My basic attitude toward Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman, which opened last night, is one of muted respect. As I said during the Cannes Film Festival, it’s not great and can’t say I loved it overall, but I was genuinely pleased and throttled by the first half-hour or so. As much as I felt underwhelmed by the drugs-and-debauchery section, I couldn’t put it down at the end because at the very least it’s an actual “musical” and at the end of the day is a better, more ambitious film than Bohemian Rhapsody.

Right now the Metacritic and Rotten Tomato reactions are at 73% and 90%, respectively.

Presumably a portion of the HE community saw it last night. Reactions are hereby requested.

From “For What It Is, Rocketman Works,” posted on 5.17:

I went into Rocketman with an attitude, but I felt pleasantly turned around soon enough. I was more taken with the first 30 to 40 minutes (Elton John‘s childhood, taking piano lessons as a teen, teaming with young Bernie Taupin) and less with the remainder, which is basically about Elton becoming more and more of a booze-swigging, coke-snorting party animal and his life downswirling into addiction and self-destruction.

I respect Dexter Fletcher‘s decision to not tell Elton’s saga Bohemian Rhapsody-style, using a linear “this happened and then that happened” approach. Instead he chose a more creative and dynamic (not to mention more cinematic) scheme by making it into a punched up, inventively choreographed, mad-brush Ken Russell musical.

The framing device is Elton confessing all during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Out of this comes a looking-back-at-my-life, All That Jazz-type deal that uses several John-Taupin songs as emotional backdrops or undercurrents for various biographical moments.

The film isn’t biographically accurate in many respects (the musical scheme requires a suspension of realism and chronological history) and there’s a lot more interest in a glitter-and-glam aesthetic than any kind of semi-realistic presentation of how things really went down, but this is the film they chose to make.

From “President Donald Trump’s poor mental health is grounds for impeachment,” a 5.31 USA Today opinion piece by John Gartner (psychologist and former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School), Dr. David Reiss (practicing psychiatrist for more than 30 years, specializing in fitness evaluations), and Dr. Steven Buser (clinical psychiatrist practicing in Asheville, North Carolina, and a former Air Force psychiatrist. Gartner and Buser are editors of “Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump“:

Absent any creative inspiration of its own, corporate Disney has digitally rebooted many of its classic animated properties — Aladdin, The Lion King, Dumbo, Mary Poppins Returns, Cinderella, The Jungle Book — while others are waiting in the pipeline, including Lady and the Tramp and a musical version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

But in the wake of yesterday’s news that Marc Webb will probably direct the Snow White reboot (with screenwriter Erin Cressida negotiating to adapt), a question hangs in the air: How do you reboot the cobwebby 1937 original, in which the angelic Snow White was rescued from a witch’s coma with a kiss from an adoring prince, in the era of #MeToo?

And do you play along with the precedent of Into The Woods, which said that fairy tales are delusional bullshit and that Cinderella’s Prince was a philanderer? Not to mention Relativity’s Mirror Mirror (’12) and Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman (also ’12). Or do you ignore all of this and just pretend it’s 1937 all over again?

I’m presuming that Disney will lean toward a “#MeToo who?” solution, but maybe not.

Justin Kroll’s Variety story reports that the forthcoming Snow White “will expand upon the story and music from the 1938 animated classic,” and that Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land,The Greatest Showman) will write new songs.

Webb’s directing credits include The Only Living Boy in New York (which I absolutely hated), Gifted and 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man.

Wilson’s best-known credit is The Girl on the Train.

With their criminal husbands suddenly out of the picture, a small crew of desperate women (Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss) decide to step into their shoes, pick up where they left off and prove their mettle in a brutal realm. So reads a potential synopsis of Andrea Berloff‘s The Kitchen (Warner Bros., 8.9), an apparently non-comedic period crime drama set in Hell’s Kitchen and based on a Vertigo comic book miniseries by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle.

Marketing slogan suggestion #1: “This may sound like Widows II, but that was 21st Century Chicago and this is midtown Manhattan in the late ’70s. So in a way we were first even though we’re second.”

Marketing slogan suggestion #2: “Those Widows women were following in the footsteps of three very tough Manhattan forebears, and they didn’t even know it!”

No matter how you sell it, audiences are naturally going to say “this again?”

Widows was born a little over four years ago (March of ’15) when it was announced that Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn would adapt the British ’80s TV series into a feature with McQueen directing. Two years later (February ’17) Berloff was hired by New Line execs to direct The Kitchen, which she’d previously adapted into a screenplay.

Widows began principal photography in on 5.8.17. The Kitchen began principal photography on 5.7.18. Widows premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on on 9.8.18 and opened three months later. The Kitchen, as noted, will open on 8.9.19.

The only thing could possibly save The Kitchen would be if it were filmed as a black comedy. With McCarthy and Haddish in the leads, that would seem like a natural way to go. But the trailer indicates that it’s mostly a straight violent drama (the musical theme is “Paint It Black”) with a few ironic asides (“What do you wear to a mob meeting? Do you get dressed up?”)

