Nice jacket, Charlie. Looks warm. I think I saw it in Barney’s last December. Obviously not in keeping with apparel commonly worn by Arthur and his mates, but Guy Ritchie is reimagining that period…tossing the salad. Which goes hand in hand with the Led Zeppelin tracks. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (Warner Bros., 5.12) will screen next week in New York and Los Angeles (and perhaps elsewhere) for people on my level.
In a just-posted interview with GQ‘s Michael Paterniti, Brad Pitt announces that he’s turned away from booze and (I think) pot, which Pitt legendarily inhaled for 25-plus years. The interview is like an AA confession. Clean and sober, a new life…for now. Pitt calls it a “season” that he has to “run off a cliff,” but good for him anyway. I knew six days in (my sobriety began on 3.20.12) that I’d be clean for life, but we all follow our peculiar paths.
Pitt: “I do remember a few spots along the road where I’ve become absolutely tired of myself. And this is a big one. These moments have always been a huge generator for change. And I’m quite grateful for it.”
HE Overview: Everybody drinks and parties for 20, 25 years. From their late teens to their early to mid 40s. But you can’t keep that shit up. Cut back, dial it down, embrace sobriety…whatever. But if you don’t rethink it or downshift to some extent, you’re likely to be in some kind of trouble by your early 50s. I speak from experience.
Pitt: “I can’t remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something. Something. And you realize that a lot of it is, uhm…cigarettes, you know, pacifiers. And I’m running from feelings. I’m really, really happy to be done with all of that. I mean I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know…things I wasn’t dealing with. I was boozing too much. It’s just become a problem.
The redesigned Hollywood Elsewhere, which may pop later today or tomorrow, has a wider column width than the classic version. HE classic photos were 460 pixels wide; the new HE will features photos that are 640 pixels wide. Which is no biggie as far as future posts are concerned, but every jpeg photo in every previous post (August 2004 to May 2017) is going to be sitting flush left with a big dumb white space sitting to the right. All notions of eye-pleasing balance will be out the window.
I can’t resize 13 years worth of photos but I’d to at least try to figure out if I can center them within the new wider (640 pixel) posts. The flush left thing is AWFUL. I’m told that a solution may be found in WordPress, that I can make “sweeping changes” to the style template I’ve been using. “But if you enter them manually those sizes are set by you,” I’ve been warned. “And they remain set by you.”
I don’t want to fuck with WordPress settings — I’m too much of a klutz. Which basically means that I’m fucked, or at least that the solution to this too-small, flush-left problem is unknown as we speak.
Posted from Cinemacon on 3.28.17, in response to footage from Nikolaj Arcel, Stephen King and Akiva Goldsman‘s The Dark Tower (Columbia, 8.4): “This is seemingly another simplistic, CG-driven dreamscape action fantasy…more big-delivery jizz-whizz with Idris Elba as the heroic, gun-blasting Roland Deschain, Matthew McConaughey as bad-guy sorcerer Walter Padick and Tom Taylor as an 11 year-old kid who bonds with Deschain as they face various dangers…zzzzz. Same old tune, same old yarn, same blighted-landscape mythology.
The Dark Tower is based on an eight-book Stephen King series that began in 1982. It also feels deja vu-ish as a motherfucker, and for good reason. It’s another name for Barad-dur, the fortress of Suaron in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s the title of a 1987 horror flick starring Jenny Agutter. It’s the name of an early ’80s board game. Ditto a 1943 British thriller starring Herbert Lom.
Which is probably why, sight unseen and no offense, I feel all Dark Tower-ed out.
GRAHAM: "Is it fair to say that the Russian government is still involved in American politics?"
COMEY: "Yes." —via @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/TFrNp4cXGO
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 3, 2017
Donald Trump hasn’t fallen into a deranged mental state. This is a permanent condition, or more precisely an ongoing ill-informed, brain-fart response to any and all topics. You can be dismissive by calling him an egoistic, know-nothing six year-old, but the Morning Joe guys are suggesting that he’s gotten worse lately, that he’s downswirling. He’s not. Trump is the exact same guy he’s always been — the same full-of-shit, living-in-his-own-realm blowhard who likes to swagger around and be nervy and impertinent. He listens to his swollen gut and improvises from moment to moment, unimpeded by facts that are not to his liking.
You’re an Anglo-Saxon girl going out with a Pakistani guy. A few weeks of increasing closeness and commitment lead to love. Then you discover that his demanding, traditionalist mom has been trying to set him up with a series of Muslim women over dinners. He’s not into this at all — he’s into you — but he’s been secretly going along with the charade to placate mom. So yes, he’s been lying to you but he hasn’t been unfaithful, or not really. He should have copped to the dinners, of course, but he was too chicken, too cowed.
