Excerpt from Geoff Berkshire’s Variety review: “In Kogonada’s Columbus (Sundance Institute, 8.4), the protagonists write, talk, bicker, and dance about an extraordinary collection of modernist structures in the unassuming Midwest town of Columbus, Indiana. The hypnotically paced drama, carried by the serendipitous odd-couple pairing of John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, is lovely and tender, marking Kogonada as an auteur to watch.”

Sidelight #1: Cho is 45; Richardson is 22. 23 years is a significant gap when you’re looking at a romantic pairing, no? It’s mitigated, yes, by the slim and healthy Cho looking like 35 or so. But remember that a potential romantic relationship between 35 year-old Josh Radnor and 19 year-old Elizabeth Olsen (i.e., a mere 16 years between them) was treated as a dicey thing in Radnor’s Liberal Arts (’12).

Sidelight #2: Richardson (Haley Steinfeld‘s best friend in The Edge of Seventeen) appears to be catching on. I can’t be specific but I’m told she’s being circled by a major director as we speak.

It’s relatively rare to run into a bad-guy character who is simultaneously (a) detestable, (b) pathetic and (c) fascinating. David Proval‘s Richie Aprile, who was only around for season #2, was such a character. Whenever he showed up or glared or said something threatening or ominous I always muttered “your attitude is toxic and your scowling is monotonous….find some new material, ya putz.” And yet he was never boring. Characters who are this repulsive turn me off sooner or later, sometimes in a matter of minutes.

Aprile took two bullets in the chest 17 years and three months ago. Okay, on 4.2.00 — near the end of the twelfth episode. The Sopranos ended almost exactly a decade ago, on 6.2.07.

From “You Gonna Cry Now?”, posted on 3.27.13: Richie Aprile was shot by Janice Soprano in “The Knight in White Satin Armour.” Time sure flies along. I dearly love the way Janice’s younger brother enters very cautiously, like an animal approaching sleeping prey, and then strokes his chin when he realizes what’s happened.

I swear to God this series made me feel so at home, like I was sitting in a suburban New Jersey diner somewhere with friends on a Friday evening or Saturday morning. It made me feel wise and comfortable and secure while fully reminding me in each episode of all the plagues and anxieties.

Five days ago I described Daniel Day Lewis‘s announced retirement as a kind of cowardice. “Abandoning the struggle is a sin,” I wrote. “We’re here only a limited time and then we’re dead, for God’s sake. I understand burnout — it happens — but I don’t respect people who’ve been lucky enough to find a special calling and then just walk away from it.”

Gifted people get to retire under two circumstances — i.e., if they’re in the grip of a fatal disease or in the final stages of old-age dementia. Otherwise retirement is not an honorable option.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has adopted a more charitable view. DDL isn’t a coward — he’s just doing another mercurial hide-out, an extended Frank Sinatra thing.

Day-Lewis “will, at some point, want to act again because that’s such a dominating dimension of who he is,” Gleiberman writes. “Besides, to put it in terms he’d surely disdain: What else is Daniel Day-Lewis going to do? He’s 60 years old, which really is the new 50, and assuming he lives a long and vital life, how could he stay away? My instinct says that his instinct wouldn’t let him.

“It’s easy to imagine Day-Lewis busting out of his retirement in about four years by showing up, seemingly out of nowhere, to portray Big Daddy in a stage production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, mounted in some tiny 180-seat theater in Dublin. It would immediately become the hottest ticket in the world. Then, of course, there are the film directors who will likely never stop beckoning.

The Presidency of John F. Kennedy was far from radiant. He had his shortcomings and hesitations. He wasn’t always the bravest or the wisest. But he was sane and sensible and rhetorically progressive, and if he was around today he would almost certainly regard Donald Trump as a “bullshitter”, as President Obama privately muttered last year, if not worse.

