Wells to Lodge: “So I can’t voice a distaste for Japan (actually Tokyo) without being slagged by the likes of yourself? My reservations about this or that city, region or culture are about tradition, aesthetics, architecture, atmosphere. I said in one of my Japan riffs that I found Tokyo lacking in character and personality for the most part. (Though not entirely.). I said it reminded me of Cleveland or Houston; I also said Seoul reminds me of Newark.

“On the other hand I adore Hanoi and much of Vietnam. But not Nha Trang (impersonal, overbuilt, Cannes without the personality) or the overdeveloped, skyscraper-heavy Ho Chi Minh City. I’m told that much of Bangkok has fallen to the same corporate influences.

“All in all my objections are about certain standards and appreciations for native flavor and urban design that I’ve developed over the decades. Racial animus has never once entered into it. I don’t even know what it is. How dare you accuse me of anything in this realm…how fucking dare you?

“You’re a brilliant critic who knows his stuff, and then you turn around and tweet like the lowest troll. And you also eat up my time as I have to rebut your sloppy tweet darts. Don’t be an ass.”

Lodge responds: “When you boil it down to ‘I’m not a fan of Japan’, that says something far less specific to me, as does your routine dismissal of most Asian cinema, for example. So maybe choose your words more delicately.” Wells to Lodge: “What I wrote was that I’ve ‘never been a huge fan of’ Japan.” which can be translated as ‘while I haven’t seen that much of Japan, the small section of Tokyo that I’ve seen has not enthralled me.’ I didn’t say that I dislike the whole country, which would be pretty close to ridiculous.

David Oyelowo has gone from playing a nice-guy boyfriend in Ava DuVernay‘s Middle of Nowhere (’12) to the son of Forest Whitaker in Lee Daniels‘ The Butler (’13) to Martin Luther King in DuVernay’s Selma (’14) to a chess coach in Queen of Katwe (’16) to Seretse Khama, the president of Botswana, in A United Kingdom (’16) to…an excitable chump running from the Mexican cartel in Nash Edgerton‘s Gringo (Amazon, 3.9).

I don’t think so. Not for me. If for no other reason than not relating to protagonists who let go with falsetto screams when they’re scared. Feels paycheck-y.

David Wain‘s A Futile and Stupid Gesture (Netflix, 1.26) is based on Josh Karp‘s same-titled biography of the National Lampoon‘s brilliant and self-destructive Doug Kenney, the leading formulator of anarchic, horndoggy, anti-establishment ’70s humor, and which largely influenced the comedic attitudes of Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon’s Animal House (’78) and National Lampoon’s Vacation (’83), et. al.

You can sense right away, however, that this Netflix production won’t be all that great. The trailer suggests a rote, paint-by-numbers scheme. If you were Doug Kenney in heaven and you had absolute mystical power in choosing who would direct this film, would you be cool with the director and co-writer of Wet Hot American Summer (’01) and Wanderlust (’12)? I didn’t think so.

Quote from 12.20 EW story by Jeff Labrecque: “The spine of Futile and Stupid is the relationship between Kenney and his more responsible and aristocratic Harvard classmate Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson), during and after they partnered to take their campus Lampoon publication national. So think The Social Network but with cocaine, pranks and food fights.”

In a deleted, apologized-for tweet, Rose McGowan recently attacked Meryl Streep for allegedly knowing about Harvey Weinstein’s criminal assaults but saying nothing: “Actresses, like Meryl Streep, who happily worked for The Pig Monster, are wearing black @goldenglobes in a silent protest. YOUR SILENCE is THE problem. You’ll accept a fake award breathlessly & affect no real change. I despise your hypocrisy. Maybe you should all wear Marchesa.”

And now a street artist, ignorant of or indifferent to McGowan’s apology, is pushing the “Streep knew” narrative. Every revolutionary political movement has its radical purists and Robespierres, and history never forgets them; the #MeToo movement is no different.

Yesterday Streep released a statement about the McGowan charge. Here’s part of it:

“It hurt to be attacked by Rose McGowan in banner headlines this weekend, but I want to let her know I did not know about Weinstein’s crimes, not in the 90s when he attacked her, or through subsequent decades when he proceeded to attack others.

“I wasn’t deliberately silent. I didn’t know. I don’t tacitly approve of rape. I didn’t know. I don’t like young women being assaulted. I didn’t know this was happening.

“Rose assumed and broadcast something untrue about me, and I wanted to let her know the truth. Through friends who know her, I got my home phone number to her the minute I read the headlines. I sat by that phone all day yesterday and this morning, hoping to express both my deep respect for her and others’ bravery in exposing the monsters among us, and my sympathy for the untold, ongoing pain she suffers. No one can bring back what entitled bosses like Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes and HW took from the women who endured attacks on their bodies and their ability to make a living.. And I hoped that she would give me a hearing. She did not, but I hope she reads this.

