Last night I read a recent draft of Liz Hannah‘s script for The Post, the forthcoming 20th Century Fox film about the Pentagon Papers crisis of 1971. It’s a good script, but my initial dream that it might be some kind of definitive Pentagon Papers saga or a tense newsroom thriller along the lines of Spotlight or All The President’s Men turned out to be…uhm, just that.

The Post, which will topline Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will begin filming in May under director Steven Spielberg and be released in December. It’s about how Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (Streep), who initially saw herself as less than ideally suited to the task and was little more than a blandly embedded figure in Washington social circles, gradually grew some courage and a sense of journalistic purpose during the Pentagon Papers episode, which transpired over a 17-day period in June 1971.

Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, exec editor Ben Bradlee in the early ’70s.

Hannah’s script is about a testy, at times caustic relationship between Graham and exec editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) when the N.Y. Times published Neil Sheehan‘s report about Daniel Ellsberg‘s Pentagon Papers documents (which proved that the stated motives and justifications for the Vietnam War were dishonest and deceptive) and the Post debated whether to publish a trove of similar docs, also from Ellsberg, and stand up to the Nixon administration’s legal challenges and threats.

The Post is basically a middle-aged woman’s self-empowerment saga. The project was hatched and nurtured along by producer Amy Pascal.

I wrote the following to a critic friend this morning: “I had no idea Mrs. Graham was so mushy-minded, such a slow-boater, so reluctant to accept the responsibility of first-rate, big-city journalism…even after the N.Y. Times had published the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post (not Bradlee but Graham, the lawyers and others) was still hesitating, still unsure about whether to publish more of the same…the draft I read is 118 pages and for over 70 pages my constant thought was ‘when is Mrs. Graham going to wake up and man up?’

This is several days old and yesterday’s news, but a 2.28 Hollywood Reporter piece by Stephen Galloway that derided the echo chamber of Oscar punditry and the failure of the know-it-alls to foresee Moonlight‘s Best Picture win (“Why the Pundits Were Wrong With the La La Land Prediction“) was wrong in two respects.

One, whoda thunk it? Even now I find it perplexing that Moonlight won. A finely rendered, movingly captured story of small-scale hurt and healing, it’s just not drillbitty or spellbinding enough. I wasn’t the least bit jarred, much less lifted out of my seat, when I first saw it at Telluride. It’s simply a tale of emotional isolation, bruising and outreach and a world-shattering handjob on the beach…Jesus, calm down.

As I was shuffling out of the Chuck Jones I kept saying to myself “That‘s a masterpiece?” (Peter Sellars, sitting in front of me, had insisted it was before the screening started.) If there was ever a Best Picture contender that screamed “affection and accolades but no cigar,” it was Moonlight. And the Oscar pundits knew that. Everyone did. So I don’t know what happened — I really don’t get it. I’ve already made my point about Moonlight in the Ozarks. It’s just a head-scratcher.

And two, Galloway’s contention that only pipsqueaks with zero followings were predicting or calling for a Moonlight win is wrong. As I noted just after the Oscars, esteemed Toronto Star critic Pete Howell and Rotten Tomatoes‘ Matt Atchity were predicting a Moonlight win on the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby charts. As I also noted, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone hopped aboard the Moonlight train at the very last millisecond, although she stuck to La La Land for her Gurus of Gold ballot. These are facts, and Galloway’s dismissing Howell and Atchity was an unfair oversight.

Nobody and I mean nobody was predicting a Best Picture win for Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight, but it edged out La La Land all the same.  So what happened?  

Donald Trump happened, for the most part.  Championing a small, sensitive film about a lonely closeted black dude from Miami — a film about love, compassion and overcoming fear as well as the bruisings of a bad parent — was the right thing to do in the face of a loathsome climate of alt-rightism and “make America [white] again.”

Obviously a large bloc of voters simply warmed to Moonlight for its intimacy and artistry.  A good portion of these supporters, I suspect, had also been stubbornly insisting all through award season that La La Land was escapist fluff. Which anyone with a soul and a brain will tell you it definitely isn’t (or at least is a lot sadder and more melancholy than the lightweights realized).  But the “say no to fantasy” clods wouldn’t budge.

L.A. Times columnist Glenn Whipp wrote last night that after giving Best Picture trophies to The Artist, Argo and Birdman Academy members had tired of honoring yet another film about struggling artists and the travails of the entertainment industry. 

But at the end of the day, Moonlight won a Best Picture majority for the same reason that Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman took the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar — it was the right film to support in lieu of the ugliness in Washington.

