The Rene Magritte-like Birds of Passage poster speaks for itself. I believe that’s a skull under the red tunic. The Bumblebee poster looks odd, off. An absence of clarity, of balance. Randomly thrown together. Hailee Steinfeld is anguished about something? John Cena seems forlorn about something.

On 11.22 Hollywood Elsewhere posted a grand tally of just under 90 2019 films (“The Whole Shebang“) — The Irishman, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Gemini Man, You Are My Friend, Triple Frontier, Official Secrets, Greyhound, Little Women, The Woman in the Window, etc. The presumption is that a significant portion of these will probably feel at least moderately satisfying to smarthouse viewers.

Here’s an alternate-universe rundown of 2019 hotties, courtesy of @ComicBookRumors:

From AP’s Bernardo Bertolucci obit, posted in today’s N.Y. Times: “‘Maybe I’m an idealist, but I still think of the movie theater as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together‘ — Bertolucci upon receiving a DGA award for The Last Emperor (’87).

From “Reverence, Churches and Moon Dust,” posted on 7.17.06: “Every time I walk into a plex or a screening room it’s like entering St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue or Sacre Coeur in Paris. If you’re not feeling awe as you enter a theatre, why go? What is moviegoing if not a ritual about great possibility? The chance that something jolting or transcendent might happen?”

Posted on 5.12.18: “Late last night I saw Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra‘s Birds of Passage, an indigenous drug-dealing film that’s been justly celebrated as a fresh nativist take on the Columbian drug boom of the ’70s and ’80s, using the perspective of the Wayuu culture.

“The dramatic theme is roughly the same we’ve been seeing in drug-dealing movies for decades, which is that (a) dealing will pollute your soul and (b) sooner or later anyone who seeks to profit from big-time drug dealing will wind up dead on the floor. Sooner or later all dealers form gangs and go to war with each other, etc. The principal Wayuu characters start out simple and pure and just looking to better their lives, and by the end they’ve all taken a bullet or several.

“The perspective is interesting, but it’s basically the same bouillabaisse. During the last third you’re saying to yourself, ‘Okay, everyone’s gonna die, this scourge will consume itself, the black birds of death are circling.'”

The Orchard will release Birds of Passage on 2.13.19.

I was raised to understand that life is generally not a breeze or a bowl of cherries, and that you won’t experience much in the way of fulfillment or security without putting in a lot of hard work and also applying a fair amount of discipline and caution at all times, at least during weekdays.

I was also brought up on the idea that the best women work just as hard as men, and that the best marriages — the ones that work out, at least — are partnerships based on two ideas. One, life is nothing without joy, kindness, caressings, imagination, optimism and healthy diets. And two, neither party can lean too much on the other and that both have to contribute what they can and pull their own weight, etc. What’s past is past, and it’s best to look forward.

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Throughout my 20s I had a fairly low opinion of shrinks (i.e., psychologists, psychiatrists). And for good reason, I felt. It had to do with my assessment of a certain suburban therapist — a chilly, officious guy in his 40s whom my parents arranged for me to see on a weekly basis when I was 17.

I had a regular weekly appointment with this asshole on Tuesday or Wednesday evenings at 7 pm, and as it happened one of my meetings came right after suffering a brutal beating from my dad. Our fight had erupted in the kitchen during dinner and had resulted in a gash on the side of my head and a good amount of blood soaking my shirt.

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The passing of Bernardo Bertolucci…good God. The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed…Bertolucci is dead! Bernardo Bertolucci of Rome lives no more!

There were five distinct Bertolucci eras or episodes — early, earthy, scruffy (The Grim Reaper, Before The Revolution), Glowing, Sensual, Perverse Perfection (The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, 1900), The First Stumblings (La Luna, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), Return to Glorious Form (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky) and the Long, Gradual, Modestly Respectable Downfall (Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers, Me and You).

For 90% of his followers, Bertolucci’s lasting glory stems from episodes #2 and #4 — the other three don’t count. If he had only made The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, his world-class reputation would be assured.

Bertolucci talked like a Communist in the ’60s and ’70s but from the early ’70s on he loved going first class. He was a delirious sensualist, a colorist, a composer, a wearer of the finest clothing, a pageantist, and always a maestro of tracking shots. He and Vittorio Storaro, hand in hand, joined at the hip…brothers of the softest light and the most magical of colors (particularly amber).

If there’s one term or phrase that sums up Bertolucci’s spiritual or directorial signature, it would be “exquisitely composed decadent luxury.”

Remember that elegant party in 1900 when a huge white horse is led into a living room full of rich swells sipping champagne, and the owner tells everyone that the horse is named Cocaine? That was Bertolucci. He was every element in that scene…the guests, the horse, the cocaine, and certainly the audacity of leading a magnificent four-legged animal into a beautifully decorated living room and saying quite calmly “say hello to my gentle friend…for he is you and you are he and we are all together.”

Bertolucci was an absolute God between the releases of The Conformist, which opened stateside on 10.22.70, and Last Tango in Paris, which opened on 2.7.73. Two and a half years of being the absolute Zeus of filmmakers, and everyone on the planet was bowing down, including the lordly-at-the-time Norman Mailer.

