Five weeks ago I raved about the first trailer for Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s Battle of the Sexes (Fox Searchlight, 9.22), and particularly a hunch that Steve Carrell‘s performance as tennis blowhard Bobby Riggs “is going to get most of the award-season action” with Emma Stone having won a Best Actress Oscar earlier this year. This was met with instant derision by the comment thread know-it-alls. (“No Oscar nom…Carrell in Anchorman mode…better in The Big Short,” etc.) This new trailer highlights another strong contributor — screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. If you can’t sense from the trailer that Battle of the Sexes is well written, you can at least presume that the top-notch quality of Beaufoy’s previous screenplays will manifest again — The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Everest, etc.

I’ve always loved this photo of WNBC newsman Gabe Pressman listening to the Beatles during their first-ever U.S. press conference, minutes after they landed at JFK airport on 2.7.64. Here, in a nutshell, is the great hair gulf between generations — the 39 year-old Pressman, a WWII veteran and very much a Brylcream man, pondering a new wave of longish, non-Brylcreamed hair as the world turns and a new chapter begins. Anyone who grew up in the tri-state area in the ’60s and ’70s remembers Pressman — hard-nut TV street reporter, always with the mike, more than 60 years on the beat. He began in the mid ’50s and never retired. Wiki excerpt: “Until the very end, Pressman worked part-time at WNBC, mostly as a blog writer about New York City news on the station’s website. He was [also] active on Twitter. In 2014, he stated that an arthritic knee kept him from chasing stories like he used to. A few months before his death, Pressman covered the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York.”

I just got an auto-response email that says “I am currently out of the office with no access to emails.” I get the message — “please converse with my associates while I re-charge” — but if it were me, I would say the following: “Of course, naturally, I’m receiving your emails. I’m not dead or in a coma or hibernating in a deep, dark cave or stranded on a Himalayan mountain peak or camel-ing across the Jordanian desert. I’m hearing you, reading you. I’m just doing that soul-nourishing, plant-watering thing that we all need to do from time to time. No biggie. Talk to you soon.”

Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.

The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

From my 1.25.17 review — “Odd, Minimalist, Engagingly Trippy Ghost Story“:

“David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story (A24) lives on the opposite side of the canyon from Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart‘s Personal Shopper, a ghost tale which is all kinds of different and original but seriously scary from time to time. It has to be said upfront that Lowery’s film isn’t all that scary. Okay, two or three moments put the chill in but this isn’t the game plan, and that’s what’s so cool about it. Really. Either you get that or you don’t.

“For this is basically a story about a broken-hearted male ghost (or formerly male) who doesn’t know what to do with himself, and so he mopes around and says to himself ‘Jesus, I feel kind of fucked…where am I?…what’s happening?…am I gonna stand around watching humans for decades or even centuries? I don’t know what the hell to do.’

There’s no way to not speak highly of Matthew Heineman‘s City of Ghosts, which premiered at Sundance ’17 and which I saw last night at a special screening at CAA. It’s a melancholy doc about a team of brave Syrian dudes who’ve been filing online reports since early ’14 about the atrocity-filled occupation of Raqqa, their home town, by the ideological fiends known as ISIS. 

Hands down, all the critics are swearing by Heineman’s doc and bowing down. I’m an admirer also, but I have a few questions.

Co-founded by the 26 year-old Abdalaziz Alhamza, the group has been posting about the medieval brutality of ISIS (killings, beheadings, torture, deprivations) via their website, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently or RSS. Initially based in Raqqa and then Turkey and finally Germany, they’ve passed along reports (which have occasionally included photos and even videos) from brave citizen correspondents. If ISIS could get their hands on any these guys they’d be quickly killed, just as surely as their friends and family have been shot or beheaded without mercy.

Following last night’s CAA screening, a discussion of Matthew Heineman’s doc with RSS co-founder Abdalaziz Alhamza sitting at far left.

Who doesn’t know that ISIS is one of the rankest manifestations of absolute evil in the history of the species, and that the only righteous solution is to herd the entire army and particularly its leaders into a huge, 300-foot-deep hole in the Syrian desert, and then bury them alive under thousands of tons of sand? Everyone understands this, no one disputes, settled issue.

Nonetheless your heart goes out to the RSS guys. You feel almost nothing but admiration and respect. Anyone reading this who wants to help out should send money to RSS. I myself am planning to send a little coin. If nobility and bravery count for anything, City of Ghosts, which has been playing the festival circuit for six months now, will almost certainly be nominated for a Best Feature Doc Oscar.

