The person who designed the jacket cover for Paramount Home Video’s forthcoming Collateral 4K disc (12.8.20) got it wrong. Tom Cruise‘s “Vincent” doesn’t have a narrow dark beard of any kind. He sports a light 10-day growth…a salt-and-pepper thing that doesn’t begin to merit the “b” word.

The ending of Collateral is one of the most curiously moving I’ve ever seen. For an urban film in which a few guys get killed, I mean.

“This world is just a game but…”

It dawns upon “Guy” (Ryan Reynolds), a non-engaged video-game character, that he’s (a) living inside an action-packed video game and that (b) his world is also about to end. And so he’s determined to change his fate by making himself the hero, and then saving the game before the developers can shut it down. But he’s only a digital construct, of course, and not a part of any organic scheme so where could this possibly lead? Talk about a story with nowhere to go.

Peter Weir‘s The Truman Show (’98) was a somewhat similar fantasy. Jim Carrey played Truman Burbank, an innocent who’s grown up living within a large, dome-shrouded TV set populated by actors…a guy who knows nothing about life except for this fake, fascistic realm. Written by Andrew Niccol, The Truman Show would have had a fascinating third act if (a) Truman had escaped the dome only to be shocked by how sad and frustrating and hugely difficult real life is, and then (b) returned to the dome, suddenly grateful that he has a place to live that’s much less “happier” that what the real world allows.

Free Guy would be interesting if Reynolds and or two of his fellow characters could somehow become human. I doubt this is in the cards.

Directed by the dependably shallow Shawn Levy and cowritten by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn, Free Guy (20th Century Studios) pops on 12.11.20.

In IFC Film’s Shithouse, director-writer Cooper Raiff plays a somewhat emotionally hindered college freshman named Alex. His problem is that he wears his heart too plainly on his sleeve and therefore isn’t aloof or blase enough. This becomes apparent when he scores with Maggie (Dylan Gelula), who feels weirded out by his morning-after sincerity. Or something in that realm.

My disorientation stems from the fact that Raiff is (a) good looking in a young Harry Hamlin sort of way, and (b) curiously rail thin. This goes against the Schlumpies & Dumpies aesthetic that began to take hold about five years ago…an anti-attractiveness aesthetic that argued with the decades-old Hollywood rule by which the guy who got the girl looked like the guy who got the girl.

Sometime during the Obama administration leading males began to look a little dweebier, a little thicker and pudgier, a little dorkier and a little beardier with pimples on their butt cheeks. Raiff doesn’t fit this paradigm — he actually looks attractive in the old-fashioned waspy-Warren Beatty-in-the-’60s-and-’70s sense. So I don’t get it. Is Raiff an outlier, or an indication of a new direction, a new vogue?

Shithouse, which won SXSW’s Grand Jury Award last March, will premiere in select theaters and on VOD on 10.16.20.

Orange Plague to U.S. Citizens: “Don’t be afraid of Covid…don’t let it dominate your life!”

What Trump means is that if you have the money, blue-chip insurance, power and high-level connections that allow access to the medical equivalent of “the kitchen sink“, which is what he’s been getting since Friday, and if you have those rugged German genes, you might resist the Covid embrace and leave the hospital after three days.

But he won’t be out of the woods for another 12 days if not 21. And only drooling morons will come within 20 feet of this douchebag, if that.

Three days ago Trump was treated with an 8-gram dose of the experimental antibody therapy cocktail made by the biotechnology company Regeneron. He also took doses of Remdesivir and Dexamethasone, not to mention zinc, vitamin D and other mild-mannered remedies.

Denis Villeneuve, Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures’ Dune has totally and unsurprisingly caved to COVID and run screaming in the other direction. The 12.18.20 release has been scrapped — the sci-fi epic is now slated to open theatrically on 10.1.21. Does this mean Wonder Woman 1984>, which bumped its release date to 12.25.20 about three weeks ago, will also pull the plug and delay theatrical until sometime in ’21? Three guesses and the first two don’t count.

My theatrical viewing of Tenet a few weeks ago in a Flagstaff Harkins plex was a great thundering high. Big screen, booming sound, small buttered popcorn, extra-comfy rocking chair, first indoor viewing experience in over six months…mother!

