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AMC CEO Adam Aaron has upset a lot of people this morning with the posting of some liberal remarks he made yesterday about in-theatre texting. The quotes were part of a Cinemacon Variety interview with cyborg reporter Brent Lang. Aaron didn’t say that AMC will allow texting in all theatres, but that AMC might designate some theatres within a given plex as text-friendly. Another option, he allowed, might be to allow texting in the rear of some theatres.

HE’s view is that people who text in theatres should be beaten, spat upon, soaked with soft drink splashings and then turned over to ISIS for further discipline after the film has ended. But if texting must be allowed, I don’t have a problem if it happens only within, say, the last six or eight rows of a theatre. As long as those bright little screens aren’t glowing within my sight lines, fine.

And I guess it wouldn’t be super-terrible to allow total texting in certain designated theatres. I’ll just avoid those theatres if and when I pay to see a film, which happens from time to time.

Here’s the offending passage from the Lang/Aaron interview:

Lang: “Would appealing to millennials involve allowing texting or cellphone use?”

Aaron: “Yes. When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow. You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.

“At the same time, though, we’re going to have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t disturb today’s audiences. There’s a reason there are ads up there saying turn off your phone, because today’s moviegoer doesn’t want somebody sitting next to them texting or having their phone on.”

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I didn’t stay up until 3 am to file my reactions to the announcement of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival slate because (a) I was presuming that no wowser surprises would be included (this has turned out to be correct) and (b) there’s an apparent downside factor attached to…well, a good percentage of the films announced this morning. I’m not exactly “blue” in the Billie Holiday sense, but the Cannes turn-on factor is down this year. When the stars are aligned above the right kind of Cannes slate I’ll feel an 8 or an 8.5 warm gutty-wut in my soul. My bones and inner organs tend to vibrate. This one feels like a 6 or a 6.5. Okay, a 7.

Agreed, none of the announced films are radiating “please, God…no!” vibes except for the out-of-competition slot given to Steven Spielberg‘s The BFG, but very few seem (emphasis on the “s” word) to possess that special X-factor anticipation tingle-vibe that you can always somehow sense from a distance. And so my insides aren’t humming. The little pleasure light that hangs near the bow of my Cannes-bound ship won’t illuminate no matter how many times I unscrew and re-screw the bulb.

This is a good attitude to have, by the way, because when and if something really pops I’ll be all the more startled and thankful.

At least there’s (a) Baccalaureat, the competition film from Romania’s Cristian Mungiu, who can do no wrong in my eyes; (b) Cristi Puiu‘s Sierra-Nevada, about a demimonde of prickly Romanian family members who’ve assembled to raise a glass for a deceased patriarch; and (c) Julieta, about a character played in younger-older stages of her life by Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suarez, from the almost entirely faultless Pedro Almodovar. (If anyone can tell me why Pedro made I’m So Excited, I’m all ears.)

I’d like to express my deep, heartfelt gratitude to Thierry Fremaux or God or fate for the wonderful, glorious absence of Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time, the IMAX film that Mr. Wackadoodle has been fiddling with for the last four or five years, and which had been mentioned here and there as a possible out-of-competition inclusion.

Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society will open the festival, but opening-nighters are often chosen because they’re relatively mild or unchallenging or even toothless. Do the math.

Director Andrea Arnold seemed to have some kind of lightning in her bottle when she made Red Road and Fish Tank but American Honey, described as a portrait of “a group of young people who travel the country selling magazine subscriptions and making trouble,” sounds fucking dreadful. Magazine subscriptions? Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough costar. (Competition)

I’m enormously grateful, by the way, that Derek Cianfrance‘s The Light Between the Oceans wasn’t chosen. The prospect of watching Fassbender-Vikander engaging in a form of delusional child-rearing on an isolated island…forget it, leave it there. And thank our Almighty and Merciful God that James Gray‘s The Lost City of Z wasn’t chosen for whatever reason.