Put another way, how could Berloff and her producers, Michael De Luca and Marcus Viscidi, have decided against making a black comedy version of more or less the same plot, i.e., “women criminals muscle their way into a brutally tough, all-male arena”? In what galaxy could they have decided “it doesn’t matter if we wind up looking like Widows II: Manhattan Moms in the marketing materials — we’ll carve out our own identity regardless”?

“…for obstruction of justice. This isn’t even a close case. If you or I did what President Trump did, we’d be facing prison.”

…is only an emotion away. Tatyana’s plane arrived this morning at CDG at 9 am. I RER-ed out to meet her around 8 am. She and Gleb are quality-time-ing as I tap out some items. We’re be dinner-ing at Cafe Soprano in a half-hour or so.

Boilerplate: “Rambo T. Geezer travels to Mexico to save a friend’s daughter who has been kidnapped by the Mexican cartel.” Sylvester Stallone in the Gibson role; costarring Adriana Barraza, Paz Vega, Yvette Monreal, Sergio Peris-Mencheta. Directed by Adrien Grunberg, cowritten by Stallone and Matt Cirulnick.

Boilerplate: “Assuming he is incapable of winning, all of the members of a prestigious Madison Avenue advertising firm accidentally vote to appoint the company’s only black executive, Putney Swope, as chairman of the board. His unexpected win behind him, Swope changes the company’s name to ‘Truth and Soul, Inc,’ fires nearly all of its elderly white employees, and focuses solely on creating subversive, outlandish, and shocking campaigns.

“As the company is catapulted to new heights of success, Swope finds that he has drawn the ire of the U.S. President, who seeks to declare him and his renegade staff a threat to national security.

“Considered one of the masterpieces of late 60s counterculture cinema, Robert Downey, Sr.‘s Putney Swope remains a vital cinematic satire on race, politics and pop culture. Featuring a supporting performance from Allen Garfield (The Candidate, Nashville) and a cameo from Mel Brooks, Vinegar Syndrome is proud to present the Bluray debut of this landmark 1969 film in a stunning 4K restoration created by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Film Foundation.”

The Swope Bluray pops on 7.2.19.

A new “final cut” 4K Bluray of Oliver Stone‘s The Doors (’91) pops on 7.27.

Am I a huge fan of this film? No. Do parts of it work? Yes. I felt intrigued and diverted during an initial screening. The early Doors music carried me along and the acid-tripping scene in the desert was quite the stand-out. Robert Richardson‘s cinematography accurately recreated the off-center, crystalline, almost spooky atmosphere that a psychedelic adventurer might visually encounter.

But overall the film seemed to weaken and even fall apart upon my second viewing.

The main reason is that I felt more and more alienated by Stone and Val Kilmer‘s portrayal of Jim Morrison as a coarse loutish type (party-animal, screamer, show-off, indelicate). To hear it from Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and others who knew Morrison well, there was a lot more to the guy than just climbing chain-link fences, whipping his schlong out during a concert or two and acting like a bellicose asshole.

For at least a three-year period (early ’65 to ‘early ’68) Morrison gave every indication of being a solemn poet and spiritual adventurer — a guy who had apparently tasted serious satori. Morrison’s song lyrics from that period clearly indicated he’d broken through to Aldous Huxley‘s “other side”. He was like a new Arthur Rimbaud.

The Doors’ first two albums, The Doors and Strange Days, offered abundant indications of this mystical bent among Morrison and his bandmates, but did Stone and Kilmer take heed?

Yes, Morrison allegedly became a dispirited, dissolute alcoholic during the last couple of years (the beard, the weight gain, Morrison Hotel, L.A. Woman, the final few months in Paris before his death at age 27) but I decided after my second viewing that Stone and Kilmer had blown it by dismissing the delicate threads in Morrison’s soul during that ’65 to early ’68 period. Stone encouraged Kilmer to act the part of a rock ‘n’ roll animal and he certainly nailed that aspect, but in so doing they made Morrison into a tiresome figure.

This is the way liars admit the truth, by blurting out words in passing or more precisely a clause within an otherwise lying, agitated, bloviating, diarrhea-mouth denial. In other words, when it comes to sociopaths the truth will only leak out accidentally. As in “oops…uhm, I didn’t mean that.”

This is what happened this morning to Donald Trump, tweeting that Russia had helped get him elected in ’16. An hour later he retracted the statement — “No, Russia did not help me get elected…I got me elected.” But the milk had been spilt.

In a just-posted open letter to Robert “leave me alone” Mueller in the N.Y. Times, Robert DeNiro (who’s been playing Mueller on SNL for several months) begs him to stop behaving like a loyal (i.e., not overly confrontational) Republican and stand up for America. A significant portion of the public is too lazy and mind-scattered to read the Mueller Report, DeNiro has written, but if straight-arrow Mueller is able to man up and explain his findings (and, perhaps more importantly, convey his fully-considered beliefs about the character of Donald Trump) he’ll be doing this once-great nation of ours a favor.