Yesterday’s news about legendary producer Joel Silver, 66, leaving Silver Pictures didn’t seem to add up.

A onetime protege and producing partner of Larry Gordon, Silver launched the company in ’80, built it into a strong and successful action-flick shop, co-pioneered the whammy-chart approach to action films, earned hundreds of millions for Warner Bros. (the Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and Matrix franchises, Predator, The Last Boy Scout, Assassins, Swordfish, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, V for Vendetta, The Nice Guys). Things began to wind down when Silver’s longstanding partnership with Warner Bros. ended, and then a subsequent Universal deal didn’t pan out. Silver then partnered with Canadian private equity financier Daryl Katz.

But how does a guy who blazed his own high-powered trail and created his own self-named fiefdom…how and why does the commandant of Silver Pictures wind up leaving Silver Pictures?

According to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, the big-spending Silver (owner and renovator of Auldbrass, a South Carolina plantation estate built by Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as a former owner of the Wright-designed Storer House as well as a Wright-designed 1941 Lincoln Continental) more or less torpedoed himself by blowing too much dough while failing to produce enough hit films.

“It is unclear whether Silver was fired or left on his own accord,” Kit reports.

“Silver rose to prominence in the era of the non-writing movie producer, a time when he and peers like Jerry Bruckheimer could command $2.5 million plus a cut of first-dollar gross on a studio film. Warner Bros. was a home to him, advancing him money when he needed it and assigning him big-budget features to develop and produce. As he rose in prominence, Silver purchased homes in Brentwood, Malibu and South Carolina, as well as an art collection he once valued at $17 million, courtside Lakers seats and the architecturally significant Venice Post Office property near the ocean in Venice Beach.”

I was chummy with Silver for a couple of years in the early ’90s — late ’92 through ’94. Then relations chilled. Too complex to recite here. Silver has a legendary temper. He was the real-life model for Saul Rubinek‘s Lee Donowitz character in True Romance. It’s also been said that Silver was a partial model for Tom Cruise‘s Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.

Posted on 4.26.07: “The late Dan Cracchiolo, the hot shot get-around who worked as Joel Silver‘s top guy in the mid to late ’90s and a little beyond, once told me about a conversation he and Silver had about the size of the craniums of big movie stars. He said that Silver told him, ‘Dan, all big stars have really big heads.’ Physically, he meant.”

16 years after the ghastly heat wave of 2003, Europe is about to become a sweatbox again. The boys were with me during that sweltering summer. Jett had just turned 15; Dylan was 13 and 1/2. We got through it, but barely. A couple of days before the heat began, I slipped into a Castorama near Place de Clichy and bought three sizable fans. They restored our souls. If I hadn’t pounced when I did the fans might’ve been sold out.

To escape the damp, jungle-like Paris air we decided to attend 2013 Locarno Film Festival. It began on Wednesday, 8.7.03, and closed ten days later. A smart, elegant, sophisticated gathering. Locarno is in southern Switzerland, of course, but it’s northern Italy in almost every tangible sense — culturally, atmospherically, architecturally. The gelato stands were a daily blessing.

I remember Roger Ebert‘s face being all pink and sweat-beady during an outdoor discussion panel. The guys and I were constantly soaked, of course. Every afternoon around 3 or 4 we took an hour-long dip in Lake Maggiore.

“I can say with utter confidence, however, that we’re here, we’re credentialed, and we’re rockin’ and sockin’,” I wrote in an 8.5.03 filing. “That last verb referred to the fact that the dirty socks and T-shirts are boiling in a big pot of water on the stove. Not the best way to clean clothes, but we were on a budget. If you stir the clothes around in the steaming water and then cool them off and wring them out and then sun-dry them on the sundeck, they’ll at least “feel” cleaner when you put them on later.

We arrived after an all-night train ride from Paris in a second-class compartment — six bunks in a space the size of a large foot locker. Locarno was scenically beautiful, the pizzas tasted better than in Paris, black and yellow leopard-skin motifs were printed on every exploitable object and surface (that breed of cat being the festival’s theme) and the festival looked, smelled and talked like a class act.

The kids and I were having breakfast Thursday morning on the outdoor terrace at the Hotel Arcadia, where most of the journalist freeloaders were staying, when film critic and scholar Harlan Jacobson walked over and said hello. ‘Welcome to Switzerland, guys,’ he said to Jett and Dylan. ‘It’s a wild place. Drugs and girls are very plentiful here so you’ll have a good time.’ Harlan was drolly alluding to Switzerland’s reputation as the world capital of complacency, order and tidy-ness.

