Sen. Al Franken a couple of hours ago: “I’ve bent over backwards not to say that Attorney General Sessions lied…he has to come back.”

I’ve been told that Kong: Skull Island (which I’m seeing tonight at the Arclight) isn’t tracking as strongly as it could or should. Word around the campfire is that it’s “kind of sandwiched in between Logan and Beauty and the Beast,” as one guy put it this morning, and that this might lead to an underwhelming performance on some level.

Instead of matching or even challenging Logan‘s $88-million first-weekend haul, Kong might be turn out to be more of a mid 50s thing by Sunday night. Which doesn’t sound bad until you consider the rumored $190 million budget, not to mention the p & a tab.

“What I heard a week or two ago was $40 to $45 million, which struck me as low,” a friend says. “I bet it opens to $55 or $60 million. That may not be enough for a movie rumored to cost $190 and change, but but it looks great and the money is right up there on the screen

From a 3.2 HE comment thread, written by yours truly: “If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that a significant portion of moviegoers don’t necessarily flock to a really clever, well made, high pizazz film. Some will this weekend, of course, but not all. The slow boats tend to hold off and wait UNLESS it’s a completely safe piece of shit like Jurassic World. Quality scares them on some level. They like brand comfort.

The TV was on while I was writing the column in our miserable Palm Springs hotel room last weekend. I wasn’t paying much attention to the shows but they weren’t from my usual white-noise feed (i.e., MSNBC, CNN, BBC, CSPAN, National Geographic or TCM). They were the usual lower-depths pollution feed of ugly reality series (Kardashian lap-of-luxury lifestyle stuff), Access Hollywood-type crap, glamour kiss-ass shows, sports crap, home-shopping crap, beauty consultation, weight-loss, fashion discussion, kiddie fantasy, more ugly reality, etc.

At some point something snapped in my mind. I literally flinched and shook my head when I suddenly realized a kind of poison had been streaming into my system for hours and that I had to turn it off if I didn’t want to get sick or go crazy.

General-access cable and broadcast is aimed at the American mouth-breathing mongrel class, and you can see how it inspires people to lead lives that are devoid of spiritual content…lives that are almost certainly dulled-down, compromised and shortened as a result. The only civilized way to watch anything these days is via apps (Amazon, Netflix, Vudu) and elite cable. What a cultural cesspool regular-ass TV has become. It attains such levels of toxicity that it seems natural and inevitable that regular watchers would turn into slow boats and cretins. The influence of mongrel TV is almost certainly one reason why Trump caught on.

Imagine being a relatively talented director, screenwriter, dp or craftsperson, ready and eager to work, create and possibly make history, and the only work you can find is in the horror genre. And after a few tries at expanding your realm you gradually realize you’re stuck there and will never get out — a clock-puncher in the horror factory for the rest of your life. Yes, horror carries a higher prestige factor than porn because there’s at least a slim chance that a mainstream breakout could happen, but it’s also a level or two below fantasy-superhero CG crap, which is a dungeon in itself.

Imagine waking up every day, looking in the bathroom mirror and realizing, “God, I’m still chained to this godawful racket…a lowly horror-film worker, a prisoner of gore…trying to be or at least work with the new Guillermo del Toro, Tom Holland, Wes Craven, Tom Savini, Sam Raimi, George Romero or John Carpenter but knowing deep down that the odds are heavily against me…hate myself, hate my life, hate the horror-fan conventions I’m forced to attend to so I can earn pocket money by handing out autographs and posing for photos.” Can you imagine?

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah, R): “Americans have choices…they’ve gotta make a choice. Rather than getting that new iPhone that they love and they wanna spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own health care.” Translation: “Poor shiftless Americans, many if not most of whom are non-white supporters of Democratic causes, have a long history of living louche, indulgent lifestyles that are fiscally irresponsible. 47 years ago Guy Drake, a great American, pointed this out when he wrote and recorded a popular folk song called ‘Welfare Cadillac‘, the lyrics of which still resonate today. Cadillacs, iPhones…the poor have to learn to show a little discipline and do without the luxuries.”

In a 3.3 Hollywood Reporter piece by Aaron Couch, Logan co-screenwriter Scott Frank explains the genesis: “We made it an emotional, smaller personal story where it’s not the fate of the world. It’s his own kind of sanity and redemption at stake, instead of some sort of larger, apocalyptic scenario that these movies are always confronted by. I always believed you could locate a superhero in a really adult genre story. And I pitched it to Jim as, ‘Let’s do a super, ultra-violent version of Paper Moon.'”