But here’s the thing, a criticism that none of us are supposed to mention. Too much of City of Ghosts is about lethargy and resignation and guys sitting in front of computer screens with glum expressions. Yes, I know — who can blame them? What’s been happening to their home city is almost too brutal to ponder. But the fact remains that too much of this film is about a kind of semi-passive contemplation of the seemingly unstoppable horror of ISIS. Yes, the RSS guys are fighting them but there’s no hint that the tide may be turning when in fact it is.

The truth is that Heineman’s doc doesn’t leave you much at the end of the day. It fills you with sadness and despair. I for one believe it should do better than this, and it could start by bringing the story up to date.

Stronger (Lionsgate/Roadside, 9.22), David Gordon Green‘s film version of Jeff Bauman‘s “Stronger” (co-written by Bret Witter), is obviously cut from a different cloth than Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg‘s Patriots Day. It’s a kind of “Neitszche, fuck yeah!” film, or rather a feature-length echo of the German philsopher‘s famous quote along these lines.

In a nutshell: How I survived and built past the loss of my legs after the 2013 Boston marathon bombing.

How can Jake Gyllenhaal‘s performance as Bauman not translate into a major Best Actor bid? You can tell he’s dug pretty deep. The only way this wouldn’t ignite is if reviewers and Academy types start moaning “what, another triumph of the spirit over trauma and adversity thing? We’ve seen this story 20 or 30 times.”

My first thought was that Gyllenhaal’s resemblance to Bauman is fairly striking, but my second was that he’s still Jake Gyllenhaal and is therefore too good-looking for Tatiana Maslany, who plays Bauman’s girlfriend (and later wife) Erin Hurley. Look at them together — she’s just not in his league. I’m sorry to irritate everyone by reminding that birds of a feather almost always flock together. If you look at photos of the real Bauman and Hurley [after the jump] you’ll see they’re closely matched.

I’m presuming that the end of the film will dramatize the fact that Bauman and Hurley decided earlier this year to get divorced. (The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela McClintock reported this last February.) A closing-credit acknowledgment won’t do — Gyllenhaal and Maslany have to act it out.

The CG leg-removal effects are obviously state of the art.

On 5.12.17, or three days after he fired FBI Director James Comey, President Trump tweeted that “Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” During his 6.8 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey said “I’ve seen the tweet about tapes…Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” Orange Orangutan refused to confirm or deny if recordings exist of his conversation[s] with Comey. Today he tweeted the following: “With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”

You contemptible bullshitter, you swaggering phony. You make me sick with your empty taunts and braggadocio.

From CNN.com: Ten of the 12 jurors in Bill Cosby’s recent assault trial voted to convict the comedian on two counts of aggravated indecent assault, but the case was declared a mistrial because two people on the panel continued to hold out, a juror told ABC News.

The jury consisted of four white women, six white men, one black woman and one black dude. Since the mistrial announcement my assumption has been that the two hold-outs (i.e., refusing to convict) were either among the four white women or the six white guys. Seriously — the applicable phrases are (a) tribal dynamic and (b) do the math.

Cosby faced three counts of aggravated indecent assault. CNN reports that the vote was 10 to 2 to convict him on charges that he digitally penetrated Andrea Constand in January 2004 without her consent, and 10 to 2 that he gave her drugs that substantially impaired her ability to resist, the juror told ABC Wednesday. The vote was 11 to 1 to acquit Cosby on a charge that he digitally penetrated her while she was unconscious or unaware.

Spike Lee to Variety: “Every 10 years, black people win a lot of Oscars. And then we read articles in Variety magazine and others, the black audience has been discovered. It’s a renaissance. Then there’s another nine year drought. It should be constant. I will put my money on this. The reason why what happened at the Oscars this year” — Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight winning for Best Picture — “was because the year before was #OscarsSoWhite. That was a bad look for the Academy. And they had to switch up, get more inclusion, get more people, try to get more diversity among the voting members. But what happened this past Oscars, you think that’s going to happen [next] year?”

