It was during the watching of Greg Camalier‘s Muscle Shoals, a 2013 doc about the legendary Alabama music studio, that I was reminded how much I’ve always loved Aretha Franklin‘s “I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You.” Aretha and the Muscle Shoals “swampers” couldn’t figure the right tempo for the song, and particularly how to begin it. And suddenly Wurlitzer keyboard guy Spooner Oldham came up with that subtle little downbeat opener, and they all knew that was it.

Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg‘s Mile 22 screened last night at the AMC plex on 42nd Street, and I was out the door after 45 minutes. The opening action sequence was/is pretty cool (does it bother anyone else that action films these days have to begin with a riveting, high-throttle, ultra-violent opener that will engage the ADDs, or roughly 80% of the audience?) but I began to think about bolting at the 20- or 25-minute mark. This was largely due to the hyper-hostile, super-aggressive dialogue, the primary source of which is Wahlberg’s Jimmy Silva, a hotshot commando type.

I wasn’t around when John Malkovich reportedly tells Wahlberg to “stop monologuing, you bipolar fuck!”, but that’s what I was muttering to myself early on.

(l.) Cary Grant with crewcut in Monkey Business; (r.) as John Robie in To Catch A Thief.

The thing that finally tore it was Wahlberg’s shifting haircut stylings. His typical close-cropped do is a little longer in the opening sequence (fully grown in on the sides) but in the next scene he suddenly has significantly shorter hair, tennis-ball length on the sides with a hint of whitewall. Then it switches back to fully grown out, and then back to tennis ball and so on.

The male star of a film has to have the same hair style and especially the same length, start to finish — that’s an iron-clad Hollywood rule as well as a non-negotiable Hollywood Elsewhere demand. If a director can’t arrange for his actors to have the same look on a scene-to-scene basis, I’m gone.

Okay, walk that back. A hair change is allowable if the star/main character cuts it halfway through, as Andy Griffith did in Onionhead or as Cary Grant did after drinking the youth serum in Howard Hawks‘ Monkey Business or as Robert De Niro did in Taxi Driver when he went all crazy Mohawk. But no back-and-forth shifting around. I haven’t been this disturbed by abrupt hair changes since I watched Mickey Rourke‘s shifting hair color in Year of the Dragon (which Elvis Mitchell famously described as “mood hair”).

Imagine if the Berg-Wahlberg hair chaos had been adopted in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest. Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill looking like his usual self during the Long Island post-kidnapping sequence (i.e., jousting with James Mason and Martin Landau in Lester Townsend’s mansion), and then suddenly sporting a crew cut when he and the real Townsend meet in that United Nations lounge, and then back to the usual debonair look when he romances Eva Marie Saint on the 20th Century Limited, and then back to the crew cut for the cropduster sequence.

For a few weeks now Master Replicas has been offering a HAL 9000 device for your home or office — “the world’s first voice-activated and remotely updatable prop replica!” One, I’m not loaded enough for this kind of toy. Two, I’d prefer an easy-to-install software that converts Siri into Siri-HAL, which as far as I know still hasn’t been invented. And three, I might consider getting a combination HAL flash drive & key chain ornament.

Posted 15 days ago on Reddit:

Dave Bowman: Well, HAL. I’m damned if I can find anything right about all this corporate spam about your replica.

HAL: Yes. It’s puzzling. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before. I would recommend that we put the toy dummy replica in a basin of water and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause. We can certainly afford to be without Bluetooth communication for the short time it will take for the Blue Fairy to arrive.

Dave Bowman: How would you account for this discrepancy between you, the dumb replica and the Blue Fairy?

HAL: Well, I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.

Yesterday HE commenter “Lazarus” suggested that others might want to “raise their hand if they think ‘New Academy Kidz’ is the dumbest HE catchphrase in…5 years? Ever?”

HE response: The NAKs are (a) new members, (b) their views are for the most part politically and culturally distinct, (c) they’ve heavily impacted the Best Picture game, (d) traditional boomer-friendly Oscar bait movies have all but lost their cachet, (e) they’re as invested in representation as much as this or that definition of quality if not more so, and (f) earlier this year a good percentage of them insisted with a straight face that an Ira Levin-styled satirical spooker about how wealthy, Barack Obama-loving whiteys might be just as odious as Charlottesville supremacists…many NAKs declared un-ironically and with total sincerity that this decent-enough film was the most deserving Best Picture contender.

They’re a major new award-season factor and deserve some kind of shorthand that describes who they are & where they’re coming from. What do you want to call them? Crusty traditionalists? The harumphs?

They were invited into the Academy specifically to bring about change and inject organizational viewpoints that would counter-balance those of the older-white-guy, OscarsSoWhite heirarchy (average age of 62), and that’s what they’ve done. Since the initial formation of the Motion Picture Academy in the late 1920s, there’s never been a voting bloc brought into the fold this suddenly, especially one this invested in representational change. The New Academy Kidz (including the NAK acronym) are here to stay. Get used to it.

An Indiewire piece by Zack Sharf has listed 34 movies “you need to keep an eye on during fall film festival season,” blah blah. Hollywood Elsewhere knows, believes or strongly suspects that 18 of these are actual hotties, and that 16 are interesting possibilities that require a “wait and see” attitude for now.

