All screen villains are perverse or flamboyant in one way or another, but it’s fairly rare to run into one with a truly twisted or offbeat attitude. In an off-handed, no-big-deal, between-the-lines sort of way, I mean. Muddy-souled, less-than-admirable fellows who are both neurotic and a bit moronic. Not “comedic” figures, but dour, compromised souls whose bizarre manner, obsessions and quirks makes them a bit laughable or at least amusing to some extent.

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Notice a certain resemblance between Lucas Hedges and director-writer dad Peter? And between Tatyana Antropova and her son Gleb? Outside of Hollywood movies and casting circles this kind of thing is fairly common. Parents actually resemble their kids and vice versa.

In the case of red-haired kids at least one parent will be a red-head also. (Not always but 95% of the time.) If a mother has big, beautiful, roundish eyes, there’s a decent likelihood that her son or daughter will have the same. I know that’s not the way things happen in Hollywood, but in the real world they do. Really.

I don’t know the last time I saw a more unlikely family pairing than Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges, who will play mother and son in French Exit, a dark comedy that Azazel Jacobs will direct from a script by Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers). Look at how absurdly different they are; they don’t even look like cousins.

Did anyone think that Hedges even vaguely resembled Julia Roberts in Ben Is Back? She was supposed to be his mom…please.

Jim Jarmusch‘s The Dead Don’t Die opened last Friday. More than a few HE regulars have presumably seen it. Reactions would be greatly appreciated. Here’s a re-post of my 5.14 Cannes review:

Dry, droll and deadpan are what you always get with Jim Jarmusch (and that’s fine with me), but The Dead Don’t Die, a small-town zombie comedy, is too slow, passive, resigned, lethargic and self-referential. It kind of works during the first half, but gradually spaces itself out.

Die‘s central problem is that it’s about watching a zombie apocalypse rather than somehow dealing with it.

Strange as this sounds, none of the characters actually try to survive. Well, they do but half-heartedly. It’s a laid-back hipster riff, but if you want to get serious and divine a social-political message, the film is basically saying “we’re going so wrong now and are more or less fucked at this point so why even fight it?”

Jarmusch occasionally flirts with the thematic thrust of George Romero‘s Dawn of the Dead (passive, brain-dead consumers are real-life zombies) and takes shots at the spreading Trump cancer, but he doesn’t really engage. Well, he does but in the manner of an aging, despairing, heavy-lidded type.

The Dead Don’t Die is baroquely amusing here and there, but the mood of laid-back nihilism and a general “submission to the plague” mentality is too persistent. Around the two-thirds mark the lack of any semblance of narrative energy starts to work against itself.

Horror fans are going to stay away in droves, Joe Popcorn is going to say “where’s the movie?” and Jarmusch devotees are going to feel under-nourished.

Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny play cops in an upper New York State town called Centerville, and all they really do is watch and comment, watch and comment, watch and comment.

One of the most serene and soothing mountaintop villages I’ve ever visited in my life, ten years and three weeks ago to the day. Alpha vibe-wise it was neck and neck with Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, which I first visited in May of 2012. Both trips were with the boys.

Wait…no mention of Mayor Pete in brief political discussion between Vulture‘s Bilge Ebiri and The Dead Don’t Die director-writer Jim Jarmusch? Why not?

Let’s say you’re a successful 34-year-old screenwriter in the grip of certain self-destructive behavior patterns. Behavior that not only hurts others, but requires immediate psychiatric attention. Obviously.

Let’s also imagine that this psychological malady has resulted in charges of cruel and abusive behavior from at least eight women.

Let’s further suppose that the screenwriter in question has an interest in continuing to work and thrive in the business. So he can pay his mortgage, afford a car, start a savings account, travel, take his pets to a vet when needed…stuff like that. Let’s presume all this.

What kind of manic looney-tune nutjob doesn’t say to himself, “Let’s see…I’ve been acting like a seriously abusive asshole with women and sooner or later I’m going to have to pay the piper, especially given the current social-political climate out there. So…I don’t know but maybe I should think about possibly getting help, maybe seek treatment for my alleged cyclothymia affliction, issue apologies, commit myself to some kind of 24-hour care facility….something that might allow for a slightly better future than if I just wait for the hammer to come down, which it will sooner or later?”

