Arrogant assumptions + klutzy presumptions that it wouldn’t all come out in the wash don’t translate into “disgrace” for ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. He’s not a panting sexual animal, and isn’t in the same league with brother & ex-governor Andrew at all. It was rash and sloppy for the SNL team to slander him with the “d” word.

By the way, with Chris Wallace resigning from Fox is it feasible for the Trump-loathing Chris to fill his slot? Probably not, I would imagine.

Remember Lin Manuel Miranda‘s In The Heights, the pizazzy, well-reviewed, media-adored, ethnically-celebrated New York City musical that became one of the biggest crash-and-burn calamities of recent times?

Initial first-weekend projections had it earning as much as $25 million; that figure dropped to the low teens after the first day of release yielded a lousy $5 million. The final opening weekend tally was $11.5 million. Shrieks of shock and disbelief echoed ’round the twitterverse…”what the eff happened?” In The Heights needed $200 million worldwide to break even, but ended up with $43.9 million…wipe-out.

It was generally surmised that Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story would do better — ecstatic reviews, greater brand recognition, great songs, adored by older demos, respected by upmarket X-factor Millennials. Especially given that it opened without a competing day-and-date streaming option (which In The Heights had). Plus Jett and Cait wanted to see it this weekend at their local West Orange plex and every after-dinner weekend show was sold out — they had to settle for Monday evening.

As recently as yesterday morning it was projected by CNN Business’s Frank Pallotta to earn “roughly” $15 million. But WSS only managed a paltry $4.1 million on Friday (including Thursday previews) and will probably end up with a fizzly $10.5 million by tonight — over a million less than In The Heights.

This basically translates into a big nope.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allessandro: “[While] the end game for West Side Story is a marathon [and] not a sprint, the mainstream box-office media [can now] feasibly write that a Spielberg film with a $100 million-plus production cost” — rumored to be as high as $130 million, and that’s without prints and ads — “is a bomb.”

Thanks, Millennials who fucking ignored this exceptionally well made and emotionally affecting film and yet intend to storm theatres next weekend for Spider-Man: No Way Home…thanks, Zoomers…and thanks older people (especially older women) who were too busy or too Covid-concerned to show up. You joined your various lethargies and worked together to help kill the theatrical aura (but hopefully not the long-term potential) of one of the finest and most alive-on the-planet-earth films of the year.

Yes, West Side Story is looking at a long game, but how do you work your way out of under-performing compared to In The Heights? Especially considering that West Side Story cost twice as much as Miranda’s film, and probably shouldered heftier p&a costs.

Jett (33 year old Millennial): “There was nothing about West Side Story that was new or immediate or star-driven or which felt like any kind of direct feed or boost from today’s culture. It’s not a streaming-age movie, and the here-and-now element is minimal. It’s basically a nostalgia show for older audiences, and not enough older viewers came out for it.”

67% of In The Heights audience was over 25; 63% female and 40% Latino. 52% of West Side Story ticket buyers were over 35 and 57% female.

No way around it — this was a shit-level opening for West Side Story. And if it finds no traction next weekend, what left will there be to say?

Nick “Action Man” Clement: “I find it interesting that anyone would have thought that this movie would have actually been a box-office hit. Nobody cares. This would have been the case pre-COVID, but mid-COVID? The movie was doomed from the start.

“I haven’t seen it yet — doubtful I’ll have the chance to see it on the big screen — but this spells the end of the studio-fortified adult drama-slash-big musical. If an ecstatically reviewed Beardo film can’t put butts in seats, what can?

The other night I happened to re-watch this famous scene from Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America. To me it represents the summit of what HE has been hailing for years — the art of no-laugh funny. Anxious vibe, character-driven, but never more than darkly, oddly amusing.

The only conventional laugh line comes when casino manager Gary Marshall takes offense when Brooks alludes to “all the schmucks who come to Las Vegas to see Wayne Newton,” etc.

Brooks and Marshall are treating each other correctly and amiably as far as it goes, but there’s a fascinating tension between the latter, a smart, perceptive, no-nonsense type, and Brooks’ David Howard, a 30something advertising guy who’s recently persuaded his wife (Julie Hagerty) to join him in a drop-out adventure in which they’d live out of their mobile home and become nomads. Except Hagerty has blown their nest egg at roulette, and Brooks is thisclose to melting down, etc.

