For the time being Kino Lorber is keeping mum about their forthcoming Bluray of Carl Reiner‘s Where’s Poppa (’70), which will pop on 7.19. I haven’t seen this bizarre, occasionally hilarious Jewish-guilt comedy in eons, and I know it hasn’t had any kind of upgrade since it appeared as an MGM/UA DVD 14 years ago. As it’s out of print, a new copy of the DVD will set you back $60 so the cheaper Bluray will make sense.

Nervy for its time, Where’s Poppa? is coarse and extreme and way beyond the current limits of politically acceptable humor.

Robert Klane‘s screenplay is about a 30ish Manhattan-residing attorney (George Segal) who wants to put his highly eccentric, bordering-on-senile mother (Ruth Gordon) in an old-folks home but feels hamstrung by a pledge made to his dying dad that he’d never do that. His married brother Sid (a non-toupee’d Ron Leibman) made the same pledge and guilt-trips Segal along these lines. The issue is forced when Segal falls in love with a nurse (Trish Van Devere) whom he hires to take care of Gordon.

There’s a running gag about a trio of black Central Park muggers (one of them played by SNL‘s Garrett Morris) accosting Leibman and stealing his clothes and later forcing him into taking part in a half-rape. I remember one of the muggers saying to Leibman, “Lookie, man…everybody’s gotta make a buck, right? So how’re we supposed to make a buck when you walk across Central Park but you don’t bring any bread?”

I also seem to recall Van Devere telling Segal about some guy she’d gone out with who “went ca-ca” on the bed.

The Guardian‘s David Smith has posted a 4.9 piece about how residents of Chappaqua, the leafy, well-tended hamlet 45 minutes north of New York City, feel about Bill and Hillary Clinton, who moved there after leaving the White House in January 2000.

Excerpt: “Stan Amberg, 81, a retired lawyer, recalled sitting with his coffee and newspaper at Lange’s Little Store, a deli where the Clintons often take breakfast away in brown paper bags, and where the former President introduced himself one day.

“He came over and said, ‘My name’s Bill, mind if have coffee with you?’ He’s very approachable and he loves kids. He gets down on his knees and talks eye to eye with them. She can’t do that. She has this issue with engaging. I don’t know if it’s an inherent problem with her personality.'”

Smith re-posts a recent Hillary quote: “I am not a natural politician, in case you haven’t noticed, like my husband or President Obama.”

I don’t know (or care to know) the address of the Clinton abode but you know what’s odd? Consult Google Maps and you’ll see a highlighted designation that says U.S. Secret Services along with an address (480 Bedford Road, Chappaqua, NY 10514). You’d think the Secret Service guys who shadow the Clintons would want to keep things on the down low, no?

To fix HE’s Sony 4K sound-synch problem all I have to do is buy and apply the following items: (1) Catchin’ Synch, a sound-synch testing app that can be installed on any half-decent audio-visual receiver ($14), (2) a Marantz NR15065 Audio/Video Surround Receiver with Bluetooth and Wifi ($500) and (3) an Oppo BDP-103 player, which allows the viewer to adjust sound-synch issues backward or forward ($500). Never in my life have I been fleeced like this, and the nightmare isn’t even over. I’m in hell.

I hope to never again hear of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side Of The Wind. Nor will I ever again speak of Filip Jan Rymsza or Oja Kodar or Sasha Welles or anyone else involved in this infuriating, godforsaken project. Okay, I’ll discuss/mention Peter Bogdanovich or Frank Marshall or any other peripheral players who have distinguished themselves in some other realm but the movie, which has never existed in any kind of coherent, showable, arresting form and may never in fact attain that condition, no longer exists for me.

If The Other Side Of The Wind ever appears on streaming or Bluray or in theatres I will strenuously ignore it. I’m sick of it. I’m off the boat. If anyone comes up to me and says “I will give you a thousand tax-free dollars if you’ll just sit down and watch The Other Side of The Wind,” I will look them straight in the eye like Ted Cruz does when he’s talking to TV reporters, smile, gently place my hand on their shoulder and politely refuse.

I donated $100 of my hard-earned money to help get this scattered, disjointed mess of a would-be film restored and assembled but that was then and this is now. I’ve washed my hands of it, and I’m urging everyone else to think about making a similar pledge. All together now, “To hell with The Other Side Of The Wind!

