I’m reading Michael Callahan‘s Vanity Fair profile of illustrator Robert McGinnis, “The Man Behind History’s Most Iconic Movie Posters, From Breakfast at Tiffany’s to James Bond.” I know the realm — all those ’50s and ’60s-era illustrations of glammy, cartoonishly rail-thin women, often posed with leading men in tuxedos and suede pumps. But the illustration that got me was “Ethan,” which McGinnis painted 37 years ago. McGinnis’s subjects, curiously, are always slimmer and taller. That’s his trademark unreality. The Duke, 48 and bulky when he made The Searchers, is down to his Big Trail weight.

Ten people dead inside St. Petersburg’s Sennaya Ploshchad metro station. Happened around seven hours ago, or sometime after 3 am Pacific. Obviously the work of Swedish terrorists. “I saw a lot of smoke, a crowd making its way to the escalators, people with blood and other people’s insides on their clothes, bloody faces…many were crying,” said St. Petersburg resident Leonid Chaika, who said he was at the station where the blast happened. The motive was probably related to Russia’s anti-ISIS, pro-Hassad aggression in Syria.

What female villains have you completely believed in, and why? I could go on and on about my faves, but the key element is that you believed they weren’t just “playing” villainy but living in caves of their own choosing or creation.

In no particular order: Barbara Stanwyck‘s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Meryl Streep‘s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Jane Greer‘s Kathy Moffet in Out of the Past, Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, Kathy Bates‘ Annie Wilkes in Misery, Louise Fletcher‘s Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Sharon Stone‘s Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct, Bette Davis‘s Baby Jane Hudson in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, etc.

I didn’t believe in Margot Robbie‘s Harley Quinn (Suicide Squad) at all. Her performance was all about extreme-playdough mannerisms, posturing, makeup and wardrobe. All I believed was that Robbie had been hired because she’s hot.

I’ll tell you who I believed in 110% — Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The capsule definition of Alex Forrest was that of a manic, lion-haired feminist banshee who tried to leverage a single night of mad, passionate sex with Michael Douglas into a knife or a bomb that would detonate his marriage. But I didn’t really believe in that — that’s what the research-screening audiences saw. What I believed in was Alex’s instability and emotional desperation, and that made her scary. The scariest thing she said was “I won’t be ignored, Dan!”

I’m sorry but I don’t regard Sofia Boutella‘s demonic mummy demon (i.e., a resuscitation of Ahmanet, an Egyptian princess from 5000 years ago) as any kind of scary. One, Boutella’s casting as the mummy was a political sop to notions of gender equality in the film industry. And two, I saw her up close at Cinemacon in Las Vegas and she’s no Charlize Theron (who I would buy as a mummy monster in a New York minute) — Boutella is delicate and modest-sized. I don’t get the threat.

You can say “in a CG spectacle the physical size or gender of the villain doesn’t matter…it’s all in the dark conjurings and wild effects” and I would reply “no, you’re wrong…the performer has to put some kind of chill into your system…you have to accept the idea that the actor or actress villain is harboring some kind of real-deal malevolence or madness on their own dime…you can’t just trot out some attractive French-Algerian actress who’s slender and only 5’5″ tall and say ‘okay, audiences…here’s somebody you should definitely be scared of.'”

Alex Kurtzman and Tom Cruise‘s The Mummy pops on June 9th.

I watched Dr. Zhivago last night for the sake of the SRO, who had only vague memories of it. It had been a few years since my last viewing. Released in late ’65 but seen by most audiences the following year, it will never be more than an eye-filling, handsomely composed soap opera, but it works because of Maurice Jarre‘s haunting score along with David Lean‘s incisive editing style.

My favorite character is Klaus Kinski‘s anarchist on the train, but the most interesting developed character is Tom Courtenay‘s Pasha Antipov (aka “Strelnikov”) and he has…what, five or six scenes? This chat with Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is his best moment:

In the film Rod Steiger‘s Komarovsky tells Yuri that Strelnikov, on the run from the Bolsheviks, was captured five miles from Yuriatin while apparently trying to find Lara, his abandoned wife. He refused to answer to any name but Pasha, and then committed suicide en route to his own execution.

In Boris Pasternak’s 1957 book, Pasha finds only Yuri when he arrives in Yuriatin. From a Wikidot summary: “Yuri and Pasha are both walking dead men, having lost what was most vital to them somewhere along the way. They are Russians though, so they drink and talk hours into the night. Then Yuri goes to bed. Pasha takes a walk, and shoots himself in the head. Yuri finds his corpse in the morning.”

We’re two weeks away from the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rosza, who is currently my favorite classical-styled movie-score composer. I change my allegiance all the time — Bernard Herrmann, Maurice Jarre, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman — but I always come back to Rosza.

A short list of Rozsa’s classic scores — Double Indemnity, Spellbound, The Killers (one of the best noir scores ever), Brute Force, The Naked City, Madame Bovary, Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table, Lust for Life, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, El Cid. Rosza’s scores performed the required duties (augmenting the moods and themes, intensifying the emotion) but they work on their own terms.

I posted the following about Rosza’s King of Kings score on 12.21.10: “Rosza sometimes let his costume-epic scores become slightly over-heated, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rosza really had soul.

“Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch that Nicholas Ray’s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rosza described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and it’s obvious that Rosza came closer to capturing the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than anyone else on the team (Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan, producer Samuel Bronston).”

It’s not just my loathing of almost all Asian machismo action spectacle (martial arts, sword and wire ballet) that floats my boat. I’m also indifferent to Japanese anime and manga and regret whatever influence they may have upon modes of 21st Century filmmaking. It therefore goes without saying I never intended to acknowledge, much less see or write about, Rupert Sanders‘ Ghost In The Shell. 