There’s a phrase I’ve been hearing since I was three or four years old. The phrase is “actions have consequences.” It’s amazing how some people develop an idea that they can somehow duck this.

Last night I finally watched episode #1 of Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Too Old To Die Young (Amazon, 6.14). I have nine more episodes to go, but I’ll tell you right now I’m not much of a fan.

I “respect” the noirish-arthouse atmosphere (solemn, menacing, gates-of-hell atmosphere) and the slow, snail-like pacing. By which I mean that I’m okay with Refn’s decision to shoot it this way as, you know, a stylistic “look at me” signature thing. But I didn’t find it involving. Like, at all. It’s basically about ugliness, evil, malevolence, posing, slowness, dark lighting, irony, set design, death, perversity.

“This is not human behavior as I know it,” I kept saying to myself. “This isn’t even noir behavior. In the first scene it takes…what, 15 minutes for a cop to hassle and interrogate a young woman that he’s pulled over and apparently wants to take advantage of in some fiendish way? Less? Feels like 15. They talk and talk and talk and talk…what is this?”

If human history progressed at this pace we’d still be back in the heyday of the Roman Empire. I’d be wearing a toga and sandals and writing for the Foro Romano Gazette. Everyone takes too damn long to speak or do anything, for that matter. I asked myself again, “Why the fuck am I watching this?”

To be honest, I watched TOTDY because I’d heard it was a problematic slog and I wanted to see Miles Teller struggle. I’ve had it in for this fucking guy ever since that 2014 Hollywood-Highland escalator episode (“Don’t be a pervert, man”).

“This is not going to add to my understanding of or appreciation for the wonder of God’s universe,” I went on. “This isn’t going to turn me on or make me laugh and drop to my knees like I’m watching the second coming of Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s just going to irritate me so you know what? Fuck this series. Okay, I’ll probably watch a few more episodes.”

Paul Walter Hauser will play Richard Jewell, the overweight security guard who was falsely and widely accused by news media types of having planted a bomb during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, in Clint Eastwood‘s The Ballad of Richard Jewell.

My first thought when I read this was “I know that the Jonah Hill + Leonardo DiCaprio version of this project went south a couple of years ago, but what happened exactly?”

I’m frankly not delighted about Hauser playing Jewell, mainly because he’s played so many low-rent scumbags that he’s convinced me that he might not be acting on a certain level. Hill would’ve been a slamdunk, but I’m not sure I can get engage with Hauser, root for him, identify with his plight.

Hauser, 32, alluded to this perception last year during a BlacKkKlansman red-carpet interview:

“Unfortunately because of how I look, a chubby, slightly awkward white dude, [I’ve gotten] cast as a lot of scummy dudes lately, and I play a real scummy dude in BlacKkKlansman. [Also] I Tonya…anytime I’m on a sitcom I play a doofus or an ayehole, but you know, those [roles] are fun to play, somebody’s got to do it, I’ll do ’em.”

The conservative-minded Eastwood is doing The Ballad of Richard Jewell, of course, because of the anti-news media narrative.

In Jewel’s case the narrative (which unfolded over 88 days from late July to late October of ’96) was earned and then some. Several reporters and commentators (including the Atlanta Constitution‘s Kathy Scruggs and NBC’s Tom Brokaw) fingered Jewell as the likely Atlanta bomber without having all the facts.

Jewell’s tragedy nonetheless feeds into Trump’s fake news mythology, and Eastwood’s film, you bet, will almost certainly strike a chord in America’s heartland or, you know, with the same ticket-buyers who flocked to Clint’s American Sniper and chortled along with Grant Torino‘s Walt Kowalski.

Full disclosure: Hollywood Elsewhere loved Gran Torino from the get-go. I also liked the geriatric drug-smuggling thing, The Mule. I wasn’t much of a fan of American Sniper, in part because Bradley Cooper looked too fat and also because of that fake animatronic baby scene.