Yesterday Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson posted a 2017 Best Picture projection piece. I’m here to straighten her out on a few things. I’ll post her list of preferred contenders with comments and corrections, and then post my own.

Thompson’s first wrongo is her statement that Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation and Jeff Nichols‘ Loving have emerged as “the biggest Oscar contenders for Best Picture.” The wildly euphoric response to Parker’s film during last January’s Sundance Film Festival is still having its effect. I’m not saying Birth won’t be Best Picture nominated, but it won’t stand up to the second and third waves of scrutiny that will kick in after it screens at the fall festivals and especially after Joe and Jane Popcorn start paying to see it. Loving is a decent film but not a great one. The Oscar pony isn’t the film but Ruth Negga‘s lead performance.

Thompson undervalues Kenneth Lonergan’s “emotionally devastating” Manchester By the Sea (Roadside/Amazon) by ranking it third. As a portrait of human tragedy and vulnerability it is two or three times better than Loving and The Birth of a Nation combined. Lonergan’s writing alone makes it a huge stand-out. And there’s are no performances in Loving (including Negga’s) or The Birth of a Nation that can hold a candle to Casey Affleck‘s turn as a devastated lonely-guy divorcee.

Thompson’s leading Best Picture contenders following the above three:

4. Robert Zemeckis‘ Allied (Paramount). Wells comment: Does Zemeckis make Best Picture contenders any more? Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, WWII espionage and assassination, etc. Feels more “commercial” than anything else.

5. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Sony). Wells comment: Probably.

6. Denzel Washington‘s Fences (Paramount). Wells comment: Probably.

7. Gary Ross‘s The Free State of Jones (STX). Wells comment: Not a chance. They’ve been hiding it. Ross clearly doesn’t “do” Oscar-level stuff.

8. Derek Cianfrance‘s The Light Between Oceans (DreamWorks/Disney). Wells comment: No way. It’s opening commercially on 9.2 — the day that Telluride kicks off. If it had the vaguest Oscar qualifying chops it would be playing at Telluride and opening later.

9. Morten Tyldum‘s Passengers (Sony). Wells comment: Strictly a big-budget commercial space drama. Not a prayer of Oscar contention except for production design, FX, etc. The plot has an ethical problem that will stir a fair amount of debate once it opens commercially.

10. Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply (New Regency/Fox). Wells comment: No clue at all but Beatty having described it as a “lighthearted dramedy” doesn’t exactly suggest an awards contender to me. It might be a perfectly fine film. I know it has a good story.

11. Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (Paramount). Wells comment: I’ve been hearing for months it’s going to be a rough sit in terms of physical anguish and torture scenes. Are we talking about the new Revenant?

12. Clint Eastwood‘s Sully (Warner Bros.). Wells comment: Maybe but after Tom Hanks lands his jet on the Hudson where can the movie go?

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Suicide Squad‘s put-on attitude is obvious to the dumbest ticket-buyers in Beijing, Shanghai or Bangkok, but I’m getting a demonic vibe from this trailer. Something feral and soul-less. Maybe it has something to do with the Orlando massacre vibe but I’m suddenly asking myself “are there any depths that corporate Hollywood won’t sink to to make a sick buck?” What will this movie bring to the table except a razzle-dazzle porno-violent milkshake with a wink-wink attitude? How will this film not inject corporate poison into the veins of the culture? How will it expand our movie vocabulary or give anyone a sense of elevation? It seems 110% aimed at the lowest common denominator. Is director-writer David Ayer a closet Satanist? I’m sensing nausea here.

Did you know that prior to being condemned by Messala (Toby Kebbell) to life as an oar slave on a Roman ship that Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) travelled to Nazareth and had a philosophical conversation with a brawny, bearded carpenter of Brazilian ancestry (Rodrigo Santoro)? Carpenter: “Love your enemies. God is love. He has a path for you.” JBH: “If he’s already decided my path how am I better off [something or other]?” Carpenter: “Why don’t you ask God?”

