Variety‘s Dave McNary is reporting that Steven Spielberg‘s The BFG is a shortfaller, based on early Friday estimates. This is music to my jaundiced ears, of course, but why? Why have American families said “maybe but not so much” to an expensive, technically accomplished giant-in-a-fairytale movie by the great Spielberg? I was no fan after catching The BFG in Cannes, but I didn’t fantasize for an instant that families wouldn’t embrace it.

McNary says The BFG “is underperforming forecasts, which had projected an opening in the $30 million range. Friday’s debut day looked likely to hit between $6 million and $8 million [for a] disappoint $25 million. The Roald Dahl adaptation has received plenty of affection from critics with a 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, thanks to Mark Rylance’s motion-capture work as a giant who befriends an orphan girl. But The BFG will likely struggle to break even, given its high-priced $140 million budget, funded by Amblin Partners, Disney and Walden Media.”

I don’t know if this is a Photoshop job of Hillary Clinton or a shot of a woman who resembles her or what, but the instant I saw this I knew. It hits exactly the right note, expresses exactly what she needs to project about herself. I’m not being facetious. One look at this serene, gently smiling Hillary and all of the bad shit just flies out the window — no conniving, no private email server, no Goldman Sachs, no malevolent plotting. It’s the perfect image. It came to me like the essence of Three Women came to Robert Altman, like a dream or vision of some kind. This plus choosing Elizabeth Warren for her vp will completely change Hillary’s image. I look at granny blueshades moonface and say to myself, “Oh, God…do I really have to vote for this biddy?” But I feel the absolute opposite when I look at granny blueface goldstar hippiechick. It totally flips the pancake. Do I expect anyone to realize what a great idea this is? Of course not. But this isn’t some idea I cooked up — it came from God. I’ve had these visions before and I know what I’m talking about.

In a thread about Terrence Malick‘s forthcoming Voyage of Time and more particularly the dismissive comments that have greeted the trailer, HE reader Spicerpalooza said, “I just can’t wrap my head around dismissing something that looks this staggeringly beautiful. This is the kind of thing only the cinema can create, and with the biggest possible screen.”

Wells response, posted this morning: “I’m not ‘dismissing’ it. I’ll be catching the Brad Pitt-narrated IMAX version and it might be really trippy and levitational. It probably is that in portions, at least to some extent, at least for stoners. I’m just saying it won’t matter, that Malick doesn’t matter. If you throw a Malick stone into a pond, the impact will create subtle little ripples, of course…but few will notice or care. Because no one’s looking at the pond in the first place. Malick’s tossed-salad way of composing movies and regarding things from a passive-cosmic perspective has as much connection to the culture of 2016 as the social views of Art Linklater or the golf swing of Bing Crosby.”

Two and a half years ago I suggested that two making-of-Jaws scripts — Richard Corinder‘s The Shark is Not Working and Nick Creature and Michael Sweeney‘s The Mayor of Shark City — should be merged. Excerpt: “In ’81 Tootsie director Sydney Pollack pieced together four or five different versions of the script (by different authors) to make a semi-coherent whole. 40-plus years ago Sterling Silliphant merged two burning-skyscraper novels (The Tower, The Glass Inferno) into a single script called The Towering Inferno. Maybe the two Spielberg projects could come together in a similar way?” But I guess the whole idea of making any making-of-Jaws movie has gone south.

My discovery is late by a month, but this 5.30 piece by photographer & Guardian contributor Chris Arnade offers the most concise and illuminating explanation of the moronic mentality of your average downscale Trump voter that I’ve read thus far.

The hinterlanders have basically become Pvt. Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, living in what they feel is a world of shit. They’ve stopped being reasonable, they don’t believe in positivism or constructive solutions, they drink a lot and they’re holding a loaded gun in their hands and telling themselves that things are so bad — stuck, no hope, no future — that pulling the trigger couldn’t make things any worse, and it might just make them better.

Arnade: “As any trader will tell you, if you are stuck lower, you want volatility, uncertainty. No matter how it comes. Put another way, your downside is flat but your upside isn’t. Break the system.”

Seven Arnade paragraphs + Wells comments:

(1) “Large parts of the U.S. have become completely isolated, socially and economically. Kids are growing up in towns where by six, seven, or eleven, they are doomed to be viewed as second class. They feel unvalued. They feel stuck. They are mocked. And there is nothing they feel they can do about it.”

Wells comment: There’s at least a possibility of a way out for under-30s through self-education. Higher learning and all kinds of unforeseen creativity via the internet is free. They don’t need college. And the more they listen to their out-of-work dad or mom or uncle, the more fucked they’ll be. Leave them behind. Their future is mapped out for them, but it isn’t for people who believe in tomorrow. They can do anything or at least die trying.

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Okay, now I’m psyched. Notice how Miles Teller is apparently playing it real, or at least isn’t overtly winking or hinting that you’re watching a comedy and are therefore expected to laugh? I have a feeling it’s going to be his movie more than Jonah Hill‘s, and I’m saying this as a major Hill homie.

Posted on 3.24.16: I love the term “American biographical criminal comedy.” Todd Phillips‘ film is about the real-life saga of arms dealers Efraim_Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller) who ran afoul of the law five or six years ago for selling crap-level arms to the Afghan army.

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There will be a little more time for Academy members to fill in their nomination ballots next January. Balloting will begin on the morning of Thursday, 1.5.17 or six days later than last year’s 12.30 balloting kickoff. It will conclude at 5 pm on 1.13.17, or nine days later. Last year the nommie balloting period lasted 10 days (12.30.15 to 1.8.16). The slackers (i.e., those who routinely refuse to attend screenings or watch screeners until the very last minute) will be able to begin the process a little later, but they’ll have a day less to sort things through. Some guy tweeted today that “you’d be amazed how many members don’t watch all the movies because they’re away for Xmas and New Year’s.” I’m not amazed in the least. The default attitude on the part of many older Academy members is one of extreme laziness. The Oscar nominations will be announced on Tuesday, 1.24. The PGA and DGA awards will happen on 2.4 and 2.6, respectively. Final voting will open on Monday, 2.13 and finish on Tuesday, 2.21. The Oscar telecast will happen on Sunday, 2.26.

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.

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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.

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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.”