Variety‘s Kris Tapley is proclaiming that Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is no longer a six-part Netflix anthology series but a feature film using an anthology structure? Am I reading this right?

So a few months ago the Coens said to Netflix, “Sorry, guys, but that western anthology series we sold you on, that six-segment concept that might’ve run somewhere between three and six hours…sorry but we prefer the idea of a feature film with a six-chapter structure.”

In other words the Coens wrote six segments that would have minimally run a half-hour (or possibly 45 minutes or an hour) each, and then decided to trim each segment down to, what, 20-minute vignettes for a grand narrative total of 120 minutes plus main titles and end credits? And now they’re debuting the feature at the Venice Film Festival with Tapley and others hailing a new potential Best Picture contender?

10:10 pm update: “Actually, it was always a feature script,” a friend informs. “Then they had the idea to cut it up into a six-part series. One assumes that, in the end, this proved easier said than done.”

I don’t know if this is how Tim Blake Nelson will appear in Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but he definitely looks, uhm, ornery and scraggly.

Way back in the summer of ’17, when this here thang was a Netlix anthology series, the six segments were described as follows:

(1) “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” — The story of a singing cowboy named Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson);

(2) “Near Algodones” — A high-plains drifter whose own fecklessness dogs his attempts at bank robbery and cattle driving, costarring James Franco, Ralph Ineson and Stephen Root;

(3) “Meal Ticket” — The story of an actor and impresario of a traveling show;

(4) “All Gold Canyon”– A prospector (possibly Tom Waits) happily finds a gold seam but then unhappily finds an evil encroacher;

(5) “The Gal Who Got Rattld” — The story of two trail bosses on the Oregon Trail and a woman on the wagon train who needs the help of one of them and who might be a marriage prospect for the other, w/ Zoe Kazan and Jackamoe Buzzell; and

(6) “The Mortal Remains” — Five very different passengers find themselves on a stagecoach to a mysterious destination w/ Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek.

Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson are also listed as costars.

Here’s the thang: With the exception of Franco and Neeson, none of the Buster Scruggs cast members are leads — they could all be compassionately described as off-center, eccentric, funny-looking character types. So right off the top the film is charisma-challenged. No Josh Brolin, no Javier Bardem, no Frances McDormand, no Tommy Lee Jones, no George Clooney, no Jeff Bridges, no Hailee Steinfeld.

Official Coen statement: “We’ve always loved anthology movies, especially those films made in Italy in the ’60s” — i.e., RoGoPaG — “which set side-by-side the work of different directors on a common theme. Having written an anthology of Western stories we attempted to do the same, hoping to enlist the best directors working today. It was our great fortune that they both agreed to participate.”

I can’t divulge the location, but Hollywood Elsewhere will be there in spirit if not physically. And I’ll apparently be interviewing director Matt Tyrnauer when he arrives in Manhattan early next week.

Yes, I’m a serious fan of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich, 7.27), in part, I suppose, because I’ve always found good backroom gossip irresistible, but mostly because I really and truly believe Scotty Bowers was a sexual go-between for gay or bisexual Hollywood stars in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. And because I admire Scotty’s intrepid attitude about everything.

“The sexual proclivities of some of the biggest stars of that era — Cary Grant, in particular — were well known to the town’s insiders,” Tyrnauer told Brooks Barnes in a 7.16 N.Y. Times article. “But people still gasp. That says so much about the enduring power of the Hollywood myth machine.”

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I saw Kevin Kurslake‘s Bad Reputation, a life-and-times-of-Joan Jett doc, during last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It tells her scrappy story in a thorough, relatively straightforward fashion, and therefore earned my admiration. The whole tale, start to finish, warts and all. Eight years ago I saw and mostly liked Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways; I would classify Bad Reputation as a respectable complement to that film, and an essential sit if you’re any kind of fan.

