At 1:19 pm today Exhibitor Relations Co. (‪@ERCboxoffice‬) announced that Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, sometime in November) has been rated R for “language throughout, drug content and some violence.” HE question: In what realm does “some” violence warrant an R rating? And who cares about drug use and salty language? What is this, the mid 1950s?

Sundance ’21 will basically be doing a TIFF next January, which is to say they’ll mostly be streaming films with a drastically reduced physical presence in terms of theatres, ticketing and office space. And they’re cutting down from the usual ten days to seven (Thursday, 1.28 through Wednesday, 2.3).

Plus limited screenings, a heavy digital component and, if it’s “safe” again, an assortment of world premiere screenings in a number of U.S. states all around the country. In short, they don’t see the pandemic situation getting much better six months hence.

In other words, fizzle fuck. Relatively few people cared about wokester Sundance fare before. Now they REALLY won’t care.

From a 2.1.20 HE rant called “Official Verdict: Sundance ’20 Blew Chunks“: “Like I’ve said a few times, Sundance has more or less woked itself into a corner, and now it’s pretty much stuck with that brand or identity badge and can’t hope to free itself. The wokeness has been strident and persistent. The die is cast.”

There was always the chance that Charlie Kaufman might try to re-shape Iain Reid‘s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” into something less spooky and malevolent and a little more dryly comedic and perverse (i.e., Kaufmanesque).

The just-released trailer for Kaufman’s film suggests not. It feels like a psychological Middle American horror film by way of a 21st Century “Wisconsin Death Trip“…perhaos a subtle, less emphatic version of Ari Aster‘s Hereditary or at least a film that flirts with the creepy. Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley are the victims; Toni Collette and David Thewlis are the ghouls.

A24 has assigned no theatrical release date for this Sundance “hit” (i.e., ecstatic Park City response = not that much among the hoi polloi), but Jordan Ruimy is hearing “it could be the first, and possibly only, A24 feature to go fully digital this year.”

“Zola Pan Flash,” posted on 1.25.20: I don’t know from Janicza Bravo‘s Zola as I’m not in Park City, etc. But last night at the Eccles (a) the mob went apeshit for it and (b) certain black critics got on certain white critics for not liking it and/or using the wrong terminology in their positive reviews.

I’m imagining that Zola might become the next Tangerine…right? Hipster filmgoers have room in their heads for this kind of thing. Absurd humor, Floridian sleaze, based on a 2015 Twitter tale, etc.

Zola “is all about escalation. Bravo is a talented filmmaker, but there is nary a subtle moment in her overtly stylish frames. One imagines that with a better screenplay she will eventually give us a special film someday.” — from Jordan Ruimy’s World of Reel review.

HE friendlies are hereby asked to regard the sweater worn last night by costar Nicholas Braun, 31, and render an honest verdict. Purple, tan and cream-biege. You can’t order a person to show taste in this realm. You can’t slap them into submission. I’m not the only person to suggest that Millennials may be the most atrociously-dressed generation in American history.

I can’t find the embed code for the trailer for Adilkhan Yerzhanov‘s Yellow Cat as it seems to be temporarily exclusive to Indiewire.

Pic is a Badlands-influenced “kids on the run” flick. It’s clearly aimed at the scholastic cineaste crowd (Guy Lodge, Peter Debruge, Eric Kohn, David Fear, Alison Willmore) as well as free-thinking types like myself. It will premiere under the Horizon section of the 2020 Venice Film Festival (Wednesday, 9.2 through Saturday, 9.12).

Free the Yellow Cat trailer from the Indiewire cage! It needs to be free and find its own feet and be re-posted a thousand times!

You’ll notice that the music in the Yellow Cat trailer sounds awfully close to Carl Orff’s “Gassenhauer”, the theme for Terrence Malick’s afore-mentioned Badlands (’73). The same music (or a close facsimile) was adopted by Hans Zimmer for his score for Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino‘s True Romance (’93).

Boilerplate: Set in Kazakhstan, Yellow Cat is about criminally inclined Kermek (Azamat Nigmanov) and main squeeze Eva (Kamila Nugmanova) hoping to escape dark fate by building a cinema in the mountains.” Indiewire line: “Will Kermek’s love for 1960s French cinema icon Alain Delon, and particularly Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, be strong enough to keep them away from crime gangs’ violent clutches?”

This morning a producer friend sent me the below video (shot in September 2019) of Cafe Deux Magots. I watched, frowned and sent her the following:

In early October 1987, my ex-wife Maggie and I (plus my parents, her brother Andy and his girlfriend and three or four others) went to Cafe Deux Magots for a post-wedding reception after we exchanged vows at St. Julien Le Pauvre. The song in the air was Sting’s “We’ll Be Together.” Mild, warmish weather. Nearly 33 years ago.

I haven’t been to Cafe Deux Magots since then. It’s been around since 1884, and particularly since Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Paris heyday in the ‘20s (although Hemingway preferred Cafe de Flore), and I seem to recall it being a fairly cool Left Bank haunt when I first visited Paris in June of ‘76.

