Director Paul Thomas Anderson pulled a Steven Soderbergh on Phantom Thread, the ’50s-era fashion-world drama with Daniel Day-Lewis that Focus Features will open on 12.25.

I regret to say I’m no fan of Gillian Robespierre‘s Landline (Amazon/Magnolia, 7.21), which I saw last night at the Rodeo Screening Room. (I ducked it at Sundance last January.) And I’m saying this as a devout fan of Robespierre’s Obvious Child and particularly Jenny Slate‘s performance in that noteworthy 2014 film. Slate is also the star of Landline, and I’m sorry but I didn’t care for her character this time. I didn’t care for anyone‘s character in the entire film.

If I were to run into any of these guys at a party, I’d make up an excuse and bolt within 25 or 30 minutes. Why? All they talk and think about are themselves — their own little dwarf realms. Me, me, mine, mine, why, why…unhappy, vaguely pissed off, unsatisfied, fickle this, fickle that, etc.

Set in ’90s Manhattan, Landline is cut from the same basic cloth as Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters — an episodic tale of a smartypants Upper West Side Jewish-Italian family (half-healthy, half-neurotic) and how they cope with infidelity and general middle-aged weltshmerz. It’s particularly about Slate’s Dana cheating on her fiancé Ben (Jay Duplass) with a glib lightweight type (Finn Wittrock) and how this affair precedes or somehow sparks an interest in Dana bonding with her younger, very bratty and sullen sister, Ali (Abby Quinn).

In the meantime the pater familias, John Tuturro‘s Alan Jacobs, is secretly boffing a middle-aged blonde, or actually not so secretly since his wife Pat (Edie Falco) gets wind about halfway through the film.

I just found the whole cast tedious and tiresome and flat-out dislikable. I can’t stand married characters who ask each other if they’re about to come — that’s one thing — and I despise any husband who offers to urinate on his wife’s upper leg in the shower in order to fend off poison ivy. It felt to me like the kind of typical Sundance indie that gives me a headache. I wanted to escape but I felt it would be unprofessional to do so. On top of which Tatyana was enjoying it (Landline being more or less a woman’s film) so I was stuck.

Tatyana: “I liked the movie, at least in part because it reminded me of my relationship with my slightly older sister and with my mother, who also dealt with infidelity early in her marriage. Excellent acting, very realistic, very truthful. I could feel the characters’ inner anxieties and emotions and longings. Love, infidelity, remorse, disillusion.”

Back in the Eisenhower era tail fins were de rigueur on luxury cars. Before their heyday the only kind of fins you’d see anywhere were shark fins (or more welcomely dolphin fins) while you swam at the beach (Jersey to Florida back east, San Luis Obispo to Mexico in California). Nowadays the only fins that are commercially available in any form are the plastic surfboard or boogie-board kind. I know because I was thinking about buying a pair for my recently purchased Morey boogey board, which I just bought a special leash for down at Rider Shack. I’m mentioning this because I’ve found it extremely bothersome that when you research boogey board fins online you mostly get listings for what I’ve always called flippers — i.e., simulated frog-foot slip-ons. The second problem is that if you check retail boogie-board fins cost a bit more than $100 plus labor costs to install them. I don’t think that a dilletante like myself needs them anyway.

Yesterday Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported that Baby Driver‘s Ansel Elgort will play John F. Kennedy in a new version of P.T. 109, titled Mayday 109. I immediately rolled my eyes. Elgort would have made a note-perfect Han Solo — he’s got the slightly brash attitude, the smug assurance and the guy-ness. Han Solo directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord, not to mention producer Kathy Kennedy and the Disney brass, were dead blind not to see this. (Instead they hired a 5′ 9″, beady-eyed Rabbinical student with a gloomy countenance.) But as JFK? Probably not.