A guy was openly smoking weed later that night while sitting in the middle of a big crowd watching an open-air screening of Vincente Minelli‘s The Band Wagon. Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant…stoned.

We all know what a 65% Rotten Tomatoes rating means. It means that the film in question has problems. It means that if Yesterday was a kid in science class who’s just taken a pop quiz, he’d be looking at a failing grade. Not horribly failing but a notch or two below the minimum passing grade of 70.

Regional film critic friend: “Yesterday is more of a Richard Curtis than a Danny Boyle thing. The premise is so offbeat that it actually works. The totally arbitrary nature of other things that don’t exist in human memory after a worldwide blackout — Coke, cigarettes, Harry Potter — is kind of fun.

“Himesh Patel is a very sympathetic lead, and Lily James is a real cutie. Patel’s singing isn’t great, but good enough for the purposes of the film.

“The first hour is a lot of fun but Yesterday sags in the middle, and you get the feeling that screenwriter Richard Curtis has boxed himself into a corner with his premise. The ending is a typical feel-good Curtis production, which will probably turn a certain amount of people off, and the (spoiler here) confessional scene in front of a Wembley audience is one of those ‘no one would ever in a million years do this in front of a group of total strangers’ kind of sequence that is used all too often in films these days.

“Yesterday is finally a reminder, as if we needed to be reminded, of how truly great the Beatles catalogue is.”

Friend who moderates a film series for 40-plus types: “I held a preview screening of Yesterday last night at the usual venue. Not only did it sell out — but the audience was probably half-kids, from about 10 into their teens. Most there with their parents. This sold out strictly on word-of-mouth and an email blast to the membership — in other words, a lot of people have seen this trailer and apparently want to see this movie.

“As an unabashed Richard Curtis fan, I was disappointed in this movie when I went to a press screening a couple of weeks ago. I felt the film had serious third-act problems, that he didn’t know how to finish it. I also felt he seriously underwrote Kate McKinnon‘s role, as well as the role of the sidekick/roadie. The latter should have had the inspiredly random humor of the Rhys Ifans character in Notting Hill but doesn’t.

“Watching it again last night, the latter two criticisms still held — but they didn’t bother as much. And the rest of it played really well for me. Better yet, it was a big, big hit with the audience, which ranged in age from 10 to 80. And there’s that surprising scene near the end that, at a minimum, will take your breath away and bring a lump to your throat. A lot of people last night walked out smiling, while wiping away tears.

“Plus, as noted, the music, which remains incredibly vital. This, the Crosby doc and Rolling Thunder make this a boomer’s musical wet dream of a summer.”

According to recent (6.21 through 6.24) Emerson Polling national survey, Mayor Pete beats Donald Trump by 52% to 48% — margin of error 2.9% plus or minus,

At a recent Planned Parenthood convention in South Carolina, “several groups of chanting supporters marched their candidates into the auditorium. On Saturday morning, Kamala Harris came down an escalator accompanied by a cheering throng and a high school drum line. Later, boisterous backers of Cory Booker streamed in behind him from one end of the convention center, only to meet dozens of raucous Beto O’Rourke fans coming from the other. They came together in the middle, attempting to drown each other out with chants like rival gangs in a good-natured musical.

“Shortly after that, a group of Joe Biden supporters gathered to march into the main hall. Biden wasn’t with them, but they planned to enter as he appeared onstage. There were 20 or 30 people, a smaller group than those accompanying Harris, Booker or O’Rourke, and despite a few earnest woo-hoos, they weren’t nearly as loud as the others.

“An ability to draw crowds isn’t everything — a tepid vote counts the same as a passionate one. Biden’s supporters are older than those of other Democrats, which gives his campaign less visible energy but a more reliable voting base. Still, as recent elections have shown, enthusiasm matters. Anyone convinced that Biden is the safe choice should go see him for themselves.” — from Michelle Goldberg‘s “Joe Biden Doesn’t Look So Electable in Person,” posted on 6.24.19.

