A little while ago I walked over to the Debussy for a 10:45 pm screening The Shining. I wanted to see Stanley Kubrick‘s eerie-vibe classic on a big screen again, and the 4K digital remastering made it look…uhm, as good as it ever has. I was half-hoping for some kind of slight bump, but after 20 or 25 minutes I was admitting to myself “this looks fantastic, but it doesn’t look any better than my Shining Bluray does on my Sony 4K HDR 65-incher.” So I excused myself and went back to the pad. Sleep is more important.

Update / correction: The 4K Shining isn’t a “restoration” but a remastering. It was created from “a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s former personal assistant Leon Vitali worked closely with the team at Warner Bros. during the mastering process.”

Elle Fanning is very animated, very Carole Lombard-ish in this just-up trailer for Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York. A complex demimonde suffused with a fizzy, peppy vibe. The games that eccentric New Yorkers or witty weekend visitors play. Sniffing around for angles and opportunity, sometimes betraying each other romantically, etc. Allen’s famously delayed romantic comedy will almost certainly debut at the Venice Film Festival, after which it’ll open commercially in Italy and other European territories.

At some point during Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton, a TV actor having trouble breaking into features, finds work in a couple of Italian-made cheapies — this thing and a spaghetti western (or so I’ve read).

Once again Tarantino is paying tribute or otherwise wink-winking at Italy’s half-century-old exploitation film industry, which has been one of his key passions since he began working at that Manhattan Beach video store (Video Archives) in the ’80s. The poster is basically saying “wow, those cheesy Italian schlock movies of the late ’60s, right? Great primitive cinema!”

The biggest single plot element in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood involves the brutal slaughter of five people (Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent) in a home just down the street from Dalton’s rental, which he shares with stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). But there hasn’t been the slightest hint of this in the marketing materials this far. Not the slightest little tease.

It’s been amply reported that Game of Thrones star Richard Madden has been offered a chance to succeed Daniel Craig as strong>James Bond, particularly following his performance in Bodyguard. I’m a bit late to the table on this (as in six months late), but after watching Madden in Rocketman, I agree that he’d be an excellent successor. He’s got it — definitely Connery-esque.

#Rocketman star Taron Egerton is shaking and stirring the rumors that Richard Madden could be the next James Bond https://t.co/yYmvhgBkUC pic.twitter.com/TeDmvmpU1b

— Variety (@Variety) May 17, 2019

The first line of Elton John & Bernie Taupin‘s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” (’74) is “I can’t light no more of your darkness.” I know this song well, but for decades I heard the line as follows: “I can’t line no more awwgey dogness.” And for decades I sang it that way in the shower or whenever the tune played on the car radio. Did I ever ask myself what “awwgey dogness” means? Yes, a few times, but I could never make heads or tails of it.

I went into Rocketman with an attitude, but I felt pleasantly turned around soon enough. I was more taken with the first 30 to 40 minutes (Elton John‘s childhood, taking piano lessons as a teen, teaming with young Bernie Taupin) and less with the remainder, which is basically about Elton becoming more and more of a booze-swigging, coke-sniffing party animal and his life downswirling into addiction and self-destruction.

I respect Dexter Fletcher‘s decision to not tell Elton’s saga Bohemian Rhapsody-style, using a linear “this happened and then that happened” approach. Instead he chose a more creative and dynamic (not to mention more cinematic) scheme by making it into a punched up, inventively choreographed, mad-brush Ken Russell musical.

The framing device is Elton confessing all during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Out of this comes a looking-back-at-my-life, All That Jazz-type deal that uses several John-Taupin songs as emotional backdrops or undercurrents for various biographical moments.

The film isn’t biographically accurate in some respects (i.e., certain songs are played at the wrong time) and there’s a lot more interest in a glitter-and-glam aesthetic than any kind of semi-realistic presentation of how things really went down, but this is the film they chose to make.

It’s “cinematic”, yes, but I’m betting that down the road an ambitious director and a gifted choreographer will transform Rocketman into a Broadway stage musical.

My dissatisfaction with Egerton’s singing voice, which sounds only vaguely like John’s, remains. Now that I’ve seen the whole magillah, I can say definitively that Egerton’s singing moments are only mildly sufficient (they don’t stop the film in its tracks but they don’t quite knock you out either), and that I would have felt a lot more satisfied or soothed if he was capable of delivering a more Elton-like sound.

Egerton seems a little taller and more muscular that the Real McCoy (he’s 5′ 9″ compared to John’s 5′ 7″) but I wouldn’t call that an actual quibble.