Last posted on 12.21.19: “Sometime in the late winter or early spring of ’83 I flew from New York to Los Angeles for a job interview, and during the visit I went out to Universal studios to poke around. I wound up climbing a chain-link fence and walking onto a sound stage where, lo and behold, Scarface was being shot. The huge set contained a portion of Tony Montana‘s Miami mansion — the upstairs office, the red-carpeted foyer and staircase, a portion of the white-painted exterior with royal palm trees outside.

Hanging on a wall near the base of the staircase was a fairly large (at least six or seven feet tall) oil portrait of Al Pacino‘s Tony and Michelle Pfeiffer‘s Elvira Hancock. I’m no authority on oil portraits, but it looked like an absolutely first-rate effort. Someone had taken the time to make it look like a serious artist (one who knew from color and shadow and subtle gradations) had worked on it. In the film the painting is seen for maybe 1.5 seconds, if that.

I’ve long wondered what happened to this grand portrait. Did Brian DePalma or [the late] producer Marty Bregman make off with it? Online you can buy cheap knockoff versions with bullet holes, but the real thing was quite impressive.

The real-deal, full-size portrait presented a somewhat darker image that the one you see here.

Obviously Peter Weir‘s direction, Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley‘s screenplay and John Seale‘s cinematography, coupled with Lucas Haas and Harrison Ford‘s performances. But the most active ingredient is Maurice Jarre‘s score. That’s what really siezes and brings you in.

Jarre, who passed in 2009 at age 84, was unquestionably pantheon-level. I know that Doctor Zhivago is generally regarded as sappy and that we’re not allowed to praise it too strongly, but Jarre’s music for David lean’s 1965 film melts me down every time I hear. Not to mention his scores for Lawrence of Arabia, The Train (’64), Grand Prix (’66), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Year of Living Dangerously (’82 w/ Vangelis), Witness (’85), The Mosquito Coast (’86), Fatal Attraction (’87), Gorillas in the Mist (’88), Dead Poets Society (’89), and Ghost (’90)

For me at least.

From Brett Easton Ellis’s recollection of seeing The Shining for the very first time on 5.23.80, at the Westwood Village:

As I began to glumly settle into an awareness of the kind of film Cocaine Bear is — a film that’s weirdly cottonball and barren but at the same time not a piece of shit and which is reasonably well-framed, cut, written and directed…as I took stock of what it was up to, I didn’t know what to make of it. Really…I was lost.

I can report that I laughed twice, which should count for something.

I honestly don’t know what to say except that CB is some kind of dopey–ass hybrid deadpan comic gorefest, and yet one that’s chortle-worthy at times and even touches bottom once or twice. “This is a wank, a waste of time,” I was muttering, “but it’s not that awful.”

I found myself lamenting, in fact, that director Elizabeth Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden had decided to go for dumb laughs — if they’d only committed to making some kind of dry, half-realistic ensemble docu-dramedy, CB might have amounted to something (though I can’t quite imagine what that would be exactly).

I’ll tell you this much — the late Ray Liotta plays it totally straight as a furrowed-brow drug dealer, and I felt really badly that he wasn’t allowed to play a nogoodnik of greater consequence, or at least that he wasn’t given better lines.

Alden Ehrenreich (whose hair is going gray already!) plays Liotta’s half-heartedly criminal son, and I swear to God he’s more compelling in this role than he was in Solo or Rules Don’t Apply.

The steadily low-key O’Shea Jackson Jr. is wasted, and that bummed me out. Ditto Keri Russell as a good mom searching the forest for her 13-year-old daughter (Brooklyn Prince, who of course looks nothing like Russell)…she also plays it straight like Ehrenreich and Liotta.

I just wish Banks hadn’t tried to goof her way through it. I wish she’d made this film in a Steven Soderbergh-type way. That’s all I’m saying.

Hollywood Elsewhere will be submitting to Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear sometime around 5:25 pm eastern. Call it 5:30. I’ll post some kind of half-assed, lean-and-mean, “don’t fuck with me” reaction by 8 pm…okay, no later than 9. Meanwhile the early birds are saying it’s not awful, “reasonably silly”, “gonzo goofy,” etc.

HE readers know that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon will almost certainly have its big debut at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. So what follows is mostly water under the bridge.

I know that I popped in for a little taste on 7.26 (i.e., seven months ago) after Mike Fleming and Justin Kroll reported that Flower Moon would be skipping a late ’22 release in favor of “a possible ‘global showcase premiere’ at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.”

On Jan. 12 World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy reported that “two sources” had told him Flower Moon would play Cannes.

I was told privately on February 1st that this would indeed happen.

The last columnist to report same was Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman, on Monday, 2.20.

And now (Thursday, 2.23) Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy and Justin Kroll have posted a Cannes caboose story, timidly reporting that Killer Moon is “eyeing” a Cannes debut. Their story qualifies three times that the Cannes booking isn’t 100% firmed, but it is, I’ve been told. Plane fares and hotels are booked — done deal. Probably in an out-of-competition slot.

Nearly three months ago bbc.com’s Nicholas Barber explained why Top Gun: Maverick is the only film that deservers to win the Best Picture Oscar….okay, he didn’t say that but he might as well have.

Barber also made it clear that anyone who votes instead for Everything Everywhere All At Once is a cinematic philistine and a sworn enemy of the Movie Godz ethos…okay, he didn’t say that but he might as well have.

Barber: “Top Gun: Maverick was a romantic-comedy-drama-action-thriller – which is another way of saying that it was simply a Hollywood movie that everyone could enjoy. To people who had stayed away from cinemas since before the pandemic, TG:M felt like a warm welcome home.

“Still, it was a bittersweet feeling — as if we were being welcomed home, but we had to leave again soon. Even while we were cheering, laughing and crying at the film, we were aware, on some level, that it was a one-off. Top Gun: Maverick won’t set any trends because it isn’t part of a trend. It’s unique, the last of its kind — just as its hero was the last of his. It marked the end of an era. But as long as the film was on the screen, we could tell ourselves that it hadn’t ended yet.

“The screenwriters put it best. ‘The future is coming, and you’re not in it,’ says Ed Harris says to Tom Cruise. ‘Your kind is heading for extinction.’

“‘Maybe so, sir,’ says Cruise. ‘But not today.'”

Will you listen to this freshman kid’s voice? Remind you of anyone? Ben Shapiro‘s perhaps? The reedy-voiced kid says that he wrote “ALL LIVES MATTER” on a blackboard and was soon after told by school supervisors that this sentiment is politically problematic (i.e., racist). This is why we need Seth Rogen to school this little prick.

Freshman in high school SMOKES the school board. pic.twitter.com/Gv489lQqq5

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) February 22, 2023