What killed King Arthur: Legend of the Sword? The widely-shared opinion that it stinks? Medieval genre fatigue? Guy Ritchie‘s attempt to make a tale that has been told again and again into a hodgepodge of flash-bang editing, modern colloquial dialogue, the sounds of Led Zeppelin and a general sense of the absurd? The fact that Charlie Hunnam is no one’s idea of a box-office draw? Or did the trailers turn people off for some other reason?

Did anyone see it? I sure as hell didn’t and wouldn’t.

Reported by Variety‘s Brent Lang: “It looks like summer 2017 has its first official flop. Ritchie’s attempt to make the Knights of the Round Table hip again, is collapsing at the box office. Based on its Thursday pre-shows and Friday afternoon mid-day grosses, the $175 million epic is looking at a disastrous $18 million debut.

“Those projections come from rival studios. Insiders at Warner Bros. think the film could still exceed $20 million, but even if it does, that’s still a very weak start for such an expensive picture. Barring a mid-weekend surge in enthusiasm for tales of gallantry, there will be red ink.”

This trailer for Home Again (Open Road, 9.8) looks to me like a suburban sexual fantasy film. More specifically about 40ish Reese Witherspoon, her character recently separated from Michael Sheen, hooking up with some young stuff. The director-writer is Hallie Meyers-Shyer, the daughter of Nancy Meyers (who produced with Erika Olde) and Charles Shyer. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. Costarring Candice Bergen, Michael Sheen, Lake Bell, Nat Wolff, Reid Scott and Pico Alexander.

I’ve just arrived in in a country that recently elected a sensible pragmatist instead of a racist fearmonger to run the show. It feels very good to be here for that fact alone. Would that American bumblefucks had the common sense to realize what they were doing when they voted last November for Orange Orangutan. Yeah, I know — a lot of them didn’t vote for Trump as much as vote against Hillary Clinton, but still.

Donald Trump’s ill-informed, authoritarian, shoot-from-the-hip bluster and bullshit-spewing is a rolling embarassment. The tweets he posted this morning verged on the surreal. Threatening that he may have secretly recorded conversations with recently-dismissed FBI director James Comey, and that “[he’d] better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press“?

Followed by a hypothetical about cancelling live press briefings in favor of issuing written reports? And then doubling down on this notion with Jeanine Pirro in a forthcoming interview on Justice With Judge Jeanine? And admitting in a recent interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that the previous explanations for the Comey firing were evasive, to put it mildly?

It’s exhausting, infuriating. But it also feels good — satisfying — to watch him unravel. I’ve nothing brilliant to offer about any of this, and even if I did I wouldn’t be able to phrase it…I can’t even finish this sentence.. Too jet-lagged. I quit. But it sure feels good to be in a country that primarily values sanity and level-headedness. Leave it at that.

Every time I arrive in Paris there’s always something that goes a little bit wrong, usually because I haven’t gathered all the necessary information or forgotten something. Or because I’m too tired to figure something out. That’s what happened today. I missed some instructions about picking up the apartment keys that had been sent several weeks ago by my Airbnb host, Romain. They were sent early last March but not re-sent today or yesterday, which would have been the considerate thing. But a couple of other things also went wrong on their own.

My flight from JFK arrived around 12:40 pm.   I took the usual Roissy bus (40 minutes, slogging through traffic), and arrived at the depot behind Place d’Opera around 2:40 pm.  I hopped on a Creteil-bound metro, got off at the Filles du Calvaire stop, and dragged the luggage over to 40 rue de Saintonge.

I had texted Romain yesterday and explained I’d be there around 3:30 pm. But when I texted him today as I stood by the street entrance, he told me the keys were sitting inside a code-entry lock box inside Bistrot de la Gaite (7 rue Papin), which is ten blocks to the west. I scrolled back through my Airbnb inbox and found a message, sent on 3.9, explaining this procedure, so my bad. I should’ve double-checked.

So I hailed a cab and went over to this place, bags and all. But then the code Romain gave me in the original message didn’t work. Punched it out four times — no dice. So I texted Romain, blah-dee-blah, “not working, brah.” He eventually gave me another code that worked. Keys and bags in hand, I taxied back to the pad.