film but Freeman was first-rate) and Invictus. Eleven films out of…what, 100 or thereabouts? And most of them in the ’90s. But he did his best in what he was able to grab. And Freeman’s pre-Street Smart perfs were distinctive, particularly his angry-convict scene with Robert Redford in Brubaker.

The 20th anniversary of There’s Something About Mary is 11 months off, but Fox Movie Night’s James Finn and Schawn Belston are celebrating it next week (8.29) all the same. Ben Stiller told the Farrelly brothers that he didn’t like the hair gel scene — thought it was unbelievable and therefore not funny. I felt the same way. The audience was roaring with laughter as I sat in my seat like a sphinx. The only Mary scene I really laughed at was Matt Dillon‘s with the dog.

Bobby and Peter Farrelly were touched by lightning for seven years — from Dumber and Dumber to Me, Myself and Irene. Their 21st Century track record has been spotty, but I’ll never back off in my admiration for 2012’s The Three Stooges. During a late ’90s phone interview I asked for their opinion of Ernst Lubitsch, and without missing a beat one of them said “who?” That’s confidence, that’s fearlessness.

Fox Movie Night used to screen classic studio-era films (All About Eve, The Ow-Box Incident), but nostalgia standards are changing. People in their late 30s and early 40s regard late ’90s films as kind of old-timey, ’80s films as moldy and crusty and ’70s and ’60s films as artifacts from the Iron Age.

Christian Bale as Captain Joseph Blocker in Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles, which will premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. Set in 1892, pic is about Blocker and some other soldiers (Jesse Plemons, Ben Foster, Timothee Chalamet) escorting a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back to his tribal lands. Could Bale be playing the great-grandfather of Dan Blocker, who starred in NBC’s Bonanza several decades hence, or is he just another rugged individualist given to blocking his emotions?

Christian Bale in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles.

I was no fan of Andrew Dosunmu‘s Where Is Kyra? after catching it during Sundance ’17. I called it “more or less a bust…a funereal quicksand piece about an unemployed middle-aged woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) in a terrible financial jam, and about a relationship she has with a fellow down-and-outer (Keifer Sutherland). It’s a carefully calibrated, well-acted, oppressive gloomhead flick that feels like it’s happening inside a coffin or crypt. This is Dosunmu’s deliberate strategy, of course, but the end-of-the-road, my-life-is-over vibe is primarily manifested by the inky, mineshaft palette of dp Bradford Young — HE’s least favorite cinematographer by a country mile.”

Michelle Pfeiffer, Keifer Sutherland in Where Is Kyra?.

I don’t know anything but this morning a reader confided the following: “A producer [has] told me that Where Is Kyra? will be a 2018 release, most likely sometime first quarter although that’s not set in stone yet. But it will definitely be 2018 sometime, with no 2017 awards qualifying date for Pfeiffer. I know you didn’t like it overall, but it got great reviews from Variety, TimeOut New York, IndieWire and others, and Pfeiffer got rave reviews. It has 78% on RT so far, so it’s weird they’d just dump it in January or February. I think it at least deserves a December release for Pfeiffer. I doubt she would have gotten further than an Indie Spirit nom, but this sounds like a great showcase for her. Too bad.”

From Owen Gleiberman‘s latest Variety essay, “Healthy Tomatoes? The Danger of Film Critics Speaking as One,” posted this morning: “Remember when film critics were obsolete? When we’d lost our swagger, our sway, our influence? When it seemed like the entire world had gone critic-proof, because we just didn’t matter anymore?

“It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, film critics attained Peak Irrelevance, but it’s starting to seem like an eon ago, because this summer a chorus of people — moviegoers, film-industry executives, critics themselves — have been singing a very different tune. It’s called: We’re back! Critics, in case you hadn’t heard, have emerged from the dark cave of our obsolescence and are once again bringing the news, keeping the studios in check, making the world safe for bad movies to die the grisly box-office death they deserve. Look out, Emoji Movie! We’re coming at you with a pitchfork.

“As someone with a vested interest in thinking that critics matter, I’d argue that our influence never totally went away. There was certainly a perception that it did, a feeling that went hand in hand with the notion that we were elitist art-head snobs who stood on the other side of a divide from the mainstream audience. Film critics have been called out for elitism ever since there were movies, but in an age when mega-budget franchise filmmaking had become a literal universe, one that dwarfs everything around it (including critics), that hostility reached a new pitch of jaded dismissal.”

