Two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters was the absolute best — no side-stepping, said what she felt, straight-from-the-gut candor at all times. And I’m not just saying this because I ran into her a few times and liked her from the get-go. Always an artist first and a diplomat second. Smarts, steel, liberal-progressive views, etc.

Winters knew Marilyn Monroe pretty well, roomed with her for about a year between 1947 and ’48. For decades after Monroe’s passing Winters was repeatedly asked about her, and offered pretty much the same recollections.

Monroe began to enjoy life a bit in the late ’40s, Winters said, and had a genuinely thrilling and abundant life in the ’50s, but not so much in the early ’60s. Monroe wasn’t well educated but was highly intelligent and constantly reading. Totally into older-guy father figures. No family, no support group, suspicious of most would-be friends or acquaintances. Key quote: “If she’d been a little dumber, she would’ve been happier.”

Monroe began to slip into an increasingly troubled place when she hit her mid 30s, which, back in the day, was when actresses needed to begin thinking about transitioning into character roles and/or playing mothers, or so Winters believed. But in the early ’60s the big studios didn’t want Monroe as a character actress — they wanted her to go on being a 25-year-old blonde sexpot forever. (When Winters signed to play a 40ish old-school motherly type in The Diary of Anne Frank, for which she later won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, director George Stevens told her that “because of this role you’ll be able to work for the rest of your life.”)

Winters believed that Monroe’s August 1962 death from a sleeping-pill overdose was most likely an accident, and that she’d just forgotten how many she’d taken earlier. “I’ve done that,” Winters said.

You don’t hear a lot of church bells in Los Angeles, on Sunday or any other day. I’m about as religious as Bill Maher, but as I was listening to this 6 pm bell serenade a while ago something inside felt vaguely comforted or perhaps even stirred.

Producer pally: “I think The Kitchen (Warner Bros., 8.9) looks great. I think Widows was sooo bad. There’s still a big audience for this kind of smart, edgy chick-revenge drama.

“And NYC in the late ’70s? Wow. Punk rock. Soho artist colony downtown exploding. Studio 54 burning down the house. Cocaine and quaaludes. Massive waves of hot Euro immigration. New fabulous restaurant on every corner. Plus serious street crime — watch your back everywhere at night. A fantastic jungle coming back to life. That was 1978. So this looks good. Maybe.”

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Today I began watching Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us (Netflix), a four-part dramatization of the Central Park jogger case, or more precisely the racist hysteria and grotesque injustice that the case triggered.

I’ve only seen two episodes, but I know a highly realistic, absorbing, triple-A effort when I see one — well written, believably acted and generally humming with honesty, authenticity and the application of high craft.

I can’t say it’s Duvernay’s best narrative feature so far, but it probably is. I decided not to see A Wrinkle To Time (everyone said it was an absolute nightmare) but When They See Us is more complex and highly charged than 2012’s Middle of Nowhere (which I’m a big fan of), and more even-steven and less weighted than the five-year-old Selma (which I was okay with as far as it went)

In line with Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, Duvernay’s focus is on the wrongful railroading, conviction and imprisonment of five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — over the assault and rape of stockbroker Trisha Meili in a northern region of Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89.

The five defendants didn’t help their situation by offering coerced, wholly imaginary confessions to NYPD detectives. Nor did it help that earlier that evening they were part of a “wilding” gang that had harassed random victims. The bottom line is that the the cops, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Donald Trump and especially the press all succumbed to varying forms of racist shorthand and unwarranted presumptions.

Despite a lack of hard evidence (the DNA collected at the crime scene didn’t match any of the suspects, and indicated that it had come from a single assailant), questionable testimony and the fact that all five were innocent, they were nonetheless found guilty and went to jail for several years.

After the actual culprit confessed, the five defendants’ convictions were vacated by New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada on 12.19.02. The five sued New York City; they were finally awarded $41 million in 2014.

Two years ago I theorized that Duvernay’s film would be facing two major issues, story-wise. As it turns out only one of these remain, at least in my head.

