The long-awaited commercial release of Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune is only days away. Theatrical + HBO Max on Friday, 10.22, with many theatres launching the night before. And with that, Average Joes and Janes will render a verdict about whether or not Dune belongs on a list of potential Best Picture contenders.

In this light, Dune has four Gold Derby handicappers in its corner — IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson (#2), Yahoo‘s Kevin Polowy (#1) and Variety‘s Clayton Davis (#3) and Tim Gray (#1).

So in a sense these four critics will be facing the music this weekend also. As you and your movie-watching brethren watch this 155-minute sand epic, say to yourself “it wasn’t just the usual gifted suspects who created this film — director-cowriter Villeneuve, dp Greig Fraser, screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth and star Timothee Chalamet — but also Thompson, Polowy, Davis and Gray, who’ve done what they can to lend award-season cred.”

In a strictly illegal sense, Dune “opened” yesterday morning when pirates began streaming an alleged HD version. I’ve only pirate-streamed two movies in my life — Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse and Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in Manhattan — and see no reason not to wait for Thursday.

But I’m telling you right now I can’t wait to hate this thing. At least I’m honest about this. Every fibre of my being wants to loathe it. By the same token if I like it and say so, it’ll mean more than praise from some snivelling gladhander critic.

And then two weeks later comes Chloe Zhao‘s Eternals, which I’m also looking forward to despising with every fibre of my being. Because Eternals hates me. I know how it’s going to make me feel, and so I’m turning it around and pledging to give it back before the fact. Death to Marvel unless it’s the Marvel films I like. Death to superhero franchises. Death to superhero wisecracks. Death to dinner-table camaraderie. Death to all of it.

Friendo: “Technically Dune is wonderful.  It will probably sweep all the tech awards at the Oscars.  Still stuck with that storyline which is a bit on the ‘who cares?’ spectrum.  Oddly enough the most compelling and likable character is Jason Momoa‘s.

“David Lynch‘s 1984 version is 2 and 1/2 hours long. The new film ends at around the 90 minute mark of the Lynch film, so basically it’s another hour of storytelling that if they get to make Part 2, which will actually take a lot longer than an hour.”

I should have posted this Bari Weiss-slash-Brian Stelter discussion yesterday.

Key passage: “What’s going on [now] is the transformation of these sense-making institutions of American life. It’s the news media, it’s the publishing houses, it’s the Hollywood studios, it’s our universities, and they are narrowing in a radical way what’s acceptable to say and what isn’t. And you and I both know there doesn’t need to be an edict from the C-suite for people to feel that.”

Author and Canadian evolutionary psychologist Gal Saad to George Takei after the latter complained about Dave Chappelle‘s trans remarks in The Closer: “Stop being such a whiney faux victim….you could not have survived five minutes of my childhood in Lebanon.”

The Mick Jagger and Keith Richard love lifted the SoFi stadium off the ground last night…the entire place (the size of 10 or 15 Roman Colisseums stacked side by side and atop each other) dislodged from its foundations and rose above terra firma like the mother ship in Close Encounters. The crowd of 40K or 45K or thereabouts was as one.

That said, I kinda missed the intimacy of the 20K seat Madison Square Garden experience. But that’s me.

The Mick love was especially levitational. Thank you, oh godly metaphor of lasting vigor and thick, nut-brown hair and flat abdominal muscles, for looking like a weathered Peter Pan and prancing around like a 36 year-old workout Nazi…take our hearts and caress them, please! Talk about a contact high…

I expected the crowd to be around 65% boomers and older GenXers, and 35% younger GenX with maybe a sprinkling of older Millennials. Instead it was more like 35% or 40% boomer. Okay, maybe 45%. There were two pretty 20something girls sitting right behind us. I almost said something encouraging to them, but an instinct said “leave well enough alone.” Maybe they’re friendly with that Woke Ice Cream Girl who works in the Farmer’s Market.

The Gotti mob charged people $80 to park in the various surrounding lots (millions raked in) and we were stuck in parking-lot gridlock for 90 minutes. The show ended around 10:50 pm, and we weren’t free of the snarl until 12:20 am…no exaggeration.

