Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s Mission Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27) has to try and top the last MI film and the one before that and before that and yaddah yaddah. And yet stunt-wise, the bell tolled twice for Cruise during the shooting of this latest installment. He was seriously injured last August and — according to TMZ — got hurt again a few days ago. The man is 55 — he’ll be 56 in July. Tragic as this may seem, Cruise is being told by God, biology and fate to steer his energies away from energizer-bunny action flicks.

Oscar-wise, it appears as if Laurie Metcalf‘s neurotic, tour de force Lady Bird performance is going to lose to Allison Janney‘s cigarette-smoking monster mom in I, Tonya. I wish it were otherwise, but the writing is clearly on the wall.

And the reason has just hit me. People don’t just vote for performances but for the characters, and most Academy members like largeness and intensity. They’ll vote for characters who are lovable or emotionally vulnerable on some level, and also for ones who’ve delivered a certain eccentric theatricality or campy trippiness. But they won’t vote for characters who make them feel badly or remind them of unpleasant frictions.

I suspect that Metcalf’s caring but high-strung and badgering mom hits too close to the bone for a lot of voters out there, particularly women who had contentious relationships with their own mothers when they were younger. They’re sensing emotional reality in her performance, of course, but also the guilt-tripping, shade-throwing and high-strung agitation, and they can’t quite “like” her character because it stirs unpleasant memories.

Janney’s character is a fiend — an awful mother and far more dislikable than Metcalf but also safely broad and evil and grand guignol-ish. In this sense she’s less real and relatable and less disturbing than Metcalf, and at the same time offering more of a show — “Look at how detestable I can be! Am I a hoot or what?”

I don’t know who wrote this ScreenPrism essay about what makes Lady Bird so rich, layered and praiseworthy, but it’s perceptive, precise and well-ordered. The essay, I mean. Especially (a) the visual scheme stuff and (b) the thought about “attention being equal to love, and if you deny a significant someone your attention you’re denying them love.” Just ignore the first 54 seconds and scroll forward to 55.

Soon after arriving in Park City for the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, I filed the following: “Roaming around Park City left me with a fatigued sense of déja vu. Like I’ve done this too many times before and the thrill is…well, I’m sure it’ll come back once things get rolling.

“The area has been experiencing a drought so there’s not much snow, but every year I return Park City seems a little dryer, a little less exotic, and a little more of an orchestrated Mardi Gras. It’s as if the town is becoming more and more of a real-estate experiment — how many more condos, homes, buildings and new businesses can the local hustlers add to an already over-developed burgh before Park City has relinquished its former silver-mining-town identity entirely?

Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston and Robert Redford during the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

“When I first came here in ’93 I thought, ‘Wow, cool.’ Now I’m going, ‘Hmm, yeah …okay.’ This festival used to be run and enjoyed by the hip elite; now it’s a mob scene everywhere you go. I guess all things lose their charm if you experience and re-experience them often enough. I wish it would snow and just blanket everything. Then I could run out into the middle of it and fall on my back and make an angel and maybe throw snowballs at cars.”

Some of the Sundance 2002 films: Niki Caro‘s Whale Rider, Rebecca Miller‘s Personal Velocity, Justin Lin‘s Better Luck Tomorrow, Susanne Bier‘s Open Hearts, Ted Demme & Richard LaGravenese‘s A Decade Under The Influence, Todd Louiso‘s Love Liza, Joe Carnahan‘s Narc, Mark Romanek‘s One Hour Photo, Steven Shainberg‘s Secretary, Gary Winick‘s Tadpole, Patricia Cardoso‘s Real Women Have Curves.

“I often write about social media mobs…and what I have found is that they are not frequently misinformed, but they are almost always misinformed. You just don’t know what happened unless you were (a) there or (b) someone has actually investigated whatever claims have come forth. But that’s not how mobs work.

“This atmosphere makes it difficult, if not impossible, to dissent. I was recently talking to a friend about the #MeToo movement. In hushed tones, she told me she had a confession to make. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said, “but I don’t think Woody Allen raped his daughter.”

“Luckily for her, she was in good company — I also doubt the veracity of Woody Allen’s guilt because the evidence just doesn’t support the claims — but she said this as though she were confessing to a terrible crime.

“And she was: a thought crime, one so potentially harmful to her standing among her own friends that expressing it to anyone besides a known thought criminal was unthinkable. The resistance, it seems, is intersectional in everything but opinions.” — from “Call-Out Culture Is a Toxic Garbage Dumpster Fire of Trash,” posted by The Stranger’s Katie Herzog on 1.23.18 at 3:27 pm.

I was told earlier today that the Gangs of New York Wikipedia page mentions a noteworthy piece by yours truly, posted in December 2001, that described the differences between a 1.37:1 work print version of Gangs that I saw on VHS vs. the final 2.39:1 release version. Here’s a link to the original article, and here’s a repost of it:

If Miramax Films and Martin Scorsese had decided to release a polished, cleaned-up version of the Gangs of New York work print they had in the can (or, if you want to get technical, that was stored on Marty and editor Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Avid) sometime in October ’01, we’d all be enjoying a better, more rewarding film than the Gangs that will open nationwide four days from now (12.20.02).

I’ve seen both versions and most of you haven’t, so I know something you don’t. The best Gangs of New York will not be hitting screens this weekend, and may never even be seen on DVD, given Scorsese’s apparent disinterest in releasing “director’s cut” versions of his films, or in supplying deleted scenes or outtakes or any of that jazz.

