I’m not approaching Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer with an attitude. Seething class warfare on Runaway Train sounds like a great concept. But Joon-Ho’s Mother struck me as a little too Brian DePalma-esque, and I’m a bit afraid of that flourishy, operatic style. “There’s no doubting that Bong Joon Ho is a DePalma devotee in the same way that DePalma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the ’70s and ’80s,” I wrote five years ago. “Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element — deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director’s film.” Joon-ho himself has proudly declared that DePalma is a major inspiration. In my book that means “caveat emptor.”

Where will Ukranian celebrity prankster-masher Vitalii Sediuk, who accosted Brad Pitt Wednesday night at the Malificent premiere, end up in life? What’s the difference between guys like Sediuk and Travis Bickel? Obsessive celebrity stalkers who want nothing more than to brush up against the famous, and in so doing perhaps acquire a little fame for themselves? We’re talking about a culture of instant ADD pestilence that’s manifesting more and more. Sediuk, 25, is reportedly the guy who attempted to kiss Will Smith at the Russian premiere of Men in Black III and hid under America Ferrera‘s dress at the How to Train Your Dragon 2 premiere in Cannes.

“I should be clear that I know and like Ann Hornaday. But this isn’t about having a friend’s back; Ann can definitely take care of herself. This is about the idea that the images and stories we consume matter, that they affect us profoundly, although not always in ways we can see and rarely or never in some clear cause-and-effect fashion. That idea is what Hornaday is struggling with here, and it’s an idea we confront over and over again, in slightly different forms, after every one of these mass shootings that seems to have been deliberately designed by its perpetrator as a media spectacle.

“For Seth Rogen to boil all that down, for his 2 million-plus Twitter followers, to ‘@AnnHornaday how dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage?’ is a black-comic example of movie-star narcissism. (I originally wrote that Rogen’s phrase about ‘getting girls’ sent an unfortunate signal, and it rubbed a lot of other people the wrong way too. Various commenters have correctly observed that Hornaday put it exactly the same way, so let’s chalk that one up to the endless game of Telephone that is the Internet.)” — from Andrew O’Hehir‘s 5.27 Salon piece titled “How Seth Rogen proved Ann Hornaday’s point about Elliot Rodger.”

The idea behind Maleficent (Disney, 5.30) is to re-imagine Sleeping Beauty along feminist lines so as to reach a female audience that has no use for the old fairy-tale mythology about put-upon female characters finding happiness by hooking up with a gentle dashing prince at the finale….and who can blame them? Malificent is about commanding woman power in the form of Angelina Jolie‘s vengeful sorceress of the flaming cheekbones, no longer a wicked fairy godmother and Mistress of All Evil but a girl who was betrayed and mutilated by a loathsome turncoat (Sharlto Copley, who always plays scurvy creeps) so who can blame her for wanting a little revenge? She’s never entirely sincere about being evil, in short, and even if she seems wicked-ish at times she certainly has her reasons so calm down and give the girl a break.

Did the dysfunctional family reunion dramedy begin with Arsenic and Old Lace or The Big Chill or…where did it begin and when did it become a genre? Everybody comes home for a funeral or because someone is dying, and they all hash their lives out and one or two fall in love with someone new. One of my favorites is Thomas Bezucha‘s The Family Stone (’05). The 21st Century has seen a few films in this vein (okay, more than a few) but I don’t mind seeing another one. I like the title and I’m definitely down with anything Jason Bateman does, but I’m a tiny bit scared of “directed by Shawn Levy.” But no reason to fret. Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne (who has costarred in a lot of films lately), Corey Stoll, Jane Fonda, Dax Shepard, Connie Britton, Timothy Olyphant and Kathryn Hahn. Warner Bros., opens on 9.12.14.

