I’ve nothing left to say about Comic Con, but I’m gonna say it anyway.

For the last few years this infernal San Diego gathering has been Hollywood Elsewhere’s idea of Evil Central — the absolute dregs of cinema culture congregated en masse, goofballing and cosplaying in one ten-square-block area of downtown San Diego, ripe for strafing as they fiddle with this or that pathetic fantasy…anything to distract them from the general drift and hollowness of their day-to-day lives.

Last year I said I wouldn’t go there with a knife at my back and a $1000 cash bribe in a brown paper bag. My refusal price has since gone up. This year I wouldn’t attend Comic Con with an offer of (a) $1500 in cash, (b) a RT flight to San Diego in a private jet, (c) ten gratis sushi dinners, (d) a year’s supply of dark Italian Starbucks Instant and (e) a $300 gift certificate from The Kooples.

Okay, the British guy who managed to actually fly around like a low-altitude Iron Man deserves a round of applause.

“Cons are for partying and cosplay and raucous behavior,” a “retired organizer of genre cons” named faustidisq wrote last year. “This attitude attracts so many different people now and not just the fat basement dwellers who used to be the only types. But at least those comic book guys weren’t pushovers to taste. They were well-read and quite articulate and knew their movie history. Nowadays, it’s a ‘look at my costuming group’ and ‘can I sneak into that press event, dude?’ attitude.”

Me too: “Except for noteworthy exceptions like Ant-Man, Avatar, portions of the 2014 Godzilla, the original Guardians of the Galaxy, the first two Captain America flicks and others I’m forgetting right now, the Comic-Con influence is the nexus of evil in the action-movie realm.

I would seriously pay to see a movie about Will Smith trying to get along and stay cool in a hood, cleaning his house, trying to sell it, swinging a push broom, wearing a maroon bathrobe, jawing with the locals, fixing himself breakfast, etc. If it stayed on that level, I mean. But another buddy cop flick, slightly rearranged or re-fitted with Orcs, serving the old saw about racial disharmony and distrust and pushing past resentments? Naah. No unholy alliance of David Ayer and Max Landis for me.

Last March a research-screening guy expressed measured enthusiasm for Joseph Kosinski‘s Granite Mountain, which at the time was a Lionsgate film slated for a 9.22 release. Now it’s a Columbia film called Only The Brave, and slated to open on 10.20. Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Jennifer Connelly, et. al. Don’t jump to conclusions. Kosinski is a strong, above-average director. 

From my 5.25.17 Cannes Film festival review: “Brigsby Bear espouses a belief in clinging to adolescent dreams and oddball weirdnesses as a way of keeping reality at bay. It doesn’t advance the idea that integrating into ‘normal’ society is a particularly good thing. It insists, in fact, that feeding and sustaining obsessional realms can actually be a recipe for emotional health, and that normal realms are healthier, happier places for understanding and celebrating outsider sensibilities. Or something like that.

“Brigsby Bear isn’t about going for breakneck hilarity or building up a head of steam, but it does understand itself, and it sticks to that. It has a certain patch of ground that it proudly owns, and you either get that or you don’t. Again — I’m the farthest thing from a geek type or any kind of pre-indoctrinated member of the Brigsby Bear society, but I got this film. I went in with a guarded attitude, but I had a smile going by evening’s end.”

Sony Pictures Classics is opening Brigsby Bear on 7.28.

If I took the time to dredge my memory and think it through, I could come up with 20 or 30 movies that I found riveting and pulse-quickening when I first saw them in my teens and 20s, but felt like pale, under-energized remnants when I re-watched them as a wise but creased adult. But I haven’t the time right now. (I have to leave at 10:30 am for an 11 am screening.) The best I can come up with are two letdowns I’ve already written about — Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and John Sturges‘ The Great Escape. Surely there are scores that qualify in the thorny minds of HE readers.

Over the past decade or so I’ve devoted more than a little ink to Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy. Let no one doubt this is a highly unimaginative, under-budgeted B-level thing — the best term is tedious — but for some curious reason I’ve always found its silliness comforting on some level. A couple of years ago I mentioned the old saw about how the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies, and that basic levels of scriptwriting have been dropping, certainly when it comes to CG-driven tentpolers, since the turn of the century if not before. I’ve also been saying with some irony that there are “relatively few big-studio whammers that are as well-ordered and professionally assembled as Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy, as silly and inconsequential as that 1955 film was.”

In a Daily Beast interview with Tim Teeman, playwright Tony Kushner confirms that Steven Spielberg really is planning a big-screen remake of West Side Story, and that Kushner is working on the screenplay.