Imagine if Gary Ross‘s Ocean’s 8 (Warner Bros., 6.8.18) was made like a modern-day Rififi. If eight shrewd women got together and successfully pulled off a big heist, but then one of them rats another out to the cops. Or a rival crew finds out about the job and kidnaps the child of Sarah Paulson, and so Paulson, Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett hunt down the kidnappers except Bullock gets shot in the stomach. Or after flashing too much money around Helena Bonham Carter gets busted by detectives and pressured to reveal who else pulled off the job, and Mindy Kaling panics and realizes HBC has to die or she’ll spill the beans on everyone. I would love an escapist film like that, one that promises the usual bullshit but then turns around and gets real. But of course, no one would be allowed to make a Rififi about ruthless women thieves as this would go against the narrative.

Incidentally: The MovieBox copy that accompanies this new trailer starts with the words “to steal a priceless neckless…”

I saw Ridley Scott‘s All The Money in the World (Sony, 12.25) for the second time last night at a big Academy premiere — talent, producers, actors, publicists, below-the-liners, people like me, etc. Scott and some of the cast attended (Mark Wahlberg, Christoper Plummer, Michelle Williams, Charlie Plummer, Timothy Hutton), and there was a big party afterward with loads of great-tasting food by Wolfgang Puck caterers.

All The Money is about a true-life event — the 1973 Rome kidnapping of John Paul Getty III and the laborious, months-long negotiations between the kidnappers and the young Getty’s tightwad grandfather, oil baron and billionaire J. Paul Getty, that followed. Scott doesn’t fool around with the story beats, and has made a stylish, well-finessed thing, jarring and intelligent and always believable.

Prior to last night’s Academy screening of Ridley Scott’s All The Money In The World — Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Williams, Scott.

The film is actually about tycoon vs. people values — a rumination about the real price of meat in the market, about how cold things can get when a capitalist emperor like Getty Sr. (chillingly played by Plummer) has been told to cough up or else when it comes to life of one of his own (Charlie Plummer, no relation), and how thorny and malignant life can be when hard bargainers are sparring over the size of a ransom. It’s a film about icy, eyeball-to-eyeball behavior on all sides.

Except, that is, when it comes to Gail Harris (Williams), the mother of the kidnapped scion who, as you might expect, doesn’t see the situation in monetary as much as human terms. And also, come to think of it, when it comes to Cinquanta (Romain Duris), a member of the Red Brigade kidnapping gang who becomes the young Getty’s closest captor and “friend”, in a manner of speaking. At the end of the day Cinqunata is almost as much on the human side as Gail.

In the Scott canon, All The Money in the World isn’t as cruel and ruthless as The Counselor, the 2013 drug-dealing drama that is arguably Scott’s finest 21st Century film, but it operates in the same chilly ballpark. Scott isn’t commonly associated with straight-talking dramas about upfront realism, but when he decides to settle down and make films for adults (i.e., stories about how things really are out there), there’s no one better.

We’ve all been impressed, I think, by Scott’s recent herculean re-filming of all the J. Paul Getty scenes (re-performed by Plummer when it became apparent in early November that the disgraced Kevin Spacey had to be jettisoned) between 11.20 and 11.30. Scott was given a longish standing ovation when he took the stage before the show began.

It’s been nearly 11 months since I first saw Call Me By Your Name at Sundance ’17. Like everyone else, I was floored by that quietly climactic father-son scene between Michael Stuhlbarg and Timothee Chalamet. Even before it ended I was dead certain that Stuhlbarg would become one of the five contenders for Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and perhaps even the likeliest winner.

But then, of course, The Florida Project premiered in Cannes four months later and then Willem Dafoe began to happen in the early fall, and now there’s not even an element of doubt about his winning, despite strong competition from Sam Rockwell‘s performance in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Stuhlbarg’s performance, jewel-perfect as it is, never lifted off the award-season runway. The unfairness of life amazes me, and it never stops.

From Brett Easton Ellis’s 12.18 Out piece: “In terms of plot nothing much happens on the surface of Call Me By Your Name, but of course something monumental is happening because what we are witnessing is the erasure of innocence — this affair will kill that. On a second viewing the gay vibe** from Elio’s father (Stuhlbarg) is clearer, and in a very moving scene near the end he gives a speech to Elio (Chalamet), devastated over the loss of Oliver and flooded with the pangs of first love’s disappointments.

“The speech is culled from the book where the father tells his son that he knew what was happening between him and Oliver and that he has nothing to be ashamed of and to cherish the pain he’s feeling and that he’ll always be there for him. This scene could have been nearly insufferable in its noble ‘progressive’ virtue-signaling: if only we all had fathers this wonderful and warm-hearted and accommodating, who can console their sons with lines like ‘When you least expect it nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot,’ and ‘Remember, I’m here.’

