Movie Nation

Sorry to park this housekeeping business in midst of all your regularly scheduled movie programming.

But searching the web, I can find no discussions of this massive, unexplained fall-off on the major blog host WordPress’s advertising CPM rates.

Mysteriously, WordPress closed off comments on its own “Wordads” questions/complaints blog. A common gripe with this company is a general unresponsiveness to hard questions and complaints, although I did get quite a bit of help on a technical matter regarding traffic metrics a couple of months back. I don’t have to tell you how denying publishers access to the company for common questions and legitimate gripes looks.

“Talk to the hand!”

And if nobody else is pointing this out, griping about some company policy aimed at “More for us, who simply provide the host, less for you, who do ALL the work,” well let’s put this out there and see who else has thoughts on it. Let Google Search reveal that “I am not alone at seeing this pocket-picking on the part of a host service.”

Other WordPressers, and we are legion, may be experiencing the same dismay I am — massive increase in high-value North American pageviews and traffic, and a 60-70% plummet in remuneration rates, year to year.

Anybody else seeing this and interested in speaking out?

And seriously what…the…FUDGE WordPress?

Are the ads being discounted, despite the quality of eyeballs one produces? Prices go up, even at Walmart and Uber, which happily cut the throats of their workforce to try and gain market share.

What is your explanation for this plummet?

Because what you’re doing is dis-incentivizing hard work and improvements in performance and YOUR OWN AD REACH, and to what end?

A related matter, WordPress used to disperse ad-pay to publishers within 30 days of the end of the month — 20, typically. Now it’s 50 days+. Why? Does WordPress need working people to float it 30 day loans, like some shady banks I’ve dealt with?

This is suspiciously like Google’s high-handed behavior with GoogleAds publishers, which got Google good and sued.

There are alternatives — moving the site to a more responsive perhaps less greedy provider, upgrading the site to allow outside vendors to provide ads and remove WordPress from at least some “temptation” to cheat. I am reluctant to do either of those, but the corner I am being backed into by this cut-rate screwing over is more confining by the day.

Looking for answers, pissed off enough to do something about it. Just saying.

The late Peter Sellers was one of the greatest mimics and finest comic actors in screen history. His career was filled with films which weren’t worthy of his prodigious talents, but he got two shots at winning an acting Oscar — for “Doctor Strangelove” and for “Being There,” which came out just before his death. He went to his grave certain that director Hal Ashby stole his Oscar from him (Dustin Hoffman won for “Kramer vs. Kramer,” meh) by including outtakes that “break the spell,” as Sellers told him in a pleading note.

Sellers was right.

Jim Carrey is the Peter Sellers of his day, also a gifted mimic, a comic of unique talent capable of performances of wacky anarchy and alarming sensitivity. He has never been nominated for an Oscar, but should have been for “Man on the Moon,” “The Truman Show,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” I’d have thought “I Love You, Philip Morris” was worth at least consideration. But no.

Robin Williams was another singular comic talent who endured years of dismissal before finally breaking through to be considered –– briefly (“Good Will Hunting”) Oscar worthy.

Eddie Murphy hasn’t made many films that would warrant awards consideration, too often content to take the paycheck, support his enormous family, and occasionally “phone-it-in” in many a project. The first inkling we had that he might want some sort of recognition was “Mr. Church” a few years back. The movie wasn’t much, even as “awards bait.” “Dolemite is My Name” is a dazzling turn, “Oscar bait” but also Oscar-worthy. His past of crappy films, his ’80s homophobia may still count against him, and it’s a crowded field making him a long shot. But I would not be put out if he pulled in a surprise nomination, just this once.

So tell me again how Adam Sandler “deserves” a nomination for the a role he took on with that in mind. Is he better in “Uncut Gems” than he was in “Punch Drunk Love” or “Spanglish” or “Reign Over Me” or “Funny People,” other awards-bait turns? His directors this time out did what his directors in all those earlier “Let’s try something serious (ish) with this guy” did. They all engineered a role to fit his limited range.

Look at his face in that desperate — or seemingly so — moment in “Uncut Gems.” Packed into a car with a hard-hearted bookie (Eric Bogosian), two ruthless, testy thugs holding him down, no idea how bad it will be for him before the night is over. And that’s all he’s got. Voice rising, face flat, eyes dark pools of dull.

