World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted a fairly persuasive projection of the 2021 Venice Film Festival, as well as a scoop about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom (UA Releasing, 11.21) probably aiming to debut at the ’21 New York Film Festival. A source has told him that NYFF director Eugene Hernandez is close to locking down the world premiere of PTA’s Los Angeles-set period film.

Just to be thorough I checked with Hernandez myself this morning…crickets.

Ruimy is calling Soggy Bottom, which has something to do with a San Fernando Valley high-school student becoming an actor in the early ’70s, “the most anticipated movie of the year, without a doubt.”

Maybe, but I don’t think PTA is cooking with the old high-test these days. To me the PTA show peaked somewhere between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood and started to gradually lose the mojo with The Master (’12), Inherent Vice (’14) and Phantom Thread (’17).

I’m sorry but we all experience peaks and valleys. Sometimes we bounce back — it happens in rare cases.

Take me, for example. The column-writing is going great, but I sure as shit am not peaking these days in other respects. Not since the wokester shitheads put out a contact on me starting in ’18 and ’19, followed by a special boosted contract put out last March over that idiotic hoo-hah about a single paragraph’s worth of commentary that I didn’t even write.

The only other things that people know about Soggy Bottom is that (a) Bradley Cooper plays a Jon Peters-resembling hotshot (and possibly Peters himself), and that (b) Benny Safdie will portray real-life politician Joel Wachs.

Here’s Ruimy’s Venice Film Festival spitball rundown:[NOTE: IMPROVED LIST POSTING TONIGHT]

Dune, d: Denis Villenueve
Blonde, d: Andrew Dominik
Madres Paralelas, d: Pedro Almodovar
The Power of the Dog, d: Jane Campion
The Card Counter, d: Paul Schrader
The Hand of God, d: Paolo Sorrentino
Spencer, d: Pablo Larrain
Decision to Leave, d: Park Chan-wook
The Eternal Daughter, d: Joanna Hogg
Driftwood, d: Michel Franco
Il buco, d: Michelangelo Frammartino
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, d: Ana Lily Amirpour
Official Competition, d: Gaston Duprat, Mariano Cohn
Freaks Out, d: Gabrielle Mainetti