Last night I saw Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Lodger (’27), a vaguely kinky, London-based parlor drama about the terror caused by a Jack The Ripper-type killer, called “The Avenger,” who mysteriously murders attractive blondes on Tuesday evenings. (We’re not told if he’s a stabber or a strangler — maybe he just eyeballs his victims and they drop dead on the spot?) Suspicions quickly surface that a recent arrival at a London boarding house — a tall, good-looking but oddly behaving fellow (Ivor Novello) — may be the killer. Hitch encourages you to weigh this possibility for a good 75% of the film until revealing that Novello is just a queer duck who’s looking to find the man who killed his sister. Novello’s innocence is first hinted at when Daisy (June Tripp), the daughter of the boarding-house owners as well as a model, begins to feel affection and attraction for him, which understandably infuriates her much-older detective boyfriend (played by Malcolm Keen, who was nudging 40 during filming but looked closer to 45 if not 50) and adds to…well, the uncertainty factor, I suppose.

The Lodger was the first Hitchcock film about an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime. It was also Hitch’s first commercial success (it pretty much launched his career) and was also the first film in which he performed a walk-on. (He’s seen from the rear during a scene in which the presses of a major newspaper are printing news of The Avenger’s latest killing.) But this is a rather stiff and primitive little film — more “interesting” than good. Portions are nicely framed and focused, and yes, Hitchcock manages to implant a notion that for certain wackos there’s a kind of erotic charge that accompanies the murder of pretty girls. But he was only 27 during filming with only two or three previous films under his belt, and he just didn’t have enough knowledge or polish at this stage in his life. Not enough, certainly, to satisfy a guy like me watching The Lodger 88 years hence.

A clip from Marc Meyers‘ How He Fell In Love, a mumblecore infidelity drama that will screen at the Los Angeles Film Festival (6.10 thru 6.18), surfaced yesterday on Deadline. Pic is about a 20something downhead musician (Matt McGorry) falling into an affair with a married yoga teacher in her 40s (Amy Hargreaves). After watching this scene three times on headphones I began to understand parts of it. The sound technician was presumably following standard mumblecore protocol by making the dialogue sound murky and muffled — a word here, a phrase there. Hargreaves says something about “pent-up energy” and the fact that her marriage is child-less, and then she says, “Sissahduhnya sleeping with two men at the same time.” (The line actually reads “It’s not like I can be sleeping with two men at the same time.”) And then she says, “Does that make you happy?” (What kind of a dumb-ass line is that? Their affair has only just begun and therefore still hormonally flush, so why would McGorry be “happy” when she tells him she can’t go stereo?) In any event McGorry ups the mumblecore ante by replying “Huhhrburruhrrnn.” His actual line: “I can’t be jealous of your husband.” I don’t want to get bogged down in describing my hate flashes toward movies that make me struggle to hear their dialogue, but my feelings along these lines are very strong. Offer optional subtitles for streaming and Bluray and the problem goes away. Their call.

I know what it’s like to be dead. I know what it is to be sad. ‘Cause you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born…

Newsday‘s Rafer Guzman: “Imagine a candlelit dinner prepared by a top chef and served on the sands of a sparkling beach. Now imagine that the dinner has been boiling on the stove for something like two years and you’ve got Aloha, [which has] been overcooked into an unidentifiable, inedible mush. Aloha is one of those films whose characters behave and speak so irrationally that they no longer make any human sense at all.”

Variety‘s Andrew Barker: “Unbalanced, unwieldy and at times nearly unintelligible, Aloha is unquestionably Cameron Crowe’s worst film. Paced like a record on the wrong speed, or a Nancy Meyers movie recut by an over-caffeinated Jean-Luc Godard, the film bears all the telltale signs of a poorly executed salvage operation disfigured in the editing bay.”

Seattle Times‘ Moira McDonald: “Well-meaning but nearly unwatchable. Where’d you go, Cameron Crowe?”

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Shari Linden: “With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand. As with another major miss by the writer-director, 2005’s Elizabethtown, the new film has the awkward feel of a repository for everything but the kitchen sink. The chemistry is mostly forced, the story without an emotional core. And though Crowe’s facility for language can be striking, here it never moves beyond self-consciousness.”

Prague is downshifty enough to leave room for something I probably wouldn’t get around to in Los Angeles — a screening of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (’27) with live musical accompaniment. I’ve seen nearly all of the worthwhile Hitchcock films, but not this one. Tonight at 7 pm, or three hours hence.

Kate, a 20 year-old English-speaking waitress who works at Restaurace U Bile Kravy, an excellent little steak joint not far from Wenceslas Square.

Reviews of Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha (Sony, 5.29) will finally pop later today. One presumes that reactions will be mostly non-adoring (here’s a review by The Stranger‘s Erik Henriksen). And yet a seasoned, been-around guy who attended Tuesday night’s all-media says that (a) it’s actually a fairly pleasing film and (b) his wife called it the most engaging she’s seen this year. (This will almost certainly turn out to be a minority view.) I won’t see Aloha until I return to the States on Monday…well, actually Tuesday as I’ll be catching a 7 pm Manhattan all-media of Entourage on 6.1.

In any event I’ve been thinking about the beefs against Crowe’s film by the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, which are basically that the Hawaii-based film ignores the multicultural nature of society in general (i.e., not just Hawaiian) by telling a story that is pretty much entirely about white people — Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin.

