Earlier today stories broke about first-peek footage from Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon that was shown at Cinemacon. The coverage is okay except for three wrongos — one in a story by Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin, and two reported by The Daily Beast‘s Jordan Julian.

I know a bit about this 12.25.22 Paramount release because (a) I have a 2019 draft of Chazelle’s script (183 pages) and (b) I’ve spoken to two people who caught a rough-cut version of Babylon at a research screening in late March.

Rubin reports that Babylon, a three-hour Hollywood epic mostly set in the 1920s and early ’30s, “puts the spotlight on Brad Pitt as silent film star John Gilbert and Margot Robbie as Roaring Twenties icon Clara Bow.” Her Robbie info is correct but Pitt plays “Jack Conrad”, a silent-film star who faces career difficulties when Hollywood transitions into sound — a character whose arc echoes what Gilbert went through.

Julian claims that Tobey Maguire plays Charlie Chaplin in the film. This assertion may be correct but it’s absolutely wrong according to the two rough-cut witnesses as well as the script, in which no CHAPLIN character appears.

The witnesses say Maguire plays some sort of rich, nefarious gangster-like character who wears a pencil-thin moustache — a bad guy.

“Nothing about Maguire’s performance is Chaplin-esque,” says witness #1. “No British accent, no moustache, no bowler hat, no oversize shoes or cane.”

Julian also reports that Olivia Wilde is in Babylon “and she’s absolutely not,” says witness #1.

Excerpt from Babylon notes I wrote a month and a half ago, based on reports from witnesses #1 and #2: “It’s Vincente Minnelli meets Fellini Satyricon…a flamboyant, envelope-pushing, 185-minute version of Singin’ In The Rain, but with the songs and dancing and smiles taken out. Call it a depravity-tinged survival story about Hollywood transitioning from the silent era to sound, although ultimately spanning three decades (mid 1920s through 1952).

“It’s also been described as The Wolf of Wall Street meets Singin’ in the Rain plus The Day of the Locust, the orgy sequence from Eyes Wide Shut…all combined into a ghoulash and serving the basic Singin’ in the Rain theme.”

Give her time. She’s only been here since 11.17.21. Fanatical kindergarten teachers won’t be pouncing on her for another three or four years yet. Seriously — this woman strikes me as…I want to put this delicately…mildlydangerous if not a little bit of horrific.

This is a reasonably accurate chart of how it’s all convulsed and weirded out since ‘08. The psycho-wokester “de-platform all 40-plus white guys” thing began in ‘17. The difference between Elon Musk and myself is that I still regard myself as a center-left moderate.

Posted on 2.10.09: “On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

“The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes. The driver barrel-assed all the way from Porte Dauphine (the city’s western edge, adjacent to the Bois de Bologne) to the Basilica Sacre Coeur in Montmartre.

“On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.a

“No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 mph (or was it kph?) in some stretches. The footage reveals him running a red lights or two, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up several one-way streets.

“Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.”

HE won’t be seeing this long–delayed Tom Cruise blockbuster sequel until the morning of May 10th.

Straight-from-the-shoulder reaction from Bonasera, The Godfather undertaker: “My beautiful daughter couldn’t even weep because of the smelly feet of the man sitting next to us. And yet I wept. Why did I weep? Because I’ve been watching Tom a’Cruise movies for more than 40 years, and here he still is…still a movie star, still pitching fastballs, still hale and hearty. Okay, so it was filmed between three and four years ago. This doesn’t bother me. Because Tom a’Cruise, he make-ah me cry,”

John Hinckley, who shot but didn’t kill President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, became a featured musical character in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (‘90). Perhaps this is what gave Hinckley, partially released from supervised psychiatric care two years ago, the idea of becoming a real-life roving troubadour.

Alas, a forthcoming Hinckley gig in Hamden, Connecticut (Space Ballroom, July 16), has been cancelled due to a sizable negative response.

Imagine that in addition to nearly killing Texas governor John Connolly, Lee Harvey Oswald only wounded JFK on 11.22.63. 40 years later Oswald is released from psychiatric care, and decides to star in a one-man lounge act, “An Evening with O.H. Lee: Poetry, Philosophy, Impressions.”

You can almost set your watch by mainstream Hollywood’s refusal to cast younger actors who bear even a FAINT resemblance to the older actors they’re supposed to be the sons or daughters of.

In Ol Parker’s Ticket to Paradise (Universal, 10.21), Kaitlyn Dever (5’ 2”) is playing the daughter of George Clooney (5’ 11”) and Julia Roberts (5’9”). I’m sorry but tallish parents almost never produce Hobbitt-sized children.

Plus Dever doesn’t even vaguely resemble Clooney or Roberts. Casting directors are infamous for ignoring this basic genetic tendency, but family resemblance IS a stubborn trait. Apologies.

Parker directed and wrote 2018’s Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. Do the math.

Plus the film is supposed to be largely set in the Indonesia’s Bali region, and yet shooting was done in or near Australia’s Queensland resort area. Why? Why not just set it in Oz? I hate movies that do this.

The vast majority of us (99.5%) accept and live by the idea of deferring or side-stepping to avoid any sort of physical conflict. Let it go, head down, duck and cover, etc. Alas, the below video falls under the heading of “regrettable but understandable racism.” Honest question: How is this young woman’s defiant, looking-for-trouble attitude substantially different from the attitude of young Liam Neeson during that notorious incident in the early ’80s, give or take?

Race obsessed tiktoker films herself walking around “not moving out of the way for white people” as a form of “reparations.” pic.twitter.com/iTWwbDCuPj

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 27, 2022

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Kasi Lemmons‘ I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Sony, 12.21), a cradle-to-grave biopic of the late Whitney Houston, was screened last night in Las Vegas, and the word (I spoke to two viewers) is definitely on the approving side.

It’s longish (150 minutes, give or take) and technically incomplete, as is normal for any film that’s more than eight months from opening. And it covers almost all of the biographical basics for Whitney fans — definitely a fan-service presentation.

For what it’s worth one guy’s reaction is through the roof about Naomi Ackie‘s Whitney performance. I know nothing about Ackie except that (a) she’s British and (b) played the smallish role of “Jannah” in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

What kind of movie is I Wanna Dance With Somebody? Honest response: “It’s a TIFF People’s Award winner…it’s not a Venice or Telluride type of film…it’s been made for your hoi polloi faithful. And yet it’s intelligent and well-written as far as biopics go…screenplay by Anthony McCarten, shot by Zero Dark Thirty‘s Barry Aykroyd. Nothing wrong with that. It takes all sorts of films to make a world.

It’s basically a six-character drama — Ackie as Houston, Ashton Sanders as Bobby Brown, Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawford (Whitney’s girlfriend), Clarke Peters as Whitney’s father and Tamara Tunie as her mom.

Houston’s Bodyguard costar Kevin Costner isn’t a character in the film.

I seem to recall that David O. Russell‘s officially-titled Amsterdam (20th Century, 11.4) was being referred to as Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Not in trade stories but in unofficial circles. And then came that perplexing, all-but-meaningless title of Canterbury Glass. And now we’re back to Amsterdam.

The long-gestating 1930s period drama, fortified with a cavalcade of big-name costars (including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Zoe Saldaña, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Taylor Swift) and a story involving fraud and skullduggery…I don’t know what I’m saying but I should admit that I feel a wee bit concerned. I know nothing at all. Just an insect antennae signal.