Received last night from Jordan Ruimy:  “Moonlight‘s Best Picture win was at least partly mandated by the racial politics of the moment.”

S.R.O. (Significant Russian Other) to me last night:  “What is this Moonlight?  Have you seen it?”

Me:  “Yeah. Saw it last September.  It’s small but good.  Very well made.  Didn’t exactly rock my plimsoul…”

S.R.O.:  “As good as La La Land?”  [Which she saw a few weeks ago and loved.]

Me:  “Well, in my humble opinion, no.  But it’s good.  I respect it.  It’s a thumbs-upper.”

My takeaway from this morning’s American Cinema Editors (ACE) nominations is that David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water (and to a slightly lesser extent Mel Gibson‘s Hacksaw Ridge) have gotten a Best Picture Oscar boost.

An ACE nomination is supposed to indicate industry preferences on the Best Picture front, right? So the intrigue is not about three well-established Best Picture hotties — La La Land, Manchester By The Sea, Moonlight — receiving Best Edited Feature Film (Drama) noms as much as the Mackenzie and Gibson being among the five.

The blogaroos, remember, have been downplaying Hell or High Water to some extent. Most of the Gold Derby experts have been slotting HOHW in sixth or seventh place on their Best Picture rankings, and a 1.3.17 Gurus of Gold chart has HOHW listed in eleventh place. So basically we’re looking at a Hell or High Water upgrade and a moderate blogaroos fail, especially when it comes to the Gurus.

The 67th annual ACE Awards will happen on Friday, 1.27.

Ballots will be mailed to ACE members on on Friday, 1.6. The voting concludes on 1.17. What’s gonna change between now and then? Nothing.

HBO has moved up the debut of Fisher Stevens and Alexis Bloom‘s Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, an intimate, un-sugarcoated portrait of the mother and daughter bond between the late Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. The doc will now debut eight days hence — on Saturday, 1.7, at 8 pm. It had previously been slated for a March debut but the deaths of Reynolds and Fisher, which happened roughly 30 hours apart earlier this week, changed the landscape. I would’ve made the same decision if I was running HBO. I saw Bright Lights in Cannes last May — it’s touching, wise, well-judged. And honest.

A friend saw Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant (Warner Bros., 10.10) last night. “Ben Affleck is quite good as an autistic hitman,” he writes, “and those two words say all you need to know about the film. It’s thoroughly watchable but totally ridiculous, filled with too many plot contrivances, a very long exposition scene explaining the plot, and a way-too-long shootout scene at the finale. Also, if you’re going to hire top actors like Jean Smart and Jeffrey Tambor in supporting roles, why give them about two lines to speak, and then shuffle them off into oblivion? Bottom line: this film is not exactly an advertisement for autism research.”

Posted on 9.9.16 by Esquire‘s Stephen Marche:

Posted by yours truly on 10.16.15:

Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight, which I saw last night at 8 pm, is a gentle, sensitive saga of a gay Miami black dude named Chiron. The story is told in three chapters over a 16-year period. Three actors portray this extremely guarded and hidden soul — Alex Hibbert as the little-kid version (nicknamed “Little”), Ashton Sanders as the teenage version and Trevante Rhodes as the adult version (called “Black”) in his mid 20s.

Moonlight didn’t destroy me or rock my soul, but I was impressed and moved. I admired it as far as it went. I just had to adjust myself to what it is as opposed to the earth-shaker that some have been describing.

Trevante Rhodes during third-act scene of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

Jenkins (who has worked for years as a senior Telluride Film Festival volunteer) knows what he’s doing, and the subject, for me, is a unique thing. I’ve never seen a “travails of black closeted gay guy” movie before, and this one quietly works on its own terms.

With Birth of a Nation all but out of the race, will Moonlight take its place as the reigning black-experience Best Picture nominee? Or will Denzel Washington‘s Fences be the champ? Or will they both make the cut? Hard to say. I have no dog in this — I’m just watching and wondering. Moonlight is very quiet and specific and soft-spoken, but it never really builds up a head of steam. Which is fine with me. I respected the quiet, deliberate, soft-spoken scheme.