It’s a bit after 6 pm. I saw Maleficent (decent, handsomely composed but basically the same old family-friendly CG fantasy package that turns up at the start of every summer) but not until roughly 3 pm today so I just got back to the pad. Now I have to catch Doug Liman‘s Edge of Tomorrow at 8 pm at a Gaumont plex on the Champs d’Elysee…starts in 50 minutes. Update: After I heard from a WB staffer around 11 this morning that it was fine for me to attend, a senior Warner Bros. publicity who had been cc’ed on the approval message met me at the door of the Champs d’Elysee screening to tell me I couldn’t attend as there was no room due to overbooking. That wasn’t the reason, of course, but since when has Warner Bros. publicity made an exceptional effort to be friendly to Hollywood Elsewhere? Then again it’s just another summer movie. I won’t be back from Paris in time to catch the June 2nd all-media so I’ll just have to see it opening day.

The laid-back boogie rhythm and rolling bass tones are partly what make “All Shook Up” sound soothing and yet fresh each listening, which has to number in the hundreds if not thousands. But the biggest stand-out element, in my head at least, is the absence of drums. The beat is kept by someone (possibly Elvis) tapping on an acoustic guitar or…I don’t know, a phone book? Recorded in January 1957 and released two months hence, “All Shook Up” is one of the very few percussion-free cuts of rock’s classic era…just that relaxed, almost slapdash vocal delivery (which Presley reportedly copied phrase for phrase from songwriter Otis Blackwell‘s original demo) and the instruments — piano, lap steel guitar, stand-up bass…what else?

In a 5.27 Cannes Film Festival wrap-up by Hollywood Reporter staffers, senior critic Todd McCarthy is the first big-leaguer to strongly agree with my view that Leviathan was shafted by the jury — a great film totally hosed.

I’m planning to catch the 1 pm showing of Malefique at the Les Halles plex. General critical approval is prevailing thus far. Except for the Telegraph‘s rarely fully satisfied Robbie Collin, of course, but even he was more or less okay with it. Sasha Stone and her daughter may be looking forward to this, but I’m not. At least it only runs 90-something minutes.

A day or two ago Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen posted angry Twitter responses to a piece posted last weekend by Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday. It suggested that perhaps the resentful anti-social feelings of Isla Vista murderer Elliot Rodger were somehow exacerbated by “male fantasies of wish fulfillment and vigilante justice” generated by Hollywood downmarket filmmakers. She mentioned Neighbors in particular, presumably because it’s fairly recent and is chockablock with depictions of college-age bacchanalia, and that’s what set Rogen and Apatow off. Here’s Hornaday’s measured response:

Amat Escalante‘s Heli (6.13, NY & LA) “is a starkly drawn, no-frills, deeply ugly Mexican art film about the ravaging of Mexican society by drug traffickers and how poor people always take it in the neck,” I wrote on 5.13.13. “I respect Escalante (Sangre, Los Bastardos) and his austere mindset, but there would have to be something wrong with anyone who says they ‘liked’ this movie. It uncovered every dark and fatalistic thought I’ve had about my life and about life in general, and generally sent me into a black-dog mood pit.

“Heli is about a family of poor Mexican rurals living near the very lowest rung of everything — income, education, opportunity, consciousness. I would rather kill myself than live a life like this — no computers, no wifi, no Blurays, no film festivals, no love, no laughter to speak of. The movie is basically saying life for these guys goes from drab and depressing to flat-out ghastly due to the drug-dealing malevolence that’s plaguing much of Mexico.

Smelling flowers, staring at the stars and falling in love are delightful and free, yes, but if you haven’t found at least some financial comfort or stability in life you’re probably going to be so anxious and fretful that you’ll never even think to smell flowers or stare at the stars. And no woman is going to give you the time of day if you’re living hand-to-mouth, much less fall in love with you. You really do need dough to be happy. It takes the edge off things and allows you to smile every so often. It allows you to wear better socks and high-thread-count T-shirts and ride cool bicycles and belong to health clubs and afford an occasional dinner at a nice restaurant. They say that money can’t buy you love in this world, but it’ll get you a half-pound of cocaine and a 16 year-old girl in a great big long limousine on a warm September night. Now, that may not be love but it is all right.