Now that Ant-Man has opened and been enjoyed nationwide, does the HE readership understand that I was totally on the money when I said what a surprisingly tight and well-done kick it is, and that it’s dryly self deprecating as well as sharp and fast and disciplined as a Marine, and yet it regards its own story elements and emotional undercurrents seriously? Does everyone now understand how tiresome and flat-out blind some of the naysayers were, and that these guys are only interested in specific geek fantasies that wank them off in just the right way (i.e., according to their particular emotional needs), and that they live in their own pathetic little wanker worlds?

It hit me last night that the main-title themes for Henry King‘s The Bravados (’58) and John Ford‘s The Man Who Liberty Valance (’62) are nearly identical. Listen to the Bravados music (which is credited on the Wiki page to Alfred Newman, Hugo Friedhofer and Lionel Newman) and now Cyril J. Mockridge‘s Liberty Valance theme — pretty close to plagiarism, I’d say.

But the Liberty Valance Wiki page credits the score to both Mockridge and Alfred Newman, and Mockridge’s Wiki page describes him as “a staff composer for 20th Century-Fox for years, frequently working with Alfred Newman and Alfred’s brother Lionel.” I’m assuming that Mockridge asked Alfred if he could rip off his Bravados main-title theme as a favor, and the esteemed composer said sure, what the hell.

We all know that Moe Greene took a bullet in the eye in the final moments of The Godfather, but now he’s really dead. Poor Alex Rocco, the deep-voiced character actor who played urban goombahs for nearly four decades (from ’67’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre until Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty), died yesterday at age 79. But honestly? The only other Rocco performance that I genuinely enjoyed besides Moe Greene is/was Jimmy Scalise in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73). Even his mafia don performance in Find Me Guilty was a little underwhelming. Let’s just say Rocco peaked with The Godfather and Eddie Coyle and let it go at that. Friend: “You obviously never saw The Famous Teddy Z.” Me: “Who?” Friend: “One of the great unheralded TV sitcoms of all time. It didn’t last a season on CBS yet Rocco’s performance as an agent won him an Emmy.”

For those who may been away or not paying attention in early June, you need to avoid the 25th anniversary Bluray of Goodfellas (which popped on 5.5.15) because it looks darker, thicker and browner than the 2007 Bluray version, which is far superior. Don’t be misled by the fact that Scorsese approved the 25th anni version — sometimes it looks okay but mostly it seems covered with a mixture of lentil soup and butterscotch sauce. To my eyes it’s a constantly irritating thing to sit through. Just remember the name Brownfellas and the fact that Warner Home Video has helped you to remember this by tinting the cover a brownish amber. One more time: Brownfellas is bad, but the 2007 and 2010 Bluray versions are just fine.

On 11.13.13, I shared an alternate ending of Spike Jonze‘s Her with a few friends (including some critics and columnists). A much better ending, I should say. Here it is: “As we all know, Her ends with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) more or less dropping Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) — something about her having evolved so far and taken in so much and gone to so many wondrous and mystical places in her head with Alan Watts and possibly others that she’s no longer able to just simulate a girlfriend experience and so she’s expanding her wings and moving on. Or something along those lines. (If I’m not mistaken the same thing has happened with Amy Adams’ OS1 relationship.) The OS1 software has evolved itself out of being an emotional relationship surrogate for lonely humans and has gone up and into the universe….right?

“This is where and why the movie is going to lose Joe Popcorn. The film ends with Amy dropping her head on Joaquin’s shoulder as they sit and stare out at the vast LA cityscape, but it’s not quite enough. The movie ends, but the way it ends isn’t an ‘ending.’ It just kind of slows to a stop. It’s an ending that says, ‘We haven’t figured out an ending but at least we’re ending on a sad kind of note.’

“Here’s how it should end. We know that Theodore’s intimate letters book has been published and gained, let’s presume, a certain attention, a certain fame. We include a brief scene near the end in which the creators of OS1 get in touch with Theodore and tell him how much they loved his book and particularly his voice (both inwardly and stylistically), and that they have a proposition for him to think about. Theodore has presumed that they were getting in touch with him to express regrets about his relationship with Samantha going south, but this is surprising. A proposition…?

Here’s another drag-ass situation on top of the 92Y Coppola posting. On 7.10 John Turturro sat for a master class at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Two days later CinemaScope‘s Yair Raveh posted a video of Turturro riffing (with Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher) about getting started and his relationships with Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers, Michael Cimino, Nanni Moretti, etc. And then Raveh waited seven days to send me the 7.12 video — a full week! The Jerusalem Film Festival ends/ended tonight.

