Late this morning we watched four musical segments from Michael Gracey‘s The Greatest Showman (20th Century Fox, 12.20). Lasting about 15 minutes, the footage contained four songs — “The Greatest Show,” “This Is Me,” “From Now On” and a song I can’t remember the title of. Then it was over to the Four Seasons for a nice lunch and then a performance of “This Is Me,” sung by Keala Settle with accompaniment from songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also wrote the lyrics to Justin Hurvitz‘s La La Land score. The performers were introduced by Hugh Jackman, who stars as showbiz impresario P.T. Barnum. The Greatest Showman opens in 22 days — no screening invites yet.

(l. to r,) Benj Pasek, Hugh Jackman, Justin Paul, Keala Settle.

Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey.

No details about what particular behaviors sent Matt Lauer‘s career crashing into the rocks, but former MSNBC anchor Keith Oldermann tweeted this morning that NBC knew about Lauer’s sexual misconduct prior to getting whacked yesterday and that the network had chosen to “enable” and “bury” the issue rather than take action.

“Matt Lauer was [remorselessly] vindictive and tyrannical to everyone at NBC News and management repeatedly enabled him and buried the issue,” said Olbermann tweeted.

At the same time Prairie Home Companion creator-headliner Garrison Keillor, 75, has been cut loose by Minnesota Public Radio, but the term in this instance was “improper conduct,” or allegations of his inappropriate behavior with an individual who worked with him,” according to a statement from the radio network. The AP reported that he’d been canned over “a story that I think is more interesting and more complicated than the version M.P.R. heard.”

Earlier today the National Board of Review handed three big fat awards to Steven Spielberg‘s The Post — Best Picture, Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Actor (Tom Hanks). Everyone presumably understands by now that Call Me By Your Name operates on a much loftier aesthetic plane than the Spielberg film, and that it’s much more emotionally nourishing. But the anti-Trump political metaphor was hard to vote against, I suppose. The Post is a smartly written, highly stirring newspaper drama from the old school, and I for one loved the way it made me feel. But Call Me By Your Name is a masterpiece. I’m sorry but it is.

Lady Bird‘s Greta Gerwig won the Best Director trophy, and Laurie Metcalf (who plays Saoirse Ronan‘s stubbornly willful mom) who won the Supporting Actress prize. The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe won for Best Supporting Actor, and the Get Out cast took the Best Ensemble prize. Call Me By Your Name‘s Timothee Chalamet nabbed the NBR’s Breakthrough Performance award.

Paul Thomas Anderson took the original screenplay award for the richly perverse creation known as Phantom Thread, and Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber won the adapted screenplay award for The Disaster Artist.

The NBR choices for 2017’s Top 10 Films included Baby Driver, Call Me by Your Name, The Disaster Artist, Downsizing, Dunkirk, The Florida Project, Get Out, Lady Bird, Logan and Phantom Thread. They gave The Post their Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Actor award but didn’t include it among their top ten? And…wait, they blew off Darkest Hour, The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri? How will Pete Hammond and Tom O’Neil explain that one? Guys?

The magnificent Coco won the Best Animated Feature prize. Brent Scowcroft…I mean Brett Morgen’s Jane took the Documentary Feature award. Foxtrot, which I still haven’t seen, was named Best Foreign Language Film.

Freedom of Expression Awards went to John Ridley for Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, and to Angelina Jolie for First They Killed My Father.

Wonder Woman helmer Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot took the NBR’s Spotlight Award.

The NBR awards will be handed out on Thursday, 1.4.18.

In a snide and dismissive 11.26 article called “Ten Years of Trying To Make Armie Hammer Happen,” Buzzfeed‘s Anne Helen Petersen describes Hammer’s difficulty in launching himself over the last seven years or so.

Most of her observations are partly true, but here’s how I’d put it. Hammer happened in 2010’s The Social Network (i.e., the “Winklevii”), and it was just a matter of landing another role as good. I was a bit worried for him after The Lone Ranger, but I suspected he’d recover. He actually did half-recover in The Man From UNCLE but the film…not good enough. And then Luca Guadagnino came along and just flat-out saved Armie’s ass. In the immediate aftermath of the first-anywhere screening of Call Me By Your Name at last January’s Sundance ’17, it was obvious Hammer had been restored, redeemed and propelled onto high ground.