I’m all tapped out as a result of another horrible day in which I’ve tried to solve the myriad 4K sound-synch problems as far as the Oppo BD-93 Bluray and 4K Roku apps are concerned and more particularly have suffered yet another Direct TV technician miscommunication. I’m in the deepest and hottest cavern of hell right now, but I have to least say that Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation is one of the creepiest and most bizarrely chilling yuppie dinner party flicks of my lifetime. It’s not just a thriller but a conveyer of seriously demonic vibes. All my life I’ve secretly hated guys who smile as they raise wine glasses at parties and talk about how everyone should enjoy themselves as they celebrate their good fortune, and The Invitation reacquainted me with that. People who try to instruct you how to feel or who urge you to feel a certain way about this or that are, I’ve found, generally evil. That’s all I’ll say in this context. No specifics, no plot elements, no hints — they’ll only get in the way. Just see The Invitation any way you can this weekend (it’s viewable on Amazon and iTunes as well as select theatres) before the word gets out. I’m telling you it’s a stand-out. It’s also shot to the top of my Best of ’16 list. I’m so burnt from today’s head-pounding misfortunes that I’m quitting for the day and going on a long walk to flush my head out. But see this film.

Following last night’s Arclight screening of Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation, Kusama sat for a q & a with actress Kathryn Hahn.

We’ve all felt susceptible to certain dubious filmmakers, actors or genres. Movies that aren’t good for you and will only stunt your growth, but you watch them anyway. For some people it’s mid ’40s to mid ’50s big-studio musicals. For others it’s Asian martial-arts cinema. Some have a thing for lavishly made, large-format period-spectacle flicks (Quo Vadis to The Fall of the Roman Empire). For guys like Quentin Tarantino it’s ’70s grindhouse flicks with a special nod to blacksploitation. My Bluray weaknesses are for (a) film noir and (b) pre-1970 films that have almost no grain like Criterion’s Sweet Smell of Success (or which have been tastefully DNR’ed a la Universal’s Psycho and Cape Fear) and have been mastered at 1.66:1. I’ll buy almost (I say “almost)) any Bluray that fits those criteria regardless of quality. What other bad habits have you in their grip?

Recapping: Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Demolition (Fox Searchlight, 4.8) “is about a youngish, day-dreamy investment banker (Jake Gyllenhaal) succumbing to all kinds of weird, self-absorbed behavior as a way of dealing with his wife’s car-crash death. He doesn’t grieve as much go inward. He ignores his job, grows a stubble beard, becomes enamored of fixing machinery and then tearing things down.

“In so doing he begin to increasingly mystify and then piss off his father-in-law (Chris Cooper). He also slides into a nonsexual but connected relationship with a customer service rep (Naomi Watts) for a vending machine company. She has a somewhat alienated son (Judah Lewis) and a big, suspicious, more-than-a-little-angry live-in boyfriend.

“A lot of stuff gets taken apart and trashed and sledge-hammered in a kind of acted-out, fuck-it-all, let-it-fall-down way, but there’s one demolition scene that really didn’t go down very well with me, and which prompted some in the audience to groan and cry out.

“It happens when Gyllenhaal and Lewis completely wreck everything in his super-expensive home in the New York-area suburbs — furniture, walls, kitchen, music system, 70” flatscreen. “What kind of shit is this?,” I said to the screen. ‘Who wrecks a house like this? If Jake does’t want to live there, sublet it or sell it or whatever. But don’t destroy a perfectly nice house for some petty emotional reason…fuck is wrong with you, man?’

Today Filip Jan Rymsza, the tight-lipped, publicity-averse organizer of an attempt to restore Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind (upon which work has never seemingly begun) issued a bizarre non-statement. He did so in response to Ray Kelly‘s 4.4 piece on wellesnet.com that stated (a) Netflix has been negotiating to come aboard for the last few months but that (b) Welles’ longtime squeeze and partner Oka Kodar is still making trouble and delaying things by demanding this and that. (I riffed on Kelly’s article last Tuesday.)

Rymsza declined to mention the possible Netflix deal (“Naturally our conversations with potential partners have been confidential”) but says “we have been very close, at times a week or weeks away, but, through no fault of our own ” — i.e., because of that Croatian banshee Oja Kodar — “those weeks turned into months.”

Then he said “we are working tirelessly to finish the film”, which sounds questionable as he doesn’t seem to have the money to even halfway complete, much less finish, the process.

Kelly’s piece stated that Rymsza has spent $70K in legal fees and has squandered $40K on Sasha Welles‘ 11-week stay in Los Angeles in early ’15 that yielded nothing. Subtract this $110K from the $406K raised by the OSOTW Indiegogo campaign, and there’s less than $300K remaining. This against a $1.695 million pre-Netflix budget to compete the film means that Rymsza is $1.4 million in the hole.

