Tatyana and I attended a special gathering Friday night for Cold War director Pawel Palikowski and star Joanna Kulig. The elegant affair happened at the Brentwood home of producer and hostess supreme Colleen Camp. A sea of faces both familiar and distinguished — Alexander Payne, Michael Mann, Phillip Noyce, Helen Hunt, Dustin Hoffman, David O. Russell, Robert Towne, screenwriter Michael Tolkin, producers Art Linson and Albert Berger. It was great speaking with Kulig (due to give birth to a son in early February) and her husband, documentarian Maciek Bochniak. The evening ended with Kulig singing three songs, accompanied by a skilled, low-key pianist and a stand-up bassist. (I regret that the videos I took were unsteady and poorly angled.) Awesome buffet, desserts to die for. A special thanks to Camp for her gracious hospitality.

Waiting for valet guys outside Colleen Camp home — Friday, 1.11, 10:45 pm.

Have any HE readers recently accepted the Bird Box challenge? Which is to say have they attempted any activities that normally require eyesight while blindfolded? Has anyone tried to play darts, make an omelette, sit on top of a flagpole, walk a tightrope, cross a traffic-heavy boulevard or build a house of cards without using their eyes?

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Posted on 12.22.13: We all know Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Well, here’s an early ’70s occurence called “Gas Pedal Space-Out.”

We were all young and wasted and riding around the wilds of Wilton, Connecticut. Five of us, no direction in mind, maybe 11 pm or midnight. Wilton is exurbia — all shady and winding country roads with woods all over, woods and big lawns and colonial rock walls guarding homes on two and three-acre lots. I was sitting shotgun with two others in front and three in back, and I swear to God the episode is as clear now as if it happened last night.

While engaged in a fairly mesmerizing conversation (are there any other kind when you’re fried on cannabis sativa?) the driver gradually forgot to keep his foot on the gas. The car went slower and slower until it came to a dead stop. And nobody noticed for a good five or ten minutes, of course, until some guy pulled up behind and flashed his lights and honked. If it had been a Wilton patrolman he would have have searched the car and our pockets, and somebody would have been popped for possession.

Two or three years earlier the same driver was motoring across a bridge in Kansas City with four or five friends. Somebody had a recently-bought ounce of something potent. They were all passing a pipe around when someone noticed a cop behind them. Instant paranoia. “Be cool, just be cool,” etc. Then the cop flashed his lights and gave a short blast with the siren, and the person with the bag decided the only thing to do was dump the contents out the window. He poured it out the driver’s side window and, sure enough, the finely-ground pot blew right back into the car, covering everyone and everything.

Here and now. Anyone who was getting high in the ’70s or ’80s has at least a couple of stories like this. I asked this five years ago and I’m asking again in 2019: Has anyone ever experienced a late-night car slowing and then stopping for the above-described reason?

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said today she will run for president in 2020. “I have decided to run and will be making a formal announcement within the next week,” the Hawaii Democratic congressperson told CNN’s Van Jones during an interview slated to air early Saturday evening on CNN’s “The Van Jones Show.”

A 37 year-old Iraq War veteran, Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012. Seemingly more progressive than Texas Congressperson Beto O’Rourke and arguably as much of a high-charisma candidate as he, Gabbard currently serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She is the first American Samoan and the first Hindu member of Congress.

“There are a lot of reasons for me to make this decision,” Gabbard said. “There are a lot of challenges that are facing the American people that I’m concerned about and that I want to help solve,” alluding to health care access, criminal justice reform and climate change.

Posted on 5.11.13: I had an issue today with the wonderful people at Superfit, a health club in Berlin Charlottenberg (Wilmersdorferstrasse 54). I wanted to just hit the treadmill and use some of the machinery, but I didn’t think to bring sweats or shorts with me to Europe. So I tried to skirt the fashion norm by paying my 10 euro-per-day fee and using the facilities with my Nike workout shoes and jeans. Yes, I know, of course — jeans don’t pass muster in a workout club. It’s not cool and I get that. They’re totally right. But I was looking for a little leniency.

Call me a cheapskate but I just couldn’t see shelling out 20 or 25 euros for a pair of bathing suit trunks or gray sweatpants so I could pay 10 euros to do two miles on a treadmill for one time. I was being a pain and a bit obstinate, okay, but was it really that crazy to ask for a little slack? As a one-time deal?

Last night I attended a Green Book screening + after-party on Mt. Olympus Drive. Director-cowriter Peter Farrelly was there; ditto costars Linda Cardellini and Joe Cortese. A pleasant time was had by all.

I was talking to Film Threat‘s Chris Gore about the prevailing climate of woke political terror, which we both despise, and about my being denied a press pass for Sundance ’19 for insufficient woke-itude. In a flash of inspiration Chris told me I needed to create my own Sundance pass with “rejected” stamped across it.

I went right home and sent snaps of my 2016 Sundance press express pass to HE’s own Mark Frenden, the Chicago-based designer who created that HE-stamped American Friend poster I love so much. This morning he sent me my new pass, which I think is dead perfect. This weekend I’ll print it out at Kinko’s. I intend to wear this pass around my neck during my whole forthcoming Park City visit (1.22 to 1.31).

As Wednesday’s attempted torpedo takedown of Green Book made clear, all Oscar contenders need to delete anything and everything from their Twitter accounts in order to fully protect themselves. Because their enemies will search through their twitter histories for anything negative they can find find. Who knows which other films or contenders will be next?

Only one thing seems more or less assured, and that’s the fact that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma is totally bulletproof in this regard. Apart from the fact of its own cinematic excellence, Roma is adored by the wokesters. Twitter banshees have never taken shots at it, and they never will. Because they don’t want to. Because Roma has no indictable qualities.

Roma has all the heat, all the momentum right now. It didn’t suffer an embarassing Golden Globes loss a la A Star Is Born, but in fact triumphed. It will probably rule during Sunday’s Critics Choice awards. It will win at the BAFTAs. The Alliance of Women Journalists has saluted it. Roma is all alpha, all “forward ho!”…all win, win, win, win, win, win.

Somebody please explain how Roma can lose the Best Picture Oscar. Or how Cuaron can lose the Best Director trophy. I just don’t see how either scenario is possible at this stage. One plea to Academy voters: Give the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to Pawel Pawlikowski‘s abundantly deserving Cold War, not Roma. Spread it around.

It took her a while after Wednesday’s attempted Green Book takedown, but yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted one of the best bitch-slappings of the lefty woke fascist brigade (i.e., “Woketopia”) that anyone’s ever read. I dare Mark Harris or A.O. Scott or Manohla Dargis or Team Indiewire or Melissa Silverstein or anyone from that snowflake crowd to question or push back upon what Sasha has written here — I double-dare them.

Please read the whole thing but here are some of favorite portions:

Excerpt #1: “The leaders of Woketopia…truly believe that Green Book winning the Oscar is the worst thing that could happen in America.

“‘THEY DESERVE IT!’, they scream. At best, that’s what we get. At worse we get a lot of tongue-clucking and lectures by high-minded folks who are here to set everyone straight about what deserves or doesn’t deserve the Oscar. I’m referring not to black critics, BTW, but to certain white critics who scream the loudest.

Except #2: “This has greatly impacted how the Oscar race is covered, as bloggers scan each project for un-wokeness. Films by and about white males are mostly fair game for any kind of attack, and hopefully will eventually be just completely shunned. One tweet is all it takes to send a wave of hysteria through the hive mind and suddenly that film, too, is problematic. And anyone who likes the film or votes for the film is likewise caught up in that shitstorm.

Except #3: “When I heard about how much Green Book was liked, the first thing I thought was ‘white filmmakers telling a story about race are going to get creamed.’ It didn’t matter how good it was. It’s simply not possible, in today’s climate, for any white person to tell a story about race. White people and specifically white men are considered the enemy unless they arm themselves by becoming Woke Warriors, which many of them have done.”

What if Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis hadn’t been released five-plus years ago and instead a couple of months ago? Would it be a more formidable Oscar contender than it was in actuality, when it managed only two nominations (cinematography, sound mixing) and no wins?

Few Coen films have aged better than Llewyn Davis. Every time I re-watch ILD (I’ve seen it at least nine or ten times) it gets a little funnier, a little craftier and more perverse.

Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading are maxed out — they are what they brilliantly are, preserved in a kind of Coenesque amber. But Llewyn Davis never stops breathing and expanding and rolling its eyes.

It was one of the most critically celebrated and heavily awarded films of ’13, but the Academy slowboats brushed it off. Why? Because in their eyes it was too glum, too downbeat, too grayish-brown, too resigned. Because the misty desaturated color scheme did something to their souls that they just didn’t like.

Suzanne Vega: “I feel that the Coens took a vibrant, crackling, competitive, romantic, communal, crazy, drunken, brawling scene [i.e., early ’60s folk music in Manhattan’s West Village] and crumpled it into a slow brown sad movie.”

For me it’s one of the most consistently amusing Coen flicks ever made. In a downish, contemplating-suicide sort of way. I’d like to watch it again right now. Hell, I want to see a 4K version.

On this, the 20th anniversary of the HBO debut of The Sopranos (1.10.99), I’m trying to understand why my all-time favorite moment might be the one in which a seething Tony orders that low-rent Millennial guy in Artie Bucco‘s restaurant to take his baseball cap off. I guess it’s because, for me, the baseball-cap guy represents all the Millennials whose cinematic preferences have all but turned theatrical exhibition into a superhero waste dump. 2nd favorite: Paulie and the cat. 3rd favorite: Junior tips off Tony that Richie Aprile is planning to move against him. 4th favorite: Tony beats the hell out of a guy who insulted Meadow. 5th favorite: Tony chews out Richie for using New Jersey garbage truck drivers to push cocaine.

Presumably conveying shades of Antonioni’s The Passenger, Christian Petzold‘s Transit is an adaptation of Anna Segher‘s 1942 novel. It concerns a German refugee (Franz Rogowski) who, trying to escape Third Reich fascism, steals the transit papers of a dead novelist and assumes his identity in order to escape into France. Except Petzold’s film isn’t period — it’s set in the here-and-now.

There’s nothing worse than being in a hurry as you’re trying to serve some Sheba Perfect Portions to a hungry howling cat.

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