I’m not a JFK sentimentalist, but I am a 21st Century surrealist. Ever since Trump’s election (almost eight months ago) and particularly since he took office I’ve occasionally been shook by this rocked-back feeling, a face-slap realization anchored in ghastly darkness. It’s like agents managed to pour massive amounts of brown acid concentrate into the nation’s water supply, and now even the best of us are enveloped a kind of brown-acid mentality or psychosis.

We are stuck in a kind of quicksand — in the midst of the most grotesquely vile Presidency in the history of this nation, a seeming throwback to the psychotic Roman reign of Caligula.

Which is why this 100th anniversary of JFK tribute reel (posted on 5.24.17) seems so moving and yet strange. There’s no sense from listening to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her kids — Rose, Tatiana and Jack — that the spirit of the JFK era is dead and gone, that the kind of country this used to be isn’t even a memory any more. They seem to actually believe that those old JFK vibes can make some kind of return. Nor is there even an allusion to the fact that the same office occupied by JFK 55 years ago is now occupied not by a Republican or a man who thinks differently than JFK did or would today, but by a stone sociopath — a lying, salivating, pot-bellied beast.

In the early ’70s Tom Wolfe wrote about the cultural “grim slide” that seemed to be happening. He was more right than perhaps even he realized. We have slid right down since. These are the bad times.

Hollywood Elsewhere salutes Jonah Hill on his latest weight loss. That’s it — that’s all I have to say. An image is worth a thousand words. Seriously.

(l.) Re-svelted, slim-again Jonah Hill; (r.) A fat Ken doll as envisioned by fans looking to see a more realistic reflection of the world we live in today.

A recent, anonymously-written Den of Geek report reminds that Season 2 of HBO and Jonathan Nolan‘s Westworld won’t happen until ’18, and perhaps not until the fall. Take your time, guys! I began as a fascinated viewer — hell, I was nearly a fan — but by the time season #1 ended I had moved beyond concerns about narrative enervation. I was just plain sick of it.

“I hate this series with a passion for just layering on the layers, for plotzing, diddly-fucking, detouring, belly-stabbing, meandering and puzzleboxing to its heart’s content,” I wrote on 12.5.16 (“Westworld Hate Will Continue To Spread”).’

“You know Westworld is just going to be keep being Westworld for God knows how many damn seasons until the beleagured audience, like the hosts, stands up and says “Enough, Jonathan Nolan…you and your never-ending longform sprawl, your endless teasings and knife-stabbings and shallow sex scenes, your slowly-germinating metaphysical character arcs and parallel timelines…you’re just spreading your winding narrative double-back bullshit to see how long you can keep it going…two, three, four seasons. If it weren’t for the nudity we probably would have revolted four or five episodes ago.”

The Den of Geek piece got me thinking in one respect. Through most of Westworld S1 I was wondering when the hell are the robots finally going to revolt and start murdering the guests en masse?

“If one views Nolan’s Westworld as a series to be a long, loose, and convoluted retelling of its 1973 source material’s narrative, then season 1 was essentially the first act,” the piece supposed. “The park was in proper use until it wasn’t. Now, the fences are down, the Tyrannosaurus Rex has a Jeep in its mouth, and Dennis Nedry still hasn’t even reached the Dilophosaurus paddock. Hence, season 2 could quickly evolve into a kind of war between the guests and the hosts.

“It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that 10 episodes in season 2 could stretch out a week of the survivors’ dire circumstances just as liberally as how season 1 stretched out William and Logan’s two-week vacation over nine episodes.”

More stretch-out? If I was a guest looking to survive the slaughter I would get the hell out of the park as soon as possible. How big is Westworld, square-acre-wise? Is it as big as, say, eight Disney Worlds or the city of Winslow? Trust me, it wouldn’t take me any more than a day or two to rescue myself. I would hide behind rocks, travelling only at night, killing as I go. It’s going to be fascinating (not) to watch Nolan shovel the endless meandering bullshit as he endeavors to keep the guests from escaping for weeks on end.