Best laugh of the day: “This aspect of Sad Ben Affleck is not a disposable meme; it’s a modern analogue to the famous image of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.” Follow-up: “If ‘The Scream’ represents the existential anguish of modernity, Sad Ben Affleck represents the barely suppressed despair of living in a world of way too many screamers, with way too many conduits to scream right in your face. You could, of course, scream back. Or you can just sit, and ride it out, and hope for a better tomorrow, while patiently and stoically enduring the indignities of today. Either way, Sad Ben Affleck, c’est moi.” — posted earlier today by Vulture‘s Adam Sternbergh.

This morning I discussed the 2016 Oscar spitball situation with Award Watch‘s Erik Anderson. We covered a slew of contenders in record time — David Michod‘s War Machine, Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals, Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea, Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation, Garth Davis‘s Lion, Jeff Nichols‘ Loving, Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight, Denzel Washington‘s Fences, Clint Eastwood‘s Sully, Robert Zemeckis‘s Allied, Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie, Peter Berg‘s Patriot’s Day, etc. Again, the mp3. Sorry for the odd machine-like noise in the very beginning, but it fades away. The chat lasts about 20 minutes, give or take.

“Dark Angels, Black Barranca, Noir All Over,” posted on 4.19.16: “Like a chump or a drunken sailor, I recently bought Criterion’s Bluray of Only Angels Have Wings despite ample warning that it was too dark.

“A DVD Beaver review said it was “darker than the DVD,”and it definitely is that. Like it was shot in a mine shaft. Yes, the blacks are deep and wonderful and portions of this 1939 film look smoother and cleaner than any version I’ve seen before, but my God, man! This Angels is more shadowed than ten Jacques Tourneur and Robert Siodmak films put together. And there’s no reason for it.

“Is this an aviation film directed by Howard Hawks or what? Yes, much of it takes place after dark but this is also a film with a certain merriment and esprit de service and drinks and songs on the piano. Why so inky?

“I lost patience after a while and turned the brightness all the way up, and it was still too dark. I much prefer the high-def Vudu version that I own; ditto the TCM Bluray that I bought a year or two ago.

“Mark this down as a case of Criterion vandalism — it’s just not the film I’ve been watching all these years.”

Screenwriter Vladimir (“Vladi”) Cvetko, the son of HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko, is a writer for the cable TV series Power and Kingdom. Over the last two or three weeks he’s been bopping around Europe. The natural thing would be to cruise chicks and catch rays in a couple of sexy beach towns, and for all I know Vladi got around to this. But he also recently visited a Syrian refugee camp in Idomeni, a village in northern Greece that’s just south of the Macedonian border, and all of a sudden he was no longer some Hollywood dude on the prowl but a photo-journalist in a conflict zone.

Mustafa Alhamoud, face coated in toothpaste to protect against tear gas, had pleaded with the Macedonians to open the border on April 10. (photo by Vladimir Cvetko)

What Vladi saw and heard was newsworthy. Young people in a tough spot, angry, pushing back against closed borders and a growing sense of despair while coping with tear gas. So he took photos and tapped out a 2000-word piece and sent it to the N.Y. Times (no response), the Wall Street Journal (declined) and the Los Angeles Times, among others. An L.A. Times editor liked the article but cut it down (as editors often do) to 900 words. It ran today as an op-ed under the title “Border Skirmishes.”

Excerpt: “I asked the young men who had faced down the troops if they understood what came after Macedonia — more troops, more political resistance and between three and five more border crossings on the way to their preferred destination: Germany. They shrugged. They were focused on the border at Idomeni. No matter how insignificant a step it might be in their journey, crossing would be cause for renewed hope.”

From a September 2009 HE piece: “I wouldn’t call myself a critic in the Eric Kohn/David Edelstein/Matt Zoller Seitz/Justin Chang/Stephen J. Whitty sense of the term. Which can be otherwise defined as seeing every last film that comes along and sitting down like a rank-and-file machinist in Detroit and reviewing every last one (including and especially the awful-awfuls) and always with a five-or-six-paragraph plot synopsis. Which can otherwise be defined as being a good soldier who does the hard and once-necessary task of grappling with all of it, good or bad, rain or shine, sick or healthy. Critics do the job like those pilots in Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings flew mail over the Andes.