HE response to Gleiberman: “I’m glad critics are back also, but there’s still an elite cadre of ivory-tower snobs who have done and are continuing to do their level best to convince Average Joe ticket-buyers to be highly suspicious of critical opinion. One result is that while every critic on RT loved Logan Lucky, for the most part Joe & Jane Popcorn stayed away in droves. A famous Samuel Goldwyn‘s statement has been quoted a million times and has never stopped being true. “If people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop ’em.”

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After 91 and 1/2 years, the feisty and flinty Jerry Lewis is gone. The indisputable king of comedy during the Martin & Lewis heyday of the early to mid ’50s (although their partnership actually began in Atlantic City in ’46), and a boldly experimental avant-garde comedic auteur from the late ’50s to late ’60s. And a truly delicious prick of a human being when he got older, and oh, how I loved him for that. Refusing to suffer fools can be a dicey thing when you’re younger and have to get along, but it’s a blessing when you’re an old fart with money in the bank.

I know that Lewis was one of my first impersonations when I was a kid….”Hey, ladeeeeeee!” (I performed this for director Penelope Spheeris way back when, and while she could’ve gone “uh-huh” she said “hey, that’s pretty good!”)

If you were born in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s and therefore haven’t a clue who Jerry Lewis was, please, please consider reading Shawn Levy’s “The King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis,” which I’ve long regarded as the best researched, the best written and probably the most honest portrait of the occasionally contentious Lewis. If you get hold of a paperback or Kindle copy, find the passages to do with Bob Crane — hair-raising. Or the business about Levy and Lewis in the epilogue, which, Levy says, “were so infamous that I’m told Marty Short spent an evening entertaining Tom Hanks and Paul Reiser at dinner doing impressions of Jerry from it.”

You also have to read Nick Tosches‘ rhapsodic, utterly brilliant “Dino: Living High In the Dirty Business of Dreams.”

I can’t sit here on a Sunday morning and tap out some brilliant, all-knowing, heart-touching essay on what a huge electrical energy force Lewis was for 20 years in the middle of the 20th Century. So I’m just going to paste some choice HE posts, starting with an excerpt from my one and only interview with the guy at the Stein Erickson hotel during the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and on through to my last in-person encounter when Lewis did a q & a at the Aero theatre to promote Daniel Noah’s Max Rose.

Posted on 5.1.13: “Jerry Lewis has long been regarded as a difficult man, but listen to him at this recent Tribeca Film Festival appearance. He’s 87 and yet he seems more engaged and feisty and crackling than the vast majority of his contemporaries. There’s something about old show-business buzzards. The scrappy survival instincts that helped them make it when young are the same qualities that keep them sharp in their doddering years. You don’t have to be a prick to be intellectually focused and alert (the elegant Norman Lloyd is in his late 90s and a beautiful man to speak with) but if given a choice between a state of advanced vegetation and being a Jerry Lewis type of old guy, I’d definitely go with the latter. I suspect that Lewis biographer Shawn Levy will go ‘hmmm’ when he reads this.”

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Early this morning I re-read a 7.24.16 piece that riffed on Michael Moore‘s “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win,” and the nightmare of those days suddenly rushed back in. The debates hadn’t happened and the election itself wouldn’t be for another three and a half months, and somehow Moore knew. And as I read his words along with my own, long-buried feelings of irritation and even loathing for Hillary Clinton began to fill my chest. She orchestrated it all. She brought hell into our lives.

The graying and complacent Democrats and centrists who nominated Clinton and then ignored everything that was happening out there, brushing aside all of the fervor and passion churned up by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders…these people are the authors of our present nightmare. I get the willies when I re-live it. I didn’t realize it at first, but the summer of ’16 was a truly terrible period in American history. Not as terrible as now but close.

“I’ve been split on Hillary Clinton since she vanquished Bernie Sanders,” I began. “Half of me accepts that I have to vote for her sensible, pragmatic, Obama-continuing wonkery (along with her hawkish foreign policy instincts), and the other half can’t stand her — her cautious sidestepping of the Bernie revolution, that cackle, the Wall Street ties, the testy substitute-teacher vibe, her liberal-leaning but weather-vane-ish political values, the just-revealed DNC connivance against Bernie, the eye bags, the eff-you to the Berners with her selection of Tim Kaine, her compulsively secretive nature.”

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There are three things about Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Warner Bros., probably sometime in late November or December) that scare…okay, concern me. I didn’t moan or roll my eyes but I did go “hmmm” when I read about them. My brow was furrowed, and I say this with all due respect for Eastwood’s celebrated fast-shoot, fast-cut approach to making features.

