I bailed on HBO’s Perry Mason five or six weeks ago. Right after episode #2. Too icky, muddy, smokey, gunky and grimly desaturated. Plus Matthew Rhys, the 45 year-old actor with the lined, Elmer’s Glue-All, beard-stubbled complexion, is too long of tooth to be playing a World War I veteran in 1931, particularly one who’s still trying to come into his own as an attorney.

“No way,” I told myself. “I will not sit through eight episodes of this shit. Life is too short.”

Perry Mason ended last night, and the general complaint is that it didn’t pay off, much less deliver a socko finish.

Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall: “If there’s a fictional character whose most famous gimmick, by far, is that he puts the real criminal on the witness stand and talks them into confessing, and you decide to not have him do that in your version? Well, you’d better come up with something really spectacular to do in its place. And the HBO series’ first-season finale utterly failed to do that.

The ending, says Sepinwall, is “cynical and extremely underwhelming. Previous Mason stories certainly leaned toward wish-fulfillment fantasy — tales of a man so noble, and so smart, that he needs only his wits to talk killers and other criminals into going against their own self-interest and admitting their guilt — but this feels like edgelord-style revisionism.

“It’s as if the HBO show’s writers couldn’t imagine Erle Stanley Gardner’s pure-hearted and persuasive creation existing in a more “realistic” world, so they had their guy cheat. But in not having Andrew Howard‘s Joe Ennis character take the stand at all — not even for Perry to try and fail to get him to confess — there’s no real drama at all to the season’s climax. It feels like both Mason and the show simply run out of ideas by the end, and just hope things will work out anyway.”

Peacock, the NBCUniversal streamer that launched on 7.15, has ordered 11 episodes of a weekly late-night Larry Wilmore show. Yes, once a week. Like Real Time with Bill Maher. Maher is an established brand but once-weekly isn’t how things work now. Way back in the Mr. Showbiz and Reel.com days (’98 to ’04) Hollywood Elsewhere was a twice-weekly column. I shifted into the daily bloggy-blog format in April ’06. Imagine a columnist launching a new column these days that refreshes twice weekly….nope! That said, it’s good to have Wilmore back in the saddle.

833,839 viewers have watched this. Six years and two months old. Not a big deal. But it brought tears to my eyes.

Two days ago Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt, whom I know slightly and is not generally regarded as an excitable, hysterical, “fly off the handle” type, reported that Disney has “made an internal decision to suspend the 4K Ultra HD release of live action catalog titles from both their own vaults and those of their newly acquired 20th Century Fox label.”

Boiled down and according to his understanding, this means that “beyond new release theatrical titles, animated fare from Disney and Pixar, or Star Wars and Marvel-related projects, there were no plans at the studio going forward to release titles on physical 4K Ultra HD”, and that “future releases will be 4K digital only.”

Journo pally comment: “If Disney wants to make it hard to see The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, that’s one thing. But taking the entire Fox library down with them, especially coupled with Disney’s apparent unwillingness to license revival screenings (not that anybody would be able to tell right now), is something else.”

HE to Connected Industry Guy: “What have you heard about this ‘Disney jettisoning 4K physical media’ thing? Not just Disney but the entire Fox library. Sounds like a big deal.”

Connected Industry Guy to HE: “I wouldn’t be too concerned about this. I’d bet they’ve yet to fully evaluate the situation. They have a superb exec in Schawn Belston, who is quite able to lead them to proper potential 4K IP in the Fox library. There’s very little in the Disney library that’s actually 4K fodder. Most of the Fox IP that would be interesting is large format, so low in numbers. The situation needs to jell a bit.”

I subsequently reached out to Belston…crickets.

I’ve posted this photo three times since the birth of Hollywood Elsewhere in August ’04. This is the fourth posting. It was taken on a great blue-sky day in Italy 20 years and two months ago, somewhere south of Siena during a leisurely drive to Rome. I can recall the aroma and the summery air and the pastoral vibe like it happened yesterday. To this day I’m not sure what kind of flowers are dotting the landscape but I always default to poppies. I’ve tried to find this property a couple of times since; it may be the Val d’Orcia estate. If this image rings a bell for anyone and they know the address or can provide a Google capture, please get in touch.

Snapped sometime in late May of 2000

For decades the legend about the notorious Don’t Look Now sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie has been that it involved actual coitus and not just simulation.

Two and a half years ago Sutherland insisted that Peter Bart‘s recollection about Sutherland and Christie really doing it was dead wrong.

Sutherland said that the scene involved four people — Christie, himself, director Nicholas Roeg and dp Anthony Richmond — in a bedroom and that “the takes were 15 seconds long, maximum. ‘All right, Julie, hold your head. Okay, turn your heard a little to the side. Okay, Donald….all right Julie.'”

