Earlier today I mentioned that the basic plot of Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man (Sony Pictures Classics, 7.24), about a 40ish college professor (Joaquin Phoenix) having it off with one of his students (Emma Stone), is sure to reactivate discussions about Allen’s personal history. The subject is actually reactivated now with an excerpt from Mariel Hemingway‘s new book, “Out Came The Sun,” being kicked around. Hemingway was 16 when she played Allen’s 17 year-old girlfriend in Manhattan (’79), but when she was 18, she writes, the 44 year-old Allen invited her to come to Paris with him.

Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (Sony Pictures Classics, 7.24)

Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan (’79).

That was a bit on the sleazy side, agreed, but it wasn’t that bad as Allen made the offer with the full knowledge of her parents, who “lightly” encouraged her to go. If a middle-aged guy wants to make a play for a significantly younger woman, the decent thing, I feel, is to wait until she’s 21 or 22. Then again Woody and Mariel had a certain levitational bond over having brought their very best game to Manhattan, and Woody, I’m assuming, was probably channeling the usual X-factor rationale about exceptional people living by their own rules.

Yesterday’s Salon contributor Erin Keane wrote that Hemingway’s revelation “demands we look unflinchingly at the reality that Manhattan so artfully disguised as art, and see it for what it truly is. Woody Allen is a genius. Woody Allen is a predator. He put those two sides of himself together, hand in hand, and dared us to applaud.”

Doesn’t “predator” allude to a compulsive behavior pattern, or certainly something more than a one-off? Keane also says that the idea of an 18 year-old being romantically entwined with a 40-something boss is “theoretically disgusting.” Well, okay, but not entirely. It was unseemly for the 44 year-old Allen to try and get something going, I agree, and yet the 18 year-old Hemingway was of legal age. As it happened she said no and everyone moved on.

From what I’m hearing, the only guaranteed solid-crack, down-on-your-knees home run at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival (5.13 to 5.24) will be George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which will screen on Thursday, 5.14, in an out-of-competition slot. I’ve heard second-hand from a guy who knows a guy who’s worked on the sound effects (or something like that) that this all-new chronicle of the adventures of Max Rockatansky is total wowser. At the very least it’s generating a lot more excitement than the rest of the presumed Cannes slate combined, or at least the one that’s been spitballed by Variety staffers.

Like last year’s Leviathan or Wild Tales, the ideal Cannes film is, of course, either a triple or a homer — a film that will ripple and resonate all through the summer, get a second bounce from Venice, Telluride and Toronto and keep running all the way to the finish line. A film that brings you to your feet, sends you out on a high, makes you happy to be a film worshipper. But aside from Fury Road I’m not sensing any serious power-hitters this year. Most of the films being speculated about by Variety sound to me like doubles and line-drive singles at best, and a few sound like instant dismissals (i.e., Naomi Kawase‘s Sweet Red Bean Paste).

I’m not “bummed” by this likely slate, but I do feel a tiny bit deflated. I read the Variety piece and went “really?…that’s it?” The air is hissing out of my Cannes balloon as we speak. 2015 is looking like one of the strongest award-calibre years in a long time, and for timing reasons none of the serious hotties will screen in Cannes. What happened to Scott Cooper‘s Black Mass? Or Angelina Jolie‘s By The Sea? And what happened to my idea of Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight debuting on the Croisette? Phffft.

For all I know this color shot from the Trevi Fountain scene in Federico Fellini‘s La Dolce Vita isn’t a black-and-white frame capture that’s been colorized. It may be that, but until yesterday I’d never contemplated the dark brown hair of the young Marcello Mastroianni (35 at the time of filming in the summer of ’59) or the blazing blonde tresses of the young Anita Ekberg (28 at the time) in their apparently natural splendor. (Nod to Leticia Garcia, a.k.a. ‏@Ms_Golightly, for posting this.)

Primitive stuff. “Great white dope” indeed. There’s a basic instinct in Antoine Fuqua‘s films, not always present but often enough, that wants to amplify or exploit rather than insightfully explore or finesse or find new ways into familiar or otherwise common situations. Fuqua always goes for the gut impact moments. Faux-sensitive. Basically an “exploitation” guy. Jake Gyllenhaal‘s pugilist (when’s the last time you’ve seen a WASP boxer?) seems to be saying in almost every scene, “I love my little daughter…don’t take her away from me…oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood!” Tweet from Christopher Campbell (i.e., thefilmcynic): “Going by her brief scenes in the trailer, I have a feeling Oona Laurence is the one to watch in Southpaw more than Jake Gyllenhaal.”

Since last summer Universal Home Video has been working with restoration guru Robert Harris on a digital high-def restoration of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (’60). This new version will, I’m told, look more detailed and more Super Technirama 70-ish than the somewhat derided “shiny” Spartacus Bluray that came out in 2010. The new version, which is both a restoration and a reconstruction, was going to be screened this weekend at the TCM Classic Film Festival but Universal yanked it at the last minute because it couldn’t be finished in time. It’s now expected to pop on Bluray sometime next fall.

Spartacus producer-star Kirk Douglas, director Stanley Kubrick during filming in early 1960.

Soon after the 2010 Bluray emerged Harris, who famously supervised the Spartacus restoration of 1991, called for a new digital harvest that would more closely represent the film as it appeared in its early 70mm Technirama engagements.”    

“The bottom line is that the new Spartacus is going to be gorgeous,” Harris told me earlier today. “The work has been underway since last July, and it’s been a huge, huge project. I’ve been consulting with them, and Universal is taking this very seriously.  They’re doing everything that I asked for, and in 4K. You’re going to see detail and color that you haven’t seen since the restored 70mm version screened 24 years ago.”