By the same token, when mainstream Academy fuddyduds start seeing Call Me By Your Name this fall, they’re going to say “wait, whoa…we already gave the Best Picture Oscar to a gay film last year….we ain’t goin’ there again…not two years in a row!” And that would be a bullshit attitude to embrace. If for no other reason than the simple fact that Call Me By Your Name, which isn’t a gay film (although it is) as much as a northern Italian film about sensuality, family and community, is 16 times better than Moonlight.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge have posted their best-of-2017 picks thus far. Tediously, they’ve restricted themselves to films that have opened commercially. Jordan Peele‘s absurdly over-praised Get Out, the kind of film that John Carpenter might have made in the ’70s or ’80s without a single critic creaming in his or her pants, tops the roster. They’re also fans of Miguel Arteta‘s audaciously conceived, reasonably decent Beatriz at Dinner, Michael Showalter‘s The Big Sick (one of my faves) and Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver. I won’t repeat the others but they all fall under one of two headings — “not bad” and “huh?”

(/) Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, star Timothee Chalumet during 2016 filming in Crema, Italy.

The real list (i.e., my own) is composed of the Best 2017 Films, period — i.e., not yet opened theatrically but which have (a) made big splashes at this or that festival or (b) have simply screened for press. They are, in this order, (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (Sony Classics, 11.24 — a Sundance ’17 wowser that should have opened in Cannes), (2) The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23 — Sundance ’17), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 7.14), (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless (Sony Pictures Classics, late 2017) and (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square (Magnolia, late 2017). Okay, I’ll include Get Out but strictly in terms of it being a smart, noteworthy, socially reflective genre film — it deserves an upvote but calm down.

I haven’t seen Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project and I won’t see Baby Driver until tomorrow night.

Hats off to Western Built Construction, the general contractors who’ve been working on a huge, two-story, concrete-and-glass structure at the northwest corner of Melrose and Westbourne, which is near my place. I complained about some obnoxious lighting mounted on the rear of their building, and one of the WBC principals responded in a reasonable, mild-mannered way in a matter of minutes. Life should be so simple and easy in other realms.

“[Name] and [name] — I’m Jeffrey Wells, a Hollywood columnist (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) and longtime journalist who lives near that massive, two-story commercial space you’ve been working on for…what’s it been, eight or nine months? I’m writing to complain about those three obnoxiously bright lights mounted on the rear of your building. I’m asking you to please replace them with lights that are quieter, amber-ish, toned down and not so aggressively bright.

“Right now these lights are a nocturnal eyesore. I don’t know the wattage but the level of brightness and intensity is ridiculous — the kind of lethal, industrial-strength lighting that might be used by a state prison or some warehouse with truck bays in the middle of nowhere.

“Westbourne Drive is a quiet residential street, and having lived here for many, many years I assure you there’s no need for that kind of illumination. We have no escaped convicts running around (or none that I know of) and there’s no need to have lighting so fierce and glaring that jets flying over Los Angeles at 35,000 feet can easily pinpoint the corner of Westbourne and Melrose.

“This may sound curious, but some of us believe that the night should be allowed to be what it is, which is to say allowed to be dark. You know, the way it was on the planet before guys like you and your commercial lighting schemes came along?

“Walk down Westbourne south of Melrose — each and every home is lighted quietly, softly, with a certain restraint. Your building is the only one using an aggressive state-prison aesthetic.

I have two questions about the firing of Phil Lord and Chris Miller off the Han Solo spin-off. One, why did producer Kathy Kennedy wait four and a half months to cut them loose with the film having begun shooting in late January or thereabouts? And two, what does it say about Kennedy’s hiring instincts that she chose a couple of guys whom she so disagreed with that “she didn’t even like the way they folded their socks,” according to Brent Lang‘s Variety story?

Kennedy, no doubt looking to shoot and construct the film along familiar lines, said in a recent statement that “it’s become clear that we had different creative visions on this film, and we’ve decided to part ways.”

This conflict wasn’t apparent to Kennedy after three or four weeks of principal photography? Or after several weeks of it? I don’t know the backstory but what kind of producer needs four and a half months to assess a flawed situation and then finally do something about it with filming two-thirds completed?

In my book this is the second big problem with the Han Solo flick, the first being the casting of Alden Ehrenreich as Solo. I explained my reservations in a 5.22.17 piece called “Ehrenreich Won’t Cut Han Solo Mustard“:

It was my reaction to Alden Ehrenreich‘s performance in Alexandre Moors‘ The Yellow Birds, which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film festival, that convinced me he won’t be a good Han Solo. He just doesn’t have that presence, that Harrison Ford cock-of-the-walk cool. There’s just something about Ehrenreich that feels guarded and clenched.

Alden Ehrenreich and Untitled Han Solo Film costars (including Woody Harrelson) in recently posted set photo.