Jesus Christ has long been imagined by U.S. heartland types as a handsome, Anglo-Saxon guy with kindly brown eyes and gleaming, shoulder-length hair. Then came Jeffrey Hunter‘s blue-eyed Nazarene in Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings (’61) and jokes about Christ being retailored to suit pop-culture tastes — “I was a teenaged Jesus.” With the ascent of the Christian right in the late ’70s Jesus became a more staunchly Anglicized figure — a vaguely conservative Orange County guy with pearly white teeth and broad shoulders, and who always wore freshly-pressed white robes. Since Donald J. Trump‘s inauguration some fringe-y conservative Christians (like Joshua Feurstein) have publicly embraced a belief that Trump’s political agenda and the spiritual tradition of Jesus Christ are more or less aligned. Did I say “fringe’y”? I meant foam-at-the-mouth insane.

The first and only time I saw Robert Bresson‘s L’Argent was inside one of those little shoebox theatres in the old Beverly Center. It was either during the fall of ’83 or the winter of ’84. Based on Leo Tolstoy‘s “The Forged Coupon”, and Bresson’s final film. Dry, subtle, precise. Bresson never faked anything — movie-pretend wasn’t in his vocabulary. When his protagonist (Christian Patey) killed a family with an axe near the end, Bresson only suggested the killings, and chastely at that. The Criterion Bluray pops on 7.11.17.

Later that month Criterion is also releasing a Bluray of Albert Brooks’ Lost in America (’85). Will Criterion’s 2K restoration deliver the necessary “bump”? Let’s hope so. I’ll buy it for (a) the conversation between Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide, (b) interviews with Julie Hagerty, executive producer Herb Nanas and director James L. Brooks, and (c) an essay on this seminal Reagan-era film by Scott Tobias.

Don’t tell Glenn Kenny but there were two hot lesbo nun movies at Sundance ’17 — Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, which delivers a single, highly affecting erotic scene in the third act, and Jeff Baena‘s The Little Hours, which I’m told was the “real” hot lesbo nun movie to see. Obviously more bawdy than “hot”. The Boccaccio-inspired comedy stars Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Kate Micucci, Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon. It opens on 6.30.17 via Gunpowder & Sky, which bought John Sloss‘s Filmbuff last fall.

Dance Camera West is an annual two-weekend Los Angeles film festival about…you’ll never guess.  Okay, the transportation of dancing.  It’s been a thing for 16 years, but I didn’t know that until this morning. Because I’m not exactly a dance enthusiast. I respect and admire great dancing (I’ll never forget a Twyla Tharp show I saw at the Winter Garden in the ’80s), but it doesn’t make me levitate as a rule. But I like it.

The Dance Camera West Film Festival, a selection of dance-themed shorts with a feature or two thrown in, kicks off on Thursday night (4.20) at Royce Hall, and will continue over the weekend at UCLA’s Fowler Museum ($12 admission). Free stuff will occur the following weekend at the Santa Monica Pier.

Tonia Barber, a friend of HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko, has been running the operation and programming the films for six years now. She’s paid a modest salary, works hard, consults with a board…the usual razmatazz. But she’s mainly doing it for love, or so it seems.

“The films we show don’t capture dance…we show films in which dance was made for the camera,” Barber says. “The festival has a certain history, a certain audience and it has to exist. It has to be out there, and I would feel really sad if it wasn’t.”

Weren’t the legendary dance numbers of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly all about integrating dance, atheleticism, camera moves and production design? Sure, she says, but “the technology of that time created that product…dance films today are more fluid and free-form, more about improv, nativism.. shot hand-held, drones, GoPro…how people have come to capture the form.”

I place a lot more trust in Jeff Sneider‘s snap judgment on Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (Disney, 5.5.) than all the Marvel-fellating twitter whores combined. Do you think it’s some kind of ringing endorsement when Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn says it plays “exactly as advertised”? He’s calling it Marvel assembly-line flotsam. You have to expect a certain amount of spurious reactions from attention-seeking trolls, but you can’t dismiss Kohn and Sneider.

Ralph Bellamy (speaking to Lee Marvin about Burt Lancaster in Act One of The Professionals): “But is he trustworthy? Can he be relied upon?” Marvin: “I trust him.”

Howard Stern, Robin Quivers and Gary Busey had this conversation eons ago, but I don’t care. I love Busey’s deep-down, gravelly-voiced, glint-of-madness thing. On the other hand he’s a fucking Trump supporter and a Promise Keeper, which is more or less a rightwing character-building Jesus thing for older guys. Creepy. But I really loved this conversation, and I wish I could share in a few conversations of this type on my own. Not the aggressive aspects but the open-book, this-is-who-and-what-I-really-am stuff.

Last Thursday (4.13) a major Guardian story (“British Spies Were First To Spot Trump Team’s Links With Russia“) about Russian-Trump collusion appeared. The 34th and final paragraph says the following: “One source suggested the official [American] investigation was making progress. ‘They now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion,’ the source said. ‘This is between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.'” I read a hint of this on Twitter but it didn’t sink in — apologies.

The gist of “Smartphones Are The New Cigarettes,” a 4.17 Think Global piece by Mark Manson, is that constantly eyeballing your phone screen and otherwise divorcing yourself from the life’s natural changes and currents is declasse behavior, or something that only low-lifes are succumbing to. Those with class and cultivation are dodging that stereotype with a passion, he’s saying, and if you’re still acting like a mutt you should probably reassess things.

