I caught The Big Sick for a third time last night (Tatyana hadn’t seen it), and in the Cinerama Dome yet — not a good place to see almost anything due to that image-distorting Cinerama screen. (Remember that Alan Parker had a less curvy screen installed before he’d allow Evita to play there in ’96.) The Big Sick plays very nicely the third time. Nothing felt the least bit tired or overbaked — it still feels fresh and natural and sharp as a tack. On top of which I understood more of it this time. There’s a lot of tossed-off vocal-fry muttering going on (especially from Zoe Kazan), but the Cinerama Dome sound system was good enough to overcome the psst-psst-nep-nyep tonalities.

We were talking about how much we liked Holly Hunter as Zoe’s mom. When we got home I persuaded Tatyana to watch Broadcast News (’87), which she’d never seen and in which Hunter gave her career-best performance.

Yesterday Page Six reported that Daniel Day Lewis‘s post-Phantom Thread game plan is to become a dressmaker or, you know, possibly a dress designer of some sort. The 60 year-old actor fell for the art of making women’s dresses while researching haute couture fashion in preparation for playing the legendary Charles James. James is the focus of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, which Focus Features will open on 12.25. It’s about James’ high-time career in the ’50s. While James operated out of New York City during that decade, Phantom Thread is strangely set in London.

DDL’s career-switch decision makes perfect sense, of course. Instead of building upon a brilliant body of work as a universally admired actor of unquestioned genius, he will henceforth devote himself to dressmaking, a notoriously fickle and demanding profession that only a relative few have truly excelled at, and as a journeyman at that.

Question: From my moron perspective I’m presuming that dressmaking is more or less about literally constructing dresses on your hands and knees with sewing needles between your teeth, and that dress designing is where the inspirational part comes in…right? And that DDL has opted to be a grunt who handles the material and thread and whatnot? Or is he looking to design dresses as James did? I’m presuming he’s intending to primarily design but also roll up his sleeves when the occasion demands and literally cut and stitch the damn things together. I don’t know anything. I love high-end men’s fashion (particularly shoes) but I never cared about women’s stuff. What straight guy does?

Who said Lewis is particularly gifted as a designer? Who has told him “you have promise, young man…you should develop your skills!” Where are DDL’s original designs so we, the popcorn-munching audience, can assess whether he’s just as talented in this new calling as he is at acting? I respect Lewis’s willingness to explore new terrain at an advanced age, but c’mon, dude…what are the odds that you’re the new Yves Saint Laurent or Christian Dior or Stella McCartney?

John Malkovich has a suit-designing business.

Boil it down and this is the latest what-the-fuck?, should-he-stay-with-the-same-medication-or-see-a new-doctor? move from an actor known for his mercurial eccentricity.

Remember that Lewis quit acting for five years in the 1990s to become a Florence-based shoemaker under the tutelage of Stefano Bemer.

I’m doing a phoner tomorrow with Oliver Hirschbiegel about his latest film, 13 Minutes, which is about a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Naturally I’ll have to ask if he’s accepted the likelihood that his greatest claim to fame will be that Hitler rant scene in Downfall, which has given birth to hundreds upon hundreds of YouTube parodies. There may be as many as 1500 variations out there. I’m sorry but I’ve never seen this 2012 interview with Bruno Ganz before. He’s not happy about the parodies but he has no choice but to graciously accept them. His pained expressions are hilarious.

My head began to throb as I watched an extended Cinemacon product reel for Nikolaj Arcel‘s The Dark Tower (Sony/Columbia, 8.4). I was going to say “there’s nothing more boring than battles between absolute good and evil,” but then I remembered Shane (’53), which is almost a black-and-white thing. But not quite as it acknowledges, like any decently written story, that we all have our reasons. Even Donald Trump, the most flagrant manifestation of evil this side of ISIS, has a motive or rationale of some kind.