Buster Keaton was “The Great Stone Face.” Sandler is the “Great Dull Face,” the “I can’t really give you any facial expression that matches the hysteria, rage or delight in my voice” face.

Look at all the Razzies he’s “earned” over the decades. And again, TELL me how this guy deserves one of the five honored spots in a Best Actor field for this upcoming Academy Awards.

He isn’t driving spikes into railroad ties these days. But “John Henry” is still toting that hammer.

And he’s about to go all Terry Crews on Ludacris and the bad guys of The Hood.

“John Henry” is headed our way in mid January.

Did you see the Swedish film “Force Majuere” a few years back?

It was a dark DARK comedy about a family falling to pieces on a Swiss ski trip thanks to the husband’s failing the most basic “man test” of all. An avalanche hits, and he flees — leaving his wife and kids…to DIE as far as they know.

And afterwards, when they don’t die, he has a lot of rationalizing, explaining and soul searching to do as the central relationship in his and her life finally falls apart.

It was so dark and um SWEDISH that it could be hard to see the comedy in all this tragedy.

But cast Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfuss in the leads, and any doubt is removed.

“Downhill”looks like THE film to see Valentine’s Day. No. Seriously.

Heavens, the venom hurled at “Cats,” one of the first big “tourist attraction” musicals, finally brought to the big screen and with a star-studded cast, no less.

Long-planned, long-thought unfilmable, a hodgepodge of songs and feline choreography and feelings attached to the flimsiest plot one could piece together from the poems of T.S. Eliot, it’s not going to be to every taste.

Early reviews have taken on a blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy from the reviewing community. Is it really the “worst film of the year,” as a few have intimated?

No, it’s not.

A mix of singers ranging from very good to game but not polished, to indifferent and thin, with the great Jennifer Hudson and the not-in-her-class Taylor Swift among them, digitally-augmented fur and tails which render some good choreography choppy and jerky and a “plot” that’s been problematic from the start and there you have it. As the trite cliche goes, “It is what it is.”

But approach it on its own terms, as a period piece with a twinkly electronic-flavored ’80s score. Recognize that it is spectacle song and dance and emotion and cat-fancying, and eventually you’ll get what director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech,” “The Danish Girl”) was shooting for.

There’s a chance you could still recoil from it, the garishness of it all. But if you aren’t moved by “Memory,” the play’s show-stopper, even if it seems the Oscar-winning Hudson is about to overwhelm it at times, that’s on you.

Perhaps you’re too far away from the old age and loneliness this epic balladdic lament is about. You’ve never tried to comfort an ancient pet in your arms, assuring them that they’re not dying alone.

Ballerina Francesca Hayward is Victoria, a young cat dumped in an alley in a neon-lit soundstage and digital backdrops version of 1920s London.

She is taken in by the gang, the Jellicle cats of Eliot’s poems. She dances with and sings with them as they tell their stories in song.

One deserving cat, nearing “The End,” is singled out every year by Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) as being worthy of selection to go to the “Heavyside Layer” to be reborn and earn another of those “nine lives” cats are supposed to have.

Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson) is “a magical cat,” a magician. Bustopher Jones (James Corden) is a fat cat, “puss in spats,” a bit of a swell. Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson) is confined to one tiny corner of her house, the kitchen, where she plays with the mice, trains the cockroaches as a marching chorus line (chomping down on one, every so often). Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae) is “The Railway Cat,” a terrific tap dancer.

There’s Gus the Theatre Cat (Ian McKellen), ancient enough to sing that he’s “not the cat that I was in my time.” McKellen gives this doddering old hoofer a twinkle and is one of the stand-outs in this cast.

There’s funky showoff Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo), and many others — all of whom are spied on by the streetwise McAvity, given a delicious menace by Idris Elba. He’s so cunning, he plays on fixing the “selection” for himself, so cruel he’s willing to do awful things to the other cats being considered to ensure his own survival.

And he’s so important that he has his own sultry siren as opening act, Bombalurina, vamped up by Taylor Swift, who puts her song over despite not having what we’d call a “musical theater voice.”

Neither do Dench, McKellen or the ostensible lead, Hayward. If you’re going to this for the music, you might feel let down by a few of the singers.

And if you’re most familiar with one of the many plaintive, sensitive covers of “Memory” that have streaked through the pop culture firmament over the decades — Streisand’s lovely one comes to mind — you might not warm to Hudson’s crushing embrace of “Touch me, It’s so easy to leave me, All alone with my memory, Of my days in the sun.”

