Posted 4.16, 10:05 pm: Today’s excursion involved El Matador, La Piedra and Pescador beaches — a couple of miles north of Trancas. Walking from beach to secluded beach, crawling through caves, getting soaked at one point and a bit sunburned overall. Drove up Kanan Dume Road to Mulholland Highway and then east to The Old Place, which was too noisy and crowded and too much of a wait.

Blake Edwards’ Sunset [posted 4.16, 1:13 pm]: Every tourist who’s ever visited Santa Monica has taken this exact same shot. But there I was yesterday on the big bluff. The SRO and I had pedaled out from West Hollywood (Santa Monica Blvd. all the way) and then down to the beach bike path, all through S.M. and Venice and back again.  I hadn’t meditated upon a Pacific sunset in several years, and so we did. (It was Tatyana’s first time.) An hour later we put the bikes on the front rack of an eastbound #4 bus, and were back home by 8:30 pm.

I haven’t bothered to watch Sandy Wexler, the new Adam Sandler movie for Netflix. Mainly because I was afraid. I don’t want to sit through a softer, more congenial Broadway Danny Rose or All That Jazz. At all. If I catch it tonight I’ll write something…maybe.

Soon after the 4.2 finale of HBO’s Big Little Lies it was clear that Nicole Kidman‘s performance would be getting the big Emmy push. The pushing will last several weeks as Emmy nomination voting runs from 6.12 to 6.26. The articles and tweets have mostly advanced the career-tribute narrative — it’s not just Kidman’s turn as Celeste-the-abused-wife but her whole 28-year career. If you count Dead Calm as the beginning, I mean.

That’s a pretty good trick considering that over the last six or seven years Kidman has made herself into a kind of Queen of the Indie Bs, giving her all in one eye-rollingly bad, mezzo-mezzo or not-good-enough film after another — Trespass, The Paperboy, Stoker (which I hated), The Railway Man, Grace of Monaco (grotesque), Before I Go to Sleep, Paddington, Strangerland, Queen of the Desert, The Family Fang (a decent film that quickly disappeared), Secret in Their Eyes and Genius. Yes, Kidman was reasonably okay in Lion but don’t get carried away.

Kidman will soon be seen in the Geraldine Page role in Sofia Coppola‘s The Beguiled (Focus, 6.23). She’ll have three films in Cannes — The Beguiled, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Killing of a Sacred Deer and John Cameron Mitchell‘s How To Pick Up Girls At Parties.

What Kidman performances have really and truly earned the gold medal? 13 in all. I’ve listed them not in order of preference but sequence: Dead Calm (’89 — I knew when I first saw this that Kidman had “it”), My Life (’93 — Michael Keaton‘s taller wife standing by as he dies of cancer), To Die For (’95 — probably her pinnacle performance — certainly the cleanest and most confident), Moulin Rouge! (’01), The Others (’01), Birthday Girl (’01), The Hours (’02 — “by a nose”), Dogville (her second best ever, just a notch behind To Die For), The Human Stain (’03), Birth (’04), The Interpreter (’05 — I have a soft spot for this Sydney Pollack film), Margot at the Wedding (’07) and Rabbit Hole (’10)

I’m glad that Kidman has achieved a kind of bounce-back effect with Big Little Lies. But there’s no disputing she’d been in a long, slow downswirl cycle for seven years prior. On the plus side she had a vivid, luminous career for 21 years before that (i.e., starting with Rabbit Hole and working backwards).

Real-estate developer, publisher and Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, apparently the President’s most trusted and influential adviser, is only seven and a half years older than Jett. On last night’s SNL Alec Baldwin mentioned that Kushner “doesn’t like to talk.” Indeed. Until this morning I’d never heard his voice or listened to him speak about anything.

The below excerpt is from June 2014. Kushner is obviously an amiable blueblood hustler (the onetime Democratic liberal apparently converted to conservatism for purely opportunistic reasons) and for all I know he’s literally Damien Thorne, but listen to his remarks here. He sounds like a comme ci comme ca frat boy, but he’s not stupid. He talks the talk.

If by clapping my hands three times I could eject Trump from the Oval Office and install Kushner in his place, I would do so. Because that would at least mean the death of Steve Bannon and perhaps even Stephen Miller. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Kushner is clearly smarter and more conversant with the cultural-technological particulars of our time than his father-in-law. Scratch Kushner and you’d find a guy who understands that climate change is 110% real.

Here‘s a nicely composed inside-the-West-Wing piece by Vanity Fair‘s Sarah Ellison, not just about the Jared Kushner-Steve Bannon clash but the constantly shifting ground benath everyone’s feet. Everyone, that is, except for Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

“[Steve] Bannon’s real undoing in the eyes of his boss, according to three people familiar with the situation, involves his perceived attacks through the media against Kushner and Ivanka as liberal Democrats seeking to undermine a more conservative agenda. Bannon’s other big mistake has been taking credit for Trump’s own popularity, such as it is.

Vanity Fair illustration by Darrow.

“Referring to [Bannon’s] Time cover, a senior administration official told me, ‘He is very talented at making himself seem the hero of the conservatives who elected Donald Trump’ — the implication being that if you lose Bannon, you lose them. ‘It’s a very smart thing to do on his part,’ this official added, ‘but ultimately it’s not a sustainable strategy for him. The president sees through that kind of thing, and he’s aware of what’s happening.”

“The official went on: ‘The reality is, if he keeps this up he’s not going to be here.’

