The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg is reporting that the replacement for Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs will be chosen on Tuesday August 8th, and that the three top candidiates are Oscar-nominated actress Laura Dern, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy and casting director David Rubin. Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby announcing its support for Kennedy, mainly because of my admiration and respect for two docs that she directed and produced, Ethel and Last Days in Vietnam, and because she’s smart, likable and gracious. At the same time I suspect that Dern will probably win because she’s been an industry presence since the mid ’80s or certainly since Wild At Heart (’90), and those who don’t know her well certainly know her mom and dad, Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern. Rubin hasn’t a chance against these two — he has no pizazz and doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page…please!

No hyperbole here. I’m going to play it cool and calm. Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of The Apes is a grounded, eye-filling super-epic, but I’m not going to get carried away. So I won’t be calling it a delivery device for some magical movie potion or, you know, a blessed and majestic achievement for the ages or the answer to any of your personal prayers. Well, maybe one: “Oh Lord, please save us from the scourge of summer movies by giving us a great film — primal, painterly, deeply rooted, character-driven, beautifully fused — that just happens to have a mid-July release date.”

Yes, it’s a franchise flick (further installments are probably inevitable) but Reeves, director of the second and third installment in the 21st Century apes trilogy, has enhanced the brand above and beyond. War is part popcorn and part arthouse, and graced with exquisite chops start to finish. It’s a kind of wintry Apocalypse Now in simian…wait, I said no hyperbole.

But it is that, dammit. A dystopian thing, an emotional tour de force, a band-of-brothers film, a ferociously realistic war movie, and — I love this — a kind of Great Escape meets Escape From Alcatraz in a snow-covered (you could almost say enchanted) forest. The key terms are “measured just so”, “exquisitely composed” and “the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”

War traverses the realms of smart summer tentpole, masterful art-film composition and epic storytelling at a high emotional pitch. If the snoots and the slovenlies are equally satisfied you know a film is up to something extra.

So yes, War For The Planet of the Apes is an answered prayer of sorts, except God had little to do with it. Okay, maybe in the usual sense (i.e., God as co-pilot or the vague architect of destiny), but it was Reeves who Pattoned this thing…who rolled up his sleeves, came to grips, demanded certain standards, co-wrote the War script with Mark Bomback, led his troops into the forested northwest and made a couple of thousand creative decisions over three and a half years.

Rupert Wyatt launched the apes trilogy in 2011, but Reeves has carried the weight since late ’12 and has now brought it home.

It would sound obsequious to call him the simian maestro, but we can at least say that Reeves is the Peter Jackson of this exquisitely hairy CG realm. The Academy waited for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Return of The King before handing him a Best Director Oscar, even with the layered and laborious Return (be honest) not being all that great. But War is a staggering piece of work — ask any big-league critic. Surely a similar consideration is due to Reeves for concluding an epic saga on such a grand and Spartacus-like note.

I didn’t mention this in early May, but the one thing that really leaps put from the Terminator 2 3D trailer is when Arnold puts on the Raybans around the 23-second mark. It’s obviously a 2D capturing of 3D, but it makes you go “aaah.” I’ve mentioned this before but Cameron’s 3D-ing of Titanic“>extremely subtle approach to the 3D conversion of Titanic leads me to presume that T2 will deliver the same. em>Titanic was such an aesthetically subtle thing that after the first 20 or 30 minutes I forgot I was watching 3D — I just sank into the film itself. I had the same reaction four years ago after seeing the 3D conversion of The Wizard of Oz: “The conversion was very nicely done, I felt — tasteful, subtle, in no way bothersome. So subtle, in fact, that after a while I kind of forgot that I was watching 3D. The photoscopic process starts to take a back seat to the content of the film. You get used to it and then you forget about it.” Distrib Films will put Terminator 2 3D into theatres on Friday, 8.25.

I’ve been watching Atomic Blonde excerpts and trailers since last March, and the cartoonish cyborg quality in the fight scenes is starting to turn me off. I’m starting to weaken, slump over. The apparent “joke” is that Charlize Theron‘s lezzy Cold War agent isn’t quite human, but it doesn’t amuse — it numbs you out. Director David Leitch‘s refusal to show her getting winded or pausing to catch her breath is irksome. I didn’t really buy the robo-badass aesthetic in the John Wick films either, although I found the first installment (which Leitch co-directed) amusing here and there.

