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.

Sometime last fall I decided that Pete Holmes, star-creator of HBO’s Crashing, is not only not funny, but revoltingly upbeat. I was watching him do a standup bit and saying to myself “God, I hate this fucking guy…silly, unfunny dipshit comedy..and I hate it even more that the crowd is laughing with him.” Upbeat is fine if it’s coming from within my own heart (occasionally, from time to time), but it’s poison in comedians.

The truth is that I kind of hate upbeat as a rule, and goofy voices and too much smiling and little pig eyes, which Holmes definitely has, are toxic. I don’t need Sam Kinison-level anger, but the absence of anger is not only fatal — it’s inhuman. I want my comedians to call bullshit on everyone and everything. I want them to sneer and frown and shake their heads derisively. So “thanks but no thanks” on Holmes and Crashing. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all but later.

The concept of a chilly hottie kicking ass and drilling bad guys was hatched 27 years ago by Luc Besson‘s La Femme Nikita, and a lot of superspy/action films have tired to make that shit work ever since. The problem is that you need a female lead whom you can really and truly believe can punch and kick like a horse. Did you believe that Salt‘s Angelina Jolie was strong and tough enough to beat up big bruisers? I didn’t.

Up until now the only female action heroine I’ve really believed could seriously kick ass was Gina Carano in Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire. But I think I’ve been sold again — Charlize Theron as Lorraine Broughton in Atomic Blonde (Focus Features, 7.28). She’s strong and scrappy enough, having more than proved her mettle in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Based on a graphic novel called The Coldest City, a Cold War-era Berlin thing (circa 1989) about double agents and whatnot, pic costars James McAvoy, John Goodman, Eddie Marsan, Sofia Boutella and Toby Jones. Pic will premiere two days hence — Sunday, 3.12 — at South by Southwest.

The only scary element is that ex-stunt guy David Leitch is the director. Leith co-directed John Wick with Chad “pool attendant” Stahelski, and has directed the forthcoming, almost-sure-to-blow-chunks Deadpool 2. Leitch is definitely trouble.

Exactly two weeks ago (Friday, 2.24) I went to catch Jordan Peele‘s Get Out at the Pacific Grove plex. After the show mercifully ended I realized I had lost my keys somewhere between the outdoor Grove parking lot and the theatre, and it was no small loss — my Mini Cooper ignition/door key, a Yamaha Majesty ignition key plus a carrying case and chain-lock key, two apartment door keys, a laundry room and bicycle-lock key.

I got down and crawled all over the theatre floor with my iPhone flashlight on, certain that they must have fallen out. But I couldn’t find them. I whined and bitched at God, and then left my name and phone # with Pacific management. Then I gave the same info to the Grove valet desk as well as the Grove security office, which is adjacent to the Farmer’s Market grocery area. Nobody called over the next two or three days so I figured “okay, I’m fucked.”

Sometime last week I made some low-cost copies and then had to shell out $150 for two new bolt-lock apartment keys, and I would have had to pay a little more than $250 for a new Mini Cooper key. But yesterday afternoon (right after a screening of Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song) I went by the Grove to ask around again, and lo and behold the Grove plex guys had them. The sight! My eyes all but bounced out of their sockets. Elated, walking on air, shook everyone’s hand, “thank you!”, etc.

HE to Rian Johnson: What are your thoughts, brah? Did it raise a smirk of any kind, or are you too busy in editing? I realize it doesn’t have the same visceral impact as Luke Skywalker telling Rey to “eat my ass,” but that aside…well, this is our life, isn’t it? Everyone is making The Last Jedi right along with you. It’s a community effort. You can’t expect to just spring your movie on the world next December and expect the fans to just go “oh, wow….Rian, you’ve changed our lives!”

This drearily synthetic “meet Walter” piece, a promotion for Alien: Covenant (20th Century Fox, 5.19), was conceived by Ridley Scott and 3AM, directed by Luke Scott and produced by RSA Films. What horsehit…a perfume commercial! Why didn’t they use Rihanna or Beyonce as the nurse-surgeons? The Alien: Covenant buzz has just taken a nosedive.

The following is the final line from Manohla Dargis‘ N.Y. Times review of Kong: Skull Island, 90% of which reads like a spirited, half-joyous rave: “Alas, beauty no longer has her beast, the beast no longer has his beauty and this darkness has no heart even if it will have a sequel.”