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I haven’t been in a fist fight since I was 12 or 13. The guy actually went down but my right hand was aching and swollen for three or four days. When I was 19 or 20 a guy I was arguing with tagged me on the jaw, but I just absorbed it and ignored it like Jake LaMotta and kept saying what I was saying. I never even dreamt about getting into a fight after that. Until Twitter came along, I mean. Since my Twitter battles have become semi-regular I’ve been fantasizing about slugging this or that asshole. Slugging them in a John Wayne or Tom Hardy movie-fight way, of course — a couple of right crosses and a gut punch and maybe a kick to the mouth or the neck. Actual fights are fast and pathetic and over in about nine or ten seconds. Plus the likelihood of damaging your writing hand is high so it’s never gonna happen again. But boy, do I dream of it! This is totally a Twitter thing. Before Twitter began to happen big-time (what, seven years ago?) I rarely fantasized about beating the shit out of anyone for any reason. Okay, I used to dream about duking it out with the husband of a woman I was seeing in ’98 and ’99, but it never happened. (I was ready though — I bought a samurai sword.) Until Twitter, fistfights were for kids and drunks. I’ll bet I’m not alone on this. That’s Twitter for you, a rage thing.

In about 50 minutes I have a 5 pm screening of Jason Bateman‘s The Family Fang, and after that it’s a choice between seeing the Hollywood premiere of Gary Marshall‘s Mother’s Day with an after-party or catching a 70mm screening of Patton at the Fox lot Zanuck theatre. The 81 year-old Marshall peaked in the ’80s and ’90s (his last decent concoction was 1999’s Runaway Bride) and his last two, Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve, were completely dismissable. Plus Julia Roberts‘ hair style in this thing…’nuff said. I’ll be able to stream Mother’s Day before long, but how may more chances will I have to see Patton projected in mint-condition 70mm inside a first-rate theatre?

Date/time: 4.13, 11:30 am. From: Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere. To: Steve Weintraub, Collider. Message: You and the other geeks who posted about Captain America: Civil War a few days ago OVER-PRAISED, dude. Brilliant choreography and structuring, of course. And yes, the Russo brothers’ tone and efficiency is spot-on and hugely “entertaining” in spots. Yes, it’s waaay better than fucking BvS. Yes, it’s very smart and well-ordered. Yes, quite witty and funny at times. But Jesus, it wears you down, man.

The first hour or so is more or less fine (at times wowser) but I began to feel whipped and numb after the Berlin airport brawl, and certainly by the 100-minute mark.

Approaching the Dolby prior to last night’s Captain America: Civili War premiere.

The incessant juggling of bowling pins….the juggling…all those hyper-alert, ready-to-rock superheroes wrestling on the mat…all that juggling and re-juggling, matching this guy against the other guy…the Magnificent Russos! 12 or 14 or whatever pins. Will they drop one? Holy shit…not a single bowling pin dropped! Master jugglers!

Honestly? Eventually you start to not give a shit. Is there more to life than juggling Marvel combatants? No, there isn’t. That’s all there is.

And the slugging…the savage slugging…250 to 275 punches are thrown in this thing at least (whoof! whoompf!), and it just stops mattering after the 70th or 80th hammer-blow. Russo brothers to Wells: Can we throw in another 50 to 75 blows anyway?

The film peaks with the Berlin airport full-team brawl — admittedly a very cool, even masterful sequence — truly an action fan’s delight — but I needed a Red Bull after that. Pic ends fairly well — quietly, ready for the next installment — but the idea of another Marvel all-star duke out seems like real punishment this morning.

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“Are you listening to me, asshole? Because I like you. I got a serious question for you. What the fuck are you doing? This is not shit for you to be messin’ with. Are you ready to hear something? I want you to see if this sounds familiar. Any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you’re gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them then you’re a genius…and you ain’t no genius. You remember who told me that? I hope you know what you’re doing. You’d better be damn sure because if you ain’t sure then don’t do it. Of course that’s my recommendation anyway. Don’t do it.”