No one can play the 35th President and emerge fully unscathed. They either don’t look right or they overdo the accent or both. Elgort’s main advantage is that he’s matinee-idol handsome and slender like Kennedy, although he’s slightly disadvantaged by being too tall at 6′ 3″, or three inches higher than the Real McCoy. On top of which no one has ever quite gotten the voice, and I doubt if anyone ever will. The only way to do it properly is to (a) digitally edit and reconstitute audio recordings so that JFK himself “speaks” the dialogue or (b) hire a gifted JFK mimic to dub Elgort a la Vincent D’Onofrio‘s as Orson Welles in Ed Wood.

Why does anyone want to remake P.T. 109 in the first place? The story isn’t that riveting, for one thing. It’s just about an accidental WWII collision (Kennedy’s P.T. boat getting sliced in half by a larger Japanese ship in the dead of night) followed by some marathon swimming and then carving out an S.O.S. message on a coconut shell, blah blah. By current action-thriller standards it has next to no juice. It even seemed tepid and low-energy by the standards of 1963, which is when the original Cliff Robertson version was released. Jack L. Warner presumed it would be commercial due to JFK’s Oval Office occupancy, but who the hell cares now except for long-of-tooth boomers?

As a title, Baby Driver is definitely too literal-minded. It would have been cool if Ansel Elgort‘s character wasn’t literally called “Baby” and if he wasn’t a gifted getaway driver, but this is precisely the case in Edgar Wright‘s film. Baby Driver isn’t quite on the painful level of John Singleton‘s Poetic Justice (’93), but it’s close.

The tendency to literalize or de-poeticize movie titles hit me for the first time in ’84 when Taylor Hackford decided to drop the original Out of The Past title by calling his remake Against All Odds. Out of the Past stirs and haunts; Against All Odds promises some kind of pitched battle or macho grudge match. If only Witness had been titled Amish Hide-Out: Be Careful Among The English or One-Eyed Jacks had been called Rio Settles Score.

Today’s assignments: (a) Name other titles that have embraced explicit references rather than metaphors or allusions and (b) name titles that were too metaphorical or vague, and could have used simpler, plainer terminology.

In the twittered view of the great Guillermo del Toro, Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver “is a fable, complete with its very own Disney prince and princess, but is also rock n’ roll. Meaning [that] the magic exists in a dirty, genre-tainted world. The film is incredibly precise, [and] flawlessly executed [down] to its smallest detail: breathtaking Russian arm shots, real-world car mount and foot chases executed with the vigor and bravado of a Gene Kelly musical. This is An American In Paris on wheels and crack smoke.”

Everything GDT says is perceptive, excitingly phrased and, by my perceptions, accurate as far as it goes, but like the South by Southwest critics who couldn’t stop wetting themselves when they saw Baby Driver last March, Guillermo sidesteps the final truth of the matter, which is that Baby Driver, after sticking to a buoyant musical-fairytale scheme that feels right for 90 minutes or so, assassinates itself with an injection of foam-at-the-mouth, logic-free, crash-bam-boom insanity over the last 15 or so minutes.

I explained it all last Friday. It’s certainly worth catching for the portion that works (roughly the first five-sixths), but be prepared for that horrible moment when the wheels come off and Baby Driver spews all over itself.

Eight years ago Michael Nyqvist was the 48 year-old star of the hugely successful Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy (Tattoo + The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), playing the conflicted good-guy journalist Mikael Blomkvist with skill and feeling. (Daniel Craig played the same character in David Fincher‘s 2011 Tattoo remake.) He went on to play lead villains in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (as Kurt Hendricks) and John Wick (as Viggo Tarasov). Now he’s dead — a victim of lung cancer. Only 56 years old.

From “Dear Cops — Please Capture or Shoot These Assholes,” posted from Cannes on 5.26.17: “Yesterday nearly every Cannes critic went apeshit over Benny and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time, a visceral, high-crank crime drama about a couple of low-life, bank-robbing brothers, Robert Pattinson‘s Connie and Benny Safdie‘s Nick, running around Queens. Nick is basically Lenny from Of Mice and Men, and right away I was going ‘oh, Jesus, I have to hang out with some stammering…I’m sorry, challenged guy for the next 100 minutes? This guy can’t put two sentences together without sweating from the mental strain.’

