President Trump spoke to reporters about his call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. When asked if he told Mr. Putin not to meddle in the 2020 presidential election, the president said, “We didn’t discuss that.” They didn’t discuss it? Trump decided to let it slide, brush it under the rug? Does he think the Russians won’t be interfering again in 2020? More likely is that Trump knows (or at least has been told) that the Russians will most likely re-meddle, and he doesn’t care.

Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe‘s finest and most personal film, opened 18 and 1/3 years ago. I remain a huge fan, especially of the 162-minute director’s cut “bootleg” version that came out on Bluray in 2011.

Crowe’s initial theatrical version ran 122 minutes, in part because Dreamworks producer Walter Parkes kept insisting on “shorter, shorter, shorter.” It felt a bit constricted, didn’t really breathe. The 162-minute Bluray is the definitive version.

During production I got hold of a 1998 copy of Crowe’s script. It was 168 pages long, and I fell in love with it straight off. Almost all of it was shot and most of it became part of the final cut. Unfortunately my favorite scene (which is posted after the jump) wasn’t shot or was shot and never used.

Almost Famous is a largely autobiographical saga about a teenaged, San Diego-residing Crowe stand-in (called William Miller in the script and played by Patrick Fugit) landing a Rolling Stone assignment to profile an up-and-coming band called Stillwater, which had a star performer called Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup).

William hangs out with the band, gets into all kinds of wild-ass adventures, gets to know the Stillwater groupies and so on. After a false start he eventually turns in an honestly written article to Rolling Stone.

Russell and the band members are alarmed when the fact-checker calls. Fearful of being portrayed as insecure dipshits, they lie by insisting that Miller’s account is fiction. The article is killed, and William returns home in a state of defeat and total exhaustion.

The final graph of the Wiki synopsis: “Russell feels guilty for betraying William. He calls Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and wants to meet with her, but she tricks him by giving him William’s address. He arrives and finds himself face-to-face with William’s mother (Frances McDormand), who scolds him for his behavior. Russell apologizes to William and finally gives him an interview. Russell, we learn, has verified William’s article to Rolling Stone, which runs it as a cover feature. Penny fulfills her long-standing fantasy to go to Morocco. Stillwater again tours only by bus.”

To the best of my knowledge, this legendary poster for Richard Thorpe‘s Jailhouse Rock is a stand-alone in one specific respect. It’s the only big-studio release that that sold itself with a big painted profile of the star (i.e., Elvis Presley) that…wait for it…doesn’t look like the star at all. A slapdash resemblance but that’s all.

The poster was used, I’m guessing, because producer Pandro S. Berman, who’d been a big-studio operator since the early ’30s and was in his early 50s at the time, didn’t give that much of a shit. He knew that the dark pompadour-and-sideburns hair sold the Presley presence, which everyone knew from his two previous films, Loving You and Love Me Tender, and his appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and whatnot. But the face doesn’t look like Presley at all. The eyes are way, way off, not to mention the bizarre jawline and the weird, brushed-forward sideburns.

Young Elvis had a kind of half rock-and-roll rebel, half pretty-girl appearance. He had big luscious eyes and sensuous lips, but he wasn’t anyone’s idea of “manly.” The guy in this painting is an older professional illustrator’s “idea” of Presley without having actually settled into his face. To me it’s a portrait of a good-looking Presley wannabe.

THREE MOVIES I HATE: Memoirs of a Geisha, Cannonball Run II, Crazy Stupid Love.
THREE MOVIES I THINK ARE OVERRATED: Forrest Gump, Get Out, The Artist.
THREE MOVIES I THINK ARE UNDERRATED: Silver Linings Playbook, The Outfit, Castle Keep.
THREE MOVIES I LOVE: The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Paths of Glory, Sideways.
THREE MOVIES I CHERISH: L’Avventura, Zero Dark Thirty, Rushmore.
THREE MOVIES I COULD WATCH ON REPEAT: Shane, Dr. Strangelove, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
THREE MOVIES THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH MOVIES: King Kong, Shane, Foreign Correspondent.
THREE MOVIES THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia.
THREE GUILTY-PLEASURE MOVIES: Ant Man, North to Alaska, Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy.
THREE MOVIES I SHOULD HAVE SEEN BY NOW BUT HAVEN’T: Stalker, Rules of the Game, Chimes at Midnight.

“It will happen this way. You may be walking. Maybe on the first sunny day of spring. And as you walk past a bookstore, you will notice a book in the main display window — a thriller by James Grady called ‘Six Days of the Condor.’