Love that analogy-description, and Frank’s acknowledgment of Logan‘s “ultra-violent” nature is respected for its candor. I loved the Paper Moon aspects (although Dafne Keen isn’t Tatum O’Neal as much as Natalie Portman in Leon The Professional) but the decision to assault the audience with relentless brutality is what put me off. I wish it had been turned down. I wouldn’t have minded sporadic violence.

Variety‘s story about the April re-opening of Manhattan’s Quad Cinema (34 W. 13th Street) allows me to re-run “The Crowd Stops Watching and Turns The Showing Into Performance Art”, initially posted on 9.30.15:

“I’ll never forget my first and only viewing of Irwin Allen‘s The Swarm at the Quad Cinema on 13th Street. It was maybe a week or two after the 7.14.78 opening. By then it had tanked and word has gotten around it was mythically awful, so a few feisty types were seated in the smallish Quad theatre. The heckling started between the one-third and halfway mark, and then it got better and better.

“But the film was so impossibly square and tedious and ogygen-sucking that you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the mostly middle-aged or long-of-tooth cast — Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Bradford Dillman, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda. They were being humiliated, plain and simple.

“As it ended with a shot of Caine and Ross watching the killer bees burn to death at sea, I remember the guys sitting in the front going ‘aaauuughhhhh!,’ like they been gored by a bull.” — from a 4.6.14 post called “Shoulda Been There.”

I worked with the late Robert Osborne — not closely but editing-wise — during my time at the Hollywood Reporter in 1983 and ’84, back in the clackety-clack era of typewriters and white-out and red-ink pens. This was when the Reporter headquarters were on Sunset at the corner of Las Palmas…Tichi Wilkerson, Bruce Binkow, Lynn Segal, Jefferson Graham, Hedy Kleyweg, Jeff Ressner, Duane Byrge, Ruth Robinson, et. al.

Osborne wrote a daily column back then.  He had a desk in the outer area, but now and then he’d saunter into the main news room and shoot the shit. 

He got angry with us once when we mistakenly corrected what we thought was a misspelling of Michelle Pfeiffer‘s name, only to find out Bob was referring to some guy whose name was similarly spelled, Michael Pfeffer or something like that. He really let us have it, but then again we couldn’t reach him when we were debating what to do so it was at least partly on him.

The great Osborne passed last night at age 84, and I’m sorry. He was a good, sharp, amiable fellow who really knew his stuff. I loved his TCM summaries as much as the next guy, but he was best when he was off-camera and really spilling the beans among friends.

In an L.A. Times story Osborne’s partner of 20 years, David Staller, said two things — one, that Osborne died of natural causes in his sleep at home in New York City, and two, that “he made the choice to call it a day, and he wants everyone to know that he’ll see them at the after party.” Hold on…you can pass from (i.e., get taken out by) natural causes or you can choose to call it a day, but you can’t do both.

Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper finally opens theatrically this Friday, almost ten months after jolting and dividing the Cannes Film Festival last May. It’s being shown tonight at LACMA with Assayas and Kristen Stewart sitting for a post-screening q & a. The excitement that I felt just after the Salle Debussy screening — a sensation I’ll never forget — will be semi-rekindled one last time, and then the movie will die like a mouse trying to cross the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour.

Yes, this brilliant fear-and-anxiety flick is going to perish faster than you can snap your fingers, which is all the more reason to see it immediately. Unless, of course, you couldn’t care less about theatrical submissions and would rather wait for streaming, in which case I say “go with God” or “go fuck yourself” — take your pick.

Either way Personal Shopper is irrefutably one of the most original and unsettling ghost flicks ever made and certainly the nerviest this century. This has been proven, in a sense, by the pooh-poohers and naysayers. There’s never been an important, game-changing piece of art that hasn’t been trashed in the early stages by milquetoasts and conservatives.

Personal Shopper‘s brilliance is partly about the fact that it’s not so much a “ghost story” as an antsy mood piece about…well, a whole jumble of ingredients but all of them drawn from the here and now. It’s more of an uptown cultural smorgasbord that’s seasoned with a ghostly current that you can take or leave, but it certainly doesn’t hinge on standard shock moments — cracked mirrors, moving furniture and all that.

