All hail Spike Jonze‘s Being John Malkovich, now 18 and 1/2 years old. I haven’t seen it in almost that long, but I’ll be watching it again this weekend. From Janet Maslin’s N.Y. Times review: “Without spoiling what follows, let’s just say that Being John Malkovich features a fine cast of dryly comic actors who are very much in on the joke. That can even be said of Charlie Sheen, who turns up for some wicked self-parody in a film that also features cameo appearances by Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and the New Jersey Turnpike.” Pitt has a cameo in this?

If Isle of Dogs makes one thing unmistakably clear, it’s that director-cowriter Wes Anderson truly adores Japanese culture. The food, the clothing, the ancient drums (“taiko”), the language, the architecture….you can just feel how much he enjoys the immersion.

How strange, then, that Wes is getting beaten up for not enjoying Japan in the right way. Or, more to the point, in the wrong way. His crime, it seems, is (a) not using subtitles when his Japanese characters speak and (b) creating a blonde American activist character, Tracy Walker, voiced by Greta Gerwig, who plays a significant role in bringing about the rescuing and re-acceptance of the Trash Island dogs. What didn’t he invent a fucking Japanese activist instead?

The crime is cultural appropriation, and at least four name-branders have been slapping Wes around for this since yesterday — L.A. Times critics Justin Chang and Jen Yamato, Slant‘s Steve McFarlane and Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday.

Anderson’s reply: “The movie is a fantasy, and I would never suggest that this is an accurate depiction of any particular Japan…this is definitely a reimagining of Japan through my experience of Japanese cinema.”

Roughly ten months ago (or around 5.10.17) the Cannes Film Festival announced that Netflix releases would not be screened in competition at the 2018 festival and beyond unless, you know, Netflix changed its mind about sidestepping theatrical and opening straight-to-streaming. Netflix never changed its mind and so, just to underline last year’s announcement, the no-no Netflix policy has apparently been re-announced or at least re-filed by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Rhonda Richford.

Cannes honcho Thierry Fremaux has said that the streamers (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Hulu) can show their films out of competition during the festival, but those who sidestep theatrical exhibition can’t win a Palme d’Or.

Amazon is not at all in league with Netflix on this issue. As a friend points out, “Every single one of Amazon’s films gets a full-scale theatrical release with the minimum 90-day window required to play in the major chains before going to VOD — and are sold to local theatrical distributors all over the world, and for this reason can play in competition at Cannes.”

Due respect and no offense, but I couldn’t help but flinch when I heard Richford say “Cannes”, which should be pronounced “caahhnn” but which she pronounces in the usual American way — i.e., synonymous with “tin can” or “Dan Rather” or “Peter Pan.” Listen to her pronunciation — it’s not way off but it’s not right either. I’m sorry but I can’t let this stuff slide.

For a woman just turning 47 (her birthday is today), Karen McDougal looks pretty great. Genes, diet, exercise, “work”. McDougal, an admitted conservative who says she voted for Donald Trump and may even approve of his handling of the Presidency so far, is almost exactly eight years older than Stormy Daniels, 39, whose birthday was six days ago.

Stormy’s affair with Trump happened 12 years ago, when she was 27. McDougal’s relationship happened around the same time, between ’06 and ’07, when she was in her mid 30s.

Class, character and poise-wise, McDougal strikes me as a level or two above Daniels, who seems…what, a bit scampier? On the other hand Daniels seems to have a better sense of humor about the media circus that she’s performing in. She seems to grasp the vaguely comedic aspects, I mean, while McDougal sounds seriously guilt-ridden (“I know it’s wrong…I’m really sorry”). Her big emotional moment starts at 11:15.

McDougal and Daniels have both spoken with Anderson Cooper for the money, of course. Not direct payment for sitting down and sharing intimate details of their relationship with Orange Orangutan, but for the money they’ll probably earn in one way or another down the road. (Right?)

The Stormy chat won’t air until Sunday on 60 Minutes, but she looks seriously pissed when Cooper says “I guess I don’t know why you’re doing this.” There’s a very slight note of disdain in Cooper’s voice and facial expression when these words pass his lips.

Distributors always hire security goons to stand on the side aisles at early-bird screenings and eyeball the viewers, sometimes with the aid of ultra-violet binoculars. The idea is to discourage jerks from video-recording a scene or two on their smartphones. I understand why distributors have invested in this (why take chances?), but has anyone at an invitational or all-media screening ever tried to surreptitiously record a portion of a new film? And if one or two have been stupid enough to attempt this, have their haphazard video capturings ever shown up on YouTube or been of any interest to anyone?

I’m mentioning this because one of these big guys was standing a few feet away during a screening of Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs the other night, and dammit, he was too close. I felt as if he was interfering with my contemplative movie space. I want to sink into a meditative trance when I watch a film, and that means (a) focusing solely on the screen and (b) not seeing some six-foot-five, Dwayne Johnson-type guy out of the corner of my left eye, staring a hole in his scrambled eggs as he laser-visions my ass. Hey, homey…get offa my cloud! This is entirely between me and Wes and the stop-motion dogs, and I’m sorry but three’s a crowd when it comes to this kind of intimate communion. I mean, I could almost feel his body heat.