…the industry takes note. But this sounds a bit curious. Everything I’ve heard and read about James Gray‘s Ad Astra (Disney/Fox, 9.20), a father-son, space-travel, Heart of Darkness-like drama with Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, has indicated it’s a hard-luck project. Gray wanted it to go to Cannes, but the FX couldn’t be finished in time. The release date was bumped twice (slated for 1.11.19 and then 5.24.19). Remember that for a film of this scope (space adventure, other realms and universes, etc.), $50 million is a nickle-and-dime budget. So what is it that Tapley has heard about Ad Astra? Specifically, I mean. What’s special about it, what stands out? It’s not enough to say “whoa, I’m very excited!” If you’ve heard something solid, great — pass it along. If you haven’t heard any specifics or don’t want to share them, stand down.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is allegedly in big trouble with African American voters (not just in South Bend but all over) because he didn’t personally step into the 6.16 confrontation between South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill and the late Eric J. Logan. Or because he’s had the temerity to run for President and therefore wasn’t home in South Bend where he should have been at the time of the shooting.

The O’Neill-Logan shooting happened around 3 am, which suggests that if Buttigieg had been in South Bend he probably would have been home sleeping. Nonetheless, the African-American community mantra is “dilletante Mayor Pete has to face the music!”

O’Neill’s account of the shooting of Logan is admittedly curious. Logan, who apparently had been breaking into cars, either came at O’Neill with a knife or “threw” it at him. What kind of a drooling idiot threatens a cop with a knife when the cop is holding a loaded gun and saying “drop it!”? It’s obviously problematic that O’Neill didn’t turn on his bodycam, and so the African American community is assuming O’Neill is flat-out lying, and that he may have plugged Logan without reasonable cause.

But I’ve also read that (a) today’s high-end bodycams can be automatically activated when a police offer removes his/her weapon from his/her holster, and that (b) South Bend chose instead to purchase manually-operated bodycams, which are cheaper.

I know I’m just a typically smug and clueless white guy sitting in West Hollywood, but how likely is it that a 19-year veteran of a big-city police force who rose in the ranks…hired in 2000, promoted to sergeant in 2015…how likely is it that O’Neill would just shoot Logan in cold blood? It’s possible, sure, but how likely?

A 6.18 account of the incident by South Bend Tribune reporters Greg Swiercz and Christian Sheckler states the following:

(a) “Investigators…found six vehicles [that] had been broken into — two on William [Street], two on Taylor Street and two in the Central High parking lot. A purse, a wallet and a knife — the same knife that was found at the scene of the shooting — were stolen from the various vehicles, according to South Bend prosecutor Ken Cotter .”

(b) Cotter and Metro Homicide commander Michael Grzegorek said that “shortly after O’Neill drove into the Central High Apartments parking lot, he saw a person’s legs sticking out of a Honda Civic. O’Neill stopped his cruiser, stepped out and asked the man if the car was his. The man said ‘yes’ but O’Neill spotted a purse wedged in his clothing. The man then emerged from the car with knife in his right hand.”

(c) “Logan is said to have ignored multiple orders to ‘drop the knife’ and then approached O’Neill with the knife raised. O’Neill, backing up toward his vehicle, fired two shots. One shot struck Logan in the right side of his abdomen, while the other struck the opened door of the car. Logan ‘was coming toward (O’Neill) at roughly the same speed that Sgt. O’Neill was retreating,’ Cotter said.”

It’s not a rumor: Ari Aster‘s Midsommar (A24, 7.3) is brilliantly made right up until the final 15 or 20 minutes, which don’t quite work. But this doesn’t matter, or certainly shouldn’t. Because Aster, born 31 or 32 years ago, is such a gifted and masterful filmmaker. He’s way, way up there, and I don’t want to hear any dissenting bullshit about this.

Midsommar is a 100% essential summer freakout flick no matter how you feel about elevated horror, chilling Swedish pagan rituals, shitty boyfriends or Florence Pugh. The 23 year-old actress (recently in The Outlaw King and The Little Drummer Girl) is quite good in the lead role of Dani, a 20something who’s recently been devastated by a ghastly family trauma and by the less-than-fully-engaged, close to aloof vibes she’s been getting from her brooding boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor).

Yes, Midsommar is a breakup film — David Edelstein called it “a woman’s fantasy of revenge against a man who didn’t meet her emotional needs” as well as “a male director’s masochistic fantasy of emasculation at the hands of a matriarchal cult.” That’s about as concise and on-target as a capsule description could be.

Downmarket meat-and-potatoes horror fans will probably speak ill of Midsommar, as they did to some extent about Aster’s Hereditary. But if watching a sublimely creepy (and even occasionally hilarious) film made by a phenomenally talented craftsman means anything to you, you simply have no choice in the matter — you have to see this puppy, and I mean the first weekend. Aster is so good, so sharp, so fully in command.