The story will still be set in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the ’50s, he said, and Leonard Bernstein‘s classic score won’t be touched. “I’m interested that we see love at first sight, as opposed to lust,” Kusher says of his version. “By the time they’re singing ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight,’ things are at a much deeper plane than just two horny kids.”

Kushner is a wonderful writer, but I tremble with dread at what Spielberg will do with this sad Romeo and Juliet-inspired tale.

I’ll be ignoring the forthcoming Bluray of Journey To The Center of The Earth, the dismissable 1959 adventure flick with James Mason, Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl. The Eureka release will pop on 9.18.17. But I’ll always remember the film for two elements: (1) A line in Charles Brackett‘s screenplay, spoken by Thayer David‘s “Count Saknussemm”, in which he describes our nightly slumber ritual as “little slices of death.” (Which is true — going to sleep is like dying in a sense, and waking up the next morning is a little like being reborn.) And (2) Bernard Herrmann‘s musical score. Other than these, forget it.

Roughly nine months ago I posted a favorable reaction to a West Los Angeles research screening of Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, 11.10). It came from an anonymous HE reader whom I trust as far as it goes. At the end of his remarks the guy wrote that FS “will probably launch Three Billboards during next year’s fall festivals…probably Toronto, since Seven Psychopaths played there…and then come out in the fall.” Apparently this guy knew or had heard something. Apparently McDonagh’s ties to Team Toronto are still in place. Because word around the campfire is that Billboards is more likely to debut at Toronto than Telluride, presumably with a big gala during the first three or four days. Nothing confirmed, just hearing, etc.

DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze has posted an interesting screen capture within a review of an upcoming Bluray of Arthur Penn‘s Mickey One. It’s a shot of Warren Beatty walking in front of Chicago’s Wood theatre while Otto Preminger‘s The Cardinal was playing there. Preminger’s low-tide drama opened on 12.12.63 so you’d have to figure this was captured in February of ’64. (Or maybe a bit later to judge by the Woods’ “nominated for 6 Academy Awards” proclamation.  As The Cardinal began playing on a reserved-seat basis and was therefore regarded as a high-prestige film, it wouldn’t have been unusual to linger at the Woods for a few months.) But Mickey One didn’t open until 9.27.65, which obviously indicates a prolonged and difficult post-production period. Under routine circumstances it would have opened in late ’64 or at the latest in early ’65.

Warren Beatty, 26 at the time, striding under the Woods marquee, mostly likely in early ’64.

The Cardinal billboard in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, 1964 — the arrival of the Beatles and the beginning of the general turning of the culture was only a month and a half away.

Presumably everyone knows by now that Criterion is coming out with a 4K-mastered Barry Lyndon Bluray on 10.17, or about three months hence. The big thing from HE’s perspective is that they’re going with a totally correct 1.66:1 aspect ratio. This amounts to a stiff rebuke to longtime Kubrick associate and Warner Home Video consultant Leon Vitali, who six years ago persuaded WHV to release a Lyndon Bluray that cropped Stanley Kubrick‘s masterpiece at at 1.78:1.

The problem is that the Bluray table of contents on the Criterion page doesn’t seem to acknowledge the highly significant, historically important Lyndon aspect ratio brouhaha of 2011 — one of the most bitterly fought and not incidentally triumphant a.r. battles in Hollywood Elsewhere history, the other being the Shane a.r. battle of 2013.

Glenn Kenny actually provided the coup de grace in the form of a letter confirming Kubrick’s wish to have Lyndon screened at 1.66, but HE felt a surge of pride regardless because I’d insisted all along that 1.66 was the only way to go.

Why doesn’t Criterion’s Peter Becker man up and admit that his company’s decision to go with a 1.66 a.r. on their Lyndon Bluray was at least a partial offshoot of the HE/Kenny-vs.-Vitali debate? Why don’t they just act like men and cop to it instead of pussyfooting around and pretending it never happened?

The ultimate way to go, of course, is for Criterion to present its remastered Barry Lyndon on an actual 4K Bluray, as opposed to a 1080p Bluray using a 4K scan. If they do this I’ll break down and buy a 4K Bluray player.

The Barry Lyndon a.r. debate ranged between 5.23.11 and 6.21.11. I posted three or four argumentative pieces about the Barry Lyndon Bluray in late May, but before 6.21.11, which is when the whole matter was cleared up when Kenny posted that “smoking gun” letter from Jay Cocks and I ran my q & a with Vitali explaining “the confusion.”