Speak for yourself, pal. I’m well aware of the declasse aspect and am always careful not to yank my phone out in mixed company, and if so only for a minute or less. But in my own lone-wolf realm I’m a three-pack-a-day man, especially with the constant copy editing, searching for ideas and the endless twitter duelling, and that will never change. Like, ever.

In a 4.17 Indiewire piece, critic David Ehrlich laments the impression that Netflix movies aren’t really movies because the only theatrical experience they’ll receive is at this or that film festival. Because once they turn up on Netflix, they’re just part of the churning digital swarm on this or that device. As Ehrlich puts it, it’s the fate of all Netflix movies to be “quietly uploaded to a computer server and added to an ever-expanding menu of content in the cloud. I saw it in a theater; you’ll see it buried somewhere between Iron Fist and Sandy Wexler.”

If I had labored hard and gone into heavy debt to make a feature film, I would be overjoyed if Netflix picked it up because at least I would be made whole and could then go on to make another film. But I would also feel a bit drained knowing that my film will never experience the slightest theatrical pulsebeat.

In the eyes of many Amazon is doing it right with their commitment (recently reiterated at Cinemacon) to give new films some kind of theatrical exposure before streaming them. In Ehrlich’s view, a Netflix acquisition means being sent to a kind of digital elephant’s graveyard.

“If a movie premieres on Netflix, is it still even a movie?,” he writes. “In an age where the word ‘film’ is often a misnomer and content is classified less by the intent of its production than by the means of its distribution, it could be said that movies — at least for the time being — are simply things that play in movie theaters. It may seem like a matter of semantics, but I think we’re talking about qualitatively different experiences.

Will the 2017 L.A. Film Festival follow the mindset of the ’16 and ’15 fests, which was basically to screen lower-profile, hand-to-mouth indie titles that no one had heard of or wanted to see? Or will they program at least a few not-yet-released films screened at Sundance, Tribeca or Cannes?

Posted on 5.30.16: “The L.A. Film Festival (6.1 thru 6.9) feels like a no-buzz flatliner. So far I’ve noticed three or four films of passing interest but nothing that really heats the blood. Just a lot of indie titles of marginal interest. No hot premieres, minor Sundance repeaters, none of the Cannes headliners. I shared this view with a film-savvy friend and he said ‘my impression is the same as yours…I felt like last year’s LAFF had almost no buzz, and this year it has even less.’

If I’ve said this once I’ve said it 100 times. If you’re a 60-plus actor you need to lose the droopy neck wattle. It’s about as complex as having your teeth cleaned, and if your surgeon isn’t a complete idiot it won’t look like anything. You can still look weathered and grizzled and all that other other sexy saddlebag stuff. You can even keep a slight neck wattle, but droopies are impossible. And Sam Elliott knows this. Joe Biden‘s neck wattle has been driving me crazy, and he refuses to do the thing. It’s like walking around with your fly open.

From a 1.21.17 Hollywood Reporter review, written by John Frosch: “In The Hero, unlike in most of his other projects, Elliott appears in nearly every frame as Lee Hayden, an over-the-hill Western film star whose cancer diagnosis prompts him to plan a comeback, reconnect with his estranged daughter and romance a younger woman. If that story sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it before, with tweaks and variations, in movies like The Verdict, Tender Mercies, The Wrestler, Crazy Heart and many more.

Images from Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born popped over the weekend. They showed Lady Gaga (in the role played by Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland and Janet Gaynor in previous versions of this time-worn tale) and Cooper (in the downswirling drunk role played by Kris Kristofferson, James Mason and Fredric March) performing before cameras at Coachella. The Warner Bros. film will pop sometime in ’18, most likely in the fall.

Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga during filming of a Star Is Born concert-performance scene at Coachella.

The press-release takeaway is that Lady Gaga will be billed by her actual name — Stefani Germanotta. Which has to be one of the dopiest big-studio kowtowings to a headstrong celebrity in history. By the time the movie opens everyone will know this is just an ego game — a way of Lady Gaga saying “I’m extra-special” or “being an artist, I have to be extra-real with myself in order to play this role…it’s essential to my process.” Except this is a partial copout because LG’s actual real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

A second, very fundamental aspect is that millions don’t have a clear idea what Lady Gaga actually looks like. LG has been a glammy image-changer and clotheshorse for years, and so heavily made up and be-wigged that all anyone really knows is that she sings well and has prominent cheekbones. If I were to run into an au natural Miley Cyrus doing lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, I would say to myself, “Huh, Miley Cyrus without makeup.” If I were to encounter Lady Gaga in workout duds nothing would register. Okay, I might say to myself “hmmm, interesting face…do I know her?”

A third aspect (and I’ve said this repeatedly) is that stories about drunks are boring. There’s nothing the least bit touching about a person who can’t help killing his/her career because he/she can’t face facts and get sober. Many successful entertainers find they can’t keep the fire going or, worse, fall by the wayside when they let alcohol or drugs carry the load. I feel a measure of sympathy for anyone caught in a self-destructive pattern (having sworn off the hard stuff 21 years ago and embraced sobriety on 3.20.12), but the idea of paying to see a tired story about a talented person slowly turning into a boorish asshole as he/she slips beneath the waves is, well, inconceivable. To me at least.