Yes, Charlize is more believable as a kick-ass queen than little Angelina Jolie was in Salt, but she’s still not Gina Carano in Haywire. What a thrill when I first saw that Steven Soderbergh film in 2011. Over the last six years no would-be female action star has come close to matching Carano in terms of believable toughness, much less besting her.

Last March HE commenter Abby Normal claimed that Leitch “supposedly hates bullshitty, unrealistic, Fast and Furious-style violence” and is “leading a movement back to coherent action sequences and that ole timey thing we used to call ‘blocking’ as opposed to ‘quick cut and who gives a fuck.'” Yes, Leitch is aiming for a greater degree of choreographed realism than what the Furious films deliver, but it still feels pushed to the nth degree.

I just can’t buy Charlize “demolishing big guys with blows to the face,” as Roger Thornhill noted, because she just doesn’t seem brawny or heavy or strong enough, not to mention those identical thud-whunk sounds every time someone gets hit.

Last night on Facebook Paul Schrader asked if there’s any grotesque thing Donald Trump could do or say that would alienate his core supporters, or will they stick with him no matter what?

A guy named Sam Forrest wrote that Trump is “a fascist but I want to Make America Great Again.” Jordan Musheno wrote “maybe if he says Black Lives Matter.” Justin Allen said he “can deal with any sort of nonsense Don comes up with, but if he wears a tan suit I’ll register as a Democrat.”

A lot of morons out there are standing by Trump out of dumb pride, I suspect. Many of them voted for him not out of rapt admiration, but because their loathing of Hillary Clinton knew no bounds. And now they’re stuck with the fruit of this obstinacy.

I suspect that the only thing that would change their minds would be some kind of classic Lonesome Rhodes-Budd Schulberg truth-spill. Only if Trump directly insults their culture and values will they have a problem with him. He can shit all over the dignity of the office. He can accelerate the fossil-fuel ruination of the planet. He can scheme and personally profit from his job like Boss Tweed. He can lie and fabricate and fantasize until he’s blue in the face. He can Clown President to his heart’s content. The Bumblefucks are fine with all that. But if he does an Andy Griffith hot-mike Face In The Crowd thing, all bets are off. Then and ONLY THEN will the Trump faithful re-assess the situation.

From today’s N.Y. Times story by Matt Apuzzo, Jo Becler, Adam Goldman and Maggie Haberman: “Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

“The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.”

Obviously things look bad for Team Trump right now, but what if you, a senior guy with the Clinton campaign, had been told a year ago that a possibly dicey Russian source was ready to provide a video file containing what would later become known as the pee-pee tape? Would you want to at least meet with the guy, or would you say “no, this is unethical and slimey and I won’t do this, even if the tape turns out to be real, which it might very well be”?

Business Insider‘s Jason Guerrasio and Michael’s Telluride Blog have recently indulged in some Telluride ’17 speculation, so I might as well offer my own two cents worth of hot air. Which is not to suggest that HE’s wish picks are total bullshit. I’ve heard some things and have good insect antennae, so what I’m guessing or suggesting has at least some relation to reality.

MTB’s list has included Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘ Battle of the Sexes, Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049, Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdalene and Aaron Sorkin‘s Molly’s Game. (He also mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread, but that’s highly, highly unlikely.)

Hollywood Elsewhere is hearing for sure that Todd Haynes‘ problematic Wonderstruck is a lock; ditto Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project and Sebastian Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman, which popped at last February’s Berlinale.

I’m strongly hunching that Battle of the Sexes, Call Me By Your Name and Andrey Zvagintsev‘s Loveless (the last two being distribbed by Sony Pictures Classics, a longtime Telluride presence) are more or less locked, and I’d love to see mother! play there also, of course.

Other apparent likelies or good fits, some of which overlap with MTB: Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049, Aaron Sorkin‘s Molly’s Game, Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying, Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Ritesh Batra‘s Our Souls At Night, George Clooney‘s Suburbicon and John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (excellent script and apparently finished, but that’s all I know).

These films playing at Telluride would make basic sense in terms of generating buzz and marketing prowess, although I haven’t asked what’s actually going on. I’m figuring it can’t hurt to run a few flags up the pole and see who salutes. No harm in a little spitballing.

Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk has passed the first critics-screening test with flying colors. The comments to keep in mind are (a) “Never seen anything like it,” (b) “Almost a silent film,” (b) “A VERY different Nolan film” and (d) “may be divisive.” I’m interpreting the last remark to mean that discerning types may like it more than the popcorn-munchers. Great if true!

Criterion’s 2K Bluray of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Lodger popped on 6.27. This 1927 silent is regarded as the first Hitchcock film that showed stirrings of what would become his signature themes and obsessions (a wrongly accused main character, a serial killer hunt in the Frenzy mode, creepy erotic undercurrents under a tidy facade). I saw it two years ago in Prague, and feel obliged to warn anyone thinking of buying the Criterion version that The Lodger simply isn’t that good. Here’s what I wrote:

The Lodger is a vaguely kinky, London-based parlor drama about the terror caused by a Jack The Ripper-type killer, called “The Avenger,” who mysteriously murders attractive blondes on Tuesday evenings. (We’re not told if he’s a stabber or a strangler — maybe he just eyeballs his victims and they drop dead on the spot?) Suspicions quickly surface that a recent arrival at a London boarding house — a tall, good-looking but oddly behaving fellow (Ivor Novello) — may be the killer. Hitch encourages you to weigh this possibility for a good 75% of the film until revealing that Novello is just a queer duck who’s looking to find the man who killed his sister.

Novello’s innocence is first hinted at when Daisy (June Tripp), the daughter of the boarding-house owners as well as a model, begins to feel affection and attraction for him, which understandably infuriates her much-older detective boyfriend (played by Malcolm Keen, who was nudging 40 during filming but looked closer to 45 if not 50) and adds to…well, the uncertainty factor, I suppose.

The Lodger was the first Hitchcock film about an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime. It was also Hitch’s first commercial success (it pretty much launched his career) and was also the first film in which he performed a walk-on. (He’s seen from the rear during a scene in which the presses of a major newspaper are printing news of The Avenger’s latest killing.) But this is a rather stiff and primitive exercise — more “interesting” than good.

Portions are nicely framed and focused, and yes, Hitchcock manages to implant a notion that for certain wackos there’s a kind of erotic charge that accompanies the murder of pretty girls. But he was only 27 during filming with only two or three previous films under his belt, and he just didn’t have enough knowledge or polish at this stage in his life. Not enough, certainly, to satisfy a guy like me watching The Lodger 88 years hence.

I have a rendezvous with Patti Cake$ (Fox Searchlight, 8.18). I missed it in Park City. I missed it in Cannes. I missed a 6.22 screening on the Fox lot. But I will see it soon, I trust. And I will surrender myself to the New Jersey-ness of it, as I was born and raised and suffered through years of adolescent angst in Westfield, New Jersey. Westfield was and is a comfy whitebread hamlet while Patti Cake$ is set in the grim streets of Bergen County — a far cry. But I lived in North Bergen in ’08 and ’09 and suffered once again due to the grotesque antics of the Hispanic Party Elephant, who lived one floor above. I don’t hate New Jersey but it has always brought me some kind of pain or lethargy or discomfort. I’ll never be at peace with it, but I shouldn’t blame Patti Cake$ for being a New Jersey thang. The word all along has been highly positive. (Here’s a good piece by a fellow New Jerseyan.) It’s said to be a spiritual descendant of Hustle & Flow and 8 Mile, both of which I loved. So I’m ready to do it.

The usual grousing about the Oscars, posted last night by JR: “Who fucking cares what the Academy does? I am done with the Oscars, completely done. I am frankly embarrassed that I have given a damn about the Oscars for this long, literally more than 50 years of my life. There’s never been much common ground between my list of the year’s finest alongside the Academy’s Best Picture nominees, and lately the divide has grown much wider.”

Which required my usual patient response: “Once again, it’s not the Oscars as much as The Season. The Oscars are the final event, the grand crescendo, the last stop on the line. Agree with or ignore their picks, but they’re worth their weight in gold because they drive The Season, and thank God and glory hallelujah for that.

“For without The Season (Labor Day to late February) the reach, depth, character and quality of films would never rise above the level of Wonder Woman or the latest Kevin Feige or D.C. Comics fantasia or, at best, noteworthy genre exercises like Get Out. And I’m saying this as a genuine fan of Ant-Man, by the way, as well as one who respects and admires the other two as far they go.”