Worry #1: Eastwood’s decision to cast the real-life heroes of the 2015 train attack in France — Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone — as themselves. You know that’s a dicey call, and that the best we can expect from these guys will be “not bad but somewhat self-conscious” performances. You know their best won’t be good enough. No one will make a big deal about it, but deep down people will be muttering.

Worry #2: The decision to tell the story of the friendship of these guys when they were kids. There’s no way of exaggerating how little I care about this aspect. Didn’t I just finish explaining that back-stories and origin stories are a pain in the ass, and that all a really good film needs is a gripping capture of the way things really are when stuff starts to happen?

Worry #3: The dopey-sounding title. Firstly the “The” is completely unnecessary. Delmer Daves‘ 3:10 to Yuma (’57) and James Mangold‘s 2007 remake, both based on a 1953 Elmore Leonard short story, didn’t see the need. Secondly, only military people use military time; everyone else uses the common colloquial. The title — hello? — should obviously be 3:17 to Paris. Keep it straight, simple.

The 15:17 to Paris was announced in April, and began shooting last month. It’s already damn near close to wrapping.

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With Justin Chadwick‘s Tulip Fever (Weinstein Co., 9.1) finally opening after nearly three years of test screenings, re-edits and release-date shifts, Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan has attributed the shoddy treatment to the 17th Century historical drama being a tweener — i.e., neither award-worthy nor juicy enough.

If you ask me the avoidance is due to three factors: (1) the word “tulip” in the title, which implies a certain painterly stillness or lack of narrative propulsion, (2) the casting of runt-sized Dane DeHaan as Alicia Vikander‘s romantic suitor and (3) Christoph Waltz as her cuckolded husband. Nobody wants to hang with those guys in this context…nobody.

From “Skeptical, A Certain Distance,” posted on 4.29.16:

“You can tell Tulip Fever is a carefully honed, well-crafted thing. The cinematography by Eigl Bryld (In Bruges) is obviously handsome; ditto the production design. It’s probably safe to assume that the screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on a book by Deborah Moggach, will have a certain rhyme.

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A day after HE’s Oscar Spitball Best Picture chart appeared, I was told that Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel (Amazon, 12.1) is allegedly “great.” Until then my impression had been that Kate Winslet‘s performance, which New York Film Festival honcho Kent Jones has called “startlingly brave” and “powerhouse,” would be the big magnet. But maybe there’s more to it. We all process festival hyperbole with a grain of salt, but now I’m thinking that Jones description of Wonder Wheel — “a bracing and truly surprising movie experience” — might be on the up-and-up.

Wonder Wheel will close the NYFF on Sunday, 10.15, or six weeks before Amazon’s nationwide opening. My NYFF press pass is good but I can’t afford to be in NYC for more than a couple of days following Jett’s 9.22 wedding — maybe a concurrent LA screening?

What does Tony Schwartz know, and how does he know it? The ghostwriter of “Trump: The Art of the Deal” and longtime bete noire of the 45th President, tweeted on Wednesday that President Trump “is going to resign and declare victory before Mueller and Congress leave him no choice…the circle is closing at blinding speed…Trump’s presidency is effectively over…would be amazed if he survives till end of the year…more likely resigns by fall, if not sooner.” Isn’t that a little optimistic? At best Trump is gone in 2019, and only if the Democrats win bigtime in both chambers in ’18, and who knows if that’s assured?

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More than a few writers and publications have posted articles about the 40th anniversary of Elvis Presley‘s death (8.16.77). Of all the Presley milestones worth pondering, the least is surely the poor man’s death from the combination of an enlarged heart and having 14 drugs in his system. Want a great Elvis anniversary? How about September 9th, or the 1956 date of Presley’s first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show — a telecast seen by 60 million viewers or 82.6% of the TV audience. Or July 5th, the day in 1954 when Presley and Sun Records honcho Sam Phillips, after some false starts, happened upon the right Elvis sound — quasi-rockabilly by way of white channeling of what was then regarded as “black” music, but with a frisky, jumpin’-and-shufflin’ tempo. Or simply EP’s birthday — 1.8.35. Two days ago Variety‘s Joe Leydon listed Presley’s “10 Greatest Films.” First of all Presley never made any films that could be called “great.” But the best of the bunch were obviously King Creole, Flaming Star, Jailhouse Rock, Loving You, Love Me Tender and Wild in the Country. I’m not counting the concert films, but feel free.