Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that his vocabulary is roughly that of a 15 year-old who gets poor grades. That plus his compulsive boasting bullshit is the primary reason why his patter often sounds so pathetic.

“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he tweeted early this morning. He claimed to be a “VERY successful businessman” and TV star who’d won the White House on his first attempt. “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius…and a very stable genius at that!”

If Trump had said “unusually intuitive” instead of “like, really smart”, he wouldn’t have been half-wrong. However destructive or demonic they may be, Trump’s intuitive perceptions about political trends and tweet-currents have connected with and inflamed his dumbshit base (i.e., the lower 30%). He does seem to have an intuitive understanding of how to manipulate topics and blood-level prejudices in this particular arena.

Alas, the words “intuition” and “intuitive” didn’t occur when he tweeted the above, and now he’s once again reminded tens of millions what a true-blue moron sounds like.

My first reaction to the trailer for Steven Soderbergh‘s Mosaic (HBO, 1.22), the narrative version of that interactive thing, was “who’s the fat guy?” Conviction, intense vibes. Devin Ratray played Bruce Dern‘s loathsome nephew “Cole” in Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, but he’s mainly known for having injected poison serum into the American bloodstream with his portrayal of Buzz McAllister, the chubby demon with the flattop and warlock eyes from the Home Alone movies. His Mosaic character, Nate Henry, is described on the HBO Mosaic site as “chief detective of a small police force…who now has to face the toughest case — and choice — of his career.”

I ignored the Mosaic iOS/Android mobile app, but the six-episode series seems intriguing. Same content but minus the interactivity + the option to research documents. Garret Hedlund, Sharon Stone, Frederick Weller, Jennifer Ferrin, Maya Kazan, Beau Bridges, et. al.

Three hours ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitchposted a q & a with “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff. The topic, naturally, is Wolff’s response to the oolah-boolah of the last 72 hours. Unlike Trump, Wolff sounds as if he’s dealing with the hailstorm in a reasonably adult fashion.

The excerpt that caught everyone’s attention concerned the all-but-inevitable movie or miniseries adaptation. Abramovitch: “What’s the situation with the movie and TV rights to the book?” Wolff: “Let me not answer that at the moment. I can say at this point no deal, but lots of things happening.”

I will fall over backwards in my chair if the Fire and Fury movie doesn’t turn out to be a Jay Roach-Danny Strong collaboration for HBO….please! And the sooner the better.

The just-right quality of Roach and Strong’s Game Change (HBO 2012), an expert, carefully measured saga of the Sarah Palin campaign meltdown of ’08 with note-perfect performances from Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson (as John McCain‘s campaign manager Steve Schmidt), not to mention Recount (HBO, 2008), Roach and Strong’s brilliant distilling of the 2000 Florida recount calamity, make this a mandatory scenario.

Getting the right actor to play Trump will obviously be crucial. The performance will have to be delivered with an absolute aversion to broad caricature. He’ll have to look and sound right, but the acting will have to be on the level of Anthony Hopkins‘ wounded-wildebeest portrayal in Oliver Stone‘s Nixon or Jason Robards‘ performance as Ben Bradlee in All The President’s Men. A flailing orangutan in a constant crisis mode, of course, but with an undertow of little-boy panic and matter-of-fact sadness. An American tragedy inflated into an epic-scaled calamity.

Two days ago I re-posted my 9.3.17 review of Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water. I hadn’t mentioned the Oscar-tipped Fox Searchlight release since it opened on 12.8, and it was time to hear some reactions.

Same deal now with Aaron Sorkin‘s Molly’s Game, which opened on 12.25.17 or 11 days ago. I posted a slapshot Toronto Film Festival “review” on 9.8.17, or three and half months before anyone had seen it. So here it is again. Those who’ve seen this motormouthed legal drama are invited to weigh in.

Tweeted on 9.8.17 at 9:30 pm: “Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game is an edgy, brutally complex, hard-driving motormouth thing with some excellent scenes, but the only people I cared about were Idris Elba‘s attorney (i.e., defending Jessica Chastain‘s Molly Bloom on illegal gambling charges), Elba’s pretty daughter and Kevin Costner’s dad character during a third-act park-bench scene with Chastain.

“I didn’t care about anyone else, and I basically found the whole thing, despite the very brainy writing, extremely fleet editing, the scrupulous attention paid to character shading plus that little sapling sticking out of the snow (a metaphor for unfair or random fate)…I found this whipsmart film demanding, not very nourishing and finally exhausting and soul-draining.”

