In his analysis of the Babylon catastrophe, Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro writes that Paramount, the financing studio, thought that Damien Chazelle‘s 1920s Hollywood-in-transition epic would basically be The Wolf of Wall Street meets Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

I’m sorry but whoever told that to D’Alessandro is either lacking in perception or, you know, a bullshitter.

Any Paramount exec who’d read Chazelle’s script (I read a 2019 draft) knew from the get-go that it was basically a vulgar Fellini Satyricon meets a 1920s Wolf of Wall Street, but minus the Scorsese-DiCaprio humor, charm, irony and the Tarantino wit and charisma…basically a general atmosphere of toilet-bowl downswirl. It was obvious on the page that none of it was funny like, for example, Scorsese and DiCaprio’s big quaalude scene.

It was obviously going to be a big-canvas Hollywood Guernica…a tour of orgiastic behavior (the emphasis was less on filmmaking and much more on drinking, cocaine-snorting and other degenerate indulgences) and stylistically intensified by whatever directorial panache Chazelle could muster. It’s a story about two major self-absorbed characters (Margot Robbie‘s Nellie LaRoy and Brad Pitt‘s Jack Conrad) suffering through the silent-to-sound transition period, and a neutral observer character (Diego Calva‘s Manny Torres) who doesn’t fare all that well either.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting that Avatar: The Way of Water now has $955.1 million in global revenue — $293 million domestic, $661 million foreign.

James Cameron’s film will almost certainly earn $1 billion by year’s end. It seems unlikely, however, to reach the $2 billion mark, which it needs to do, Cameron has said, to be considered a serious success.

From HE’s limited perspective (i.e., insect antennae readings), Avatar 2’s repeat viewing factor doesn’t seem to be happening with that old 2009 fervor. I felt rocked and energized by my first IMAX viewing, but also a bit exhausted and drained even. Impressed by the eyeball-popping tech, of course, but not particularly moved in any kind of primal emotional sense.

I’d like to see it again (or so I’m telling myself) but the idea of another 192-minute power-punch workout seems a bit daunting. It runs about 40 or 45 minutes too long. The consensus on this is pretty locked in.

The Oscars have been withering on the vine for the last six or seven years due to woke politics and are pretty much all but toast, but in the view of the Los Angeles Times editorial board and an editorial they posted on 12.27, they’re not toasty enough.

“Let’s really stick a fork in this sad, dying annual celebration of movies,” a 12.27 LAT editorial essentially says. “Let’s urge AMPAS and the TV academy to kill gender-based acting Oscars in order to satisfy the political goals of the trans community and their progressive allies.”

Everyone understands that the lore of the Academy Awards telecast is all but finished. The viewing audience been shrinking over the last several years, especially among Millennial and Zoomers and double especially since the disastrous, pandemic-sieged Soderbergh Oscars of April 2021.

My heart is broken over this. I used to feel joyful during Oscar shows; now there’s almost nothing. James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Billy Wilder, Cary Grant, Ernest Borgnine, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, William Wyler and William Holden are weeping in heaven and taking turns pounding the refrigerator door.

But in order to finalize the death process, the show needs one more kitchen knife shoved between the ribs, and the gender neutral acting initiative might just be the dagger point that does the job.

On 8.23.22 the Spirit Award honchos decided to abandon gender categories for acting awards, more or less following the lead of the Gotham Award guys. Two months later (on 10.12.22) a woke cabal within the Los Angeles Film Critics Association adopted the same policy, despite nearly half of LAFCA being opposed to gender neutral.

And now this L.A. Times editorial has gotten into the act.

I said this last August and I’ll say it again: “If the Academy decides to go gender-neutral with the Oscar acting awards, the eclipse will be total and absolute, and I mean beyond the level of anything dreamt of by Michelangelo Antonioni.

