After three or four weeks of gratis sampling, the HE:plus paywall went up tonight. Half of HE content will henceforth be free, the other half for a price. Three and three daily, or more depending on the breaks. No worries if you’d rather just stick with HE free, which has been rolling now for 14 years. But I’m going to push as hard as I can with HE:plus and keep the doors open, so we’ll see what happens. Thought: After each posting I could read it aloud and maybe digress with a thought or two, and then post the mp3 above or below. Wouldn’t add much to the workload. Making this up as I go along.

The presumption all along has been that 20th Century Fox’s longstanding intention to release James Gray‘s Ad Astra in mid-January meant that an Academy-qualifying release in December (i.e., two months hence) would eventually be announced. Well, forget it. January is history and the new opening date for this “epic science fiction thriller” is now 5.24.19. Which presumably means that Fox marketers figured that the benefit of a December ’18 platform debut wouldn’t amount to much, and that a Cannes debut will probably deliver a greater bounce. Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland and Jamie Kennedy costar.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg is reporting that Olivia Colman, who plays the role of Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite, is officially campaigning for Best Actress. Despite fair assessments to the contrary.

Any straight-shooting, non-agenda-driven assessment of this admired period drama would conclude that Colman’s character is roughly analogous to Robert Shaw‘s Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting. For Queen Anne is a mark, which is to say a character being played or duped or exploited in order to serve the interests of others, which in this case are Rachel Weisz‘s Sarah Churchill and Emma Stone‘s Abigail Masham.

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The Wrecking Crew, The Killing of Sister George, Krakatoa, East of Java…really? To go by the 1969 marquees and posters in Quentin Tarantino‘s currently filming Upon Upon A Time in Hollywood, you could get the idea that ’69 was a moderately shitty year in movies.

But of course, Tarantino is deliberately emphasizing the dicey titles and avoiding the good stuff. For ’69 also saw the release of George Roy Hill‘s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Dennis Hopper‘s Easy Rider, Paul Mazursky‘s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Henry Hathaway‘s True Grit, Larry Peerce‘s Goodbye, Columbus, Peter Hunt‘s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Vilgot Sjöman‘s I Am Curious (Yellow), Costa-Gavras‘ Z, Alan Pakula‘s The Sterile Cuckoo, Sydney Pollack‘s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch.

Actually Robert Aldrich‘s Sister George wasn’t too bad. One of the first mainstream lesbian films, unless I’m misremembering. Somber. Ground-breaking sex scene between Susannah York and Coral Browne.

All photos originally posted by Peter Avellino.

Claire Denis‘ High Life (A24) reportedly had an underwhelming showing at Roy Thomson Hall during the Toronto Film Festival. I was told by a journalist friend that half the audience had bolted by the time it ended, partly because it had begun late but mainly, he said, because the science-fiction drama had injected a certain lethargy. From that moment on I had no interest. I can smell trouble, and you can’t trust the big-name critics as they’re mostly in the tank for Denis.

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The big five nominees for the third annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards were announced this morning, and Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Free Solo led the pack with six nominations. The other five hotties are Minding the Gap and Wild Wild Country (five nominations each) and Dark Money, Hitler’s Hollywood and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (for noms each).

Hollywood Elsewhere couldn’t stand to watch Free Solo because the no-safety-line, life-and-death dynamic freaks me out. That’s obviously not a putdown but a simple, no-big-deal admission that I couldn’t bear to watch the damn thing.

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A decade or two will sometimes offer a clarifying, cut-through-the-bullshit perspective, especially when it comes to Oscar winners. It’s been 25 and 1/2 years since the 1992 Oscars were handed out on 3.29.93, so I figured I’d run through the top-ranked winners and decide if any mistakes or oversights were made.

Best Picture: Giving it to Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven was the right call. It’s a rugged, scrappy western full of irony and lament and all kinds of tortured guilt and self-loathing on the part of Eastwood’s Bill Munny character, and it simultaneously takes a hard look at Hollywood’s whole violent tradition of glorifying frontier justice. And yet Martin Brest‘s Scent of a Woman, manipulative and pandering as it sometimes was, offers a richer emotional catharsis. It has three or four big-payoff scenes compared to Unforgiven‘s two — “we all got it comin'” plus the violent barroom finale.

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This morning President Trump told journalists that Jamal Khashoggi could have been gutted, sliced and diced by “rogue killers”. He emphasized that King Salman‘s denial of any Saudi Arabian involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance “could not have been stronger” so “who knows?” What a shameless sociopath.