“But critics aren’t truly and finally critics unless they’re stone Catholics about movies, and I have always been that. I’ve been swimming in these waters for 30 years now and I don’t just skim across the surface of the pond when I see and write about a film. True Catholics put on the wetsuit and dive in each and every time. They swim to the bottom and search around and can identify and quantify the various fish and algae down there, not to mention the geological assessments of silt and sand and bedrock.

“I do all that and then some. All my life I have felt and communed and wrestled with films as seriously and arduously as Martin Luther did with Catholicism before striking out with the Protestant Reformation. Okay, not every last flick made and distributed on the planet earth but most of the ones worth seeing. Yes, I’ve deliberately chosen not to suffer through each and every film that opens because 60% to 70% of them are soul-sucking torture to sit through. Some of the worst suffering I’ve endured in my life (which has included getting punched and spat upon, being in car and motorcycle accidents, getting arrested and put behind bars, being fired just before Christmas a few times, getting divorced and seeing friends and family members die) has been due to bad films.

I’ve recalled this before, but during the summer of 1980 I was part of a press contingent that was invited to watch the after-dark filming of John Carpenter‘s Escape From New York on Liberty Island. The gang was out in force — bearded and scruffy Kurt Russell in his Snake Plissken garb, costars Season Hubley and Adrienne Barbeau (who was married to Carpenter at the time), producer Debra Hill. Things began with a well-catered yacht party. By the time it ended everyone had at least half a buzz-on. As some of us prepared to leave to watch Carpenter and Russell shoot a scene under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, Russell got up and addressed the throng: “We’ve had a great time, we’ve loved having you here…now go home!” And everyone laughed their guts out. It was that kind of mood, that kind of party.

Sean Hubley, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell during the shooting of Escape From New York. Carpenter looked like a spry 32 year-old at the time — today he looks like he’s pushing 85.

I wrote my piece for The Aquarian, an alternative New Jersey weekly that’s still going. Here’s a little anecdote that will give you an idea what it was like to collaborate with my stuffy editor, whose name was Karen something-or-other. During the yacht party I overheard Barbeau say to Carpenter, “I have some whites for you, honey, if you need some,” and so I put it in the article. Karen scolded me over the phone for including such a potentially litigious anecdote. “Thank God I caught that and took it out!”, she said. “What were you thinking?” I was thinking, Ms. Tight-Ass, that whites (i.e., Benzedrine or some derivation of) are relatively harmless prescription drugs and that adding this line gave the piece a little inside flavor, directing being a tough job that keeps you up into the wee hours, etc.

Even with Bernie Sanders‘ recent surge in New York and nationally, Hillary Clinton will almost certainly win tonight’s New York State primary because of three and possibly four reasons: (1) Independent voters can’t vote — only registered Democrats and Republicans; (2) Same-day registration voting (which is entirely within reach today) is unavailable in New York State, and other blocking tactics are expected; (3) younger voters may not show up in sufficient numbers to make a difference in Bernie’s tally and (4) Low-information African-American voters are certain to vote for Hillary, as they have elsewhere. So that’s it — it’s basically a rigged election, the New York State Democratic machine is largely behind Hillary, the fix is in and so on.

via GIPHY

The main hotties to be shown during the 2016 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight will be Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog (closing night headliner with Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe), Pablo Larrain’s Neruda, Laura Poitras‘ Risk (about Julian Assange), Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s Endless Poetry, Marco Bellocchio‘s Sweet Dreams, Joachim Lafosse‘s L’Economie Du Couple and Kim Nguyen‘s Two Lovers And A Bear. How many of these will Hollywood Elsewhere make a serious effort to catch? Definitely the Larrain, the Schrader and the Poitras. We’ll see about the rest. My current plan is to stage a one-man-standing-against-the-wind protest against Steven Spielberg‘s Big Fucking Giant by not attending, and it may be that while doing this I can squeeze in an extra DF screening in the bargain.