Question: If you were the white girl, would you maybe cut your dishonest Pakistani boyfriend a little slack? You could tell him to fuck off for weeks on end just to make him sweat, but if he kept apologizing and trying to gently win you back…maybe? I’m no Middle-Eastern scholar, but even I know that Pakistani parents are very strict when it comes to their children staying within the Muslim flock. If I were the white girl, I doubt if I’d be completely destroyed when the truth was revealed. Rather than go nuclear I would probably ease up and try to “understand”, I think.
Initial Wells reaction: “The Big Sick was the second best film I saw at Sundance (Call Me By Your Name was #1) — a dry, diverting romantic saga that feels very authentic in a low-key way. You never really know where it’s going, and that’s just how I like it. Droll, low-key humor for smarties & hipsters. And it really does come together emotionally during the last 25% or 30%. I loved the ISIS and 9/11 terrorist jokes. Kumail Nanjiani embroiders with a unique tone and sensibility, certainly within the realm of a modern American love story. He and Zoe Kazan hold things together for the first 40%, but it’s Ray Romano and Holly Hunter (as Kazan’s parents) who bring it home.”
I don’t know how to put this exactly, but after an extremely spirited and turbulent eight days involved wedding bands, La Piedra State Beach, a disputed pre-nuptial agreement, green card assessments and whatnot, the SRO and I are on again. All the discord fell away the night before last. Off to Europe, planning to marry in June, pre-nup 100% agreed to, etc. This is the last relationship bulletin I will share. I just felt that having posted “High Dive” on 4.24 and then “Peter Weir’s Son of Green Card” on 4.30, I had to at least update the tale. I’m not going to offer any explanations, rationales or recountings of Douglas Sirk-like dialogue. Everything is just…well, trusting and right and full speed ahead.
A year ago I decided that I had to watch an HD streaming version of Breakout, the 1975 B-grade Charles Bronson actioner. For historical reasons if none other. For as dicey as it may seem by today’s standards, Breakout was the first Hollywood film to open via wide saturation booking, and not Jaws, which usually gets the credit/blame.
A region 2 Bluray recently popped, but I don’t think it warrants that level of purchase. An Amazon streaming rental will do. Honestly? I don’t really want to watch it, but I have to. Just once. I know what I’m in for but duty calls.
Posted on 4.15.16: “After Breakout opened on 3.6.75 in several hundred theatres (a radical, roll-the-dice move at the time) and took in a then-respectable $7.5 million domestic, Universal chairman Lew Wasserman and studio president Sid Sheinberg decided to ape this strategy by opening Jaws, which they knew would be a big hit, on 6.20.75 in a similar fashion. The initial Jaws plan was to open it in 900 theatres, but Wasserman cut that figure down to 464.
Film Independent will kick off the L.A. Film Festival on 6.14 with Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry (Focus Features, 6.16). Written by Greg Hurwitz, pic costars Naomi Watts, Jacob Tremblay, Jaeden Lieberher, Sarah Silverman, Lee Pace, Maddie Ziegler and Dean Norris. Watts plays a single mom; Tremblay plays her genius-level son. The plot is about Henry’s decision to try and save a young girl he’s developed a crush on (Ziegler) from her stepdad (Norris), whom Henry regards as some kind of bothered, hell-bent figure. On 3.30 I reported on some general scuttlebutt, but don’t let that stop you.
There’s a certain Best Picture narrative that I don’t approve of, but which has apparently taken root. The thinking is that with Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight, an African American gay film **, having won the 2016 Best Picture Oscar, Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, which is about much, much more than just a gay relationship but will nonetheless be painted with that brush when it opens on 11.24, can’t hope to win the 2017 Best Picture Oscar because the Academy won’t “go gay” two years in a row.
If this is Call Me By Your Name‘s fate, so be it. Unfair but what else is new? The Oscar game is all about timing, politically correct theologies and the right narrative at the right time. The irony is that Call Me By Your Name isn’t just a better film than Moonlight — it’s 17 times better in just about every department. Moonlight was a striking breakout flick — Call Me By Your Name is flat-out masterful. Rave reviews are assured, and the nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Timothy Chalumee, Best Supporting Actor for Michael Suthlbarg) are already all but locked in. The important thing, as always, is reaching as wide an audience as possible. I have a feeling it might really connect. For Guadagnino’s film is “gay” in a way than even Trump Nation bumblefucks can roll with. Or so I’m telling myself.