Problem #1: The teens who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home. How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Duvernay shows that the five were interrogated half to death and to the point of absolute frenzy and exhaustion by city detectives. I was still having a hard time understanding how they could have been persuaded to invent fake testimony against each other, but I have a better idea now of how intense and punishing the atmosphere was.

Problem #2: Trisha Meili’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was \flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

Duvernay basically agrees with this viewpoint, and conveys it by having Manhattan district attorney sex-crimes chief Linda Fairstein (Felicity Huffman) look around the crime scene and say “what the fuck was she doing here?”

In an April ’16 Tom Hanks career assessment piece, I wrote than “once your cards have gone cold, it’s awfully hard to heat them up again.”

I added that “there’s nothing more humiliating than for a man who once held mountains in the palm of his hands having to push his own cart around the supermarket as he buys his own groceries and then, insult to injury, has to wait in line at the checkout counter.”

The piece was triggered by a Hanks quote from a Tribeca Film Festival discussion with John Oliver: “I peaked in the ’90s.”

Hanks had been respectably plugging along since the end of his late ’80s-to-early aughts heyday (The Road to Perdition was his last big score in that run). Holding on, hanging in there. But just a few months after the Oliver chat, his cards began to warm slightly. Then they got hot again.

Hanks’ less-is-more performance as the white-haired Chesley Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood‘s Sully was respectfully received; ditto his Ben Bradley in Steven Spielberg‘s The Post. But the strongest indication that his mojo was back came when Hanks improvised his way through a pause in a West Los Angeles performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

It seems like a fait accompli that Hanks will be be Best Actor-nominated for playing the amiable Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller‘s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Sony, 11.22).

Six months later Hanks will star as Commander Ernest Krause in Aaron Schneider‘s Greyhound (Sony, 5.8.20), a World War II drama. Later that year he’ll star in Miguel Sapochnik‘s BIOS (Universal, 10.2.20).

Who knows if Hanks will star in Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World, a post-Civil War-era drama, but the project was certainly announced a few months ago.

At some point down the road Hanks will reportedly portray Colonel Tom Parker, the cigar-chomping, straw-hat-wearing hustler who did more to destroy Elvis Presley‘s life and career than anyone besides Elvis himself, in a Baz Luhrman-directed drama.

That’s quite an impressive lineup for a guy whose career had appeared to be in flatline mode only four or five years ago.

After a leisurely three-hour stroll, Tatyana and I returned late last night to 6 rue des Arquebusiers. Alas, the micro-battery door opener wasn’t working, and I couldn’t find the door code on my iPhone notepad. So I called Gleb, sitting in our fourth-floor residence, for the door code or to otherwise let us in. 15 seconds later a folded piece of parchment flitted down from above. The door code was written on it. We ran into Gleb on our way upstairs and learned that he hadn’t written the note. The author was some English-speaking building resident who had heard me explain the situation, etc. Thanks, neighbor.

Robert Pattinson is officially locked and loaded to play Bruce Wayne + alter ego in Matt Reeves‘ The Batman.

Reeves: “I’ve talked about making it a very point of view, noir-driven definitive Batman story in which he is investigating a particular case and that takes us out into the world of Gotham. I went on a deep dive again revisiting all my favorite comics. Those all inform by osmosis. There’s no continuation of the Nolan films. It’s very much trying to find a way to do this as something that for me is going to be definitively Batman and new and cool.”

It’s amazing how quickly we accustom ourselves to living spaces. I was delighted and even emotionally moved when I first entered this century-old (if not older) Marais apartment three days ago. Now it’s like “yeah, fine, nice place, whatever.”

Collider‘s Vinnie Mancuso has joined the small fraternity of Godzilla girthers (i.e., critics who have at least acknowledged that Godzilla is obese**) while at the same time cleverly avoiding any fat-shaming suspicions by praising Godzilla’s Hank Quinlan proportions.

Mancuso: “Honestly? The state of Godzilla’s girth is the best part of the movie. The most iconic of the Kaijus feels legendary in his mass, powerful in his weight. More like King of the Chonksters, imho.