Wiki tipoff: “Unlike in the original film, Jesus H. Christ will have a prominent role in this version. Paramount Pictures’ vice chairman Rob Moore [has] stated that Christ in this version “is going to be consistent with people’s expectations,” and that the “expectations of the faithful will be honored by this one.” This was because Paramount wants to avoid the sort of backlash received by Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah because some Christians were dismayed by the film’s inventive and inaccurate interpretation of the Bible.”

What is that Godawful song playing over portions of this?

The trailer obviously makes clear that Jack Hawkins‘ Quintus Arrius character has been eliminated from the upcoming version, which Paramount will release on 8.19.

Last night Jimmy Fallon said that “when we think of Orlando, we think of bliss-out vibes, frolic, people having fun” or words to that effect. Prior to last Saturday night if you had asked me for an instant “Orlando” reaction I would have said “Disneyworld, tourist schmucks, ugly, flat typography, over-developed, a must to avoid, I’ll never go there.” I once knew a married guy who said that he and his wife had vacationed twice in Disneyworld, and that they were planning to go again. It was their idea of a really nice time. You can’t order people to have a sense of taste about things. You can’t teach it. Taste is a result of a thousand distastes, and some people don’t clue #1 what the hell that even means.

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Could there anything more “twee” than a gently emotional film about A.A. Milne, the creator of the “Winnie the Pooh” books? Especially with Milne being played by Domnhall Gleeson, one of the undisputed kings of Hollywood twee with his achingly sensitive manner, fucking carrot hair and watery blue eyes? When I read about Fox Searchlight’s Goodbye, Christopher Robin, which will costar Margot Robbie as Mrs. Milne, I went “aarggh!” Mrs. Tarzan and Jordan Belfort‘s insanely seductive gold-digging wife married to a dweeby English poet? In what universe will this film take place?

Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne and son Christopher Robin Milne, taken in the mid 1920s.

We’ll apparently be looking at another Finding Neverland (’04), in which Johnny Depp played another revered London-based author of a legendary children’s fable. Pic will be directed by Simon Curtis (Woman in Gold, My Week With Marilyn) with a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughn.

Is there any chance we’ll one day see a movie about Theodor Seuss Geisel, i.e, the creator of the Dr. Seuss books?

Will Curtis’s film acknowledge that Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was the inspiration for the Christopher Robin character in the Pooh books, became more and more resentful of his father’s exploitation of his childhood and came to hate the books that had thrust him into the public eye?

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This teaser is all about emphasizing how “real” and un-CG’ed the shooting of the new Ben-Hur chariot race was. Director Timur Bekmambetov, costars Jack Huston and Toby Kebbell…all on the same page. Why, then, does the moment when Judah Ben-Hur’s chariot rides over the wreckage and he’s nearly thrown out of the chariot…why does that scene look utterly real in the ’59 version but like exaggerated CG bullshit in the newbie? And why does the new sequence look so bleachy and washed out compared to the William Wyler version, which is full of rich sandy browns and arid yellows with accents of blue and red? I’m not saying that Bekmambetov, Huston and Kebbell are lying about shooting their version realistically. I’m saying it doesn’t look or feel as arresting as the old version. I’m not being a knee-jerk crank here. I’m not saying “oh, the older stuff is always better.” The newbie really doesn’t look as good. Honest.

Listen to this again.

I sent that male-betrayal thing I wrote about yesterday to an ex-girlfriend, and she wrote back today and basically said “Wow, you’re still angry at something that happened 36 years ago? Shouldn’t you be serene and cosmic and burning incense at this stage in your life?”

Response: “I’m not actively pissed off about this, not really, but it did happen, and it was fun to resuscitate it. I’m okay with Bob. He’s a good fellow. But what’s past is present and vice versa. The ghosts swirl around us. I live with stuff that happened when I was 8 or 20 or 42 just as vividly as when these incidents were fresh. That’s the joy of writing about this and that every day. Nothing is dusty or faded. Everything that has ever happened or will happen is alive and crackling.

