In the wake of Saturday’s surprise screening of Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith‘s Emancipation, Apple has announced that the Civil War-era drama will open in theatres on Friday, 12.2, and begin streaming on Friday, 12.9.

Smith slapping Chris Rock on the Oscar stage several months ago was “bad form,” obviously, but only in a performative or ceremonial sense. Superficially uncool but at the same time revelatory.

For what really happened was that Smith, after pretending to be Mr. Chuckly Happyvibe for over three decades, showed us who he really was deep down — an angry, abused dude from West Philadelphia who was ready for violence at a moment’s notice. And what’s wrong with that? It’s who he is, and he finally broke through and told us that. Don’t we value honesty and confession?

One significant revealing by the Emancipation teaser is that apart from the opening shot (green leaf, red blood), the suggestion is that the film is largely in black-and-white with faint hints of desaturated color.

I’m sorry that Bros flopped — perhaps an understandable thing from a Joe Popcorn perspective but a deeply wounding thing from the viewpoint of the Movie Godz, given the generally excellent craft levels — tight script construction, naturalistic acting, revelatory writing, etc.

All I can figure is that people know Billy Eichner from Billy on the Street and Parks and Recreation, and they just didn’t want to watch him in flagrante delicto.

Over the last 20-plus years Average Joes and Janes have gone through a sea-change in their attitudes about gay people, but generally speaking they don’t want to pay $16 at the megaplexes to watch certain bearded guys doing certain things bare-assed.

Last weekend Bros producer Judd Apatow told CNN’s Chris Wallace that the gay community has been “underserved.” Did he mean in terms of sex scenes featuring bearded guys or hunky good looking ones like Luke Macfarlane? No offense and due respect but given what happened last weekend, the gay community should probably get accustomed to being “underserved” in this regard.

It probably wouid have been more comprehensive to say to Wallace that over the last 20 or 30 years the gay community has been slavishly catered to by Hollywood six ways from Sunday, and particularly by way of emotional investments in films and TV series, general glamorizing, image enhancements and political alignments.

Apatow’s response to Wallace about his preference for “just funny”, or the stuff that many comedies put into their first halves, because he lives an overworked and over-stressed life…that was funny.

Apatow also mentioned how his two daughters, Maude and Iris, never let him soak in any sort of satisfaction when a civilian compliment comes along. When some random passerby praises Apatow for one of his comedies, say, “as soon as he’s out of earshot they’ll make fun of that person for, like, ten minutes.”

…how pronounced are the reactions? Nobody is mild about it — it’s a hate-or-worship thing.

For a gripping account of the ghastly 1955 murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the despicable perversion of justice that followed, Stanley Nelson and Marcia A. Smith‘s The Murder of Emmett Till, a 2003 American Experience doc, is your best bet.

Having just seen and been moved by Chinonye Chukwu‘s Till (UA Releasing, 10.14), I’m actually planning to rewatch the PBS doc.

Partly (and I don’t mean this in a naysaying sense) because Till is not a tightly focused, chapter-and-verse procedural about the tragic facts, and that’s what I, a shameless just-the-facts type, more or less wanted the whole time.

Which is not to say Till is a problem film — it’s not. It’s just that it’s strictly focused on the agonizing ordeal of Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler), and about the dignity and resolve that this half-broken woman summoned in order to bring about a form of justice for her son.

Not legal justice, of course — not in the Jim Crow south of the mid ’50s. But the justice of history and all the facts being known.

Co-written by Michael Reilly, Keith Beauchamp and Chukwu, Till recounts the basics of Emmett’s Chicago life (sharing a home with Mamie, his colorful personality and natty clothing) before his visit to Money in late August of ’55, and how his expression of hormonal arousal (a wolf whistle) directed at Carolyn Bryant, a married 21 year-old storekeep, led to his killing by her husband and half-brother because he’d violated a sexual racial barrier.

The heart of the film is how Mamie dealt with this horrible occurence, and particularly her decision to reveal her son’s mutilated, bloated, bashed-in head to the world by opening the casket lid during his Chicago funeral. This was followed by her Mississippi testimony at the trial of his killers.

Till’s murder is aurally suggested but mercifully not shown.

Till is sad and penetrating and well acted up and down, but award-season-wise it’s mainly an acting showcase vehicle for the gifted Deadwyler, who will obviously be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She channels three simultaneous currents — devotion, devastation, steel.

Till is deeply appalling and sadly factual. But it’s not a satisfying story because the actual story itself was unsatisfying. Not only were the bad guys not convicted but they even pocketed a fat fee when they admitted to killing Emmett in a Look magazine article.