“In a populist cultural sense as well as aesthetically, the Oscars will have announced to the Joe and Jane Popcorn public that after six or seven years of fiddling around with secular woke passions and priorities, the Oscars are truly no longer about engaging even a semblance of a mass audience, or certainly in any way that seems to matter.

“Yes, Virginia, the Oscars are about wokesterism, secular industry politics and (this is key) elbowing older, insufficiently progressive white guys aside…about a tiny cabal of progressive fanatics who are determined to de-popularize not just the Oscars but movies themselves.

If AMPAS manages to eliminate gender-based acting awards, Average Joes and Janes will simply walk away and stay away…the more impassioned among them (i.e., the Oscar torch-bearers and sentimentalists) will raise their fists and voices and say “stop this insanity, stop this bullshit…outside the woke realm men are men and women are women, and they generate different moods and expressions and ways of living and processing the ups and downs of living…stop this bullshit and come down to earth.”

All hail the death of the great American art form called movies…right? All hail the political instruction that has overtaken a significant portion of mainstream movies and the casting process altogether. The Oscars were launched in the late ’20s and are now, 95 years later, on the verge of completely erasing themselves from mass public consciousness. All hail presentism!

And why? Several reasons and factors are behind this, but in today’s context it boils down to this: the non-binary trans community wants to strengthen its political influence and power. And to accomplish this goal, one of the most populist, mass-outreach, Joe and Jane Popcorn aspects of the Oscar telecast — gender-based acting categories, which have been with us for nearly a century and in fact for hundreds of years beforehand — has to be dissolved.

What the overwhelming majority of movie lovers might prefer is not important. The aims of a small activist minority is what counts.

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I’d never before seen this Rebel Without A Cause set photo. Snapped sometime in late ‘54 or early ‘55. I eat this shit up. Second only to Times Square marquee photos, especially the color ones.

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But I, a crusty male melancholic given to fuck-all gloomitude, can’t go there. I was moderately dishy back in my hey-hey days (early 20s to mid 40s) but no longer. Even with the Prague enhancements, older, creasier and slightly saggier is a biological fact these days and no amount of age-positivity can change that. I’m in reasonably good shape for the mileage but let’s not kid ourselves.

Now that Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon has been written off as a monumental flop as well as the second of Margot Robbie‘s box-office disasters this year (the first being Amsterdam), everyone is taking shots at it. Which is easy to do once a film has failed.

In an 11.18.22 piece called “1920s Bel Air Wasn’t Palm Springs Foothills,” I mentioned that Babylon‘s depiction of how Bel Air looked back in the mid ’20s seemed “untrustworthy.”

Excerpt: “For 80 or 90 years Bel Air has been a flush and fragrant oasis for the super-wealthy, but in the mid ’20s, according to Babylon, it was fairly dry and barren and desert-like — no trees, no bushes, no grass and definitely no golf course. Almost Lawrence of Bel Air. In fact Bel Air of the mid ’20s was starting to come into itself. Photos from that era show the beginnings of paved roads, smallish trees and shrubbery, yucca plants, a few mansions, a reservoir, the east and west gates and a little shade here and there.”

A 12.24 Paul Schrader Facebook post mentioned other historical inaccuracies, and commenters Matt Dorff and Farrran Smith Nehme (among others) chimed in with their own complaints and challenges.

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I’ve driven through Buffalo two or three times, and every time the same question comes to mind: “Even under the best of circumstances, who would want to live in this godforsaken region, this cultural Siberia of Upper New York State?”

Hugs and condolences for those 26 Buffalo residents who’ve died and the countless others who’ve suffered grievously over the last three days, but again…why? Even the name “Buffalo” seems oddly repellent on some level. Who would want to live in a city named for (or having the same name as) a hulking prairie mammal? Boggles the mind. Plus it reminds me of the dreaded term “beefalo.”

I’m not saying anything as dismissive as “if I never visit Buffalo ever again, it’ll be too soon,” but I’m honestly wondering why anyone would say “yes, this is where I want to live.”

