A weird thing happened as I was driving home last Friday night after having dinner at the Smokehouse. It was around 10:30 pm as I drove south on Laurel Canyon Blvd. Honestly? I was feeling a little bit tired. I passed the light at the Laurel Canyon country store as I drove in the right lane, and as I approached the Hollywood Blvd. turnoff I started to ease in the middle lane…hahhnnk!! A guy had driven into my left-rear blind spot. I zipped back into my lane. Shit.

And then the guy pulled ahead of me and veered into my lane and slowed and then came to a sudden stop at an angle, blocking both lanes. At first I thought we was making a U-turn but he just sat there. When I tried going around his left side he veered forward to block me. Oh my god…a raging asshole who wants to go Dodge City on Lauren Canyon Blvd. Three or four cars were stopped behind us. One of them honked.

The road-blocker opened his window and I could see a shaved head — always a sign of trouble. “You wanna settle this?” he yelled. I indicated “naah” with a hand signal. “Are you a fucking asshole?” he yelled. I just said “sorry, man.” “Don’t fucking drive like that!” he yelled. “Okay,” I said. “You hear me?,” he added. Then he barrelled off.

Everyone gets angry when someone almost drives into their lane, but real men suck it in and let it go. Real men swear and forgive. Mr. Clean was basically conveying that he’d felt very scared for a micro-instant and so, being a baby or an alcoholic or just a rage junkie, he became Vernon Wells in The Road Warrior. “Mommy…this bad man almost hit me!” This is what Los Angeles can be late at night. The psychos who sleep until 11 am or noon the next day tend to come out after 10 pm.

Update: Yesterday I mistakenly referred to to the Road Warrior costar Vernon Wells as Vernon Wez. The character he plays in George kennedy’s 1982 film is called “Wez.”

What Maisie Knew, written by Carroll Cartwright and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, updates Henry James’s 1897 novel about familial breakdown to contemporary New York,” Evening Standard critic David Sexton wrote during last September’s Toronto Film Festival.

“Eight-year-old Maisie’s warring, profoundly selfish parents are art dealer Beale (Steve Coogan, the weakest link in the film, always only himself, apart from some evocations of Alan Partridge) and aging rock star Susanna (Julianne Moore, as a truly a nasty piece of work). Neither is interested in Maisie herself, only in using her as a weapon against each other.

“Alexander Skarsgard and Joanna Vanderham are sympathetic as their new partners, who come together in caring more for Maisie than her own parents do — but the star of this show is Onata Aprile, just seven but wonderfully good as the wide-eyed, ever observant Maisie, increasingly wounded, turning in on herself.

“The film’s simple strategy of filming always from Maisie’s height whenever she is present works amazingly well, an object lesson in how point of view can be what matters most.”

I think child-custody battles are horrific. I can’t stand parents who’d much rather “defeat” their ex than make their child feel loved and secure. But I’m getting a moderate, intelligent vibe off this film. I could have seen it in Toronto but for several reasons I didn’t.

I missed a 2.23 Economist piece about the economic state of Hollywood. Probably because it ran the day before the Oscars and I was running around at the Spirit Awards and doing this and that. I read it thanks to a “movies suck in the early part of the year” piece that Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet posted today.

Anyway, a taste:

“By 2015 Americans will have 861 million internet-connected devices, such as games consoles, tablets, smartphones and laptops, up from 560 million in 2012. That translates into every American owning 2.7 devices.”

“Studios think they can make owning movies attractive again, if it is easier to watch them on all these gadgets. The big studios (with the exception of Disney) have got together for an initiative called UltraViolet, which allows people to store the rights to watch movies they buy in the cloud. But even boosters of the plan admit consumer behaviour has changed. In the future, more people may prefer to rent, not buy.”

I own six internet-content devices — two Macbook Pros, an iPhone 5, an iMac, an iPad3 and one of those little Apple TV devices that plug into the TV. I’ll very occasionally watch movies on the Ipad3, and more often on the 50″ Vizo via Apple TV. I don’t want to know about Ultra-Violet. I like owning Blurays and select DVDs, period.

“So some want studios to go further and get rid of the theatrical window (when films are exclusively in cinemas) altogether,” the article continues. “The idea is to let consumers watch movies at home for a higher price rather than trek to the cinema. Predictably, cinemas are not enthusiastic. Nor are most studios. ‘Movies are just too expensive for us to collapse the windows and effectively eliminate a separate source of revenue,’ says Alan Horn, the head of Disney’s studio.

