I don’t trust that James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (Warner Bros., opening later this year) was euphorically embraced yesterday at South by Southwest. One, SXSW audiences are notoriously easy — they’ll go apeshit for almost anything edgy or geeky. And two, it’s the easiest thing in the world to poke fun at a no-talent filmmaker. Laughing at cluelessness allows the audience to smugly imagine that they’re better (or at least potentially better) than the object of derision. and that shit has always turned me off.

In this case the schmuck is an actual guy named Tommy Wiseau. Director-star Franco (i.e., the elder) plays Wiseau, and is “clearly having a blast in the role of his career,” writes The Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael Rechtshaffen

(l. to r.) Disaster Artist costar Dave Franco, director-star James Franco costar Seth Rogen prior to last night’s SXSW screening at Austin’s Paramount theatre.

Based on Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell’s same-titled book about the making of Wiseau’s notoriously awful The Room (’03), The Disaster Artist may, for all I know, be as good as or even better than Tim Burton‘s Ed Wood (’94).

But Burton’s film, remember, was about a guy (Johnny Depp) who so loved the hustle of Hollywood and the making of movies that he didn’t allow his complete lack of talent to get in the way. It wasn’t about a notoriously mediocre director (although it was) as much as Wood’s unstoppable alpha.

Burton focused on Wood’s openness, optimism and especially his devotional love for Martin Landau‘s Bela Lugosi…generally his all-consuming devotion to the wily game of commercial filmmaking. There wasn’t even a pinch of derision in Ed Wood, and that was why it worked.

Remember Franco’s “Alien” in Spring Breakers and particularly his “look at mah sheeyit” riff? Whatever and whomever Alien might have been on the page, there wasn’t a drop of compassion for the guy in Franco’s performance. Every line and gesture said “look at this pompous, predatory, drug-dealing dick.” Okay, I felt something for Alien when he died, but before that moment he was just a scuzzball.

Cinefamily deserves respect and support for tributing the great Adam Curtis, the British political documentarian and journalist whose brilliant, highly essential essays, particularly The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and Bitter Lake, have been praised and praised again in this space.

Next weekend’s Curtis tribute (3.17 thru 3.19) is mainly about premiering Curtis’s HyperNormalisation, which has actually been streaming on YouTube since last October. Over the weekend Curtis will explain, expound and connect the dots on everything he knows and believes — everything within his own perceptual, philosophical, found-footage universe.

Curtis’s docs are brilliant, on-target and laser-focused, but they all say the same thing, which is that the wool has been pulled — is being pulled — over our eyes, and most of us don’t even realize it.

In Curtis’s view the last era in which society truly breathed and dreamt and reached for the stars was the late ’60s and early ’70s, but beginning in the mid ’70s (or around the time of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s ultra-prescient The Passenger, which will be discussed during a Curtis seminar next weekend) increasingly powerful corporate forces have been subjugating and controlling more and more.

“The term ‘hypernormalisation’ is taken from Alexei Yurchak‘s 2006 book ‘Everything Was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation,’ about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 20 years before it collapsed.

“Yurchak asserts that everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the ‘fakeness’ was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak called ‘hypernormalisation’.

Now that you’ve presumably seen Kong: Skull Island as well as Personal Shopper, do you understand what I was talking about a few days ago, which is that (a) Skull is a sloppy, scattershot joke (not one of those ten helicopters realized the danger and steered away from Kong’s reach during that chaotic swat-down sequence?) that feels a lot more like Son of Kong than King Kong and which is really quite stupid, and (b) Personal Shopper is smartly chilling and a bold, unusual knockout in more ways than you shake a stick at?

Last week it was announced that HBO will team with director Jay Roach and producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman for an adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann‘s Game Change, a forthcoming book about the Trump vs. Hillary battle. Halperin and Heilemann have already made similar hay with The Circus, a Showtime series that ran all through ’16, as well as the currently streaming Trumped: Inside The Greatest Political Upset of All Time.