19th Nervous Breakdown from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

Standing room access is filling up, but the super-pricey white floor seats are maybe 30% filled, if that. Okay, 35%. The sound is imprecise, echoing and bouncing all over the place, like artillery shelling outside of Damascus…a joke. The video screens for the opening act, The Glorious Sons, look like twin postage stamps from section 430. And the John Gotti-level criminals running the SoFi parking lot are charging $80 per car.

I’ve seen the Rolling Stones twice — once in Madison Square Garden, once in Paris (“Les Rolling Stones aux Abbatoir”), and the MSG show was okay — big but visually and aurally palatable. I’m telling you that so far the SoFi stadium viewing experience (70K seating vs. 20K in MSG) feels like a ripoff — all about fuck-the-chumps greed. The players on the stage look like fleas on my cat.

8:45 pm update: The joint is pretty much filled. Video screens are much bigger for the Stones. Sound seems of a higher quality. “Street Fighting Man”,”All Down The Line”…”be my little baby for a while.” Energy spike…”19th Nervous Breakdown”, “Tumbling Dice,” “Beast of Burden.” The new drummer is really good, but he’s wearing too much bling. Okay, I feel better now. Mick Jagger’s smile is more than about happiness. It’s about warmth, ecstasy.

Rank ambition, stink of corruption, sparely designed, F.W. Murnau-ish.

Imagine being known as a distinctive stamp choreographer with his own unmissable style…a leap-and-somersault-and-stomp thing that said “Michael Kidd” first and foremost but also “not gay.”

Posted on 12.26.07: “Three things about Michael Kidd, the award-winning choreographer (Guys and Dolls and Can-Can on stage, The Band Wagon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in films) who died Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles.

“One, he was straight. Two, he talked like a New York cab driver or newsstand vendor. And three, he gave a snappy, lived-in performance as a choreographer hired to finesse a stage show for a Santa Rosa teenage beauty pageant in Michael Richie‘s Smile (’75).”

This Tender Bar trailer is a much better thing than the film itself. Better timing, better editing, more emotion. It basically coasts along on the strength of Paul Simon‘s ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’, even though it has nothing to do with the film. It’s a mood cocktail that kind of lifts you up and pulls you along.

And now you can see what I meant in my review about young Daniel Ranieri playing a young version of Tye Sheridan. Stop blowing smoke as there’s NO WAY IN HELL this kid grows up to be Sheridan. You can’t be a dark-eyed Lebanese at age ten and suddenly transform into the biological son of a middle-class German paleface couple (Lily Rabe, Max Martini) when you hit 18. Come down to earth and stop trying to wrestle audiences into woke submission.

Last night I watched John Farrow: Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows, a 96-minute doc about the prolific, under-rated Australian-born director. Farrow made scores of better-than-decent, lower-budgeted films (The Big Clock, Five Came Back, Calcutta, His Kind of Woman, Hondo). A skilled and dependable craftsman, he directed no drop-dead masterpieces but was great with long takes.

Married for 20-odd years to Maureen O’Sullivan while constantly catting around, the Roman Catholic Farrow sired seven children, including Mia Farrow.

Co-directors Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg have delivered a respectable effort, often edifying if less than fully satisfying, for reasons I’ll try to explain.

The sage talking heads include Australian directors Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford and Philippe Mora, plus film critics Todd McCarthy, David Thomson, David Stratton, Margaret Pomeranz, Imogen Sara Smith and Farran Smith Nehme. Hollywood biographer Charles Higham and Farrow’s wry look-alike son, John Charles Farrow, also participate.

I’m not a serious Farrow devotee but I respect his assurance and sense of polish and control, and his extra-long takes are Scorsese– or Coppola-level.

I’m as much of a fan of The Big Clock as the next guy. Vincent Price’s performance in His Kind of Woman is one of my all-time camp favorites of the ’40s, and Five Came Back (’39), a crashed-in-the-jungle survival story with Lucille Ball, is a keeper. I’m trying to recall if I saw Farrow’s 1956 remake, Back From Eternity. And the 3-D, John Wayne-starring Hondo is pretty good.

