I caught Meera Menon‘s Equity at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, and while I liked or respected most of it, I decided in the end that it was just pretty good. And when I sat down to write about it, nothing happened. I was “with it” and attuned and waiting for the power-punches to land, but they were never thrown. The behavior gets darker and nastier as things move along, but the film pretty much stays on the same level start to finish. Which isn’t a “bad” thing — it’s a totally decent film — but I felt a wee bit underwhelmed.

Promoted as “the first female-driven Wall Street movie,” Equity basically says that financial sector women are just as predatory, conniving and deceitful as the guys in Wall Street or The Wolf of Wall Street. The main problem is that it starts out with someone you’re thinking might be the audience’s friend (Anna Gunn‘s Naomi Bishop) — a rooted, charismatic lead to stand by and root for — but then shit happens and the floorboards don’t hold and [SPOILER!] Naomi gets more or less elbowed aside. We’re left at the end without a friend or a hero or anything, really. 

It’s basically a chilly film about people you don’t like or identify with, and everyone fucking their marks or rivals any way they can.

Floundering in the editing room since 2011 or thereabouts, Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time was first envisioned in the late ’70s as a project called Q, a naturalist epic about the beginnings of life on earth. Portions of it turned up in The Tree Of Life, but now (after a July 2013 lawsuit filed by Seven Seas, claiming that nearly $6 million in production funds had been more or less pissed away on nothing) Voyage has finally been completed and will open as two films — a 40-minute IMAX version narrated by Brad Pitt, and a 35mm feature-length version narrated by Cate Blanchett. 

No offense but I’ll take the Pitt and shine the Blanchett.

The Voyage kin will open on 10.7.16 but really, nobody cares. Nobody except critics and the cloistered film-society monks who’ve taken it upon themselves to guard the Malick flame. VFX by Dan Glass and Douglas Trumbull, music by Ennio Morricone…flatline. If Voyage had popped 15 or 20 years ago it might have seemed like something, but it’s arriving in the midst of The Great Malick Rejection and is therefore a wildebeest calf facing wild dogs.

Nobody will give a damn about Weightless either. Critics will see it, of course, and take it for a spin around the dance floor but not a bird will stir in the trees. Unless, of course, Malick has reinvented himself with Weightless but what are the odds of that? Barring a miracle the man is over. The current incarnation, I mean. He could always go out to the desert and meditate for six months and return a changed man. Anything is possible. I’m sorry but he did this to himself.

Yes, this episode happened two years and two weeks ago. Yes, it’s apropos of nothing. Yes, I’m experiencing a dull day. But mentioning Neeson (a valid thing given his experience dealing with forest predators) at least affords an opportunity to post a 14-month-old Kevin Pollak bit, after the jump.

Albert Brooks: I know you like and respect him. I’ve never seen you like this about anyone, so please don’t get me wrong when I tell you that Justin Lin, while being a very nice guy, is the Devil.
J.J. Abrams: This isn’t friendship. You’re crazy, you know that?
Brooks: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around?
Abrams: God!
Brooks: Come on! Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! What’s he gonna sound like? Acchh-acchh-acchh! I’m semi-serious here.

Abrams: You’re seriously…
Brooks: He’ll be attractive! He’ll launch his career with a fascinating Sundance film called Better Luck Tomorrow. He’ll direct a shitload of Fast and Furious movies that will make many millions for all concerned. He’ll never do an evil thing! He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing…he’ll just bit by little bit turn the art of cinema into a more synthetic, less recognizably human, more audaciously cartoonish form of megaplex wankery, and the empty Coke bottles will love him for it. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along, flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit. And he’ll constantly talk about the need to out-perform the last bullshit swizzle-stick, quarter-of-an-inch-deep CG event movie, and about the next level of razzle-dazzle CG porn we’ll need to put into the next one. And he’ll get all the great women.

Wikipage excerpt #1: “Chesley Burnett ‘Sully’ Sullenberger (born 1.23.51) is a retired airline captain and aviation safety consultant. He was hailed as a hero when he successfully landed US Airways Flight 1549 upon NYC’s Hudson River on 1.15.09, after the aircraft was disabled by striking a flock of Canadian geese during its initial climb out of LaGuardia Airport. All of the 155 passengers and crew aboard the aircraft survived.”

Wikipage excerpt #2: “In a 60 Minutes interview, Sully was quoted as saying that the moments before the crash were ‘the worst, sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling’ that he had ever experienced. Speaking with Katie Couric, Sully said: ‘One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

Wikipage excerpt #3: Sullenberger testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’s Subcommittee on Aviation of the Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure on February 24, 2009, that his salary had been cut by 40 percent, and that his pension, like most airline pensions, was terminated and replaced by a ‘PBGC’ guarantee worth only pennies on the dollar.

“Sullenberger cautioned that airlines were ‘under pressure to hire people with less experience. Their salaries are so low that people with greater experience will not take those jobs. We have some carriers that have hired some pilots with only a few hundred hours of experience…there’s simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety.’ Sully also mentioned his pay cut in a 10.13.09 appearance on The Daily Show.”