I went with it. And for its sometimes choppy dance numbers and its various dead spots — it’s really too much, too diffuse, too loopy to be the play that turned generations of kids into musical theater fans — I went with the film, too.

CATS CR: Universal Pictures

A project this challenging, this ambitious and this extraordinary, for all its faults, is foolish to dismiss. God knows we have enough mass market “product” built on a guaranteed “Star Wars,” Marvel or “Insidious Universe” fanbase.

If it’s not for everybody (I think fans of the play will like it), that’s no crime either.

I appreciate the effort, got in sync (eventually) with what Hooper was trying to do and found myself quite moved, once or twice — which is twice more than “The Rise of Skywalker” managed.

MPAA Rating: PG for some rude and suggestive humor

Cast: Francesca Hayward, Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, James Corden and Ian McKellen.

Credits: Directed by Tom Hooper, script by Tom Hooper and Lee Hall, based on the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber which was based on T.S. Elliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” A Universal release.

Running time: 1:50

It ends just as predictably as it began, a trilogy of “Star Wars” movies built on George Lucas’s Greatest Hits.

J.J. Abrams produced three of the biggest blockbusters in screen history, and with “The Rise of Skywalker,” directed two of them. But deja vu, corporate demands for characters, living and mechanical, suitable for toy shelves and his own intimidation by the scale of it all produced the two worst movies on Abrams’ action-packed resume.

As somebody who has been pounding these films as unoriginal “glib facsimiles” of the “New Hope” trilogy, at first as a lone voice, eventually joined by a growing chorus of others, I’ve taken no pleasure in that complaining, and not much more in the movies.

So no spiking the ball in the end zone, no more “I TOLD you so’s” about “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”

The endless pandering, “fan service,” reviving favorite characters for a final bow, bringing back beloved bits of tech, means “Skywalker” will make another mint. But those simple happy patrons loudly proclaiming “critics are IDIOTS” as they blissfully exited the opening night showing I caught have some explaining to do.

You’re not under the illusion that the plot Abrams concocted to confine this trilogy to was anything fresh or surprising, that casting blunders at the outset haven’t grown more obvious with each film, right?

Tell me you didn’t see a mid-space rescue mission straight out of “A New Hope” coming. Darth Vader choked and tossed around a member of the Empire’s Joint Chiefs of Staff once upon a time. Kylo Ren does it here.

The villainous Sith are revived, the monstrous Emperor returns to venomous life — soap opera style. “The Force” isn’t the only thing that “will be with you, always.” It’s all a rehashing.

Because, hell, they couldn’t come up with anything better and were afraid to try out anything new that wasn’t a Jetski on tracks on sand, a trimaran to pound through alien seas or a droid (D.O.) that Amazon couldn’t deliver by Christmas.

Let’s introduce another badass bounty hunter type, cast Keri Russell in form-fitting jumpsuit, give her a past with the rakish space pirate Poe (Oscar Isaac), and keep her damned helmet on for the entire movie.

Deaths that aren’t really deaths, light saber duels showcasing the growing supernatural skills of the young Jedi? A desperate, pull-out-all-the-stops final battle? Exactly the same action beats that Lucas introduced over 40 years ago.

The story here drags everybody off the laurels they were resting on, because the hapless Vader Lite Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has been lured into teaming up with a supposedly dead blast from the past, Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDirmid).

“The First Order” of the Sith didn’t work out. Let’s gather “The Final Order” together and pose them for some cowled Blue Oyster Cult album cover scenes.

“Don’t Fear the Reaper,” J.J. But nobody fears Emperor Palpatine either, for Pete’s sake. Not any more.

Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) and her pals Chewie, Finn (John Boyega) and Poe and droids must figure out where the voice of Palpatine is coming from, a “hidden world of the Sith” where he’s been amassing hardware as the Empire has set out to “harvest more of the galaxy’s young” to fill those storm trooper ranks.

No wonder none of them have ever been able to shoot straight. They were conscripted.

Rey figures out, from Luke Skywalker’s old treasure map, that there are these magical compasses straight out of Hogwarts that will guide them to the planet X-Egul. They take on a quest just to set up another quest that will eventually get us to the Big Space Battle.

Meanwhile, half-siblings Rey and Kylo are swapping ESP light-laber blows and disembodied trash talk.