I understand why producer Mike Todd fired Farrow off the direction of Around the World in 80 Days (i.e., Todd wanted a less headstrong director, someone he could push around) but why exactly did Farrow lose the King of Kings gig? The filmmakers couldn’t explore that?

Farrow losing two high-paying 1950s prestige gigs in the space of five years is odd. It alludes to an imperious, uncooperative manner.

Was Farrow’s 1963 heart attack a genetic thing? Was it due to alcohol abuse? Farrow was only 58 when he passed — a relatively early departure for a man who wasn’t overweight.

How many years ago was this doc shot? The answer seems to be “not recently.” Three, four years ago for the most part? More?

Why don’t the filmmakers simply mention where the Farrow family lived in Bel Air? How could that be a violation of anyone’s privacy so many decades after the fact? The home was built for Farrow & O’Sullivan in ‘37.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the absence of Mia Farrow and Ronan Farrow, and especially Mia.

I gather she didn’t participate due to negative feelings about her philandering, possibly emotionally abusive dad, and Ronan undoubtedly passed out of deference to his mom, but really? Mia refuses to sit for an interview because her Catholic father cheated on her mom with “dozens” of women during the heyday of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and she doesn’t want to endorse or seem blasé about that? In the context of her own checkered sexual history, Mia is hardly in a position to judge or throw stones. Very odd. Sexual indulgence and even perversity is seemingly baked into the Farrow clan’s DNA.

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, both in their 50s, are too old to play Lucille Ball in her early 40s and Desi Arnaz in his mid 30s in Aaron Sorkin‘s Being The Ricardos (Amazon, sometime in late December). I’m sorry but they are. Human biology and all that.

Kidman and Bardem can be de-aged with makeup and CG, of course, but will the audience buy it? Or will I be the only one carping and nitpicking while everyone else says “whatever”?

It’s one thing for an actress in her mid 50s to play 15 years younger, which is what Kidman will be doing when she portrays Ball in the early 1950s, when I Love Lucy was hitting its stride and she was in her early 40s. That’s presumably doable with makeup and careful lighting.

But a couple of days ago Sorkin mentioned to TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz that the film will include a scene of rehearsing for Too Many Girls, the 1940 George Abbott musical that Ball and Arnaz costarred in. (And which occasioned their first meeting, which led to their marriage later that year.) That will require the 52 year-old Bardem to play 30 years younger, as Arnaz was 22 or 23 when Girls was shot. Likewise Kidman will have to attempt to look 29 for this section of the film.

From EW summary of Sorkin-Mankiewicz interview: “Sorkin [reveals] that the film focuses on three points of ‘friction’ between Ball and Arnaz that really occurred but that Sorkin has condensed into the timeline of a single week.”

To the best of my knowledge there was one point of friction between Ball and Arnaz — Desi’s infidelity.

“Unregenerate Desilu Hound,” posted on 9.20.21: “As Lucy and Desi prepare over the course of a single week to shoot an episode that will go down in history as having some of the funniest and most memorable scenes to grace television, we will be enthralled to peek into why despite all of that passion and success their world-famous relationship could never be.”

“Cutting to the chase: Arnaz’s Cuban upbringing taught him that catting around outside the bonds of marriage was perfectly acceptable or at least workable.

I don’t know what I doing on the night of Friday, 6.25.93, but I was probably drinking my second or third vodka and lemonade of the evening and watching a laser disc movie in my living room. Maybe the kids were visiting that weekend….can’t remember. But for damn sure I wasn’t watching the final airing of Late Night with David Letterman — Dave’s last night on NBC before moving over to The Late Show on CBS.

It’s been 28 years, and all this time I’ve never watched this clip of Bruce Springsteen, teamed with Paul Shaffer & The World’s Most Dangerous Band, playing fucking “Glory Days.” That might be the best rock performance I’ve ever seen on a regular TV show, including Saturday Night Live.