I didn’t hate The Meg, but I didn’t believe a second of it. But then you’re not supposed to.

Everyone knew that Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws was just a scary summer movie, but audiences were nonetheless persuaded that what they were seeing could be half-real. Spielberg did everything he could to make it suspenseful and flavor it up, throwing in clever tricks and diversions and making at least some of it stick to the ribs.

Meg director Jon Turtletaub has no such inclination. His weightless, stone-skimming film is part put-on, partly a Jaws competition piece and partly a $150 million theme-park jizzathon. It’s assembled like an early ’50s MGM musical, the shark encounters being the musical numbers, of course, and the dialogue scenes providing the usual connective filler.

I didn’t seethe and twitch as I sometimes do during bad movies. I sat there and guffawed from time to time, which I guess is a good sign.

The Meg definitely isn’t scary. It’s too dopey for that. It’s all about wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank…”we have your admission and candy money…we don’t care so why should you?…eh, that wasn’t too bad…that one half-worked, the other one didn’t…please have all fat guys get eaten by the Meg…oh, look, a fat 12 year old kid…can the Meg eat him too? O joy and rapture!”

Every single guy with even a slight weight problem in this film becomes Meg food, or so I recall. Does Page Kennedy get eaten? I think so but I’m not 100% sure. I was zoning out during the last third — i.e., awake but glazed over.

Three Hollywood Elsewhere rules for shark movies: (1) Feel free to kill off fat guys and all fathers and secondary characters, but (2) no feeding women to the shark or you’ll have the MeToo! movement on your ass, and (3) never kill off an entertaining character who has a sharp-tongued, irreverent attitude thing going on.

You don’t want to hear about the plot or the set-up, which is all hand-me-down, by-the-numbers crap.

Jason Statham is the studly tough guy who has an early traumatic run-in with the Megalodon, a 75-foot-long prehistoric shark, in a kind of Octopus’s Garden in the Phillipine trench. An underwater research facility funded by a mildly overweight billionaire nerd (Rainn Wilson) with fairly atrocious taste in footwear. Oceanographers exploring a hidden ecosystem in the trench, blah blah, but the Meg tries to eat a submersible piloted by Statham’s ex-wife (Jessica McNamee) blah blah. There’s also a fetching marine biologist (Li Bingbing) who quickly develops the hots for Statham. Her oceanographer father (Winston Chao) is bland boredom personfied.

There are maybe five or six “musical numbers” during the first two acts (whew, that was close, almost got eaten!). In act three the Meg decides to chow down on a crowded swimming area a la Jaws….hors d’oeuvres! And then the big finale in which Statham singlehandedly dominates and defeats.

There are lots of homages to other water-logged films. There’s a scene in which a giant squid wraps itself around a submersible a la 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. There’s a “reviving an apparently drowned pretty woman” scene a la The Abyss. There’s a scene with a little flop-eared white poodle called Pippin getting eaten, just like another dog named Pippin got eaten in Spielberg’s film. There’s a cable-drag scene out of Jaws. At one point Statham mounts and rides the Megalodon like Gregory Peck‘s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (’56), and there’s even a close-up shot of the Meg’s eye looking right at Statham — an exact copy of Moby Dick doing the same with Peck.

I wasn’t able to catch a Manhattan screening of John Chu‘s Crazy Rich Asians (Warner Bros., 8.15). I can’t honestly say that I’m sorry about that, despite the excellent reviews. I realize it’s a big representation thing (i.e., the first all-Asian film to get a big opening since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club) but I have some issues. I have a problem with any film of any ethnic persuasion that sells itself with an image of an attractive young couple smiling and gently embracing. That image alone says “swoony girly flick.” I have a problem with any film that “takes you back to the greatest hits of Nancy Meyers, Richard Curtis and Nora Ephron” — aaggghhh! I have a problem with any film described as “two hours of romantic fantasy and real-estate porn, poured on so thick it’s almost lickable.” Anything wealth-porny makes me nauseous. And I have a huge problem with the critic who wrote “the only excuse you have not to see Crazy Rich Asians is because you hate love“…blecccch! I will see Crazy Rich Asians at the next opportunity, but I’m just saying.

Three years ago I repeated my long-held Taxi Driver perception that Travis Bickle died on the couch after that East Village shoot-out. Everything that happens in the epilogue — the newspaper articles praising him for having murdered a couple of pimps, Iris’s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shephard looking at him dreamily after he drops her off at her Grammercy Park apartment — is Travis’s dying fantasy. And then in the last shot he’s driving along and looks into the rearview mirror with a slight look of alarm, apparently sensing that something’s wrong and…zhhhoop! Bickle disappears.

It seems obvious as hell, but no one ever agreed with me. Until a week ago, that is.

From Lindsay Zoladz‘s “God’s Lonely Men: Taxi Driver in the Age of the Incels,” posted on TheRinger on 7.30.18:

“Last week, immediately after watching Martin Scorsese’s 1976 fever dream for the first time in more than a decade, I scrambled for my phone to confirm that I was not the only person who had completely misremembered the ending of the movie: I could have sworn Travis Bickle died.