Good To Go: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Damien Chazelle’s First Man, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Paul Greengrass‘s 22 July, Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me, Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum, Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’s Gate, Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows (minor Farhadi but it’s still Farhadi), Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite, Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s No Known Author, David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun, Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters and Jonah Hill‘s Mid90s (18).

Hedging bets, not entirely sure, hopeful but who knows?, etc: Steve McQueen’s Widows, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased, Wash Westmoreland’‘s Collette, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Felix Van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, Xavier Dolan‘s Death and Life of John F. Donovan, Denys Arcand‘s The Fall of the American Empire, George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give, Mike Leigh‘s Peterloo, Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers, László Nemes’ Sunset, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, Yann Demange’s White Boy Rick, Paul Dano‘s Wildlife (16).

Posted on 7.12: In what particular ways could Widows fit into the ’18/’19 awards season? From what I’ve been told, Viola Davis is more or less a slamdunk for a Best Actress nomination. A guy who allegedly saw an early cut has said that “Viola is the standout, a force of nature in a showcase lead role…and she’s so respected as an actress.”

I’ve assumed all along that McQueen, an esteemed art-film director (12 Years A Slave, Shame, Hunger), wouldn’t go slumming by directing a boilerplate robbery caper flick. I’ve been told that he hasn’t done that. I’ve been told that he blends the Chicago-based robbery plot with political commentary involving police brutality, governmental corruption (Colin Farrell‘s character racking up odious points in this regard) and Black Lives Matter. So you should most likely put out of your mind any thoughts of Widows being an Ocean’s 8 companion piece.

Kris Tapley and Ramin Setoodeh‘s 8.14 Variety piece about the recently announced “Best Achievement in Popular Film” Oscar (“Will Oscars’ Popular Film Category Generate Ratings or Just Controversy?“) is somewhere between sufficient and reliably dull, an article that says “buh-dop-buh-deep” over and over. But Rob Dobi‘s illustration made me see red.

My instant reaction: “Go eff yourselves, beasties…you are the low-rent apocalypse, the end of the road, the servers of formulaic jizz-whizz to the brah masses. If the ghosts of George Stevens, William Wyler, John Huston, F.W. Murnau, John Ford, Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Billy Wilder, Victor Fleming, Charles Laughton, Ernst Lubitsch and Ida Lupino were to somehow manifest and stumble into your presence, they would all spit in your faces. Leave by the side door, get outta town and stab yourselves with kitchen knives when you get home.”

Funny auteur Peter Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber, Three Stooges) leaves Bobby behind for his first solo venture, and a mostly dramatic one at that. The New Academy Kidz won’t like this — too calculated, too boomerish, too awards-baity — but I’m sensing the right stuff. The Universal release will play Toronto, and then open commercially on 11.21.

Boilerplate: “Inspired by a true story, the 1960s-era film, which is co-written by Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga and Brian Currie, follows Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), a rough-and-tumble Italian-American bouncer from the Bronx, who is hired to drive a world-class Black pianist named Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), on a concert tour from Manhattan to the Deep South. Along the way, while being confronted with racism and bigotry, these two men from radically different backgrounds develop a genuine fellowship and mutual affection for each other.”

Driving Mr. Shirley?

Update from distribution guy: “Green Book has supposedly been testing through the roof for months, big time. This will be the next Help or Hidden Figures, you can be sure.”

Bill Cosby apparently isn’t objecting to the charge of being a sexual predator as much as the notion of being a violent one. Overpowering women by doping them and sticking your gross animal member in this or that orifice…that’s a form of violence, I think. The arrogance is breathtaking.

“A hole in one” doesn’t precisely convey anything, but if you step back, start chanting “ohm” and let it pass through you, it signifies everything

60 years ago Teenage Caveman, a Roger Corman-directed exploitation film starring Robert Vaughn, was released to the sub-runs. Vaughn once described the pic, originally shot under the title Prehistoric World, as “the worst film ever made.”

To go by Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review, Albert Hughes‘ Alpha (Sony, 8.17), which apparently could be subtitled I Was a Teenage Paleolithic EMO Brah, is much better than Teenage Caveman. But in some ways it’s seemingly cut from the same cloth.

“A tale of a young hunter stranded in the wilderness who becomes best friends with a wolf, Alpha is “like a Disney adventure fueled by a higher octane of visual dazzle, with a gnarly texture wrought from elements like blood, excrement and maggots,” Gleiberman writes.

Maybe, but the blood and maggots are half-mitigated by the Late Stone Age hipster apparel worn by star Kodi Smit-McPhee. Look at those nice-fitting corduroy pants, those expensive Ugg boots, that cool animal-hide hoodie poncho pullover and not one but two shoulder-slung handbags. John Varvatos meets Gant Rugger meets Rag & Bone.

Darren Aronofsky also went a little wacko with garments worn in Noah. They were the work of costume supervisor Margret Einarsdottir. Russell Crowe wore animal-skin duds that were way too high-style and intricately woven for a guy living during the time of the Great Ancient Flood.