While the Apocalypse Now echoes are incessant and Kong: Skull Island is clearly paying tribute to the jungle-thrills portion of the original King Kong, it is more similar to the friendly-monkey tone of Son of Kong. Why am I the only one saying this? King Kong was a tragedy about the perversion of naturalism and the heartbreak of obsessive love while the lightweight Son of Kong was mostly about goofy adventures on Skull Island and the making of a fast buck. The previous 12 words are as precise a description of Kong: Skull Island as you could possibly come up with.

Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, HE’s favorite 2017 film hands down, has opened to largely favorable reviews — currently at 77% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. A 67% or 71% rating means a modest degree of difficulty, but 77% basically means that a film has been judged as very, very good except for the complaints of naysayers who don’t or can’t get it.

I was blown away in particular by Tony Scott’s beyond-brilliant N.Y. Times review. It’s so on-target and revelatory that I felt spellbound as I read it. Scott doesn’t just understand and accept this immaculate and mesmerizing film; it’s almost as if he wrote or directed it himself and has taken to reviewing to explain it to the pissheads and tomato-throwers.

Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper.

The “perpetually displaced nomad set” amid “the drift and mystery of modern life”…yes!

Read it on the Times site or here in its entirety, but this is about as bull’s-eye as it gets:

“Like many other characters in the films of Olivier Assayas, Maureen, a young American woman living in France, belongs to a relatively privileged slice of the international nomad class. The old-fashioned term ‘jet set,’ with its connotations of glamorous indolence, doesn’t quite fit. Mr. Assayas’s world is populated by figures in perpetual transit: actors, corporate executives, terrorists. Their identities have been dissolved by perpetual displacement. We remember their faces (which are often the faces of movie stars), even if we’re not quite sure who they are.

“Maureen, who works as a personal shopper for a spoiled celebrity named Kyra, certainly brushes up against glamour, and occasionally tries on a piece of Kyra’s borrowed couture. But she dwells mostly in a benumbed, stressed-out limbo, in frenzied motion from one nowhere to the next. Her human connections are often mediated by screens. She video-chats with her boyfriend, a tech consultant on assignment in Oman. She exchanges feverish texts with a stranger on a train from Paris to London and back. When asked what she’s doing in Paris, Maureen answers, ‘I’m waiting.’

In just under three months the 50th anniversary of the 6.1.67 debut of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band will be upon us. A half-fucking-century ago. The first Beatle event that shocked boomers worldwide was when John Lennon died — 12.8.80. Methinks Pepper‘s 50th will register as a similar jolt. There’s no stopping time, but I wish there was some way to slow it down a bit.

If Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song (Broad Green, 3.10) turns out to be a critical bust, will his string have finally run out? In the view of the Guardian‘s Danny Leigh, quite possibly. “Of course, there are diehards to whom [Malick] remains sacred,” he writes. “For a certain kind of movie star too, he is still the one director for whom they will risk the raw indignity of being dropped from the finished film.”

But truth be told, The Tree of Life (’11) is the last film in which Malick got away with his darting, flakey-mystical, twirling-barefoot-maiden Emmanuel Lubezki bullshit. The critical deaths of To The Wonder and Knight of Cups within the last four and a half years have taken their toll on Malick’s rep. “The catcalls have increased,” Leigh writes, “[and] the graph of public opinion has become a ski-slope.”

3.9 comment from HE reader “JR”: “What has Malick done since his hiatus? Gone into the same well of voice-over, nature porn, floating camera, natural light, running water, whispering, twirling camera bullshit, no script…hoping Emmanuel Lubezki‘s gorgeous cinematography would save him from not having a story. He doesn’t have anything else. He’s 70 so he’s not going to change or try NEW things, he sure as hell isn’t going to get better because he’s set in his ways, so he’s going to rehash his old tricks, being abhorrently inferior to his past greatness, trotting along on the endless road of self-parody.”

“All Hail Bert Schneider,” posted on 12.13.11: “Bert Schneider was the last producer to semi-successfully micro-manage Terrence Malick and keep him from his own self-indulgent tendencies, and [in so doing] persuaded Malick to keep Days of Heaven down to a managable 94 minutes. After Heaven, Malick never made a lean, well-honed movie again. When he returned to filmmaking in the ’90s it was all pretty photography and leaves and alligators and voice-over and scrapping dialogue and expansive running times. Mister, we could use a man like Bert Schneider again.”