Last September Cannes Film Festival honcho Thierry Fremaux announced that he was thinking about changing the timing of gala and press screenings. And now he’s done it officially.

Instead of critics seeing films first in the Grand Lumiere at 8:30 am with black-tie gala screenings occuring later that day around 6 or 7 pm (or with Salle Debussy press screenings at 7:30 pm followed by gala screenings the next day), Fremaux said he wants gala and press screenings to happen simultaneously. That way critics, who always tweet immediately and then post reviews four or five hours after press screenings, won’t be killing the buzz on dicey or questionable films hours before they screen for the swells.

If a movie is said to be great or very good or mezzo-mezzo or shitty, the word always gets out right away in Cannes. But at least the new simultaneous screening policy means that viewers in tuxedos and gowns will henceforth see films without knowing what the often crabby critics have already said.

Critics and journalists will catch films in the Debussy theater at the same time that guests inside the main auditorium watch the evening world premieres. Fremaux told Le Film Francais that removing the early-buzz factor from morning press screenings will “revamp the attractiveness of and gloss to gala evenings…at 7 p.m., the press will see the film at the same time at Debussy, [and] the suspense will be total!”

As for films premiering at 10 pm, the press will catch them the next morning. Afternoon screenings of films selected in competition or Un Certain Regard will mix industry-ites, journo-critics and locals.

Producers are mostly happy with this new arrangement, to go by trade articles. Critics will now have to bang out some of their reviews between 10 pm and 1 am, in addition to all the other deadlines and pressures.

Especially Karan Soni, the taxi driver who shrieks like a 12 year-old girl when alarmed. Posted 25 months ago (“What If The Antichrist Wasn’t A Person But A Movie?”): “Anyone who goes to Deadpool and comes out saying ‘wow, that was pretty good!’…70% contempt, 30% pity. You don’t like good action, you don’t like craft, you don’t care about that thing that the Russo brothers have in spades and that Deadpool helmer Tim Miller will never, ever have. All you care about is sinking into another jizz-wank hot tub that reenforces your glib bullshit attitudes about superhero movies…you’re as low as it gets in the movie-watching (or more accurately movie-sampling) realm.”

In Peter Medak‘s overlong but delightfully insane The Ruling Class (’72), Peter O’Toole plays two versions of Jack, the 14th Earl of Gurney. During the first 65% he plays Gentle Hippie Jack, a golden-haired mystic given to silly riddles and looney non-sequiturs. All kinds of ridicule and pressure are brought to bear by elite British society, and somehow Jack crumples from within and, just like that, becomes an ultra-conservative, homicidal, knife-wielding fiend — a chilly, well-dressed psychopath who fits in much better with the swells. Nobody wanted to see a film about a Jesus impostor morphing into Jack the Ripper, and so The Ruling Class was a complete financial bust. But O’Toole’s madman scream…my God! Not to mention the “Varsity Drag” number.

Debra Tate, the Palm Springs-residing sister of the murdered Sharon Tate, has described herself as a “vocal opponent” of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

The Tarantino drama, which starts shooting this summer, will use the 1969 Manson murders as a backdrop to a story about a pair of struggling actors, to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. It’s presumed that Margot Robbie will play Sharon Tate. And Tate’s 65-year-old sister is pissed, she told Vulture, because Tarantino has “yet to reach out to me to talk to me about anything to do with my sister or her depiction in his film. Why? Because I believe it’s negative. If his depiction was positive, he’d have a dialogue with me.”

Wrong! Tarantino doesn’t do research. He doesn’t do realism or history. Everything he’s ever written and directed has been pulled straight out of his ass.

Posted last July: “As intriguing as this project sounds, Tarantino is incapable of playing it even semi-straight. He’s not a docu-dramatist — he’s a creator of alternate Quentinworld fantasies. His last three films have mined the past — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight — and each time he’s reimagined and re-dialogued history in order to transform his tales into his own brand of ’70s exploitation cinema. Why should QT play his cards any differently with the Manson family?

“Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman said this morning that location-wise he wants Tarantino to deliver an exact duplicate of everything we know about the Manson geography (Spahn ranch, Haight-Ashbury, etc.) but ‘make it feel new.’

Nobody cares what I think about Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs (Fox Searchlight, 3.23), which opens tonight. I’m not even sure I care all that much, and I’m sitting right here. Anya and Yanna are staring at me now, and their eyes are saying “well…?”