This morning I was re-reading a nearly three-year-old review of Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, and I think I said a few things back then that were right on-target. Please review these excerpts and answer two questions — (1) did everyone go just a little too easy on Phillips? and (2) have you re-watched it any time over the last three years?

Excerpt #1: “It does an interesting thing by inserting a slight vein of sympathy or measured compassion by depicting the Somali hijackers as desperate, dirt-poor losers who are entirely outflanked and out of their league when they attempt a takeover of this scale. Because boiled down Phillips is about a team of well-funded, corporate-backed cargo-ship guys supported by the might of the U.S. military vs. four jerkoffs in a motorboat carrying guns.”

Excerpt #2: “Phillips is not quite up to par by the measure of Greengrass’s past works. It’s not as bracing or emotionally affecting as Greengrass’s United 93 or Bloody Sunday, his two previous dramatic recreations of melodramatic real-world events. Nor does it challenge the jolting tone and hardcore immediacy in Zero Dark Thirty, which was/is more gripping and intriguing as far as this sort of thing tends to go.”

Excerpt #3: “It’s not the filmmaking chops, which are always excellent with Greengrass at the helm. It’s not the integrity that clearly went into the making of it. It’s the material — the necessary emotional punch and dramatic juice simply aren’t there. I’m not saying Captain Phillips doesn’t cut it. It does and then some, but only as far as the material and those Greengrass moves allow.”

Ben Younger‘s Bleed For This, the overcoming-tragedy story of middleweight boxing champ Vinny Paz, is obviously a movie-movie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. All the hallmarks of a strong boxing flick including a flirting-with-nutso lead performance, given by Miles burn-it-down Teller (who also got into a bad auto accident in Whiplash). Bleed has already been shown to a select few, and will be screening for a few more this summer. I don’t know about a Telluride appearance but it’ll definitely play Toronto. Open Road will debut it commercially on 11.4.

I’m reading that Owen Wilson, Julia Roberts and Jacob Tremblay will costar in Wonder, an adaptation of the R.J. Palacio young adult novel. Except Palacio’s book isn’t aimed at teens but readers in the 8-to-12 range…Jesus. The story’s about Augie, a kid with a facial deformity going to public school for the first time, and of course dealing with all the loathsome shit that elementary school kids give to anyone odd or different. Problem #1: Any Y.A. adaptation gives me the willies. Problem #2: I’m all Tremblayed out from last year’s Room campaign…later. Problem #3: I’m not much of a fan of Owen playing dads. I want him to be that insincere Wedding Crashers man-child for the rest of his life. Problem #4: The director is Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower).

“At first glance I was a little afraid of David MacKenzie‘s Hell or High Water (CBS Films, 8.12), as it seemed B-movieish. It turned out to be not just a tight and forceful bank robbers-vs.-cops drama, but a wry and eloquent one also. It has guns and loot and getaway cars, but the real subject is the tapped-out hinterland economy and how it all seems to be about despair and downhill attitudes out there in shitkicker country. The wise, sometimes funny and sometimes solemn screenplay, written by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), is the saving grace. Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster (who’s looking a lot beefier than he did five or six years ago) bring their own moods, voices and energy currents.” — filed from Cannes on 5.17.16.

When Dwayne Johnson is starring in a film, you know there’s a decent chance that Johnson’s character will smash through a plate-glass window and drop three or four stories to the ground without injury. You know the film will be crude, submental, loud, never good enough. Every single film he’s starred or costarred in over the last 15 years has been the stuff that headaches are made of.

Be Cool (’05) was half decent, but Johnson’s casting in that F. Gary Gray film was a cosmic accident. Since then he’s shown an instinct for shit that few have even approached, much less rivalled.

Dwayne Johnson

Which is why I’m posting this — what other big star has a more bottom-of-the-barrel record? Whose name at the top of the poster is a more reliable assurance of a mind-numbing, kill-me-now experience? I’m asking.

None of this matters in terms of success and swagger, of course. The megaplexers seem to love the guy, and making shitty movies haven’t slowed him down yet. Johnson is worth between $125 and $160 million, and that figure will almost certainly double or triple or better before his string runs out.

Johnson is the new Schwarzenegger, but he’s totally ignored the game plan or pattern that Schwarzenegger followed by occasionally making smart, semi-entertaining, half-decent films — The Terminator (’84) Predator (’87), Total Recall (’90), Kindergarten Cop (’90), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (’91), True Lies (’94), Eraser (’96), Batman and Robin (’97), etc.

How many years did ago did the culture completely accept that anyone saying “ohmyGod” in any conversational context needed to be automatically written off, or at least take a serious hit on the NASDAQ? I’ve been flinching at OMG for at least a decade, but when Brad Pitt‘s health-club trainer said the magic words eight years ago in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading, I figured “okay, now the outre factor has been explicitly stated in a mainstream film — now the awareness is unavoidable.” But under-educated, slow-on-the-pickup women still use it without blinking an eye. I heard it last night at a party and I went “okay, that’s it…this person’s future is laid out…she might be happy or loaded but she’ll never be accepted by people in the cool, cultured realm.”