The Paramount release not only opened this weekend to sucky reviews but also underperformed — a lousy $19 million from 3,440 theaters. Yes!

The audience was 61% male vs. 39% female. Johansson’s skin-tight outfit plus the sexual aroma of Japanese manga indicated that Ghost In The Shell was basically about giving guys boners, which would explain the less ardent female response. Box Office Mojo‘s Brad Brevet notes that Scarlett Johansson‘s Lucy opened with $43.8 million, due in part to a larger (50%) female following.

I’ve been mainlining movies my entire life, and I don’t even want to know about this weekend’s box-office biggies, much less sit through them. The dismally reviewed Boss Baby (50% Metacritic, 48% Rotten Tomatoes) narrowly edged Beauty and the Beast to win the weekend. Lionsgate’s Power Rangers came in fourth with an estimated $14.5 million. Who watches this shit? It’s April 2nd, and there’s almost nothing I want to see between now and May 1st. Well, two or three.

The only film opening next Friday that I believe to be 100% worthy is Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation.

Who cares about Going in Style, The Case for Christ and Smurfs: The Lost Village (all opening on 4.7)?

Kino Lorber is releasing a Bluray of Andre de Toth‘s The Indian Fighter on 5.9.17. Excerpt from from “Dust to Dust,” posted on 5.30.14. “Have you ever seen The Indian Fighter? I didn’t think so. Have you ever heard of it? There’s no reason you should have. A 1955 Kirk Douglas mediocrity, co-written by Ben Hecht, opened at the Mayfair (later the DeMille) on 12.21.55. Not awful but generic. Why should succeeding generations pay the slightest attention to a film made on auto-pilot? By people who wanted only a commercial success and not much else? Don’t kid yourself — the fate of The Indian Fighter awaits 80% to 90% of the films that have opened in the 21st Century. Deep down producers and directors know it’s not just a matter of dollars and cents, which is why some occasionally try to make films that sink into people’s souls on some level. Because they want future generations (including their own descendants) to speak about them with affection or at least respect. It’s about legacy.”

Last Tuesday all the Cinemacon journos went apeshit after seeing ten minutes of footage from Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22), myself especially. Yes, it’s “comedic” but a long way from lighthearted. For all the humor and cleverness and first-rate CG it feels kind of Twilight Zone-y…a kind of Rod Serling tale that will have an uh-oh finale or more likely an uh-oh feeling all through it.

Last Tuesday I wrote that the undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

A day after the Downsizing presentation I was chatting with a bespectacled heavy-set female who works, she said, for an Arizona exhibitor (or some exhibition-related business) in some executive capacity. She struck me as a conservative, perhaps one who processes things in simplistic “like/no like” terms, definitely not a Susan Sontag brainiac. 

I told her that I thought Downsizing was brilliant and asked what she thought of it. Her response: “I don’t know what I think of it.”

HE translation: “No offense but I don’t want to spill my mixed feelings with some Los Angeles journalist I’ve just met. I didn’t like the chilly feeling underneath it. It didn’t make me feel good. My heart wasn’t warmed by the idea of working people shrinking themselves down so they can live a more lavish lifestyle. I have to work really hard at my job and watch my spending and build up my IRA, and I didn’t appreciate the notion that I’m just a little struggling hamster on a spinning wheel.”

Again — my initial reaction to the footage.

I never reported on Amazon Studio’s Cinemacon presentation, which happened at a Thursday (3.30) luncheon. It still seems as if their biggest attraction and potentially hottest award-season title (maybe) is Michael Showalter, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon‘s The Big Sick (6.23), which opened to big acclaim at last January’s Sundance Film Festival and will probably do well commercially, at least in hip urban markets.

But if Sick comes up short during award-season (a fate that often befalls relationship comedies), it’s possible that Todd Haynes and Brian Selznick‘s Wonderstuck will carry the weight. A time-flipping drama (two scenarios separated by 50 years) with a strong emotional current, pic stars Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Amy Hargreaves, Millicent Simmonds, Oakes Fegley and James Urbaniak. The trailer (which has a kind of swirling, flirting-with-euphoria quality) got me going.  Haynes doesnt fool around.

Tied for third place among Amazon’s most appealing ’17 films:  (a) Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying, a decades-later sequel to The Last Detail with Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne (the kind of film that could really benefit from a Cannes debut), and (b) Mike White‘s Brad’s Status, about a 50ish dad (Ben Stiller) dealing with vague frustrations about his accomplishments plus the seeming fact that his college-age son (Austin Abrams, who doesn’t resemble Stiller in the least) is likely to do better. Both were trailered, both look great.

Stiller’s dad reminds you of similar characters he played in Greenberg and especially While We’re Young.

Laurent Bouzereau and Mark Harris‘s Five Came Back, a brilliant three-hour doc about the transformative experiences of five name-brand Hollywood directors (John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens and John Huston) during World War II, premiered last night on Netflix. Please see it, and if at all possible in a single sitting. Here’s my 3.22 review.

That said, I’m obliged to re-irrigate a dispute between Harris, author of the same-titled 2014 book, and Ford biographer Joseph McBride about the doc’s claim that Ford’s service as a WWII documentarian-propagandist basically ended after he went on a three-day bender following the D-Day invasion.

In a 3.23 HE piece called “Ford’s Bravery, Drinking, Sentimentality,” McBride articulated his dispute with Harris based on Harris’ book vs. what McBride had reported in “Searching for John Ford,” a respected 2001 biography.

But yesterday McBride doubled down and then some after seeing the Netflix series [see below] and taking it all in. I naturally passed his complaint along to Harris. Harris came back this morning with a stern and specific reply [also below].