“The last image I remembered from Taxi Driver was that famous, otherworldly slow-motion shot from above — a ‘priest’s eye view,’ Scorsese has called it — cataloging the carnage of Bickle’s killing spree as the police arrive. What I’d forgotten was the movie’s surreal coda, in which Bickle not only survives but becomes a vigilante hero in the newspapers, receives a letter from 12-year-old Iris’s parents thanking Bickle for saving their daughter from a life of prostitution, and, perhaps least plausibly, gets another chance with his WASP goddess, Betsy, even though she knows he has just murdered three people and the last time she saw him he showed up at her workplace to harass her, threaten her, and tell her she was scum just like everybody else. With all due respect to Paul Schrader, I liked my ending better. It had a certain closure.”

Wells to Zoladz: Schrader and Scorsese’s ending is your own. They’re obviously telling us that we’re watching Bickle’s bullshit fantasy about what happened after the Lower East Side shoot-out.

It happened over racial and tribal animus, over the blood-level resentment that white bumblefucks feel about the multiculturalizing of America [see Laura Ingraham clip]. It also happened due to their concern about having been marginalized or shunted to the side in the new 21st Century economy, particularly since the Great Recession. It also happened due to the left’s embrace of the godless LGBTQs. It also happened because the bumblefucks are “low-information voters” — i.e., uneducated, less than perceptive, etc. It also happened because tens of millions couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton, and because she ran a bad campaign and then got torpedoed by James Comey. I explained it all on 6.13.18.

Michael Moore‘s Fahrenheit 11/9 pops on 9.21.

[Starting around the 2:00 mark] “In some parts of the country it does seem like the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” Laura Ingraham said last night. “Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. And these are changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like. Now much of this is related to both illegal, and in some cases legal immigration that of course progressives love.”

Several years ago a director-screenwriter friend said something about dying that struck an uneasy chord. We all imagine ourselves peacefully expiring in bed, slipping off into a cosmic eternity with our pets licking our hand and a family member or two sitting nearby and offering sips of tea. And yet most of us are probably going to die without a great deal of comfort or peace, probably uncomfortably and perhaps traumatically, not at home but in a hospital room at 3 am or on a roadside or maybe someplace worse.

Consider poor Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, the young, high-energy, star-crossed lovers in the first two Superman movies. Reeve led a life of great courage and dignity, but Lord knows he didn’t have it easy, And Kidder, it’s been reported, died in Montana last May from her own hand — ” a result of a self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose.” I’m very sorry.

From wellesnet.com, posted on 8.8: There are two companion documentaries to Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of Wind, and they’ll both be shown on 9.1 at the Venice Film Festival, a day after the endlessly-delayed-and-obstructed Welles feature has its world premiere.

The Other Side of Wind will debut at the historic Sala Grande on the Venice Lido on Friday, 8.31, at 2:15 pm. The two docs — Morgan Neville‘s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and Frank Marshall, Filip Jan Rymsza and Ryan Suffren‘s A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making — will screen the next day at the Sala Giardino at 2:30 pm. The Neville doc runs 98 minutes; A Final Cut for Orson runs 38 minutes.

Netflix will begin streaming The Other Side of the Wind and They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead on 11.2. (Wellesnet.com reports that “the release dates were posted, and later removed, from the Netflix’s press website on July 25.”) Presumably the Marshall, Rymsza and Suffren doc will be viewable down the road at some venue or in some format.

I’m presuming that the 38-minute doc will sidestep a central, oft-reported fact about the struggle to assemble and release The Other Side of The Wind — the fact that Oja Kodar, Welles’ longtime partner and the film’s key rights holder, blocked progress for years, holding out for more money, demanding this and that. I recounted the situation as best I could in a 4.5.16 HE article.

According to Wellesnet’s Ray Kelly, Venice Film Festival Director Alberto Barbera “tweeted Wednesday morning that he would be revealing the 75th annual festival’s full schedule on Friday. However, the festival’s online box office jumped the gun and posted the release times and locations for the entire 11-day festival as part of a pre-sale offer.”

From Glenn Erickson‘s Cinesavant, posted yesterday: “The scary news is a report from correspondent Simon Wells, about the much-touted Christopher Nolan restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’d like to know if other readers have seen the show, and if their prints were different, or better. Here’s Simon’s note — actually, two notes I’ve shuffled together:

‘Hi Glenn, Just wondering if you happened to see the recent Nolan de-restoration of 2001 in 70mm in recent months?

“I did and was utterly horrified by the general murkiness, blown out white and general sludginess. The colour grade was horrible, the detail pitiful. The scenes inside the space wheel where Floyd talks to Rossiter and the Russians were blown out and looked abysmal. Worse still was the new teal and amber color grade, which I am assuming is how the upcoming 4K release will be presented. I don’t think I have ever seen [this film] look so bad.

