If there’s one thing that injects pure elation into my heart, it’s hearing that the latest bullshit superhero flick (like, for example, Avengers: Age of Ultron) has earned a record-breaking $201.2 million in 44 territories this weekend. And those 44 markets represent only 55% of the international territory, mind. Disney stockholders are going to be gorging on caviar and lighting cigars with $100 bills after the other 45% play the film. On top of which Ultron is expected to pull down $200 million or so when it opens domestically next Friday. Will there be spontaneous street parties held in celebration of this success? I’ll bring the firewood and the kerosene.

At last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, emcee Cecily Strong “created a moment” when she asked all members of the media in the ballroom to raise their hands and take a solemn vow: “I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary’s appearance, because that is not journalism.” She is correct — serious journalism and offering comments or asides about a person’s appearance are separate realms of expression. Do average citizens vote for or against a candidate based on his/her appearance? Absolutely not. JFK‘s youth, matinee-idol looks, perennial tan and thick reddish-brown hair had no effect upon voter likes or dislikes. The fact that the 70something Ronald Reagan didn’t have white or graying hair or a sagging, withered face when he ran for president in ’80…nobody cared. They would have voted for him if he looked like Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo because they were voting for the man, not the appearance. Barack Obama‘s cappucino skin shade had nothing to do with his winning the ’08 and ’12 elections…zip. And Hillary Clinton’s grandma face and puffy eye-bags will have no effect on her popularity during the 2016 Presidential election. The election will be entirely about who she is or is not…about character, cojones and convictions.

Directed by Rufus Norris and written by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork, based on their 2011 National Theatre musical of the same title, London Road is a 2015 British musical mystery thriller about the Steve Wright killings (i.e., “the Suffolk strangler“), which happened in Ipswich in 2006. Wright was convicted in 2008. Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman, Kate Fleetwood, etc.

I’m feeling a teeny bit nervous about getting into a timely screening of Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha (a.k.a., Son of Deep Tiki) before leaving for France on the evening of May 7th. It opens on 5.29, at which point I’ll be in Prague. Three business days in Los Angeles before catching a red-eye for New York, and then I’ll have Thursday and Friday of this week in New York followed by four more days next week (5.4 thru 5.7) before catching a red-eye to Paris. I’m feeling curiously optimistic in my expectations. With all the negative build-up over the last few months, largely due to Amy Pascal’s dismissive comments in that hacked email, the film merely has to be half-decent to seem pretty good. I still have to laugh at that allegedly legit summary of a screening report that Gawker posted, to wit:

Everyone presumably understands by now that the universally praised Love & Mercy (Roadside, 6.5) is a time-flipping drama about the trials of Beach Boys maestro Brian Wilson during two stages in his life — the mid ’60s era when he created Pet Sounds and Smile and the mid ’80s when he began to slowly extricate himself from the clutches of Svengali-like therapist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Young Wilson is briliantly portrayed by Paul Dano; middle-aged Wilson is played just as compellingly by Jon Cusack. It’s interesting, therefore, that the new poster decides to use a likeness of the youngish, real-deal Wilson rather than Dano or Cusack. Which is cool — a concise way of avoiding any confusion.

An assortment of Los Angeles-based film bloggers and print journalists are presently enjoying a gratis, all-expenses-paid visit to the 2015 Riviera Maya Film Festival. The seven-day event is based in Playa del Carmen, the Yucatan beach town 30 miles south of Cancun and 200 miles north of Belize City. I tried to offer my…uhm, “promotional” services to Sunshine Sachs publicist Brooke Blumberg, who did the inviting, but she decided to invite every name-brand columnist in town (Sasha Stone, David Poland, Scott Feinberg, et. al.) except me…thanks! She apparently doesn’t like me or suspects I’d be more trouble than I’m worth or something along these lines. Not true! I am perfectly willing to shill for any film festival that will fly me there and put me up, etc. I write really well and can give the same kind of handjobs that other journalists give when they visit places for free.

Hotel Platinum Yucatan Princess in Playa del Carmen

This morning I got a message from Stone, who’s down there now and staying at the Hotel Platinum Yucatan Princess, which offers the exact same kind of luxurious decor and feelings of well-tended splendor offered by every other luxury hotel in the world. (I stayed in a place almost precisely like this in Hoi An, Vietnam in 2013.) May I ask something? What is the point of travelling to an exotic location if you’re going to stay in a place that’s a carbon-copy duplicate of every other luxury habitat around the world? It’s the Club Med approach to travel…the Kardashian way. Has anyone read Conde Nast Traveller lately? With slight variations every luxury hotel in the world looks exactly the same. The body snatchers have branched out — they’re now designing hotels.