Okay, I’m an animation hater — I admit that. But Isle of Dogs isn’t “animation” — it’s an extremely refined Wesworld realm by way of immaculate stop-motion canines — so exacting, so detailed, so balanced and dead center. And defined by an intense fixation upon (a) Japanese culture, (b) mountains of smelly garbage (white worms, fleas, half-eaten dumplings, piles of empty Sake bottles…thank God it wasn’t projected in Aromarama) and…I’m getting off on the wrong track there. I sound negative, but I didn’t honestly feel that way as I watched it. I felt respectful but distanced, and that’s not a bad thing per se.

Isle of Dogs is a tidy fable about good, soulful dogs joining forces with good, thoughtful humans in order to push back against the schemes of ugly, scowling humans. It’s about calmness, humanity, compassion and love. I was glad I was there last night (inside theatre #1 at the Westside Landmark) but I wasn’t…how to say this the right way?…enormously transported in a deep-down sense as much as technically impressed by how exactingly composed it all is.

Loved the Japanese drums! The drums are 90% of Alexander Desplat‘s score.

It certainly feels like another realm, this creation, this latest visit to Andersonville. You don’t feel as if you’re watching a movie as much as visiting a stop-motion art exhibit in a museum with seats.

So I couldn’t quite fall into Isle of Dogs but I was telling myself (and I mean this right now) that I might have really enjoyed it if I’d dropped a tab of LSD a half-hour before it began. Except I haven’t dropped acid since my early 20s, and if I’d actually done that last night…uhhm, I’d better not think about this any more. But Isle of Dogs is an LSD movie of sorts.

I admire the effort that went into it, and the devotion of incredible focus and discipline that it demanded of Wes, or should I say vice versa? There’s no way to put it down (and I wouldn’t want to do that anyway) except to say (a) I was unable to lose myself in it and yet (b) I studied it very closely and (c) was never less than politely fascinated.

L.A. Times critic Justin Chang has complained that Anderson has marginalized the Japanese characters by (a) having them speak their native language without subtitles and (b) having his dog characters (voiced by Bryan Cranston, Liev Schriber, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Liev Schreiber, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Bob Balaban) speak English.

Well, it is a dog movie so naturally the dogs are going to converse in the director-screenwriter’s native tongue, and with erudite, English-speaking dogs being the basic template of comprehension it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to subtitle the Japanese (i.e., the only humans except for Greta Gerwig‘s Tracy Walker, a visiting activist American), and the only way to avoid that would be to have the Japanese speak English with Japanese accents, which would be ridiculous.

The mystery of Stephen Paddock, the rich looney tune who murdered 58 people in Las Vegas on 10.1.17, will apparently stay a mystery. If he was merely suicidal, why murder dozens of innocent people before offing himself? He was obviously a sociopath, but not the sort who stirred attention or concern. Paddock probably wasn’t all that different from Andreas Lubitz, the nutbag airline pilot who decided to fly that Germanwings jet into a mountain on 3.24.15, and in so doing murdered 144 passengers and crew. Or the maniacal pilot or co-pilot behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on 3.8.14, which caused the deaths of 239 passengers and crew. Absolute madness, impenetrable insanity…no answers.

In an interview yesterday (Wednesday, 3.21) with CNN’s Christine Amanpour, Cate Blanchett was asked how she squares her support of #TimesUp with being silent about the re-ignited allegations against Woody Allen.

I’ve posted Blanchett’s response as well as a video of the interview, but boiled down she basically said (a) I haven’t been silent about Woody, (b) I knew nothing of [Dylan Farrow‘s] renewed allegations at the time of filming Blue Jasmine, (c) the issue has been handled by “the courts” (i.e., investigated twice by two state agencies, Connecticut and New York, resulting in a decision not to prosecute for lack of evidence and an element of doubt), and (d) “I’m a big believer in the justice system” so do the math.

What Blanchett said, in essence, amounts to an oblique defense of Woody. She said if evidence comes to light that warrants prosecution then a prosecution should result, but if the evidence isn’t there…well, you know, maybe the Robespierres should settle down, take a breath and direct their energies elsewhere.

I’m guessing Blanchett would like to say more, but given the social media pressures, she can’t. In case there was any misunderstanding about her views, Blanchett said that social media is great for raising “awareness about issues,” but it’s “not the judge and jury.”

The Vulture guys ran a real Robespierre headline a couple of hours ago, to wit: “Blanchett Says She Didn’t Know About Allegations Against Woody Allen Before Blue Jasmine.” That is not the gist of what she said to Amanpour, assholes. That is a fragment of what she said. This is one of most full-of-shit, deliberately misleading headlines I’ve read in a long while. The author of the Vulture story is Hunter Harris.

“I don’t think I’ve stayed silent at all,” Blanchett told Amanpour. “At the time that I worked with Woody Allen, I knew nothing of the allegations. At the time, I said it’s a very painful and complicated situation for the family, which I hope they have the ability to resolve. If these allegations need to be reexamined which, in my understanding, they’ve been through court, then I’m a big believer in the justice system and setting legal precedents. If the case needs to be reopened, I am absolutely, wholeheartedly in support of that.”