Country singer and songwriter Blaze Foley was much admired within his realm, but he was also a big ornery sucker who drank too much. When his significant other Sybil Rosen introduced Blaze to her parents, her mother took one look and reportedly wept. I myself wept when I read about Foley’s habit of wearing duct tape wrapped around his boots (total low-rent asshole move), and how he once made a suit out of duct tape (worse), and how his casket was wrapped in the stuff. (Foley was shot to death at age 39 in 1989.)

From “Song Of a Poet Who Died in the Gutter“: “It almost goes without saying that films about musicians will focus on boozy, self-destructive behavior — Walk The Line, Bird, I Saw The Light, Payday, Michael Apted‘s Stardust, etc. But Blaze feels home-grown and self-owned in a subdued sort of way. It has a downmarket, lived-in vibe. I wasn’t exactly ‘entertained’, but every line, scene and performance felt honest and unforced.

Gifted but temperamental, Foley (Ben Dickey) never really got rolling as a recording artist, but he was a well-respected outlaw artist with a certain following in the ’70s and ’80s. Dickey’s purry singing style, similar to Foley’s, reminds me of a sadder Tony Joe White (“Polk Salad Annie”).

Hawke focuses on the guy’s soft, meditative side and particularly his relationship with real-life ex Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat). He gets a truly exceptional performance out of Dickey, a hulking, elephant-sized musician who’s never acted prior to this. Dickey’s Foley is such a good fit — centered, settled, unhurried — that I nearly forgot about the bulk factor.

Blaze offers noteworthy supporting perfs from Kris Kristofferson (as Foley’s dad), Sam Rockwell, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn (as a trio of record company partners) and Josh Hamilton, among others.

The script was co-written by Hawke and Rosen, author of a relationship memoir titled titled “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley“. You can just sense that Hawke knows musician behavior like his own. Hell, I was one myself (i.e., a mediocre drummer) for a while, and know the turf to some extent, and it all feels right.

The Motion Picture Academy has invited 928 new people to join. Women will henceforth represent 31% of the membership, up 28% from last year. POCs will now comprise 16% of the membership, up from last year’s 13% tally.

If I were a senior member of the governor’s board, I would push for in-depth questionaires before final admittance. I would ask the following of all prospective new members: “Do you primarily regard motion picture theatres as (a) churches, (b) amusement arenas or (c) watching-and-texting salons?” If the prospective member answers “churches,” he/she would be admitted. If not, forget it.

Specific Tiffany Haddish question: “You’ve said you often decide which movies you want to see from what the women at your beauty salon tell you. Do you occasionally decide on your own? Do you ever read reviews or at least Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic?” If Haddish were to answer “Rotten who?…Meta what?…my beauty salon girls know best!,” I would say “approve her membership!”

I would also ask Haddish the following: “If you’re again asked to announce the Academy Award nominees, would you consider trying to learn how to pronounce their names correctly before going on the air?”

Timothee Chalamet: “Last January you threw Woody Allen under the bus in order to enhance your standing with the #MeToo community, but have you since read Moses Farrow’s essay? If so, any second thoughts?”

Mindy Kaling: “Do you still feel that the views of old-white-guy critics should be regarded askance if they aren’t part of a focus-group demographic that a certain film has been made for? Should only critics who relate to target demos review this or that film?”

Not quite a full day in Palm Springs. Arrived last evening, up early this morning, hiking in Palm and Andreas canyons, cable-car to the peak of Mount San Jacinto (which I hate visiting because of the tourists) and then back to Los Angeles by 7:30 pm — 22 1/2 hours total.

It was suggested yesterday that in the absence of Movie City News, an industry-news-link aggregation feature could be a major selling point for HE-plus. Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby looking for a sharp journalism graduate to perform this task on a valued-intern basis. You can honestly claim on your resume that you served (are currently serving) as news editor for a prominent, industry-followed site that everyone reads, and you can get yourself into occasional L.A. and N.Y. screenings in exchange. A nice deal.

“Ten years ago at Telluride I said on a panel that theatrical distribution was dying. It seemed obvious to me. I was surprised how many in the audience violently objected: ‘People will always want to go to the movies!’ That’s true but it’s also true that theatrical cinema as we once knew it has died. Theatrical cinema is now Event Cinema, just as theatrical plays and musical performances are Events. No one just goes to a movie. It’s a planned occasion. Four types of Event Cinema remain: 1. Spectacle (IMAX-style blockbusters) 2. Family (cartoon-like features) 3. Horror (teen-driven) and 4. Film Club (formerly arthouse but now anything serious). There are some isolated pockets like black cinema, romcom, girl’s night out, seniors and teen grossouts, but it’s primarily those four. Everything else is TV. Now I have to go back to episode five of Looming Tower.” — posted yesterday on Facebook.

From “First Reformed Asks, Can God Forgive Us? Its Director Has an Answer,” a 6.20 N.Y. Times q & a between First Reformed director Paul Schrader and critic A.O. Scott.

Does Scott still disapprove of Woody Allen despite Moses Farrow’s essay? This has nothing to do with the Schrader q & a, but it irks me all the same.