Morning after #1:  Remember that high-velocity, rat-a-tat breakup scene beteeen Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara in The Social Network, which Sorkin also wrote? Molly’s Game is like that all the way through.  You can feel yourself start to wilt.

Morning after #2:  Chastain is so arch, clipped and super-brittle (this is more or less Miss Sloane 2), you just give up after a while.  Elba has a great rhetorical sum-up scene with prosecutors near the end, but is otherwise trapped in a game of verbal ping-pong.  And the various high-rollers who populate the gambling scenes (movie stars, heirs, hedge-fund guys, Russian mobsters) inspire one emotion — loathing.  I hate guys like this, and I have to spend two hours with a whole string of them?

Michael Wolff‘s “Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House” went on sale this morning at 9 am Pacific. I wanted a hardbound copy to have and hold, but I had this idea that others had the same thought and there’d be a line of 30 or 40 people outside Book Soup on Sunset. So I arrived at 8:30 am, and I was the third guy there. By the time the door opened there were eight or nine of us. No biggie.

I haven’t had time to sink into it, but I did a little skimming over breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien. I found a sentence with a missing word on page 3. “This was the job Bannon a week later” should read “”This was the job Bannon had a week later.”

It’s a fast, easy read — 310 pages — and it feels light when you pick it up. I don’t know where I got the idea that it would run 500 or 600 pages. Wolff got what he got from 200 interviews, and it only represents about 11 months in the saga — Election Day to October ’17 or thereabouts. It’s basically the Steve Bannon story, and the portions I’ve read are…I don’t want to use the word “hilarious” but so much of it is WTF-level.

It ends as follows: “Trump, in Bannon’s view, was a chapter, or even a detour, in the Trump revolution, which had always been about weaknesses in the two parties. The Trump presidency — however long it lasted — had created the opening that would provide true outsiders their opportunity. Trump was just the beginning.”

The Book Soup site is announcing that they’ve sold out of “Fire and Fury,” and that more copies will arrive in Monday, 1.8.

Barack Obama will be the first guest on David Letterman‘s new six-episode Netflix series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. The hour-long Obama episode will begin streaming on Friday, 1.12. The remaining five episodes will appear over the next five months.

My first reactions to the Obama booking? I really don’t think he’s doing the country any favors with his light-dab, almost hands-offy comments about the ongoing psychodrama at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Just like he avoided mentioning the Russian intel situation in the weeks before the ’16 election. He’ll probably skirt it again with Letterman, and that’ll be a shame. There’s a madman in the White House so enough with the cheerful smoothie thing, the “I’m not President any more so I can kick back now and relax” routine.

What are the big takeaways from this morning’s Producers Guild of America nominations? Apart from the obvious, I mean, or the fact that 11 films — The Big Sick, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Get Out, I, Tonya, Lady Bird, Molly’s Game, The Post, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and Wonder Woman — were nominated for the PGA’s Best Picture trophy, which they call the Darryl F. Zanuck Award.

Takeaway #1: After being blanked by SAG and the WGA, Steven Spielberg‘s The Post has been saved from the guillotine. If it hadn’t been nominated for a Zanuck award, people everywhere would be saying “well, that’s it…The Post is dead meat.” But it was nominated, thank fortune, and so everyone’s now saying “it’s not dead!” Given that it’s the best Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan, the SAG and WGA blowoffs seemed odd, to say the least. But now it’s back in the game, at least to some extent.

Takeaway #2: Anyone who looks you in the eye and tells you that Molly’s Game isn’t a punishing thing to sit through is a flat-out liar. There’s not enough oxygen, Jessica Chastain‘s brittle performance is a chore, and Aaron Sorkin‘s machine-gun dialogue talks you to death. So why was it nominated? I know some people who respect it but nobody loves it.

Takeaway #3: Why was Wonder Woman nominated? Because it made a lot of money and because the PGA wanted to …what, acknowledge two woman directors instead of one as gesture of support in this, the year of #MeToo pushback?

The PGA’s Documentary award nominees are Chasing Coral, City of Ghosts, Cries from Syria, Earth: One Amazing Day, Jane, Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower and The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee.

