Ricki and The Flash (TriStar, 8.7) has been pre-screened and junketed and interviewed up the lah-lah, but so far no reviews. Which is a bit unusual for a film opening four days hence. But it’s very pleasing to see, for once, a mother and a daughter played by actresses (Meryl Streep, Mamie Gummer) who actually, for obvious reasons, resemble each other. Unlike 99.5% of the other mother-daughter pairings in Hollywood movies, who don’t even look like they could be cousins. The less-than-totally-cool, non-junketing all-media types (i.e., people like myself) will take a gander at Jonathan Demme and Diablo Cody’s latest tomorrow night. Fingers crossed.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming: “After all the summer frivolity for young audiences, is it time for adults to step back into the pool? Tom Rothman is betting big with the upcoming Ricki and the Flash. The film opens Friday, in the slot that brought success for the Helen Mirren-starrer The Hundred Foot Journey and other adult films.” Is that a “money” analogy? Who saw or paid the slightest attention to The Hundred Foot Journey apart from journos and industry bluehairs? If you ask me Fleming has just stabbed Ricki and the Flash in the chest with a sharp pencil.

The thrust of this Terrence Rafferty piece in The Atlantic is that under-40 American actors don’t have the chops and the snap and the vitality that same-generation British actors do, and that this American fraternity of younger male thesps is…well, what’s missing exactly? Is it because they’re too cautious, “ironic”-minded or insincere or just…what, confused? The point is that things were hopping for young American actors in the ’70s and to a slightly lesser extent in the ’80s, ’90s and early aughts…but not now. The faces of Chris Pine, James Franco and Chris Evans comprise the art but who else could be included?

“Is it time for American actors to take a hard look in the mirror?,” the piece begins. “Earlier this year Michael Douglas mused darkly to a magazine interviewer, ‘I think we have a little crisis going on amongst our young actors at this point,’ and Spike Lee, commenting on the “invasion” of black British actors, had some pithy observations on the subject, too: ‘You want talented people,’ he said, and British actors’ ‘training is very proper, whereas some of these other brothers and sisters, you know, they come in here and they don’t got that training.'”

One exception, Rafferty feels, is Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station, Creed). Another, I believe, is Paul Dano, who is so far still (i.e., among movies that have been released in 2015) the leading Best Actor candidate for his Brian Wilson performance in Love & Mercy. And let’s not forget Jake Gyllenhaal, of course, and his brilliant Nightcrawler performance. (Southpaw, not so much.) And, I suppose, Jesse Eisenberg, but I have this feeling that he’s been half-slumming since The Social Network.

Remember that Leonardo DiCaprio, Joaquin Phoenix, Christian Bale and Johnny Depp are now 40-plus and more or less middle-aged so they can’t be included. Remember that Michael Fassbender, 37, is German Irish and Ryan Gosling, 34, is Canadian.

A half second before associating this image with the forthcoming Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice and particularly Jesse Eisenberg‘s Lex Luthor (which is sure to be a Mark Zuckerbergian spin on yet another standard-issue, flamboyantly sociopathic comic-book villain), I flashed on LexG, i.e, the “real” Lex who is still, it appears, sadly and embarassingly hiding out. One of the leading metaphors or manifestations of the Schlumpy & Dumpy era (i.e., a guy who pollutes his bod with drinking and whatnot but who lives resplendently within) and he’s not even “here”? The guy who was born to write and he’s doing what now, eating a baloney sandwich in the kitchen? He said three or four weeks ago that he’s just “found the internet in general to be unpleasant and not helpful to my happiness for quite some time…just enjoying some time away from it.” Of course the internet is unpleasant! That’s like George S. Patton saying he doesn’t want to fight the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge because it’s too cold and foggy.