“Another strike against Bannon is that, when speaking of the Freedom Caucus ahead of the planned vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act, he assured the rest of the senior team, ‘I’ve got these guys taken care of,’ according to someone close to the West Wing. ‘We don’t have to worry about them.'”

From Ryan Gilbey’s Guardian 1.29.17 review of Woody Harrelson‘s Lost in London: “Even at its liveliest, cinema can only ever be a refrigerated medium, relaying images to us that were shot months, years even decades earlier. But this week there was an exception to that rule. Woody Harrelson’s directorial debut, Lost in London, was broadcast live to more than 500 cinemas in the US, and one in the UK, as it was being filmed on the streets of the capital at 2 am on Friday.

“As if that were not impressive enough, the picture was shot in a single unbroken 100-minute take with a cast of 30 (plus hundreds of extras) in 14 locations, two black cabs, one police vehicle and a VW camper van festooned with fairy lights.

“Actors who try their hand as a director typically start off with something small-scale — a sensitive coming-of-age story, say, such as Jodie Foster’s Little Man Tate or Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale. With Lost in London, Harrelson went as far in the opposite direction as one can imagine. This was edge-of-the-seat, seat-of-the-pants film-making. He didn’t just jump in at the deep end: he did so into shark-filled waters.”

From Wiki page: “The idea for Lost in London came from Harrelson’s actual experience in 2002, when he visited a Soho club called Chinawhite. He broke an ashtray in a London taxicab, which led to him being chased by police in a different taxicab, and then spending a night in jail. The film was shot and screened live in select theaters on 1.19.17, or just before Harrelson’s appearance in Sundance with Wilson. It was the first time a film was broadcast live into theaters.

If there was a sudden and immediate world decree that peanut butter was being outlawed, I would be fine with this. I always make sure to buy chunky, even though on some level I hate the stuff. But I eat it anyway. I hate the after-aroma when I have a p.b. & jelly sandwich, so I always immediately wash my face, brush my teeth, take a swig of mouthwash and suck on breath mints, and then wash my face a second time. I have to rid myself of the memory. Then two or three days later I succumb again, and the process of self-loathing, cleansing and breath-minting repeats. It’s complicated. I know I was amazed when Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer ate peanut-butter sandwiches in Mike Nichols‘ Wolf.

Amazon’s HD streaming version of Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick (’73) is one of the handsomest eye-orgasm ’70s movies I’ve ever beheld on my Sony 65-inch 4K. So much so that I own it outright. I realize that Blurays often deliver more information than HD streaming (which can sometimes be as low as 720p) so it would be reasonable to expect that the forthcoming French Bluray version, Tuez Charley Varrick! (out in early June), will look a bit better. And I mean only a teeny weeny bit. And at the cost of $20 or thereabouts. I’m thinking of getting it anyway.

I’ve explained repeatedly over the last few years that nobody pushes my loathing button like Ben Mendelsohn, i.e., Ben Sweat or Ben Smoke. But no HE commenters have ever said “yowsah, agreed, thanks for pointing this out.” It’s all been on the level of “jeez, weirdo — you really have some kind of problem with this guy, huh?” All alone on Repulsion Island. But now I have a friend, an ally — SBS.com’s Cameron Williams. He’s written a 4.10 piece titled “Going Full Mendo — An Investigation Into The Rise of Australia’s Favorite Sweaty, Smoking Master of Scumbags, Ben Mendelsohn.”

Finally! Somebody saw!

“Nobody dangles a cigarette from their mouth on screen like Ben Mendelsohn,” Williams begins. “The actor defies the laws of physics to keep it hanging from his lips for an unnatural amount of time. There’s sometimes the added difficulty curve of lighting the cigarette at the same time. These are the nuances Mendelsohn brings to each performance.

“Mendelsohn has built a career playing rogues using his downtrodden, laid-back style of acting. His approach was [once] classified by comedians Tony Martin and Mick Molloy as going ‘Full Mendo’. Mendelsohn has become an in-demand actor by doing this. There have been varying degrees of Mendo over the years, but Full Mendo is the one we want. A master of ‘less is more’, his characters move low and slow to control their status in any situation, and it makes Mendelsohn a magnetic screen presence.

“Mendelsohn’s big break-out was Animal Kingdom (’10), an Australian crime drama where he played Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody, a criminal on the run from the law living in Melbourne being protected by his crime family. Pope is one of the definitive scumbags of Mendelsohn’s career who turned the word ‘mate’ into a terrifying acceptance of criminal collusion. Mendelsohn also flipped the perception of what the criminal underworld in Australia looks like. Forget the stereotypical suits — Aussie gangsters do it in boardshorts, thongs and a stained t-shirt.

There are four ways to mount a smart-phone gripper for your car — (a) dashboard, (b) windshield suction-cup, (c) clip-on magnetized and (d) sticking a stabilizing device inside your CD player, which no one uses anymore because they’re all streaming or aux-jacking from their smart phones. I have both a magnetic holder (which necessitated buying a magnetized iPhone 6 Plus protective cover) and a CD-player device. The problem with the latter is that they’re cheaply made (or at least the ones I examined in an auto-parts store a couple of weeks ago were) and therefore fragile, and so the mount falls to the floor when you cough or stare at it too hard. Any way you slice it everyone needs one of these damn things, for GPS navigation if nothing else. You can’t balance your phone in your lap or hold it in your hand while you drive with the other. You’d think someone would make a really good, BMW-level model that isn’t made of the cheapest and most brittle plastic.