“Something about the sound of that title will immediately intrigue you, but before you reach the next stoplight you’ll know that six days of plot are too many for a movie — that somehow the days will have to be reduced to three or four. You’ve read in the trades that Peter Yates, the Bullitt guy, intends to adapt the book faithfully as a six-day thing, but somehow you know he will ultimately fail.

“And then a moment later an American car, a dark sedan with tinted windows, will pull over, and an actor you know and perhaps even trust will get out. And he will smile, a becoming smile. And he will leave open the door of the car and offer to give you a lift.”

The walking man was Sydney Pollack, of course, and the actor in the dark sedan was Robert Redford. Weeks and then months passed, and eventually Pollack, Redford, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Pollack’s ace-in-the-hole punch-up writer David Rayfiel had reduced the story to three days.

As the Washington Post is a limited pay-walled site, some may not have access to Ann Hornaday‘s brilliant review of Long Shot (Lionsgate, now playing). Here it is — please read it.

Her assessment is not only correct, but the sharpest I’ve read anywhere. Yes, I’m impressed because she largely agrees with my own 4.24 pan. Toronto Star critic Peter Howell also understands and tells it straight.

A lot of reviewers are giving Long Shot a pass (83% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), calling it a “charming popcorn flick” or an outing that does the trick or delivers a good time, etc. Put a check mark next to every such reviewer as a way of reminding yourself to NEVER trust these guys again, at least when it comes to comedy.

Hornaday: “Long Shot, a fantasy-fueled romantic comedy starring Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron, establishes its reality-adjacent ethos from the jump: In its tensely amusing opening scene Rogen’s character, an investigative reporter named Fred Flarsky, has infiltrated a neo-Nazi group and is undergoing an initiation, giving half-hearted ‘Heil, Hitlers’ and keeping the sarcastic patter going as he prepares to get a swastika tattoo.

“The sequence plays like BlacKkKlansman‘s goofball cousin, made all the more ludicrous when Fred escapes the escalating mayhem by jumping out a window and bouncing off a parked car with nary a scratch. Welcome to the raucous, cheerfully preposterous world of Long Shot, where slapstick physical comedy, coarse sex jokes and amusingly on-point political commentary are expected to coexist as happily as the self-righteous, adamantly inelegant Fred and Charlotte Field, Theron’s pragmatic, sleekly fashionable secretary of state who falls in love with him.

Best line of entire review…yes!: “You don’t have to suspend disbelief to enjoy Long Shot — you have to jettison it entirely, along with any sentimental attachments to archaic fundamentals such as sparkling dialogue, organic structure and genuine sexual chemistry.

There’s a fair amount of deep-down homophobia out there. Nobody will mention or admit to it, but it’s there in the backwaters and the suburbs, and even to some extent in the cities. If you think the average voter hasn’t laughed at Eddie Murphy’s Mr. T joke from the ’80s, you’re kidding yourself.

HE’s advice to Pete Buttigieg is to not refer all that often to his marital status (i.e., Chasten Glezman), and to basically soft-peddle the gay cards. His candidacy should be — is! — about brilliance, middle-class Indiana values, military service, Christianity, mild temperament, generational change, speaking several languages, administrative smarts.

In a manner of speaking, Pete’s candidacy has to be mild-mannered and straight-friendly. His campaign, I mean, will have to be analogous to Call Me By Your Name or Brokeback Mountain without the pup-tent scene. If so much as a whiff of Taxi Zum Klo slips out, he’ll be in trouble.

John F. Kennedy campaigned as a staunch Massachusetts Catholic, family man and World War II hero. He didn’t flaunt the fact that he was to-the-manor-born wealthy, and he kept his ex-bootlegger father, Joseph P. Kennedy, in the shadows. And of course there was never a mention of his sexual side-life or the fact that he had Addison’s disease. In short, he played it smart.

Franklin D. Roosevelt never emphasized to voters that he had polio and was confined to a wheelchair. He knew that a segment of the populace would be uncomfortable with the idea of a handicapped President, and so he used his steel braces and stood tall at every campaign rally. It’s all about branding and signage.

Hugs and condolences to fans, friends and family of the late Peter Mayhew, who left the earth on Tuesday, 4.30. For the last 40-odd years Mayhew famously played the towering Chewbacca (7 foot, 3 inches tall at his peak) in the Star Wars films. The 74 year-old actor died at his North Texas home (Arlington?) of an undisclosed ailment.

Mayhew’s only interesting Chewy moment, acting-wise, was when he restrained himself just before Han Solo was put into carbon freeze….”yuhhhhaaahhhawwwwng!”

