I’ll be getting around to this before the week’s out. By the weekend for sure. Have to get ready, think it through, prepare, etc.

Lewis Gilbert‘s Damn The Defiant!, a British-produced tale of a 1790s mutiny aboard a British warship, opened in England on 4.15.62, and then in the U.S. in late September. Two and a half months later Lewis Milestone‘s Mutiny on the Bounty, a bigger, American-financed, star-driven stirring of the same basic ingredients, opened in reserved-seat theatres. Mutiny was a bust ($13.7 million gross vs. $19 million in negative costs) but it sold more tickets and attracted a lot more attention than poor Damn The Defiant!, which was regarded as an also-ran even though it beat Bounty to the box-office by several weeks.

A similar dynamic is affecting a pair of upcoming Winston Churchill dramas. Jonathan Teplitzsky‘s British-produced Churchill, will open on 6.2.17 in the U.S. and 6.17 in England. Nearly six months later Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, a seemingly bigger, brassier, possibly more dimensionalized Churchill drama with Gary Oldman in the title role, will open stateside via Focus Features.

You know that Wright’s film is going to blow away Teplitzsky’s in terms of press attention, award-season heat and ticket sales. Then again you can’t dismiss Brian Cox, whose Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter was just as malevolent as Anthony Hopkins‘ in The Silence of the Lambs. Cox does it first, and then another actor with bigger backing redefines.

France’s Emmanuel Macron, the pragmatic businessman and centrist who heads En Marche!, will face nationalist rightwing candidate Marine Le Pen in a 5.7 runoff election. After doing some research and particularly after reading this 4.17 Guardian profile by Angelique Chrisafis, Hollywood Elsewhere is rooting for Macron. He’s certainly a more acceptable candidate than Le Pen, whose anti-immigration stance makes her the French Trump. On top of which Macron was only 16 when Kurt Cobain died.

Incidentally: The 39 year-old Macron is married to 63 year-old Brigitte Trogneaux, whom he met when he was 15 and she was 39. She was his drama teacher in La Providence high school in Amiens. His parents tried to break it up but Macron wouldn’t fold. He and Trogneaux were married in ’07. Imagine the prosecutorial rage and tabloid frenzy if a similar-type relationship had happened in the U.S. back in the ’90s.

Michael Mann producing and partly directing an eight-to-ten-hour miniseries about the battle of Hue, based on Mark Bowden‘s forthcoming book about same? Are you kidding me? Of course I’ll watch it, devour it, buy the Bluray, etc. I’m there.

Mann and Michael De Luca have acquired the rights to Bowden’s “Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam” (Grove Atlantic, 6.6). The key factors are (a) what’s the budget?, (b) who will write the screenplay? and (b) will Mann and DeLuca be able to shoot in the Vietnamese city of Hue as well as the Citadel (which I visited in 2012) or will they have to recreate?

I’ve been to Hue twice, actually, so don’t tell me.

From the release: “Hue was the epicenter of Hanoi’s 1968 Tet Offensive, in which Hanoi sought to win the war in one stroke. Part military action and popular uprising, NVA infantry crossed mountains, completely undetected, to the outskirts of Huế while VC cadre infiltrated weapons and ordinance into the city. On January 31 at 2:30am they launched a surprise attack, overrunning the city except for two small military outposts.”

Mann statement: “Mark Bowden has written a masterpiece of intensely dramatic non-fiction. [His] achievement is in making ‘them’ into us. We are them. There are no background people; people abstracted into statistics, body counts. There is the sense that everybody is somebody, as each is in the reality of his or her own life.

Photo images (jpg, png) stopped appearing on the iPhone version of Hollywood Elsewhere yesterday morning. YouTube videos show up just fine but not stills. I refreshed and reloaded my iPhone 6 Plus three times, and they still won’t appear. The cause, I’m sure, has to do with all the fiddling going on with the site’s coding and the fact that the new site is loading some of the same images. Or something like that. If anyone else is noticing the absence of still images on their phones, please advise.

Update (4.24, 7:47 am): I was too busy to bother yesterday, but I realized this morning that Safari was working but not Google Chrome. I deleted the Google Chrome app and loaded a fresh one — problem solved.

