Wanna guess how many Sundance reviewers of Eat That Question mentioned the boxy aspect ratio? So far I’ve counted one — a review by Variety‘s Dennis Harvey that mentions “archaic” video formats. I haven’t seen the doc so maybe there are portions shot in standard 16:9 but the trailer is all 1.37:1, and that, for me, is a deciding factor.

My 5.16 Cannes review reposted in recognition of a new trailer: “Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society is an attractively composed period dramedy (a few laughs but hardly a torrent) that plays it mild and steady and familiar. But it’s a fine Woody hit-list thing with a compelling if familiar moral undertow. There’s no way anyone who’s even half-acquainted with the Allen realm is going to be disappointed. Is it a bust-out in the vein of Midnight in Paris? No, but it’ll do until the next one comes along. It’s fine, it’s good — just don’t expect any big surprises.

“Set in Los Angeles and New York over a two-year period in the mid ’30s, Cafe Society is a romantic triangle piece mixed with a hard-knocks, get-tough saga. It’s witty more than funny, but it’s really great when the laughs land. How many good laughs does it have? Not more than 20 or 25. I laughed maybe 10 or 12 times but I didn’t mind because it’s not about hah-hah but fuck-me.

“It’s a romance-gone-wrong thing that deals with sadness, moral ambiguity, disappointment. It’s too mired in hurt to be called a light-touch thing, but it does kind of glide along in a way that lets you know nothing awful or grotesque will occur.

Listen to Steven Spielberg’s 5.25 Harvard commencement address [below] and then listen to Oliver Stone’s commencement address at UConn, which was posted earlier this month. The contrast is noteworthy. At the end of his address Stone tells the UConn-ers to “take a year off, be a bum, be a janitor, work with your hands, travel to some distant land second or third class” and basically break out of their entitled attitudes and smug presumptions. Can you imagine Spielberg suggesting this to the Harvard grads? Or to anyone?

The Infiltrator is a Broad Green theatrical release? Why does the trailer seem to be selling a Netflix mini? A good cast — Bryan Cranston, Benjamin Bratt, John Leguizamo, Diane Kruger, Amy Ryan, Jason Isaacs, Olympia Dukakis — doing another “take down Pablo Escobar’s empire” tale. (How many Pablo flicks have there been over the last couple of years?).  You  might be a bit concerned that the lead lawmen are an oil-and-water team, a straightlaced, no-fucking-around federal agent named Bob Mazur (Cranston) and a streetwise Latino with an occasional fuck-around attitude named Emir Abreu (Leguizamo) — that in itself spells trouble. Boilerplate: “Mazur risks it all by building a case that leads to indictments of 85 drug lords and the corrupt bankers who cleaned their dirty money, along with the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, one of the largest money-laundering banks in the world,” etc. Directed by Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer). Pic pops on 7.13.

A couple of days ago Steven Spielberg delivered a modest, unassuming, mild-mannered commencement speech to Harvard University’s graduating class of ’16. A less secure man would’ve tried to present a cultivated, ultra-brainy front in deference to Harvard’s ivy-league reputation, but he played it simple and straight. “I am not the world’s best educated film director,” he more or less said, “but I’ve been around and done pretty well for myself and here’s what I believe is important.” And that’s fine.

He urged the students to find “a villain to vanquish” when in reality the thing they’ll need to fight the most in their lives will be their own tendencies toward selfishness; ditto that of their friends, neighbors and business colleagues.

“My job is to create a world that lasts two hours,” Spielberg said. “Your job is to create a world that lasts forever.” I’m presuming he meant that they need to do something creative and visionary with their lives in their 20s and 30s while the clay is still moldable. The best of them will continue their dynamic activity into middle and old age, but most of them won’t — let’s face it.

A few hours ago Reuters’ Emily Stephenson reported that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have indeed explored the idea of debating each other sometime before the June 7th California primary, or sometime next week. It could be broadcast on Fox or maybe on The Young Turks YouTube channel, but please, please make this happen. The entire nation would tune in for what would be a highly clarifying, not to mention hugely entertaining, exchange of views.

If it comes together, two things will happen. Bernie will definitely get a boost when he gives it to Trump with both barrels. And Hillary Clinton will almost certainly take a hit if, as expected, she doesn’t take part. But she might. Anything could happen.

If Hillary doesn’t take part she’ll almost certainly risk seeming smug and entitled (she’s already declined to debate Bernie due to the mathematical certainty that she’ll have the Democratic nomination wrapped up after June 7th so why risk it?) or chickenshit over concerns that she’ll be slammed over the Justice Department’s two-day-old Inspector General report that sharply criticized her use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.