I would loved to have been there in Cesana just to hear all those drummers — a percussionist symphony for the ages. What a field day for the heat. A thousand people in the street….er, the Piedmont hills. Playin’ songs they carry inside. Except it was just one song — Foo Fighters‘ “Learn to Fly,” performed by a thousand exuberant Italians who were nonetheless grovelling at the feet of the wonderful messiah Dave Grohl. Hear our joy and consider our passion, Foo Fighters!…our lives will be incomplete if you don’t come to Italy and play for us! But in their self-abasing worship, this crowd transcended Grohl and in fact all of the Grohls of the world. Their performance was probably better than anything the Foo Fighters could have possibly brought to the table. Hats off to award-winning conductor Marco Sabiu for arranging this.

The question shouldn’t be “if God exists then whey did he make ugly people?” The question should be “if God exists, why didn’t he just eliminate beauty and make everyone into a schlumpy and dumpy type so that we could all be people who define ourselves by what we are inside and…you know, be able to rock out with super-feisty personalities and be extra-clever and witty and valuable in a crackling spiritual sense without being hung up on ‘looks’ or ‘beauty’ or even being all that good in bed?”

There’s nothing wrong with pixie cuts. It obviously depends on the shape of the face and how good the hairdresser is, but some women look good in them (Ellen Degeneres), some look great (Judi Dench, Jamie Lee Curtis) and some former pixie-wearers have looked better with their hair grown out a bit (i.e., Carey Mulligan, Charlize Theron). But when some older women wear them it’s like they’ve got an electric sign around their necks that says “I’ve reached that proverbial age when my hairdresser has told me I’ll look younger with a pixie, but of course I don’t — it just looks like I’m doing the same thing that hundreds of thousands of other 50-plus women with gray hair are doing.” I know that my mother wore her hair in a pixie when I was a kid and I didn’t like it then. I think there’s something profoundly unsexy about them. Tingly dream scenarios about this or that woman flash in my head when I’m out and about, but I’ve never had a single fleeting fantasy about a woman in a pixie cut…not one. When I talk to a pixie-cut woman it’s like I’m talking to Lee Marvin in The Wild One or a sanitation engineer or a meter maid. And I felt a slight current once when I was talking to Lily Tomlin at an I Heart Huckabees party so don’t tell me. I honestly believe there’s nothing less stirring than a pixie cut. I’m not saying that older women who let their hair grow out and do the old silver bohemian thing are the cat’s meow, but at least this isn’t an instant shutdown.

Yesterday I riffed on a possibility that we might be seeing a Cate Blanchett-vs.-Cate Blanchett Best Actress competition this fall. The notion was that Cate’s Oscar-touted performance in Todd Haynes‘ Carol might be matched by her portrayal of former CBS producer Mary Mapes in Truth. Well, right away HE commenter RealBadHatHarry claimed he’d seen Truth and cast doubt on the afore-mentioned scenario, in part because the film, he said, is too reflexively liberal. Then a friend called and asked who had told me that Blanchett’s Truth performance was extra special. “A non-vested marketing guy who attended a buyer’s screening two or three months ago,” I answered.  Then my friend told me “there’s no way this film will be in the award-season conversation.” Not even for Blanchett’s performance? “Her competitive pony is Carol,” he said. I asked if he’s seen Carol and he said no. Then he said the makers of Truth were “still working on it,” a phrase which sometimes means that the value of a film might be in question. Then he asked if I could think of a single critically praised film that was set in the U.S. but shot overseas. (Truth was mainly filmed in Sydney.) I was moved by the call because he was basically trying to save me from embarassment down the road. And then another friendo passed along the same buzz. So without casting any aspersions let’s modify the tone of yesterday’s article and pledge to see Truth whenever it screens (it’s conceivable that it might not go to Telluride) and see how everything shakes down on a step-by-step basis.

After putting up with an occasionally spotty AT&T signal for years, I’ve popped for one of those phone-signal enhancers they sell for $150 and change. At my place, I mean. The AT&T MicroCell “acts like a mini cellular tower, boosting cellular performance in your home or small business,” etc. I’ve also decided to cut ties with Time Warner and go with an AT&T cable/wifi plan that will cut my monthly down from $260 and chance to less than $100 per month. What the hell, shake things up, see what happens.

