As we speak, Wonder Woman 1984 (Warner Bros., 12.25) has an encouraging Rotten Tomatoes rating of 88%. Suggesting that most critics are in no mood to gripe and have fallen into line. But there’s one noteworthy pan from Vulture‘s Angelica Jade Bastien, who carries a certain weight and authority.

Excerpt #1: “This sequel had almost everything going for it. Its empathetic predecessor is likely the most beloved and critically successful of the slate of beleaguered DC Comics films. Its time-skipping story offered a way to expand the superhero genre’s usual plot beats — which was desperately needed — and arrived buoyed by an excellent cast. Perhaps its lopsided universe was not perfect; there were lackluster villains and a noticeable absence of racial diversity and sensuality, and the sequel had to contend with a significant jump from WWI-era Europe into early 1980s Washington, D.C. But these issues were surmountable.

“Sadly, all that glittered in the franchise’s first outing is gone in Wonder Woman 1984. The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre in film, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole.”

Excerpt #2: “Wonder Woman 1984 is a turning point in the history of Hollywood’s business, what with Warner Bros. banking big on the hope that the film’s Christmas Day release will be the push its (admittedly good) streaming service, HBO Max, needs (in the U.S., at least).

“But the film is indicative of the larger pitfalls of an aging superhero genre. Watching Wonder Woman 1984, I couldn’t help but think of the utter hollowness of representation and how corporations have adopted the language and posture of political movements in order to sell back to us a vacant rendition of the change we actually want. In many ways, studios have trained audiences to view the bombast of their blockbusters as possessing inherent worth — especially when they place reflections of us on the big screen. This isn’t good filmmaking. And as more and more exciting directors get caught up in the gears of this mammoth genre, I can’t help but reflect on how their talents would be better utilized elsewhere.

“If only Hollywood gave them real control over stories, rather than treating their work as mere conduits for content the studio can replicate and sell.”

From World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, an early summary of the most anticipated films of 2021. Many of these were bumped from 2020, of course. All the copy is on Jordan’s side. What’s missing?

1. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom
2. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (will this even be finished by late ’21?)
3. Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth
4. Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch
5. Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley
6. Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde
7. David O’Russell‘s Amsterdam
8. Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up
9. Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune
10. Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket
11. Edgar Wright‘s Last Night in Soho
12. Robert Eggers‘ The Northman
13. Leos Carax‘s Annette
14. Apichatpong Weerasethaku‘s Memoria
15. James Gray‘s Armageddon Time
16. Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog
17. Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel
18. Terrence Malick‘s The Way Of The Wind
19. Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter
20. Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon
21. Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta
22. Mike Mills‘ C’mon C’mon
23. Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins
24. Celine Sciamma‘s Petite Maman
25. Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story
26. Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island
27. Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater
28. Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis
29. Adrien Lyne‘s Deep Water
30. Jeremy Saulnier‘s Rebel Ridge
31. Kogonada‘s After Yang
32. Ruben Östlund‘s Triangle of Sadness
33. Steven Soderbergh‘s No Sudden Move
34. Ridley Scott‘s Gucci
35. Doug Liman‘s Lockdown
36. Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho

Matthew McConaughey to Good Morning Britain‘s Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid

“We need liberals…what I don’t think we need [are] illiberals” — i.e., wokesters. “What I don’t think some liberals see is they’re being cannibalized by [the Khmer Rouge].

“Where the water line is gonna land on freedom of speech, what we allow and what we don’t, where this cancel culture goes, is a very interesting place that we’re engaged in as a society and are trying to figure out. We haven’t found the right spot.

“You’ve got to have confrontation to have unity. That’s when a democracy works really well. I would argue we don’t have true confrontation right now, confrontation that gives some validation and legitimizes the opposing point of view.

“[Instead of giving] a legitimacy or validation to an opposing point of view, we make it persona non grata, and that’s unconstitutional.”

Best wishes, hail fellow and “hang in there” cheers to The Beloved Dude, whose lymphoma battle has resulted in a temporary shearing of his silver mane.

Chris Nolan‘s Tenet pops today on 4K Bluray and Amazon streaming. Both will presumably offer subtitles. So starting today, anyone on the planet can watch this thing with at least a fighting chance of understanding the particulars, not to mention the mostly obscured dialogue.

I didn’t even try to make heads or tails of the story when I saw Tenet in Flagstaff three and a half months ago (a late afternoon screening on Friday, 9.4).

First paragraph of Tenet‘s Wiki synopsis: A CIA agent, the ‘Protagonist’, participates in an undercover operation at a Kyiv opera house. His life is saved by a masked soldier with a distinctive red trinket, who ‘un-fires’ a bullet through a hostile gunman. After seizing an artifact, the Protagonist is captured by mercenaries. He endures torture before consuming cyanide. He awakens to learn the cyanide was a test of his loyalty; his team has been killed and the artifact lost.”

Last night Variety‘s Clayton Davis reported that Emerald Fennell and Carey Mulligan‘s Promising Young Woman (Focus Features, 12.25) “has been submitted to the Golden Globes in the comedy or musical categories.”

Every year some award-seeking distributor tries to expand the Golden Globe definition of what a comedy or musical might be. Trust me, swear to God, take it to the bank — there’s nothing the least bit amusing about Promising Young Woman, and I mean not “ironically”, not darkly comedic or comedy of horrors…none of that.

It delivers a certain dry, flinty attitude that some might interpret as arch, but arch has never been synonymous with funny. (Not in my book, at least.) The film is admirably dry and deadpan, true, but deep down it’s cold and frosty. It’s a feminist Death Wish but with a certain flair or flourish — Fennell and Mulligan are basically saying “death to all insensitive scumbags and date rapists out there, including a certain fellow who initially seems like he might be a decent human being.”

