After yesterday’s rave reviews from the Venice Film Festival, Regina King‘s One Night in Miami (Amazon) is suddenly looking like an award-season contender.

My immediate thought after reading Owen Gleiberman and David Rooney‘s reactions and especially Clayton Davis’s Oscar-race assessment was “cool, so where’s the mouth-watering trailer?”

For whatever reason King and Team Amazon decided to release a 65-second clip instead, and one that’s not all that stirring.

60% of it sidesteps the basic thrust of the film (four famous African-American cultural figures — Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown — hash out the the state of American blackness) in favor of a familiar-sounding boast by Eli Goree‘s Clay, crooning about his boxing victory over Sonny Liston and preening in front of a mirror. The remaining 40% is about Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s Malcolm explaining in a low-key way that the evening’s agenda isn’t about partying but self-reflection. Fine, but we wanted a serving of what the film is altogether — visually, rhetorically, spiritually.

Compare this to a 2015 trailer [below] for a 2015 Denver Center for the Performing Arts production of Kemp Powers‘ stage play. More comprehensive, crackling energy. I’m sorry but Hollywood Elsewhere feels let down. Please assemble a tasty, crafty teaser, guys. And what about a release date?

L.A. friendo who’s seen it: “Very well written, good for what it is, and Leslie Odom, Jr.’s performance as Sam Cooke is the keeper. But Clayton Davis isn’t doing Regina King’s film any favors by over-hyping it. It’s not the Second Coming.”

Brave New Brainslam. Me Want Subtitles. What The Fuck? Submit Or Quit.

Ava Duvernay’s Vanity Fair interview with Angela Davis is fairly softball. Mutual admiration society, etc. The basic idea is that the culture has finally caught up to where Davis was a half century ago, which is true. Davis was a serious Communist until the socialist world began to fall apart in the late ’80s.

The things I haven’t done are (a) gotten a tattoo, (b) sung karaoke (very proud of this), (c) skydived and (d) been on a cruise (a presumed allusion to gargantuan cruise ships)

Posted by Oliver Darcy (‪@oliverdarcy‬) on 9.6.20: “Family member flying out of California this evening just sent along these photos from the flight. She said passengers could smell the smoke from the wildfires in the cabin.” I’ve done all the rest.

Flapper

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During a month-old chat between myself and Jordan Ruimy, it was mentioned that Regina King‘s One Night in Miami had just been added to the Venice Film Festival lineup.

Based on a play by Kemp Powers, pic tells a fictionalized account of an actual February 1964 meeting that happened in a Miami Beach hotel room between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke, as the group celebrates Clay’s surprise title win over Sonny Liston.

“That’s the only title that turns me on,” I remarked. “It’ll rise or fall depending on Eli Goree‘s performance as Clay and Kingsley Ben Adir‘s as Malcolm X. And on the writing, of course.”

Now, to go by early reviews, One Night in Miami is sounding like a serious award-season hottie. Variety‘s Clayton Davis is calling it “the first bonafide major contender for the 2021 Oscars season.

“Setting the stage for a very long, unpredictable season, King’s emotionally charged and vibrant helming of this stage play adaptation is wonderfully restrained,” Davis raves. “[She] never lets the story get away from her. Not stepping into the director’s chair as a gimmick, she pays meticulous attention to the four men’s stories and the world she builds for the viewer.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “The appeal of a movie like this one isn’t just that we’re seeing different fabled worldviews pinging off each other. It’s that the characters, loosened up by a few drinks and the pleasure of their camaraderie, reveal who they are — not just what they think and feel, but how they think and feel it — in a way that even a lot of good biopics never quite find the room for. I love Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, but in all three hours of it we don’t see much of the casual, sitting-around-and-shooting-the-breeze Malcolm. Even if you’re as monumental a man as he was, that’s still a lot of what life is.

“All four burrow their way into the psyche of these legends, into their manners and contradictions and vulnerabilities. Goree nails but shrewdly understates the music of Clay’s voice, the insistence that could rise to a lordly bellow, Hodge invests Brown with a seen-it-all wary force, and Leslie Odom Jr., from Hamilton, makes Cooke a supreme paradox: smooth as silk on the surface, roiling underneath. The men we see before us are suffused with their destinies and, at the same time, they’re funny, earthy, relatable people who wear their egos on their sleeves.

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Most of the time I’m working hard at posting whatever seems right, and other times I’m floating around in various Paris memories. Sometimes it’s a struggle to focus on the here-and-now.

Tatiana, Gleb — rue Bretagne cafe, late May 2019.

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For thousands of years expectant parents never knew their baby’s gender until the moment of birth. Ultra-sound scans changed all that, of course, but the news was shared discreetly with parents and close friends.