A forthcoming Esquire article will allegedly rehash Bryan Singer‘s whole checkered history with twinks, some of which hasn’t held up or has been called into question, and so Singer has posted a preemptive pushback piece on Instagram.

The Esquire article will probably appear later this week, or certainly a week or two before the 11.2 opening of Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which plays it right down the middle but is nonetheless quite engaging at times, especially during the Live Aid finale. Besides reporting what I presume will be factual information, the idea is to sell magazines on the back of 20th Century Fox’s promotion of the film.

Singer has written that the Esquire article will “rehash false accusations and bogus lawsuits” about the sexual assault allegations that have been thrown upon his doorstep. “I have known for some time that Esquire magazine may publish a negative article about me,” Singer says. “They have contacted my friends, colleagues, and people I don’t even know.

“In today’s’ climate where people’s careers are being harmed by mere accusations, what Esquire is attempting to do is a reckless disregard for the truth, making assumptions that are fictional and irresponsible.”

“[The article] will attempt to establish guilt by association simply because of people I’ve either known or met in the past,” Singer has written. “They will be attempting to tarnish a career I’ve spent 25 years to build.”

Leaving aside the various allegations and suggestions of misbehavior, it seems to me that Singer’s having abandoned the Bohemian Rhapsody shoot before the film was completed could harm his career much, much more. Who builds a directing career over a quarter-century and then walks off a set or otherwise “goes missing”? That’s not eccentric or intemperate behavior — that’s 100% insane.

I for one know for an absolute fact that Damien Chazelle‘s First Man is a major achievement in the realm of personal, epic-scaled cinema — a film about a huge, earth-shaking event that was nonetheless “seen” and painted with deft little psychological brushstrokes, which in a way makes it a kind of galactic companion piece to Lawrence of Arabia.

David Lean‘s 1962 Oscar-winner told us that T.E. Lawrence was a poet warrior-dreamer who accomplished great things militarily against the German-allied Turks during World War I, but who the hell was he? Why was he so not-of-this-earth? Why was he so clenched and blocked and deluded in certain ways?

Similarly, Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer are reminding us that Neil Armstrong, by any measure a repressed and inexpressive fellow, tapped into a certain greatness and fulfilled his fate in part by burying his emotions. And at the same time these filmmakers are asking “okay, but why couldn’t Neil be more like the rest of us? What was his problem?”

Or maybe, they’re also asking or saying, it wasn’t a problem. Maybe all great-destiny types have to be hardcore like Neil? Maybe they all have to embrace steel and severity? Maybe, as Robert De Niro’s Neil Macauley said to Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna 23 years ago, ‘That’s the discipline’?”

Nonetheless, First Man fell short over the weekend, and Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman‘s analysis isn’t that Chazelle’s film was wounded by charges of being “too cold, too impersonal” or because of that idiotic flag-planting complaint, but that the last 40 years of George Lucas-inspired space fantasies have killed interest in actual, real-deal space travel.

Gleiberman: “I think the explanation for why First Man has met with a ho-hum response at the box office — and a ho-hum response in the culture — comes down to something basic. The film is about the moon landing, and frankly, in 2018, no one gives a damn. Not really. Because they’ve seen it before. And they’ve been seeing it for most of the last 50 years.

Gleiberman is basically saying that popular culture and reality started to merge — “fusing in our imaginations” — after the Star Wars explosion of 1977. “Part of what it did was to co-opt the imagery of space and elevate it into a video-game religion,” he notes. “That may have been one of the reasons the space program faded; it began to seem prosaic by comparison. Star Wars was colorful and energized, but the moon, after we’d conquered it, remained barren and gray. What were we going to do, grow vegetables there?

“Once we’d been to the moon a couple of times, and Star Wars had turned outer space into our new home away from home, who needed to go back? The moon had become a blank slate. It was Star Wars without the gizmos. And Star Wars was the space drama that a generation now lived inside.

I didn’t want to watch Donald Trump jousting with Lesley Stahl last night on 60 Minutes, so I didn’t. I looked at a couple of clips on YouTube late last night but that’s all. Just like with Bob Woodward’s book and Michael Wolff’s before it, both of which I stopping reading at the halfway mark. The man is a foul, sociopathic, shoot-from-the-hip junkyard dog liar, and I don’t need to immerse and re-immerse myself in his bluster and bullshit to absorb that fact. I know it going in. And the rural bumblefucks don’t care. They love him as one of their own.