I’ve been gradually warming to James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1) since I first saw and reviewed it about three weeks ago. Do I have to describe it again? A drly comedic true-life saga about the making of a notoriously awful indie-level film called The Room, etc.? Naahh.

On 10.25 I called it “a curio, a diversion…fine for what it is…generates a kind of chuckly vibe on a scene-by-scene basis, but that’s all.” Shoulder-shrugging approval, thumbs up but calm down, etc.

Nine days later I said I couldn’t get the sound of James Franco‘s spazzy, primal-scream “aaaggghh!” out of my head. The howling is part of Franco’s dead-on imitation of Tommy Wiseau‘s performance in The Room.

I saw The Disaster Artist again last weekend, and for some reason it seemed funnier this time. Probably because I knew the story and when the highlights would arrive, so I was able to focus on the tone and delivery. Maybe it was also because Tatyana was laughing a lot; ditto several others in the screening room. It just felt like more infectious, more fun. So if it’s okay I’d like to upgrade my reaction. If I gave The Disaster Artist a B-minus in my 10.25 review, I’d like to change that grade to a B-plus or maybe even an A-minus.

People have been staring at me for years (in cafes, at parties, on subways) because they were sure that I was Chris Walken. There’s a resemblance, okay, but my hair is darker and a bit longer, I look younger than C.W. (no facial saddblebag creases or neck wattle to speak of, due in part to my Prague touch-ups), and — hello? — I don’t have his signature voice. At all. Last May a guy in a Rome leather shop came up to me and insisted with a knowing smile that he knew I was Walken, despite my denials. “You’ve seen him in movies, right?” I said to the guy. “So you know his voice. People have been imitating him for years, right? Do I sound like him?” The guy wouldn’t back off, continuing with the grin and the “heh-heh” and saying “okay, Chris, but I know it’s you.”

“Because in the end, none of us live very long on this earth…life is fleeting.” — Robin Williams‘ Jack Powell, a kindly fellow afflicted with Werner Syndrome, which causes sufferers to age four times faster than normal. Oh, my God…there’s Bill Cosby!

Murdered by critics for its treacly mawkishness, Jack (released by Disney on 8.9.96) was probably the worst film and surely the most perplexing career move by esteemed director Francis Coppola, who only four years earlier had directed the mostly respected Bram Stoker‘s Dracula. Coppola followed Jack with another weird film for someone with his exalted reputation — The Rainmaker, an adaptation of a Jon Grisham airport novel with Matt Damon and Danny DeVito.

And that was it for Coppola and mainstream commercial filmmaking. With Youth Without Youth (’07) he began a second career as a self-funded indie filmmaker.

In my mind at least, Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons and Jeffrey Wright are “better” than the kind of movie that Game Night seems to be. They seem to be slumming. Maybe I shouldn’t judge too quickly. This New Line Cinema release opens on 3.2.18.

I’m aware, of course, that Daddy’s Home 2 has ratings of 16% and 29% from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively. But the serious anguish and agitation in this scene strikes me as funny on some level. All this bother over a thermostat. The little girl turns it up to 85 and all these four guys can do is fret and glare and hyperventilate? I would tell that little girl to cut it out or else. Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro saysDaddy’s Home 2, playing in 3575 situations, will probably end up with $21 million by Sunday night. So Joe and Jane Popcorn have found a place for this in their heads.

If Disney’s animation department had any character or courage, which of course they don’t, they would jump on the Kenyan gay lions story and create an animated feature about swishy lions fighting discrimination among the animal community as they try to find a haven for a stress-free life as a couple. This is just off the top of my head but it would basically be The Lion King meets Brokeback Mountain. I’m sorry but the photo that popped a week or two ago of those male lions going at it uncorked my imagination.

The comic element in the gay lions story emerged on 11.5 when Ezekeil Mutua, head of the Kenyan Film Classification Board, claimed that the lions were copying the activities of gay men who had visited Kenya’s Masai Mara park. Mutua theorized that the only other explanation was Satan. “These animals need counselling, because probably they have been influenced by gays who have gone to the national parks and behaved badly,” the official said.

“Russ Yelburton, deputy chief of Los Angeles Water & Power, died yesterday at the age of 84. “We’re… well, we’re not anxious for this to get around, but we have been diverting a little water to irrigate orange groves in the northwest valley. As you know, the farmers there have no legal right to our water, and since the drought we’ve had to cut them off. The city comes first, naturally. But we’ve been trying to help some of them out, keep them from going under. Naturally when you divert water, you get a little runoff.”

This morning Louis C.K. confirmed that negative allegations in yesterday’s N.Y. Times story about his behavior with five women several years ago are true, and that his behavior in these instances was hurtful and abhorrent. He then fell upon the church steps and begged for forgiveness. His statement strikes me as honest and forthright and decent as the situation allows. No equivocations, no distractions, no wiggling-around bullshit. There’s one sentence in his statement that strikes me as odd, but that’s probably because Louis C.K. didn’t show it to a good editor friend before posting.

