Tatiana wanted to go out for dessert and coffee, and the Bel Air Hotel is one of her favorite haunts. We arrived sometime around 8 pm, and right away it felt wrong. As we walked over the stone bridge there was a huge outdoor dinner party (90 or 100 guests) happening to our left with sparkly white lights, and a live four-piece band playing obnoxious Middle-Eastern or Turkish music. It was awful, and you could just sense that the general clientele weren’t casual X-factor types like myself (I was wearing jeans, my brown leather motorcycle jacket and black-and-white saddle shoes) but Kardashian wannabes with something to prove.

The low-lit bar area has some nice mini-sofa seating, but the Wolfgang Puck dessert menu…I don’t know why I’m complaining given the locale and pretensions, but something in me recoiled when I saw they were charging $18 for a single chocolate chip cookie and a gluten-free snickerdoodle. I was muttering to myself, “I will not order an $18 cookie and this is not my scene…I don’t need to do this. I’ve hung loose in some of the coolest, most casual-vibe cafes and bistros in the world…Paris, Rome, London, Hanoi, Berlin, Belize, Savannah, San Francisco, Cannes, Munich, Prague and lower Manhattan…and the Bel Air Hotel just isn’t cool…everyone is trying too hard and the vibe feels like that of an overpriced hotel in Dubai. And that godawful music from the dinner party wouldn’t quit.

Hell is other people, particularly those wearing black designer sweat suits and white designer-label sneakers.

A couple of nights ago I was chatting with a New York journalist friend at Enzo’s Pizzeria in Westwiood, and it was 15 times cooler and more enjoyable because the place has character and personality and nobody gave a shit.

In the comment thread about yesterday’s Hustler post (“Pay The Man Again, Fats“), “Bentrane” wrote that he re-watched Robert Rossen‘s 1961 classic just last week, and that he couldn’t think of a single thing wrong with it. “One of the greatest films of the ’60s,” he said, “and a terrific morality tale about the things people will do for money, power and fame, and the people they step on along the way.”

HE to Bentrane: “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. Piper Laurie’s Sara is what’s wrong with it.

“In Louisville Eddie angrily tells boozy, delicate Sara (‘We have a contract with depravity’) to stop bugging him and just let him play Murray Hamilton’s Findlay, the mint julep rich guy. Playing Findlay for big dough is the WHOLE REASON she, Eddie and Bert have visited Louisville in the first place (and on Bert’s dime). Are they in Louisville to murder someone or rob a bank or sell drugs to school kids? No, and yet Sara says ‘don’t do it, Eddie…you’re better than this.’

“Then, feeling deflated and rejected, Sara somehow allows Bert (George C. Scott) to seduce her, and then commits suicide. She’s so depressed about Eddie having told her to butt out and then having had bizarre drunken sex with Scott (and WHY would she do that?) (and why would Bert do that to a guy who will make a lot of money for him if he keeps him sweet?)…Sara is so despairing that she slits her wrists? Is she eight years old? Has she escaped from a mental institution?

“Sara knows Eddie is a gifted pool player (‘Some men never get to feel that way about anything’) and has no other marketable skill, and she doesn’t want him to win big money doing the one thing that he’s great at because she despises Bert and his chilly, flinty, cut-and-dried manner? He’s not a warm or kind fellow, obviously, but so what? The world is full of flinty guys with gimlet eyes. Sara should’ve stayed in New York and spared herself the angst and heartbreak and confusion.

“The whole Sara thing is more than a little crazy.”

“Cinefan35” responds: “Well, I think the film makes it clear that Sara is psychologically unbalanced but, with Eddie, she sincerely believes (not wrongly) that he is too talented to be a small-time pool hustler for the rest of his life and should aspire to be the next great pool player (i.e., the next Fats).

“And I would also say that she is proven quite right by the end of the film, both with Eddie getting his hands broken while attempting a small-time pool hustle, and with him soundly drubbing Fats in pool repeatedly at the end of the film after his hand has healed.”

“Childerolandusa“: “I think it’s more the obsession with money and winning at all costs that Sara is upset with, more than anything else. Considering how Eddie dumps on Charlie in Act Two, Charlie’s got good reason to be upset about that also.”

HE to “Childerolandusa“: “Myron McCormick‘s Charlie is fundamentally intimidated by the big time. He’s fine with Eddie hustling guys for relatively modest amounts of cash in small towns, but he doesn’t like the big-city realm of Minnesota Fats and Bert Gordon. He’s getting old, Charlie admits. He’s starting to think about maybe owning a small regional pool parlor with a little handbook on the side. He and Eddie are on fundamentally different trajectories. Charlie’s on the way down, and Eddie, who’s more about the transcendent art of pool than the money, wants to see how high he can go. Life works that way at times. Often, in fact.”