If you want to taste a bit of what was going on after Tango opened, read this Mailer essay — “A Transit to Narcissus” — which appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Hugs and condolences to family, fans, friends, colleagues…this is a big one. And no, the ridiculous twitter outburst of 2016 over misinformation about shooting the Last Tango butter scene isn’t worth reviewing.

This shot (taken by whom?) is an instant classic — right up there with that horrific shot of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (i.e., the Vietnamese “napalm girl“), taken by AP photographer Nick Ut in 1972. This image is stamped upon Donald Trump‘s legacy — he’ll own it for the rest of his life, and just as certainly it will own him.

Adam McKay‘s Vice (Annapurna, 12.25) is a brilliant, slash-and-burn, hellzapoppin’ portrait of deliciously ruthless schemin’, schemin’, schemin’ like a demon. And it’s great rightwing fun for the most part — witty, wicked and wonderfully cruel. How we fucked ourselves and bought the WMD bullshit and murdered tens of thousands and bombed the hell out of Iraq and created ISIS in the bargain, etc.

The primary object of scorn and fascination, of course, is former vp Dick Cheney (fully inhabited and reanimated by Christian Bale, as you may have heard) but the film teems with a whole cavalcade of conservatives…a whole kill-or-be-killed universe of conniving super-serpents who’ve risen and slithered over the last half-century (George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Antonin Scalia, Frank Luntz) along with Dick’s go-getter wife Lynne (Amy Adams) and their daughters Mary and Liz (Allison Pill, Lily Rabe).

Really and truly, the gang’s all here and it’s all fun, fun, fun. Or it was for me, at least.

Vice costar Amy Adams, director-writer Adam McKay following this morning’s screening at the SVA theatre on West 23rd street.

“Fun” in a downishly deadpan sort of way, of course, because we’re talking about the balls-out career of a really shitty, cold-blooded human being as well as the collapse of the twin towers, the imagining of WMDs and the invasion of Iraq and all the horrors and cold-cockings and focus-groupings and flat-out lying that followed. Not to mention the smirking and jaw-clenching.

And it’s all so precise and scalpel-like, so dry and cutting and laser-focused. It’s a movie that says “Dick, Dick…what a dick!” As well as “you guys out there, the ones eating the popcorn…you fucked yourselves and our country by electing these assholes…you know that, right?”

And stylistically Vice is all over the place so you don’t know where the hell to turn. It fully cops to being a “movie” from the get-go, offering a narrator while reversing and fast-forwarding, delivering a blatantly phony ending at the halfway mark, always smirking, full of self-regarding commentary, double-backing and hop-scotching around…it’s instructional with a bullwhip.

Bale will land a Best Actor nomination and deserves to win it, if you ask me. You can’t help but marvel at the voice, the attitude, the physical transformation…all of it. Bale sure as hell has done more than deliver a first-rate impression of Kris Kristofferson in the ’76 version of A Star Is Born, which is arguably what his principal competitor has been praised for.

Adams, count on it, will definitely be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. She glares, she snaps, she takes no shit.

“This is not my cup of Starbucks Via, but I’ve been hearing buzz about New Line’s The Curse of La Llorona. It’s scheduled for an April 19th release. James Wan producing, written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, directed by Michael Chaves.” — an agent friend.

Jim Cavender by way of Jim McBride, 11.24 Facebook post: “I suppose it was inevitable, but President Trump got his grubby little mitts on Elvis Presley (and rock ‘n’ roll generally) by posthumously awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for being ‘the true king of rock ‘n ‘roll’ — a phrase he clearly meant as a dig at African Americans and anyone else who may feel otherwise.

“[The] media commentary I’ve run across seems to acknowledge this. It’s also why Trump chose to recognize Babe Ruth and Roger Staubach, as a ‘remember when white people were in charge?’ dog whistle. But I’ve also picked up an undercurrent of sneering contempt that indicates the commentators can’t imagine any other reason for the recognition. I find it bewildering and ironic that Elvis has been turned into this buttress for reinforcing the racial barriers he set out to obliterate. Any thoughts?”

HE to Cavender: It’s a shame that Presley’s memory has been used by Trump as a dog-whistle thing, but remember also that Presley never set out to “obliterate racial barriers,” to use your phrase. Presley adopted blues and gospel singing styles that he picked up in Tupelo, and thereby became the “white guy singing black music” that Sam Phillips, the Sun Records honcho, had dreamt of and was able to sell. Presley’s debt was obviously huge, but he never stood up for the civil rights movement — not even when Hollywood liberals attended the August ’63 March on Washington en masse.

And of course, Presley became a hippie-deriding, protestor-hating conservative in the early ’70s. If he’d lived he almost surely would be a Trumpster today, so Trump’s Medal of Freedom tribute sadly correlates.

This is all in Eugene Jarecki‘s The King, one of the great 2018 docs.

The guy whose memory and legacy I feel badly for is Babe Ruth. He may not have been a paragon of virtue in all respects, but he was still Babe Ruth. Now he’ll be forever linked as a symbol of white pushback.