Race-track flicks are naturally about serious pro-level drivers and their vehicles. (Renegade fast-car movies are a different breed.) The most enjoyably immersive race-track flicks, in this order: Claude Lelouch‘s Rendezvous (not shot on a track but all the more thrilling for that), John Sturges and Steve McQueen‘s Le Mans (the failure of which marked the end of McQueen’s superstar phase), Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero, John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix, James Goldstone‘s Winning, Tony Scott‘s Days of Thunder, Ron Howard‘s Rush, the Fred Astaire race-car sequence in On The Beach.

Last weekend Joe and Jane Popcorn stood eyeball-to-eyeball with Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures and said the following: “You can’t keep Monsterverse-ing us with the same old Godzilla crap and expect lines around the block. We’re not going to sit for this stuff endlessly, on top of which your new Godzilla is at least a couple of tons heavier than the five-year-old Gareth Edwards version…the first flat-out obese monster in the history of motion pictures. We’re fat enough on our own, bruhs — we’d rather not be reminded of the obesity epidemic when we go to the movies.”

Yes, I’m kidding. Mostly. But Godzilla: King of the Monsters did under-perform last weekend.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “Godzilla: King of the Monsters didn’t have a roar quite as deafening as its franchise predecessors. The third entry in Warner Bros. and Legendary’s MonsterVerse opened with a middling $49 million at the domestic box office, a start well below 2014’s Godzilla ($93 million) and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island ($61 million).

“Like its series brethren, Godzilla’s umpteenth return to the big screen had a more promising start overseas, where it debuted with $130 million. Even so, that’s a potentially problematic drop in ticket sales for a movie that cost roughly $200 million to make. It also likely required a marketing spend in excess of $100 million.

This is a mildly cruddy kinescope of a 4.8.55 Person to Person segment in which the 47-year-old Edward R. Murrow interviewed Marilyn Monroe, who was then 28. She was staying at the Connecticut home of celebrity photographer and producer Milton Greene, who had photographed her many times and with whom she had formed a production company. Monroe’s appearance (along with Greene’s wife Amy) begins at 3:30.

Even though she’s “acting” (as anyone sitting for an on-camera interview would do) and particularly the inaccurate but well-known part of the less-than-robustly-intellectual blonde who nonetheless tries like hell, there’s something emotionally devastating about Monroe’s eyes, personality, manner, looks…the whole package.

Yes, this observation has been shared tens of millions of times but something extra is going on in this interview, I swear. Very political and practiced and polite, a sly sense of humor, but the delicate sensitivity and especially the vulnerability…God. The way she occasionally takes a beat to collect her thoughts, and sometimes speaks slowly and cautiously, drawing on a sufficient but less-than-vast vocabulary. Try not to succumb.

Wiki excerpt: “Greene’s work with Monroe (whom he first shot for a layout for Look in 1953) changed the course of his career. The two struck up a friendship and, when Monroe left Los Angeles to study acting with Lee Strasberg in New York City, she stayed with Greene, his wife Amy and young son Joshua in Connecticut. Together with Greene, Monroe formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, a production company in an effort to gain control of her career. Greene would go on to produce Bus Stop (’56) and The Prince and the Showgirl (’57).

“Monroe and Greene’s friendship ended after the production of The Prince and the Showgirl, and [then] Monroe fired Greene.”

In yesterday’s thread about Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us, “Mr. F” said something that I regarded as borderline astonishing. “Now matter how often I see it,” he said, “I remain amazed at Wells’ ability to criticize a character or person for acting differently than he would.”

Mr. F was apparently serious. He was saying that the correct way to watch a drama is to immerse yourself in the basics (story, character, milieu, tone) but without drawing upon your own life experience for perspective or judgment.

Maintain a strict distance, Mr. F was saying. By all means submit to whatever the characters are going through, all the while considering their various motives, dreams, delusions and appetites. But do so impersonally. You’ll only muck things up if you merge the story with your own saga or knowledge of how life works. Turn off your mind, forget what you know, dumb yourself down.

Let me explain something very clearly: I’ve always put myself into the narrative and especially the shoes of various characters, and I always ask myself “is this how I’d play my cards?” Or “is this how I’d react?” If not, I say “what then are their motives for acting in a way that I don’t agree with? Why would they behave in a way that seems a little outside my realm or which doesn’t seem to make basic sense?”

I’ve been watching films, plays and TV dramas this way for decades…hell, since I was seven or eight years old. I have an idea that tens of millions of others do the same.

Going back to the eras of Aeschylus, Agathon and Sophocles the basic task of drama has always been to merge the proverbial audience member with the experience, mindset and emotional leanings of the lead character[s]. The idea has always been to “walk a mile in these characters’ shoes, and once you’ve gotten to know them decide for yourself if he/she is living her life sensibly or radically or dangerously or brilliantly or something in between.”

If you don’t use your own life experience to assess the wisdom or bravery of a given character, to determine whether he/she is acting foolishly or clumsily or with enviable political skills…if you’re not bringing what you know into a narrative and making assessments of various characters based on what you’d do or wouldn’t do if you were in their shoes…if you’re not engaging with a drama as a human being with memories, emotions and regrets of your own then what the hell are you doing?