This Cosby juror, 21 year-old Bobby Dugan, said this morning on Good Morning, America that while he personally believed Cosby was guilty, the jury’s deliberations became about “he said, she said…what it really comes down to is who you gonna believe more? That’s all it was.” In other words, the two holdouts on the jury believed Bill Cosby‘s version rather than Andrea Constand‘s. Insufficient evidence, he says, but c’mon. The jurors who bought Cosby’s version almost certainly did so out of pre-trial allegiance or favoritism, or — to put it more simply — denial.

Andrew Jay Cohen‘s The House, a Will Ferrell-Amy Poehler comedy about 40ish marrieds running an illegal casino to pay for their daughter’s college costs, opens this Friday (6.30). A Canadian critic friend reports that Warner Bros. has “cancelled” plans for critic screenings, and wants to know if it’s being hidden from U.S. critics as well. I haven’t received an invite to a Los Angeles all-media screening, but I often have to ask to be invited to lowest-common-denominator studio flicks. If anyone knows anything, please advise.

A 6.23 interview with Clint Eastwood in the Carmel Pine Cone, written by Paul Miller, says that Eastwood’s next film, The 15:17 to Paris, will begin filming in August and will “probably be released later this year.” Which indicates a likely December release date. So we may have an Eastwood film in the 2017 Oscar derby, and one sure to be embraced by the same red-state audiences who went apeshit over American Sniper.

Based on “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes,” a 2016 book by Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone and Jeffrey E. Stern, which recounts a true-life episode in which three young guys, one of them a U.S. Air Force enlisted man, stopped an armed terrorist from murdering God-knows-how-many-passengers aboard a Brussels-to-Paris train.

The incident happened in August 2015 — the book popped twelve months later.

Miller excerpt: “At his office on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Eastwood is busy these days refining the shooting schedule, while his casting directors are choosing the actors, costumers are picking the outfits, and set designers are planning the shots — all routine tasks for a major Hollywood picture.

From Kim Masters’ 6.26 Hollywood Reporter story about the ongoing Han Solo calamity (“Star Wars Firing Reveals a Disturbance in the Franchise“): “Matters were coming to a head in May as the production moved from London to the Canary Islands. Lucasfilm replaced editor Chris Dickens (Macbeth) with Oscar-winner Pietro Scalia, a veteran of Ridley Scott films including Alien: Covenant and The Martian. And, not entirely satisfied with the performance that the directors were eliciting from Rules Don’t Apply star Alden Ehrenreich, Lucasfilm decided to bring in an acting coach. (Hiring a coach is not unusual; hiring one that late in production is.) Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller suggested writer-director Maggie Kiley, who had worked with them on 21 Jump Street.”

Alden Ehrenreich, the anti-Han Solo.

Did I just read this?

Han Solo producer Kathy Kennedy and her creative consigliere, Lawrence Kasdan, could have chosen anyone to play the brave, reckless, somewhat rascally commander of the Millenium Falcon. How many name-brand 20something actors could have easily slipped into the role, guys with the natural insouciance and underlying gravitas of a young Harrison Ford? More than a few, I’m imagining. They had to choose a guy who could be at least faintly believable as a young Ford, which would have meant conveying a certain Hanitude — a mixture of Anglo Saxon cock-of-the-walk confidence, selfish mercenary cunning and shoulder-shrugging heroism.

And yet they chose a mopey, modestly proportioned, beady-eyed guy with the air of a rabbinical student — Alden Ehrenreich. Say hello, Star Wars fans, to the new Solo — a seemingly joyless, small-shouldered guy who lacks a sense of physical dominance (Aldenreich is five inches shorter than the 6’2″ Ford) and whose stock-in-trade is a kind of glum, screwed-down seriousness. A perfect candidate to play a solemn neurotic in one of Woody Allen‘s New York-based dramedies, but as Han Solo, not so much.

You’ll never guess what happened next. After three-plus months of shooting (early February to early May) or more than halfway through principal, it dawned upon Kennedy and Kasdan that Ehrenreich wasn’t working out like they’d hoped. They were presumably expecting that he’d shed his naturally morose manner and magically morph into a devil-may-care adventurer, but, to Kennedy and Kasdan’s astonishment, this didn’t happen.

