A glimpse of the cover for a forthcoming Bluray of Harry & Son (Olive, 4.28) took me back for an instant and made me feel good that Robby Benson isn’t around anymore.  Younger moviegoers have no way of knowing what a drag it was during his late-’70s-to-mid-’80s heyday. Benson was the “up” guy who always seemed to portray gentle, earnest, open-hearted types who smiled and hugged and kept in touch with their emotions (Tribute, The Chosen, Running Brave). He was too radiant, his eyes were too blue, he smiled too much, and every time he turned up in a film I would go “oh, Christ.” Benson is now 59, still married to Karla DeVito and apparently a happy, healthy fellow. Good-looking guys always become interesting when age catches up with them. Sidenote: Has there ever been a father-son pairing more genetically disparate than Benson and Paul Newman?

I missed last Tuesday morning’s press screening of Cedric Jimenez‘s The Connection (Drafthouse, 5.15), a fact-based Gallic take on the French Connection-related, Marseille-based heroin drug trade, set in 1975. My next shot is a Friday, 4.24 showing at L.A.’s COLCOA Film Festival. And if I blow that one (I can be brilliant at missing screenings) my last shot before leaving the country is in NYC on Thursday, 5.7. “Considerable theatrical appeal in English-language territories [will be] boosted by both its art house-approved cast and the thematic tie-in to William Friedkin‘s evergreen cop film.” — from John DeFore‘s Hollywood Reporter review, filed from the Toronto Film Festival on 9.10.14.

A producer friend tells me that Todd Haynes‘ Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith‘s 1952 lesbian romance (i.e., initially published under a nom de plume and called “The Price of Salt“) is being called “the female Brokeback Mountain” by an industry crony or two and that “it’s going to get a lot of Oscar buzz early on.” She believes that Cate Blanchett, whose titular character endures most of the story’s heartache and anguish, will be a likely recipient for a Best Actress nomination. The drama will have its big debut next month at the Cannes Film Festival, and open in the fall, of course, with all the attendant Oscar hoopla. Harvey is back in the game!

Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’ Carol, which some are allegedly calling a “female Brokeback Mountain.”

The Cannes reception will have a lot to do with it, of course, but if the script is as good as my friend claims Carol could well end up as a Best Picture contender, and Haynes, who’s been churning out a string of sublimely realized, indie-level films for many years (including the fascinating Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There), could benefit from Best Director chatter. It’s certainly conceivable that Rooney Mara, who plays Carol’s love interest Therese Belivet, might also lure some heat as a Best Supporting Actress contender. Maybe. I don’t know anything.

My pally read Phillis Nagy‘s script sometime back and “loved it. It’s Cate Blanchett’s next Oscar, or at least her next Best Actress nomination. I really think I’m going to be proved right on this one. It’s a great story of a woman in a cold, affluent, unhappy marriage who sleeps around with women and decides to seduce a young engaged shopgirl — and then falls hard for her.”

It’s commonly known that “The Price of Salt” was a kind of autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley). Producer pally: “Women just had to stay hidden in the closet back then and this was Highsmith’s love story.” Or one of them, at least.

Highsmith’s Wiki page notes that “The Price of Salt” was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and that “it garnered wide attention as a lesbian novel because of its rare happy ending. Highsmith didn’t publicly associate herself with this book until late in her life, probably because she had extensively mined her personal life for the book’s content.”

Principal photography on Carol began on 3.2.14 in Cincinnati and wrapped on 4.25.14.

Blanchett and Mara during Blanchett’s big night at the 2014 Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Gotta catch this in IMAX 3D, right? Too big, loud and cool to stream. If only we lived in a Marvel world 24/7. If only we could all share in the profits! Imagine the souls of millions of moviegoers being sucked in by a giant CG Ultron vacuum machine. Imagine smashing a peach ice-cream cone into my forehead. Imagine movies without the influential virus of comic books and videogames and needing to appeal to submental Asian filmgoers. It isn’t hard to do. Imagine a world in which Marnie is rediscovered and celebrated…no, wait, scratch that one.

In a sometimes hilarious 4.17 review of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, Variety‘s Justin Chang begins with the following passage: “Nothing aired by WikiLeaks could possibly be more destructive to Sony’s reputation than the release of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 the sort of movie that goes beyond mere mediocrity to offer possible evidence of a civilization in decline.” Every now and then a Variety critic will depart from the template (make sure observations are dry and sage, focus on craft and commercial potential, mention but don’t dwell on social undercurrents) and let go with a remark like this, which is obviously out of the Hollywood Elsewhere playbook. Since this column began 10 1/2 years ago I’ve pointed over and over (some would say tediously) to indications of a grim cultural slide. I see “evidence of a civilization in decline” in all kinds of films and events on a daily/weekly basis. Anyone would. Everyone probably does. But Chang’s job description specifically forbids “going there.” Slap his palms with a ruler. Note: As we speak Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 has a zero Rotten Tomato rating.

I don’t know how I feel about posting footage of BB-8, but I guess I don’t feel too badly about it. A genuine, organic thing — a creature that was built, puppeteered and performed. I don’t know anyone who would have been happy dealing with R2D2 again. I valued his smarts and spirit  but he always bothered me.  And BB-8…well, I’m impressed.

