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Posted on 2.10.09: “On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

“The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes. The driver barrel-assed all the way from Porte Dauphine (the city’s western edge, adjacent to the Bois de Bologne) to the Basilica Sacre Coeur in Montmartre.

“On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.a

“No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 mph (or was it kph?) in some stretches. The footage reveals him running a red lights or two, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up several one-way streets.

“Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.”

HE won’t be seeing this long–delayed Tom Cruise blockbuster sequel until the morning of May 10th.

Straight-from-the-shoulder reaction from Bonasera, The Godfather undertaker: “My beautiful daughter couldn’t even weep because of the smelly feet of the man sitting next to us. And yet I wept. Why did I weep? Because I’ve been watching Tom a’Cruise movies for more than 40 years, and here he still is…still a movie star, still pitching fastballs, still hale and hearty. Okay, so it was filmed between three and four years ago. This doesn’t bother me. Because Tom a’Cruise, he make-ah me cry,”

John Hinckley, who shot but didn’t kill President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, became a featured musical character in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (‘90). Perhaps this is what gave Hinckley, partially released from supervised psychiatric care two years ago, the idea of becoming a real-life roving troubadour.

Alas, a forthcoming Hinckley gig in Hamden, Connecticut (Space Ballroom, July 16), has been cancelled due to a sizable negative response.

Imagine that in addition to nearly killing Texas governor John Connolly, Lee Harvey Oswald only wounded JFK on 11.22.63. 40 years later Oswald is released from psychiatric care, and decides to star in a one-man lounge act, “An Evening with O.H. Lee: Poetry, Philosophy, Impressions.”

You can almost set your watch by mainstream Hollywood’s refusal to cast younger actors who bear even a FAINT resemblance to the older actors they’re supposed to be the sons or daughters of.

In Ol Parker’s Ticket to Paradise (Universal, 10.21), Kaitlyn Dever (5’ 2”) is playing the daughter of George Clooney (5’ 11”) and Julia Roberts (5’9”). I’m sorry but tallish parents almost never produce Hobbitt-sized children.

Plus Dever doesn’t even vaguely resemble Clooney or Roberts. Casting directors are infamous for ignoring this basic genetic tendency, but family resemblance IS a stubborn trait. Apologies.

Parker directed and wrote 2018’s Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. Do the math.

Plus the film is supposed to be largely set in the Indonesia’s Bali region, and yet shooting was done in or near Australia’s Queensland resort area. Why? Why not just set it in Oz? I hate movies that do this.

The vast majority of us (99.5%) accept and live by the idea of deferring or side-stepping to avoid any sort of physical conflict. Let it go, head down, duck and cover, etc. Alas, the below video falls under the heading of “regrettable but understandable racism.” Honest question: How is this young woman’s defiant, looking-for-trouble attitude substantially different from the attitude of young Liam Neeson during that notorious incident in the early ’80s, give or take?

Race obsessed tiktoker films herself walking around “not moving out of the way for white people” as a form of “reparations.” pic.twitter.com/iTWwbDCuPj

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 27, 2022

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Kasi Lemmons‘ I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Sony, 12.21), a cradle-to-grave biopic of the late Whitney Houston, was screened last night in Las Vegas, and the word (I spoke to two viewers) is definitely on the approving side.

It’s longish (150 minutes, give or take) and technically incomplete, as is normal for any film that’s more than eight months from opening. And it covers almost all of the biographical basics for Whitney fans — definitely a fan-service presentation.

For what it’s worth one guy’s reaction is through the roof about Naomi Ackie‘s Whitney performance. I know nothing about Ackie except that (a) she’s British and (b) played the smallish role of “Jannah” in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

What kind of movie is I Wanna Dance With Somebody? Honest response: “It’s a TIFF People’s Award winner…it’s not a Venice or Telluride type of film…it’s been made for your hoi polloi faithful. And yet it’s intelligent and well-written as far as biopics go…screenplay by Anthony McCarten, shot by Zero Dark Thirty‘s Barry Aykroyd. Nothing wrong with that. It takes all sorts of films to make a world.

It’s basically a six-character drama — Ackie as Houston, Ashton Sanders as Bobby Brown, Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawford (Whitney’s girlfriend), Clarke Peters as Whitney’s father and Tamara Tunie as her mom.

Houston’s Bodyguard costar Kevin Costner isn’t a character in the film.

I seem to recall that David O. Russell‘s officially-titled Amsterdam (20th Century, 11.4) was being referred to as Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Not in trade stories but in unofficial circles. And then came that perplexing, all-but-meaningless title of Canterbury Glass. And now we’re back to Amsterdam.

The long-gestating 1930s period drama, fortified with a cavalcade of big-name costars (including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Zoe Saldaña, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Taylor Swift) and a story involving fraud and skullduggery…I don’t know what I’m saying but I should admit that I feel a wee bit concerned. I know nothing at all. Just an insect antennae signal.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), a Mexico City-based “nostalgic comedy” about a Mexican journalist and documentarian (Daniel Giménez Cacho) working his way through identity and cultural issues, is now an official Netflix release.

It will therefore receive the whole bucks-up, blue-chip Lisa Taback and Albert Tello red-carpet ooh-lah-lah treatment as part of a deluxe award-season campaign, with a likely launch at Venice/Telluride.

Shot on 65mm (love that aspect!) and costarring Griselda Siciliani, Bardo will debut in certain upscale theatre venues before streaming on Netflix.

Bardo is Spanish for “bard,” which most of us associate with William Shakespeare. The conventional definition is “a poet, traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular oral tradition.”

For several months I’ve been asking myself why Bardo sounds so familiar, but I couldn’t figure it out. This morning it hit me — Bardahl Motor Oil, which used to heavily advertise on TV in the mid to late 20th Century.

I have to be honest: When I read earlier today about Amber Heard’s alleged personality disorders, I immediately wondered if I suffer from any such maladies. Or if some of the HE regulars do. I don’t think I have any debilitating personality issues, but I had to look in the mirror and ask myself “well…do you?”

Guardian story: Shannon Curry, an expert in intimate partner violence, testified that her evaluation of Amber Heard revealed two psychiatric diagnoses –– (a) borderline personality disorder and (b) histrionic personality disorder.

“Curry said that Heard, 36, displayed a “reactive”, “overly dramatic presentation” and used words like “magical” and “wonderful” to describe events. Heard, she said, flitted between “princess and victim”.

“As sophisticated, “cute and girlish” as such people may present, Curry said, they “may in reality be very destructive”, “dramatic, erratic and unpredictable” and possessed of an “underlying drive to not be abandoned but also to be [the] center of attention”.

“Curry said borderline personality disorder represented an unstable personality, alert to rejection, with little access to self-regulation and marked by “a lot of anger, cruelty toward people less powerful, concerned with image, attention-seeking and prone to externalizing blame, a lot of suppressed anger that may explode outwards”.