“And I must tell you I’m well past being concerned about whether this or that post will reflect well or ill upon me. I get shat upon every day of the week and twice on Sundays on Twitter. There is no tranquility in this life for someone like myself. Not with guys like Glenn Kenny in the world. No solace, no serenity, no plateau. Well, there’s happiness in fits and starts, of course, but certainly not as a going proposition. There’s only the next story to write, the next film to see, the next experience, the next encounter, the next festival, the next interview…the river of it all. And it’s the happiest period of my life, by far.”

The Night Of is an eight-part HBO series that will debut on Sunday, 7.10. It’s about a wrongfully accused guy (Riz Ahmed) caught in a murder investigation. John Turturro plays Ahmed’s lawyer. It’s been directed by Steve Zaillian, who co-wrote the script with Richard Price. The cinematography and editing are obviously high calibre. The 2013 pilot starred James Gandolfini in Turturro’s role. Everything collapsed after Gandolfini died in June 2013, but here it finally is.

Because it popped on 5.10, or just as the Cannes Film Festival was getting underway, I ignored Criterion’s Bluray of Nicholas Ray‘s In A Lonely Place (’50). Last night I finally caught up with it. I had never thought of this downish Hollywood romance as anything special to look at, but now, thanks to Criterion, I’ve got a new attitude. The crisp black-and-white imagery is luscious and rich like a river…a river of glistening silver. It’s strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. The mine-shaft blacks are to die for. I was sitting up in my seat and going “whoa, wait a minute…this is excellent!”

Criterion Bluray of Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place.

A lot of times Criterion will make a classic film look darker or grainier than it should be. (The Only Angels Have Wings debacle is one example.) But every now and and then they’ll make a film look much better than ever before. This is one of those times.

Wiki boilerplate: “Humprhey Bogart stars as Dixon Steele, a troubled screenwriter suspected of murder and Gloria Grahame co-stars as Laurel Gray, a neighbor who falls under his spell. Beyond its surface plot of confused identity and tormented love, the story is a mordant comment on Hollywood mores and the pitfalls of celebrity and near-celebrity, similar to two other American films released that same year — Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard and Joseph Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve.”

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A week ago I was wondering when STX would begin to screen Gary Ross‘s Free State of Jones (STX, 6.24) to guys like myself. Today STX finally sent out invites to their NY and LA all-media screenings on Wednesday, 6.22, with an embargo review date of 9 am Eastern the following morning. The Civil War-era conflict drama will technically open on Thursday evening, 6.23.

I’ve read that Hollywood beauticians and makeup artists of the 1930s regarded Katharine Hepburn‘s facial freckles as appalling, and that they constantly (a) covered them with pounds of base and (b) urged dps to shoot Hepburn’s CUs with a vaseline-smeared lens. By the ’50s or certainly by the ’60s this view had more or less subsided. The culture has long accepted freckles as appealing or even beautiful, but I’ve never fully agreed. A smattering of freckles across the nose and upper cheeks is…well, fine. Reddish, light-brown pointillist accents upon alabaster skin. But I still prefer creamy, freckle-free complexions. Sue me.

Cover of New York Times Style Magazine — Sunday, 6.12.

I’m mentioning this because I was definitely going “whoa” when I gazed at that super-freckly model on the cover of yesterday’s New York Times Style Magazine, especially with the slogan “Real Beauty” placed to her left. Those hundreds if not thousands of teeny black and brown markings don’t look like freckles as much as…I don’t know what to call them. They’re like a cross between Hepburn or Lindsay Lohan-style freckles and…I’d better not say any more. The p.c. Twitter banshees (who, don’t forget, yesterday tried to have me flayed when I admitted to having speculated in my head in the immediate wake of the Orlando slaughter that the shooter might be a radical Islamic wacko) will probably shriek like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers over what will sound to them like freckle prejudice.

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