Plus I wasn’t thrown by my all-but-complete inability to understand the particulars. (I’d absorbed the broad concepts in advance.) I knew going in that Tenet would defy understanding in the usual sense. I hate, hate, hate Nolan’s arrogant sound-design schemes. I couldn’t understand Tom Hardy‘s Bane, and I couldn’t understand half of Inception, and Interstellar, which I loathed from the very depths of my soul, was even worse. So I went into Tenet with an attitude of “go ahead, make my day…make it all but impossible to understand…I won’t care.” And I didn’t.

But time and again, as I mentioned in my 9.5.20 review, I was acknowledging that I’d never seen anything quite like this before. Excerpt: “I was smiling quizzically and a few times literally guffawing with pleasure. Tenet is all but impossible to fully ‘understand’ (certainly upon a first viewing, and even after reading the Wikipedia synopsis I was still going ‘wait, what?’) but my eyes, mind and expectations were constantly being challenged and blown. Pleasurably, of course.”

Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman summed up this reaction as follows: “The film doesn’t entirely make sense, but that’s okay, because even when it doesn’t it’s such a bravura spectacle of head-spinning awesomeness (or something) that our heads are spun…sort of.” Yup, that was the reaction of Old Flagstaff Jeffie. And that’s what I’ll hang onto until a subtitled Bluray or the subtitled streaming version comes along, and then I’ll derive a whole new level of comprehension.

Gleiberman’s 10.4 column was titled “Why Tenet Was the Wrong Movie at the Wrong Time.” Here are some salient paragraphs and my corresponding reactions.

OG: “By the last act of Tenet, which is a grandiose action battle full of explosions that run backward (the sand funneling down into the earth, because those forces are moving in reverse), you can see that the effects are cool, and the idea is cool, but how the logistics of it all fit together remains barely coherent, which kind of limits the fun.” HE: “Yes, it’s curious and limiting, but I knew going in that Nolan was going to pull the same shit he did before.”

OG: “But what I discovered, to my surprise, is that Tenet, in all its high-toned kinetic quasi-obscurity, completed the alienation of the [oppressive COVID] experience. Rather than offering a great escape from the COVID blues, the movie was perfectly in sync with the COVID blues. Which is exactly what made it the wrong film for this moment.” HE: Disagree. Tenet rescued me from that climate of widespread depression outside the Harkin plex. For two and a half hours, I managed to forget the dull, dispiriting gloom of face masks, social distancing, no indoor restaurants, no flying to Europe, etc.

OG: “No, the reason that people are going to want to go back to the movies is joy. That’s what they want to feel; that’s the feeling that sitting at home can leach away. And Tenet, while marketed as a great escape, is a movie so tangled up in itself that it turned out to be as joyless an experience as the very prospect of going to see a movie during COVID.”

Punishment from God the Father Almighty for dishonorably spinning on behalf of Satan’s agent? Just desserts in my book.

Every now and then ads for 3DM loafers (butterfly, penny) pop up on Facebook. They’re almost right, but not quite. Because they don’t have that easy slip-on look. Because the tongue is too big. To explain how loafers should ideally look, I got out an old pair of Johnston & Murphys that I bought…oh, six or seven years ago. I’ve taken them in for re-heeling and re-soling twice. This is how loafers should look….almost like slippers but with decisive heels and built with first-rate leather.

3DM penny loafers circa 2020.

Hollywood Elsewhere Johnston & Murphy loafers, bought sometime in ’13 or ’14.

This Culprit Underwear billboard was sitting on the Sunset Strip last night, and it’s not…Jesus, I don’t know what to think. My first reaction was “holy shit, they’re kidding…right?”

The idea seems to be that most straight guys (the ad is clearly not aimed at gay guys) don’t look like Calvin Klein models. The idea seems to be that if you’re a straight Millennial or Zoomer dude and of average proportion (i.e., between overweight and morbidly obese) and you don’t care if you’re not living up to 20th Century or even early 21st Century standards of male attractiveness…if you’re some kind of animal and couldn’t care less, Culprit Underwear is probably for you.

What else could the message possibly be?

Last night we came upon a West Hollywood apartment complex filled with skeletons and spiders and cobwebs. I see skeletons in my dreams every other night. I see monsters and goblins and giant spiders on the news with alarming regularity. The idea of “celebrating” Halloween just seems off this year. As in “why?” or “what for?” or “who needs it?”

I’m not sure that average voters understand what might happen if the vote goes strongly against Donald Trump on 11.3. I’m not sure that I understand it, but I’m definitely sensing disturbances in the force.