I don’t care how many Francis Coppola interviews you’ve seen or listened to over the years. This series of clips of a 6.9 92nd Street Y discussion between Coppola and Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf (the people in charge of posting these interviews always seem to drag ass) is wonderfully entertaining and illuminating. In late ’81 I cold-called Coppola when he was staying at the Sherry Netherland, and for whatever reason (possibly because I was fearlessly loquacious due to having dropped a quaalude) he stayed on the phone with me for well over an hour. I published the interview in a two-part q & a format in The Film Journal, which I was managing editor of from late 1980 to the early summer of ’83.

Two and half years ago I was bitten by the Judy Greer bug, particularly by her smallish but poignant performance in Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants — a supporting turn that definitely warranted an Oscar nomination. Since then she’s worked a lot, written a book, scored nicely as Lily Tomlin‘s girlfriend in Grandma, played inconsequential roles in a pair of 2015 blockbusters — Jurassic World and Ant-Man — and landed a rich ongoing role in FX’s Married. The Week‘s Scott Meslow has joined the team by saying, quite appropriately, that this isn’t enough. Greer needs to snag a super-role or two…something legendary, zeitgeisty. He concludes with a Greer pitch: “Judy plays Judy, a ferociously skilled actress who keeps getting cast in bland, forgettable bit parts: a nagging mother, a gossipy sister, a long-suffering wife. Fed up with an industry that refuses to give her a decent role, she breaks out on her own and starts a Hollywood studio. Or a detective agency. Or maybe a vampire bites her. Whatever. Just grab the best script you have lying around right now — as long as it features a real role for a talented actress. She’s good for it.”

“Warner Bros. wanted two major stars, so I went to Jack Nicholson to play Ed [i.e., Jon Voight‘s role]. He agreed to do it and asked, ‘Who will you get to play Lewis [i.e., Burt Reynold‘s role]?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know yet.’ He said, ‘What about Brando?’ So I went to see Marlon Brando, spent the day with him. Finally, he said he’d do it. I asked, ‘Who’s your agent?’ He said, ‘I don’t have an agent.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s your price?’ And he said, ‘I’ll take the same as you pay Jack.’ I went back to Nicholson’s agent and said, ‘What do you want for Jack?’ He said, ‘Half a million.” [Except] Nicholson had never got more than $75,000.

“So I [informed] Warner Bros. studio head Ted Ashley. ‘Brando? Oh, God. He doesn’t mean anything anymore — he’s box-office poison,’ he said. Well, I thought Nicholson and Brando would work very well together. Ashley asked, ‘What does Jack want?’ I said, ‘Well, he wants half a million. ‘Half a million?” Ashley almost went through the roof. Then he kind of calmed down and said maybe they would pay him that money because everyone in town wanted Nicholson. He said, ‘What does Brando want?’ ‘I agreed to pay him the same as Jack.’ Ashley then exploded, ‘I’d be laughed out of this town if I paid half a million for Brando.”

The following is a true story. I was starting something with an L.A. woman in the early aughts. I was intrigued as far as it went, but then she eventually conveyed what the situation was. She was seeing two guys at the time, and I was basically being auditioned as a back-up in case one of them didn’t pan out. She was serious. There were two pitchers on the mound (alternating innings?) and I was being told that if I wanted to I could start warming up in the bullpen just in case. I told her I didn’t care for this arrangement, and her response was to basically “you’re throwing away an opportunity here.” I might step into a situation if a woman is seeing another guy — maybe, depending — but not two.

Almost everyone has experienced at least one movie breakup moment. Even if the decider didn’t act on it right away. You know what I’m talking about. Any time you fall heavily for a film you always want to see it two or three times, at least, and so you take the hot lady of the moment to see it and she doesn’t get it — she’s either mezzo-mezzo or distracted and hates it or whatever. And right away you know.

You might continue to see each other and have some really good times, but that sinking feeling tells you it’s never going to pan out, not really, because she wasn’t wise or seasoned or deep enough to get that film. Because rejecting exquisite films is a blade of grass that tells you a lot about a person. Not everything but a lot.

I would never break up with a woman if she didn’t like Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. That’s a highly respectable film but very tough to watch, and I would never think less of someone who actively hates it. Ditto Repulsion, My Darling Clementine, Repo Man….the list goes on. But I once secretly decided to part company with a dazzling blonde who used to gasp and scream in bed when she said she didn’t like David Fincher‘s The Social Network.

“Though Trainwreck is a robust comedy, ranging from genial to zingy to uproarious, it’s essentially a romantic melodrama of self-abasement, self-deception and self-discovery. Its subject is the proximity of pleasure and pain, of self-affirmation and self-doubt. Its resolution involves love, which, in Apatow’s view, is no renunciation or simplification, but just another mode of difficulty, a kind of fulfillment that emerges from characters who are already formed and who merely put themselves and each other to new tests.