No longer. Nowadays aspirational vulgarians are making a huge deal out of gender-reveal parties. The same immoderate types who throw self-aggrandizing birthday parties for themselves invite pallies to outdoor events in which their child’s gender is proclaimed like the winner of a regional beauty pageant, with all kinds of pomp and braggadocio, smoke-generating devices and fireworks displays, etc. Blue smoke for a boy, pink for a girl, champagne all around.

Yesterday morning a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device that was used during an outdoor gender-reveal party in Yucaipa’s El Dorado Ranch Park ignited a major blaze, which is currently burning over 8,600 acres in San Bernardino County.

What kind of a drooling moron ignites any kind of incendiary device for any purpose during a massive heat wave while fires are burning throughout California? If I was the deciding judge I would throw the book at the couple who did this. I would insist that both be put on a daily work detail in which they’d have to smash rocks with sledge hammers.

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As we all know, the denial impulse is always turned up to 11 among Trump supporters. No matter what he’s reportedly done or said or intends to do, no matter how sociopathic his fantasy-embracing, foam-at-the-mouth behavior, between 38% and 42% of the voting-age populace will stick with this monster, come hell or high water.

Yes, it’s a good and worthy thing that Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, the guy who broke the “Trump called soldiers losers and suckers” story, is more or less pledging that “more reporting [will] come out about this…more confirmation and new pieces of information in the coming days and weeks.”

But Trump Nation will never want to know. You can stand them up before the gates of hell, and they won’t back down because they believe that non-whites, protesting BLM wokesters and LGBTQs are slowly taking over this country, and so they’re defending the Alamo against the troops of General Santa Anna.

It’s the fence-sitting hinterlanders and dismayed Classic Republicans who’ve almost certainly been influenced by Goldberg’s piece.

Yesterday (9.5) Sasha Stone updated her Best Picture Oscar predictions. Within brackets I’ve placed a boldfaced HE next to the 13 titles I’m especially interested in or enthusiastic about. If you ask me (and what do I know?) I think it’ll come down to Mank, Nomadland, Hillbilly Elegy, Stillwater, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and West Side Story. What am I overlooking?

Tenet is a definite contender, I feel. Maybe, probably. On one hand an emotionally cool Chris Nolan head-trip movie can only travel so far with Academy and guild members, and yet it delivers action scenes that no one’s ever seen before and is quite the conceptual landmark in this sense. Elizabeth Debicki could land a Best Supporting Actress noms…yes, she’s that good. The Playlist‘s Greg Ellwood believes Tenet could land a Best Picture nom by way of industry gratitude. “If Tenet helps usher back moviegoing across the world it’s going to mean something to many members of the Academy,” he writes.

Prime Hotties (an HE designation — Sasha calls them “top tier”):

David Fincher‘s Mank (Netflix) / [HE]
Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix) / [HE]
Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World (Universal) / [HE]
Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland (Searchlight) / [HE]
Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story (Fox) / [HE]
Liesl Tommy‘s Respect (MGM)
Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24) / [HE]
Sofia Coppola‘s On the Rocks (A24) / [HE]
George Clooney‘s The Midnight Sky (Netflix)

High Potential, Major Threats, Who Knows? (Sasha calls ’em “high potential”)

Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater (Focus) / [HE]
Chris Nolan‘s Tenet (WB) / [HE]
Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix) / [HE]
Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins (Searchlight)
Francis Lee‘s Ammonite (Neon)
Michael Showalter‘s The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Searchlight)
Mike Mills‘ C’Mon, C’Mon (A24)
Dune (WB)
Aaron Schneider‘s Greyhound (Apple)
Kevin Macdonald‘s Prisoner 760 (BBC)
George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix) / [HE]
Lila Neugebauer‘s Red, White and Water (A24)
Lee Daniels‘ The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Paramount)
Ryan Murphy‘s The Prom (Netflix) / [HE]
Regina King‘s One Night in Miami (Amazon) / [HE]
Florian Zeller‘s The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)
Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch (Searchlight) / [HE]

As mentioned, the night before last (Friday, 9.4) I caught a 7 pm Tenet show at a Flagstaff Harkins plex. As the closing credits began to roll I got up and looked around and counted…oh, maybe 75 or 80 heads. Obviously a weak showing for an opening-weekend Friday, but under a pandemic mushroom cloud and especially with New York and Los Angeles theatres dark…not too bad.

Under normal conditions I would presume that the mind-blowing but challenging Tenet would pull in…what, $250 million domestic and maybe $750 million worldwide? (A decade ago Inception earned $292,576,195 domestic and $834,791,961 worldwide.) An exceptionally strong film might quintuple its first-weekend haul, and this is what Tenet will have to do stateside to make $100 million theatrically.

Current trade projections are that Tenet will generate a domestic tally of $20.2 million over the Labor Day weekend. And yet worldwide Chris Nolan‘s time-flipping thriller is approaching the $150 million mark. Around Europe and elsewhere Tenet brought in $78.3 million, bringing the global tally to $146.2 million.