Seven days ago this video essay about the scene in question, “The Greatest Sex Scene in Horror,” appeared on YouTube.

The testy back-and-forth between Bart and Warren Beatty, Christie’s then-boyfriend who wanted some of the graphic portions removed, is amusing.

Out of the current U.S. population of 331 million, 5 million or roughly 1.5% have been infected by COVID-19. That doesn’t mean that 98.5% of the population hasn’t been infected because the numbers are imprecise, but it’s probably something in that general vicinity. 162,000 U.S. citizens have died from the virus, or .05% (1/20th of 1 percent). But it’s really not the infected and the deaths as much as the economic impact upon the entire nation due to business shutdowns and whatnot.

What makes this Lincoln Project video work is (and correct me if I’m wrong) the Phillip Glass score.

When you’re starting to regret your vote for Trump pic.twitter.com/hAofMi7qOz

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 8, 2020

From MOMA curator Dave Kehr, a 1902 short called The Flying Train. It depicts a ride on a suspended railway between the towns of Barmen and Eberfeld, Germany, which are due east of Dusseldorf. Shot on Biograph’s proprietary 68mm stock, which obviously “affords stunning visual clarity and quality, especially compared to the more standard 35mm or 16mm stocks,” etc. Twelve years before the start of World War I.

I fell hard for Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous nine or ten months before it opened in September 2000, or when I came across a 1998 draft of the script (called “Untitled”, 168 pages). I didn’t just like or admire it — I was blown away, head over heels.

I was generally delighted with the film but it didn’t get me off like the script did because it felt a little too compressed here and there. It ran 122 minutes, in part because Dreamworks producer Walter Parkes kept insisting on “shorter, shorter, shorter.” Plus the film didn’t include a “Russell Hammond confesses all to Rolling Stone editors” scene that I thought was perfect.

I’ve had Almost Famous on my best of the 21st Century list for two decades now as it’s 90% of a great film, but I didn’t completely tumble until the 162-minute “director’s cut” bootleg Bluray came out in 2011.

I attended a big Almost Famous press shebang during the 2000 Toronto Film Festival, and a moment from that event is burned into my memory. I was shuffling into the main restaurant where the party was taking place, and in a center booth I saw L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan chatting with Crowe and then-wife Nancy Wilson. And I was almost startled by a look in Turan’s eyes — a look of absolute rapture that reminded me of a ninth-grader swooning over his prom date and dreaming about some act of exquisite erotic kindness that might be in the offing later that evening.

Turan, in short, was making goo-goo eyes at Crowe…talking to the man of the moment was filling him with awe and joy and ecstasy, and his eyes…his eyes were doing ring-a-ding-ding backflips. Turan was in love…completely fluttering with feeling.

And at that very moment I made a mental note to myself, to wit: “Don’t ever give anyone slavish goo-goo eyes for any reason or under any circumstance…show respect and admiration but keep your cool…hold on to your dignity. Because if you don’t show a modicum of restraint the filmmaker will remember those goo-goo eyes, and if you don’t goo-goo him the next time he’ll know you don’t like the new film as much as the older one, or he’ll conclude that you were being a phony the first time.”

Let this be a lesson to us all. The next time you find yourself chatting with someone you genuinely admire, don’t flash the goo-goo eyes!

Please reconsider the way things stood on Tuesday, 2.25.20. Five and 1/3 months ago, give or take. The post was titled “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” and it contained the very first photo of a Hollywood-centric journalist in any country or on any coast wearing a mask. I distinctly remember a longtime publicist friend remarking on Facebook that the mask photo had taken things a bit far, and my replying that I had done so with a humorous attitude. Not so funny two or three weeks later!

And please look at the world infection map that was current back then. Almost all of it in Asia and Italy. And please take special note of the comments from that malignant asshat Mr. F. who accused me of being panicky [after the jump]. And Mr. Sunset Terra Cotta saying that the situation was being exacerbated by “an alarmist, pathologically dishonest news media. Fortunately we do have that.”

My response to accusations of pandemic paranoia was that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you’re walking along 23rd Street during a Manhattan snowstorm, is it ‘freaking out’ to sidestep a big slush puddle? Have you looked at all the photos of people in Venice and Milan wearing facemasks?”

“Don’t Stand So Close To Me“, chapter and verse: “And let’s not shake hands, just to be on the safe side. And don’t cough in my vicinity. But man, I really hate the idea of wearing a surgical mask. By the way: Now is the time to book airfare to and hotels in Venice, Milan, Lombardy and Veneto.”