During last night’s televized chat with Diane Sawyer, the transgendered Bruce Jenner said (a) “I’m not gay…I am, as far as I know, heterosexual…I’ve never been with a guy” and (b) that while he’s been attracted to women all his life, that’s no longer the case — “I’m asexual,” Jenner said. So the new Bruce is embracing womanhood for inner identity reasons and not sexual ones. He’s not, in short, Lana Wachowski. The former Larry Wachowski became a woman for the same identity reasons, but also (as I understand things) to become a lesbian. I’ve known a lot of guys in my life who are very feminine and fully at peace with that, and isn’t that the main order of business? To know inner fulfillment and serenity? It’s fine with me if Jenner wants to physically transition in terms of genitalia and breasts and whatnot, but what’s the point if he’s decided to ignore sexuality? What can’t he just be womanly, nurturing and compassionate Bruce with a dick?

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This pic of Jared Leto‘s Joker in David Ayer‘s Suicide Squad (Warner Bros., 8.5.16) was tweeted by Ayer this afternoon. Freakier, I guess, than Heath Ledger or Jack Nicholson‘s version but what else could Leto do? Go tamer? Suicide Squad is the third installment in the DC Comics’ “shared universe” films. Directed and written by Ayer; also costarring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman (is there anything Kinnaman isn’t costarring in?), Viola Davis, Jai Courtney and Cara Delevingne.

Lena Dunham spoke movingly and eloquently today about coping with sexual assault or exploitation and doing whatever may be possible to help teenage victims of same. It happened at Variety’s Power of Women New York luncheon, which was held at Cipriani on 42nd Street. Her pageboy haircut is unfortunate, but her speech was strongly phrased and well delivered. From the heart. But before we get too swept up in the goodness and rapture of women standing proudly arm-in-arm, consider the fact that Kim Kardashian was also honored at this luncheon (for what achievement exactly? to celebrate the fact that she’s rich and famous and that her derriere is strikingly proportioned? that she’s become an expert at self-parody?). The robotic way that Kardashian read from the teleprompter seemed almost like an ironic form of performance art. (Her speech is after the jump.) The other honorees were Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg and Rachel Weisz.

Three days ago I posted a piece titled “Realism Factor Is All But Meaningless.” It was inspired by that practical effect in the new upcoming Mission Impossible film of Tom Cruise hanging on to a plane taking off — a stunt that was not CG’ed (except for cover-ups of cables and harnesses and whatnot) but actually performed for real. I said that “it almost doesn’t matter because nobody believes anything they see in a movie is real so who cares?…if the shot had been CG’ed and green-screened the net effect would be identical.” I need to walk that back. I meant that most audiences probably can’t tell the difference between CG and practical effects, but I for one value the hell out of practical effects. And I completely agree with a recent tweet from “beardo” critic Sam Adams, to wit: “Practical effects are to CG as vinyl is to CD.” Everyone needs to stand up and cheer when a first-rate practical effect is used in a film, and I will always do whatever I can to point this out.  All I meant originally is that I’m not sure if regular-issue ticket buyers can tell the difference between CG and practical, or if they understand what a cool thing it is when real-deal action performing is woven into the fabric.

Cyborg rules of Furious 7 state that everyone is a T-1000 so nobody ever gets hurt (even if they’re in a car that somersaults down a rocky mountainside at a 45-degree angle) or the least bit tired. Then again vulnerability and fatigue haven’t been much of a concern in action films over the last..what, 30 or so years? I’m mentioning this because last night I happened to watch a high-def stream of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73), which is still far and away the finest of all the Musketeer films (1921 version with Douglas Fairbanks, 1935 version with Walter Abel, 1948 version with Gene Kelly, Lana Turner and Van Heflin, 1993 version with Brat Packers and 2011 version that everyone either hated or didn’t see) and then about half of the 1974 Part II portion (The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge) that wasn’t as good. And I was delighted to note that guys in sword fights in both films always seemed to get exhausted after four or five minutes, particularly in the final duel between Michael York and Christopher Lee [immediately below]. I started to compose a list of action/fight scenes in which the participants seem noticably whipped at the end, and all I could think of were the two first-act sword fights in El Cid (Charlton Heston vs. Sophia Loren‘s father, Heston vs. the brawny bearded guy in the formal jousting match with poles and swords) and the prolonged fist fight between Heston and Gregory Peck in The Big Country. There have to be others. I’m not talking about fights in which the parties are bloodied or somewhat winded — I’m talking about fights in which both combatants are so depleted that they’re barely able to breathe.