Did I read somewhere that he’s declared that Midsommar is his last horror film (at least for a while)? Whether Aster said it or not, it’s a very smart decision. No exaggeration, Aster is Martin Scorsese, Ruben Ostlund, Alfred Hitchcock, David Fincher and Val Lewton rolled into one. He’s way too genius-level (and I mean better than Tarantino) to plant his flag in the realm of a single genre.

I caught Midsommar at Monday night’s Arclight premiere, and then attended the after-party at No Vacancy (1727 No. Hudson).

Midsommar director-writer Ari Aster (l.) and Eighth Grade direcot Bo Burnham (photo stolen from Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson).

I want credit for lasting 161 minutes with Carlos Reygadas‘ Our Time. Yes, I missed the last 13 minutes but it’s not a problem, trust me. It’s one of those interesting, real but vaguely un-real art films that make you feel glad you’ve seen the good parts, if not altogether nourished by the whole.

It’s also one of those pain-in-the-ass adult relationship films that you know will never end in a just-right way. It just goes on and on and on and on. But it’s definitely “good” for the portions that turn your head around.

It will irritate you, try your patience, make you exhale loudly and throw up your hands. But at the end of the day you’ll be half-grateful you saw it (or at least saw as much as you could endure).

If Our Time had ended at 100 minutes, I would have been fine with that. 120 minutes would have been pushing it, but I could’ve handled it. 150 minutes would have been too much. But 174 minutes? That’s why I bailed at 161.

During the last 35 or 40 minutes (or rather the last 35 or 40 that I saw) there were five or six scenes that could have worked as a servicable finale. In particular there’s a moment when the lead fellow, Juan (played by Reygadas, who also directed and wrote), breaks down while visiting a friend dying of cancer. He’s not crying about the friend but the end of his marriage, or more precisely the end of his ability (and his wife’s ability) to amiably or constructively accept the terms of an open marriage. The weeping-at-the-deathbed ending would’ve been perfect.

Juan and Esther (Natalia Lopez, a renowned film editor and Reyadas’ real-life wife) run a bull ranch in the rugged, mostly treeless Mexican countryside (near the town of Tlaxcala, about an hour east of Mexico City).

And it’s a parched, somewhat muddy property, let me tell you. It ain’t Switzerland or southern Austria in the springtime, I can tell you that. “Later”, I was muttering to myself. Especially after a scene in which a “wild” bull gores a donkey and spills his intestines all over the ground. Yeah, it’s a metaphor but still.

Esther is in charge of running the day-to-day while Juan, a famous poet, raises and selects the horned beasts. They have some kids, and a no-secrets open marriage.

The problem is that Esther has embarked upon a secretive affair with a bearded, laid-back, bordering-on-fat horse trainer named Phil (Phil Burgers), and Juan starts freaking about her lack of openness and general sneaking around, which tells him it isn’t just a recreational affair but something a bit more than that.

I’ll tell you what Our Time left me with. It left me with an idea that if you’re going to cat around outside the bonds of marriage (which I wouldn’t recommend by the way), old-fashioned cheating is the way to go. Lie your ass off, invent elaborate fictions and try to pull the wool over your significant other’s eyes the way all those suburban John Updike characters attempted back in the ’60s.

Cheaters get busted sooner or later anyway and it all comes out in the wash so you might as well enjoy the hot sex while it lasts. There’s nothing like betraying your wife or husband the old-fashioned way.

My point is that anything is better than the jaded terms of an “open” marriage. Remember Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage? Nothing but misery and rage.

A guy who sometimes hears about research screenings wrote the following early today: “I’ve heard the same good things about The Aeronauts (Amazon, 10.25). Easy slamdunk Oscar contender. An undeniable hit. Visually staggering vintage adventure with impressive and tense set pieces.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Sometime around ’92 or ’93 I had a brief chat with brilliant Steve Allen, whom I’d long worshipped for his ’50s and ’60s hot streak as the original Tonight Show host (’54 to ’56 — three years), the Sunday night Steve Allen Show on NBC, and the Hollywood-based, Westinghouse-produced Steve Allen Show.

Not to mention his having written more than 50 books plus his prowess as a composer- songwriter (over 8000 tunes). Easily the brightest guy of that generation (i.e., my dad’s) I’d ever spoken to.

My face-time session happened at the House of Blues. We only spoke for 15 minutes or so, but it was electric. (For me at least.). As I was thanking him and saying farewell I cried “smock! smock!” Allen laughed, patted me on the shoulder.