“But some are flirting with it. Last year Lionsgate, an independent studio and distribution company, made Arbitrage, a thriller about a fiendish financier, available in theatres and on video-on-demand at the same time. Michael Burns, Lionsgate’s chairman, reckons it earned three times as much as it would have done otherwise, because it ‘found two different audiences’. But if one big studio did this, cinemas could fight back and refuse to show that studio’s movies.

“Few want to risk it. Poverty is awful. Have you seen Les Misérables?”

I first saw and fell in love with Xan Cassevetes‘ Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. And during that festival I got to know Xan a bit through F.X. Feeney, who talks a lot about the late Jerry Harvey in her doc. And then I noticed Xan get mouthy with IFC topper Jonathan Sehring at a Hotel du Cap party, and I remember saying to myself at that moment, “Uh-oh…temperamental.”

The next film Xan directed, a segment for New York, I Love You called “Allen Hughes,” came out five years later. And now, four years later, Magnet is preparing to release her latest, Kiss of the Damned, which looks to me like a rather typical sex-and-blood vampire film. It’s showing at South by Southwest, which begins this weekend. Pic will open on 5.3.13 after being available on iTunes/On Demand on 3.28.13. I’m hoping it won’t take her another six or seven years to deliver a feature-length film.

Last week I wrote that the opening credits of Oz The Great and Powerful, presented in black-and-white 3D within a 1.33 aspect ratio, are inventive and beautiful and altogether quite masterful. I also noted that the subsequent 15 minutes, also in the same format, are quite good also and in fact deliver more allure than the rest of Sam Raimi‘s film, which is in widescreen color and loaded down with more emphatic, eye-soaking CG than Raimi or the audience know what to do with.

The film runs another 110 minutes after the black-and-white section, and at great cost. A recent N.Y. Times story reported that the total Oz tab is $325 million, including marketing. I wonder how much Raimi made?

The opener is more involving than the eye-candy stuff because it’s mainly about (a) echoing the beginning of Victor Fleming‘s 1939 The Wizard of Oz, which began in black-and-white sepia-tone, and (b) is all about character set-up. The shakedown on James Franco‘s Oscar Diggs, a low-rent magician performing in a travelling carnival in 1905, is that he’s a reckless flim-flam man who feels unfulfilled (he wants to be a Harry Houdini or Thomas Edison-level achiever) and can’t recognize or express love. So we’re presuming, naturally, knowing the original backwards and forwards, that Diggs will gradually recognize and solve these issues once he air-balloons into the fairytale land of Oz and all the “whee!” stuff with the shreaking witches and flying baboons and whatnot kick in.

A resolution happens at the finale, I suppose, but not in a way that felt particularly satisfying or whole or fused together in just the right way. Not for me, at least.

But you’re thinking early on that the newbie just might come together like the 1939 original, particularly after watching a black-and-white Franco get lifted up and whipped around by a huge, snarly, wild-ass tornado, which also propelled Judy Garland‘s Dorothy Gale into The Land Beyond Kansas. But then Franco lands in Oz and the color kicks in and before you know it a cute little CG hummingbird shows up and then some piranha-like fish with razor teeth and it’s like “oh, Jesus God…here we go with the cute family crap.”

The screenplay for the old Wizard of Oz — written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf with uncredited rewrites by Herman J. Mankiewicz, Arthur Freed, George Cukor, King Vidor, Richard Thorpe, Jack Mintz, Victor Fleming, John Lee Mahin, Ogden Nash, Irving Brecher, Samuel Hoffenstein, Herbert Fields, Sid Silvers, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, E.Y. Harburg and William H. Cannon — was a personal tale about 12 year-old Dorothy’s angst and imagination. The movie is basically a dream she has after being knocked out by a flying window frame. The fanciful characters are all from Dorothy’s actual life (Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch, Frank Morgan‘s Wizard, Ray Bolger‘s Scarecrow, Bert Lahr‘s Cowardly Lion, Jack Haley‘s Tinman) and the issues are all about what Dorothy and her three comrades want in a personal vein, but which they try to solve, futilely, by asking for help from others. They had the power all along but they didn’t know it. All they needed to do was reach in instead of out.

Oz The Great and Powerful, written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire, is only occasionally or incidentally about Digg’s character issues. It’s more precisely and often oppressively about excuses to turn loose the CG crew so they can go to town with this or that mindblowing digital landscape or magical effect or eye-candy fireball or waterfall or what-have-you. It’s about the same old game, the same old “let’s try and whip the easily impressed into a CG lather!”