“Then it turned out I didn’t have to — fine. But I was definitely stuck with Pattinson’s Connie, whose brain cell count is only slightly higher than his brother’s.

“The Safdie brothers know how to whip action into a lather and keep the kettle boiling, and there’s no doubt that Good Time felt like the punchiest and craziest film to play during the festival, which is why so many critics, feeling underwhelmed by a relatively weak lineup, responded with such fervor. But I can’t abide stupidity, and after 40 minutes of watching these simpletons hold up a bank and run around and ruthlessly use people to duck the heat I was praying that at least one of them would get shot or arrested. I can roll with scumbags and sociopaths, but I need a little something I can relate to or identify with. If the repulsion factor is too strong, I check out. And that’s what I did in this instance. And good riddance.”

Leave women athletes alone. Don’t go there. They have their own realm, and it is what it is. Don’t try and crash it with an unfair comparison. Yes, Serena Williams might not measure up to a lot of young male tennis players today….so? Note to McEnroe: You’re only 57, dude. You could stand a little touch-up work, the kind no one would notice. Just saying.

I caught The Big Sick for a third time last night (Tatyana hadn’t seen it), and in the Cinerama Dome yet — not a good place to see almost anything due to that image-distorting Cinerama screen. (Remember that Alan Parker had a less curvy screen installed before he’d allow Evita to play there in ’96.) The Big Sick plays very nicely the third time. Nothing felt the least bit tired or overbaked — it still feels fresh and natural and sharp as a tack. On top of which I understood more of it this time. There’s a lot of tossed-off vocal-fry muttering going on (especially from Zoe Kazan), but the Cinerama Dome sound system was good enough to overcome the psst-psst-nep-nyep tonalities.

We were talking about how much we liked Holly Hunter as Zoe’s mom. When we got home I persuaded Tatyana to watch Broadcast News (’87), which she’d never seen and in which Hunter gave her career-best performance.

Yesterday Page Six reported that Daniel Day Lewis‘s post-Phantom Thread game plan is to become a dressmaker or, you know, possibly a dress designer of some sort. The 60 year-old actor fell for the art of making women’s dresses while researching haute couture fashion in preparation for playing the legendary Charles James. James is the focus of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, which Focus Features will open on 12.25. It’s about James’ high-time career in the ’50s. While James operated out of New York City during that decade, Phantom Thread is strangely set in London.

DDL’s career-switch decision makes perfect sense, of course. Instead of building upon a brilliant body of work as a universally admired actor of unquestioned genius, he will henceforth devote himself to dressmaking, a notoriously fickle and demanding profession that only a relative few have truly excelled at, and as a journeyman at that.

Question: From my moron perspective I’m presuming that dressmaking is more or less about literally constructing dresses on your hands and knees with sewing needles between your teeth, and that dress designing is where the inspirational part comes in…right? And that DDL has opted to be a grunt who handles the material and thread and whatnot? Or is he looking to design dresses as James did? I’m presuming he’s intending to primarily design but also roll up his sleeves when the occasion demands and literally cut and stitch the damn things together. I don’t know anything. I love high-end men’s fashion (particularly shoes) but I never cared about women’s stuff. What straight guy does?

Who said Lewis is particularly gifted as a designer? Who has told him “you have promise, young man…you should develop your skills!” Where are DDL’s original designs so we, the popcorn-munching audience, can assess whether he’s just as talented in this new calling as he is at acting? I respect Lewis’s willingness to explore new terrain at an advanced age, but c’mon, dude…what are the odds that you’re the new Yves Saint Laurent or Christian Dior or Stella McCartney?

John Malkovich has a suit-designing business.

Boil it down and this is the latest what-the-fuck?, should-he-stay-with-the-same-medication-or-see-a new-doctor? move from an actor known for his mercurial eccentricity.

Remember that Lewis quit acting for five years in the 1990s to become a Florence-based shoemaker under the tutelage of Stefano Bemer.