HE’s own Nick Clement (aka “Action Man”) has posted a three-part, non-exhaustive q & a interview with director Phillip Noyce. It covers the span of Noyce’s 40-year career — Backroads, Newsfront, Dead Calm, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Sliver, The Saint, The Bone Collector, Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Quiet American, Catch a Fire, Salt, The Giver and the brilliant, still unreleased Above Suspicion.

Click on part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Noyce on his mindset as he began making Rabbit Proof Fence: “The biggest challenge was that I had to take all of the ‘Hollywood’ out of my system. I was making a film that literally would stand no chance of being financed on any sort of studio level, and in a way, that made all of us who were involved more and more determined to get it made. It was a story we needed to tell, not something we were doing for the paycheck.

“We ended up raising $6 million to get the film made, and one of the proudest things about the entire experience is that it’s the most profitable film I’ve ever been involved with in terms of how much it cost to make and how much it took in from sales. Not forgetting the hearts and minds that were changed all around the world.”

There are pack rats (i.e., people who never throw anything out and who gradually choke to death on the clutter) and those who throw a lot of stuff out but hang on to a few remnants. I’m one of the latter. The past will consume you if you let it.

Mark Pellington‘s Nostalgia (Bleecker Street, 2.16) was acquired during last year’s Sundance Film Festival, but it’s debuting at this year’s Palm Springs Festival. Pic “follows several people as they mutually come to a pivotal moment in their lives where they must rid of old family belongings,” etc.

The trailer indicates that Nostalgia has no story. It appears to be an acting-class format that allows several characters (played by Ellen Burstyn, Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener, John Ortiz, Bruce Dern, Amber Tamblyn, James LeGros) to share about the sentimental value of bric a brac they don’t want to part with.

Confession: I’ve never seen Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Nostalghia (’83).

Since last May I’ve posted two European-created trailers for Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s short-listed Loveless (Sony Pictures Classics, 2.16), but this is the cleanest and most concise. A long procession of missing children dramas have been domestically released (Gone Baby Gone, Changeling, Bunny Lake is Missing, Without A Trace, Ransom), but American producers have never had the balls to make one with Zvyagintsev’s approach — a drama that focuses on efforts to find a disappeared boy, yes, but is mostly about why the boy might have escaped in the first place. A movie that weeps over his absence, but at the same time considers the all of it, and even half-sympathizes.

I’ve always been intrigued by Walt Disney‘s Lady and the Tramp (’55) because it’s the only animated feature to be shot and projected at 2.55:1 — i.e., the early to mid ’50s Fox Scope aspect ratio that was phased out in favor of 2.39:1 in ’56 or thereabouts. To the best of my knowledge all other widescreen animated features have been presented in either 2.39 or, in the case of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Super Technirama (2.25:1).

There’s a new extra-laden Disney Bluray coming out on 2.27, but you can order a region-free British Bluray right now for less than $20.

The newbie has a ton of extras [see below], but not the one I’d like to see — a 1.37:1 version that was created for theatres that still hadn’t installed CinemaScope screens by mid ’55.

Eight years ago Fox Home Video released a Bluray of The Robe (’53), the first Hollywood feature shot in CinemaScope. The Bluray contained an alternate 1.37:1 version that was shot concurrently out of concern that the CinemaScope version might be a huge flop. As it turned out the 1.37 version never saw the light of day.

From Lady and the Tramp Wiki page:

“Originally, Lady and the Tramp was planned to be filmed in a regular full-frame aspect ratio [i.e., 1.37:1]. However, due to the growing interest of widescreen film among moviegoers, Disney decided to animate the film in CinemaScope making Lady and the Tramp the first animated feature filmed in the process.

“[But] problems arose as the premiere date got closer and [an awareness dawned] that not all theaters had the capability to show CinemaScope at the time. Upon learning this, Walt issued two versions of the film: one in widescreen, and another in the Academy ratio. This involved gathering the layout artists to restructure key scenes when characters were on the edges of the screen.”

Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff has penned a delicious, dessert-like Hollywood Reporter piece that summarizes his process in absorbing the whole Trump White House magillah.

Axios’ Mike Allen is reporting that Wolff, due to appear on news shows this weekend as well as Morning Joe Monday morning, “has tapes to back up quotes in his incendiary book — dozens of hours of them,” including chats with Steve Bannon and former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh.

A taste: “After the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, there was hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump’s family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

“Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia ‘collusion’, Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)

“There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.