“I’m going to find you and turn you to the Dark Side!”

“Are not!”

“Am TOO!”

Three films in, and Ridley has mastered the fierce scowl and “stick the landing” poses of a superhero movie. She has not, in any sense, created a character who moves us with her expressions of fear or grief. Every time somebody she cares about dies, it’s dry tears all around.

Driver is going to get an Oscar nomination for “Marriage Story” and never look back on these movies (he hates looking at his performances) ever again. He has reason. He’d have been better served playing Kylo in a helmet the entire time. His facial expressions trying to capture the character’s conflicted nature, with even his flashes of temper looking like he’s about to cry, are risible here — laughably off.

The casting issues aren’t limited to the poor actress Boyega, playing the ex-storm trooper who cries (Finn), threw under the bus in interviews about the end of the trilogy. Boyega is adequate, no more, in the action scenes, and he and Isaac (as smuggler/rogue/substitute Han Solo, Poe) have a sparkle to their bro-banter.

But pairing them up as co-equals and co-“generals” only lets Isaac upstage Boyega in every single second of screen time they share.

The high-mileage “original stars” fare little better, although Billy Dee Williams still twinkles with charisma. Digitally reanimated Carrie Fisher is a drab, unemotional shell of the real thing, and Mark Hamill literally shrinks in his Wise Old Dead Jedi robes in scenes where he’s advising his protege.

New addition Richard E. Grant makes little impression, but as I said, Isaac and Boyega manage their banter well.

And the movie’s message, “They win by making you think you’re alone” has a “resist” resonance in today’s world.

A clue as to where all this went wrong, where the stumbling began, might be in Anthony Daniels’ new book,”I Am C-3PO.” J.J. Abrams wrote the preface to it, and he reiterates his connection, as a 10 year-old, to “Star Wars.” When I interviewed him for “Star Trek” he declared he’d never paid the TV show any mind in reruns and wasn’t invested in it in the least.

Perhaps, with all the Disney memos and marketing meetings and focus-grouping, he was just too close to “Star Wars” to give it an arm’s length look and the shot in the arm that it needed. Perhaps TV, where “Baby Yoda” rules “The Mandalorian,” is where this never-ending story really belongs.

If you want to be delighted by “Star Wars” again, pick up Daniels’ delightful memoir.

But after heroically reviving “Star Trek” and managing impressive “Mission: Impossible” moments, in “A galaxy far away,” J.J. Abrams went 0 for 3.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Keri Russell, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Mark Hamill,Ian McDermid, Domhnall Gleeson, Richard E. Grant and Anthony Daniels.

Credits: Directed by J.J. Abrams, script by Chris Terrio and and J.J. Abrams. A Lucasfilm/Walt Disney release

Running time: 2:21

A teen pregnancy drama coming this March looks promising.

An agoraphobia thriller in the “Rear Window” mold? Intrigued.

Big break for Denzel’s son.

Howard Ratner is the kind of irritant that never lets up, never allows you a moment’s relief.

The constant tirades on the phone, shamelessly ranted out in public, the empty threats, the impulse-control explosions of profanity in inappropriate places, the general shiftiness that makes everyone in his presence feel that this lowlife is somehow hustling you — it’s all of a piece.

Add in the excuses, the endless torrent of lies and blame-shifting in a braying voice that rarely stops to take a breath.

“I’m broke!” “That wasn’t my money!” “Last time wasn’t my fault. We TALKED about that!” “I’ll handle it! I’ll handle it!” “I’m gonna need a couple weeks on that.” I’m begging you…” “Don’t be mad at me!” “I happen to be a litigious individual!” “It’s in the safe.” “I left it on Long Island.”

This guy is grating as only Adam Sandler could make him.

Sandler may not show us anything that’s new in his limited repertoire in “Uncut Gems.” He just serves up his two or three notes of range relentlessly and often at top volume as this gambling jeweler juggling his business, family, marriage and sickness, risking ruin, injury or worse.

The effect is a movie that has a couple of great scenes tucked into a brilliantly excruciating tale that will not let go of its feeling of dread, or its manic energy.

If they gave Oscars for Most Unpleasant Performance — and they don’t — Sandler would be the cinch that many are saying he is for Best Actor. I see the same expressionless, nuance-free stiff he’s always been, this time with a goatee, ugly bling, coarse patter and an unfiltered rage that at least this once seems motivated by something. It’s born from razor’s edge desperation fueled by an addiction deadlier than cocaine.

