“I often write about social media mobs…and what I have found is that they are not frequently misinformed, but they are almost always misinformed. You just don’t know what happened unless you were (a) there or (b) someone has actually investigated whatever claims have come forth. But that’s not how mobs work.

“This atmosphere makes it difficult, if not impossible, to dissent. I was recently talking to a friend about the #MeToo movement. In hushed tones, she told me she had a confession to make. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said, “but I don’t think Woody Allen raped his daughter.”

“Luckily for her, she was in good company — I also doubt the veracity of Woody Allen’s guilt because the evidence just doesn’t support the claims — but she said this as though she were confessing to a terrible crime.

“And she was: a thought crime, one so potentially harmful to her standing among her own friends that expressing it to anyone besides a known thought criminal was unthinkable. The resistance, it seems, is intersectional in everything but opinions.” — from “Call-Out Culture Is a Toxic Garbage Dumpster Fire of Trash,” posted by The Stranger’s Katie Herzog on 1.23.18 at 3:27 pm.

I was told earlier today that the Gangs of New York Wikipedia page mentions a noteworthy piece by yours truly, posted in December 2001, that described the differences between a 1.37:1 work print version of Gangs that I saw on VHS vs. the final 2.39:1 release version. Here’s a link to the original article, and here’s a repost of it:

If Miramax Films and Martin Scorsese had decided to release a polished, cleaned-up version of the Gangs of New York work print they had in the can (or, if you want to get technical, that was stored on Marty and editor Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Avid) sometime in October ’01, we’d all be enjoying a better, more rewarding film than the Gangs that will open nationwide four days from now (12.20.02).

I’ve seen both versions and most of you haven’t, so I know something you don’t. The best Gangs of New York will not be hitting screens this weekend, and may never even be seen on DVD, given Scorsese’s apparent disinterest in releasing “director’s cut” versions of his films, or in supplying deleted scenes or outtakes or any of that jazz.

The work-print version is longer by roughly 20 minutes, and more filled out and expressive as a result, but that’s not the thing. The main distinction for me is that it’s plainer and therefore more cinematic, as it doesn’t use the narration track that, in my view, pollutes the official version. It also lacks a musical score, with only some drums and temp music.

This leaves you free, in short, to simply pick and choose from the feast of visual information that Gangs of New York is, and make of it what you will. And if that isn’t the essence of great movie-watching, I don’t know what is.

It also points out what’s wrong with the theatrical release version, which I feel has been fussed over too intensively, compressed, simplified, lathered in big-movie music and, to some extent, thematically obscured.

Miramax and Scorsese had the superior work-print version in their hands 14 months ago. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s not tremendously different from the version being released on Friday. It is only missing Leonardo DiCaprio‘s narration, a musical score and some CG effects, which tells me it could have easily been prepared for a December ’01 release. But Miramax decided otherwise and pushed it back it until now. If you ask me their reasons for doing so were short-sighted and wrong.

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This morning I saw…no, endured David Wain‘s A Futile and Stupid Gesture (Netflix, 1.26). Based on the same-titled 2006 biography by Josh Karp, it’s a half-surreal, half-inept and wholly depressing saga of National Lampoon co-founder, Animal House producer-screenwriter and self-destructive genius Doug Kenney.

I don’t want to overstate my reaction, but ten minutes in I was saying to myself “nope, naaah, nope, nope…wrong, fake, not believable…shit, this is mindblowingly bad.”

It dishonors the legacy of the National Lampoon by suggesting that Kenney and his editorial colleagues weren’t very interesting. John Aboud and Michael Colton‘s screenplay supplies clunky exposition and by-the-numbers plotting until it seeps out of your ears. The interplay among National Lampoon staffers isn’t brisk or brainy or cruel enough — there’s no believing it. Cranking out monthly NatLamp issues couldn’t have been this tedious.

There’s no believing Will Forte‘s performance as Kenney for an instant, partly because (a) he looks and and sounds like an actor pretending to be an allegedly funny guy rather than the Real McCoy, and (b) partly because Forte was a bit overweight during filming and therefore doesn’t look like Kenney as much as late-period Truman Capote.

Domnhall Gleason‘s performance as NatLamp co-founder Henry Beard is bland and lifeless, and he wears the same stupid-ass ’70s wig in scene after scene, despite the passing of time and refining of hair styles. The ’70s wigs that everyone wears, in fact, really look like wigs, and the sideburn paste-ons have to be seen to be believed.