In his article Davis called Promising Young Woman “darkly comical” — a flat-out lie.

From “Promising Surprise“, posted on 11.22.20: “This is a really well-made film…carefully honed, brittle attitude, super-dry dialogue, well shot…rage, nihilism, chilly and icy but highly controlled…deliberate glacier-hood, calculating.

“It’s been described as a kind of #MeToo Death Wish thing, but it’s a much finer creation than Michael Winner’s 1974 film. And yet God, the ice water in its veins! So angry at chauvinist prick fuckheads that it can’t…well, it can see straight but it can’t cut anyone a break. The evil parties must pay and die, and the feeling of vengeance and wrath is such that it just HAS to splash over and soak Carey’s character…I’ll leave it at that.

“And yet one mark of exceptional artistic achievement is not being afraid to go all the way. PYW definitely goes for broke and then some. It doesn’t just despise the young male tribe of insensitive assholes out there — it wants them exterminated like insects.”

…about agreeing to star in a new Dungeons and Dragons film? Apart from the paycheck factor, I mean.

Pine is a formidable actor. He knows his craft. Twice I’ve watched him deliver like a pro at the Geffen Playhouse — in a 2007 production of Neil Labute‘s Fat Pig and in a 2009 production of Farragut North. Four years ago he was excellent in Hell or High Water. In August ’19 it was announced he’s “attached” to play Walter Cronkite in Newsflash.

I wouldn’t exactly call Pine’s willingness to do Dungeons and Dragons tragic. It’s basically just a financial portfolio move. He probably sees it as analogous to Harrison Ford starring in Cowboys & Aliens. But it does seem silly and wasteful.

When this or that celebrity expresses strong disapproval of some person or policy or behavior, the tabloids constantly use the transitive verb “slam”. To slam someone is to assault them with the verbal equivalent of a right cross…right? Except when criticisms are voiced or more often tweeted, they often feel more like taunts or glares or jabs. HE “slam” substitutes: backhand, side-eye, upbraid, zing, reproach, poke, scold, diss, badmouth, stiff-arm, ding.

…knows how to assemble a good trailer.

HE-posted on 9.12.20:

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Attorney General William Barr, amply defined as Orange Plague‘s toady, enabler, spinner, protector and personal grudgemeister, has been whacked for not being sufficiently slavish and obsequious over the last few weeks.

Sin #1 was Barr’s refusal to officially agree with Trump’s bullshit claims of massive voting fraud in battleground states.

Sin #2, as reported last week by The Wall Street Journal, was Barr’s decision to keep the the Justice Department’s investigations into Hunter Biden under wraps. Trump allegedly believes that had this been made public, the 11.3 election might have swung in his favor.

Oh, and the electoral college officially ratified Joe Biden‘s win. That happened too.

I never knew any Vinnie Barbarino or Tony Manero “borough” types in the mid ’70s, but I’d known a few Italian-American guys during my painful upbringing in Westfield, New Jersey. They proudly called themselves “guineas”, wore pegged pants and pointy black leather lace-ups, radiated pugnacious vibes and seemed to live in their own angry little world.

And I knew that the bridge-and-tunnel chumps who came into Manhattan on weekends in the late ’70s, the ones who were too thick to realize that their chances of getting into Studio 54 were completely nil…those razor-cut slash polyester goons who radiated sartorial cluelessness in so many ways, and thereby indicating a certain myopic mindset…I knew these guys.

And so I believed Nik Cohn‘s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the 6.7.76 New York cover story that soon became the basis for Robert Stigwood and John Badham‘s Saturday Night Fever, which became a huge hit and cultural earth-shaker after opening on 12.14.77.

I loved the 2001 Odyssey dance sequences as much as the next guy, but I wasn’t a fan of the film itself, largely because I found John Travolta‘s Tony Manero an impossible asshole — chilly, closed off.

Yes, I know — that was who and what he was, being based on the “Vincent” character Cohn had written about and so on. But where was it written that I had to like Manero’s company?

I bought a ticket to see Badham’s film at Westport’s Post Cinema just before Christmas of ’77. I wanted to have an interesting and perhaps an eye-opening time, but almost immediately I was saying to myself “I have to hang out with this asshole?” On top of which FUCK DISCO…that was one of my foundational beliefs at the time.

What a shock, therefore, to discover 20 years later that Cohn had basically “piped” the New York cover story. He’d done a little research in Bay Ridge and poked around and talked to a few locals, but had more or less made it up.

And yet Cohn’s article felt genuine. I totally recognized (or felt that I recognized) his observations about a certain strata of young, under-educated Italian-American guys in their late teens and early 20s and their dead-end jobs and whatnot…it seemed to convey certain basic impressions of borough guys of that era. I bought it and so did Hollywood, Stigwood, Badham, Travolta and, down the road, tens of millions of fans of the film.

It just went to show that fiction could masquerade as honest reportage and vice versa. I re-read Cohn’s piece last night after watching the Bee Gees doc, and I had a good time with it. Even knowing about Cohn having admitted the truth in ’96, I bought it all the same. Good writing is good writing.

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The competition henceforth is between a Democratic party, a party that believes in democracy, vs. an autocratic party of bumblefuck-kowtowing Alamo defenders…rubes determined to use their last reserves of gunpowder to fight the leftist Khmer Rouge comintern, the white cis male-hating #MeToo brigade, the BLM “defund the police” store trashers, etc.