Yesterday’s Best Picture assessment riff vaguely depressed me. After I re-scanned the films, I mean, and realized that an apparent majority of them seem to belong (emphasis on the word “seem”) to the pretty-good-but-no-cigar category. Which indicates, at least for now, that the forthcoming six-month award season (Labor Day to 2.28.17) may turn out to be weak or pallid, at least compared to other years. Then I asked myself, “What if this becomes a pattern? What if weak-tea fall/holiday films become the norm?”

With more and more U.S.-based directors and producers talking about how increasingly difficult it is to get funding for quality-level theatrical films because of the usual depressing reasons (i.e., the complete absence of John Calley-level thinking among studio execs, an overwhelming preference for sequels and fantasy films among the big studios, specialty distributors leaning more and more on acquisitions) and with more and more filmmakers (especially screenwriters) moving over to cable…Jesus, I don’t want to go there. Okay, I guess I have to.

All I can say is, thank God for Amazon and Netflix and Megan Ellison because at least they care about the over-30 audience, and because they’re pumping money and feeling into the form, and I don’t mean longform cable. Longform has gone to some stellar places over the last 17 years (i.e., the birth of The Sopranos) but it takes a special gift or discipline to tell your story and “say it all” in the space of 100 or 110 or 120 minutes. People who can do that are still operating on the highest level, I believe.

But with megaplex fare getting critically out-performed and out-pointed by small-screen dramas with increasing frequency, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has to grim up and ask itself a tough question, to wit: “Where, really, is the art of cinema thriving today? Because many of the truly talented people in this town aren’t working on projects that will necessarily end up in theatres, and the day is coming when it won’t be “many” but “most.”

Screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence, Jack Reacher) offers an interesting comment in this 11.15.13 Trailers From Hell riff about Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’72). Noting that Yates film is “not strictly a comedy but more of a caper film with a light touch,” Olson says that these days “Hollywood seems to have a problem with anything that combines tonality.” More than a few critics have the same aversion. Over and over I’ve read the line that “this movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a comedy or a thriller” blah blah. Another thing that’s enjoyable about The Hot Rock is that everyone — Yates, Robert Redford, George Segal, Zero Mostel, Moses Gunn — is working beneath their station. They’re doing paycheck work but giving it their full spirit. Assignment #1: Name a good 21st Century film in which everyone is slumming but fully respecting the job and bringing their A-game, and the movie succeeding because of this. Assignment #2: Name a good 21st Century film that straddles tones or genres, mixing this and that but never quite being one thing.

Tate Taylor‘s The Girl on the Train (Universal, 10.7) is being research-screened on Monday night. I wish I could attend. I’ve written before that I’ve been sensing a guilty-pleasure thing from the trailers. Everybody wants it to be Gone Girl 2. But honestly? I’ve heard otherwise from a guy who’s seen it. He’d never be impolitic enough to channel Lloyd Bentsen in a hypothetical chat with Taylor, but this is what he’d say without constraints: “I’ve worked with David Fincher. I know David Fincher. David Fincher is a friend of mine. Tate, you’re no David Fincher.”

Now that everyone has seen Suicide Squad, what of the majority critical view that David Ayer‘s film exudes soullessness and suckage? I don’t mean the first 40 to 45 minutes — I mean the rest of it. I ask this knowing that over-25s with a semblance of taste and a marketable skill will almost certainly agree that it’s putrid for the most part, and those under 25…well, we know what they’ll say.

What did the room feel like as you left the theatre? Were fellow moviegoers looking ill, stricken, ashen-faced? Did they seem to be questioning their lives or at least their willingness to sit through another piece of shit from the Warner Bros./D.C. Comics kingpins?

“There’s a major disconnect with what the critics are saying and the audience is seeing,” Warner Bros. distribution vp Jeff Goldstein told Variety‘s Brent Lang. “We’re resonating with a younger audience. The younger the audience, the higher the score.”

Lang reports, however, that Suicide Squad dropped 41% between Friday and Saturday, which is a much steeper decline than Captain America: Civil War or Deadpool experienced. It seems likely that Squad will drop around 70% next weekend, which is what the similarly-loathed Batman v Superman managed to do.

Keep in mind the N.Y. Times estimate that Suicide Squad cost at least $325 million to make and market, which means it has to pull down $650 million to move into profit.

Posted from Cannes on 5.20.16: “I’m crestfallen about Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog — a lurid, blood-splattered genre satire. It’s not that I don’t get the fuck-all, porno-violent attitude. I just don’t understand how or why a good fellow like Schrader would succumb to this kind of gaudy nihilism with such mystifying gusto. He’s taken a 1997 Eddie Bunker crime novel, which I haven’t read but is reputedly grounded in brutal reality, and made a dark, sloppy comedy of excess that only the animals will like and which only Cannes critics will praise with a semi-straight face.

Dog Eat Dog – Trailer [VO] by Filmosphere

“I’ll admit that Dog Eat Dog hits the amusement button maybe three or four times (Schrader’s dry performance as a crime lord is one of the few elements that satisfy) but mainly it’s a clumsy, splattery, tonally-chaotic wallow. I know it sounds unkind but the words ‘diarrhea dump’ came to mind as I sat in the balcony this morning.”

Schrader Indiewire quote: “I wanted to push the envelope, to never be boring, to take this as far as it could go without breaking the conception of the material, and I think ‘Dog’ was something that really enabled this. Every department head, we said, ‘Go for it. Take it as far as you can go’ so the movie is playing at eleven in every scene.”

Two days ago MCN’s David Poland posted his first “Blankety-blank Weeks To Oscar” piece for the 2016-17 award season.