But 11 years later this storied place and in fact the whole neighborhood had begun to transition into an aggressive tourist destination, all but swamped with Americans, Germans, Brits and the like. In the same category as Cafe de la Paix near the old Opera house.

Now it seems to have been scrubbed of that old vibe and atmosphere. Still the same place, of course, but at the same time too new and gleaming and renovated. And swarming with Middle Eastern conspicuous consumption types along with all the other rubes. They kill da coolness.

A truly great Paris cafe has to radiate a certain present-tense hum (locals enjoying a slight edge over tourists) and be well maintained, but at the same time it needs to feel a tiny bit musty and tainted by history — pleasantly odorous (strong coffee, unfiltered Galouises, fresh and fragrant croissants) and faintly haunted. Today’s Cafe Deux Magots looks and feels like a Disneyworid recreation.

Deadline‘s Tom Grater speaking to Gerard Lemoine, owner of indie venue Cinepal in Palaiseau, a suburb south of Paris:

“Lemoine explained that he decided to make the video to express his frustration after hearing about Disney’s decision to go straight to Disney Plus. He said that he has been promoting Mulan ‘for months’ and that he and his fellow operators had hoped the film would be a key title to boost their re-opening efforts. Cinemas re-opened in France in June, and Lemoine admitted it has been an uphill battle since then to attract audiences, even in the famously cinema-hungry nation.

“It’s really a huge effort to stay open right now for most of us, but we were assuming there would be some ambitious movie releases in the coming weeks,” he said. “By losing Mulan, we lost the possibility of offering our audiences a long-awaited film that would have helped us after these past hard weeks. It is also a bad message to send to the public [who had been expecting a theatrical release].”

La réaction d’un exploitant suite à la décision de Disney… #Mulan pic.twitter.com/I2uWICofve

— Destination Ciné (@destinationcine) August 6, 2020

I started to think about embracing sobriety in late 2010 or early 2011…somewhere in there. I didn’t have a huge “problem” outside of occasionally drinking too much wine at parties, but I wanted to re-experience life as I had in my tweener and early teen years. A cleaner system, better sleeping habits, more productivity and no morning hangovers.

But Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which I’d sampled at my father’s suggestion, had always left me feeling somewhere between depressed and horrified, and particularly by the reliance on the King James Bible and the general philosophy of being powerless. My basic attitude was that “powerless” can blow me. I still feel that way.

And then I read Pete Hamill‘s “A Drinking Life” (’94), an account of his boozing decades and his late-in-life decision to leave it all behind for the sake of clarity and increased brain cells. I read the book in the fall of 2011. It gave me confidence to quit without those tiresome AA people in my life. If Hamill could do it, so could I. I finally ditched wine and beer on 3.20.12. I’ve always felt hugely grateful to Hamill for helping me get there.

From Kate Erbland’s 8.5 Indiewire piece, “Tenet Unlikely to Screen for U.S. Press in Major Cities Ahead of International Premiere”:

“Two sources close to Warner Bros. confirmed that press screenings will take place for the film, but it will not screen in markets in which theaters are not currently open. For the moment, that means that Tenet won’t be shown to press in major markets like New York City or Los Angeles, where both theaters and smaller screening rooms remain closed.”

How does this square with what Indiewire‘s Tom Brueggemann posted on 7.31: “In the U.S. today, 45 states permit indoor theaters to operate (with safety precautions) in all or most locations. Because of lack of new product, most have yet to do so. To preclude the September 3 opening, governments would have to shut them down — and that’s much more difficult to do than delaying permission to open.

Brueggemann “spoke to exhibition sources in some of the riskier regions who question whether they will make the date, but it’s clear that most of the nation’s cinemas will open as allowed. They are not irresponsible people, but their companies’ survival depends on this. And they will play Tenet.”

So WB will screen Tenet for journos who reside in markets outside of NY and LA?

Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo are not going to reopen their respective states until late in the fall.

The massive Beirut explosion looked like an A-bomb detonation in early 1950s Nevada or Utah, or somewhere in the South Pacific. Apologies to Variety‘s Manori Ravindran, but it reminded me of the montage of nuclear blasts at the end of Dr. Strangelove. We think we have it bad here in the States. Well, actually we do, but not as bad as those poor people who were covered in blood and stumbling around in Beirut yesterday. Ghastly.

In Episode 2 of Spotify’s “The Michelle Obama Podcast,” the former First Lady says that she’s “dealing with some form of low-grade depression” because of the pandemic, racial strife and the “hypocrisy” of the Trump administration.

That’s me — I’ve been low-grade glooming since last March.

Obama tells NPR‘s Michele Norris about her “emotional highs and lows,” and how “exhausting” and “dispiriting” it is to assess endless episodes in which people of color has been hurt or killed. Her depression is “not just because of the quarantine but because of the racial strife…spiritually, these are not fulfilling times, [and] this has led to a weight that I haven’t felt in my life, in a while.”

But not a single word about the increasingly annoying Portland and Seattle protests (to what end?), or about cancel culture or the unwillingness of Democrats to stand up to the Khmer Rouge. Wokesters are not universally admired out there. There’s more to what ails this country than what Michelle mentioned,