When the facts come out from the New York Attorney General’s report on allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviors concerning Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the general conclusion will be the same: However anyone slices it, Cuomo appears to have behaved in an astonishingly clueless way with…what is it, four or five accusers?

The #MeToo movement has been up and rolling for three years and change, and somehow Cuomo, a high-profile politician constantly under media glare, thought he could be casually handsy and familiar and whatnot? How hard could it have been for Cuomo to understand that shit doesn’t work any more?

There’s one thing that nobody’s mentioned, partly because it would sound cruel or below-the-belt to do so. But here goes anyway: Gov. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t look like Brad Pitt, George Clooney or Cary Grant in their respective heydays. Nor does he look like Chris Cuomo.

Another way to put it is that Gov. Cuomo is somewhat homely. I think it’s fair to say that, and I think most of us understand two things: (1) Because of their looks and magnetism and ease with women throughout their lives, Pitt, Clooney and Grant put out vibes that most women regard as alluring, cool, gentle and for the most part good to be around. Generally speaking it’s very hard (but not impossible) for guys in Pitt, Clooney and Grant’s league to offend women by showing interest or in some instances even coming on to them. It’s also relatively easy for a homely man to generate a stand-offish or negative reaction from same.

An hour ago I felt a spark of humor in a familiar notion — i.e., derogatory nicknames of failed movies and Broadway shows. And then it died.

I’ve never been much for laughing out loud (I’m basically an LQTM-er) so it means something when I blurt out a chuckle while experiencing a mild chest spasm, and that’s what happened at 6:10 am when I was reading a Wiki bio of lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, Camelot). In May ‘83 a Lerner-directed B’way musical (co-created with Charles Strouse) called Dance A Little Closer opened and closed the same night. Wags called it Close A Little Faster.

I was immediately reminded of a John Travolta-Scarlet Johansson relationship film called A Love Song for Bobby Long (Lionsgate, 1.21.05). Directed by Shainee Gabel and set in New Orleans, the 120-minute film, which tanked after earning a 43% RT rating, was dubbed Bobby Way Too Long.

Now I can’t think of any others. C’mon! I did a Google search…zip. I know they’re out there. Please.

One more Alan Jay Lerner-ism. The famed lyricist and librettist was married eight times. Quote from one of Lerner’s ex-wives: “Marriage is Alan’s way of saying goodbye.” That’s funny! I’m sorry but it is.

“Near the conclusion of North by Northwest, Cary Grant finds himself in something of a pickle.

“His true love, Eva Marie Saint, is dangling helplessly in space on the face of Mount Rushmore. If she falls, splat. The reason she has not fallen is that Grant is holding her with one hand while with the other he grabs a rock ledge. Not easy. Watching all this is Martin Landau, the subvillain, who stands a few feet away, holding the precious statuette that contains valuable microfilm inside, said microfilm being of great danger to America should it fall into enemy hands. Grant, desperate, looks up at Landau and asks for help.

“Landau walks over to Grant and, instead of bending down and aiding him, puts his foot on Grant’s fingers and begins pressing down. He grinds his shoe down as hard as he can.

“That’s the pickle.

“Now, between that moment and the end to of this superb Ernest Lehman-Alfred Hitchcock collaboration, the following occurs:

a) Martin Landau is made to cease and desist.
b) Grant saves himself.
c) Grant also saves Eva Marie Saint.
d) The two of them get married.
e) The microfilm is saved for America.
f) James Mason, the chief villain, is captured and handed over to the authorities.
g) Grant and Saint take a train ride back east.

“That’s a lot of narrative to be successfully tied up. And I would like you to guess how long it takes in terms of screen time for it to be accomplished. Got your guess? Here’s the answer…

“Forty-three seconds.

“I don’t know of a more adroit ending to a film.” — from a passage in William Goldman‘s “Adventures in the Screen Trade.”

I’m sorry to argue with Bill, but check the time code. If you start exactly at the moment when Landau puts his foot on top of Grant’s hand (1:20) and end exactly at the moment when the film goes to black as Bernard Herrmann‘s music crashes to a finish and the train surges through the tunnel (2:20), the elapsed time is 60 seconds.

Jasmila Zbanić‘s Quo Vadis, Aida? has been kicking around since last September’s Venice Film Festival, where it premiered. I finally saw it this morning, and I knew within five or ten it was a thumbs-upper. It’s a blistering, horrifying, you-are-there account of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — 8000 Bosnian men and boys murdered in cold blood by Serbian troops under the command of Ratko Mladic.

