I didn’t mind Paul Feig‘s Ghostbusters at first. I actually didn’t mind it for the first 80 of its 116 minutes. Then Feig throws the corporate formula switch and Ghostbusters eats itself for the last 35. It does a major swan dive into the swamp of CG overkill, and the experience numbs your soul.

Jones, McCarthy, Wiig and HE’s own Kate McKinnon.

Going in I knew Ghostbusters would be a spirited, corporatized, digitally upgraded rehash of the ’84 original. Melissa McCarthy as Dan Aykroyd, Kristen Wiig as Bill Murray, Kate McKinnon as Harold Ramis, Leslie Jones as Ernie Hudson. And it is that. A “same but newer and splashier” approach — similar set-up, similar absurd story, same determination to de-fang and de-mystify the notion of actual ghosts by turning them into Disneyworld creations.

For what it’s worth, McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon and Jones hold their own and keep the ball in the air. I liked their company. McKinnon is the most internalized of the four, but I’d love to see her as a lead in something. (A smart lesbo or hetero romcom? I’m good either way.) Jones is a lot of fun. McCarthy and Wiig deliver their usual usual. And hunky Chris Hemsworth, as their mentally-challenged assistant, is inoffensively okay.

Variety‘s Peter Debruge has complained that Feig is too averse to potential new realms, saying that “the fault lies in the fact that this new Ghostbusters doesn’t want us to forget them, crafting its new team in the earlier team’s shadow.”

Well…of course! Movies like this are never about throwing away the roadmap and revelling in creative invention — they’re about cashing in by delivering mostly the same thing only re-stirred and re-fried with some fresh cream on top.

Roland Joffe‘s The Killing Fields (’84) is, of course, a respected, harrowing, award-winning drama about the real-life horrors experienced by N.Y. Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and Cambodian photographer and interpreter Dith Pran. To me here were always four stars of that film — Sam Waterston (who played Schanberg), Schanberg, Dith and the Cambodian actor who played him, Haing S. Ngor, and won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his efforts. With today’s announcement of Schanberg’s death at age 82, only one of the original four is still with us — Waterston. Ngor, whom I interviewed for Us magazine in the fall of ’84, was killed by Los Angeles gang-bangers during a robbery assault in 1996. And Dith died of pancreatic cancer in ’08.

There’s a piece in the August issue of Town and Country, written by Daniel Mendelsohn (who is not, as far as I know, related to HE’s constantly sweating, cigarette-smoking Ben Mendelsohn) and dated 6.29.16.

Definitely not aimed at under-40 readers, the piece is called “Is This the End of Civility As We Know It?” and is basically about how social media has created a more self absorbed and narcissistic population. The message is moot but stated nonetheless: when you’re out and about, it’s uncivil to engage in a more profound relationship with one’s cell phone than with the person or universe in front of you. And more than that, it makes you an idiot.

Related quote: “The Greeks had a special horror of people who imported their private concerns into the public arena — the agora, where civic life unfolded.

“In fact, they had a word for that kind of person. Idiotes is derived from the adjective idios, which means private. Originally its meaning was innocuous: a private person. But precisely because life in a city like Athens or New York takes place in shared spaces as well as in private ones, the word came to mean someone who was irritatingly, stubbornly, contrarily ‘private’ even when he shouldn’t be.

“Over many centuries the last syllable of the word was eroded away by a million lips in 10,000 cities, from Athens to Constantinople to Antioch to Rome, leaving us with what is, when you think about it, as good a term as any to describe a figure who clomps obliviously down a city street while seemingly talking to himself, or sucker-punches someone for having different views, or practices any number of other behaviors that we would once have laughed at but now have become appallingly common: idiot.”

As I understood the betting three days ago, Gretchen Carlson’s sexual harassment suit again Fox News chairman Roger Ailes would probably result in Ailes’ departure from Fox, especially with senior Fox execs James and Lachlan Murdoch reportedly feeling little allegiance to the 76 year-old chairman.

Now, with six more women having told tales about Ailes (two on the record, four anonymous) in a just-popped New York piece by Gabriel Sherman, it would appear that he’s completely finished — no ifs, ands or buts.

Sherman’s story actually states that “more than a dozen women have contacted Carlson’s New Jersey-based attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, and made detailed allegations of sexual harassment by Ailes over a 25-year period dating back to the 1960s when he was a producer on The Mike Douglas Show.” Sherman’s story doesn’t suggest that Ailes is “the new Bill Cosby,” as someone called him a day or two ago, but his alleged behavior is close enough.

Every dog has his day. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

The primary conveyance in Tope Ongundare‘s “The Vitality of Monica Vitti,” a Fandor video that popped on 6.7, is that her existential angst channellings in those four Michelangelo Antonioni movies (L’Avventura, La Notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert) wouldn’t have penetrated if she hadn’t also conveyed gioia della vita — intensity, aliveness, a readiness to dance at the drop of a hat. Which is true. I’ve been a Vitti fan for ages so don’t tell me.

You know who also doesn’t need a reminder? Greta Gerwig. On 7.13.13 I tapped out the following after catching a screening of L’Avventura at the Film Forum:

“Gerwig was there, sitting all alone in the 10th or 11th row. We talked a bit after the show. She’s thoroughly spellbound by Vitti‘s performance, she said. Like me, she’s seen L’Avventura six or seven times. This is what women of extraordinary character and cinematic devotion do — they slip into revival screenings of classic films on a Friday night without a boyfriend and certainly without an entourage.”

I’m still not sure if Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (TriStar, 11.16) has been entirely or partially shot in 6K at 120 frames-per-second. Let’s assume “entirely” until someone in authority states otherwise. I for one am tingling with anticipation at watching an Iraq War Catch-22-like satire at 120 fps all in. Even if the process is just being used for the battle scenes, I’m there with bells on.