Mr. F. feels that the best way to watch a film is to adopt the mentality of a cupcake or a toaster or a chunk of mozzarella cheese.

Mr. F quote: “It’s a mistake if you’re evaluating character choices based on what you would do, assuming it’s clear from the narrative why they’re doing what they’re doing…it’s just empathy.”

HE to Mr. F: You can’t have empathy without feelings of allegiance or identification or at least understanding. You have to be persuaded to emotionally join this or that character’s team, even if they may not the nicest people you’re ever met. Failing that you have to be persuaded that a character’s reasons for doing what he/she does at least makes sense to them. That’s almost always what you get when the screenplay is first-rate.

Sasha Stone quote: “You can’t put yourself in their shoes. You just can’t. Not possible.”

She meant the unjustly prosecuted and jailed Central Park Five. My suburban whitebread experience, Sasha was saying, makes me incapable of understanding anything about these guys — what they were about or what was driving them onward or whatever. They might as well be microbes from the Planet Jupiter, Sasha basically meant.

Well, bullshit to that. The screenplay and the acting in When They See Us happen to be good enough to allow me to relate, to discover parallels between what these poor guys went through and my own experiences and understandings. This is what makes a film good. Either you build bridges between the audience and the characters or you don’t.

Two days ago Indiewire‘s Tom Brueggeman posted a pep-rally piece called “7 Reasons Why Booksmart May Turn Out to Be a Box-Office Hit.” Part of the idea was that after last weekend’s underwhelming opening on 25905 screens (a three-day and four-day tally of $6,933,620 and $8,701,363, respectively) that Booksmart might rally its way to $15 million by tonight.

“A typical studio film with a second weekend like this would soon disappear,” Brueggeman reasoned, “but [Booksmart] should have longer legs based on strong word of mouth. So $25 million looks like a plausible final result.”

I can’t find any Booksmart box-office figures for Saturday, 6.1. It’s now 3:45 am in Los Angeles or 12:45 pm in Paris. Monday morning update: Booksmart wound up doing $3,328,648 over the weekend, which repped a -52% drop from last weekend. It now stands at $14,366,831. As it will lose tons of theatres next weekend, it’ll be lucky to hit $20M at the end of the day.

Yesterday Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro reported that Olivia Wilde‘s indie comedy was “having a solid hold in weekend 2″ with “$4M [earned] as of this point in time, or -42% [from last weekend] for a running total of $15M.”

On the other hand Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson reported that Booksmart was looking at a likely $3.7 million (-47%) weekend. That’ll give Annapurna and United Artist Releasing’s acclaimed teen comedy a mediocre $14.74 million ten-day total. Yes, this will be a cult favorite in the years to come, but the deluge of online ink afforded to this one didn’t move the needle one bit. It rarely does.”

Two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters was the absolute best — no side-stepping, said what she felt, straight-from-the-gut candor at all times. And I’m not just saying this because I ran into her a few times and liked her from the get-go. Always an artist first and a diplomat second. Smarts, steel, liberal-progressive views, etc.

Winters knew Marilyn Monroe pretty well, roomed with her for about a year between 1947 and ’48. For decades after Monroe’s passing Winters was repeatedly asked about her, and offered pretty much the same recollections.

Monroe began to enjoy life a bit in the late ’40s, Winters said, and had a genuinely thrilling and abundant life in the ’50s, but not so much in the early ’60s. Monroe wasn’t well educated but was highly intelligent and constantly reading. Totally into older-guy father figures. No family, no support group, suspicious of most would-be friends or acquaintances. Key quote: “If she’d been a little dumber, she would’ve been happier.”

Monroe began to slip into an increasingly troubled place when she hit her mid 30s, which, back in the day, was when actresses needed to begin thinking about transitioning into character roles and/or playing mothers, or so Winters believed. But in the early ’60s the big studios didn’t want Monroe as a character actress — they wanted her to go on being a 25-year-old blonde sexpot forever. (When Winters signed to play a 40ish old-school motherly type in The Diary of Anne Frank, for which she later won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, director George Stevens told her that “because of this role you’ll be able to work for the rest of your life.”)

Winters believed that Monroe’s August 1962 death from a sleeping-pill overdose was most likely an accident, and that she’d just forgotten how many she’d taken earlier. “I’ve done that,” Winters said.

You don’t hear a lot of church bells in Los Angeles, on Sunday or any other day. I’m about as religious as Bill Maher, but as I was listening to this 6 pm bell serenade a while ago something inside felt vaguely comforted or perhaps even stirred.

Producer pally: “I think The Kitchen (Warner Bros., 8.9) looks great. I think Widows was sooo bad. There’s still a big audience for this kind of smart, edgy chick-revenge drama.

“And NYC in the late ’70s? Wow. Punk rock. Soho artist colony downtown exploding. Studio 54 burning down the house. Cocaine and quaaludes. Massive waves of hot Euro immigration. New fabulous restaurant on every corner. Plus serious street crime — watch your back everywhere at night. A fantastic jungle coming back to life. That was 1978. So this looks good. Maybe.”

