The great Tom Wolfe is now 85 years old, very much alive and kicking on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The highly influential writer and author of bestsellers like “The Right Stuff,” “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test,” “Radical Chic,” and “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” is considered the inventor of New Journalism. Anyone writing today has been influenced by him.

All that said, you’d think someone from Warner Bros. or Amazon would have told Wolfe that his most famous book, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” was being made into a mini series for Jeff Bezos’s company. Last week there was an announcement in one of the Hollywood trades that “Bonfire” was going to be produced by TV maven Chuck Lorre, whose hits include “Three and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory.”

But when I called Wolfe last week, his wife Sheila said she hadn’t heard a word about and neither had Tom. “It must have been optioned,” Mrs. Wolfe told me. “But no one’s said a word.”

The famed tale of socialite bond trader Sherman McCoy and his adventures in the Bronx was a massive bestseller when it was published in 1988. Two years later it was made into a very bad movie by Brian DePalma starring Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis. Michael Cristofer wrote the screenplay. The “Bonfire” movie — a Guber-Peters productions– was universally panned and it bombed at the box office. Julie Salaman of the Wall Street Journal even wrote a book about the whole fiasco.

Over the years there had been talk of trying to remake the movie properly, but nothing ever materialized. Now Lorre has hired TV writer Margaret Nagle to turn the story into an 8 part mini series. But really, maybe someone should have asked Wolfe how he felt considering he created the story, wrote the novel invented the whole thing. It’s not based on a real incident. “Bonfire” came from his head. The book satirized New York in the late 80s as money overcame everything, Wall Street roared and people were snorting the white lines on Fifth Avenue until, POW!, the stock market crash of 1987 was a shot heard round the world.

Do TV people seem like the right ones to re-adapt this story? I don’t know. Lorre’s strong suit is sitcoms. As for Wolfe, I guess he’s calling his agents on Monday.

By the way, what was the problem with the movie? Instead of being a drama on the level of “The Night Of” or “The People vs. OJ Simpson,” the filmmakers chose to make a buffoonish comedy. Tom Hanks’ McCoy was secondary to Bruce Willis’s portrayal of an idiotic tabloid journalist based wrongly on the New York Post’s Steve Dunleavy. It was, in a word, a mess.

The box office Friday night tells a sad tale for “Birth of a Nation.” The Sundance favorite, once tipped for Oscars, is dead again. Nate Parker’s historical saga now has just over $10.3 million total after eight days including two Fridays. Last night it scored $890,000, a fall off of 69.3% from last Friday.

What a shame and a mess. “Birth” will come out of the weekend with less than $12 million. At that point Fox Searchlight will like cut the number of screens. This should have a sobering effect on Sundance sales this coming January. And my guess is, unknown makers of hot new films will be vetted very carefully in the future.

One big name director with a lovely film is not getting the support though: Mira Nair’s “Queen of Katwe” is a lox at the box office. No one is going. This movie needs a marketing push, or some kind of divine intervention. I’d hate to see it disappear.

Meanwhile, Ben Affleck has a hit in “The Accountant.” Warners should do $26 million for the weekend. Ledgers will look good as “The Accountant” only cost $44 million– maybe $54 million all in. The Warners/Affleck deal is a winner. And it didn’t take creative bookkeeping!

I love Ang Lee’s movies. most of them, I really do, from “The Ice Storm” to “Sense and Sensibility” to “The Wedding Banquet,” “Eat Drink Man Woman,” “Brokeback Mountain,” parts of “Taking Woodstock,” and all of “Life of Pi.” Who doesn’t love Ang Lee? Even “Ride with the Devil” has its moments, and gorgeous cinematography.

But “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” is a walk too long, too tedious, and at $50 million (after tax breaks) unnecessarily expensive. Bring your Dramamine, because Ang is besotted by a new process that combines 3D with something called 4K, which produces 120 frames per second. Not only do you have to wear special glasses for it, but when the main character keeps asking for Advil in the film, you will be too. This process means ultimate clarity, according to Lee. Forget it. I don’t care how many frames there are per second in a movie, and no one else does. We just want a good movie, well acted, that looks great with an interesting story.