“And yet Stuhlberg sells it with a hushed technical virtuosity that makes every word land and vibrate, even though at times he overdoes the saintly Jewish-Daddy thing. Stuhlberg makes this the real climax of the movie — it becomes a primal scene — and in the packed theater I saw the movie you could hear the gay men (at least half the audience) barely holding back muffled sobs.

The initially dispiriting thing about Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs (Fox Searchlight, 3.23) is that (a) it’s set in Japan, which Hollywood Elsewhere has never been a huge fan of, (b) it’s about a dystopian future and (c) it’s largely set on “trash island,” which seems to be all about grayish colors, rotting food and industrial waste. Which of course makes you feel sorry for the poor dogs who live there. One presumes (hopes) that the third-act involves some kind of escape and/or transformation.

Wiki boilerpplate: “Set in a dystopian future Japan in which dogs have been quarantined on the remote eponymous island due to a “canine flu”, Isle of Dogs follows five barkers — Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Bill Murray), Duke (Jeff Goldblum) and King (Bob Balaban). They’re fed up with their isolated existence until a boy named Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) ventures to the island to search for his dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber),” etc.

Neil Blomkamp‘s District 9 meets George Miller‘s The Road Warrior meets current epic sensibilities. Pure apocalyptic formula, and called Mortal Engines, you bet. “Thousands of years after civilization was destroyed by a cataclysmic event,” blah blah, same old same old. Wells to filmmakers: Huge tractor cities don’t growl like dinosaurs — they don’t go “rrrhhoowwwhhrrr.” Directed by Christian Rivers, produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, written by Jackson, Walsh and Philippa Boyens. Costarring Robert Sheehan, Hera Hilmar, Leila George, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Lang. Universal will open it on 12.14.18.

On 12.14 I made it clear that I had no problem with the Academy’s foreign-film branch leaving Robin Campillo‘s BPM: Beats Per Minute off the shortlist. I respect BPM — it’s fleet and sharp and well cut — and I admire, of course, the balls-out militancy of the ACT UP movement in the late ’80s and ’90s. But to me Campillo’s felt too strident, too hectoring and a little too Taxi Zum Klo.

Yeah, that’s right — I prefer gay movies (i.e, Call Me By Your Name) to queer cinema. I guess that makes me a bad guy in some quarters, right?

Variety‘s Guy Lodge has dutifully passed along the elitist disappointment about the BPM snub. “More conservative voters in the general branch might not warm to the film’s length, talkiness and frankly queer sensibility, it was reasoned,” GL wrote, “and when the film got frozen out of the Golden Globes last week, we were given a hint that it wasn’t a universal favorite outside the critical enclave. [For] the general verdict from onlookers was that the Academy had erred badly by passing on Campillo’s film.”

Translation: Those who didn’t vote for BPM are likely homophobes, and they need to work through that. Group therapy, night classes, etc.

Guys like Mark Harris and Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson can lament this, but there’s no law that I know of stating that you have to be moved by, say, a scene in which an AIDS-ravaged guy gets a death-bed hand job. “Reform is desperately needed here,” tweeted Harris. “And the fact that it’s a gay movie…this is a stain.”

Presumably the foreign language committee as well as the Academy at large understand that the next queer movie that comes along needs to be embraced with a bit more fervor. If not, more charges of homophobia!

The first Sundance showing of Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, about cartoonist John Callahan, is about as prime as it gets — Friday, 1.19 at 9:45 pm, Eccles. And today’s announcement about the Amazon release being selected as a 2018 Berlinale competition title completes the picture. The film is apparently a first-rater with heat, and Van Sant is looking pretty slick himself.

(l.) Jonah Hill, (r.) Joaquin Pheonix.

Don’t forget that Van Sant was all but covered in shit after the critical drubbing that his last film, The Sea of Trees, received in Cannes two and a half years ago. It just goes to show that if you keep hustling and don’t let failure get you down, you’ll eventually find yourself back on top or close to it. Maybe. If you’re X factor to begin with.

Pic stars Joaquin Phoenix as Callahan, and costars Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Mark Webber and Udo Kier. Amazon will open the period drama stateside on 5.18.18.

I wouldn’t call President Trump’s statement about not planning to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller…I wouldn’t call that comforting because you know he wants to. He just doesn’t think he can fire Mueller without making things worse for himself. If Trump were otherwise persuaded he’d go for it. He’s unhappy about Mueller for gaining access to all transition those emails. “My people were very upset about it,” he said — right. Mueller’s spokesman claimed that the email-obtaining methods were totally legit.