What Diane Sawyer passes along in this clip is nothing earth-shaking, but it touched me: “A criticism is just a really bad way of making a request, so why don’t you just make a request?” I’ve rarely done this because most married partners (a) tend to see such a request (i.e., “could you maybe think about modifying this or that behavioral trait?”) as an assault upon their magnificence and (b) lack the humility or the character to modify anything about themselves in the first place unless it’s alcohol-related. But you never know with people. The best thing is probably to say nothing. Just tough it out.

A 35mm print of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s The Passenger (’75) played two nights ago at the Aero. I decided against attending, of course, because of my standard aversion to 35mm. Any print of a ’70s film carries a 75% to 80% chance of being scratched, weathered and “pink” to some extent. But the Aero screening put this 1975 classic back into my head and led to my purchasing a 2014 Spanish (Region 2) Bluray. As of now I’ve now posted the same YouTube clip of The Passenger‘s finale (7 minutes, 34 seconds) three times. The other two postings were on 6.18.13 and 4.25.14.)

From a 2006 David Thomson Guardian piece: “I can watch the world through Michelangelo Antonioni ‘s eyes forever. He is the greatest stylist of the modern era, and The Passenger may be my favorite film. No, it’s not in my top ten, but sometimes I think [The Passenger is the one I like the best, by which I fear I mean it’s the film I’d most like to be in, instead of just watching.”

From my 2013 post: “It’s soothing and nurturing to watch this shot every so often. When’s the last time a long dazzling uncut shot like this was the talk of film buffs the world over? 95% of those who live for CG-driven films would never even watch a film like The Passenger and therefore never contemplate a perfect scene like this, but if they did most would sit there like metal lawn furniture and go ‘uhm, okay, soooo…that’s it?’”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a bank line and some guy at one of the windows is dragging things out because he’s flirting with the female teller. Maybe because he’s a bit lonely and hasn’t enjoyed any human contact that day. Either way he’s turning on the charm, turning it up to level 11, trying to alpha the poor girl into submission. She can’t walk away and she can’t tell him to fuck off and he knows that, of course. Even if the teller is just nodding and smiling while trying to complete the transaction as fast as possible, it still slows things down.

This happened today at my local Chase just before 5 pm, and there were three or four of us waiting for Mr. Lonelyhearts to finish the flirting and get down to fucking business already. We all pretended not to notice, but every person was staring at the back of this guy’s neck and hating on him. I could tell from the insect antennae vibes. I for one was telepathically urging this chucklehead to give a second’s thought to the fact that the more he dingle-dangled the more he was dragging things out a bit longer for three or four of us and…why don’t you, like, consider that possibility? Is your life that bereft of warmth and companionship?”

At that exact same moment the back of Mr. Happy’s sunburnt neck was telepathically saying to me “fuck you, dude…what’s your problem? It’s the end of the day and she’s cute and I’m gonna enjoy a couple of extra minutes with her…okay? Are you always this miserable? Have you ever connected with a bank teller who’s flashing green-light signals? This is one of those moments. Relax, man. Life is short.”

I met briefly with Listen To Me Marlon director Stevan Riley during last January’s Sundance Film Festival, and then we sat down again a week or so ago in the outdoor lobby of the now-shuttered Aidikoff Screening Room. It wasn’t that great of an interview but here’s the mp3. I really enjoyed and admired Riley’s film — an intimate, full-scope portrait that turns rather sad during the final 20 minutes. Fascinating, never-before-seen footage. Everyone should see it, if not theatrically then at least when it hits Showtime.

I’d read Marlon Brando‘s autobiography (“Songs My Mother Taught Me“) but until I saw Riley‘s doc I’d never heard him really open up. His recollections and reflections almost shook my lifelong suspicion that he’d allowed defeatism and bitterness to consume him over the last 30 or so years of his life.

Never forget that Brando lived and screamed and wept and re-ordered the universe as people knew it in 1947 in New York City, and then rocked Hollywood in the early to mid ’50s, and left them both realms in a state of permanent shakedown and reexamination by the time of his effective departure from creative myth-making in late 1954 or early ’55….and then he shook things up again when he briefly re-emerged as The Man Who Knew and Owned Everything in the early ’70s.