I’ve participated in at least a couple of hundred round-table junket interviews over the last 30-odd years, and more often that not some idiot will ask either (a) a moderately stupid question or (b) an excruciatingly stupid one, and I mean the kind that makes your brain suffer a kind of seizure. But over the last six to eight years this tendency has gotten worse. Many TV journos, I’ve heard more than once, have developed an idea that moronic, invasive, non-professional questions are what the audience relates to. Nervy irreverence and put-on interviews in a silly vein have pretty much become the brand of MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz, and his success has probably inspired others to follow. So The Project‘s Jonathan Hyla asking Cate Blanchett about a cat on a leash is pretty much within the norm these days. (Notice that Hyla is reading the question, meaning that his editor has told him to ask it or Hyla had given the question a little bit of thought before putting it to paper.) Cheers to Blanchett for refusing to play along, of course — “That’s your question?…that’s your fucking question?”

On 1.26.15 I wrote that Rick Famuyiwa‘s Dope (Open Road, 6.30) will “almost certainly be a hit — a just reward for being a snappy (i.e., jizz-whizzy), cartoonish, wild-ass Inglewood ‘hood action farce about friendship, guns, ’90s sounds, romance, sellin’ somebody else’s cocaine, gangstas, hot girls,” etc. And yet for all its keep-it-comin’ energy Dope is “a fleet, Tarantino-like hodgepodge of fantasy bullshit in the vein of a New Line Cinema release from the ’90s (i.e., House Party), and adapted to the general sensibility of 2015. It’s fun as far as it goes but definitely not that great. Everything that happens fits a carefully calculated Hollywood street sensibility and is dead bang on the nose; nothing is soft or subtle or indirect.” Reactions to the just-popped teaser?

Marseilles prosecutor Brice Robin told a news conference earlier today that Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately took flight 9525 on a suicide dive into the French Alps two days ago. Re-phrase it: a seemingly reliable, completely certified, “very nice” co-pilot with no apparent terrorist associations suddenly flipped the bonkers switch and became a psychotic mass murderer at the drop of a hat, killing 150 passengers. My first reaction, to be honest, was “at least it wasn’t a mechanical error, systemic or otherwise, so the odds of my next commuter flight ending in a crash are no higher than before the Germanwings tragedy.” But my second reaction was “wait…isn’t this the third time within the last 13 months that planes have gone down due to an apparently psychotic, suicide-minded pilot or pilots?” The Germanwings tragedy, AirAsia flight QZ8501 last December and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing flight which totally vanished on 3.8.14 with 239 people aboard. I hate to say it but this is a movie — the discovery of an inexplicable death virus that turns airline pilots into suicidal loons.

“Severance,” the first episode of the final Mad Men season, feels like a return to square one — business as usual at Sterling Cooper & Partners, sex, a death from cancer, sexism, finessing clients, Don Draper drinking and catting around, a firing, office disputes, back to the darkness and so on. Mad Men has been running nearly eight years and we’re only weeks from the finale, and I didn’t get even a slight feeling of forces gathering and final fates approaching.   It almost felt as if the series was starting all over again fresh…almost. The most striking performance came from Elizabeth Reaser as a melancholy coffee-ship waitress whom Draper has a curious attraction for (and vice versa to some extent). The event at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was fun, spirited, relaxing, cool. The band at the after-party played mild, old-fashioned MOR — it felt like the pre-fire party scene in Irwin Allen‘s The Towering Inferno. I decided not to raise the sideburns issue…to hell with it.

Mad Men star Jon Hamm, recently out of rehab at Silver Hill, on red carpet outside Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Man Men creator Matthew Weiner speaking with Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil.

I’m attending this evening’s black-tie premiere of the second half of the final Mad Men season, which will debut on Sunday, April 5th. The first-anywhere showing of “Severance,” the first of the last seven episodes, will screen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with an outdoor “Black and Red Ball” to follow. The invitation says that “guests are encouraged to dress in garb inspired by the period show”…meaning what? One way or another I’m going to hunt down Matthew Weiner and Jon Hamm during the after-party and ask them to defend their no-sideburns policy for Don Draper, which I’ve been complaining about for a while now.

Excerpts from Get Hard review by Time‘s Richard Corliss: “The early reviews are in, and the verdict is nearly unanimous: [this] is a war crime of a movie. I’d been warned that this pairing of the 6′ 3″ Will Ferrell and the 5′ 4″ Kevin Hart was all about the fear of prison rape…gay sex [made] both explicit and terrifying. So during the first half-hour or so I was primed for a high atrocity factor. Primed and disappointed. One note I scribbled read, ‘Still waiting to hate this.’ An hour in, I realized to my shock that I was having a good time. Justin Chang of Variety would chalk this up to the ‘unexamined homophobia needed to fully enjoy Get Hard.’ But laughter trumps political fairness, and Get Hard made me laugh at, and with, situations I hadn’t thought could tickle me. The movie has a warm heart beating under its seemingly scabrous shell. [It’s] a modern gloss on the Dan Aykroyd–Eddie Murphy Trading Places: a little ruder and not quite as sharp, but in the ballpark of that 1983 comedy landmark. The adult audience for which Get Hard is designed should be able to get through it without gagging. You needn’t approve ethically of everything in a movie you enjoy. And by ‘you,’ I mean this reviewer. His last words, before he was hauled away by the critique police, were, ‘I kind of liked Get Hard.'”

This Alberto Belli parody spot (i.e., “What if Michael Bay Directed Girls?”) arrived this morning. The sender asked for reactions. “This is beyond dead-horse level. Michael Bay parodies peaked 15 years ago. No need for this. The culture has moved on.”