If B’nai B’rith issued sanctions for films that embrace ugly stereotypes, they’d be tempted to hand one to filmmakers Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie (“Good Time”) for the nasty “New York Jew” tropes trotted out in this uneven but often riveting drama about a risk junky who cannot control his worst impulses. Loud, coarse, vulgar, Weinstein carnal, greedy and tribal, donning the yarmulke for a Passover dinner that is anything but pious, it’s right on the edge of cringe-worthy.

Try not to notice the prosthetics the kids wear in the school play scene.

Howard’s sick, and we’re not talking about the colonoscopy that introduces him. He runs one of those tiny jewelry shops “upstairs” from the street life, door-buzzers allowing customers in to get “a deal” on tacky baller bling (a diamond-encrusted “Gremlins” necklace), “fell off a truck” Rolexes and the like.

He works with a former street hustler (Lakeith Stanfield) who socializes as a way of networking potential customers — rappers, athletes, etc. — into Howard’s store.

Boston Celtics center Kevin Garnett is one of the “whales” Demany cozies up to and lands. Ballers love their bling, and dollar signs dance through Howard’s head as he pitches merch to the star and his entourage.

Howard’s married (Idina Menzel is his had-enough wife) with three kids, and is keeping his laziest sales clerk (Julia Fox) as a mistress, in a tacky-swank apartment whose decor mirrors his house, and gaudy/dumpy shop.

The murderous, pasta-sucking Italian Americans of “Married to the Mob” have nothing on the Jewish underbelly of “Uncut Gems.”

Howard knows a lot of bookies, and that’s a problem. Anthony (sports talk show host Mike Francesa) is on friendly terms today. That means the two goons hanging out in Howard’s store, shadowing him around town, must be collectors for Arno (Eric Bogosian, gimlet-eyed menace). Arno’s the guy Howard lies to the most.

Because there’s this big deal. If he can fend everybody off, just close it, auction off this uncut lump of black opals from Ethiopia he’s had smuggled in for big bucks, all his problems will be solved.

Until the next “NBA on TNT” telecast, anyway.

The film begins by showing the opal being mined, and that’s the first major contrivance of a seriously-contrived tale. How would Howard network his way into getting a stolen stone from the mine to New York? No, he doesn’t seem the type and no, his explanation doesn’t wash.

Another contrivance? Garnett, whose name is similar to another gemstone, WANTS that rock of opals. He attaches mythic, playoffs-altering power to it. And that’s how Howard gets in REALLY deep — with Arno, Arno’s brutish mugs, Garnett, the auction house, with family (Judd Hirsch), the wife, the girlfriend and even the kids he’s teaching to gamble on those few occasions he’s home to watch the games he’s wagered on.

As with “Good Time,” the Safdies keep their story on the move, sometimes building suspense, sometimes covering ground simply for the nervous energy that’s expended doing it.

The movie has that juggler’s buzz and drive. Sandler’s never been a physical actor, comic or otherwise. Howard’s hustling, lying, cursing and berating are the engine here — his vocal shtick driving the action. His every-dumb-risk is its reason for being.

But do we root for him? He and Howard are grating in the extreme, first scene to last. There’s not a single noble or relatable character in this. Even the kids, in so many ways potential victims of Dad’s gambling and the family’s collapse, are tuned-out and annoying.

The grating feel of the film is underscored, literally, by an irritating, dated electronic music soundtrack by Daniel Lopatin. The setting is 2012, not 1972.

Few movies have reached as far in treating as a true addiction, a compulsion the gambler cannot resist.

Sandler seems both perfect for this part, and the same old out-of-his-depth Sand-man in it. Put him in scenes with Stanfield, Bogosian and Menzel and it isn’t just Howard who’s eaten alive (a bully easily bullied). They act rings around him.

His best moments are with Garnett, a comic sports fanatic feeding the non-actor in the scene enough to bounce off of, and not outclassed for once.

Whatever the sentiment to honor Sandler for this departure from the unwatchably bad comedies he’s made his fortune through (now relegated to Neflix), I see “Uncut Gems” as a melodrama that could use a little more polish, no matter how perfect its star is at being what he’s always been best at — annoying.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive strong language, violence, some sexual content and brief drug use

Cast: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Judd Hirsch and Kevin Garnett

Credits: Directed by Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie, script by Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:15