Patrick Ness‘s “A Monster Calls” (published in 2011) has been described as a sad but transporting tale about a boy coping with his mother’s illness from terminal cancer, and about a realer-than-real fantasy realm that he retreats into or which sucks him in…you decide. No one knows how J.A. Bayona‘s film version (Focus, 10.14) has turned out, but the trailer indicates that a subtle approach has not been chosen. Liam Neeson‘s overly-enhanced voice and Fernando Velázquez‘s overbearing score tell you that the movie has been aimed at the family idiot trade. It seems to lack the quiet spookiness of Guillermo del Toro‘s somewhat similar Pan’s Labyrinth, and seems a far cry from the the carefully layered, exquisitely underplayed The Orphanage (’07), which is Bayona’s masterpiece.

Anthony and Joe Russo‘s much-praised Captain America: Civil War (Disney, 5.6) is being screened tomorrow at Cinemacon, but I’ll be catching it tonight at the big Hollywood Blvd. premiere at the Dolby. Allegedly starting at 7 pm but most likely beginning closer to 7:45 or 8 pm, if that. If it’s as good as everyone is saying it is…well, the downside doesn’t seem to be on the table, does it? It’s a lockdown.

The slate for the 2016 Cannes Film Festival will be announced in Paris on Thursday morning, which works out to sometime between 2 am and 3 am in Los Angeles, or basically late tomorrow night. I’ve already lamented some of the underwhelming predictions (Steven Spielberg‘s The BFG, Jodie Foster‘s Money Monster) and am feeling only modest enthusiasm for Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society, which will open the festival, or Jeff Nichols‘ Loving (i.e., the beware of Joel Edgerton factor) or Nicholas Winding-Refn‘s Neon Demon.

I really, really don’t want to sit through Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time, but I may have to if it’s part of the program. More whispery footage of dinosaurs and jungle leaves and forest streams and lizards and images of magma spewing out of volcanos? Are you fucking kidding me?

Pedro Almodovar‘s Julieta, approved. Perhaps an Asghar Farhadi or a Cristian Mingiu film, okay. Sean Penn‘s The Last Face, Xavier Dolan‘s It’s Only the End of the World, the Dardennes’ La fille inconnue (The Unknown Girl), Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle, Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaid, Emir Kustrica‘s On The Milky Road, Pablo Larrain‘s Neruda, Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake…who knows?

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Deadline‘s Pete Hammond is one of the more gracious, turn-the-other-cheek columnists around. He doesn’t miss a trick but his natural wont is to be charitable or at least not backhand a film if it all possible. So his measured, less-than-cartwheely comments about Timur Bekmambetov‘s Ben-Hur (8.19) following yesterday’s Cinemacon presentation are instructive.

Referring to Paramount’s Las Vegas presentation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows, Star Trek Beyond and Ben-Hur, Hammond wrote that he’s “not sure [if] any of these is necessary for anything but Par’s bottom line, but the crowd seemed happy to see them all.”

Then he said that Ben-Hur‘s “dog days of August opening gives one pause, but perhaps Paramount has discovered a faith-based audience dying to see a biblical epic like this at the end of summer.”

He added that Ben-Hur star Jack Huston, who showed up yesterday, “is trying to fill Charlton Heston’s shoes, and might come close based on the footage.” “Trying”? “Might”?

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A week or so ago Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock told the Guardian‘s Rory Carroll that Sean Parker‘s Screening Room proposal (immediate access to new movies for $50 a pop) “is no doubt going to be the talk of the town at CinemaCon…this could be a massive game-changer.”

There’s talk about Parker and his crew offering some kind of presentation this week in Las Vegas, but not in any official capacity.

“If they’re coming because they have a hotel room…they are not on our official schedule,” CinemaCon managing director Mitch Neuhauser told TheWrap’s Matt Donnelly in a piece that posted last night. “CinemaCon is all about movies on the big screen.”

So when and where will the Big Debate occur? At what Cinemacon forum will voices be heard pro or con? If and when Parker shows up will anyone throw a drink in his face or trash Screening Room in some vocally demonstrative way, or is the whole Cinemacon-vs.-Screening Room brouhaha just a lot of hot journalistic air?

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