Last night I asked HE’s own Mark Frenden to assemble new HE:(plus) banner art. I said I wanted to use a sliver of a revised American Friend poster that Frenden created three or four years ago, in which I substituted for Dennis Hopper. I think it came out pretty well. Still a fair amount of tweaking left to do on HE:(plus), but it’s on track to launch sometime around 6.20 or thereabouts.

Okay, I guess it’s still a thing in some corner of the culture. At least give the organizers credit for finally recognizing that in real day-to-day life, people of either gender are never judged by their appearance. At least we’re past that hurdle. So the next Miss America winner will probably be a bit pudgier than normal. This is where we are, no turning back.

Posted on 4.26.15: At last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, emcee Cecily Strong “created a moment” when she asked all members of the media in the ballroom to raise their hands and take a solemn vow: “I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary Clinton’s appearance, because that is not journalism.”

Strong is correct — serious journalism and offering comments or asides about a person’s appearance are separate realms of expression. Do average citizens vote for or against a candidate based on his/her appearance? Absolutely not.

JFK‘s youth, matinee-idol looks, perennial tan and thick reddish-brown hair had no effect upon voter likes or dislikes. The fact that the Ronald Reagan didn’t have white or graying hair or a sagging, withered face when he ran for president in ’80 at age 69…nobody cared. They would have voted for him if he looked like Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo because they were voting for the man, not the appearance. Barack Obama‘s cappucino skin shade had nothing to do with his winning the ’08 and ’12 elections…zip. And Hillary Clinton’s grandma face and puffy eye-bags will have no effect on her popularity during the 2016 Presidential election. The election will be entirely about who she is or is not…about character, cojones and convictions.

There’s a new Olive Films Bluray of Robert Wise‘s Odds Against Tomorrow (’59). The only thing that distinguishes it from the 2016 BFI Bluray version, according to DVD Beaver‘s Gary. W. Tooze, is the 1.85 aspect ratio — a brutal cleavering of the BFI’s 1.37 version.

Tooze is such a toad about aspect ratios. In his review of the BFI Bluray he actually cheered the possibility of a 1.85 cleavering — “The dispute rages on about the aspect ratio…one day a 1.85:1 will surface!”

For what it’s worth an AFI.com assessment noted that Odds Against Tomorrow “marked the last time Wise shot in black-and-white within the standard aspect ratio — a formula which gave his films the gritty realism they were known for.”

1.85 cleavering, an approach vigorously argued and lobbied for a decade ago by Film Archive’s Bob Furmanek, is perhaps the worst thing to happen in the realm of home-video remasterings of ’50s and early ’60s films. If you doubt this, watch Criteron’s On The Waterfront aspect-ratio essay after the jump.

The “boxy” 2.16 BFI Bluray version above; Olive Films’ 1.85 version below.

Anyone who’s read Moses Farrow’s 5.23 essay about Dylan Farrow’s child molestation charges against her adoptive father Woody Allen as well as Robert Weide‘s “Q & A with Dylan Farrow” (12.13.17) and still insists that Allen’s guilt is absolute and unmitigated is just a bigot at this stage.

“Believe the alleged victim” and ignore everything else — the facts, the evidence, the presumably well-known fact that child molesters always repeat their crime. This is what Sam Adams, the The Playlist, Movie City News and their ilk are right now — high-denial Allen bigots, plain and simple.

Movie City News link, posted on 6.4.18.

This feels like a frenzied, Detroit-flavored version of At Close Range — i.e., young teenage criminal (Richard Wershe, Jr.) rats out ruthless, drug-dealing dad (Matthew McConaughey). Directed by Yann Demange, White Boy Rick was written by Steve Kloves, Logan Miller, Noah Miller, and Andy Weiss. Costarring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern, Bel Powley, Piper Laurie.

Pic was initially slated to open on 1.12.18, was pushed back two weeks to 1.26.18, then again to 8.7.18, then again to 9.4.18. Do I hear a fifth release date?

In my February 2014 review of Demange’s ’71, a Belfast-set action melodrama set during “the troubles”, I noted that the emphasis was on “menace and fear and thrills and adrenaline…exceptional verisimilitude and throttling realism…in some ways reminiscent of Paul Greengrass‘s Bloody Sunday, this is a jolt-cola movie.”

I’ll just hop into my Pontiac Firebird, gas up, bat outta hell. But why would I want to lam it when I’m pure as the driven snow? Either way I’m too fast for the cops. And if they do catch me I’ll just pardon myself.

