Ten months ago in Cannes, I was nearly alone in praising Nathan Morlando‘s Mean Dreams (Vertical, 3.17). I called it a handsome, pared-down serving of classic Malick rock — a 21st Century kids-on-the-run tale meets Badlands meets Cop Car meets Ain’t Them Bodies Saints meets A Simple Plan, etc. Variety‘s Guy Lodge and The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney pissed all over it, but now that it’s opened domestically it has a respectable 79% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Tables turned, Lodge and Rooney!

Okay, it also has a 64% Metacritic tally, but that’s because of Rooney and Lodge and two other pissheads — RogerEbert.com’s Nick Allen and Screen Int’l‘s Allan Hunter. Don’t let the views of four measly critics fuck things up. Mean Dreams is a completely decent reworking of a familiar American heartland tale, and if it includes an original riff or two (which Mean Dreams does) then I don’t see a problem.

Some critics are mentioning that seeing Mean Dreams will be your chance to pay a final tribute to costar Bill Paxton, who passed less than three weeks ago. Here’s my obit.

Filed from Cannes on 5.15.16: “Mean Dreams isn’t blazingly original, but I found it a handsome, pared-down thing that doesn’t give in to the usual blam-blam when a gun is purchased and push comes to shove.

“It isn’t how familiar something seems as much as how spare and straight the chops feel. Take, assimilate, make anew. And the quality of the performances, which in this case struck me as near-perfect in the case of co-leads Josh Wiggins and Sophie Nelisse, and a bad-cop, pervy-dad turn by Bill Paxton that…okay, felt a little moustache-twirly at times and yet acceptable enough in the context of greed, alcohol and obsession.

“Plus Colm Feore‘s slightly less corrupt lawman plus Steve Cosens‘ handsome cinematography and a sometimes slammy percussive score by Son Lux…solid as far as it goes.”

Last night I read a recent draft of Liz Hannah‘s script for The Post, the forthcoming 20th Century Fox film about the Pentagon Papers crisis of 1971. It’s a good script, but my initial dream that it might be some kind of definitive Pentagon Papers saga or a tense newsroom thriller along the lines of Spotlight or All The President’s Men turned out to be…uhm, just that.

The Post, which will topline Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will begin filming in May under director Steven Spielberg and be released in December. It’s about how Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (Streep), who initially saw herself as less than ideally suited to the task and was little more than a blandly embedded figure in Washington social circles, gradually grew some courage and a sense of journalistic purpose during the Pentagon Papers episode, which transpired over a 17-day period in June 1971.

Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, exec editor Ben Bradlee in the early ’70s.

Hannah’s script is about a testy, at times caustic relationship between Graham and exec editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) when the N.Y. Times published Neil Sheehan‘s report about Daniel Ellsberg‘s Pentagon Papers documents (which proved that the stated motives and justifications for the Vietnam War were dishonest and deceptive) and the Post debated whether to publish a trove of similar docs, also from Ellsberg, and stand up to the Nixon administration’s legal challenges and threats.

The Post is basically a middle-aged woman’s self-empowerment saga. The project was hatched and nurtured along by producer Amy Pascal.

I wrote the following to a critic friend this morning: “I had no idea Mrs. Graham was so mushy-minded, such a slow-boater, so reluctant to accept the responsibility of first-rate, big-city journalism…even after the N.Y. Times had published the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post (not Bradlee but Graham, the lawyers and others) was still hesitating, still unsure about whether to publish more of the same…the draft I read is 118 pages and for over 70 pages my constant thought was ‘when is Mrs. Graham going to wake up and man up?’

There’s never been any question in my mind that Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah‘s second-best film, The Wild Bunch being first and Ride The High Country being third. It’s a dark, creepy, ugly film, and yet wholly, primally fascinating. It certainly contains one of Dustin Hoffman‘s strongest-ever performances. The editing by Paul Davies, Tony Lawson and Roger Spottiswoode, especially during the violent finale, is flat-out brilliant. And yet John Coquillon‘s muted, grayish cinematography looks pretty good on the 2011 MGM Bluray — actually the best-looking version I’ve ever seen. The forthcoming Criterion Bluray (out on 6.27) is from a 4K scan and contains a lot of intriguing extras, and I’m presuming it’ll looks slightly better than the 2011 disc but you have to draw lines somewhere. Right now I’m disinclined.