Boilerplate: “Mayhew was discovered by producer Charles H. Schneer while working as a hospital attendant in London, and cast in Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. The next year, he was cast as Chewbacca, the 200-year-old Wookiee.”

I’ve always disliked the spelling of “Wookiee” — what’s the point of the “i” after the “k” if you’ve already got two “e”s?

HE’s personal preference list of Cannes ’19 films comes to 27, and that’s not counting the Cannes Classics roster (Loves of a Blonde, Easy Rider, The Shining, Seven Beauties, Moulin Rouge, the Bunuel trio). 27 to 30 films in 11 days, and that’s leaving out a lot. Which films should I downgrade and which omissions should I include? Tell me this isn’t one of the most exciting Cannes rosters in years, at least on paper.

Top Ten: (1) Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, (2) Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Intermezzo, (3) Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, (4) Jim Jarmusch‘s The Dead Don’t Die, (5) Pedro Almódovar‘s Pain & Glory, (5) Marco Bellocchio‘s The Traitor, (6) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Young Ahmed, (7) Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life, (8) Ken Loach‘s Sorry We Missed You, (9) Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman (out of competition), (10) Kantemir Balagov‘s Beanpole.

Second Group: (11) Asif Kapadia‘s Diego Maradona, (12) Nicolas Winding Refn‘s Too Old To Die Young – North Of Hollywood, West Of Hell, (13) Nicolas Bedos‘ La Belle Epoque, (14) Jessica Hausner‘s Little Joe, (15) Corneliu Porumboiu‘s The Whistlers, (16) Ira Sachs‘ Frankie, (17) Xavier Dolan‘s Matthias And Maxime, (18) Arnaud Desplechin‘s Oh Mercy, (19) Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles‘ Bacurau, (20) Gaspar Noé’s Lux Aeterna.

Third Group: (21) Larissa Sadilova’s Odnazhdy v Trubchevske, (22) Gael García Bernal’s Chicuarotes, (23) Luca Guadagnino‘s short film The Staggering Girl, (24) Leila Conners’ Ice on Fire, (25) Dan Krauss’s 5B, (26) Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite, (27) Diao Yinan‘s The Wild Goose Lake.

Yesterday Slashfilm‘s Ben Pearson passed along a possibly inaccurate but nonetheless horrific rumor about the upcoming Indiana Jones 5, which would theoretically star a 78-year-old Harrison Ford and (who knows?) could be released on 7.9.21.

The rumor was part of a 5.1 story by Making Star Wars’ Jason Ward. I hope it’s not true, but it’s so eyebrow-raising and historically grotesque that it has to be at least mentioned.

The rumor is that Dan Fogelman, the touchy-feely, deeply loathed creator of This Is Us, screenwriter of Crazy, Stupid Love, Fred Claus, The Guilt Trip and Last Vegas and director-writer of Danny Collins and Life Itself, has been hired to rewrite the Indy 5 script, which had previously been worked on by David Koepp and Jonathan Kasdan.

Indy 5 would theoretically be directed by Steven Spielberg (after he makes West Side Story), produced by Frank Marshall and Kathy Kennedy and distributed by Disney.

On 10.20.15, or 3 1/2 years ago, Joe Biden took part in an event titled Tribute to Walter Mondale. Under the auspices of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Biden, Mondale and a moderator. Go to 56:45, which is where Biden says the following: “I actually like Dick Cheney…I get on with him. I think he’s a decent man.” I don’t want to elect a President who’s comme ci comme ca about Cheney, whose rancid history and values were no secret to anyone in late ’15. (Hat tip to Young Turks’ Emma Vigeland.)

“With her declarative snap and ability to go for the jugular, Emma Thompson truly seems like a born talk-show host. Even when she’s just riffing, she grounds Late Night in something real. Yet the movie, while it races forward with snappish energy, is telegraphed and a bit scattershot.

“It keeps throwing observations at you — about age and obsolescence, the dumbing down of the culture, the boys’ club of comedy writing, the perils of social media. Yet the themes don’t always mesh into a coherent vision of the talk-show landscape.

“Twenty years ago, The Larry Sanders Show was a brilliant deconstruction of the late-night universe, and now, with so many hosts competing for our attention, that universe has only gotten headier. But in Late Night, the rigamarole of actually running a talk show stays off to the side. The film wants to be a puckish media satire and an earnest workplace dramedy about ‘growing,’ and the fusion doesn’t always gel.” — from Owen Gleiberman’s 1.25.19 Sundance review.