The forthcoming HBO docudrama, which could hit as soon as ’18 but more likely the following year, is now in conflict with a nearly identical-sounding miniseries (announced on 2.14) that Zero Dark Thirty‘s Mark Boal will produce with Annapurna’s Megan Ellison, and which Boal will write the screenplay for. If HBO’s project follows the mold of the 2012 Game Change about the ’08 election, it’ll run 120 minutes while the Boal-Eillson will run “eight to ten hours.” But they’ll both still be telling the same story.

HE to Boal: “Mark — You’re now in a race with Mark Halperin, John Heilemann and the Game Change guys. You have to have a different angle in mind, right? Something that will exceed or expand upon what they’re almost sure to do? It wouldn’t hurt to be first either. My guess is that besides going more in-depth with your eight-to-ten-hour running time, you’re going to play the Russia card (i.e., the Christopher Steele dossier) and maybe even allude to the pee-pee tape just to keep things interesting.

“What else will distinctively separate your miniseries from whatever Halperin-Heilemann may have in mind? Can you give me some kind of vague hint about your plan of attack? Or do you care about any of this stuff?”

Early last evening the SRO and I visited Chez Jay, the legendary dive-bar eatery on Ocean Avenue. It’s still noisy as hell and the service faintly sucked, but the entrees are still delicious. The faintly grubby aura, reddish lighting, checked tablecloths, peanut shells on the floor, banners on the wall, thunky-sounding music system — walk through the front door and you’re Marty McFly in 1971. Chez Jay has been one of those lowdown, cool-cat, special-vibe places since ’59; very few Los Angeles establishments feel this time-machiney.

Last night around 7 pm, give or take.

I somehow managed to afford dinner there two or three times during my Los Angeles lost-weekend period in the mid ’70s, or right before I drove back east to work at becoming a film writer. This was when Chez Jay was a serious celeb haunt. Jack Nicholson (sporting the tight curly hair perm that he wore for The Fortune) and Lou Adler and a couple of women had the back table one night; I spotted a flannel-shirt-wearing Jeff Bridges during another visit.

I knew Jay Fiondella, the owner-founder and sometime actor, very slightly back then; every time I ran into him I’d mention how much I liked John Flynn‘s The Outfit (’73), in which he played a poker player who gets held up by Robert Duvall and Joe Don Baker.

I wasn’t interested in Cinefamily’s recent ten-year-anniversary screenings of Zodiac for one reason — they weren’t showing the 162-minute director’s cut (five minutes longer than the theatrical version, highlighted by the black-screen musical time passage sequence). But Guillermo del Toro‘s recent tweet-stream about David Fincher’s 2007 classic got me going again.

Last night I dusted off my director’s cut Bluray and and sank into it deep. Once again I was in hardcore Fincher heaven. This film is gonna live forever — I knew that the first time I saw it. Eternal shame upon (a) those clueless Paramount execs who insisted on cutting Zodiac down to 157 minutes, and (b) the Oscar blogaroos who didn’t rally round because Paramount had released it on 3.2.07, which of course meant it wasn’t Best Picture material. 

Oh, and by the way? Fuck The Game — the end of that fucking film drives me up the wall.

It’s been reported over and over that the nation’s low sloppy beasts have been acting in bolder, less constrained ways since Donald Trump‘s election. Three nights ago a synagogue in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood was vandalized with anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying graffiti — “The Holocau$t is Fake Hi$tory.”

“It really is a toxic mix of Holocaust denial, the stereotypical charge that Jews are obsessed with money, and the notion coming from the [President Trump] administration that all facts are fungible…fake facts, fake history,” Rabbi Daniel Weiner told the Seattle Times the next day.