And now you’re sorry, you say? You fucked up? Okay, you get points for manning up — I respect that — but you and your kind are still the reason we’re stuck with this animal until 2021 unless he gets impeached. Sorry but you caused this catastrophe, and it’s going to take a decade or two to reverse a lot of the damage, and the ecological damage can’t be reversed at all.  It’s your fault that New York and Miami are going to be partially flooded 10 or 20 years sooner, not mine. It takes character to openly admit error, but you can still kiss my ass.

Four days ago (3.13) Screen Daily‘s Melanie Goodfellow posted a rundown of possible Cannes 2017 titles. Last night Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and Nancy Tartaglione posted their own forecast. It seems clear already that the festival’s biggest highlights won’t come from the U.S., and that the American-made films that will likely screen are going to rank as good or interesting rather than wowser or earth-shaking.

I’m not calling it another deadbeat Cannes in terms of U.S. entries, but, as I noted a couple of years ago, the counsel of Oscar strategists along with generally cautious instincts across the board have all but killed this festival in terms of potential award-season titles.

Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk hasn’t definitely been scratched, but if you know Nolan (fiddle and fine-tune until the very last minute) and Warner Bros. (why risk even a mezzo-mezzo reaction from Cannes’ notoriously picky critics?), you know it’s unlikely. Hammond says festival honcho Thierry Fremaux has been told that Dunkirk, which will open on 7.21, won’t be ready to screen in Cannes in late May. Do you believe that?

My hunch is that while Nolan and Warner Bros. might well have strong cards, they’re scared of Cannes and would prefer to hide their hand until late June or early July, press-wise.

Nolan knows the knives have been out for him ever since the Interstellar debacle of ’14, and particularly the aghast responses when he confessed that he deliberately mixed the sound so that a good portion of the dialogue couldn’t be discerned, which was easily one of the biggest fuck-you messages sent to critics and paying audiences in Hollywood history. This is why people are gunning for Nolan. For years he’s regarded himself as Mr. King Shit, and they want to get him for his aloof Kubrickian airs, for maintaining an image as a Moses-down-from-the-mountain auteurist earth-shaker as opposed to the lithe and nimble-footed guy who made Memento and Insomnia, and particularly for that fucking Interstellar sound mix.

Hammond notes that just as esteemed director Alexander Payne went along with a May 2013 Cannes debut for Nebraska, which subsequently embarked on an award-season march all the way into February 2014, he might also go along with showing Downsizing, a dryly comic sci-fi thing, in Cannes two months hence. I can tell you that Downsizing was all set for a research screening on the Paramount lot two nights ago (Tuesday, 3.14), but they sent out a sudden cancellation notice to those who’d rsvp’ed, only seven or eight hours before the screening.

If anyone can send me a recent draft of Liz Hannah‘s script for The Post, the fast-track Steven Spielberg film about the Pentagon Papers crisis of 1971 that landed the Washington Post and the N.Y. Times in the crosshairs of the Nixon administration, please advise.

As recently reported by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming, The Post will begin shooting this May with 20th Century Fox intending to open it by December. Obviously a locked-in, ratified, slam-dunk Best Picture contender. So far it has Tom Hanks as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Post publisher Katherine Graham.

The big question is who’s going to play American patriot Daniel Ellsberg and N.Y. Times reporter Neil Sheehan, the guys who stood up and broke the Pentagon Papers story.

Just as United 93 focused on the entire air-traffic control confusion of 9/11 and not just the specific incidents aboard that fateful United Airlines flight, The Post will need to tell the whole Pentagon Papers story — most of it happening over a 17-day period in June 1971 — and not just the Washington Post‘s side of things,

First and foremost because Sheehan and the Times were the first to spill the beans, and in so doing proved that the Johnson administration lied over and over about the Vietnam War. The Post got in on the action five days after the Times began publishing Pentagon Papers excerpts on 6.13.71, and of course they and the Times got into a major Supreme Court battle with the Nixon administration over the right to publish such material.