Collider‘s Steve Weintraub recently spoke with Billy Lynn (and Equals) costar Kristen Stewart about Lee’s process. Her answer suggested that Billy Lynn‘s HFR will be a different deal than the 48 fps projection that Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit (Warner Bros., 12.14) was projected at in some venues, and which was met with scorn.

“The way Ang described it is he feels so disconnected from movies that he watches that he just wants to feel like he’s closer, and that he’s done this with Billy Lynn. He’s somehow achieved that, so I can’t wait to see it,” Stewart said. “Usually if you do that without whatever process he’s doing — [and] I have no idea [what that is]– it makes it look like reality TV, it makes it crisp in a way that actually detaches you. [But] he messes with depth of field. Usually the way a lens works, you control where the focal point is, [but] in this case everything’s in focus. So when you watch the movie you can decide, almost as if you’re there in person, what you want to look at, which has just never been seen before on film.”

Every person on the planet with functioning eyes, even those wearing high-magnification lenses, is processing life at 120 fps. That’s how our eyes make reality look. But replicate a semblance of this in a feature film, as Peter Jackson did with The Hobbit, and people freak out. They want the familiar bath of 24 fps. I loved the Hobbit‘s 48 fps process, if only because it relieved me of having to pay attention to the plot and the performance.

These aren’t fakes. Humphrey Bogart really did appear in ads for Whitman’s Sampler chocolates and Robert Burns cigarillos. He also posed for an ASR butane cigarette lighter ad in 1949. And you know what? A sizable chunk of the under-35 HE readership doesn’t give a toss. Because they have the same relationship with Bogart that Daisy Ridley has with Cary Grant.

Director-writer James Toback and I were talking about the best and worst ways of dying, and he said something like the following: “We all imagine ourselves dying peacefully in bed…gently going to sleep with a wife or husband or family member holding your hand and a fire going in a nearby fireplace, and with your cat lying next to you or your dog licking your hand. But the truth is that most of us are going to die painfully, perhaps as a result of an accident or due to some kind of shock or trauma or disease, probably in a hospital or in a damaged car or a taxi or lying on a sidewalk, and without very much preparation and probably not enough pain medication.”

It is therefore soothing to report that according to F.X. Feeney, his friend Michael Cimino, who was found dead last weekend, just went to sleep and that was that.

“Many thanks to your readers for responding so movingly to what I offered about Michael the other day,” he writes. “What I wrote, near the end — ‘I don’t know what he died of, and prefer to honor his privacy,’ was an expression of caution, not lack of curiosity. I didn’t know many facts that first day and was wary of busybodies wanting some hint of Babylonian self-sacrifice. What I’ve since learned is worth sharing.

“For all that he might have had premonitions which lent an aura of conscious elegy to our last get-together, Michael was not ill. He’d recently visited a physician about a mild respiratory complaint, but as near as anyone could tell was in steady health. He was 77 years old and his heart simply stopped while he was asleep.

“Blessed are they who have known the full scope of 20th Century cinema and the best of times in that sense. The first stirrings of cinematic greatness occured in the 1920s (Lang, Murnau, Griffith, Keaton, Von Stroheim), and then came the long second movement which began in the mid ’30s and ended…well, you tell me. The early ’80s? The late ’90s? The end never came? I think things are still humming and crackling for the most part, but you could certainly argue that the arrival of the post-cinematic, sub-literate, sensation-and-explosion-seeking, digitally-attuned generation of jizz-whizz moviegoers (by far the least educated and most reality-averse in Hollywood history) and the filmmakers in their midst has brought things to an all-time low.” — cribbed from a brief tribute piece to critic Stanley Kaufman, who passed on 10.9.13.

If I was sitting in a hotel lobby and a guy wearing these hiking sandals walked in and sat nearby, I would get up and…I don’t know if I’d sit as far away as possible or just leave the hotel, but it would be one of these two. If I was conducting interviews for a staff job and a male applicant came in wearing these things, he would so not get the job. If I really liked a film and had asked to interview the director, and he/she walked into the hotel room wearing these things I would find a way of walking back my rave. Or I might publish a “mea culpa, what was I thinking?” piece. One presumes no self-respecting director would wear a pair, but who knows? Older guys seem to wear these things the most, but I suppose some women do also. To his credit, Viggo Mortensen doesn’t wear a pair in Captain Fantastic.

It may be that Jeffrey Blitz‘s Table 19 (Fox Searchlight, 1.20.17) is a cut above. The trailer seems to suggest that. Maybe. Eloise (Anna Kendrick) feels angry and humiliated over being suddenly dumped by her bearded, not-a-great-catch boyfriend (Wyatt Russell), with whom she’d planned to attend a big wedding reception with. She goes anyway, glum and seething, but gradually wakes up to the opportunity of hooking up with a nice guy who’s obviously higher calibre (Thomas Cocquerel). Trailers always lie, but the illusion being sold is that the film may be nicely cut, well scored and performed with restraint. The script is by Mark and Jay Duplass. But why trailer a film that won’t pop for another seven months?

Star Trek veteran and “out” pathfinder George Takei doesn’t care for John Cho‘s Hikaru Sulu suddenly being revealed as a closeted gay guy in the forthcoming Star Trek Beyond (Paramount, 7.22). Cho recently told Australia’s Herald Sun that Sulu will be revealed in the new film as a closet case. What’s the beef? Takei says it feels to him like a facile decision on the part of director Justin Lin and screenwriter/costar Simon Pegg.

Takei, who played Sulu in the 1960s Trek TV series, told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch that it would be better if Pegg and Lin could “be imaginative and create a character who has a history of being gay, rather than Sulu, who had been straight all this time, suddenly being revealed as being closeted.”