For three or four years but particularly since Carol I’ve been nagged by vague thoughts about Rooney Mara‘s pursed lips. Obviously she has a problem with smiling (which I relate to) but the pursed lips, which have become her signature default expression (especially on the red carpet), seem like more of a facial tic than anything else. On top of which I’ve been wondering where she got it or if it’s just a natural ice-maiden thing Mara has been playing with since she was six or seven. Then it came to me last night — Brigitte Helm did the exact same thing with her lips in Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis….of course! Right in front of me all along.

(l.) Metropolis star Brigitte Helm in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927); (r.) Rooney Mara’s Helm-like signature pose in Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015).

“What’s worse, Mara is doing it with Fassbender, Fassbender is doing it with Portman, Mara is doing it with Berenice Marlohe, Gosling is doing it with Blanchett, Gosling is doing it with Mara, Portman is doing it with the prostitute that Fassbender hired, Fassbender is doing it with the other two prostitutes he hired…everyone is doing this crap with everyone, endlessly, for what feels like four straight hours. God, these people are horrible. And it’s not even sexy-sex stuff, just this oddball grab-ass footsie nonsense stuff that is utterly ridiculous and thoroughly uncomfortable to watch. The whole thing stinks more than the ooze running down Austin’s 6th street on a SXSW Saturday morning. Fool us once, To the Wonder…fool us twice, Knight of Cups…and what the hell does that make Song to Song?” — from Josh Dickey’s Mashable review.

A few hours ago reclusive director Terrence Malick participated in a Song to Song discussion at South by Southwest, joining the stage with costar Michael Fassbender and moderator Richard Linklater. Asked about his use of recurring visual and aural motifs in his last three films — Song to Song, Knight of Cups, To The Wonder — Malick paused, cleared his throat and said, “Uhhm, it’s hard to explain with any real precision….all I can say with 100% certainty is that I’m still trying to answer certain eternal questions…who am I, what am I, where am I going, how much longer will Emmanuel Lubezski continue to work with me, what about the dinosaurs who used to roam this planet, why do I so love to watch beautiful women twirl barefoot on lawns…why does that guy, whatsisname, call me Terrence Wackadoodle?”

Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song (Broad Green, 3.17) is more or less the same movie as To The Wonder and Knight of Cups — another meandering, whispering voice-over, passively erotic Emmanuel Lubezski tour de bullshit. All directors make the same movie over and over, of course, and this, ladies and germs, is another return to Malickland…what he does, what he can’t help recreating and re-exploring. I just sat there in my seat at Broad Green headquarters, slumped and going with it and silently muttering to myself, “Yuhp, same arty twaddle.”

The older Malick gets (he’s 73), the foxier and more barefoot and twirling the girls in his movies get, and this one, a kind of Austin music industry La Ronde, has a fair amount of fucking going on. And that’s fine with me. No “sex scenes”, per se, but a lot of navel-worshipping, I can tell you. Rooney Mara‘s, I mean.

At first Song to Song is about a romantic-erotic triangle between Faye (Mara), a guitarist and band member who doesn’t seem to care about music as much as whom she’s erotically entwined with at the moment, and two attractive music industry guys — Ryan Gosling‘s BV, a songwriter-performer, and Michael Fassbender‘s Cook, a rich music mogul. I can tell you Mara is definitely the focus of the high-hard-one action or, as Quentin Tarantino put it in Reservoir Dogs, “Dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick.”

Mara seems to start off with Cook and then move on to BV. Or was it Gosling first and then Fassbender and then a really hot French girl (Berenice Marlohe) and then back to Gosling at the very end with a Cook pit-stop or two? There’s never much sense of linear time progression in a Malick film so you never really know, but she definitely does them all.

There’s something vaguely L’Avventura-esque about Song to Song…pretty, wealthy people lost in impulsive erotica, embracing momentary pleasure, bopping from song to song, bod to bod, orgasm to orgasm, and all the while trying to make things happen within the Austin music scene.  But falling away from the eternal.  And in too many cold-vibe high-rises and high-end homes and not enough folksy abodes with yards and dogs and oak trees. But with lots of rivers to gaze at.