‘Getting films you never thought you’d see on Bluray is great, but this kind of vandalism just depresses me no end. I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts. — Simon Wells’

Erickson: “Am I stirring up a non-issue, taking a reader’s evaluation on something I haven’t seen myself? The last time I saw 2001 on a big screen was at the 2012 TCMfest, and the 70mm print looked just fine to me; I’ve never seen a bad print, even in 35mm. I can say that the WB film management and restoration experts are some of the finest in the world, and that their 2003 remastering of Ryan’s Daughter was the most perfect film presentation I’ve ever seen. I’m all for celebrity filmmakers helping promote film restoration, but I’d hardly think that 2001 was being neglected.

“I am curious to get more feedback on the 70mm reissue, which I am told is a different animal than the special IMAX reissue coming up shortly. So if you saw 2001 in ‘Nolanvision’ please let me know!

“Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson”

HE comment: Does Erickson live in a cave without wifi? How could he have missed the furor over Nolan’s teal-and-piss-yellow non-restoration? How could he have bypassed seeing the Nolan version when it played at the Arclight?

Hollywood Elsewhere’s estimation of Spike Lee’s best films, top to bottom, no docs, obviously limited to those I’ve seen:

1. Malcom X (most spiritual, impassioned, best written); 2. Do The Right Thing; 3. The 25th Hour; 4. She’s Gotta Have It; 5. Inside Man; 6. BlackKKlansman; 7. Jungle Fever; 8. He Got Game; 9. Mo’ Better Blues; 10. Clockers; 11. Crooklyn; 12. She Hate Me; 13. Oldboy; 14. Son of Sam; 15. Girl 6; 16. Bamboozled (saw half of it).

Never saw Chi-Raq — should have. Never saw Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall — wanted to.

Hollywood Elsewhere salutes Kris Tapley‘s Variety essay about the new Oscar changes — punchy, blunt, no apologies.

The Highest-Grossing, Best Popcorn Movie Oscar “is the worst of these ham-fisted maneuvers because it’s such a condescending stance toward ‘popular’ cinema to take at a time when the Academy is making as many moves as possible to open the gates to all forms of cinema (i.e., waving in a thousand new members, being aggressively proactive on diversity in the voting ranks, etc.). It’s a stiff backhand to those efforts, in fact, because it outright states that popular films need to be ghettoized.

“It’s particularly troubling in the year of Black Panther, which just three days ago crossed $700 million at the domestic box office. Disney has taken the task of bringing Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed Marvel film into the Oscar fold quite seriously this year. A consultancy team was assembled early and that group has been laying the track ever since. Now here comes the Academy, establishing a corner to which voters can banish this and other films like it with a pat on the head and a ‘thanks for playing.'”

HE interjection: The only first-rate portion of Black Panther is during the last hour. Up until that it’s a colorful but unexceptional thing — a popular Marvel-stamped entertainment. It wouldn’t have won the traditional Best Picture Oscar — now it’ll most likely win the Best Popcorn trophy.

Back to Tapley: “Was there some internal panic that the movie might not be recognized otherwise? Is this a move to help carve out a place for it and therefore avoid a potential PR headache? Maybe. But, again, it’s a condescending move and it may have just undercut efforts to push Coogler’s film into competition with all worthy contenders, not just the ones that busted blocks. (And what an irony that would be if indeed Disney/ABC pushed for these changes.)

“Many of the Academy’s decisions these last few years have been met with criticism, both inside and outside the organization. But they have largely been defensible. Re-branding/identifying as a vast international group of film professionals is a good thing. Allowing more of those professionals than ever before to have a voice in the proceedings is a good thing. Drastically altering the demographic makeup of each new ‘class’ of voting members is a good thing.

“This? Bad all around. It’s not dignified to relegate the live televised glory of artisans to commercial breaks. It’s not dignified to quarantine a whole brand of cinema in the hopes that someone will tune into your show because Mamma Mia! is an Oscar nominee. It’s not dignified to transform a program that is meant to celebrate the height of cinema accomplishment into a clumsy variety vehicle for drawing advertising dollars.”

In the wake of the Clinton Correctional Facility Escape of 2015, I wrote that “the sad but oddly touching saga of Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell is a movie waiting to happen. I’m imagining a serious drama starring Melissa McCarthy in a potentially riveting dramatic performance. Or maybe it’s an HBO movie — I need to think this through.

The saga has since been made into an eight-part Showtime series called Escape at Donnemora, and the hotshot creative guy isn’t Rudin, Elwes or DeLuca but Ben Stiller, who’s executive produced and directed. And Mitchell (“Shaw-skank” in the parlance of the N.Y. Post) isn’t being played by Melissa McCarthy (too bad) but Patricia Arquette. Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano are portraying Richard Matt and David Sweat, the inmates who were able to sexually seduce Mitchell and convince her to help them escape.