…happens in supermarket aisles. Second only to showers. My third most productive meditations happen while driving.

Posted on 1.22.22: Set in present-day Bucharest and costarring Maika Monroe (It Follows), Karl Glusman and Burn Gorman, Chloe Okuno and Zack Ford‘s Watcher (IFC Midnight, 6.3) is unquestionably scary and unnerving.

In my view it stops short of elevated horror — it’s more of a low-key, Roman Polanski-level thriller in the vein of Repulsion and The Tenant. First-rate chills and creeps nonetheless.

The Scream-level morons may respond in their usual way, but Watcher is as good as it gets with this kind of palette and approach.

Greta Gerwig‘s currently filming Barbie, based on a script by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, is almost certainly not going to be a John Waters film. There would be nowhere to go if she did that. Gerwig is too crafty and edgy and invested in #MeToo consciousness to make a simple-minded, empty-headed flick about Barbie and Ken wallowing in Nothingville.

As far as I can determine there’s only one way for Gerwig to go story-wise, and that’s to make a Barbie variation of The Truman Show. Put another way, Gerwig and Baumbach’s film will most likely be Barbie and Ken Become Woke.

Margot Robbie is Barbie; Ryan Gosling is Ken.

It goes without saying that in Act One Ken will leave Barbie because he’s gay. (Ken has been totally gay since the ’60s.) Barbie herself could decide to go lezzy. Or it could be a 1950s period thing in which Ken and Barbie get married and buy a Southern California tract home and become one of those miserable couples in Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment (’57). Or it could be set in the ’60s with Barbie becoming a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Excerpt from Margot Robbie 2021 interview: “Barbie comes with a lot of baggage, and a lot of nostalgic connections. But with that comes a lot of exciting ways to attack it. People generally hear ‘Barbie’ and think, ‘I know what that movie is going to be,’ and then they hear that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, maybe I don’t.’”

Warner Bros. will release Barbie on 7.21.23.

The relentless cigarette-smoking in Drive My Car is what finally wilted my spirit and led me to say “okay, that’s enough of that” during the last half-hour. The awful sensation of cigarette smoke and chemistry-set nicotine poisoning my lungs became too much to bear.

Behold, a just-discovered image for Drive My Car that makes my point. Thank you.

Earlier today stories broke about first-peek footage from Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon that was shown at Cinemacon. The coverage is okay except for three wrongos — one in a story by Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin, and two reported by The Daily Beast‘s Jordan Julian.

I know a bit about this 12.25.22 Paramount release because (a) I have a 2019 draft of Chazelle’s script (183 pages) and (b) I’ve spoken to two people who caught a rough-cut version of Babylon at a research screening in late March.

Rubin reports that Babylon, a three-hour Hollywood epic mostly set in the 1920s and early ’30s, “puts the spotlight on Brad Pitt as silent film star John Gilbert and Margot Robbie as Roaring Twenties icon Clara Bow.” Her Robbie info is correct but Pitt plays “Jack Conrad”, a silent-film star who faces career difficulties when Hollywood transitions into sound — a character whose arc echoes what Gilbert went through.

Julian claims that Tobey Maguire plays Charlie Chaplin in the film. This assertion may be correct but it’s absolutely wrong according to the two rough-cut witnesses as well as the script, in which no CHAPLIN character appears.

The witnesses say Maguire plays some sort of rich, nefarious gangster-like character who wears a pencil-thin moustache — a bad guy.

“Nothing about Maguire’s performance is Chaplin-esque,” says witness #1. “No British accent, no moustache, no bowler hat, no oversize shoes or cane.”

Julian also reports that Olivia Wilde is in Babylon “and she’s absolutely not,” says witness #1.

Excerpt from Babylon notes I wrote a month and a half ago, based on reports from witnesses #1 and #2: “It’s Vincente Minnelli meets Fellini Satyricon…a flamboyant, envelope-pushing, 185-minute version of Singin’ In The Rain, but with the songs and dancing and smiles taken out. Call it a depravity-tinged survival story about Hollywood transitioning from the silent era to sound, although ultimately spanning three decades (mid 1920s through 1952).

“It’s also been described as The Wolf of Wall Street meets Singin’ in the Rain plus The Day of the Locust, the orgy sequence from Eyes Wide Shut…all combined into a ghoulash and serving the basic Singin’ in the Rain theme.”

This is a reasonably accurate chart of how it’s all convulsed and weirded out since ‘08. The psycho-wokester “de-platform all 40-plus white guys” thing began in ‘17. The difference between Elon Musk and myself is that I still regard myself as a center-left moderate.

Posted on 2.10.09: “On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

“The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes. The driver barrel-assed all the way from Porte Dauphine (the city’s western edge, adjacent to the Bois de Bologne) to the Basilica Sacre Coeur in Montmartre.

“On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.a

“No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 mph (or was it kph?) in some stretches. The footage reveals him running a red lights or two, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up several one-way streets.

“Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.”

John Hinckley, who shot but didn’t kill President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, became a featured musical character in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (‘90). Perhaps this is what gave Hinckley, partially released from supervised psychiatric care two years ago, the idea of becoming a real-life roving troubadour.

Alas, a forthcoming Hinckley gig in Hamden, Connecticut (Space Ballroom, July 16), has been cancelled due to a sizable negative response.

Imagine that in addition to nearly killing Texas governor John Connolly, Lee Harvey Oswald only wounded JFK on 11.22.63. 40 years later Oswald is released from psychiatric care, and decides to star in a one-man lounge act, “An Evening with O.H. Lee: Poetry, Philosophy, Impressions.”