Charlton Heston‘s performance as the devious Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) was easily the best role he landed and the best performance he gave during the ’70s. The ’80s and ’90s were relatively fallow for him, but Heston lucked into a perversely amusing supporting role as Andie McDowell‘s dad in Peter Chelsom‘s Town & Country (’01) — the last discussable performance he gave. Heston’s last memorable appearance happened the following year in Michael Moore‘s Bowling for Columbine — an ambush, obviously, and not a performance.

As I didn’t ask for DVD screeners of the first episodes of Happyish, I’ll be seeing it tonight along with everyone else. But I’m surprised it’s tanking with critics — 28% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, a not-much-better 48% on Metacritic. I was half-convinced by the trailers that it would probably be a  moderately amusing serving of misanthropic bile. Not so apparently. “Happyish has its head stuck so far up its rear end and is so filled with personal rage and rotten people that just a small dose of the show should easily dissuade half its viewers from sticking around. The other half will perhaps sense a melody beneath all the foul-mouthed diatribes and self-absorbed whining.” — from 4.24 review by Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever.

A Munich-based film journalist says he’s been told that no advance screenings of Mad Max: Fury Road will happen in his town, and that the big Cannes screening on the morning of Thursday, 5.14 (or the same day it begins showing in much of Europe and a day before the U.S. opening), will offer the first looksee for European critics. But Warner Bros. will begin screening Fury Road for New York journos starting this Wednesday (4.29). It will also screen in Manhattan on 5.6, 5.7 and finally at an all-media on Tuesday, 5.12. The review embargo lifts on 5.12 at 12:00 noon Pacific.

For a three-year period between The Sixth Sense and Signs (’99 to ’02), M. Night Shyamalan was almost the new Hitchcock. And then his rep took a hit with The Village (’04) and Lady In The Water (’06). Then he rebounded slightly with ’08’s The Happening (although the big topic of conversation back then was the scene in which Mark Wahlberg talked to plants). Then his career totally went off a cliff with The Last Airbender and especially in the wake of After Earth. Now with The Visit (Universal, 9.11), an apparently harmless little horror flick, he’s more or less become Wes Craven. I remember the being-compared-to-Hitchcock days. I remember his delicious, insightful commentary on the Strangers on a Train DVD/Bluray.

If there’s one thing that injects pure elation into my heart, it’s hearing that the latest bullshit superhero flick (like, for example, Avengers: Age of Ultron) has earned a record-breaking $201.2 million in 44 territories this weekend. And those 44 markets represent only 55% of the international territory, mind. Disney stockholders are going to be gorging on caviar and lighting cigars with $100 bills after the other 45% play the film. On top of which Ultron is expected to pull down $200 million or so when it opens domestically next Friday. Will there be spontaneous street parties held in celebration of this success? I’ll bring the firewood and the kerosene.

At last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, emcee Cecily Strong “created a moment” when she asked all members of the media in the ballroom to raise their hands and take a solemn vow: “I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary’s appearance, because that is not journalism.” She is correct — serious journalism and offering comments or asides about a person’s appearance are separate realms of expression. Do average citizens vote for or against a candidate based on his/her appearance? Absolutely not. JFK‘s youth, matinee-idol looks, perennial tan and thick reddish-brown hair had no effect upon voter likes or dislikes. The fact that the 70something Ronald Reagan didn’t have white or graying hair or a sagging, withered face when he ran for president in ’80…nobody cared. They would have voted for him if he looked like Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo because they were voting for the man, not the appearance. Barack Obama‘s cappucino skin shade had nothing to do with his winning the ’08 and ’12 elections…zip. And Hillary Clinton’s grandma face and puffy eye-bags will have no effect on her popularity during the 2016 Presidential election. The election will be entirely about who she is or is not…about character, cojones and convictions.