“Caucasians only make up 30% of the population of Hawaii, but from watching this film, you’d think they made up 99%,” a MANAA press release reads. “This comes in a long line of films — The Descendants, 50 First Dates, Blue Crush, Pearl Harbor — that uses Hawaii for its exotic backdrop but goes out of its way to exclude the very people who live there. It’s an insult to the diverse culture and fabric of Hawaii.”

MANAA is mostly right. Nativism and multiculturalism are the reigning theologies today, and anyone making a film about a group of white people in a region or country in which the vast majority are non-white risks seeming a bit jaded, and certainly out of step with the times. On the other hand it should be allowable for Crowe, a white guy who grew up in Wonderbread San Diego in the ’50s and ’60s, to make a movie about a social realm in which he used to live in, and in which he probably to some extent still lives in in his head.

From Peter Debruge’s 1.31.15 Sundance review: “Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for Kevin Bacon’s corrupt small-town sheriff to leave the keys inside his unlocked patrol car. And maybe he should have thought twice before tossing his gunbelt in the backseat and stuffing a beaten-and-bound criminal in the trunk. But all those bad decisions make for B-movie gold in Jon Watts’ Cop Car (Focus World, 8.7), a tight, easily marketable genre exercise that pushes its lean premise and all-around disrespect for authority to entertaining extremes, taking wicked delight in imagining what might happen if two 10-year-olds were to stumble upon an abandoned police cruiser and take it for a joyride.

The Aero is still my all-time favorite Los Angeles theatre — excellent repertory selections, first-rate digital projection. Closely followed by the Egyptian. But I won’t see 35mm shows at either venue for the simple reason that with very few exceptions, 35mm projection almost always guarantees a degraded experience. But the Vista, a first-run vintage theatre hanging by its nails, is probably the best place to watch a film in an old-timey atmosphere. (I’m not counting the downtown LA venues that occasionally host special-event screenings.) Digital plus 35mm, beautiful marquee, haunting pre-war decor, great-tasting popcorn, good enough seats. Cinefamily is my fourth favorite venue, especially if I’m able to sit in those cushy armchair-like seats near the front. For whatever reason I almost never think about going to the Nuart these days. And way, way, way down at the bottom of the list is Quentin Tarantino‘s New Beverly Cinema, which only shows 35mm and is therefore committed to perpetuating a kind of ’70s nostalgia time-machine atmosphere. If I never see another 35mm film it’ll be too soon. And I’m speaking as a former projectionist. And yet there’s something oddly alluring about seeing Fritz Lang‘s The Big Heat there on Wednesday or Thursday, 6.3 or 6.4. I know it won’t look or sound as good as the Bluray, but just once I want to see The Big Heat in a theatre.

In a 1.24.15 review from the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith called James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour (A24, 7.31) “by far the most moving and profound odd-couple buddy movie [to play here], with a funny, lightly intellectual script by Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist Donald Margulies that should merit heavy awards consideration. Falling halfway between Almost Famous and My Dinner with Andre, this love song to the art of conversation is about a Rolling Stone journalist, David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) who is infatuated with the postmodernist novelist David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel ‘Infinite Jest’ and begs for the opportunity to profile the author, who’s about to leave his snowbound rural home in Illinois for a five-day book tour to Minneapolis.” I tried to fit this film into my Sundance schedule but stuff got in the way. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Okay, maybe I didn’t try hard enough on some level. Maybe I don’t relate all that well to guys who who have trouble controlling their appetites or who live in Illinois or who off themselves. But I wanted to see it. Want to, I mean.

Consequence of Sound’s Michael Roffman, filed on 3.16.15: “Not since Anton Corbijn’s Control, his excellent 2007 retelling of the life and death of Ian Curtis and Joy Division, has a biopic felt so authentic and conditional of its own subject. Screenwriters Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner lean heavily on a number of must-read bookmarks in Brian Wilson’s career, but [director Bill] Pohlad adds a surreal touch, capturing the ’60s druggy landscapes and Wilson’s manic inner voices with dreamy perspectives Love & Mercy leaves the darkest hours of Wilson’s life — his weight gain, his drug abuse, and his rigorous early therapy sessions alongside Eugene Landy — for the imagination or extra-curricular studies. The film has enough struggles to resolve, specifically how Wilson’s love for music nearly crushed him, and how love eventually saved him. The way Pohlad orchestrates this strange dichotomy on-screen is about as beautiful and heartwarming as any of The Beach Boys’ best material. And when your favorite songs bubble up or weave through Atticus Ross’s unique score, the marriage of sound and screen will win your tears, your smiles and your soul. To paraphrase Wilson, that’s what you need tonight.”

I’ll grudgingly vote for Hillary Clinton in the end, but I don’t like her that much. She’s okay in a corporately liberal, center-right sort of way, and like everyone else I love the idea of a woman succeeding Barack Obama. But I really love who Bernie Sanders is — a man of balls and integrity and blunt truths. I would honestly prefer that he become the next President, or someone like him. But he’s the guy — he’s it. He won’t beat Hillary in the primaries, of course, but for the time being and the foreseeable future I’m a total Bernie guy, and that means donating and wearing a Bernie for President T-shirt and all the rest of it. But I wish they would make European-style Bernie T-shirts like they do for women. I won’t wear a coarse, inelegant, low-thread-count T-shirt for any reason, Bernie Sanders included.