I had one slight issue, and that’s the decision by Kurslake to sidestep — i.e., not directly address — Jett’s sexuality. It’s not as if her tough, hard-rock, leather-clad butchy persona hadn’t been telegraphed all along, but it still seems odd that it wouldn’t be discussed at all in a wide-open, this-is-me portrait such as this one. In a 1.29.18 review Autostrada’s “Fonseca” wrote that “Jett’s sexuality isn’t relegated to its own very special narrative segment [in the doc], and that’s because it’s everywhere — as it should be for a rock star, and as it should be for all of us.” If you say so, but it still feels like avoidance. To go by Bad Reputation, Jett not only never fell in love — she never even got laid.

BMG Films is releasing the doc sometime in September.

With the British historical drama Peterloo (Amazon, 11.9), director Mike Leigh is veering into the kind of militant political material previously owned by Ken Loach (Land and Freedom, Bread and Roses, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Jimmy’s Hall). It also feels like an early 19th Century version of Paul Greengrass‘s brilliant Bloody Sunday (’02).

Leigh is recreating the notorious Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which government troops killed roughly 15 demonstrators and injured hundreds more. 60,000 citizens from Manchester and surrounding towns had assembled in St. Peter’s Field to demand Parliamentary reform and an expansion of voting rights, and local government officials freaked.

The massacre happened a good 20 years before the intensifying of the Industrial Revolution, 26 years before the birth of Eugene Debs, 45 years before the first stirrings of the British Labour movement, and 48 years before the publication of Karl Marx‘s “Das Kapital.”

The 2018 Toronto Film Festival (9.6 through 9.16) has announced the first crop of films under the headings of galas and special presentations. I’ve bunched them all together under my own Hollywood Elsewhere classifications — Oscar bait, high expectations, critically approved in Cannes and “hmmmm.” I’m sure I’ve omitted or mis-classified a title or two.

Oscar bait: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born, Felix van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy. ​

High Expectations: Steve McQueen‘s Widows, Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction, ​László Nemes‘ Sunset, David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun, ​Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Wash Westmoreland‘s Colette, ​Yann Demange‘s White Boy Rick, ​Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Maya, Eva Husson‘s Girls of the Sun, Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers, Peter Hedges‘ Ben Is Back.

Critically approved in Cannes: Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War, Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Shoplifters, L​ee Chang-dong‘s Burning, Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum, Z​hang Yimou‘s Shadow, Matteo Garrone‘s Dogman, Paul Dano‘s Wildlife​.

Second-Tier Farhadi Is Good Stuff Nonetheless: Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows.

Hmmm: Claire Denis‘s High Life, Melanie Laurent‘s Galveston, George Tillman‘s The Hate U Give, Jiang Wen‘s Hidden Man, Anurag Kashyap‘s Husband Material, Sara Colangelo‘s The Kindergarten Teacher, Nicole Holofcener‘s The Land of Steady Habits, ​Sir​ ​Trevor Nunn‘s Red Joan, Elizabeth Chomko‘s Wish They Had, K​with Behrman‘s Giant Little Ones, Stella Meghie‘s The Weekend​, A​mma Asante‘s Where Hands Touch, D​on McKellar‘s Through Black Spruce, Dan Fogelman‘s Life Itself, Emilio Estevez‘s The Public.

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Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27) is loads of fun — a big mechanical whambammer with all kinds of plot turnarounds and shifting loyalties and eye-rolls into the forehead. It made me feel like I was ten. I honestly gasped four or five times and laughed out loud six or seven…something like that. And one of the laughs involves Wolf Blitzer.

Try and catch it on a big fat IMAX screen, which I did earlier this evening.

I’m being completely complimentary when I call Fallout grade-A, bucks-up dope, and by that I mean the kind of high-octane, expertly performed, adrenalized nonsense that gives the term “jizz-whizz” a good name (and that’s saying something). It’s the kind of crazy-silly wank that makes you feel good about life — the kind that lifts you up and smells like expensive bar soap, high-grade leather and canvas money bags.

The thing that I really loved was how many of the non-action scenes are flecked with an attitude of dry, underplayed comedy. The kind of humor that says “ya gotta get a little fun out of life, right? Are we full of shit or just lucky-ass boys spending loads of dough or…well, you tell us. We’re half-giggling and half-grimming up and obviously having fun with the priciest toyset in the world, wearing masks and buzzing around Paris on motorcycles and flying helicopters in Kashmir and yadda yadda, and well paid all the while.”