The work-print version is longer by roughly 20 minutes, and more filled out and expressive as a result, but that’s not the thing. The main distinction for me is that it’s plainer and therefore more cinematic, as it doesn’t use the narration track that, in my view, pollutes the official version. It also lacks a musical score, with only some drums and temp music.

This leaves you free, in short, to simply pick and choose from the feast of visual information that Gangs of New York is, and make of it what you will. And if that isn’t the essence of great movie-watching, I don’t know what is.

It also points out what’s wrong with the theatrical release version, which I feel has been fussed over too intensively, compressed, simplified, lathered in big-movie music and, to some extent, thematically obscured.

Miramax and Scorsese had the superior work-print version in their hands 14 months ago. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s not tremendously different from the version being released on Friday. It is only missing Leonardo DiCaprio‘s narration, a musical score and some CG effects, which tells me it could have easily been prepared for a December ’01 release. But Miramax decided otherwise and pushed it back it until now. If you ask me their reasons for doing so were short-sighted and wrong.

This morning I saw…no, endured David Wain‘s A Futile and Stupid Gesture (Netflix, 1.26). Based on the same-titled 2006 biography by Josh Karp, it’s a half-surreal, half-inept and wholly depressing saga of National Lampoon co-founder, Animal House producer-screenwriter and self-destructive genius Doug Kenney.

I don’t want to overstate my reaction, but ten minutes in I was saying to myself “nope, naaah, nope, nope…wrong, fake, not believable…shit, this is mindblowingly bad.”

It dishonors the legacy of the National Lampoon by suggesting that Kenney and his editorial colleagues weren’t very interesting. John Aboud and Michael Colton‘s screenplay supplies clunky exposition and by-the-numbers plotting until it seeps out of your ears. The interplay among National Lampoon staffers isn’t brisk or brainy or cruel enough — there’s no believing it. Cranking out monthly NatLamp issues couldn’t have been this tedious.

There’s no believing Will Forte‘s performance as Kenney for an instant, partly because (a) he looks and and sounds like an actor pretending to be an allegedly funny guy rather than the Real McCoy, and (b) partly because Forte was a bit overweight during filming and therefore doesn’t look like Kenney as much as late-period Truman Capote.

Domnhall Gleason‘s performance as NatLamp co-founder Henry Beard is bland and lifeless, and he wears the same stupid-ass ’70s wig in scene after scene, despite the passing of time and refining of hair styles. The ’70s wigs that everyone wears, in fact, really look like wigs, and the sideburn paste-ons have to be seen to be believed.

There was an older guy two or three rows back who was laughing his head off at too many of the jokes. I eventually couldn’t stand it and turned around and gave him the HE stink-eye.

Even if you have a circumspect attitude about Jordan Peele‘s horror satire, there’s no denying that Get Out has become an award season cultural topic that won’t subside. The torch has been burning for nearly a year now. This Honest Trailers riff just popped yesterday.

Late this afternoon I caught Ethan Hawke‘s Blaze, a seriously authentic-feeling biopic about the still relatively unknown country-soul singer Blaze Foley, who died from a gunshot wound in 1989.

It almost goes without saying that films about musicians will focus on boozy, self-destructive behavior — Walk The Line, Bird, I Saw The Light, Payday, Michael Apted‘s Stardust, The Joker Is Wild, etc. But Blaze feels home-grown and self-owned in a subdued sort of way. It has a downmarket, lived-in vibe. I wasn’t exactly “entertained”, but every line, scene and performance felt honest and unforced.

(l. to r.) Blaze star Ben Dickey, cowriter Sybil Rosen, director-cowriter Ethan Hawke.

Gifted but temperamental with a serious booze problem, Foley (Ben Dickey) never really got rolling as a recording artist, but he was a well-respected outlaw artist with a certain following in the ’70s and ’80s. Dickey’s purry singing style, similar to Foley’s, reminds me of a sadder Tony Joe White (“Polk Salad Annie”).

Hawke focuses on the guy’s soft, meditative side and particularly his relationship with real-life ex Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat). He gets a truly exceptional performance out of Dickey, a hulking, elephant-sized musician who’s never acted prior to this. Dickey’s Foley is such a good fit — centered, settled, unhurried — that I nearly forgot about the bulk factor.

Blaze offers noteworthy supporting perfs from Kris Kristofferson (as Foley’s dad), Sam Rockwell, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn (as a trio of record company partners) and Josh Hamilton, among others.

The script was co-written by Hawke and Rosen, author of a relationship memoir titled titled “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley“. You can just sense that Hawke knows musician behavior like his own. Hell, I was one myself (i.e., a mediocre drummer) for a while, and know the turf to some extent, and it all feels right.

Does the 127-minute length seem a bit long? Maybe. I was talking to a couple of critics who felt this way. I wasn’t bothered — the laid-back pacing agrees with the rural milieu and contemplative, occasionally surly country-dude attitude.

There’s a documentary called Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah, directed by Kevin Triplett and released in 2011.

I’m not feeling the hunger today. I feel a bit drained. I’m just gonna see what I can at a casual pace. Nobody’s in a hurry, everyone’s an adult. Jason Reitman‘s Tully (Focus, 4.20) will screen at the Eccles early Thursday evening (6:30 pm).

The weather has been in the low 30s and 20s and even the high teens late at night. These shorts were being worn yesterday by a Sundance volunteer.