Three days ago I nearly fell out of my chair when I noticed a Twitter dispute among some Alfred Hitchcock devotees (including occasional HE gadfly Glenn Kenny) about who had been more influential in restoring the reputation of Hitchcock’s Marnie — New Yorker contributor-columnist Richard Brody (a.k.a., tinyfrontrow) or the late Robin Wood, whose fascinating interpretations in his 1965 book “Hitchcock’s Films” did a lot to advance the belief that Hitchcock was a major mainstream artist. Given that Marnie is still a ghastly thing to sit through (I tried doing so a couple of years ago), I wasn’t aware that Marnie‘s reputation had ever been restored. But that’s the foo-foo crowd for you, encamped and gathering firewood on their own tight little island.

How much farther can Quentin Tarantino crawl up his own ass in search of material for his latest cinematic swagger dance? “Pretty much every account of last night’s performance has failed to say whether The Hateful Eight sounded good enough to be a decent movie,” I wrote after the 4.19.14 live reading of an early draft of Tarantino’s latest. “Let me state very clearly and without a shred of a doubt that it didn’t. It’s a fairly minor and almost dismissable thing — a colorful but basically mediocre Tarantino gabfest that mostly happens on a single interior set (i.e., Minnie’s Haberdashery, located somewhere near the Wyoming town of Red Rock during a fierce blizzard), and which unfolds in the vein of The Petrified Forest.

The Hateful Eight “is about a gatherin’ of several tough, mangy hombres sitting around talkin’ and yappin’ and talkin’ and yappin’. And then, just to break up the monotony, a little more talkin’ and yappin’. Along with a little shootin’ and poison-coffee drinkin’ and brutally punchin’ out a female prisoner and a few dozen uses of the word ‘nigger’ (par for the QT course) and swearin’ and talkin’ about fellatin’ and whatever else.

This is not a full-boat trailer — it’s basically another tease. I was in and out (“The force is in my family…I have it, my sister has it, you have it, my father-in-law has it, my cousin has it, my cat has it, my accountant has it”) and waiting for a taste of narrative, some hint of a story…nope. But at least it has that Uncle Festus-and-Chewy moment at the very end — “We’re home.” I’m sorry but I’m detecting too much of a geek-friendly vibe, a little too much of an attitude that seems to say “yah-hooo!” and “yeaah!…this brand-new amusement park is really cool!” J.J. Abrams presumably understands that this movie can’t fully succeed unless it appeals to cineastes who consider The Empire Strikes Back to be the most riveting and distinguished chapter in the Star Wars legend. In other words, it has to satisfy or at least reach out to guys like me. The toenail-fungus geeks are already in the tank. Just saying.

Elizabeth Warren is doing her reputation no favors by sitting out the 2016 election, as she’s said over and over that she’ll do. It doesn’t matter if she can’t beat Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. If the corporate-funded Clinton cakewalks to the nomination the entire country, from progressive liberals to rural yeehaws, will be denied the strong, opinion-shaping conversation about the increasingly one-percent-favoring economy that the 2016 Presidential election demands. Warren will be doing Clinton no favors by not running — the lack of a vigorous challenger will in fact make Clinton, who will almost certainly shoot herself in the foot more than once over the next several months, all the more vulnerable because her message will be unrefined and her campaign will be untested when she faces off against Jeb Bush. An easy-street Clinton will never talk the talk. Warren has to run in order to do that — to state and re-state the facts about how this country has fallen more and more under the control of a lopsided oligarchial system over the past 30-plus years. (Note: This video eloquently states the case, but for some reason it repeats itself starting at the 5:00 mark.)

“Costa-Gavras‘s The Confession is not, I think, a better movie than his prize-winning Z, with which it will inevitably be compared, not only by the critics but also by those members of the public who may look for a repeat performance. The earlier film was a nearly perfect topical thriller whose form pretty much defined the substance of its liberal politics.

“However, because the subject of The Confession is much more complex, much more human, I find it vastly more interesting than Z, even when one is aware of the way Costa-Gavras manipulates attention by the use of flashy cinematic devices that sometimes substitute for sustained drama. It is a horror story of the mind told almost entirely in factual and physical terms, which is something of a contradiction.

The 2015 Cannes Film Festival roster was announced in Paris this morning, and it is what it is. No surprises — all previously spitballed. I’ve been feeling a wee bit glum about what seems to me like an underserving of crackling dimensionality and serious marquee pizazz but let’s try to be optimistic. Among all of the announced (including out of competition or OOC), I feel instinctually drawn to or moderately cranked about the following, in this order: Todd Haynes‘ Carol (yes!), Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man (OOC), George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road (OOC), Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario (sorry but I’ll always be wary of Villeneuve), Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth, Jacques Audiard‘s Erran, Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth (Shakespeare for ADD generation?), Joachim Trier‘s Louder Than Bombs, Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees, Barbet Schroeder‘s Amnesia and Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s The Assassin (special Asian martial-arts suffering potential).