His gut suspicion is that only three films — Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation, Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk and Denzel Washington‘s Fences — are “lock-ish” for a Best Picture nomination. I’m not disagreeing, but how Poland can half-suggest that Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea is a “could be” is…well, quizzical. Did he not see it in Sundance?

Poland’s temporary, alphabetical top ten along with my parenthetical comments:

1. Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant (HE comment: An ultra-violent programmer, I’m told, with a side serving of autism — an aggressively smart genre film, but no more than that);

2. Robert Zemeckis‘s Allied (HE comment: It might amount to something exceptional but the portrait stills (and portrait stills, of course, mean absolutely nothing) suggest a schmaltzy approach — I’d like to see something that feels lean, straight and gloss-free like Fred Zinneman‘s The Day of the Jackal but I have doubts — the ungenuine, Jiminy Cricket tone that Zemeckis used for The Walk scared me);

3. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (HE comment: Quite possibly a BP contender);

4. Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation (HE comment: Likely BP nom, no win);

5. Ben Younger‘s Bleed For This (HE comment: Another overcoming-great-adversity boxing drama — decent or better-than-decent reviews, decent business, no nommy);

6. Denzel Washington‘s Fences (HE comment: Very likely BP nom);

“Despite not being a particularly gory effort but rather a Polanski-esque film, Marcin Wrona‘s Demon (The Orchard, 9.9) shows how much Polish cinema is incomplete due to its chronic lack of solid horror productions. We truly hope that the domestic yellow press and Wrona’s aficionados alike will appreciate Demon avoiding any speculation about the causes of his suicide.” — from an 11.5.15 Krakow Post review by Giuseppe Sedia. Wrona, 42, hanged himself during the Gdynia Film Festival, on 9.19.15.

A documentary about the late Hal Needham, the stuntman-turned-director who helped to cheapen, devalue and all but assassinate Burt Reynolds‘ career as a top-of-the-heap superstar, is airing tonight on CMT at 7 pm Pacific/10 pm Eastern, and then again tomorrow afternoon around 1 pm or thereabouts. Jesse Moss‘ The Bandit, which screened at SXSW and two or three other festivals earlier this year, is about the perplexing friendship between Reynolds and Needham.

Reynolds’ Achilles heel was his loyalty to Needham, a pal since the ’50s and a one-time roommate. His decision to star in a string of atrocious (if financially bountiful) Needham-directed drive-in flicks from the mid ’70s to mid ’80s cast a shitkicker pall over Reynolds’ image. It wasn’t all Needham’s fault, granted, but by ’85 or ’86 Reynolds’ heyday had come to an end.

From my 2013 Needham obituary: “What killed Burt Reynolds‘ career as a hot-shit movie star? His decision to star in a string of lowbrow shitkicker films, most of which were directed by his buddy Hal Needham, who started out in the mid ’50s as a stuntman.

“Under Needham’s Lubistch-like guidance Reynolds starred in Smokey and the Bandit (’77), Hooper (’78), Smokey and the Bandit 2, The Cannonball Run (’81), Stroker Ace (’83) and The Cannonball Run II (’84).

“It’s generally understood that Reynolds stabbed his career in the heart when he turned down the astronaut role in James L. Brooks‘ Terms of Endearment in order to make Stroker Ace, allegedly out of loyalty to Needham.

Yesterday Renee Zellweger posted a Huffpost essay about the media-storm response to Owen Gleiberman’s 6.30.16 Variety piece…blah blah here we go again. You know, the one that riffed on the obvious fact that the Zellweger of yore — the actress who costarred in Jerry Maguire, Bridget Jones Diary and Cold Mountain — is no more. Not looking older or attractively seasoned but “somehow upgraded,” as I put it on 7.3.

Zellweger’s piece (“We Can Do Better“) isn’t a tit-for-tat response to Gleiberman’s, although that would have been interesting. And why she waited four or five weeks to finally jump in is a head-scratcher. Laziness? Did her publicist suggest that speaking her piece two or three weeks before the press junket for Bridget Jones Baby (Universal, 9.16) will give her something to point to when the inevitable smarmy questions are asked?

Zellweger’s main beef seems to be that mainstream media types are lowering the bar when they discuss anyone’s physical evolution or strategic enhancement. She understands that supermarket tabloid coverage will always be cruel and tacky, but feels that grade-A types like Gleiberman should steer clear. “The ‘eye surgery’ tabloid story itself did not matter,” she states, “but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressure to look and age a certain way. In my opinion, that tabloid speculations become the subject of mainstream news reporting does matter.”

Well, yeah, agreed. Except when you’ve had work done that screams “WORK!” louder than Maynard G. Krebs.

An angry, self-admitted “wicked” guy pretty much telling his girlfriend that if she cheats he’ll kill her. “Run For Your Life” could be O.J. Simpson‘s 1994 theme song. And yet it’s right from the heart of an angry, early-era John Lennon. The Rolling Stones were sometimes accused of penning misogynist tunes in the late ’60s and ’70s, but “Run For Your Life” is more woman-denigrating than anything Mick Jagger or Keith Richards composed. It has to be one the ugliest rock songs ever, right up there with Phil Spector‘s “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).”

While I’ve seen Steven Soderbergh‘s The Limey (’99) ten or twelve times, I’ve never once seen Ken Loach‘s Poor Cow (’67). Which I should have by now. Both films star Terrence Stamp (whom I chatted with a bit in Toronto when The Limey had its big premiere in ’99) as a criminal type — the 60ish Wilson in The Limey, 20something Dave in Poor Cow. Soderbergh used clips from Poor Cow to suggest what Wilson’s life was like when he was young with a daughter, etc. I just bought a Poor Cow Bluray on Amazon.co.uk. I tried to stream a rental but British Amazon only allows people with British bank cards to do this.