The other day I was trying to figure a fresh way of addressing the same old megaplex malaise that the film industry has painted itself into a corner with. The domination, I mean, of superhero flicks, cheap horror, dumb comedies, family fantasies, romcoms and girl-power fables, etc. I’m boring myself by just repeating this. Not counting, of course, (a) the occasional middle-ground surprises, (b) the award-season films that are the oxygen of my life, (c) indie flicks and (d) the social realism and smart adult crime dramas that are pretty much owned by cable and streaming.

Then five days ago a numbers-and-trend analysis by TimStarz04 came along that analogizes Hollywood’s superhero-fantasy obsession with the 1% choke-hold that has increasingly controlled the U.S. economy over the last dozen or so years. The essay lasts 16 minutes (an eternity in the ADD realm) but is worth watching. No brilliant solutions and maybe a bit too much cynicism, but this is definitely the way things are right now.

Portion of 5.25 Weekly Standard summary by Jonathan V. Last: “The big movie studios are undergoing something like the same stresses the American middle-class has experienced over the last two decades: They’re seeing radical increases in the cost of living (for them actor salaries and marketing costs), increased competition from globalization and cheap labor (in the form of cable TV, internet streaming services, and amateur videomakers), yet they’re suffering from stagnant income (meaning that total movie revenues are more or less flat).

“The analogy goes a step further: Just as America has witnessed rising income inequality, the same phenomenon has hit Hollywood movies. Movie revenues aren’t growing much, but a smaller and smaller percentage of movies are claiming a larger and larger share of the total pie. Which movies are the 1 percent in this analogy? Comic book movies.

I thought I made this clear three months ago when the first Deepwater Horizon teaser popped but let’s try again. I really, really don’t like cutaways to anxious, worried wifeys (Kate Hudson in this instance) and scared little daughters while brave daddy (Mark Wahlberg) and his resourceful buddies are grappling with a major catastrophe. Same deal with The Perfect Storm — cut to the girlfriend/wife waiting in a bar for the latest news and the movie stops cold. Deepsix the family stuff while there’s still time. (If Terrence Malick can erase characters and subplots in the editing room, why not Peter Berg?) Just start with Wahlberg and his buddies showing up for work on that fateful day and then just tell the story. How and why the BP shitstorm happened, what they were facing, who got killed and why, and how they finally capped the oil spill.

A friend sent me this photo yesterday. It’s a groaner when someone else says this, but it’s a shame, really, that you can’t really feel the full exuberance while you’re young. I know…shut up! What I mean is not that it’s a shame that things are currently…well, a wee bit dismaying from a biological standpoint (actually not that bad), but that so much of my youth was beset by poverty, anxiety, rejection and fear of what the future might bring (or, more to the point, what it might not bring) that I couldn’t really enjoy it. I was pretty much a lad of constant fretting.

I did enjoy things to some extent (okay, sometimes to a great extent) but so much was weighing me down. I felt the music but the rent was constantly due, not to mention my inability to pay for the serious tune-up that my VW Fastback desperately needed, not to mention all those unpaid parking tickets. Then again I was batting a good .400 or so with the ladies, so there was that. Water under the bridge. But I don’t where I got that sweater or where the hell I got the idea that it would be cool to, you know, wear it.

Today’s cultural highlight was a visit to Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla museum (Krunska 51, Belgrade 11000). The other cultural immersion involved crossing the Saba river to visit high-rise workers apartments built in the Russian “brutalist” style of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. I’m sorry but they didn’t seem depressing enough to me — they were just dull. All hail the ghost of Nikola Tesla.

The ashes of Nikola Tesla, who died in 1943 at age 86, are kept within this small globe-shaped container inside the museum.

There’s nothing like lying on a bed and smelling…what is that? Something rank and musty. Sheets that might have been cleaned but were so cheap to begin with and have been slept on so often by so many dicey travellers (or by grandma and grandpa for decades) that they smell like a Goodwill store. The pillows smelled even worse. I finally used a pillow off the living room couch but that didn’t help much. And the bed was a fold-out so the mattress sagged and groaned and was maybe three inches thick. This is the first Airbnb I’ve ever been this unhappy with, bedding-wise. It’s not Airbnb’s fault — it’s the Belgrade thing. If you look beyond the rich culture and the storied architecture there are some economic and infrastructure issues. It’s been 17 years since the Kosovo War bombing but the city is still recovering in some respects. Am I unhappy here? No — I love it. But the bed is rank.