As noted a few days ago, the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza (UA Releasing, 11.26) indicates that it’s mainly a romantic relationship story about age-disparate characters played by Cooper (son of Phillip Seymour) Hoffman and rock musician Alana Haim.

Cooper’s character is an aspiring actor named Gary Valentine; Haim is apparently playing a late-teens or 20something woman named Alana Kane. We see them go through initial attraction, flirtation, awkward sexual stuff, warmth, misunderstandings, getting back together, etc.

May I ask something? Hoffman and Haim play younger-older — there’s a line in which she says “I think it’s weird that I hang out with Gary and his 15 year-old friends all the time.” In actuality Hoffman is 18 (17 when the film was shot) and Haim is 29 — 11 years apart. That’s a significant gulf when you’re young.

Imagine if Licorice Pizza was about an older-looking dude (and played by a 29 year-old) falling in love with a 15 year-old girl who’s played by an 18 year-old actress. If so, the reaction could be in the realm of Dear Evan Hansen. People might say “so it’s about a cradle robber…a guy who’s unable to grow up and is hiding in the cave of a youthful romance with a girl who’s too young for him?”

But because #MeToo has given women more agency and independence, it’s totally cool for a 29 year-old to be cast as a somewhat older woman who falls into a relationship with a kid who’s wet behind the ears. Yes, only a nervy director like PTA would even go there, but be honest — Licorice Pizza couldn’t happen with the sex roles reversed.

9.20.21: It seems to me that if you’re a major-league director making a supposedly important film about a couple of love-struck kids (even though the off-screen Haim is pushing 30), you can go with one unknown as long as you pair him/her with a skilled name-brand actor, but you can’t have two unknowns carrying the film because no one will care all that much.

I mean, movies deal in familiar faces and personalities for a reason…right?

There are basic rules about young person relationship movies. Rule #1 is that at least one of the kids should be a half-familiar face, which helps with the comfort factor. Rule #2 is that the kids have to be at least somewhat attractive, not just to each other but to the audience. I’m sorry but ginger-haired Cooper Hoffman looks nerdy and freckly. I can’t put myself in his shoes. I really can’t. Haim isn’t anyone’s idea of a knockout either. The idea seems to be “the odd couple.”

Yes, David Bowie‘s “Life on Mars” helps to some extent.

I might give a damn or even care a great deal about these two when I start watching the actual film, but my first honest reaction was “the movie rests on their shoulders?”

The film has been described as a ‘70s San Fernando Valley thing, focusing on the TV industry with a partial focus on Bradley Cooper‘s Jon Peters, L.A. City Council member Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), a film director (Tom Waits) and Sean Penn as a smiling, big-personality guy in a slick gray business suit.

There’s a snippet between Hoffman’s character and and Cooper / Peters in which Peters mentions his “girlfriend” Barbra Streisand, followed by a back and forth about how to pronounce the second syllable of her last name. StreiSAND is the correct pronunciation.

Again: Why exactly would Peters, famously paired with a world-famous actress and with ambitions to produce and become a hot shot…why would Peters smash some car windows with a golf putter, and then shout and celebrate this aggression? Guess I’ll find out.

So yesterday podcaster Josh Lewis pissed on a scene in Shawn Levy‘s six-week-old Free Guy (“One of the worst things I’ve ever seen a theatre crowd cheer for in my life”),” and 24 hours later people are still enraged.

HE to friendo: “So out of the blue and several weeks after Free Guy opened, Lewis gets attacked by Twitter flapjacks for dissing it. I don’t get it. What’s the big thing?”

Friendo to HE: “Yeah, I know, right? But the thousands of replies and quote retweets are really showing how horrible the state of affairs is with America being Marvel-ified, and these critics and screenwriters are trying to defend a movie so…okay, decent but calm down. It’s hilarious but also flat out insane. Have we really stooped this low? Are things so bad that a Ryan Reynolds film is the bastion of hope for moviegoers?”

Yesterday Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler celebrated its 60th anniversary. It opened on 9.25.61.

All the principals except Piper Laurie are long dead — director Robert Rossen, costars Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Michael Constantine, dp Eugene Shuftan, editor Dede Allen — and it’s still a thing of ripe beauty in many respects.

And yet for decades I’ve felt irked by the script’s nagging moral undertow, voiced by Laurie’s Sara character. In an Act Two scene (a picnic), Sara marvels at Eddie Felson’s gift for pool-shooting (“Some men never feel like that”), and yet she berates him for playing for money. What’s Eddie supposed to do, become a bus driver or short-order cook and play for free on weekends?