But Petersen also strolls into an unfortunate p.c. mindset. “Hammer [has] comported himself the way people who have grown up with money often do,” she writes. “With confidence and charisma, or, if you’re being less generous, like a little bit of an asshole.” Because Hammer happens to be really good-looking, she means. And because he’s white, of course, which translates as arrogant and entitled. Petersen is expressing a basic attitude about confident, broad-shouldered whiteys that has embedded itself over the last…oh, dozen years or so. Which is that there’s something vaguely dickish and socially toxic about these guys.

In a 7.30 HE piece called “When Ax-Blade Handsome Was Okay,” I asked “which upper-echelon actors in today’s realm are ax-blade handsome in that tall, broad-shouldered, WASP-ian way? Two guys I can think of — Armie Hammer and (when he’s not summoning memories of Ernest Borgnine) Henry Cavill. But that’s about it.

On top of scoring the year’s biggest per-screen average last weekend ($101K per screen on four screens for a total of $404,874), Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name added fuel to the fire tonight by taking two Gotham Awards, Best Feature and a Breakthrough Actor trophy for Timothee Chalamet. Jordan Peele‘s Get Out wasn’t ignored — he took the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award plus a Best Screenplay award. And HE’s own James Franco took the Best Actor Gotham Award for his indelible Disaster Artist performance, and Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan landed a Best Actress trophy.

A Washington Post story posted at 2:55 pm Pacific: “A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

“In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

“The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.”

“On Monday morning, Post reporters saw [this woman] walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover ‘stings’ that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.”

After last Saturday’s “2018 Hotties” post, I added several titles and then tried to reorganize the whole thing. Right now I’ve got 20 strong-sounding features, a good percentage of which could end up as awards-bait fall releases (The Irishman, Roma, Back Seat, First Man, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Wife). Plus 7 upmarket genre films plus 13 likely standouts from (in no particular order) Benh Zeitlin, Yorgos Lanthimos, Laszlo Nemes, Clint Eastwood, Garth Davis, Richard Linklater, David McKenzie, Joel Edgerton, Robert Zemeckis, Wes Anderson‘, John Curran, Jennifer Kent, Paolo Sorrentino and Paul Verhoeven.

That makes for a total of 40 noteworthy 2018 films to look forward to, of which maybe 20 or 25 will deliver the real goods…who knows? But the year is already looking pretty nifty. And none of these fall under the category of mind-melting, idiot-brand, superhero franchise CG Asian-market slop. And yet I am looking forward to Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther as well as Peyton Reed‘s Ant Man and the Wasp.

Topliners: 1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano); 2. Adam McKay‘s Backseat (Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell); 3. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, a space drama about NASA’s Duke of Dullness, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke); 4. Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots (w/ Margot Robbie, David Tennant, Jack Lowden, Guy Pearce); 5. Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Jenna Fischer, Judy Greer, Bryce Gheisar, Alek Skarlatos, Thomas Lennon, Jaleel White, Tony Hale, P.J. Byrne).

6. Steve McQueen‘s Widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Andre Holland, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell); 7. Terrence Malick‘s Radegund (August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jürgen Prochnow, Bruno Ganz; 8. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Yalitza Aparicio, Daniela Demesa, Enoc Leaño, Daniel Valtierra); 9. Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Rutger Hauer, Riz Ahmed, John C. Reilly); 10. Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Diego Luna, Dave Franco).

11. Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody (15-year period from the formation of Queen and lead singer Freddie Mercury up to their performance at Live Aid in 1985) w/ Rami Malek, Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, Lucy Boynton. 20th Century Fox, 12.25.18; 12. Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign + Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke. Max Irons); 13. Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis of Sex; 14. Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (costarring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Mark Webber); 15. Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy with Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet.