For me it ranks alongside other Bosnian brutality-of-war dramas like In The Land of Blood and Honey, Welcome to Sarajevo and No Man’s Land.

It’s not a suspense piece or a classic war drama but a mother’s perspective saga that asks “who if anyone will survive the coming massacre?” You can feel it coming from around the corner.

It focuses on Aida (Jasna Djuricic), a Bosnian translator for blue-helmeted UN troops with enough access to understand that Muslim men in Srebrenica may be in serious danger once Bladic’s Army of Republika Srpska invades.

Aida is politically protected by her job, but her husband (Izudin Bajrovic) and two adult sons (Boris Ler, Dino Bajrovic) are vulnerable. The film is about Aida trying to use her connections to protect her family from the evil intent of General Mladić (Boris Isakovic). If you know anything about Bosnian War chronicles, you know it’s a lost cause.

Quo Vadis, Aida? is the Bosnia-Herzogovina submission for the 2021 Best International Feature Oscar. It should win.

Last night I saw Radu Jade‘s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, an oddly shaped Romanian comedy-satire about sexuality, hypocrisy and middle-class rage in modern-day Bucharest.

The star is Katia Pascariu, playing a high-school teacher. It’s composed of three sections. The first is a raunchy home-made sex tape…slurpy, squishy…performed by Katia and her husband.

Chapter 2 is an aimless and meandering downshift in which Katia walks around Bucharest, crossing endless boulevards and walking down endless sidewalks as she hears from her husband that the sex tape has somehow found its way online,l. This naturally alarms as she could lose her job.

Chapter 3 is the best — a contentious parent-teacher meeting in which Katia’s sex tape is discussed and kicked around.

Jade uses three separate endings — one in which Katia is vindicated and keeps her job, another in which she loses it, and a third in which Katia’s fantasy avatar punishes the parents for their small-mindedness.

I was hot to see Bad Luck Banging after it won the the Golden Bear prize at the 71st Berlin International Film Festival. The other Berlinale contenders must have been fairly shitty for Bad Luck Banging to win the big prize.

Just fooling around…a bit creepy but you can convert any still.

Sidney Lumet’s sprawling urban epic cost $8.6 million to make, earned $8,124,356. Lumet and Jay Presson Allen‘s script ran 240 pages. The film runs 167 minutes. I would’ve been fine with 180 or even 200 minutes. The 40th anniversary is on 8.21.21.

For the last three years HE has been lamenting the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and pointing out parallels between cancel culture and the horrific prosecutorial atmosphere of the late ’40s and ’50s as far as Hollywood blacklists were concerned.

It is therefore…I wouldn’t say comforting as much as reassuring that The Telegraph‘s Tom Fordy has arrived at the same observation.

There’s a senior editor at a certain publication who’s actually accused me of being an alarmist with a persecution complex, and has stressed that in order to correct my ad situation I need to generate more alpha vibes and do more loving and sweet-talking.

I’ve actually been doing that all along. Hollywood Elsewhere believes in love and hugs, especially when it comes to Carey Mulligan, Billy Wilder, Lakeith Stanfield, Amanda Seyfried, Riz Ahmed, Cameron Crowe, Steve McQueen, et. al.

But we are living through a time of social terror and political repression, and it is the late ’40s and ’50s all over again, and the sooner people stop dismissing that face-palm reality and stand up to the purist nutters the better off we’ll all be.

HE to Cameron Crowe, author of “Conversations with Wilder“, a 1999 career retrospective book in which he and Billy Wilder discussed damn near everything:

If anyone was an auteur-level director from the ’40s to early ’50s, it was the great Billy Wilder. And yet he ducked out of the realm of personal filmmaking for a 4 and 1/2 year period in the mid ’50s. Call it his house-director phase in which he made five engaging, pro-level studio entertainments that nonetheless didn’t exactly have that distinctive Wilder stamp.

The films were Sabrina (’54), The Seven Year Itch (’55), The Spirit of St. Louis (’57), Love in the Afternoon (’57) and Witness for the Prosecution (’57).

During those 4 1/2 years, beginning with the release of Stalag 17 and ending when he began work on Some Like It Hot in early ‘58, Wilder apparently decided it would be better to stop being “Billy Wilder” for a while.

Was it because the studio chiefs (and perhaps even Wilder himself) had recoiled from the battery-acid tone and financial failure of Ace in the Hole? Was it the basic schmaltzy mood of the mid ‘50s, the era of Eisenhower-era conformity, the underlying mindset of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

Was it some kind of twitch in his chest, something in the air that told him that it would be temporarily smarter to put away the acrid pen and sharp satirical impulses and just submit to the flow of the times? Did Wilder decide to just enjoy the money and be a successful director because there was nothing wrong with that?

