It was around dusk and peaceful in the ancient section of Rome on 6.2.17. My Macbook Pro was sitting on a small round table on a narrow cobblestoned street. I was using the wifi from a cafe called Barnum Roma (Via del Pellegrino, 87, 00186 Roma, Italy), and for a moment I stopped and stood up and took a slow-pan video, and as God is my witness it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

It doesn’t matter how long my Barnum Roma time lasted (an hour or so) — what matters is how serene and in-the-pocket I felt when I was standing there. It still gets me off just to watch this.

I’ll always be a fan of Al Pacino‘s big speech at the end of The Devil’s Advocate, but Keanu Reeves makes a re-watch so difficult. He’s stuck with all the clunky lines, of course, but the yelling, the anger and denial and pulling out the gun with that dumb glare on his face….everything he says and does is truly terrible.

This tediously moralistic Taylor Hackford film is 25 years old now, and if you ask me Pacino’s John Milton was at least partly based upon Donald Trump. (The producers rented Trump’s apartment for a scene, I’ve read.) The screenwriters were Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, but the maestro behind Pacino’s big soliloquy was Gilroy, or so I’ve always understood.

So the dressing that flavored and annointed the salad that Olivia Wilde prepared for Harry Styles as their Don’t Worry Darling affair was just getting underway two years ago…the salad dressing was Nora Ephron‘s from “Heartburn“: “2 tablespoons of Grey Poupon mustard mixed with two tablespoons of good red wine vinegar. Then, whisking constantly, add six tablespoons of olive oil.”

There’s nothing like the rapture of a mad love affair as it’s just turning into something, but it never lasts, of course. The intensity dial always drops from 9 or 10 into a 6 or 7, and the lovers, if they’re good, have no choice but to find (or create) a day-to-day groove that may be nurturing and good for their souls and so on. But the sex always settles down.

HE to friendo: “Wilde lied about the timeline of the Styles affair, of course. She and Suidekis has fallen out of love, or she had at least. It happens. Harry Styles is cuter and sexier thsn Sudeikis, and Wilde went for it. I’m presuming that she and Styles are probably winding as a couple as we speak. She’s too old for him — it probably can’t last. Not with a big pop star.”

Friendo to HE: “Yeah, I saw them walking together in a recent photo and thought ‘that’s way too much baggage for him.'”

In Maria Schrader‘s She Said, the performances of Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan as N.Y. Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, respectively, “seem” to be even-steven in terms of screen time.

They’re not actually — Kazan has about 20 minutes more screen time that Mulligan does. And yes, Kantor is working on the Hollywood sexual harassment story a little before she and Twohey join forces. And Kazan comes close to choking up in a couple of scenes in which she interviews victims of Harvey Weinstein.

But the film doesn’t play like a senior-junior partnership thing. The Kantor-Twohey dynamic is roughly the same as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman‘s Woodward and Bernstein in All The President’s Men — and so it doesn’t really add up that Kazan will be pushed for Best Actress and Mulligan for Best Supporting Actress, as Gold Derby‘s Daniel Montgomery and Chris Beachum reported earlier today.

It’s not a problem, mind, that Universal has decided to play it this way. Kazan and Mulligan are both excellent, however you want to slice it.

Paramount has decided to open Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon wide on 12.23…terrific. Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “Sources close to Babylon suggest the earlier release date points to the studio’s confidence in the film”…maybe.

Paramount could also be figuring it’s safer to sell the big, broad elements than depend on early-break word of mouth. Who knows?

What are the main elements? An epic-sized capturing of a wild, crazy time. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in the ’20s. A splashy old-time Hollywood epic about change and convulsion. Orgies, elephants, cocaine and all manner of perversity.

Martin Scorsese will hate me for this, but HE is asking for predictions about how well Babylon will do with Joe and Jane Popcorn. Film mavens will eat it up, of course, and even from this distance it seems assured of several Oscar noms (including Best Picture). But how will Millennials and Zoomers respond?

It doesn’t look like streaming fare — it almost looks like something out of the Ben-Hur factory…call it Ben-Twisted…emphatic, ambitious, large-scale, orgiastic..something you really need to see on a big-ass screen..

From a certain angle it seems like a descendant of John Schlesinger‘s The Day of Locust (’75). Not the same kind of package as Babylon (a darker one actually), but vaguely similar in certain big-scale, crowd-scene respects, and it certainly seemed lavishly produced when it came out. Production costs were around $5 million, or $27.5 million in 2022 dollars.

Babylon cost $78 million.