Remember that Assayas won the Best Director prize last May, and that honors of this sort are never given out lightly.

If you like typical bullshit fast-food ghost movies…if you’re a Conjuring fan…if you like your goose bumps served with pickles, onions and extra cheese in a to-go wrapper then I sincerely hope you have a miserable time with Personal Shopper. The more I think about paying customers who are too stupid or rigid-minded to get it, the better I feel. But if you liked The Innocents and The Haunting, there’s hope for you.

An Australian critic wrote last summer that “I didn’t know that all I wanted in a movie was Kristen Stewart scootering around Paris buying expensive designer fashions for rich people while texting a ghost who may or may not be her dead twin brother.” See? He didn’t know what was coming but he got it all the same. I’ve scootered all over Paris for years on end, and watching this film for the first time…I’m not exaggerating…was simply one of the greatest summaries of that transcendent Paris scooterbuzz thing…it was heaven.

Help me, God…help me to return so I can once again use my wits and agility to dodge all that Paris traffic at night and feel like Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless.

Personal Shopper is partly about how urban life can feel at times, creepy and cold and yet exciting at the same time, but it’s also about the way it all felt in the fall of ’15 (i.e., when Personal Shopper was filming), and about the vibe when you were roaming around Paris or any big-league burgh and coping with that current and feeling varying shades of fluidity and flotation. It’s a darting, here-and-there thing, a fleeting experience about the flutterings and rattles of spirits around the corner. Or deep within. Or out in the ether.

This is what the hinterland Bumblefucks have given us, done to us — an ongoing padded-cell psychodrama for the next three and seven-eighth years. A President completely divorced from receptivity to reason, facts, decency and emotional stability. The Trump Presidency is a crazy pulpit — a fount of scattershot alt-right brain farts. We don’t get to debate or solve problems between now and 2021 — we have to debate what kind of measures or medication (and in what doses) would be the best way to moderate this maniac. Oh, to live in a world in which the public discussion is not about alt-right lunacy but primarily about beliefs, quality of life, practical applications of common sense, inspiration, justice, potential solutions and degrees of compassion. Instead we’re living in an asylum.

Last night I finally saw James Mangold‘s Logan, having missed the all-media two weeks ago. A T2-like road movie that finally concludes the Wolverine saga, it’s Mangold’s most assured ilm since Walk The Line. It’s intelligently composed, engaging and even incisive from time to time. There’s never any question about Logan being a cut above — smart, well-produced and grade-A as far as the genre allows.

And no element lit me up more than little Dafne Keen, whose instantly riveting performance as a junior-sized mutant is one for the ages. She has great eyes and a haunting stillwater vibe. In less than five minutes I knew for sure that Keen is the new Natalie Portman. (Born in ’05, she was 11 when Logan was shot last year — Portman, born in ’81, was 12 or 13 when she made her screen debut in Leon the Professional.)

Breakout Logan star and future Oscar-winner Dafne Keen, who’s now 12.

I fell in love with Keen, wanted her protected and safe, and was seriously pissed at Hugh Jackman for taking so long to wake up to the bond between them. A natural talent, Keen will probably win an Oscar for something or other within 10 or 15 years, mark my words.

But Logan wore me down with its relentless brutality. I was engaged as far as it went for, oh, 90 or 100 minutes but then I quit. I was the angriest guy in theatre #12, not to mention the oldest. I was muttering “Goddammit, Mangold…what the fuck.”

I loved Patrick Stewart‘s final Charles Xavier performance (he has two great scenes), and I felt seriously touched by Stephen Merchant‘s carefully modulated performance as the albino Caliban. And I loved the bit about an X-Men comic book foretelling what’s happening in real time (or what has always happened or will happen in a continuous real-time stream) — I wish the script had made more of this.

I don’t know what there is to say or feel about Jackman at this stage. I began tiring of his gruff, scowling “fuck off, leave me alone!” routine a couple of Wolverine movies ago, and there’s no question that Logan’s refusal to engage or accept what’s obviously happening (plot-wise, Laura-wise) goes on for too long.

But I disengaged when Jackman’s younger twin (X24) showed up and the Godforsaken poundings, gougings and kickings just wouldn’t stop. I actually said out loud “oh, come on, man…Jesus.”