The first burst of Downsizing reviews from the Venice Film Festival are averaging 90% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. There are four or five quibblers. Screen International‘s Lee Marshall says “there’s something for everyone in Downsizing, just not a full meal.” While praising director Alexander Payne as “the closest thing we have to a studio-system classcist,” Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman says it’s “more amusing than exhilarating, and what should be its emotional payoff hinges too much (for my taste) on the director’s apocalyptic vision of climate change. Downsizing turns into a movie about saving the human race. But it’s most fun when it’s about saving one man whose life turns out to be bigger than a hill of beans.” The biggest naysayer is senior Daily Beast entertainment editor Marlow Stern, who tweeted this morning that “the effusive Venice praise for Downsizing is festival hysteria, plain and simple. It’s not good, unfortunately.” But a 90% Metacritic rating ain’t hay, and don’t forget Todd McCarthy’s rave.

From a 4.1.17 post titled “Middle Americans May Not Like What They See in Downsizing“, which riffed on my reactions to a 10-minute Downsizing clip shown at Cinemacon and particularly a conservative Arizona woman’s reaction to it:

“Yes, Downsizing is ‘comedic’ but a long way from lighthearted. For all the humor and cleverness and first-rate CG it feels kind of Twilight Zone-y…a kind of Rod Serling tale that will have an uh-oh finale or more likely an uh-oh feeling all through it. The undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

“In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

“A day after Cinemacon’s Downsizing presentation I was chatting with a bespectacled heavy-set female who works, she said, for an Arizona exhibitor (or some exhibition-related business) in some executive capacity. She struck me as a conservative, perhaps one who processes things in simplistic ‘like/no like’ terms, definitely not a Susan Sontag brainiac.

“I shared my impression that the Downsizing clip was brilliant, and asked what she thought of it. Her response: ‘I don’t know what I think of it.’

“HE translation: ‘No offense but I don’t want to spill my mixed feelings with some Los Angeles journalist I’ve just met. I didn’t like the chilly feeling underneath it. It didn’t make me feel good. My heart wasn’t warmed by the idea of working people shrinking themselves down so they can live a more lavish lifestyle. I have to work really hard at my job and watch my spending and build up my IRA, and I didn’t appreciate the notion that I’m just a little struggling hamster on a spinning wheel.'”

Above-average bathroom montage, posted four years ago by Blow Up ARTE guys. Just happened upon this, nice work, nothing more.

As a longtime fan of Bertrand Blier‘s Going Places (Les Valseuses), I’ve been hoping that someone would attempt an American remake. A tricky task, for sure, as the 1974 original, a French road flick about random lawlessness and impulsive debauchery, had a curiously disarming chemistry. As it turns out John Turturro has directed a Going Places remake with the same title, and one that has the “same spirit” as the Blier filmm at least according to an Indiewire interview that Turturro gave earlier this year.

Turturro’s Going Places costars himself, Bobby Cannavale and Audrey Tatou as “sexually depraved misfits,” according to the Indiewire description. The interesting part is that Turturro’s character is Jesus Quintana, the perverse, purple-suited bowling enthusiast from The Big Lebowski (’98).

“Blier’s [film] is like a sex comedy about how stupid men are, basically,” Turturro said. “His movie was more edgy, but this is [about] a different time. Audrey Tautou is more empowered. [Plus] it’s more sexual, and you find out that Jesus was framed as a pedophile.” Susan Sarandon plays a woman just released from prison, or the part that the late Jeanne Moreau played in the original. Sonia Braga also costars.

Can I say something? You have to be younger and fresh-faced and full of beans and hormones to play a sexually depraved misfit. Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Deware were 25 and 26, respectively, when they made the original French-language version. Turturro will always own “the Jesus,” but he was born in February 1957. Cannavale is 47, and Tatou, born in ’76, is no spring chicken either.

But I want to see Turturro’s Going Places anyway.

From Todd McCarthy‘s Venice Film Festival review of Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing: “[This] is a wonderfully outsized movie for these times if there ever was one. Alexander Payne has taken a conceit heretofore used for gag-oriented sci-fi and comedy, that of shrinking human beings down to the size of a finger, and breathtakingly transformed it into a way of addressing the planet’s overriding long-term issue.

“Captivating, funny and possessed of a surprise-filled zig-zag structure that makes it impossible to anticipate where it’s headed, this is a deeply humane film that, like the best Hollywood classics, feels both entirely of its moment and timeless. It was a risky roll of the dice, but one that hits the creative jackpot.

“The rare director who has never made a bad film, Payne has now arguably created his best one with a work that easily accommodates many moods, flavors, intentions and ambitions.

“At its core, Downsizing grapples head-on with the long-term viability of humanity’s existence on this planet, but with no pretension or preachiness at all, while on a moment-to-moment basis it’s a human comedy dominated by personal foibles and people just trying to get by in life. It’s also a science-fiction film that not for a second looks or feels like one.

“As such, this is a unique undertaking, one centered on an unexceptional Everyman character who unwittingly embarks upon an exceptional life journey; in that sense, Matt Damon’s Paul Safranek is like the hero of a Frank Capra or Preston Sturges film of 75 years ago, an ordinary man who has a certain sort of greatness thrust upon him. At the same time, the movie is a highly sophisticated creation that, due to its off-hand, underplayed presentation of the future, essentially seems to be taking place in the present day.

