…while hating it. It’s so smartass modern attitude, so oppressively unsubtle, so CG eye-candy’ed to a fare-thee-well. Tatyana and I were eating last night in a great Indian restaurant (Flavor of India, 7950 Sunset Blvd., next to DGA) and of course they were showing Bollywood films on their two big flatscreens. I got sucked into watching one of them, and it seems so clear that Disney’s new Aladdin is essentially a bullshit pixie-dust Bollywood fantasy, aimed at the domestic family saps but also the Asian-Indian market, which will lap this shit right up.

Those brilliant marketers who assembled the trailer for Long Shot (Lionsgate, 5.3), the Seth Rogen-Charlize Theron political romcom that nobody and I mean nobody is going to buy into, presumably know that they made a bad-grammar choice in their trailer copy.

Because that’s what marketers will often do — they’ll express themselves like a typical under-educated, mall-roaming dumbass in order to speak the language (slanguage?) of the serfs.

So instead of saying “from the guys who brought you Neighbors and Knocked Up,” they’re saying “from the guys that brought you,” etc.

Any decent college education will excite your intellect and expand your horizons, but an elegant ivy-league education will instill a sense of confidence, assurance, well-being. Knowing that you’ve schooled and partied with other well-born, cut-above kids will put you in a good psychological place. It won’t mean a hell of a lot after you graduate, of course, even if your parents are loaded or you’re a recipient of a trust fund. Because we all have to get up early and start our own motors in order to live, discover and find our way.

The bottom line is that driven X-factor types don’t really need ivy-league educations because the most important things to have under your belt as you’re starting out are drive, curiosity, ambition and moxie. An elegant education is fine — it certainly doesn’t hurt — but 90% of the nation’s well-heeled college students regard college as a time to party and formulate their post-high-school identities and maybe give some thought to their long-range plans.

Except the vast majority of college graduates have no long-range plans. They never do. Most go-getters don’t really figure themselves out and how to get what they want until their late 20s or early 30s, if that.

But imagine what those wealthy parents ((including actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman) who went along with the just-revealed college entrance bribery scam have passed along to their kids. Imagine the corrupt karma, the message it sends: “It was our judgment, son or daughter, that you aren’t brilliant enough to get into the best schools, and that you also lack that ambitious, hungry-for-achievement, X-factor quality that you’ll need without a good education, and so we decided that we had to flim-flam the system to get you in.”

Imagine what this could do to a kid’s self-esteem.

If I had to grapple with paying back a $75K college loan on top of every other soul-crushing difficulty I was facing in my 20s, I would have crumpled and died. Simple as that. I would have folded my tent, succumbed to despair, thrown in the towel.

BREAKING: Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman are among at least 40 people charged in college entrance exam cheating investigation, court documents show.@Tom_Winter has the latest. More: https://t.co/XOoCR9jYyF pic.twitter.com/ztENd4Io0m

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 12, 2019

I’ll never see Tay Garnett‘s Stand-In (’37), a Hollywood satire which costars Leslie Howard, Joan Blondell and Humphrey Bogart. I’d never even heard of it until this morning. Obviously an outlier in Bogart’s film resume, and probably underwhelming by today’s standards. Garnett was a “house” director who made only one truly memorable film — The Postman Always Rings Twice (’46). And yet (this is the odd part) for some reason I couldn’t stop chuckling when I saw the below screen capture.

Another oddball Bogart film is The Return of Doctor X (’39), a B-level cheapie in which Bogart plays a diabolical scientist-vampire-zombie. I’ll probably never see that one either.

Four months ago I reported that a slightly more explicit version of Psycho would be available from a German video distributor. Nothing breathtaking, just a tad more explicit than the prudish U.S. cut, etc. Now it’s purchasable as part of a German Bluray Psycho box set for 129 euros.

The “uncut German version” is on disc #5, and is described as a “German Super-8 version.” Wait…the source is a shitty-looking 8mm print, and it’s dubbed in German? Forget it.

Here’s a 2012 article about the extra German footage.

Universal Home Video should issue a new Psycho Bluray with this footage, of course, but they should also (a) remaster it in 4K and (b) offer an alternate boxy version (1.37:1) — the current Universal Bluray slices off acres and acres of visual information with an unnecessary 1.85 aspect ratio.

Last night I tried to watch John Lee Hancock‘s The Highwaymen via the Netflix Media Center. I signed in but no Highwaymen. There’s some kind of changeover going on. The new access to screeners will be accessible under a tab on the Netflix app called Preview Content. I already have a Netflix account so it’s not a problem, but in the meantime no Highwaymen — aka Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson vs. Bonnie and Clyde.

The thing that will almost certainly elevate Beto O’Rourke in the minds of rural pudgeball voters is that he’s a real-deal, Bobby Kennedy-like humanist who’s not beholden to shrieking lefty Stalinists. If there’s one thing that Average Americans loathe and despise it’s doctrinaire white-male-hating p.c. crazies.