It was announced two days ago that Rance Howard, father of director Ron Howard and actor Clint Howard, had passed at age 89. Rance reportedly played a sheriff in Cool Hand Luke, which I happened to re-watch last week on a Miami-to-LAX flight. Due respect but I honestly don’t recall anything he said or did in that Stuart Rosenberg flick, and I can’t find a decent frame-grab either.

There’s one Rance role I’ll never forget, though, and that’s the shepherd (i.e., “irate farmer”) who ushers several sheep into a City Council meeting in Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown (’74) — “Tell me where to take ’em! You don’t have an answer for that so quick, do ya?” (Rance arrives sometime after the 2:00 mark.)

Time magazine has been publishing for 94 years. It was a major, highly influential news weekly for…what, a half-century? Time is still respected with a circulation of 3 million plus, but it’s been decreasing in influence since the late ’90s. I have this idea that Time mattered in a necessary, must-read cultural sense in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, but that’s just something I’ve pulled out of my ass. Maybe it also mattered in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m mentioning this because Time is all but dead now, having agreed to sell itself to the Meredith Corporation in a deal backed by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire fucktards who aren’t Trump supporters but have otherwise come to represent the worst anti-progressive forces in this country, everything evil and toxic and fossil fuel-y. From N.Y. Times story: Meredith, which publishes popular monthly magazines like Family Circle and Better Homes and Gardens, has arranged for a $600 million cash infusion from the Koch brothers through their private equity arm, Koch Equity Development.”

From “Year One: The Mad King,” an 11.10 New York Review of Books piece by Charles Sykes: “Less than a year into his presidency, we hear the same question again and again: What will it take? What has to happen for Republicans to break with their Mad King?

“The honest answer is: Who knows? Whatever people have said has to happen has, in fact, already happened, over and over again, and the GOP has swallowed it anyway. A year ago, Speaker Paul Ryan called Trump’s attacks on a Mexican-American judge a ‘textbook definition’ of racism, but today Ryan is one of Trump’s most reliable and chirpy cheerleaders. Every line has already been crossed, every norm broken, every standard of decency shattered and yet four out of five GOP voters still back him.

“Even as Robert Mueller’s investigation accelerates, there are few signs that the party has any will to resist him. In the last year and a half, Trump has succeeded in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. The collaborators rationalize their response thus: if they did not go along, then power would shift to even worse actors. As the former presidential aide Steve Bannon plots a populist revanchist rebellion, some Republicans tell themselves that it is better to be a Vichy Republican, a quiescent enabler, than one of the denizens of Bannon’s Crazytown.

My recollections of Paul Schrader‘s Blue Collar (’78) are on the vague side. It was reasonably well regarded back in the day, or so I recall. But I couldn’t remember much about the plot. I could only recall three angry, financially struggling auto workers (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto) pulling off a half-assed heist, and things becoming worse as a result. So I read Vincent Canby‘s N.Y. Times review (which ran on 2.10.78) and I still couldn’t recall anything. That’s usually a bad sign.

During filming of Blue Collar, sometime in ’77: (l. to r.) Paul Schrader, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Richard Pryor.

So rather than buy the forthcoming Indicator Bluray (which pops on 1.22.18), I think I’ll just rewatch it via Amazon streaming.

Blue Collar‘s production history was unstable and conflicted. A recent Cinephilia & Beyond piece reports that “filming was tumultuous.” At one point Pryor pulled a gun on Schrader and refused to do any more than three takes. “Pryor was the unhappiest person I ever met,” Schrader said on a voiceover commentary. “After about three weeks in, I was in the middle of the set and all of a sudden I started crying and…couldn’t stop.”

Schrader later admitted that “Pryor’s best performance would be found in those second or third takes and that he would become bored and begin to improvise from thereon, to the annoyance of Keitel.”

“A day did not go by without some form of provocation,” Schrader recalls. “Either physical or verbal or walking off [the set]. It was just trench warfare.”

Blue Collar was widely praised by critics. (I think.) Roger Ebert liked it. I’ve already rented the streaming, but I have an idea that a making-of doc might be more interesting.