On 6.30.71 the Supremes decided in favor of the Post and other newspapers who had published Pentagon Papers content, 6–3, stating that the Nixon gang had failed to meet the heavy burden of proof required for prior restraint injunction.

A Criterion Bluray of Nicholas Ray‘s They Live By Night pops on 6.13. Based on Edward Anderson‘s Depression era novel “Thieves Like Us“, this 1948 classic launched the “kids on the run” sub-genre. Its influence was felt by Joseph H. Lewis‘s Gun Crazy (’50), Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty‘s Bonnie and Clyde (’67), Terrence Malick‘s Badlands (’73) and certainly in Robert Altman‘s Thieves Like Us (’74), which was also based on Anderson’s book. It was also Ray’s debut feature (shot in early ’47, released in August ’48). He soon gained respect as a strong, passionate helmer and his career chugged along for another 14 or 15 years, but drugs and alcohol gradually interfered more and more. Ray finally screwed the pooch when he collapsed on the set of 55 Days at Peking (’63).

Could a comedy-sketch show theoretically get away with doing a “Men on Books” routine in 2017? If a latter-day David Alan Grier and Damon Wayans, who ruled the nation when they did this on In Living Color between ’90 and ’93, were to try this on Saturday Night Live, they would be torn to shreds on Twitter. In a world in which Moonlight is the ultimate “oh, wow,” comedy routines like “Men on…” have to get the boot. The gap is too great; they can’t co-exist. All I know is that (a) I used to love In Living Color and (b) I sat in my seat like a stone-faced corpse as I watched Moonlight last September in Telluride.

I met Trae Crowder a while back when he visited Real Time with Bill Maher. He sounds like the grandson of the guy who fucked Ned Beatty in the ass in Deliverance, but he’s totally cool. If only there were a few more Southern guys like him — i.e., irreverent but amiable, nobody’s fool and willing to cut through the bullshit. Crowder’s co-authored book (with Corey Ryan Forrester), “The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Outta the Dark“, came out last October, and I wouldn’t mind reading it.

Southerners are good people if you can forget what they believe in. I had a great time when I visited Shreveport six or seven years ago. I visited a nifty little country bar, drank a lot, joked around with everyone and met a pretty lady who had just left her husband and was looking to ratify this decision by doing the nasty with the right guy, who turned out to be me.

What neighborhood? My guess is the Lower West Side, north of Canal. I’m sorry but Hollywood Elsewhere approves:

Hot on the heels of Jason Pollock‘s Stranger Fruit, a controversial doc about the 2014 Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson that premiered last weekend at South by Southwest, TheRoot.com‘s Michael Harriott has posted an even more inflammatory piece called “Everything You Think You Know About the Death of Mike Brown Is Wrong, and the Man Who Killed Him Admits It.”

The big assertion in Pollock’s doc is that a new security-cam video proves that Brown didn’t steal a box of cigarillos from a Ferguson liquor store before the 8.9.14 encounter with Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Brown following an altercation. Pollock’s conclusion is that minus the cigarillo element, Brown wasn’t a belligerent asshole thief but an amiable drug dealer who got caught in a racial crossfire.

But Harriott’s piece is a bigger bombshell, or at least it purports to be. It states that a court docket (i.e., an official summary of proceedings in a court of law) from a late-2014 civil suit proves that Wilson flat-out lied in his grand jury testimony about the incident.

Harriott excerpt: “New court papers reveal that Brown never tried to take the officer’s gun, never struck the officer and did not initiate any contact with Wilson, who was cleared of wrongdoing by a secret grand jury in November 2014.”

I spent 40 minutes this morning writing a response to Harriott’s article, and then sent it to a Brooklyn guy who had passed it along. I also copied it and sent a version to myself. There was no objectionable material in what I wrote, but both emails disappeared for some reason. On top of which the Brooklyn guy was unable to forward my original email back to my inbox. He finally captured the content in three PDF docs and sent them along…got it! Rather than re-type it, I’m posting the PDF images to save time: