William Shatner didn’t say the name “Maximilien Robespierre” but he did say the #MeToo movement has become “hysterical” and likened it to the French Revolution.

That’s it for Shatner, right? But what measures should be taken? Should he be shunned, shut down, subjected to a harsh backside paddling? Or should we just treat him like a drooling old guy and ignore him to death? Whatever the comintern wants to do is okay with me. I’m all ears — I just follow orders.

Shatner: ‘In 2018 we have the #MeToo movement, which I think is great, that these hidden forces are exposed and not to be allowed and women have equal rights. I’ve got three daughters [aged 60, 57 and 54], I’m all for that.”

Letter to friend about Woody Allen-Christina Engelhardt thing: “Last night a Facebook guy mentioned Christina’s interview about Woody and she having had a long-term consensual thing in the ’70s and ’80s, and is so doing called Allen’s behavior ‘ugly.’ Perhaps a bit selfish and exploitive to some extent but hardly cruel or demonic. Remember that Christina stayed in that relationship for seven or eight years and that she isn’t condemning Allen or expressing regrets now. Did Allen behave like an opportunistic libertine? Yeah, but to my knowledge he didn’t do anything of a criminal or horrid nature. The ’70s and ’80s exuded a different climate — there was a different sexual ethos in the wind. It used to be okay to be semi-open about stuff like this, but no longer.”

Poor Penny Marshall has passed at age 76. She was a highly significant actress-turned-director who had her hand in and mattered a great deal for roughly 30 years, give or take. As a director Marshall was a respected craftsperson who understood emotion and knew how to deliver it in just the right way when the script and the casting were right. By any measure she was pitching cultural fastballs right into the mitt of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and she counted as a producer into the mid aughts.

Marshall’s first TV series breakthrough gig was playing Jack Klugman‘s secretary, Myrna Turner, on the ABC sitcom of The Odd Couple (’79 to ’75). Then she and Cindy Williams became costars in their own right when Laverne and Shirley became a hit series from ’76 to ’83. Marshall collected three Golden Globe noms for Best Actress during that seven-year run.

She mattered even more when she became a director, initially with the so-so Jumpin’ Jack Flash (’86) but especially with the triple sockaroonie Big (’88), which was pretty much her peak achievement, in part because it was the first woman-directed film to gross more than $100 million.

Marshall also did herself proud with the Oscar-nominated Awakenings (’90) and the seminal A League of Their Own (’92).

She also directed Renaissance Man (’94), The Preacher’s Wife (’96), and Riding in Cars with Boys (’01). Marshall also produced Cinderella Man (’05), which I admired, and Bewitched (’05), which I hated with a passion.

I have two chances to catch Dial Code Santa Claus at the Alama Drafthouse Brooklyn — on Wednesday, 12.19 or Sunday, 12.23. But on both days they’re showing it only once at 10 pm, obviously because they think it’ll appeal more to a midnight crowd. That view isn’t shared by the programmers at Hollywood’s American Cinematheque, which is screening it on 12.19 at 7:30 pm.

From the Alamo press release: “Dial Code Santa Claus (’89) actually pre-dated Home Alone, annihilating a generation of French kids weaned on action-packed Christmastime gems such as Gremlins and Die Hard. It disturbed critics and the moviegoing public with its uncompromising look beneath the surface of the beloved holiday. From there, the film went on to worldwide distribution except in the U.S., where it had yet to see an official release until now.

“The French-made film had its North American Premiere this year at Fantastic Fest, where it thrilled audiences and critics alike,” blah blah.

I’ll probably wind up hating it, but I feel strangely attracted to the idea of catching it anyway.

After two days of getting grilled by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee about Hillary Clinton and the Steele dossier, former FBI director James Comey yesterday shared some nail-hard truths during an impromptu presser: “People who know better, including Republican members of this body, have to [find] the courage to stand up and speak the truth. Not be cowed by mean tweets or fear of their base. There is a truth and they’re not telling it. Their silence is shameful. I hope they overcome [this]. They [surely] realize some day they’ll have to explain to their grandchildren what they did today.”

There’s a divergence between the trailer for Richard Linklater‘s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (Annapurna, 3.19) and the Wikipedia synopsis, to wit: “Bernadette hates people, she hates leaving the house, and more than anything, she hates the other parents at her daughter Bee’s school. When she disappears, it’s Bee’s mission to find out where she’s disappeared to and what really happened to her.”

Does anyone detect anything in the trailer that suggests that Cate Blanchett‘s Bernadette hates anyone, or that she suffers from agoraphobia? There are hints of edge and attitude, but that’s all. I haven’t seen Linklater’s film, but it feels as if the trailer editors have tried to make the film seem as alpha and swoony and effervescent as possible.

In short, it seems as if the trailer is lying. Almost, I’m sensing, on the level of that famous upbeat Shining trailer of 2007. This obviously isn’t an assessment of the actual film, but of the marketing.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? costars Billy Crudup, Emma Nelson, Kristen Wiig, Judy Greer and James Urbaniak.

It’s been two and a half years since I saw Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some. I was initially of two minds — more or less okay with it but also a wee bit irritated. It’s basically an intelligent college fraternity hang movie that doesn’t do the usual horndog thing and occasionally exudes depth and angularity. Will I stream it some night when I’m bored? Probably not.

But maybe I’m an outlier. Maybe a lot more people have streamed Everybody Wants Some than went to see it in theatres. (It topped out domestically at $3,400,278.) Who didn’t catch it theatrically but has streamed it sometime over the last 30 months? It was released eight months before Donald Trump’s election, remember. And a year and a half before the launching of #MeToo. Different currents, different pollen.

Posted on 3.29.16: The good news is that Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some! is cool, smart, fresh, atypical. It’s a period campus ramble-on, set in the climes of Texas State University in 1980, and more particularly a situational thing that feels enjoyably realistic and familiar in at least a couple of hundred different ways.

The bad news is that it’s mostly about a bunch of baseball-star jocks sharing a fraternity house, and athletes, I feel, are always often a drag to hang with because they’re mostly a bunch of pea-brains — hormonal, relentlessly competitive, single-minded, somewhat conservative, egoistic, and lacking in curiosity. I’m sorry but I’ve been around the track a couple of hundred times and that’s my opinion. Are there exceptions to the rule? Yes, of course.

Then again Everybody Wants Some! is a refreshingly unusual jocks-on-a-college-campus comedy, which is to say something quieter and more oblique and introspective and curious about what makes this or that guy tick. It spends a whole lotta time answering that last line of inquiry.

Yes, it’s frequently amusing but I’m not even sure if it’s fair to use the word “comedy.” It dispenses a steady torrent of little laugh sliders that make you chortle or grin or guffaw, but it never strains to be “funny.” Either you’re paying attention and enjoying the observational servings or you’re not.

Hollywood Elsewhere approves of eight of the Academy’s nine shortlisted foreign film contenders — Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War (Poland), Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra‘s Birds of Passage (Columbia), Gustav Moller‘s The Guilty (Denmark), Florian_Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s Never Look Away (Germany), Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Shoplifters (Japan), Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum (Lebanon), Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Mexico), and Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning (South Korea).

It’s not that I disapprove of Sergey Dvortsevoy‘s Ayka (Kazakhstan), which is ninth on the list — I just haven’t seen it.

HE strongly disapproves, however, of the Academy having blown off Lukas Dhont‘s Girl (Netflix). Winner of Un Certain Regard performance award and the Camera d’Or prize, Girl is the most finely assembled and emotionally affecting drama about a transgender person I’ve ever seen.

In his review of Vice, Variety‘s Owen Glieberman complains that Adam McKay‘s film never answers the big question, which is “who is Dick Cheney? How did he get to be the singular domineering bureaucrat-scoundrel he is? What is it that makes this scheming man tick?”

Gleiberman hasn’t been paying close attention. There’s one simple answer, not just about Cheney but all conservatives. The answer is ice-cold fear.

Fear of the dark and terrible unknown. Fear of the beast. Cheney needs to keep that bugger away from this doorstep. He woke up one day and felt the hot breath of the grizzly bear and saw that huge, terrible claw about to come down and rip half of his face off, and Cheney screamed and said “no! I won’t be destroyed! I will instead become the bear and I will snarl and smite others, and they will bow down and show obeisance before my power, and that will make me safer. Me and my fellow grizzlies. It’s a kill-or-be-killed world out there, and you simply have to decide which kind of animal you are.”

HE to Gleiberman: Now you know.

Another way of examining Cheney is that he became the bear to hold onto Lynne Vincent, a young Wyoming girl who became his wife.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott: “The way Vice tells it, Dick Cheney, who would go on to become the most powerful vice president in American history, started out as a young man in a hurry to nowhere in particular. After washing out of Yale, he retreated to his home state of Wyoming, pursuing his interests in booze and cigarettes and working as a utility-company lineman on the side. Dick was saved from ruin — or at least from the kind of drab destiny unlikely to result in a biopic — by the stern intervention of his fiancée, Lynne Vincent, who told her wayward beau that they were finished unless he pulled himself together.

“Her reading of the romantic riot act would have far-reaching consequences. In that pivotal moment, Dick (Christian Bale) looks Lynne (Amy Adams) in the eye and swears he’ll never disappoint her again. The thesis of this film, written and directed by Adam McKay, is that Dick kept his promise. And that everyone else — including his daughter Mary (Alison Pill), thousands of American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and just about everyone on the planet with a care for justice, democracy or simple human decency — paid the price.”

Most Americans are not, for the most part, into catching new movies at the local plex. Partly because they’re streaming films at home, okay, but mainly because they’re lazy, low-energy, heavy-lidded types.

A recent Statista chart shows that one out of five Americans will pay to visit a megaplex about once a month. These are your basic go-getters, life-gulpers, active adventurers, and vigorous content-streamers at home. People with a pulse generally watch a lot of films, read lots of books, go on hikes, go out to restaurants, visit Paris or Rome every three or four years and so on.

Put another way, one in five are awake and alive with a gleam in their eye and the rest are on life support — sleeping a lot, eating shitty foods, wearing hush puppies, taking naps on the couch and walking around with glazed-over expressions.

54% of the populace pays to see movies in theatres “less often than once a month“, which probably means they go four or five times a year, if that. Another 14% don’t go out to movies at all. 8% attend “several times a month.”

Today’s news, courtesy of Variety‘s Brent Lang, is that Netflix isn’t cutting into theatrical viewing.

“A new study conducted by EY’s Quantitative Economics and Statistics group finds that people who go to movies in theaters more frequently also consume more streaming content,” Lang reports. “That flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of box office sages, who grimly ascribe flatlining theatrical attendance to the growing popularity of digital entertainment companies.

“If the study’s findings are accurate, it would appear that the two forms of entertainment consumption are more complementary than cannibalistic. The study found, for instance, that respondents who visited a movie theater nine times or more in the last 12 months consumed more streaming content than consumers who visited a movie theater only once or twice over the past year. Those who saw nine or more movies at the cinema averaged 11 hours of weekly streaming compared to the seven hours of streaming reported on average by those who saw one to two movies at the multiplexes.”

Bottom line: Most Americans are living dead-to-the-world lives, but 20% are going for the gusto. Either way Netflix isn’t discouraging movie-theatre attendance all that much.

It’s a critical cliche to praise a performance along the lines of “this isn’t acting but a channeling…a complete psychological and biological submission.” This certainly describes Christian Bale‘s must-see performance as former vice-president Dick Cheney in Adam McKay‘s Vice — no question. But I’m persuaded that even in this realm Bale has gone above and beyond.

I haven’t felt the same kind of chills since Robert De Niro‘s Oscar-winning performance as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (’80), except this time I felt a deeper recognition and…I don’t know, something extra.

Mainly because I feel I know Dick Cheney pretty well, certainly in terms of his appearance and voice and laid-back, Prince-of-Darkness attitude, and I wasn’t at all familiar with Jake La Motta when I first saw Raging Bull 38 years ago. I was deeply impressed (who wasn’t?) by De Niro’s coarse, bellowing Bronx-Italian shtick — that primal beastliness that he’d obviously drilled into, body and soul. But experiencing Bale’s Cheney was, for me, slightly more of an “oh, wow” or a “holy moley” thing.

It’s like De Niro’s La Motta was Elvis Presley in the mid ’50s, and now Bale’s Cheney is the Beatles during their first American tour, and De Niro has just sent Bale a cable saying “okay, the torch has been passed — I had a nice long run as the king of wholly transformative weight-gain performances, and now you’re the standard-bearer…hats off, due respect.”

There’s always a slight gap between knowing what a certain famous person looked, acted and sounded like and how this or that actor registers when trying to make a performance happen. There’s always that “uh-huh…yeah, pretty close, good work” kind of acknowledgment. And sometimes not so much. Every time an actor has tried to portray John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood, Greg Kinnear, Cliff Robertson, William Devane, Martin Sheen, Caspar Phillipson, etc.), the chasm has been distracting if not irritating. But not in the matter of Bale-as-Cheney. Bale is up to something else.

You can say “hold on, calm down…this is the exact same current that I got from Charlize Theron‘s Aileen Wuornos in Monster, Bruno Ganz‘s Hitler in Downfall, Ben Kingsley‘s lead performance in Gandhi, Meryl Streep-as-Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Helen Mirren in The Queen,” etc.

Maybe, maybe not. All I can say is that I felt the appliance of skill and technique with each of these. Plus the presence of makeup or prosthetics. On top of which, as mentioned, I didn’t know the real-life characters as well as I do Cheney.

This Bananas scene used to be an amusing little hoot. Wait…who chuckled? I heard someone chuckling or at least tittering. Who did that? C’mon, fess up.