The “how will this play among Trump supporters?” question is obviously irrelevant as Trump supporters generally avoid this kind of thing (intelligent, dryly humorous, Stephen Frears-ish) like the plague.

Two days ago Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro and Anita Busch reported the following about the Rotten Tomatoes effect on soul-smothering would-be blockbusters, to wit: “Both Pirates 5 and Baywatch started high on tracking four weeks ago, $90 to $100 million over four days and $50 million over five days, respectively. [But] the minute Rotten Tomatoes hit, those estimates collapsed.

“Over the weekend it was heard that some studio insiders want to hold off critic screenings until opening day or cancel them all together (that’s pretty ambitious and would cause much ire, we’ll see if that ever happens). Already, studios and agencies are studying RT scores’ impact on advance ticket sales and tracking.”

I’ve asked this before, but when exactly did the Rotten Tomatoes effect change? Because it wasn’t that many years ago that I was hearing over and over that ticket buyers either (a) routinely dismissed film-critic opinions due to their dweeby, elitist, ivory-tower perspectives, and (b) were too dumb or distracted to check aggregate movie-reviewing sites (i.e., Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic), and that (c) mostly they just decided to see stuff based on gut reactions to trailers and the Twitter/Facebook chatter that followed.

When did all this change? The first stirrings I recall was when The Lone Ranger tanked and both producer Jerry Bruckheimer and costar Armie Hammer blamed critics.

More or less verbatim from Richard Rushfield’s Ankler piece titled “is Paramount Cursed?”: “[There have been] plenty of Paramount films that, on paper, should’ve been okay. But somehow, something just didn’t go right. Every. Single. Time.

“Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard in a glamorous WW2 spy thriller! Sounds great! Reboot The Ring! Monster Trucks that are actually monsters! The kids will love it! A new Ben Hur for the Game of Thrones generation! Scarlett Johansson in a white body suit doing anime! A Martin Scorsese medieval thriller! A new Star Trek!  A new Zoolander! A new Jack Reacher! A bawdy Office Christmas Party with every buzzy comedy star on earth! A medium-budget Michael Bay contemporary war thriller! A Meryl Streep Oscar bait film! A Richard Linklater 80’s comedy! A Tina Fey war comedy! And best of all, Dwayne Johnson in an R-rated comic reboot of a universally known TV series!

“What a line-up! How could most of those not catch fire? Or at least…some? One or two? Okay, the last XXX did well in China. [But] when that much goes wrong in that many ways, it’s time to consider that supernatural powers may be at work and perhaps what you need isn’t a new studio chief as much as an exorcist.

Wells interjection: Brad Grey‘s sad, very recent passing requires Rushfield to avoid stating the obvious, which is that the above-described films were all Grey’s.

“I hear from the Paramount lot that a lot of nerves are getting jangly as they wait for the Gianopulos reign to kick in. Lots of high hopes, but still looking for that brilliant, curse-breaking plan to come down.”

“The trades are dissecting — with Paramount’s help — what went wrong with Baywatch,” Rushfield states. “Lots of finger pointing at Rotten Tomatoes and their blasted 19% score. “A recent internal study at Paramount concluded that younger ticket buyers pay close attention to aggregated scores on Rotten Tomatoes,” reports THR.

Tatyana and I are staying in a stone cottage on a wine farm called Azienda Agricola Caparsa (47 Via Caparsa), near Radda in Chianti. The owner, Paolo Cianferoni, is a dead ringer for Steven Spielberg if you take away the beard, and if you de-age Spielberg by ten years. Paolo told me yesterday that original Sideways author Rex Pickett stayed here some years back. So between Pickett, Spielberg and myself the place has a definite Hollywood aroma.

Paolo’s electric bolt fence is more or less dead center in this photo. You can’t see it all that clearly, I realize, but does that matter? It’s there, okay? I’m telling you.

I told Paolo that Tatyana and I were planning to hike over to Radda in Chianti, and so he pointed to a shortcut path through his vineyard. He then pointed to a metal gate at the top of a far-off incline. The gate was electrified, he said, to keep out deer and whatnot, but that I just needed to open it carefully and watch where I step.

So we got to the gate and I delicately opened it — no shock. Thinking I was in the clear, I stepped through and, being a bit sweaty and breath-starved, missed the fact that a thick, coiled, half-camoflauged wire was lying in the dirt three or four inches from the gate. My ankles touched it and suddenly I was James Cagney at the end of Angels With Dirty Faces. My body convulsed. I felt as if my kidneys had been punched by a guy with brass knuckles. The electric current was mild (i.e., high enough to dissuade animals without killing them), but it definitely rocked my attitude.

For a while there I felt like (a) a huge dumbass.  I actually still feel this way.

In a 5.27 Indiewire piece from Cannes, Eric Kohn passes along a chat with Mad Max maestro George Miller, president of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival jury. Kohn wanted to know about the criteria that Miller brought to jury deliberations. “One of the good things to do is to ask everyone what they think makes a good film,” he said. “It varies with everybody. For me, the way I define a good film is how long it follows you out of the cinema. By the time you get to the parking lot, if it stays with you, then you know it’s good. How long does a film follow you around?”

HE answer to question #1: A good film is not one that massages some arcane aesthetic fancy or rehashes a Joseph Campbell myth or throws the lettuce leaves in the air without strategy or which reaches down into your private little p.c. cave and says ‘hey, homey…I’ve found you and we get each other…you’re my hombre and vice versa.” A good film conveys some kind of profound, universally recognized truth or truths that are recognized not just by you or your friends but by the stupidest assholes on the planet. It does this by slipping into private places, reshuffling old cards, resuscitating old feelings or generally bringing it all back home…it sinks into your system and reminds you that this, in part, is the way things really are. A good film might provoke or disturb on some deep-down level, but you know it’s dead real.

Fairly expert for this kind of thing. I’ve been on trains, felt these things or at least dreamt them. Directed by Seb Edwards, music by Max Richter, etc.

Scores of 97% and 79% are pretty high for a superhero flick, especially a D.C. Comics property from Warner Bros. I haven’t been able to see Patti Jenkins‘ Wonder Woman (Warner Bros., 6.2) due to the usual May travelling. It opens worldwide on Thursday, 6.1. I could catch it in Rome.

All kinds of racist scum have crawled out of the woodwork since Donald Trump‘s election last November. Uglies nationwide have felt the freedom to vent and brutalize, knowing that a certain form of code-worded kinship has been emanating from the Oval Office. It seems obvious that last Friday’s racist murders aboard a Portland train three days ago were another manifestation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations “blamed an increase in anti-Muslim incidents in part on Trump’s focus on militant Islamist groups and anti-immigrant rhetoric,” says a 5.29 Reuters story. In short, Trump supplied the impetus that led to those guys being stabbed and two of them dying. Jeremy Joseph Christian merely wielded the weapon.

'They lost their lives because of me.' Teen thanks men who intervened to try and stop hate speech on Portland train https://t.co/lYhFDJlrlo pic.twitter.com/jCLZ3NtHLN

— CNN (@CNN) May 29, 2017

Grinnell College alumnus Kumail Nanjiani ’01 delivered the Grinnell College 2017 commencement address on 5.22.17. “Grinnell, not Cornell,” “fuck an immigrant,” etc. The video posted that day. Hollywood Elsewhere, way over in Italy, is paying attention just over a week later.