You can’t tell anything from a trailer but this seems…well, spirited. A little too much like a Cameron Crowe-like romance about renewal and finding new sources of bliss and rapture, but how could it be anything else? I guess I’m ready to let go of my Son of Deep Tiki title. Pic was shot during the last third of 2013. Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, John Krasinski, Danny McBride and Jay Baruchel. Opening on 5.29.15.

Standards of hotness change over time. I’ve said more than a few times (most recently in an HE piece posted on 8.15.14) that sexual attractiveness standards have definitely evolved in favor of the notties over the last…oh, 10 or 12 years. We’re now living in an age, partly if not largely perpetrated by the films and scenarios of producer-director Judd Apatow, in which Schlumpies and Dumpies have been sold to the public as the kind of people you want to go out with, go home with, get married to, etc.

When I was in my 20s and carousing around Schlumpies and Dumpies got no action whatsoever. They stayed home, watched TV, wept in their beds, jerked off, etc. But today they make out. If a bearded guy in an Apatow movie has bigger breasts than Cameron Diaz and a dumpy milky-white body with eight or nine pimples on his fat white ass…cool! If a lead actress looks like one of the Andrews Sisters but with somewhat wider or heavier facial features…crazy mama!

I grew up in a world in which conventionally attractive or semi-attractive people used to be the ones who got laid the most often. Trust me — I used to do quite well at the Westport Players Tavern in the mid to late ’70s, and I had a good sense of what worked and what didn’t. And if a girl who looked like Trainwreck‘s Amy Schumer was to stroll into that scene, she would have had a nice time but she would not be ardently pursued by the flannel-shirt-wearing wolves, of which I was definitely one. By the standards of that time she just isn’t top-of-the-line…sorry.

But that was then and this is now, and today I was beaten and spat upon and kicked to the ground and damn near lynched for having stated what seems obvious to me, which is that Schumer is brilliant, talented and somewhat funny but she’s not grade-A or even B-plus material, certainly by my standards as well as those of any moderately attractive, fair-minded youngish heterosexual dude who’s feeling hormonal or what-have-you.

There’s this imaginary guy I’ve been visiting at Cedars Sinai. He went into a coma early last October and just came out of it yesterday. I wasn’t there when he awoke but he called today to say thanks for stopping by all those times. His mother told him about my four or five visits.

Then he said he’d gone online this morning and visited the latest Gold Derby and Gurus of Gold charts, and he wanted to know what the hell had happened to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, which was the Best Picture front-runner for weeks on end. “Where’d it go?” he said. “What happened? It was the leading Best Picture contender…it was all over but the shouting and the formalities. Every last default-minded, deferring-to-Dave Karger Oscar expert had it at the top of their lists. What’s the most likely film to win Best Picture? Why…Unbroken! What else? And now it’s vanished.”

I tried to break it to him easy. “What happened,” I explained, “is that Universal finally screened it, and a few days later the air had seeped out of the balloon. And then it just disappeared.” He asked me why. “It was the Christian torture-porn thing,” I said. What’s that? “There was something in the movie that said that the more a guy has been beaten and tortured, the braver and more beautiful and closer to God he is.” Oh, the guy said, suddenly sounding weaker and less curious.

“Right now the only chance Unbroken has at the Oscars is Roger Deakins‘ nomination for Best Cinematography,” I said. “But it would be surprising to a lot of people I know if Birdman‘s Emmanuel Lubezki loses out.”

With Trainwreck (Universal, 7.17), director Judd Apatow is once again introducing a chubby-cheeked, whipsmart, not conventionally attractive, neurotically bothered female comic to a mass audience — first Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids (’11), then Lena Dunham in HBO’s Girls (’12) and now Amy Schumer, the star and writer of Trainwreck as well as the star of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer. She’s obviously sharp and clever and funny as far as the woe-is-me, self-deprecating thing goes, but there’s no way she’d be an object of heated romantic interest in the real world. And yet that’s the apparent premise of Apatow’s film. Schumer’s wide facial features reminded me of a blonde Lou Costello around the time of Buck Privates, or Jennifer Aniston‘s somewhat heavier, not-as-lucky sister who watches a lot of TV. Don’t look at me — I’m not the one who made her the star of a film about a plucky, free-spirited girl that a lot of guys want to bang. You know who would be better in a film like this? An actress who’s nicely attractive, has the funnies and the soulful stuff besides? Jenny Slate.

Last night I saw Kingsman: The Secret Service (20th Century Fox, 2.13), an absurd, CG-diseased, terminally unfunny James Bond spoof cartoon. Director Matthew Vaughn (X-Men: First Class, Layer Cake) has given this film all the stylish wit and macho gravitas of a candy cane, and if you pay to see this thing and say it’s “really fun” and that you had a nice brainless good time then there is really something wrong with you. But the film is not the topic right now — it’s the hairpiece worn by Colin Firth. I’ve been told by studio reps that Firth doesn’t wear one as secret agent Harry Hart but…c’mon, guys, it’s quite obvious that he does. Off-screen Firth has never had a hair-loss issue so there’s no “reason” for the rug but nonetheless…there it is! Then it hit me. Vaughn, I’m guessing, told Firth to wear the hairpiece as an homage to Sean Connery‘s 007 hairpieces that were worn in Goldfinger, Thunderball and beyond. The film is a spoof of those years and that legend, of course. Why anyone decided that making a 007 spoof 53 years after the debut of Dr. No was a good idea is beyond my reasoning abilities, but that’s what Kingsman is.

(l.) Colin Firth au natural; (r.) Firth with Connery-like Goldfinger rug in Kingsman: The Secret Service.

