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Hollywood Elsewhere won’t be submitting to Kelly Fremon Craig‘s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret until tomorrow afternoon (Thursday, 4.27) at 3 pm. Hoping to hate on it, but holding my water until then.

Repeating: I HATED Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen. I’m not saying I’m already planning to get my hate-on for Craig’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (Lionsgate, 4.28), which is based on Judy Blume’s 1970 novel. I haven’t seen it and will naturally wait for a screening, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not feeing the negativity from afar. Because I can.

In the meantime I’m deriving comfort from portions of Amy Nicholson’s 4.20.23 Variety review, which is more negative than mixed.

Comfort excerpt #1: “This adaptation of Judy Blume‘s 1970 novel, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, seems uneasy putting funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is.”

Comfort excerpt #2: “Today, it’s not enough to be representative: Margaret must be a role model, too. (Even an accusation that she plagiarizes her homework from the encyclopedia gets gently buffed.) The result is a nostalgia hit with saccharine artificiality. While that might disappoint Blume fans, young audiences may not miss the original novel’s more honest truths, especially as they’ve been trained to expect tidy stories where protagonists fix their faults and here even (gah!) assure the adults in the film that they’re raising them just fine.

Comfort excerpt #3: “Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson), an earnest thing with big, curious brown eyes, comes home from summer camp to find herself thrust into transition. She spends the film in flux. Her parents, Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb (Benny Safdie), raised her without a religion, a vagueness she attempts to resolve by visiting various Jewish temples and Christian churches and chatting with her loose concept of a deity. In her first prayer to God, Margaret says, ‘I’ve heard great things about you.'”

HE interjection: What “great things” exactly? Don’t go there.

Comfort excerpt #4: “As for Margaret’s dad, quirky filmmaker and actor Safdie wears retro fatherhood like a Halloween costume, sounding so insincere as he professes his eagerness to mow a lawn that we’re tempted to add subtext to his thin role.”

Comfort excerpt #4: “As charming as the film is in its best moments, it’s hard not to be frustrated as it backpedals from the book’s awareness that not all wrongs are righted. Sometimes, our heroines might stay buddies with bullies. Sometimes they might run from conflict and never explain themselves. Sometimes, they might even hurt people without making amends. Sometimes frank talk is more impactful than an idealized fantasy.”

The late Harry Belafonte “was the little-known impetus behind ‘We Are the World,’ the all-star 1985 benefit single for African famine relief. To line up a younger generation of performers, he enlisted the music manager Ken Kragen, who got Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson to write the song and gathered dozens of other 1980s hitmakers. Modestly, Belafonte didn’t claim one of the lead vocal spots; he just joined the backup chorus. He can be spotted in the video at 4:20 and 5:55, eagerly singing along.” — from “Work, Love, Dignity and Play: 10 Key Harry Belafonte Songs,” by chief N.Y. Times music critic Jon Pareles.

Respect, hats off, proof of character.

And I’ll never want to grapple with any Viggo Mortensen specificity in this regard, and yet I’ve never been able to suppress the label of “Russian penis movie”…it is what it is. The likelihood of re-watching this thing isn’t likely.

I turn around and things that happened 20 or 30 years ago rise to the surface like air bubbles…they appear of their own volition…who am I to ignore that faint popping sound?

After visiting Jett, Cait and Sutton in West Orange last Sunday, the VW Passat suffered a seizure (call it a coughing fit) while driving back to Wilton. I was afraid of a painful financial gash, but the total tab (including an oil change) was only $418. I’ll be training down to New Rochelle Auto Care this morning to settle up and retrieve.

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Friendo to HE: “If I buy you this shirt, will you wear it in Cannes?”

HE to friendo: “Absolutely! But I’d have to wear the jacket also.”

Seriously…if WB is selling the pink Barbie jacket in a men’s size I’ll snap it up in a second.

Until proven to be a lucid, smartly-plotted, grade-A film (which it might conceivably be), I’ll be assuming that The Flash (Warner Bros., 6.16) is the same old gotterdamerung, CG-overload D.C. shite…tortured, over-emotive, anguished adolescent stuff.

“My payurants, my payurants…I lost my payurants,” etc.

I was a fanatical admirer of director Andy Muschietti‘s Mama, but I went cold on the guy after seeing his two It films. The return of Michael Keaton‘s Batman / Bruce Wayne holds no allure for me; ditto the return of Michael Shannon‘s General Zod. “Let’s get nuts”…yeah, no thanks.

Yesterday the No Hard Feelings redband trailer generated fresh energy at Cinemacon. It made me laugh several weeks ago, and it still rubs me the right way. And I adore the fact that shrieking wokesters like Scott Menzel are upset by the bawdy premise. The more alarmed Menzel is, the better.

Innocent question: What’s so stunning in this day and age about a graphically violent “ice-cold thriller” flooded with “atmospheric dread“? What else could a film about a conscience-stricken hitman be?

The Playlist‘s Gregg Ellwood on a recently-viewed Cinemacon clip of Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon: “The scenes featured hundreds (a thousand?) extras on horseback (Kingdom of Heaven vibes) and almost entirely in-camera visual effects (lots of on-the-ground explosions). There were at least three or four individual shots that anyone in the room will still remember weeks from now, which obviously a very good thing.

“The only concern is [that] Scott has allowed all the actors to speak in their native accents which in this case means Napoleon sounds American. Scott got away with it on his last film, The Last Duel, but we’re a bit concerned [that] it won’t work in this particular historical context.”

HE comment: Inauthentic foreign “accents” are usually avoided when American or British actors are playing European-continent characters (French, German, Italian, Russian). The general rule, however, is that everyone of a certain class or station has to more or less sound the same. Varying accents generally don’t work, as Valkyrie director Bryan Singer discovered when he had Tom Cruise‘s Col. Claus von Stauffenberg speak with an American accent while the mostly British cast members (i.e., Kenneth Branagh) used their own native accents.

Example: The rebellious slaves in Spartacus all spoke like working-class Americans while the Romans spoke with rarified mid-Atlantic accents.

Question for HE community: How would you play it if you were directing Napoleon? I personally wouldn’t have minded if Joaquin Phoenix and every other French character had spoken with French-accented English (i.e., Charles Boyer). The important thing is that everyone needs to sound the same. Didn’t Marlon Brando play Napoleon in Desiree with a French accent? Or am I misremembering?