There was an older guy two or three rows back who was laughing his head off at too many of the jokes. I eventually couldn’t stand it and turned around and gave him the HE stink-eye.

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Even if you have a circumspect attitude about Jordan Peele‘s horror satire, there’s no denying that Get Out has become an award season cultural topic that won’t subside. The torch has been burning for nearly a year now. This Honest Trailers riff just popped yesterday.

“I accept this award cheerfully, under no duress. With deep obligations and thanks to many. Particularly to the Zanucks, father and son, who gave the Patton project their confidence and support during the 20 years which have elapsed since I first proposed it. Thank you.” — Patton producer Frank McCarthy.

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Ava DuVernay‘s A Wrinkle In Time (Disney, 3.9) doesn’t feel like a “problem” film as much as a guarantee of howling agony…no offense. Really not looking forward.

Posted on 7.15.17: “The new Wrinkle In Time trailer begins with Chris Pine asking ‘what if we are here for a reason? What if we are part of something truly divine?’

HE answer: Don’t be tedious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

“Okay, you could call the relentless, never-ending cycle of creation, destruction and renewal a divine thing if you want, but the only reason any of us are here boils down to mere chance. In other words, we got lucky.

“Ava DuVernay and Jeffrey Wells were born on this blue planet for exactly and precisely the same reason that a certain blade of grass sprouted on a large fairway at the Bel Air Country Club last March. Why did this particular blade of grass happen to punch through the soil? Because God has a plan.

“Oprah Winfrey plays Mrs. Which, Reese Witherspoon plays Mrs. Whatsit and Mindy Kaling plays Mrs. Who. (The latter is rumored to be the great granddaughter of Who, the baseball player from the Abbott & Costello ‘Who’s On First?’ routine.)”

Regarded by virtually everyone as one of the most transcendent and emotionally affecting love stories of the 21st Century, Call Me By Your Name was nominated this morning for a Best Picture Oscar — great. Does it have even a slight chance of winning? Nope. Two widely respected but imperfect films with plot holes, unlikely occurences and reality detachments up the wazoo are far more favored in that regard; ditto a socially relevant horror satire that’s been absurdly, reflexively overpraised.

Does anyone care if (a) the three leading Best Picture contenders are clearly flawed to some extent while (b) a brilliant, unblemished masterpiece has been relegated to the “almost but no cigar” box? Answer: Nobody cares, it doesn’t matter, things are as they are.

Why did Luca Guadagnino‘s film, which has a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, get kicked downstairs into the “we really like you but forget it” realm? Because another gay film won the Best Picture Oscar last year, and because the Academy’s old male fart contingent has been cool to the Guadagnino all along.

Does anyone care that Call Me By Your Name is easily one of the three best films of the year (along with Dunkirk and Lady Bird), and that Michael Stuhlbarg‘s climactic monologue in Guadagnino’s film — without question the most emotionally affecting stand-alone scene of the year — never even began to acquire award-season traction? Answer: Nobody cares, it doesn’t matter, things are as they are.

From “Maybe It’s Not Over,” posted on 1.12.18: “Accept it — a Best Picture Oscar for a very handsomely composed genre film about rapturous mercy sex with the Creature From the Love Lagoon might soon be placed alongside the statuettes for Birdman, Spotlight, The Hurt Locker, 12 Years A Slave, Platoon, The Godfather Part II, A Man For All Seasons and The Best Years of Our Lives in the Academy’s golden display case in the upstairs lobby. Almost certainly.

“It will therefore cinch a hard-fought triumph over (a) one of the boldest, most avant garde and stunningly captured war films ever made, (b) the most emotionally affecting and transformational gay love story since Brokeback Mountain and probably of the 21st Century, and (c) one of the sharpest, punchiest and most fetchingly performed coming-of-age tales about a young woman at the start of her adult life, and in a year that obviously cries out for a top-tier woman-directed film and/or a female-centric story to be celebrated above all.

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Hollywood Elsewhere respects Bill McCuddy‘s award-season gut calls, but his recent dismissal of the Best Picture Oscar chances of Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, which collected 13 nominations this morning, is a head-scratcher. I told him this morning that he “has to answer for Santino.” McCuddy’s stonewalling reply: “I didn’t say it wouldn’t get nominated. Won’t win. Fantasy. LaLa Land.”