Scott: “You take the audience into this condition of extremism, but you’re there as if it were a perfectly natural place to be.”

Schrader: “I’ll tell you the trick, and I figured it out years ago. It’s a three-stage trick. First stage is nonemotive narration. So it’s like intravenous feeding. You’re getting nutrition but you can’t taste it.

Than Hawke in First Reformed.

“The next stage is the world is only as our protagonist perceives it. You see no other reality. There’s never a scene that he’s not in. So now you’re seeing his life, you’re being filled up with his thoughts and after about 45 minutes or so, you’ve identified. How could you not identify?

“Then, often slowly, you have to go off the rails a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. The first few times it doesn’t bother you, but then all of a sudden [you’re] saying ‘whoa, I’m identified with somebody that I don’t think is worthy of identification.’ What do I do about that?

“And that’s a great place for an artist to take a viewer because you can’t predict how people will respond when they’re opened up that way, [and so] they’re going to have to do something to defend themselves. Here’s how you can defend yourself: Just take a jump, you know.”

Scott: “On one hand you’re appalled by what he’s contemplating and you realize that you are in some way rooting for…

Schrader: “A jihadist.”

Wells-Antropova impulsively drove out to Palm Springs yesterday. Three elements: (a) the bone-dry, 100-degree heat, (b) a little hiking in Indian Canyon on Sunday morning, and (c) the loud, coarse, after-dark culture on Palm Canyon Drive. The revelers are 90% under-30. No exaggeration — a third of the Palm Springs youth brigade is balloon-shaped, and a fair number of female Jabbas were wearing skin-tight, form-fitting knit dresses…”no apologies, this is who I am.” Karaoke bars (20somethings belting tunes that were popular when their parents were teens), loud bands delivering ’60s standards (“So Glad You Made It,’ “A Hard Day’s Night”). Fellini Satyricon meets Animal House. The elite movie folk who flocked here in the 1930s would be horrified at the devolution of their once-elegant getaway community. Then again the Spanish-styled Casa Cody (HE’s favorite PS hotel) is unchanged, and the rocky-brown hills to the south are eternal.

An online ad for MJ (Mary Jennings) Hegar, who’s looking to represent Texas District 31 (north Austin) in the House of Representatives, has gone viral over the last four days. The ad, assembled by Cayce McCabe of Putnam Partners, a D.C.-based agency, tells MJ’s story — chopper pilot in Afghanistan, shot down and rescued, relocated, sued to overturn Pentagon ban on women serving in ground combat. Running against Republican John Carter.

Six years ago, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo overtook Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane in the once-per-decade Sight & Sound poll as the greatest film ever made. The next big vote won’t be for another four years, but in the view of esteemed critic David Thomson Vertigo‘s dominance may not last.

He sounds the warning in a 6.21 London Review of Books entry called “Vertigo after Weinstein.” The basic shot is that Vertigo is too much about obsessive male hunger for women and too dismissive of their feelings, too sexually perverse and generally too icky to remain the champ in this #MeToo and #TimesUp era.

Thomson’s last three paragraphs (which I’ve broken into five) sum things up:

“We have to be clear-eyed about Vertigo, and about what its power and influence tell us. It isn’t just that Alfred Hitchcock was devious, a fantasist, a voyeur and a predator. It isn’t just that no matter how many Harvey Weinsteins are exposed, it could never be enough to deliver justice to those who have been wronged and exploited. It isn’t even that men invented and have dominated the command and control of the movies, both as art and business: that they have been the majority of directors, producers and camera people despite, over the years, being a minority of the audience.

“Is what Vertigo has to tell us, beyond this history of male control, that the medium itself is in some sense male? Is there something in cinema that gives power to the predator, sitting still in the dark, watching desired and forbidden things? Something male in a system that has an actress stand on her mark, in a beautifully lit and provocatively intimate close-up, so that we can rhapsodize over her?

“In 2012, the Sight & Sound poll was urged on by a feeling that we’d all had enough of Citizen Kane. Welles’ film had been voted the best ever from 1962 to 2002. Few felt that the verdict had been unjust, but in a young medium was it proper for the champ to be a pensioner? Didn’t cinephiles deserve a more mercurial model, made in their lifetime? But the new winner was Vertigo, not very much younger than Citizen Kane, and its triumph was acknowledged as a rueful commentary on the ambivalent glory of being a film director, the auteur status that Sight & Sound was pledged to uphold.

I wonder if anyone has tried to re-edit Sicario with all of Emily Blunt‘s scenes removed, or at very least with her character reduced to a marginal figure. Sicario runs 121 minutes. A Blunt-free or Blunt-reduced version, if it exists or if someone assembles it, would maybe run…what, 80 or 90 minutes? I’m imagining this because I was so turned around by Sicario: Day of the Soldado. I didn’t have a Blunt problem in Sicario because I don’t like women in Mexican drug-dealing dramas. At all. The young Isabela Moner is awesome in Soldado — she owns almost every scene she’s in. But I don’t care for female FBI agents who are better at registering naive emotional responses to grim situations (weeping, shuddering, taking showers, picking up strangers in bars) than doing their job.