Directed by Rufus Norris and written by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork, based on their 2011 National Theatre musical of the same title, London Road is a 2015 British musical mystery thriller about the Steve Wright killings (i.e., “the Suffolk strangler“), which happened in Ipswich in 2006. Wright was convicted in 2008. Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman, Kate Fleetwood, etc.

I’m feeling a teeny bit nervous about getting into a timely screening of Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha (a.k.a., Son of Deep Tiki) before leaving for France on the evening of May 7th. It opens on 5.29, at which point I’ll be in Prague. Three business days in Los Angeles before catching a red-eye for New York, and then I’ll have Thursday and Friday of this week in New York followed by four more days next week (5.4 thru 5.7) before catching a red-eye to Paris. I’m feeling curiously optimistic in my expectations. With all the negative build-up over the last few months, largely due to Amy Pascal’s dismissive comments in that hacked email, the film merely has to be half-decent to seem pretty good. I still have to laugh at that allegedly legit summary of a screening report that Gawker posted, to wit:

Everyone presumably understands by now that the universally praised Love & Mercy (Roadside, 6.5) is a time-flipping drama about the trials of Beach Boys maestro Brian Wilson during two stages in his life — the mid ’60s era when he created Pet Sounds and Smile and the mid ’80s when he began to slowly extricate himself from the clutches of Svengali-like therapist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Young Wilson is briliantly portrayed by Paul Dano; middle-aged Wilson is played just as compellingly by Jon Cusack. It’s interesting, therefore, that the new poster decides to use a likeness of the youngish, real-deal Wilson rather than Dano or Cusack. Which is cool — a concise way of avoiding any confusion.

An assortment of Los Angeles-based film bloggers and print journalists are presently enjoying a gratis, all-expenses-paid visit to the 2015 Riviera Maya Film Festival. The seven-day event is based in Playa del Carmen, the Yucatan beach town 30 miles south of Cancun and 200 miles north of Belize City. I tried to offer my…uhm, “promotional” services to Sunshine Sachs publicist Brooke Blumberg, who did the inviting, but she decided to invite every name-brand columnist in town (Sasha Stone, David Poland, Scott Feinberg, et. al.) except me…thanks! She apparently doesn’t like me or suspects I’d be more trouble than I’m worth or something along these lines. Not true! I am perfectly willing to shill for any film festival that will fly me there and put me up, etc. I write really well and can give the same kind of handjobs that other journalists give when they visit places for free.

Hotel Platinum Yucatan Princess in Playa del Carmen

This morning I got a message from Stone, who’s down there now and staying at the Hotel Platinum Yucatan Princess, which offers the exact same kind of luxurious decor and feelings of well-tended splendor offered by every other luxury hotel in the world. (I stayed in a place almost precisely like this in Hoi An, Vietnam in 2013.) May I ask something? What is the point of travelling to an exotic location if you’re going to stay in a place that’s a carbon-copy duplicate of every other luxury habitat around the world? It’s the Club Med approach to travel…the Kardashian way. Has anyone read Conde Nast Traveller lately? With slight variations every luxury hotel in the world looks exactly the same. The body snatchers have branched out — they’re now designing hotels.

During last night’s televized chat with Diane Sawyer, the transgendered Bruce Jenner said (a) “I’m not gay…I am, as far as I know, heterosexual…I’ve never been with a guy” and (b) that while he’s been attracted to women all his life, that’s no longer the case — “I’m asexual,” Jenner said. So the new Bruce is embracing womanhood for inner identity reasons and not sexual ones. He’s not, in short, Lana Wachowski. The former Larry Wachowski became a woman for the same identity reasons, but also (as I understand things) to become a lesbian. I’ve known a lot of guys in my life who are very feminine and fully at peace with that, and isn’t that the main order of business? To know inner fulfillment and serenity? It’s fine with me if Jenner wants to physically transition in terms of genitalia and breasts and whatnot, but what’s the point if he’s decided to ignore sexuality? What can’t he just be womanly, nurturing and compassionate Bruce with a dick?

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