An exclusive Peggy Siegal party for Julian Schnabel‘s Vincent Van Gogh film, At Eternity’s Gate (CBS Films, 11.16), happened today in the Hollywood hills.

The main honorees were director Julian Schnabel and the great Willem Dafoe, whose performance as the tortured and gifted Vincent Van Gogh is surely his finest since inhabiting Jesus of Nazareth 30 years ago in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (’88). At the very least Dafoe (who was well on his way to a Best Supporting Actor win last year until Sam Rockwell stormed the Bastille) has to be Best Actor nominated…c’mon! This is great, primal, world-class channelling. Ask anyone.

(l. to r.) At Eternity’s Gate star and like Best Actor niminee Willem Dafoe, Al Pacino, director Julian Schnabel and co-screenwriter and co-editor Louise Kugelberg.

Tatyana Antropova, Guillermo del Toro.

Al Pacino, who arrived somewhat late.

San Fernando Valley view from the patio.

The fraternal, warm-hearted Guillermo del Toro conducted a q & a with Schnabel, Dafoe and co-screenwriter and co-editor Louise Kugelberg. Al Pacino (The Irishman) and Benicio del Toro were also in attendance.

Hollywood Elsewhere correspondent Tatyana Antropova, a longtime Van Gogh admirer who read Irving Stone‘s “Lust for Life” in her late teens, attended on my behalf.

HE review of The Other Side the Wind, posted on 9.19.18; my 9.29.18 review of Morgan Neville‘s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

I’m about to drive over to a friend’s place for a long-awaited viewing of WHE’s 4K Ultra HD Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The huge flatscreen and 4K Bluray player are top-of-the-line (i.e., my host is in “the business”) so whatever this disc has to offer, I’m not going to miss a single value or aspect. I’ll check back in later.

The gold-faced, green-tinted, thick-lipped fishbowl guy with plump, vaguely Eastern European features is directing all non-Republicans to abstain from voting on Tuesday. Especially those in Texas. Just go to work, focus on the chores at hand, ignore what’s going on, hit the market on your way home, keep to yourself and throw a few beers down before you crash. If you do this all will be well, and no one will throw you down a hole or insert an explosive brain-control device in the back of your neck. Read my reptilian pinchers — you know what not to do.

Originally posted on 7.7.13: L.M. Kit Carson‘s Direction Man, a five-minute short starring the immortal “Larry Williams,” played at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. I saw it at the Egyptian toward the end of the festival, and came to the immediate conclusion that it was one of the funniest found-footage shorts ever shot, made or shown.

Ignore the poor video quality — the material and personality are what count. All I know is that there’s very little likelihood of anyone running into a Larry Williams type of guy today with smartphone GPS and whatnot. In my mind Williams is a legend, a kind of genius, a jazzman. And nobody knows where he is today, or so I’ve been told.

It took forever to get hold of a VHS copy of Direction Man, but I succeeded in doing that today with the assistance of Chance Browne, the renowned cartoonist and musician who lives in Wilton, Connecticut, and particularly his wife Debbie. I gave Chance a copy sometime in late ’95 but then lost track of my own — thank God he held onto his.

Yesterday Hunter Tremayne posted the following Bohemian Rhapsody comment on HE: “Saw it tonight in Barcelona. Place was packed with families. Laughing, clapping, cheering, the works. People were singing Queen songs all the way to the metro.”

Right away I decided to catch it again, and soon after persuaded a couple of friends to come along. Around 6:50 pm I drove down to the local Wilton Bowtie Cinema to get seats, and the second I entered the lobby I saw Sophie Cabot Black, my ex-girlfriend from the mid ’70s. She was sitting on a bench and studying her phone, and didn’t see me at first.

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HE to Indiewire podcasters Eric Kohn, Anne Thompson: I’m listening to a Best Actress discussion on your latest Screen Talk podcast, and waiting for a mention of The Wife‘s Glenn Close, whom 22 out of 25 Gold Derby spitballers regard as a prime Best Actress contender and whom Deadline‘s Pete Hammond has predicted a nomination for.

Olivia Colman, Lady Gaga, Melissa McCarthy, Charlize Theron, Rosamund Pike and even Hereditary‘s Toni Collette are discussed, but not Close. And all I can say is “you guys are amazing.”

Is this because of Anne’s unfortunate opinion that The Wife is okay but not exceptional? But it is exceptional and actually rather riveting. It’s a “play,” yes, but a very well written and expertly performed one, with a nicely layered build-up to the big payoff at the end. It works, it delivers, it knocks people out.

And what about the metaphor of Close’s character — the brushed-aside but stronger, smarter and more talented wife who lets her husband have it at the end? It fits right into the zeitgeist in a certain sense (i.e., silver-haired women have had it up to here) and is hugely popular with the over-55 set. I’ve attended two screenings with a somewhat older industry crowd, and Close’s performance is a very big thing with them. The after-buzz was palpable both times, trust me, and you guys are ignoring this?

Don’t tell me you’re giving it the Indiewire brush-off because Sony Classics opened The Wife in August. That’s so shallow, so herd-mentality.

Look at this holiday-themed Starbucks cup. Those are flames. You can say “yes, the flames of a living-room fireplace as dad throws another log on and mom serves cups of egg nog.” But one could just as easily say these are the flames of hell. One could argue that flames are more commonly associated with the caverns of Hades than they are with the family hearth. If you were marketing vp for Starbucks would you have signed off on this? On some level the artist who composed this may have been channeling the social hate currents of the Trump era.

There are some fellows who are a bit irked that Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t depict Freddie Mercury‘s amorous escapades in franker terms. It’s not gay enough, they mean. Too sanitized. Why not a heifer-ramming scene or a splooge shot a la Taxi Zum Klo? There’s no question the film feels a bit chaste — it probably needed to be a bit ruder, darker, crazier. And maybe a little Mine Shaft action. Hard to say. Then again if Bohemian had been shot in a way that would have been gotten a Guy Lodge stamp of approval it probably wouldn’t have earned nearly $50 million this weekend.

“[Mercury’s] carnal wants, by all accounts prodigious, are reduced to the pinching of a waiter’s backside, plus the laughable glance that Freddie receives from a bearded American truck driver at a gas station as he enters the bathroom. With its PG-13 rating, and its solemn statements of faith in the band as a family, Bohemian Rhapsody may be the least orgiastic tribute ever paid to the world of rock. Is this the real life? Nope.” — from Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review.

From director-screenwriter friend in Los Angeles: “Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood has proven a boon to some local merchants. At least to some extent. A friend’s restaurant was closed down for some recent filming, and the friend wound up making more in a day from Quentin’s film than he does in a month.”

The Robin Hood legend is just that — a one-size-fits-all bag of mythical bullshit that each culture re-imagines and re-invents to suit its own agenda, and then casts a certain sort of dashing fellow — Errol Flynn, Richard Todd, Sean Connery, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe — to fill the shoes.

But Otto Bathurst‘s Robin Hood flick is obviously an abomination — a lazy, ludicrous, video-game-level wank with Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx and Ben Mendelsohn in the leads. A Robin Hood fantasy that not only ignores any semblance of historical auras and atmospheres, but totally spits in the face of anyone who’s ever felt a twinge of respect or affection for the previous versions. “We’re totally ripping the past to shreds,” Bathurst is saying. “We don’t care about anything except ideas and attitudes that synch with our 21st Century jizz-whizziness…we don’t care, we don’t care, we don’t care.”

Anyone who finds this shit entertaining needs psychological counseling. Lionsgate will release Robin Hood on 11.21.18.

The dishes riff [roughly the 6:50 mark] is beautiful. Partial transcript: “Sometimes I’m at home and I’m doin’ the dishes. And I say [to Michelle], ‘Hey look, I’m doin’ the dishes.’ And she says, ‘That’s the first time in a month that you’ve done the dishes. Don’t brag about it.’ [But] I’m puttin’ a positive spin on things! Then she asked me, ‘What’d you do wrong? Otherwise you wouldn’t be doin’ the dishes.'”