Notice the fullness of the coif, the slightly lower-on-the-forehead, overly clean hairline, and the lump of hair cascading off to the side of the part. The guy he’s terrorizing, by the way, is Mark Hamill, who looks like Richard Attenborough after becoming a full-on drunk and falling off his diet regimen.

I’ve known what Uma Thurman has looked like for the last 25 years so don’t tell me. This is not Invasion of the Body Snatchers — this is The Guy Who Did My Eyes Overdid It along with He Also Told Me to Not Wear Eye Makeup For A Couple of Weeks. If this is the new Uma then I’m no longer interested…no offense. A woman’s eyes are no longer the windows of her soul but a measure of how she’s coping with age. Uma’s been Zellwegered. In a sense we all have.

(l.) Old Uma Thurman; (r.) Uma replacement on red carpet for Monday night’s premiere of The Slap.

The real Thurman (with Penn Badgley) last December during filming of The Slap.

Some Academy members (oldsters mostly) are just finally getting around to seeing the big nominated movies. Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, for example, opened theatrically last July and has been industry-screened over and over for the past several months, but yesterday Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote about having spoken to some lazy-ass guy who only just saw it last weekend. Fellows like this are the dregs of the Academy membership — the slowest, least attuned, least engaged. The guy told Hammond he would probably vote for Boyhood for Best Picture but that he might vote for American Sniper because it was “so powerful…the audience just sat there afterwards.” And of course he prefers Eddie Redmayne‘s Theory of Everything performance to Michael Keaton‘s in Birdman.

“Unquestionably and indisputably, without a shadow of a doubt, Eddie Redmayne is the best thing about Jupiter Ascending,” writes Grantland‘s Kevin Lincoln. “Cast as the villain, Balem Abrasax, Redmayne plays the role as one part sexual deviant, one part reality-show judge, and a little bit Richard III. Without any explanation, he delivers almost all of his lines in a two-pack-a-day voyeur whisper; the rest of the dialogue he shouts, like a crazy person.

“I know this is from the No-Shit Files, but it’s funny how 364 days a year we all feel obliged to feign a ‘we need more female directors, need more women’s stories on film!’ line, and act all troubled by gender roles and issues in cinema and misogyny from the boys’ clubs, etc. And then the biggest woman-directed studio movie ever comes along…female screenwriter, female novelist, entirely female audience…and it’s about a mousey dishrag chick who defines herself solely through a supernaturally rich, dreamy guy who gets her to like being roughed up. From a novel that was literally Twilight fanfiction…you know, that other female-forward franchise about a virginal girl who prostrates herself and forgoes her entire existence for a hot vampire.” — posted earlier today at 2:40 pm.

Jon Stewart, 52, announced today that he’ll be leaving The Daily Show at the end of the year. Why? Because he feels burned out or something? So what does he with the rest of his life? Sit around on the veranda? Does he think he’ll wind up doing something more valuable than The Daily Show? That’s doubtful. Does he want to direct more films? One presumes as much, but Rosewater indicated that he may not quite be Stanley Kubrick. But he could grow in that regard. He’ll find, however, that until he makes a film that’s a lot better than Rosewater people will treat him as a famous ex-talk-show host first and an aspiring filmmaker/novelist/whatever second.

Esquire has posted excerpts from Brian Abrams‘ “Party Like A President” that tell tales about about JFK bacchanalia. The reporting feels a bit sloppy here and there. I’m not aware that there were “occasions when JFK spent weekends at Frank Sinatra’s place in Palm Springs,” certainly not when he was President. Abrams includes that old story about Kennedy telling British Prime Minister Harold McMillan he got headaches if he went without a conquest for three days. (I’ve read a different version with JFK telling McMillan that he didn’t feel as if he’d “really had a woman unless I’ve had her three ways.”) The surprise is reading that Kennedy allegedly “smoked three marijuana cigarettes with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of a CIA official and a Kennedy mistress who often visited the White House when Jackie was out of town. When offered a fourth joint, the president begged off. ‘Suppose the Russians did something now,’ wondered the bloodshot-eyed leader of the free world.”

Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13), which I saw last night at the Arclight in a theatre that was attended by a few media types but mostly by people you wouldn’t want to have dinner with if given a choice, is a sterile experience, to put it mildly. It’s faintly amusing and even titillating during the first hour, but it eventually narcotizes and then freezes your soul. It offers a few mildly arousing, tastefully shot sex scenes (ice cubes, lashes, blindfolds), but it lives inside its own restricted, barren, super-regulated realm. There’s no “life” in its veins. Watching it is like visiting an overly policed bondage & discipline museum with uniformed guards stationed every 15 feet…no heart, no blood, no humanity, no jazz, no off-moments. It’s a cold, ritualized girl movie about fantasy sex with a well-mannered, hot-bod billionaire who rams like a stallion and gives lots of oral.

Henry Miller would definitely not approve. He would say “perversion, okay, but where’s the heart? You need to put a little heart into sex or what’s the point?” I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that the sense of eros coveted by and written about by Miller 80 years ago is a thing of the distant past, and that we now live in an age of Seriously Perverse Franchises, which are a manifestation of what I would call the New Sterility coupled with the New Cluelessness on the part of young, anxious, under-educated women.

If you come away delighted with Fifty Shades of Grey then you are definitely on the clueless side of the equation, but don’t let me stop you. This movie is critic-proof. The none-too-brights are going to see this thing in droves, and then they’re going to talk things out at a nearby bar and drink wine and start squealing with laughter after the second glass. And guys like me are going to look in their direction and give them the stink-eye.