“I really don’t get it,” Kasdan might have said to Kennedy. “There was absolutely no reason to presume that a frowning Jewish downhead couldn’t easily assume the manner and moxie of a grinning frat-boy scoundrel type.” To which Kennedy might have responded, “Yes, Larry, I know…it’s quite puzzling.” And so, at the suggestion of Han Solo directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, they hired an indie-level female director to try and…what? Instruct Ehrenreich on the basics of big-screen machismo? Teach him a few Harrison Ford mannerisms?

Excerpt from Geoff Berkshire’s Variety review: “In Kogonada’s Columbus (Sundance Institute, 8.4), the protagonists write, talk, bicker, and dance about an extraordinary collection of modernist structures in the unassuming Midwest town of Columbus, Indiana. The hypnotically paced drama, carried by the serendipitous odd-couple pairing of John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, is lovely and tender, marking Kogonada as an auteur to watch.”

Sidelight #1: Cho is 45; Richardson is 22. 23 years is a significant gap when you’re looking at a romantic pairing, no? It’s mitigated, yes, by the slim and healthy Cho looking like 35 or so. But remember that a potential romantic relationship between 35 year-old Josh Radnor and 19 year-old Elizabeth Olsen (i.e., a mere 16 years between them) was treated as a dicey thing in Radnor’s Liberal Arts (’12).

Sidelight #2: Richardson (Haley Steinfeld‘s best friend in The Edge of Seventeen) appears to be catching on. I can’t be specific but I’m told she’s being circled by a major director as we speak.

It’s relatively rare to run into a bad-guy character who is simultaneously (a) detestable, (b) pathetic and (c) fascinating. David Proval‘s Richie Aprile, who was only around for season #2, was such a character. Whenever he showed up or glared or said something threatening or ominous I always muttered “your attitude is toxic and your scowling is monotonous….find some new material, ya putz.” And yet he was never boring. Characters who are this repulsive turn me off sooner or later, sometimes in a matter of minutes.

Aprile took two bullets in the chest 17 years and three months ago. Okay, on 4.2.00 — near the end of the twelfth episode. The Sopranos ended almost exactly a decade ago, on 6.2.07.

From “You Gonna Cry Now?”, posted on 3.27.13: Richie Aprile was shot by Janice Soprano in “The Knight in White Satin Armour.” Time sure flies along. I dearly love the way Janice’s younger brother enters very cautiously, like an animal approaching sleeping prey, and then strokes his chin when he realizes what’s happened.

I swear to God this series made me feel so at home, like I was sitting in a suburban New Jersey diner somewhere with friends on a Friday evening or Saturday morning. It made me feel wise and comfortable and secure while fully reminding me in each episode of all the plagues and anxieties.

Five days ago I described Daniel Day Lewis‘s announced retirement as a kind of cowardice. “Abandoning the struggle is a sin,” I wrote. “We’re here only a limited time and then we’re dead, for God’s sake. I understand burnout — it happens — but I don’t respect people who’ve been lucky enough to find a special calling and then just walk away from it.”

Gifted people get to retire under two circumstances — i.e., if they’re in the grip of a fatal disease or in the final stages of old-age dementia. Otherwise retirement is not an honorable option.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has adopted a more charitable view. DDL isn’t a coward — he’s just doing another mercurial hide-out, an extended Frank Sinatra thing.

Day-Lewis “will, at some point, want to act again because that’s such a dominating dimension of who he is,” Gleiberman writes. “Besides, to put it in terms he’d surely disdain: What else is Daniel Day-Lewis going to do? He’s 60 years old, which really is the new 50, and assuming he lives a long and vital life, how could he stay away? My instinct says that his instinct wouldn’t let him.

“It’s easy to imagine Day-Lewis busting out of his retirement in about four years by showing up, seemingly out of nowhere, to portray Big Daddy in a stage production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, mounted in some tiny 180-seat theater in Dublin. It would immediately become the hottest ticket in the world. Then, of course, there are the film directors who will likely never stop beckoning.