Jarring social changes happened during these 4 and 1/2 years. Brando-ish rebellion (“Whadaya got?), Elvis, Little Richard & Jerry Lee, “Howl” and Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac, spiritual fatigue and ennui in your middle-class suburbs (No Down Payment), blacklisting & Commie witch hunts, H-bomb testing in the Pacific, monster and sci-fi movies, black leather juvies, Fats Domino, be-bop babies, The Blob.

Did Wilder feel thrown by all this? Was he amused by it? Excited? Energized? Confused?

Surely you raised these topics during your hours and hours of conversation with Wilder in the mid to late ‘90s. Did he ever give you a money quote or some kind of concise answer about any of this?

Mr. Crowe to HE: “I think there’s truth in the theory that the lack of success of Ace in the Hole gave him pause. He was very proud of that movie, he said, particularly with that wickedly dark tone that could hold a line like his wife Audrey pitched — ‘kneeling bags my nylons.’ While I was interviewing him, he heard that Spike Lee wanted to remake Ace. He was very pleased about that. He was a fan of Spike Lee and the sharpness of his voice. When I wrote other directors to ask if any of them had questions for Wilder, Spike wrote back in twenty minutes about Ace. This made Billy VERY happy.

“But in the ‘house director’ phase you are pinpointing, there are certainly movies that he was very proud of. He loved Sabrina, particularly the Holden performance. He really disliked Bogart, but was still proud of the movie and the filmmaking. Love in the Afternoon was his Lubitsch tribute, and he was proud of that, even with the age difference that kept Cooper in the shadows for many of the set-ups. And Witness had his favorite actor of all-time, Charles Laughton.

Set in Paris, Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (’57) is about an unlikely romance between a 20something cello student named Ariane Chavasse (Audrey Hepburn) and a 50something Lothario named Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper). I’ve never seen it and am still reluctant. There’s a reason.

All my life I’ve felt that the 28 year age gap between the 55 year-old Cooper (born in ’01, film shot in ’56) and the 27 year-old Hepburn (born in ’29) was too much. In fact if you wanted to crank yourself up you could call Love in the Afternoon a late-arriving #MeToo lightning rod film….cancel Billy Wilder! He wrote and directed a “romantic” scenario in which Cooper preyed upon a naive and unsuspecting Hepburn!

I would have watched it if Cary Grant (whom Wilder tried to get) had played the Cooper role — he was 52 when the film was made in ’56, but looked mid to late 40ish. So we’d have been talking about an apparent 20-year age gap instead. That would’ve gone down pretty well.

If Cooper had better genes and looked younger (i.e., like he did in The Fountainhead, shot in ’48 when he was 47) he would’ve been a better fit for Love in the Afternoon. But Coop looked around 60 or 62 in Wilder’s film. If you squinted your eyes Love in the Afternoon felt like a thing about a guy wanting to diddle a woman who was young enough to be his granddaughter.

Wiki admission: “The film was a commercial failure in the United States. It did not resonate with American audiences in part because Cooper looked too old to be having an affair with Hepburn’s young character. Wilder himself admitted, ‘It was a flop. Why? Because I got Coop the week he suddenly got old’. However, in Europe, the film was a major success, released under the title Ariane.”

Recorded at the wedding of songwriter Peter Rafelson (son of director Bob Rafelson, a longtime Nicholson friend and collaborator), sometime in the early to mid ’80s.

Jack is speaking about an ancient toothpaste called Ipana, manufactured by Bristol-Myers Company. Infamous for its yellow color, the wintergreen-flavored toothpaste (0.243% sodium fluoride was its active ingredient) reached its peak market penetration during the 1950s. Marketing of Ipana used a Disney-created mascot named Bucky Beaver.

HE is about to watch Coming 2 America. Sorry for being the slow guy. I was going to watch it last night, and then…you don’t want to know. It’s streaming worldwide. I wasn’t a fan of the original 1988 film because I felt it was too wealth-porny, and I guess I’m not feeling today’s current because the C2A trailer makes it feel like more or less the same.

I was a huge fan of early, extra-nervy Eddie Murphy. Mr. T in a gay bar, that line of country. In ’81 or thereabouts I caught him live at the old Catch A Rising Star (1st Avenue between 77th and 78th). I saw him again at the Universal Amphitheatre in ’83…blew the roof off. His Rudy Moore in 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name was obviously a huge, historic comeback. but Craig Brewer’s film was as far away from wealth porn qs it could get.