“I bought a brand-new air-mobile / It custom-made, ’twas a Flight De Ville / With a pow’ful motor and some hideaway wings / Push in on the button and you can hear her sing / Now you can’t catch me…whoa, baby, you can’t catch me…’cause if you get too close, you know I’m gone like a cool breeze.”

Senator John McCain: “I like presidents who don’t need pardons, much less those who fantasize about giving themselves one.”

The great Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave, Shame) appears to have taken an Ocean’s 8-resembling genre premise — wives of four dead felons pooling forces to complete a major robbery — and invested it with brute foreboding. Escapism eschewed in favor of Trump-era political current and commentary. Corrupt Chicago authority types vs. resourceful women of varying shades. Obviously a brew of toughness and steel, especially on the part of Viola Davis. A guy who’s seen Widows calls her “the standout, a force of nature in a showcase role…her son was murdered by police after they pulled him out of a car.” Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo. Costarring Colin Farrell (baddie), Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson.

82 year-old Lutz Ismael Ebersdorf, a German psychoanalyst and actor, is suddenly a new element in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (Amazon, 11.2), which until this morning had largely been regarded as an all-female, all-witches brew. (A Buzzfeed piece claims that Ebersdorf is actually costar Tilda Swinton under layers of makeup — if so, his Wikipedia page is a neat bit of trickery.) Flat landscapes and chilly temps, overcoats and sleet, a grayish palette and graying (not to mention flat-out white) hair, supernatural events and Tilda sucking on a cigarette. This isn’t your father’s Dario Argento realm.

Lutz Ismael Ebersdorf or Tilda Swinton?

The tag line for Walter Hill‘s Streets of Fire was “Tonight is what it means to be young.” When producer Joel Silver saw the poor box-office numbers from the opening weekend, he quipped “Tonight is what it means to be dead.” The young, foxy-sexy, leather-adorned costars of this failed 1984 Universal release are now pushing the big six-oh, if not past it.

I actually stole the above headline from a Chinatown moment in which Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) asks Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) if he’s “alone”, and Gittes replies “Isn’t everybody?” I don’t actually feel “alone” in this life. Because of Hollywood Elsewhere I feel like I’m part of a huge, roaming, fickle, transcontinental community, on top of which are the wife, the sons, the friends, the cats and the semi-close industry pallies. But at the end of the day and especially during the “hour of the wolf” or in the pre-pre-dawn hours (2:30 am to 5 am) we’re all pretty much alone in a sense. Not helpless, of course, or even lazy or weak necessarily, but whatever’s going on (or not going on) we all to have stand up and clear our heads and fix it ourselves. If we don’t do that, everyone and everything else will eventually fall away. That’s the message of High Noon, and it’s also the damn truth.

Here are two brilliant post-Solo-catastrophe riffs, but be honest — would The New Yorker and Variety have run these assessments if Solo had somehow connected and become a huge hit a la Last Jedi?

From Joshua Rothman‘s “The Growing Emptiness of the Star Wars Universe,” posted in The New Yorker on 5.31.18: “Early in William Gibson’s novel ‘Pattern Recognition,’ from 2003, Cayce Pollard, a highly paid professional ‘coolhunter,’ wanders through a London department store. Pollard is hypersensitive to the semiotics of brands: when a product is lame, she feels it physically, as a kind of pain. In the basement, she stumbles upon a display of clothes by Tommy Hilfiger. Recoiling from the ‘mountainside of Tommy,’ she thinks, ‘My God, don’t they know?’

“This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row…but Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

“I thought of this scene this weekend, after watching Solo: A Star Wars Story. “Solo” is an entertaining movie, with engaging performances, vivid production design and enthralling action sequences. It’s also distressingly forgettable — it’s about nothing, an episode of Seinfeld with hyperdrive.

“In ‘Pattern Recognition,’ Pollard wonders if Hilfiger’s blandness might be the source of his appeal: where most preppy clothes are freighted with meaning, Tommy allows you to look preppy without actually being that way. Similarly, Solo evokes Star Wars without quite being it. It isn’t the ‘null point’ of the franchise, but it’s close.”

From Owen Gleiberman‘s “Why the Tanking of Solo is a Force of Darkness for Star Wars,” posted by Variety this morning:

“There have now been 10 Star Wars films, and right up until Solo, each and every one of them produced the kind of box-office grosses that were potent enough to bend the universe with the magnetic power of their the-whole-world-is-watching! hegemony.