Why have I posted this? Because Marshall pronounces “Santa Claus” as “Santy Claus”, and I’m wondering where that pronunciation comes from. Maybe nowhere. Perhaps Marshall, a once-powerful signature helmer of mainstream studio relationship comedies, was the first, last and only guy who said “Santy Claus.” He was born in the mid 1930s to an Italian dad and a German, English and Scottish mother. It’s presumably an immigrant-class ethnic thing — no relatively well-off, college-educated, middle-class person has ever said “Santy” Claus. I’m just asking.

Every parent the world over has had this conversation with their kid. This one happened 30 years ago. The topic was a rabbit that Jett (now 33 and 1/2) and Dylan (32) had been chasing around the large front yard of our Cape Cod rental, and had taken refuge in some bushes and shrubbery. Jett was nearly 3 and 1/2; Dylan was three months shy of his second birthday.

Earnest apologies for failing to post a few words of tribute to Oscar-winning Italian helmer Lina Wertmuller, who passed two days ago at age 91. My summary is no different than anyone else’a. I was around for her mid ’70s heyday and I channelled the same things — a strong tide lifts all boats. As we speak I can’t summon a single original Wertmuller thought. I’m just another fanboy.

Wertmuller’s first two Giancarlo Giannini films in the ’70s — The Seduction of Mimi (’72) and Love and Anarchy (’73) — were warm-ups for her historic one-two punch — Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (’74) and especially her crowning achievement, Seven Beauties (’75). It landed Wertmuller a Best Director Oscar nom. And right after that her hot streak was more or less over, never to return. But at least she had one.

A little more than two years ago (’19) Wertmuller was honored with a career tribute Oscar.

Three Wertmuller signatures that always come to mind — (a) the “Oh Yeah” newsreel montage at the beginning of Seven Beauties (wonderful, pure joy), (b) that third-act moment in Swept Away when a purring Mariangela Melato asks the Marxist Giannini to “sodomize me” and Giannini doesn’t know what that means, and (c) those white-framed glasses.

“The ones who were there…”

In an interactive N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece, critic A.O. Scott celebrates 11 actors whom he believes delivered the creme de la creme of 2021 screen performances. Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart, Passing‘s Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, King Richard‘s Will Smith, The Tragedy of Macbeth‘s Denzel Washington, Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima, et. al.

One presumes that if one of Scott’s favorites somehow couldn’t make himself or herself available for a special N.Y. Times photo session with Ruven Afanador, they were replaced by another favorite. So let’s be liberal and hypothesize that the two finest female performances of the year — Penelope Cruz as a woman with child in Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers and Renate Reinsve as a young woman of solitude in Joachim Trier‘s The Worst Person in the World — were on Scott’s initial list but couldn’t fit Afanador into their schedule.

HE sez: A for vision, A for speaking comic truth, A for Leonardo DiCaprio’s explosive acting in two temper-tantrum scenes and…uhm, somewhere between a B-minus and a C-plus for execution.

Very ballsy and bold Strangelove-like satire that feels like an extended, gargantuan, improv-y, effects-laden SNL super-skit about massive self-delusion & self-destruction, and yet oddly inert in certain portions. But not entirely.

Because at the same time it’s really out there and righteously wackazoid, and it works now and then.

The cast of Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth, a play about medieval Scotland, is pretty close to one-third African American. Presentism is par for the course these days, of course, but Coen and wife-producer-costar Frances McDormand seem to have moved beyond your obligatory woke casting requirements.

Which is a switch for Joel, at least compared to remarks he and brother Ethan made during an interview with The Daily Beast‘s Jen Yamato in February ’16 while promoting Hail Ceasar.

Yamato had brought up the issue of diverse casting and multi-ethnic representation. Even though Hail Ceasar was set in the racially illiberal early ’50s, her beef was basically #WhyIsHailCaesarSoWhite? Joel’s attitude was quite resistant and in fact fairly dismissive. Boiled down, his view was “why should I ethnically mix up my cast just for political reasons?”

It’s probably fair to say that a different Joel was at the helm when it came to casting The Tragedy of Macbeth. I know nothing, but I suspect that McDormand told him “you can’t really play it that way now, plus there are so many great actors of color out there…you should get in on this.”

Obviously Joel could have ignored the presentism requirement and made Macbeth as a traditional all-paleface play a la Roman Polanski and Orson Welles, and if anyone had complained he could have used the same argument he threw at Yamato. So why didn’t he? Because the Yamato mindset is industry-wide now, and he figured “well, I guess I need to get with the program…why make trouble for myself?…why not just embrace presentism and turn it into a plus?”