For some reason I’ve been obsessed for years with Marilyn Monroe‘s walled-off home at 12305 5th Helena Drive, right off Carmelina Ave. in Brentwood. She died there, of course. Built in 1929, it may be the most serene-looking Spanish-style home I’ve ever laid eyes on. I adore the pool and the indoor amber lighting just after dusk. That or I’m some kind of nostalgia queen who can’t help investing in her remnants. I drop by every couple of years around dusk and peer over the wall. Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller is reporting that the place is for sale for $6.9 million. Monroe probably didn’t pay much more than $50K when she bought it in ’61 or thereabouts. Miller says the owner never lived in the home — they just bought it in order to flip it. I hate people like that.

There’s this tendency among web designers to use large-point-size type and acres of white space. I really hate this, and this morning I told good friend Sasha that Hollywood Elsewhere’s redesign will not follow the Babar and Celeste thematic approach. This was three or four hours ago, mind. We’ve since moved past the Babar-and-Celeste thing but for a while there I was very concerned. I’m sorry but web design disputes make me emotional.

“I do not want and will not stand for a Hollywood Elsewhere designed for four year-olds — readers who need the point sizes to be gargantuan and web pages that revel in acres and acres of pointless white space.

“I want the copy and point sizes of the new Hollywood Elsewhere (which was created to make it feel less ‘old’ and revitalize advertising and make the site load faster) to look sensible and balanced and elegant. I don’t want it downgraded. I want it to look handsome and balanced and respectfully old-world in the sense that N.Y. Times or Forbes or Vulture copy looks, or how the current HE looks. I hate how it looks now.

“The old (current) HE is unremarkable but palatable — the point size of headlines and copy are okay — they don’t leap out but are at least proportionate, unchallenging and sensible. If they seem too small, the reader can use his/her fingers to increase image size. The current redesigned version looks awful on mobile. The headline point size is gargantuan. And the general copy point size is also too big. It looks like a child’s reading book.

The shrieking laughter of people enjoying brunch next door is interfering with my concentration. I’m listening to one woman in particular, and it’s like someone is pointing a gun at her head and threatening to shoot if she stops laughing. Except she’s a really good actress and pulling it off. But you can’t help saying to yourself, “What on God’s earth could possibly be that funny?”  

A person who continues to laugh and laugh like some giddy hyena, louder and louder by the minute, almost certainly isn’t enjoying anyone’s humor — she doing this out of form of nervous desperation. She’s trying to flatter someone or emphasize how spirited she is or something.

If I was telling hyena girl a funny story and she started in with the hyper giggling, I would stop and smile and pat her on the shoulder and say, “Okay, okay…you’re good.” Then I’d lean forward and look in her eyes and say, “Uhhm, you know it’s not that funny….right?”

Katherine Waterston was the hot new actress du jour when she popped three years ago in Inherent Vice. For better or worse, the sex scene in that film put her on the map. Then she landed a supporting role in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which I refused to even see. And then Ridley Scott or somebody on his team persuaded Waterston to wear a butchy haircut for her role in Alien: Convenant (20th Century Fox, 5.12), and suddenly the internets were saying “wait, wait..what happened?” This is the most confounding, throughly de-glamorizing haircut any name-brand actress had submitted to since Keri Russell chopped her hair off for Season #2 of Felicity. Remember how tough and take-charge Sigourney Weaver was in the original Alien, but how she didn’t jettison her hetero allure?

Katherine Waterston in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant

Waterston in Inherent Vice.

“Fuck Mars…this is it.” Until last night I didn’t know that colonizing Mars was even half a thing. I hadn’t paid much attention…uhhm, since reading last October about Leonardo DiCaprio wanting to travel to the red planet on one of Elon Musk‘s SpaceX vehicles.

I wrote a while back that I wouldn’t be polluting my soul with a viewing of The Fate of the Furious. Because I like real fast-car movies (Bullitt, Drive, both versions of Gone in Sixty Seconds) and am therefore burdened with a sense of taste in this realm. And because I’ve suffered through three Fast & Furious films, and the only one I could half-stand was Rob Cohen’s 2001 original. Vomit bag.

Today’s news about Fate having topped $900 million worldwide is yet another indication of the coarsening of 21st Century culture. The people who paid to see this have done their part to ensure that hundreds of gallons of Vin Diesel sewage will be pumped into megaplexes for God knows how many more years. As a cultural omen this is almost as dark as the election of Donald Trump and the 9/11 attacks. The animals have taken over the asylum.

“If the fate of the Furious series is to grow somehow both wearier and dumber with age, then the eighth film is proof of a mission firmly accomplished.” — from a recent review by Globe & Mail‘s Barry Hertz.