“Godzilla has never felt more of a gorilla-whale than he is in Godzilla: King of the Monsters; this is, for sure, the Very Large Man of Godzillas. Five years have passed between [Gareth Edwards‘] Godzilla and King of the Monsters, five years that my dude spent snackin’ and mackin’ at the bottom of the ocean, emerging as the most mountainous monster you could imagine.”

** Variety‘s Owen Glieberman, N.Y. Times critic Glenn Kenny, myself.

My basic attitude toward Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman, which opened last night, is one of muted respect. As I said during the Cannes Film Festival, it’s not great and can’t say I loved it overall, but I was genuinely pleased and throttled by the first half-hour or so. As much as I felt underwhelmed by the drugs-and-debauchery section, I couldn’t put it down at the end because at the very least it’s an actual “musical” and at the end of the day is a better, more ambitious film than Bohemian Rhapsody.

Right now the Metacritic and Rotten Tomato reactions are at 73% and 90%, respectively.

Presumably a portion of the HE community saw it last night. Reactions are hereby requested.

From “For What It Is, Rocketman Works,” posted on 5.17:

I went into Rocketman with an attitude, but I felt pleasantly turned around soon enough. I was more taken with the first 30 to 40 minutes (Elton John‘s childhood, taking piano lessons as a teen, teaming with young Bernie Taupin) and less with the remainder, which is basically about Elton becoming more and more of a booze-swigging, coke-snorting party animal and his life downswirling into addiction and self-destruction.

I respect Dexter Fletcher‘s decision to not tell Elton’s saga Bohemian Rhapsody-style, using a linear “this happened and then that happened” approach. Instead he chose a more creative and dynamic (not to mention more cinematic) scheme by making it into a punched up, inventively choreographed, mad-brush Ken Russell musical.

The framing device is Elton confessing all during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Out of this comes a looking-back-at-my-life, All That Jazz-type deal that uses several John-Taupin songs as emotional backdrops or undercurrents for various biographical moments.

The film isn’t biographically accurate in many respects (the musical scheme requires a suspension of realism and chronological history) and there’s a lot more interest in a glitter-and-glam aesthetic than any kind of semi-realistic presentation of how things really went down, but this is the film they chose to make.

From “President Donald Trump’s poor mental health is grounds for impeachment,” a 5.31 USA Today opinion piece by John Gartner (psychologist and former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School), Dr. David Reiss (practicing psychiatrist for more than 30 years, specializing in fitness evaluations), and Dr. Steven Buser (clinical psychiatrist practicing in Asheville, North Carolina, and a former Air Force psychiatrist. Gartner and Buser are editors of “Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump“:

Absent any creative inspiration of its own, corporate Disney has digitally rebooted many of its classic animated properties — Aladdin, The Lion King, Dumbo, Mary Poppins Returns, Cinderella, The Jungle Book — while others are waiting in the pipeline, including Lady and the Tramp and a musical version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

But in the wake of yesterday’s news that Marc Webb will probably direct the Snow White reboot (with screenwriter Erin Cressida negotiating to adapt), a question hangs in the air: How do you reboot the cobwebby 1937 original, in which the angelic Snow White was rescued from a witch’s coma with a kiss from an adoring prince, in the era of #MeToo?

And do you play along with the precedent of Into The Woods, which said that fairy tales are delusional bullshit and that Cinderella’s Prince was a philanderer? Not to mention Relativity’s Mirror Mirror (’12) and Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman (also ’12). Or do you ignore all of this and just pretend it’s 1937 all over again?

I’m presuming that Disney will lean toward a “#MeToo who?” solution, but maybe not.

Justin Kroll’s Variety story reports that the forthcoming Snow White “will expand upon the story and music from the 1938 animated classic,” and that Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land,The Greatest Showman) will write new songs.

Webb’s directing credits include The Only Living Boy in New York (which I absolutely hated), Gifted and 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man.

Wilson’s best-known credit is The Girl on the Train.