According to L.A. Times film staffer Jen Yamato, the fallout from that Licorice Pizza hiccup in which succeeding Asian wives of a character named Jerry Frick (John Michael Higgins) were made into an Asian punchline…the fallout from this is “bigger than the Oscars.”

It is? Strange as that thing was, it’s over and forgotten now — the ship has sailed. Nobody cares. Oh, and who thinks the 94th Oscars are “big”? Last time I checked the buzzword was “diminished.”

“Senator, she’s had nothing to do with the Kavanaugh hearings…”

I realize that I’m expected to know who Jacob Elordi is. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of Euphoria so I guess I do. I’m also aware that he’s tall (6’3″) and hunky with 13 million Instagram followers. At least he has something to do with movies, which is more than you can say for DJ Khaled.

Through residing in some kind of cosmic cine-realm, the spirit of Gordon Willis has nonetheless gotten wind of the ecstatic reactions to the digitally reordered 50th anniversary Godfather. I would like to think that he’s pleased about the following statement, which Willis wrote several years ago, having been posted this morning on Home Theatre Forum:

“Apparently restoring the Godfather [films] is becoming more difficult than the original task of making them.

“The main thing is to reflect on the word RESTORE, which in the simplest possible terms, means PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS.

“I realize how difficult it is for people not to fall in love with ‘THE PROCESS’… whatever it might be. Digital reconstruction of the Godfather films should be held to remounting the film in its ORIGINAL visual structure.

“That means NO sharpening, NO grain reduction and NO reshaping of of the visual interpretive levels. The period work in Part 2 will be especially affected, or maybe I should say INfected.

“How this picture was shot, regarding the lighting, and the color was well thought out…don’t change it. I realize it’s everybody’s instinct to reduce or expand things to a level they understand, but the job is to PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS. The tools that are available to do that now, are miraculous. They are, however a means to an end… not an end in themselves.

“These films have been made already. People working on them should give them the respect that’s necessary to bring them back to life, which means not changing one damn thing.”

HE hits the local Pavilions — exactly two years ago:

I’m sorry but “I’m not a biologist” was definitely the wrong answer.

Last night Showbiz 411 reported that Oscar Isaac, the long-rumored lead in Francis Coppola‘s still-in-the-works Megalopolis, has “passed” on the role.

No one (myself included) is allowed to speculate negatively on this long-gestating project. We all want Coppola to hit Megalopolis out of the park, but we’re also speculating right now about what might have prompted Isaac’s departure.

I’ll tell you this much — Coppola needs to come up with a logline that won’t scare the shit out of prospective viewers. Because “a love story that’s also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man”…I intend to see Megalopolis no matter what, but that description does kinda scare me a bit. It would scare anyone.

Posted on 2.23.22: “I think Francis Coppola (whom I had the pleasure of doing a two-hour phone interview with 41 years ago) was one guy when he made The Godfather, The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II. He was a slightly different guy when he made Apocalypse Now, and a faintly altered version of the Apocalypse Now guy when he made One From The Heart. He was a whole different dude when he made Jack — that’s for damn sure. And a much different guy when he made Tetro and Twixt.”

I don’t want an Honest Trailers take on the Best Picture nominees — anyone can do that. I want an Honest Trailers take on the collapsing shit show that the Oscar brand has become over the last four or five years. Particularly the expertly-managed shrinking of the viewing audience, the mass indifference on the part of Millennials and Zoomers, the narrowing field (i.e., woke-icizing) of the nominees, the Oscars becoming the Left Coast Tony Awards, Film Twitter destroying prospective hosts like Kevin Hart, Academy members blowing off the most transportational fantasy film of 2021 as a Best Picture nominee, and the way last April’s Soderbergh show suffocated the Oscar glamour thing and did a brilliant job of channelling…never mind.