O’Rourke, who may announce his Presidential candidacy later this week, “has betrayed little concern about catering to his left flank. People close to him say a central takeaway from speaking to disparate audiences in recent months is that voters are far less ideological than some in the party might believe — supplying an opening, Mr. O’Rourke senses, for a unifying figure in a bog of partisan warriors.

Beto O'Rourke says he has made a decision on a 2020 presidential run. CNN's @leylasantiago caught up with O'Rourke in El Paso, Texas, where he teased an upcoming announcement. https://t.co/x43EYTIhMX pic.twitter.com/ObrA3ZQbn3

— CNN (@CNN) February 28, 2019

“Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016, said that Mr. O’Rourke stands apart as a politician who can ‘drive his own news,’ independent of Donald Trump, alluding to his history of social media-ready flourishes on the campaign trail.

“’It’s not just a matter of being authentic,’ Mr. Mook said. ‘It’s authentically taking on Trump and challenging political norms.’

“Still, most candidates considered to be top 2020 contenders tend to check at least one of the following three boxes: (a) a firm policy bedrock anchoring their campaigns, like the economic platforms of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren; (b) the potential to make history, like Kamala Harris or her female Senate peers in the field; or (c) deep experience and national standing, like Joe Biden.

“Mr. O’Rourke would appear to satisfy none of these descriptions, though his instinct for viral internet ubiquity and generational uplift may amount to its own category.

“His fans compare him to Mr. Obama or the Kennedys — a font of rangy inspiration — rarely dwelling on his record. But Mr. O’Rourke would enter the race without a signal achievement over six years as an El Paso congressman, nor an obvious big-ticket policy idea that might animate his bid.

Last weekend David Fincher visited South by Southwest to talk about Love, Death and Robots (Netflix, 3.15), an “anthology animated short series made by different artists from around the world” blah blah.

I’m a stone worshipper of Mindhunter, the 2017 series that Fincher produced and partly directed (and which will re-launch with a second season later this year), and I definitely enjoyed the Fincher-produced House of Cards for the first couple of seasons. But I wouldn’t watch Love, Death and Robots with a knife at my back. Because in my mind an “anthology animation short” series is Otto Ludwig Piffle…take-it-or-leave-it esoterica for animation oddballs and navel gazers and guys who avoid sunlight and regular pedicures, and who look and behave like Pete Davidson and wear skeleton-feet sneakers.

Remember the old David Fincher? The guy who was one of the most dynamic, innovative, forward-reaching directors of narrative features (on the level of Soderbergh, Cuaron, Inarritu and Kubrick) and who was slugging it out in the boxing ring and at least trying to make stuff that really mattered? That Fincher has now retreated into a kind of Netflix cave. He hasn’t made a theatrical feature in over four years, close to five. The good but vaguely underwhelming Gone Girl (’14) was his last theatrical effort.

If you ignore Alien 3 (which I advise everyone to do), Fincher was on the feature-film stick for 19 years, and made four world-class knockouts — Seven (’95), Fight Club (’99), Zodiac (’07) and The Social Network (’10). He also made four above-average, stylistically-striking popcorn films — The Game, Panic Room, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. I’m not calling The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a stinker, but I’ll never, ever watch it again.

Why is Fincher more or less hiding in his little Netflix cave? He’s following his heart and his muse, and I’m sure that’s a satisfying place to be, but what about the devout fan base (i.e., persons like myself?) It’s like Fincher has decided he can’t be “David Fincher” any more…like that was a phase and now he’s past it.

He obviously no longer believes in theatrical narratives. Because Hollywood itself no longer believes in same, and because the zombie executives won’t greenlight anything even remotely original, and because Fincher won’t make formulaic crap. And so he’s operating out of his own little creative bunker. He’s not even doing a Soderbergh — making modest but original features, working with Netflix but exploring new distribution schemes, shooting on iPhones, etc. He’s working and living in a realm that allows for creative freedom, but the absence of the old Fincher breaks my heart.

If Fincher is trying to get anything made in the realm of narrative features, I haven’t heard of it. Has he totally bailed or is there something he’s developing that might actually become something? I’m asking.

The first weekend is almost always about the marketing and never about the quality (or lack of). The second and third weekends tell the tale. Don’t tell me about this damn film — I tried to watch it but it quickly began to eat my insides out. It was secreting poison gas. I could only make it to the 80-minute mark.

From a video taken in Mar-A-Lago this morning…

Woody Allen used to play wimpy guys like Casey Davies, except the temporary karate class remedy would be dispensed with in a first-act montage and then Allen would move on to the actual story. Now “the karate class” is the whole thing. You can feel the thin-ness, the micro-focus.

Directed and written by Riley Stearns, The Art of Self-Defense (Bleecker Street, 6.21) costars Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola and Imogen Poots. No interest, zip, forget it. That look of intimidation of Eisenberg’s face = later.