Yesterday a planned Los Angeles premiere of Jeepers Creepers 3, an insignificant-sounding horror film directed by Victor Salva, was cancelled. It had been slated to screen at the TCL Chinese on Monday, 11.13, under the auspices of some kind of horror aficionado screening program organized by moviedude18, aka Kory Davis. The screening was cancelled over fears of negative protests and social-media agitation. The provocation is Salva’s criminal past, and more specifically a 1988 incident of child molestation that resulted in time. Salva did 15 months for this, and then laid low for a few years. But his notoriety blew up again when Powder, which wasn’t half bad, was released in ’95. In fact, I wrote an Entertainment Weekly story (11.10.95) about it.

Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal is one of my favorite comfort flicks. I’ll watch it maybe once a year, and when I do it never fails to engage. What other respected thrillers have been about “how and when will the lead protagonist be stopped from carrying out an evil deed?” and with such impressive finesse? (I can’t think of a single one.) Jackal is so crisp and concise, so well disciplined. And I loved Michael Lonsdale‘s inspector, and Edward Fox was such an attractive and well-behaved sociopath. And so nicely dressed.

It’s been nearly 20 years since the 1997 remake with Bruce Willis and Richard Gere, and I don’t even remember it. It did pretty well financially ($159 million) so it must have done something right, but I haven’t the slightest interest in seeing it again.

What if Zinneman’s version and the remake had never been made, and what if, say, Steven Soderbergh had recently directed a just-as-good-as-the-Zinneman version with Ryan Gosling in the lead role, and it was about to be seen and praised at the Venice Film Festival and then open stateside a few weeks later? How would today’s popcorn inhalers respond to it?

“Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal is one hell of an exciting movie. I wasn’t prepared for how good it really is: it’s not just a suspense classic, but a beautifully executed example of filmmaking. It’s put together like a fine watch. The screenplay meticulously assembles an incredible array of material, and then Zinnemann choreographs it so that the story — complicated as it is — unfolds in almost documentary starkness.

“The Day of the Jackal is two and a half hours long, and seems over in about fifteen minutes. There are some words you hesitate to use in a review, because they sound so much like advertising copy, but in this case I can truthfully say that the movie is spellbinding.” — from Roger Ebert‘s Chicago Sun Times review, 7.30.73.

I’ve heard a couple of genuinely positive responses to Our Souls At Night, the Robert Redford-Jane Fonda romantic drama that Netflix will debut on 9.29. Both tipsters have said it’s a really nice film with very winning performances. The Venice Film Festival reviews (expected to pop sometime late Friday) will tell the tale, of course. Why isn’t it showing at the Toronto Film Festival? I mean, why wouldn’t it? It’s not a bust — the film is somewhere between good and pretty good — so where’s the downside?

Excerpt from Amazon reader review of same-titled Kent Haruf book: “I don’t want to spoil the ending of this book. It takes an unexpected twist and isn’t all happiness. But the overwhelming impression this book leaves in your mind is of simple friendship that moves into love, and of two old people who discover they’re still able to learn and grow. It’s beautiful. There are no verbal fireworks, no peeking inside characters’ heads. Everything is observed from the outside. It’s simple, clean, human.”

Publicity shot for Barefoot In The Park, which opened on 5.25.68. Fonda was 29 at the time; Redford was 31.

Sydney Pollack‘s Electric Horseman, released on 12.21.79.

The title of Craig Zahler‘s Brawl in Cell Block 99, a prison drama about a mechanic (Vince Vaughn) sentenced to prison for smuggling guns, obviously alludes to Don Siegel‘s Riot in Cell Block 11 (’54). The trailer suggests it’s not so much about a brawl as an adjustment on the part of Vaughn’s good-guy character. It appears, in short, to have a couple of things in common with HBO’s The Night Of. Playing out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, and then a few days later at the Toronto Film Festival. Limited theatrical debut on 10.6, followed by VOD release on 10.13. I’m sensing this might be half-decent. Zahler’s last film was Bone Tomahawk.

Melania Trump as she was deciding what to wear for this morning’s trip to besieged Houston area: “Obviously visiting flooded areas and offering support and comfort to Harvey victims won’t be a glammy photo-op thing. Even I realize that. Nonetheless I need to dress as if I haven’t the slightest interest in wading through water. Why should I pretend to be anything more than what I am — a pampered trophy wife who doesn’t want to know about life on the lower levels, much less get close to or reflect upon same? Stiletto heels reflect this mindset. I can’t be a hypocrite. My husband can pretend that he’s willing to rough it with his tan hiking boots, but not me…sorry.”

For me, good movies deliver the steady current, the bedrock reality of life. Year in and year out, there is always a cosmic pulse, rhyme and rhythm in the realm of the top 5% of films (i.e., not your sludge- or superhero-level flicks but real-deal serious films). They deliver the fundamental things that apply. Raggedy day-to-day life constantly dilutes and compromises these truths, or certainly makes them less evident. It is therefore better to live “in” movies with occasional detours into real life, rather than vice versa. I owe my sanity to movies, and will always be grateful for the joy and wisdom they’ve provided.

Yesterday’s news, but seriously. Trump said he assumed that the ratings on his Sheriff Joe Arpaio pardon “would be far higher” except for the irksome interference of Hurricane Harvey?