Fallout doesn’t quite tip over into hah-hah comedy but the attitude is definitely jaunty if not jovial. If director-writer Chris McQuarrie had gone a little bolder and embraced a tiny bit more of a “fuck it” attitude and turned up the deadpan Three Stooges dial a bit more, this could have been an amazing piece of action comedy, and I mean like something the world has never experienced before. But Fallout holds itself in check and so it’s just a whole lot of high-grade, Daffy Duck-on-ritalin, state-of-the-art excitement with more than a few bone-dry guffaws.

Tom Cruise fills the bill, of course, but he’s looking older. I’m sorry but he is. A wee bit puffy and fuller of face. Some of the humor is about how Ethan Hunt is still the energizer bunny (always!) but now he’s getting winded a bit sooner, and even limps a bit after an especially traumatic bodyslam. I honestly liked Henry Cavill a bit more. He’s a good, disciplined, straight-dealing actor, and he handles the dry under-playing in just the right way. Some of his reaction shots are quite funny. Hollywood Elsewhere says “Cruise is cool but Cavill is better.”

Per Variety, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will screen competitively at the 2018 Venice Film Festival.

I don’t what that precisely means, given that Scruggs is a six-episode Netflix miniseries composed of six separate stories. I’m presuming that the same-titled opening episode, which stars Tim Blake Nelson as the title character, will screen for sure — no telling how many other episodes, if any.

Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born (8.29 thru 9.8) will screen non-competitively on the festival’s second night, or Friday, 8.31. Why not screen in competition? It’s supposed to be Best Picture bait, right?

Also showing will be Brady Corbet‘s Vox Lux, an “American musical drama” as well as a chilly take on the life of a pop star Celeste (Natalie Portman) over a period of several years. (I read the script a year or two ago.) Pic costars Jude Law, Stacy Martin, Raffey Cassidy, Stanford Warshawsky, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Candace M. Smith and Jennifer Ehle.

Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’s Gate, a Vincent Van Gogh biopic with Willem Dafoe in the title role, will also screen. Rupert Friend (Theo Van Gogh), Oscar Isaac (Paul Gauguin), Mads Mikkelsen and Mathieu Amalric costar.

This evening, or roughly six hours hence, Hollywood Elsewhere will finally see Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27). Which led me this morning to read David Edelstein’s 7.23 Vulture review, and his somewhat dismissive description of Tom Cruise (i.e., Ethan Hunt) as “cocky” and “generally unlovable.” Which is true, I suppose, and yet Cruise remains on a short list of bona fide Hollywood movie stars who deliver heft and consequence.

Who are the real-deal movie stars of the present, Cruise aside? Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Dwayne Johnson (dented), Robert Downey, Jr., Jennifer Lawrence (dented), Will Smith (seriously dented), Tom Hanks (although his last gasp of star-power oxygen happened over 15 years ago, with the release of Sam Mendes‘ Road to Perdition), Samuel L. Jackson and who else?

Liam Neeson, I suppose, to a lesser extent. Adam Sandler is done. Julia Roberts is a “name,” obviously, but she hasn’t been a super-power for a full decade if not longer. Bruce Willis is mostly about the paycheck these days, overly willing to make crap.

Consider a 2.6.18 Observer piece by Brandon Katz, titled “Movie Stars Are Dead and They’re Never Coming Back.”

Key passage: “It isn’t about the names these days — it’s about the property.”

Paul Degarabedian, senior media analyst for ComScore: “The idea of star power used to be in global audience recognition, a major star in a movie might ensure global success here and in the international marketplace. But with the advent of big-concept movies, franchise ensembles like Fast and Furious and Marvel and big-budget blockbusters, the concept and marketing is now what gets people excited. Merely having a movie star is no longer a guarantee of box office success. Now, big stars need a concept in concert with that star power to create excitement.”

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