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Today I began watching Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us (Netflix), a four-part dramatization of the Central Park jogger case, or more precisely the racist hysteria and grotesque injustice that the case triggered.

I’ve only seen two episodes, but I know a highly realistic, absorbing, triple-A effort when I see one — well written, believably acted and generally humming with honesty, authenticity and the application of high craft.

I can’t say it’s Duvernay’s best narrative feature so far, but it probably is. I decided not to see A Wrinkle To Time (everyone said it was an absolute nightmare) but When They See Us is more complex and highly charged than 2012’s Middle of Nowhere (which I’m a big fan of), and more even-steven and less weighted than the five-year-old Selma (which I was okay with as far as it went)

In line with Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, Duvernay’s focus is on the wrongful railroading, conviction and imprisonment of five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — over the assault and rape of stockbroker Trisha Meili in a northern region of Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89.

The five defendants didn’t help their situation by offering coerced, wholly imaginary confessions to NYPD detectives. Nor did it help that earlier that evening they were part of a “wilding” gang that had harassed random victims. The bottom line is that the the cops, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Donald Trump and especially the press all succumbed to varying forms of racist shorthand and unwarranted presumptions.

Despite a lack of hard evidence (the DNA collected at the crime scene didn’t match any of the suspects, and indicated that it had come from a single assailant), questionable testimony and the fact that all five were innocent, they were nonetheless found guilty and went to jail for several years.

After the actual culprit confessed, the five defendants’ convictions were vacated by New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada on 12.19.02. The five sued New York City; they were finally awarded $41 million in 2014.

Two years ago I theorized that Duvernay’s film would be facing two major issues, story-wise. As it turns out only one of these remain, at least in my head.

Problem #1: The teens who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home. How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Duvernay shows that the five were interrogated half to death and to the point of absolute frenzy and exhaustion by city detectives. I was still having a hard time understanding how they could have been persuaded to invent fake testimony against each other, but I have a better idea now of how intense and punishing the atmosphere was.

Problem #2: Trisha Meili’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was \flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

Duvernay basically agrees with this viewpoint, and conveys it by having Manhattan district attorney sex-crimes chief Linda Fairstein (Felicity Huffman) look around the crime scene and say “what the fuck was she doing here?”

In an April ’16 Tom Hanks career assessment piece, I wrote than “once your cards have gone cold, it’s awfully hard to heat them up again.”

I added that “there’s nothing more humiliating than for a man who once held mountains in the palm of his hands having to push his own cart around the supermarket as he buys his own groceries and then, insult to injury, has to wait in line at the checkout counter.”

The piece was triggered by a Hanks quote from a Tribeca Film Festival discussion with John Oliver: “I peaked in the ’90s.”

Hanks had been respectably plugging along since the end of his late ’80s-to-early aughts heyday (The Road to Perdition was his last big score in that run). Holding on, hanging in there. But just a few months after the Oliver chat, his cards began to warm slightly. Then they got hot again.

Hanks’ less-is-more performance as the white-haired Chesley Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood‘s Sully was respectfully received; ditto his Ben Bradley in Steven Spielberg‘s The Post. But the strongest indication that his mojo was back came when Hanks improvised his way through a pause in a West Los Angeles performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

It seems like a fait accompli that Hanks will be be Best Actor-nominated for playing the amiable Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller‘s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Sony, 11.22).

Six months later Hanks will star as Commander Ernest Krause in Aaron Schneider‘s Greyhound (Sony, 5.8.20), a World War II drama. Later that year he’ll star in Miguel Sapochnik‘s BIOS (Universal, 10.2.20).

Who knows if Hanks will star in Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World, a post-Civil War-era drama, but the project was certainly announced a few months ago.

At some point down the road Hanks will reportedly portray Colonel Tom Parker, the cigar-chomping, straw-hat-wearing hustler who did more to destroy Elvis Presley‘s life and career than anyone besides Elvis himself, in a Baz Luhrman-directed drama.

That’s quite an impressive lineup for a guy whose career had appeared to be in flatline mode only four or five years ago.

After a leisurely three-hour stroll, Tatyana and I returned late last night to 6 rue des Arquebusiers. Alas, the micro-battery door opener wasn’t working, and I couldn’t find the door code on my iPhone notepad. So I called Gleb, sitting in our fourth-floor residence, for the door code or to otherwise let us in. 15 seconds later a folded piece of parchment flitted down from above. The door code was written on it. We ran into Gleb on our way upstairs and learned that he hadn’t written the note. The author was some English-speaking building resident who had heard me explain the situation, etc. Thanks, neighbor.

Robert Pattinson is officially locked and loaded to play Bruce Wayne + alter ego in Matt Reeves‘ The Batman.

Reeves: “I’ve talked about making it a very point of view, noir-driven definitive Batman story in which he is investigating a particular case and that takes us out into the world of Gotham. I went on a deep dive again revisiting all my favorite comics. Those all inform by osmosis. There’s no continuation of the Nolan films. It’s very much trying to find a way to do this as something that for me is going to be definitively Batman and new and cool.”