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…to read Olivia Nuzzi’s 12.23 New York piece (8500 words, give or take) about Donald Trump’s slow and climactic sinking into the swamp of over-ness., here’s an hors d’oeuvres.

[3:50 am]. I’m taking care of Jett and Cait’s dogs (Joey and Luna) at the homestead in West Orange, New Jersey while they’re hanging out with Cait’s family in Tewksbury, MA. A solitary unit of three (me and the dogs), withdrawn and isolated by weather…reading, writing, snacking and streaming films (Mark Boal’s Echo, Walter Hill’s 48 HRS., William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and no Brendan Fraser).

The fact of the matter is that we’re living in what I’ve been calling The Icebox or Chill House, i.e., not warm enough since the Arctic air mass arrived a couple of days ago. I’ve promised not to burn any extra heating oil and to rely on space heaters, and so I’m hanging out in layers, jackets, boots, a scarf and my black overcoat and cowboy hat. Okay, the upstairs guest room is warm but that’s all. It’s so chilly here that I’m afraid to take a shower. Nor have I shaved. A little gamey.

Plus I can’t seem to get a good night’s sleep. No more than three or four hours max. I routinely awaken at 2 or 3 am, read and write for three or four and then back to sleep for another three. I don’t sleep at night — I nap.

I was going to say I’ve become General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, coping nightly with “sleep so close to waking it’s barely worth the name.” But I’m closer to a half-and-half combination of Al Pacino in Insomnia and Dennis Hopper’s Tom Ripley in The American Friend. I’ll score some Melatonin tomorrow (i.e., later today) and see what happens.

Anyone who uses the word “scream” or “screaming” in any context or circumstance, I regard askance. As in “he was screaming at me” or “screaming at the flight attendant” or whatever. Because people, in fact, almost never actually “scream.”

Millions of people get upset and angry about stuff every day, but very few of them scream like baboons or chimps or rhesus monkeys. Babies and little kids scream, of course, but adolescents, teens and adults merely get loud.

Screaming is primal and half-animalistic — it’s what Faye Wray did when King Kong approached or what scream-queens do in horror films. I’ve raised my voice or shouted or snarled or bellowed in heated arguments, sure, but I’ve never screamed at anyone, and I’ve never once claimed that anyone I’ve heard shouting or hollering or howling has screamed. Not once.

Here’s the part that gets me in trouble: I’ve heard the term used over and over, but in my experience it’s more favored among women.

Fair warning: Don’t say the “s” word if you can help it. Try to avoid it altogether. It’s used by people who tend to exaggerate, and it’s better to keep your distance from that sort.

On 12.24 World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy alerted his readers to a tweeted announcement by director James Mangold (Walk The Line, Ford vs. Ferrari, Indy 5). The big news is that Mangold’s troubled Bob Dylan biopic, widely known as Going Electric, has a new title — A Complete Unknown.

Which sounds decent or semi-acceptable (it’s taken from Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone“) until it hits you that Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home (’05), a landmark doc about Dylan, also took its title from “Like A Rolling Stone” and in fact from the same chorus — “How does it feel, how does it feel? / To be on your own, with no direction home / A complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”

In short, Mangold’s title sounds lazy. His Dylan biopic is already covering the same territory as Scorsese’s film (the early ’60s folky troubadour years, ending with the 1966 motorcycle accident). He clearly needs to poach another Dylan lyric, but which?

HE suggestions: (a) The Ghost of Electricity (obvious allusion to the original title), (b) Darkness At The Break of Noon, (c) Shelter From The Storm, (d) All Along The Watchtower, (e) Simple Twist of Fate, (f) My Weariness Amazes Me.

Any of these six would make for a fascinating, catchy title — the only problem is that they might seem a bit too poetic for the dumbasses. Other suggestions? Remember that the title has to suggest something about the difficulty of change and finding a new direction.

Seriously, my favorite is The Ghost of Electricity followed by My Weariness Amazes Me.