So when they write Seth Rogen‘s obit in 2060 or thereabouts the first thing they’ll mention is that (a) he and Evan Goldberg pretty much triggered the Sony hack with their lampooning of Kim Jong-Un in The Interview and (b) after becoming a name-brand star with Knocked Up he mostly made low-rent throwaway comedies and (c) when all was said and done the only films that he could look back upon with any pride were The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Pineapple Express, 50/50 and to some extent Steve Jobs. But he made a lot of money, smoked a lot of weed and lived what most people would call a fairly happy life.

The 4K sound-synch issues still haven’t gone away. They keep teasing, nudging me, spitting in my ear. Things look pretty good on the Sony 930C 65″ 4K when I watch Blurays off the Oppo, but I can’t stop thinking that the dialogue is just slightly behind the lips. (Maybe a half second late.) Movies on the Roku Amazon app are definitely unsynched but things are okay when I watch them on Vudu. It’s driving me crazy. The regular Direct TV seems close to perfect but home-installer John Tillett, who dropped by Monday morning, said if I really want to dispense with these problems I need to buy and install some kind of sound facilitator (cost: $1K plus installation fee) which will allow me to adjust the sound/lips timing from each source. I said yes because I need to stop weeping and pulling my hair out.

Tillett also said if I want to erase any notion of a sound-synch problem with Direct TV I need to get a Direct TV 4K HR54 genie instead of what I had been given by a Direct TV guy a month or so ago, which was not a genie but a “slave.” So I went down to Direct TV and ordered this, and today a Direct TV installation guy with a Middle Eastern accent showed up to install what he called a plain old HD genie. “But it’s not just a genie but a 4K HR54 genie,” I said. “There’s a difference. Do you understand? I didn’t order just a boilerplate HD genie.” His face told me everything. He had an idea of what I might be talking about but not too much beyond that. We tried to exchange thoughts but his English was so impenetrable I gave up and asked to speak to his superior.

The Middle-Eastern guy (I’ve dealt with natives of Marrakech who’ve looked and sounded exactly like him) called his superior three times and finally got him, and they conversed in his native tongue (Farsi? Arabic?) for about five or six minutes. And then he hung up. “Why did you hang up?” I said to the guy. “I said I wanted to talk to your superior.” Rashad tried to explain something in his rambling-ass way but I wouldn’t have it. “Why did you hang up?” I repeated at a slightly higher volume. I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump but I won’t have a crucial piece of audio-visual equipment installed by a guy I can’t understand, much less have a discussion with. “That’s it…sorry but we’re done,” I said. I pointed to the door. “Don’t touch me,” he said as he slipped out.

A coding error erased 80% of this review earlier today — sorry:  I didn’t laugh at Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone‘s The Boss (Universal, 4.8), but I respect the conviction that informs it. Melissa McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, a self-hating, emotionally blocked, Type-A butch boss who reminded me, frankly, of two or three Hollywood-serving women I could mention, and she really owns the Lucretia McEvil. On top of which The Boss delivers almost no conventional late-in-the-second-act softening moments. Okay, Michelle grows a slight heart toward the end but only a little bitty one. Mostly she just bitches out in the ugliest way imaginable, and it’s pretty damn great for that.

This is one pissy, misanthropic, “we hate everyone and everything including our own selfish selves” diarrhea comedy. Okay, it softens up here and there (no pun intended) but you can almost ignore these portions. It suggests from time to time that little girls (particularly Ella Anderson‘s Rachel, who plays the 11 year-old daughter of Kristen Bell‘s marshmallow mom) aren’t so bad but it also says other girls are filled with just as much poison as the adults. Love it! And it romantically pairs Bell with the fat-assed Tyler Labine, a jowly Canadian comedian who would never score with a Kristen Bell-type in real life, but The Boss runs with Judd Apatow‘s schlumpies-and-dumpies aesthetic and does it anyway. Plus it delivers an extra-creepy Peter Dinklage performance…I can’t go into it, too strange to describe.

The Boss doesn’t make you laugh but it does make the case for no-laugh funny like no film since Ishtar. It has a rancid attitude and a belief system that is 100% bile and hostility, and you have to hand it to McCarthy/Falcone, seriously, for embracing this and never backing away from it, and for throwing in all kinds of perverse sexual seasonings. This movie hates you, hates God, hates itself…the only thing it doesn’t hate are the little girls but halfway through there’s a savage street rumble between a goody-two-shoes girl scout troupe and a snarly, opportunistic girl gang run by Michelle, and what results is pretty close to The Road Warrior.