“I want to address the stories told to The New York Times by five women named Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia who felt able to name themselves and one who did not.

“These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.”

Wells exception: Over the course of my entire life I have never once asked a woman if I could show her my gross animal member. Not once. During each and every occasion it was just cool all around and we both knew it. The terms of consensual relations the world over state that disrobing always happens by mutual, silent consent, and certainly without the necessity of verbal approval before the fact.

Back to Louis C.K.: “I have been remorseful of my actions. And I’ve tried to learn from them. And run from them. Now I’m aware of the extent of the impact of my actions. I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position.

“I also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t think that I was doing any of that because my position allowed me not to think about it. There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for. And I have to reconcile it with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with.

“I wish I had reacted to their admiration of me by being a good example to them as a man and given them some guidance as a comedian, including because I admired their work.

A Rory Carroll Guardian piece about an atmosphere of fear and trepidation among the Hollywood elite popped this morning. This climate of paranoia is due, of course, to numerous allegations of sexual misconduct that have surfaced over the last few weeks, which in turn have everyone wondering “who’s next?” Carroll knows the Hollywood beat as well as any top-tier trade reporter, but it’s telling that the only person who would go on the record with him is Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.

“Anxiety pervades Hollywood,” Stone tells Carroll. “There’s a lot of nervousness. People don’t know where this is going. Everybody is asking who will be next. Publicists are paid to keep stories down and control the message but now they’re in a situation where the truth comes out faster than they can control the message. It’s like gasoline. As soon as a story breaks, whoosh.”

Honestly? Carroll reached out to yours truly, but I said I couldn’t help. When you give an interview you can never be exactly sure how your words will sound according to sentence structure, context and whatnot. “The whole town is skittish,” a journalist observed this morning. “I get it. You could talk to a journo for 20 minutes and make solid, nuanced, empathetic points, and then the one little bit that’s used triggers backlash.”

Not to mention that the slightest expression of concern about rush-to-judgment condemnations could result in the finger being turned around and pointed at anyone expressing such concern. Decent people everywhere agree with the general condemnation of inappropriate or assaultive behavior, but it’s wiser to keep it to that. Former Hollywood Reporter editor Janice Min can express concern about a “Robespierre French Revolution”-like mentality but if a guy says this in a major publication….forget it.

In a seven-year-old N.Y. Times video essay about Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown, A.O. Scott noted that “evil is elemental” in this 1974 classic. “It’s in the air, in the water.” If this piece had never been composed in 2010 and if Scott had been asked to assess Chinatown today, he would probably avoid this observation. Because this kind of resigned acknowledgment argues strongly with the current mood. Because today’s victims-deserve-payback mindset is that “certain forms of evil, including a particular form that a certain Paris-residing director was jailed for in the mid ’70s, will be rooted out and eradicated, and it’s about time.”

It goes with saying that this classic, Robert Towne-authored film would never be made today for various reasons, but will the time come when Chinatown will be downgraded in the same way that Gone With The Wind has been recently? Because it seems insensitive and a touch heartless by the measure of current consciousness among liberal progressives? Noirish fatalism, the stink of corruption, semi-consensual sexual relations between a father and a daughter, etc. Not a fit in today’s Hollywood culture.

Like most podcasters, Variety‘s Kris Tapley likes to keep things loose, chatty and breezy when he interviews a Hollywood guest. It’s fair to say that this mindset didn’t quite mesh with 82 year-old Donald Sutherland, star of Sony Pictures Classics’ The Leisure Seeker (1.19.18) and a trophy recipient at this weekend’s Governor’s Awards.

Sutherland is a truth-teller, a take-it-or-leave-it reality guy. He gushes about co-workers like anyone else, but if he didn’t get along with someone during the making of a film and still has a bad taste in his mouth about it, he doesn’t mince words. He went there this morning during a chat with Tapley, and it sounded to me as if Sutherland’s candor threw his host off-balance.

In this morning’s “Playback” podcast, Sutherland dissed (a) the late Great Train Robbery director Michael Crichton, basically calling him a cold, heartless prick; (b) spoke about what a shit director Richard Marquand was for arranging for Sutherland to smash his hand through real glass during the shooting of Eye of the Needle (’81); and (c) expressed disdain for the late Robert Altman when producer Ingo Preminger told him that Altman was against casting Sutherland in M.A.S.H. and, when told Sutherland was a keeper, said he didn’t want Sutherland to get top billing.

Sutherland also talked about what a serious and personal heartbreaker it was when the Dodgers’ Rick Monday hit a home run against the Montreal Expos in ’81.

“This is not the detour I was expecting,” Tapley said. “Why would you expect a detour?,” Sutherland replied. “What’s the point of expecting anything? You just concentrate.”