“Billy Lynn” fulfills little of the above. First of all, whatever this new process is– please, no one use it again. It makes the screen look like a video show or a soap opera. It has that HD effect you’re always trying to fix on your Smart TV. I don’t know what Ang Lee was thinking. He said before last night’s screening that he was very nervous. And he did say, “I am not crazy.” But something sold this Oscar winner on a pig in the poke. The lighting is bad, close ups are horrendous, no favors are given to even good looking actors, forget old ones are homely types. Steve Martin, a handsome man, should sue.

The story: Billy and his Bravo Squad have had a huge military victory in Iraq, and now they’re in the States, on a break, being feted by people who don’t understand what they’ve been through. No one knows the trouble they’ve seen. On top of that very few of the fans, the workers at the stadium or even the security team seem to have any respect at all for these war heroes. This is seemed to me very typical of Vietnam era soldiers, but not Gulf War or Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The many attacks on the soldiers are lined up in service of Billy and his pals being able to observe that it’s more dangerous at home than in the Middle East.

Some of the film works when the focus is on Billy’s family and the technology is secondary. What Ang Lee excels at is intimate moments. And when Billy has a final talk with a cheerleader (there’s been some quick backstage intimacy) there’s a brutal but fleeting realization that she finds him attractive because he’s a war hero– nothing less will do.

The actors chosen for most of the roles are a problem. Everyone is wild about the star, 19 year old British newcomer Joe Alwyn. But Alwyn needed to be surrounded by strong actors. Garrett Hedlund does his best, but either the dialogue doesn’t suit him or the whole thing was a bad idea. Much worse by far is Vin Diesel as a kind of Zen officer in Billy’s Bravo troop in the Middle East. Did you ever think Vin Diesel would be in an Ang Lee movie? No, and there’s a reason for that. He is painfully under-equipped.

This kind of movie begs for a Robert Altman touch– satire with humor. Lee treats it straight on, with no irony or subtlety. Billy’s family, save for Kristin Stewart as his anti-war sister, are badly cast, and they are miserable people. (Stewart is excellent, but she’s better in other recent films.) Steve Martin plays the central casting patriotic head of the NFL team that expects Billy and co. to parade around like monkeys at half time.

But again, a Barry Levinson (Wag the Dog) would have been the director with the right temperament for such a satire.

Again, the publicity hook is the technology because the movie itself is not there.

Here’s the trailer, which is in regular old 2D. If only the movie looked this way:

Okay, so we finally got see Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie” tonight, with Natalie Portman’s hypnotic, psychedelic walk on the wide side as Jackie Kennedy in the days after the JFK assassination.

Some of it is real, some of it is imagined. But Larrain and  screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (who’s also the NBC exec in charge of the Today show and is responsible for Billy Bush) have pulled off making a tense and brittle movie about what Jackie Kennedy might have gone through from the moment Lee Harvey Oswald took aim at the presidential motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

It is by far not a perfect movie, but it is wholly engrossing. We’ve seen so many JFK movies over the years, and Jackie played by lots of actresses– but none like this performance. This is Jackie isolated and alone, depending on Robert Kennedy (an excellent, of course, Peter Sarsgard) and trying to keep it together while everything else is falling apart. She’s no magnolia, not even a steel one. She is tough, and realistic.

Oppenheim frames the movie by having an unnamed journalist played by Billy Crudup come to Hyannisport, commissioned by Mrs. Kennedy to write her story for a magazine. This is fiction in itself, although there might be some reference to Theodore H. White. Anyway, Crudup is a convincing conduit, and elicits the real Jackie while helping to construct the one she wants history to remember.

So this is not history, but just close enough to sell the idea of Jackie. Let me tell you, this is a bleak film. There’s no happy ending. But what you get is this insanely desperate profile of a surprise widow who must quickly decide how history will treat her and her husband. There’s no reference to Jack Kennedy catting around, Marilyn Monroe, or any of that stuff. It’s all about Jackie loving Jack, knowing his shortcomings and plotting her future– one that we don’t get to see beyond the funeral, really.

But Portman is so sensational and luminous that you almost see how Mrs. Kennedy became Mrs. Onassis and then Greta Garbo in New York. As I noted the other day, Portman gets an Oscar nomination to be sure, although I think in the end she’ll be jumped by Annette Bening for “20th Century Women” or Emma Stone in “La La Land.”  But Portman still gets the highest of praise. Wild stuff.

PS Loved the music by Mica Levi, she’s an up and comer.