Even by the hokey, intentionally vulgar standards of ’50s movie posters this is a howler for two reasons. One, Victor Mature‘s Samson wasn’t loaned out by Cecil B. DeMille to perform a cameo in which he brings down the temple by pushing the pillars apart. And two, the copy is beyond purple and out of control. The “buried alive” thing is a finale spoiler even if it’s mostly inaccurate. British Pharoah Jack Hawkins‘ “wives” aren’t buried alive at the end (just one wife), and the court and slaves aren’t forced to accept this fate due to Hawkins’ cruelty, etc. And Joan Collins doesn’t cause anyone’s blood to be spilt except for Sidney Chaplin‘s (with whom she was having an affair when the film was being shot in Rome), much less enough blood to anoint hundreds of pyramid stones.

I’ve got a conflict between tomorrow night’s all-media screening of Anne Fletcher‘s Hot Pursuit (Warner Bros., 5.8) and an 8 pm performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tomorrow night. The play wins, of course, but that means not seeing the film until late May because (a) I leave Thursday night for Paris, (b) for some reason the film isn’t opening in France until September 9th (“openings of American comedies tend to lag by months [here],” says a Paris-based critic friend) and (c) it won’t open in Prague until May 28th.

Sofia Vergara, Reese Witherspoon in Anne Fletcher’s Hot Pursuit.

Here, in any event, is a portion of one of the first reviews, posted yesterday by Westword‘s Stephanie Zacharek: “The flagrant silliness of Hot Pursuit is a plus, not a liability. Directed by Anne Fletcher, [it’s] a quiet triumph of tone and timing. Nearly every scene is cut at just the right point, often topped off with a fantastic kicker of dialogue. While self-deprecation is integral to humor, self-humiliation is a trickier, more delicate business, particularly when it comes to comic roles for women. Thankfully, Hot Pursuit — with its script by David Feeney and John Quaintance, both of whom have thus far been writing mostly for TV — avoids gags of the ‘Darn! I broke my heel!’ variety.”

There’s been no chatter about my response to Julie Miller’s Vanity Fair conversation with Amy Schumer (posted on 5.4), which included a reference to myself and last February’s Schumergate episode. I’m naturally anticipating more Twitter hate so even though this is a dead-horse issue for regular readers, I’m posting one final clarifying retort. As I noted a few weeks ago, there’s almost no point in responding to these things. The legend or the meme about what I allegedly wrote but did not in fact write has totally taken over. Nobody wants to read or re-examine anything.

At one point during Miller’s chat with Schumer about the “male gaze” factor, Schumer says, “Like the only person who has ever written anything saying that I am not pretty or attractive enough to be on camera was that one guy, Jeff Wells. I did not read [the post], but of course my best friends are like, ‘It was so fucked up!’”

Well, I didn’t say Schumer wasn’t “pretty or attractive enough to be on camera,” which of course mirrors the premise of her 12 Angry Men parody on her Comedy Central show. I wrote that in the context of the first Trainwreck trailer, in which her character was depicted as being the absolute belle of the ball who’s being hit on constantly with this and that guy almost fighting for her attention, she didn’t seem quite as hot as all that. I still think this. Schumer is attractive enough and a spirited barrel of laughs and so on, but in my mind she’s in the realm of 7.5 or 8. Is that really such a terrible thing to think or say?

I thought reactions to Mad Max: Fury Road were embargoed until next Tuesday. When I asked last night about a rave tweet from York University’s Rob Trench, he said “no embargo, at least at the Toronto screening I was at tonight.” He meant, I presume, that no embargo was announced at last night’s screening. The use of the word “masterpiece” is tempered, of course, by the fact that Trench is fairly young, but still…

Yesterday the first image from Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, which recently wrapped and will presumably open at year’s end via Paramount, was posted by Entertainment Weekly. The film is based on Shūsaku Endō‘s 1966 novel, which is set in 17th Century Japan and concerns the religious persecution of a Jesuit missionary (Andrew Garfield). Pic costars Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano and Ciaran Hinds. Per usual custom pic has presumably been assembled as Scorsese has shot over the last few months. He now has the entire summer and early fall to fine-tune, CG-finesse, lay on the score and whatnot. It shouldn’t be a huge deal to have it ready by October or November.

Andrew Garfield, Shin’ya Tsukamoto in Martin Scorsese’s Silence.

Andrew Garfield, Martin Scorsese during Taiwan press conference to announce end of filming of Silence. Note: The scraggly beard-growth thing doesn’t work when you’re Scorsese’s age — you have to either be clean-shaven or do a full smoothie beard.