If you want the kind of emotional satisfaction that results when the bad guys pay for their foul deeds, re-watch the fictional Mississippi Burning. But if you want to submit to a wowser, soul-deep lead performance, see Till.

Last May the understanding was that Apple + had chickened out of releasing Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith’s Emancipation, the fear being that Smith’s Oscar slap incident would overshadow the film, at least in terms of award-season recognition.

But yesterday’s THR report about yesterday’s screening in Washington, D.C. strongly indicates that the Apple team has changed its collective mind. Sounds good to most of us! Bring it on, boys.

Delaying this film for a year wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference, damage-control-wise.

In a 10.1 Air Mail piece about Italy’s newly elected Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (“They’re With Her”), George Pendel laments three warning signs — “conspiracy theories about immigration” (whatever that means), Meloni’s “perpetual use of anti-Semitic dog whistles” (obviously odious if true) and “her screeds against political correctness” (what’s wrong with that?…more power!).

The best thing about the article, however unfair or malicious it might be, is Harry Greb’s illustration of Meloni as the evil queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

A part of me  genuinely sympathizes with Jordan Peterson’s tearful empathy for incels, and I therefore agree to some extent with Megyn Kelly’s “screw you” dismissal of Don’t Worry Darling‘s Olivia Wilde along with, to some extent, Matt Walsh‘s impressions of all of this, but we have to face facts about incels. 

Various understandings of who and what they are may be flawed, but there’s a certain common ground.  My understanding (take this with a grain) is that incels are lonely guys who are both (a) unattractive to women and who (b) haven’t made a great effort to be attractive to women. 

This is mainly (or at least partly) because they’ve given up.  They tend to live in their own realm (not a lot of socializing) and spend an inordinate amount of time at home with their computers.  They exist, of course, but they clearly don’t want to to be “in the game.”  And they don’t seem to want to take hints about how to fix this.

By all appearances incels don’t eat healthily, they don’t work out (i.e., are overweight) , they’re probably medicating too much (alcohol) and they tend to groom and dress horribly — the usual beardface thing, contemptible flannel shirts, baggy shorts, ugly T-shirts, lace-up sneakers with black socks (or no socks), backwards baseball caps and all the rest of that awful garb.  And their absorption in online forums and superhero realms verges on the neurotic, if not the diseased.

If I was a reasonably attractive straight woman I would run in the opposite direction and I wouldn’t stop running until I ran out of breath, and then I’d hail an Uber or a Lyft to put even more distance between me and these fucking guys.  

With a less desirable genetic inheritance and an even more punishing upbringing and minus the deliverance of movies and journalism, I could have been an incel.  I’m not indifferent to their plight.  But c’mon, man…God helps those who help themselves.

Don’t Worry, Darling, by the way, plummeted 75%  this weekend.  That means people really don’t like it.  And it’s not the craft levels — it’s a reasonably well made film and that’s obviously on Wilde.  The problem is with the third act, which leaves you with nothing and jettisons the whole “social focus on the ’50s” and the granddaughter’s inheritance from Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment. 

Don’t Worry Darling has earned $33 million so far.

Paul Schrader’s The Master Gardener, the final chapter in his “lonely haunted man with a certain history writing his thoughts in longhand while sitting at a clutter-free desk” trilogy, is a “Southern fable,” as Schrader put it earlier today.

It’s actually a redemption-seeking love story. Redemption by way of acceptance, submission, renunciation, devotion and violence.

The only truly difficult part for me was Joel Edgerton’s “Hitler youth” haircut — absolutely no one looks good with one of these godawful things. They smell of fear and repression and a form of cowardice and self-loathing.

I’ll leave it there and tap out an HE review sometime tomorrow as it’s 8:34 pm and I’m standing in line for a 9 pm viewing of Triangle of Sadness (which I saw in Cannes last May) at Avery Fisher Hall.

HE’s big office romance…I’m sorry, I meant to say the emotionally devastating extra-marital affair that I fell into during my time as an in-office freelancer at People magazine and which continued until her husband found out a couple of years later…it was almost the emotional death of me. (The actual span was between early ’98 and the early fall of ’00…call it 32 months.) No relationship had ever brought so much heartache, hurt or frustration. Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard had nothing on us. I was a man of almost constant sorrow. I was so upset by one of our arguments that one afternoon I made a reckless left turn on Pico Blvd. and got slammed by a speeding BMW, and for weeks I told myself it wasn’t really my fault — it was the married girlfriend’s. Definitely a form of insanity.