On 1.9.16 I wrote that the material in Elvis and Nixon (Bleecker/Amazon, 4.22) seems better suited to a 20-minute short than a feature. Now that I’ve seen it I can repeat that conclusively. There’s not enough here. It’s just a skit, really, about a mumbling, gun-toting, cape-wearing Memphis yokel (Michael Shannon‘s Elvis Presley) who flies to Washington in late 1970 to ask for some face time with President Richard Nixon (Kevin Spacey) and is granted a few Oval Office minutes on the strength of his celebrity. And so Elvis and Dick shoot the shit about how the hippies and the New Left and the Beatles and the counter-culture are dragging the country down. And that’s it — a piece of taffy that’s been stretched and tugged so it’ll run 86 minutes.

The screenplay (written by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal and Cary Elwes) is all low-key jokes and jive, and the movie delivers the least convincing White House sets and Los Angeles backdrops in the history of motion pictures. Not for one second do you believe that the film is happening anywhere other than in shitty-ass-substitute Louisiana.

Shannon doesn’t play Presley — he plays himself playing Presley for a paycheck. Yes, he also plays it solemn but he always does that, right? And Spacey…okay, his Nixon is faintly amusing in a Saturday Night Live way but the movie is a wash. Everyone in the cast is trying for low-key laughs (Colin Hanks as Egil “Bud” Krogh, Evan Peters as Dwight Chapin, Tate Donovan as H. R. Haldeman, Johnny Knoxville as another Elvis buddy) that don’t quite land. I felt cheated and I saw it for free.

But you know who’s really good? Alex Pettyfer (whose last big role was in Magic Mike) as Elvis’s real-life pal Jerry Schilling. He’s the only guy in the room who seems to realize that the only way to achieve a measure of dignity is to play it straight. All I know is that his is the only performance that registers.

The muffled dialogue and whispery, muttered voice-overs in Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups were barely intelligible when I saw it a month ago. The film is mixed that way. But the subtitles on the German Bluray definitely altered things. I still don’t like this film but I no longer despise it. Because now, at least, I know what some of the characters are on about. Words and sentences are very significant components in our lives; it helps when they’re understood.

At the beginning of the Knight of Cups Bluray a title card suggests that the disc should be played loud. I would have done that but the shitty Sony sound bar I bought the other day can’t go any louder than it already is, which is medium to pronounced.

As I understand it the alleged “Revenant can’t win because it’s too divisive” scenario means this: (a) Revenant support is impassioned but lacks the numbers to win a sufficient majority on the first ballot and therefore (b) when they do a second count all of those second-place votes for Spotlight will kick in and put it over the top. Or something like that. But as much as I love Spotlight and am in the tank for it as far as that goes, I just don’t think it has the horses. The passion vote (i.e., people who came out of it saying “whoa, never saw a film that intense and immersive and raw as the outdoors before”) belongs to The Revenant. But how many are out there?

Probably enough, I’m thinking, but there’s also enough of a head-scratching factor to make the end of tonight’s Oscar telecast a spellbinder. Side issue: Hollywood Elsewhere has been invited to the Spotlight after-party. Obviously the vibe will be one thing if it wins Best Picture and another if it doesn’t. If I’m the hearty fellow I think I am, I’ll attend either way.

After The Big Short won last weekend’s PGA Daryl F. Zanuck award I had the following exchange with a director friend who’s been a Big Short praiser from the get-go:

Director friend: “Do you still think I steered you wrong?”

HE: “The Big Short is a good film but calm down.”

Director friend: “Bubba, you don’t get off that easy. After your initial viewing of The Big Short you shamed me, ridiculed me, questioned my Oscar predicting manhood. I told you it was a contender and I was banished to the Elba of your mind for saying so. On the other hand, when I told you to calm down about Truth, I was ridiculed the other way. You said it was on the level of All The President’s Men.”

HE: “Truth and All The President’s Men are analagous. One is a success story, the other is about failure. Truth is a complex tale of a journalistic disaster that is ironically compounded by the fact that the reporters, despite their failure to fully vet the Killian documents, were reporting the truth about George Bush‘s record in the National Guard. They were right but they got taken down anyway when the Karl Rove brigade went after the report and CBS corporates felt they had no choice but to wash their hands.

“Yes, I found The Big Short too dense and wonky after the first viewing, but I warmed up to it with a second viewing, and now I’d actually like to see it a third time with a friend.”

I wrote the director friend this morning after Spotlight won the SAG ensemble award, which of course meant a loss for The Big Short, which had been favored to win by certain blogaroonies (Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Glenn Whipp).

HE: “Like I said last weekend, ‘calm down.'”

Director friend: “Dude, just because The Big Short didn’t win an ensemble award doesn’t mean it’s not a player. I told you it was going to be in the mix. You told me that I was wrong and that I misled you. Do you still think that?”