At the invitation of Disney publicist Howard Green I had a nice chat with Ray Bradbury on the Disney lot in…now I can’t remember. It was either during a visit to Los Angeles in late ’81 or after I’d moved to L.A. in the spring of ’83. The motive was to promote Something Wicked This Way Comes, for which Bradbury had written the screenplay, adapting it from his same-titled 1962 novel. We talked about the film a bit but we mainly just freestyled all over the place. I remember feeling irritated by Bradbury’s insistence that writing was a total joy, and that anyone who didn’t feel that joy shouldn’t write. Well, writing had been murder for me since I started writing reviews and whatnot in the late ’70s. Every piece I wrote took it out of me big-time so I really didn’t like hearing how fucking wonderful it was to put words to paper. Bradbury was right, of course, but I only started to feel happy about writing about 15 years ago, maybe a bit more. Before that it was like digging ditches.

Almost a year ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Megan Lehmann reviewed Josh Lawson‘s The Little Death (the English translation of “la petite mort,” a French euphemism for orgasm) somewhat favorably. The film is basically a collection of vignettes about odd sexual behavior between couples, but the only one that Lehmann found truly affecting happens “toward the end of the film’s fairly brisk running time. Newcomer Erin James plays Monica, a partially deaf switchboard operator at a video relay service who acts as a go-between connecting deaf-mute Sam (TJ Power) to a phone sex line. The two actors have fairytale chemistry, making this particular segment both hilarious and swooningly romantic.” It sounds worth the rental (or ticket price) for this alone. Magnolia opens it on 6.26.

Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, the action cyborg blam-blammers who gave us the amusingly ridiculous John Wick, are almost contractually locked to deliver John Wick 2 to Lionsgate. This time the slaughter commences when Keanu Reeves‘ pet hamster is eaten by a pit bull that belongs to a totally psychotic, bug-eyed, mouth-drooling Ukranian hipster drug dealer who lifts weights and wears a Hitler youth cut and a ten-day stubble and listens to ’70s-era vinyl and has greenish-yellow teeth with shiny metal fillings. But before Keanu can waste this miserable fuck he has to take out between 180 and 200 bodyguard goons, some of whom are Lithuanian, some Georgian, some Romanian but all of them brawny and studly with black suits and Hitler youth cuts and size 14 feet.

It was reported last January that Stahelski and Leith will also co-direct Cowboy Ninja Viking Samurai Street Fighter Fucknose Bare-Knuckled Stud With a Nine-Inch Wang, a Chris Pratt action-fantasy flick for Universal. I wrote in the same story that that Leitch and Stahelski “are robo-directors, and that they (along with Zack Snyder and all the other zombies in good standing) represent everything about the action-fantasy-superhero franchise business that is rancid, puerile and devoid of a soul. I’ve also noted that Stahelski is the last name of an electrician, a surfer, a pool-maintenance guy, a hot-dog chef at Pinks, a garbage man or a guy whose grandfather worked in the same New Orleans factory as Stanley Kowalski.”

The very first time I’ve ever heard those familiar John Williams themes coming out of a wooden, 1930s-era radio. It’ll probably turn out to be the last time. The radio is located at Dun-Well Doughnuts on Montrose near Bushwick. The waitress behind the counter spoke with the usual mincing, sexy-baby, beep-uh-duh-beep-beep vocal fry. When she asked if I wanted soy or almond milk (as they have no dairy), it sounded like “deebeedeesoyahahmand?” Uhm…are you asking if I want regular or low-fat milk? “M’sayingweeyonlyhavesoyahmand.” Soy or…? “Soyahamand.” Which is the least problematic? “Soy.”

“These people, their lives…they’re in a galaxy far, far away…it’s a journey that people can relate to” — 23 year-old Daisy Ridley (i.e., Rey) offering a generic, somewhat worrisome thought about Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens in the Vanity Fair video piece. What I find worrisome is a sense of what Ridley may (I say “may”) be implying when she says “people.” Millenials and fanboys, I fear she means. A chill just went down my backbone. I sincerely hope my suspicions are neurotic rather than intuitive. I really want Awakens to work in a classical way.

I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that that the converted, fluttery-voiced devotionals (i.e., the children of Harry Knowles) mean nothing — they’ll be there no matter what. This movie has to knock my demanding, somewhat grumpy socks off…that’s what’ll count at the end of the day. I will be one of the first canaries to go down into the Force Awakens coal mine, and if I die, the movie dies with me in a sense.

About five months ago the Stars Wars 7: The Force Awakens actor/characters were identified via Topp-style trading cards provided to Entertainment Weekly by J.J. Abrams and Co., and one of them was Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, which I described as “the black-cloaked bad guy in the snow-covered forest with the light saber“…duhh. In yesterday’s ign.com piece about the Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair photo shoot on the set of the film, Lucy O’Brien somewhat breathlessly notes that the video essay [below] suggests that (a) Driver “is indeed playing antagonist Kylo Ren” and (b) “very little is known about his character beyond the lightsaber he carries and his attire, as spotted in the Force Awakens‘ first teaser trailer.” HE to O’Brien: How much do you need to know at this stage? When you see a tall, big-shouldered guy with severe features dressed in black, what does that suggest to you? Abrams quote from VF piece: “I have a thought about putting Jar Jar Binks’ bones in the desert there. I’m serious! Only three people will notice, but they’ll love it.”