You could use your imagination and say it’s about commercial pressures (or some phantom or claw-footed gargoyle created by these pressures) standing behind poor Raimi and constantly nudging him in the ribs and going, “Sam…Sam! You’re a family man and you live in Brentwood and you’ve contributed to Republican politicians so you need to get paid the really big bucks, right? Which is why you’re making a relatively empty-headed CG-covered family-trade movie like this. And you know, or should know, that successful movies are not story- and character-driven any more, Sam…not really and not for years. They’re driven by wow effects, and so you really have to keep ’em dazzled, Sam…okay? Keep lathering on those FX, keep playing to the four year-olds.

“C’mon, Sam…we let you have your pain-in-the-ass black-and-white opening so do the right thing and make us the kind of soul-smothering, moron-level family flick that makes big money!”

Oz The Great and Powerful doesn’t really fit together or make a lot of sense. There are two witches…okay, one witch and a sister who’s under her influence (Rachel Wiesz, Mila Kunis)…who are seen as oppressors by the citizens of Oz, whose lives, they claim, are not “free,” whatever the hell that means. Believe me, these people are as free as you and me or Sam Raimi or any Anaheim Disneyland employee. They’re well-dressed and jolly and they sings songs and blah blah. And Glynda the Good Witch (Michelle Williams) is kind of half-assed in that she doesn’t seem to have much power. And the finale doesn’t involve Franco’s finding some kind of fulfillment (although he does, sort of) as much as it involves a kind of people’s revolution…you don’t want to hear this.

I know that if you’re going to include singing in a film, as in a singing or half-singing “musical,” you have to introduce it early on, certainly before the end of Act One. You sure as hell can’t can’t wait until the end of Act Two, I can tell you that.

“There’s neither a subversive nor even a gleeful bone in this film’s body,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, “which means there can be no fun in the evil or in villains being vanquished. Similarly missing is any zest to the storytelling. Quite the opposite of the great earlier film, the Oz here is a dull place to be. Given the choice, you might even consider going back to Kansas.”

It’s strange that Oz The Great and Powerful has a 63% Rotten Tomatoes rating among the general population. This obviously indicates trouble, but a film as bad and unfulfilling as this one deserves a negative rating in the 30s or 20s even. I don’t get why so many people who should know better have given it a pass. The top critic rating is 29%.

Repeating from last week: “Handsome naturalistic black-and-white 3D hasn’t been seen since…what?…The Creature From The Black Lagoon? (Tim Burton‘s Frankenweenie was animated.) “This is amazing…delightful,” I was saying to myself. “I haven’t watched anything like this ever on a big screen…the first time in my life!”

I picked up the Schindler’s List Bluray last night. It seems sadder and more horrific than it did 20 years ago. And it’s sheer black-and-white heaven. Rich, razor-sharp, super-textured. Plus I’d forgotten how tight, well-written and superbly acted it is, especially by Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes. Virtually no trace of the man who made War Horse. And I’d forgotten how young Liam Neeson used to look.

“I don’t think of dying. I think of being here now.”

This is Valerie Harper‘s statement to People‘s Tim Molloy about her having been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and having been told by doctors she may have as little as three months to live. What kind of foul, fiendish manifestation is leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, “a rare condition in which cancer cells spread into the fluid-filled membrane around the brain”?

Love, hugs and empathy to Valerie, her husband, family, friends, fans. Hugs all around. Hugs forever.

Most of us, I’m sure, agree with and try to live by the famous title of Baba Ram Dass’s 1971 book. But the difference between being able to tell yourself you’ve got 10 or 30 or 50 or even 5 years left and looking at lights out within twelve weeks has to be a significant one. “Be here now” indeed, although I vastly prefer living with the general condition known as denial. Who, me? I’m fine, man. I eat right, feel great, never get sick.

I also feel a bit more kinship with Woody Allen‘s famous line: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work — I want to achieve it by not dying.”

Spartacus’s (i.e., Kirk Douglas‘s) answer to the above question: “No more than I was to be born.”

The WordPress version of Hollywood Elsewhere is up and running.  Disqus is also installed.  And yet, I’m told, commenting on previous posts (i.e., those composed before this very instant in the presently constituted space-time continuum, or the currently morphing version of same) are a no-go.  They can only be posted via “the old commenting system,” I’m told, except that’s not accessible any more so what the eff?

The new commenting universe begins this morning.  Hollywood Elsewhere’s ten-thousand-mile journey begins right now.  As William S. Burroughs once said in a Felt Forum event that I attended in the early ’80s, “We are here to go.”