And I’ve always been irritated by the grim expressions of McCormick’s Charlie. Once Felson starts playing Minnesota Fats in the temple of Ames Billiards, Charlie seems intimidated and bummed out by the stakes, the vibe…by everything. Shuftan’s elegant cinematography tells you what a joy the game can be, but Sara and Charlie do nothing but groan and lament. They’re a drag to be around.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 9.26 Variety piece about Dune‘s day-and-date, theatrical-plus-HBO Max opening on 10.22:

“3. It’s going to play a lot less well on television. Growing up, I once watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on a 16-inch black-and-white TV set, and it actually worked. That’s how great a movie it is. Dune is a lot less great. I would argue that it’s a reasonably commanding sci-fi parable that begins to run out of gas in its last hour. That’s because Frank Herbert, in the Dune books, may have been a better world-builder than he was a storyteller.

“The world of Dune, like the world of Lawrence of Arabia or the original Blade Runner, needs to overwhelm and envelop you. But if you watch it at home, the film’s narrative — is Paul Atreides the Messiah? Watch the House Atreides go down to defeat, and look out for that sandworm! — is going to stand revealed as the rather patchy affair it is. When you shrink the grandeur of Dune, you shrink its appeal.

HE comment: I appreciate big-screen grandeur as much as the next guy, but given the high likelihood that the content of Dune (story, dialogue, pacing) is going to make me miserable and moaning and writhing in my seat, it might be a more interesting thing to watch it on a 16-inch black and white TV. Okay, I’m kidding. 16-inch black and white TVs no longer exist.

In 2012 I saw the digitally restored Lawrence of Arabia projected at the Salle du Soixentieme in Cannes, and it looked beautiful. Four or five years ago I saw a 70mm Lawrence on a moderately large screen at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre, and it didn’t look all that great — half the time I was thinking how much better my digitally streamed 4K Lawrence (issued around ’16 or thereabouts) seemed. After I watched Sony’s 4K UHD Bluray version in June ’20, I called it “the most exciting and orgasmic home video experience of my life — a mind-blowing eye bath.”

What am I saying? That 70mm isn’t what it used to be, that a big-movie presentation has to be a first-class, technically flawless thing or nothing, that watching a film without Millennial mongrels eating pizza and cheese nachos nearby can be a blessed thing, and that seeing a big movie like Dune on a 65-inch 4K HDR screen isn’t necessarily a tragedy.

Four days ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg posted his first forecast about the Best Picture Oscar race, and he put Reinaldo Marcus Green, Zach Baylin and Will Smith‘s King Richard at the top of the list.

Feinberg was completely correct in doing so for a simple, undeniable reason. Of all the contenders seen so far King Richard is the only one that is (a) exceptionally well made, (b) perfectly acted and (c) makes you feel good in an honest, fully earned, non-pandering way.

There are no other Best Picture hopefuls that have even come close to managing this feat. No other 2021 film so far has delivered this kind of effective emotional pizza. Plus it’s a mostly all-black sports film** (the saga of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams) about a super-competitive family from Compton, and in particular about a thorny, whip-cracking dad (i.e., Smith’s Richard Williams) who was far from perfect.

Smith is a Best Actor lock; ditto Aunjanue Ellis as his combative wife + mother of phenomenal daughters.

King Richard delivers a metaphor that everyone will understand and relate to — if you want to win, you have to be hardcore.

There are several films I haven’t seen, but I can still tell (or make a very good guess about) which ones will meet these three criteria.

Using Feinberg’s list as a template, here are my no-bullshit assessments as things currently stand. The boldfaced titles are the only ones that stand a fraction of a chance of beating King Richard. (I’ve also boldfaced King Richard for emphasis.)

1. King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19) — The only Best Picture contender right now that looks like a real winner.
2. Belfast (Focus, 11.12) — Sentimental, cloying and manipulative family drama — an Irish Roma with an overly cute central kid character + wall-to-wall Van Morrison.
3. A Hero (Amazon) — Brilliant Asghar Farhadi film that will most likely be slotted in the Best Int’l Feature category.
4. The Power of the Dog (Netflix. 11.17) — Exceptionally well made, skillfully acted period drama about Montana ranchers writhing in denial and misery with a little touch of anthrax — makes you feel really, really bad. All hail Jane Campion, but the only time you feel good about The Power of the Dog is when it ends.
5. Dune (Warner Bros., 10.22) — Torture to sit through for some; delightful for genre geeks. Not a prayer of being nominated for Best Picture.
6. C’mon, Cmon (A24) — Haven’t seen it, but for years my basic motto has been “beware of Mike Mills.”
7. CODA (Apple, 8.13) — Appealing but not good enough — a feel-good sitcom about a hearing-impaired Massachusetts family in the fishing business, and a high-school age daughter who wants to sing.
8. Spencer (Neon/Topic, 11.5) — Not a chance. Agony to sit through. Strictly a platform for Kristen Stewart‘s Best Actress campaign.
9. The Lost Daughter (Netflix, 12.31) — Haven’t seen it but I’m told it’s somewhere between okay and not that great.
10. Cyrano (MGM/UA, 12.31) — Brilliant musical. Joe Wright‘s finest effort since Anna Karenina. Exquisite Best Actor-calibre lead performance by Peter Dinklage.