The layout and graphics of the Criterion Channel are rather pleasing. Soothing even. Plus the film offerings are nicely curated (i.e., not too effete) and egalitarian. I’m still bothered that they won’t specify what format their films are being presented in — 4K, 1080p, 720p or 480p. They’re as forthcoming about formats as North Korea is about the actual health status of Kim Jong Un. (Who may unfortunately be alive, to go by today’s update.) I became a CC subscriber last night. Certainly worth it for $10 a month.

I’ve decided that the coolest sailing ship owned by a Hollywood hotshot was John Ford‘s USS Araner — 106 feet, 147 tons, a significant presence in Donovan’s Reef, now moored in Honolulu. (Ford bought her in 1934, sold her in ’71.) The second coolest is a tie between James Cagney‘s Swift of Ipswitch (bought in ’40, sold in ’58) and David Crosby‘s Mayan, which he owned for 45 years. The third coolest is Humphrey Bogart‘s 55-foot Santana (’45 to Bogart’s death in ’57).

Yes, I’d have trouble defining the differences between a schooner, yawl, sloop, sailboat, ketch and cutter. But I love the romance of the sea plus the idea of having enough time to sail away on one of these things, under whatever circumstance.

John Ford’s USS Araner (’34 to ’71).

James Cagney’s Swift (’40 to ’58).

Weekends used to mean something. Now they mean nothing. Friday is like Monday or Tuesday or Sunday. I’ve even stopped caring what day it is.

Nonetheless with my so-called life caught in a faintly hellish state of suspension I’ve decided to try and slog my way through The Wire again. But God, I resent this. I feel the same way about watching this fucking show that I used to feel about certain homework assignments when I was in my early teens. It’s partly to do with the intense anti-allure of Baltimore. The pall of Barry Levinson and John Waters, etc.

If I was in Baltimore right now I’d be immediately be plotting my escape. I’m a tristate area guy — New Jersey, Connecticut, Manhattan/Brooklyn. I’m also attached to Boston, Hanoi, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, southern Vermont, Key West, Prague, London, Belize, southern Ireland, San Francisco and Livingston, Montana. Just don’t try and force Baltimore on me…Jesus.

Jill Colvin: "Will you pledge never to lie to us from that podium?"

Kayleigh McEnany: "I will never lie to you. You have my word on that." pic.twitter.com/gB5PXoH2Dd

— Contemptor (@TheContemptor) May 1, 2020

Nobody would love to see Chris Nolan‘s Tenet (Warner Bros., 7.17) in a big, swanky theatre more than myself. But can someone explain what it means to “work overtime to ensure theaters can re-open and that movie exhibition business can come roaring back to life,” as IMAX honcho Richard Gelfond said earlier this week about Nolan? How does anyone “work” to make the pandemic go away?

By the way: In my mind Dunkirk is one of Nolan’s greatest films, right up there with Memento and The Dark Knight. I’ve never watched a 4K version of Dunkirk at home (and that in itself might tell you something) but it’s certainly gained upon reflection.

And yet after the curious plot gymnastics of Inception, the deliberately muddy sound design and infuriating storyline in Interstellar and the atrocious yellow and teal-tinted nostalgia version of 2001: A Space Odyssey that Nolan oversaw, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a very slight trepidation about Tenet.

Consider what the trailer might amount to if you take away the reversed action sequences and one-two punches like “what happened here?” and “it hasn’t happened yet”. Seriously, it feels like a kind of cinematic three-card monte.

And don’t forget that aside from being a moderately engaging, good-looking actor, John David Washington lacks that tingly, charismatic “it” factor. Nolan hired him because his BlacKkKlansman performance had generated a certain amount of heat, but remember that old remark about Marilyn Monroe‘s star quality, about how “you can’t take your eyes off her when she enters in a scene”? This is precisely what JDW doesn’t have.

Joe Biden‘s campaign tried to starve the Tara Reade charge with a lack of oxygen. Despite inconsistencies and indications about Reade’s character, this strategy didn’t work. And so Joe went on Morning Joe this morning to try another tack. Joe to Mika: (a) “It never happened…period.” (b) “No, it is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened.” (c) “I assure you it did not happen. Period. Period.”

Berners and righties won’t back off, of course. So what’s next?

I’m honestly not all that intrigued about becoming a Quibi subscriber. Not now, at least. But tomorrow’s another day.

Quibi honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg to Gold Derby‘s Bill McCuddy: “”A commitment to watch a Quibi show or an episode is six to eight minutes. And a series is two hours. To watch a Netflix series — I’m in the middle of Ozark right now — that’s ten hours. And theirs is about watching on a TV set and ours is about watching on a phone.”

McCuddy: “So you have no regret about launching in the middle of a pandemic with people unable to watch your content on TV?”

Katzenberg: “I have 100% regret about it. The good news about being a startup and being entrepreneurial is that when your customer talks to you, if not shouts at you, you must listen. And so literally we will launch, in less than two weeks, an update for the app that will let people watch Quibi on their TV set. That’s something we didn’t anticipate. And obviously we didn’t realize the world would be sheltered in place, literally. If that’s what the customer wants it’s our job to give it to them.”

“A novel angle on achieving notoriety in the art world is revealed in The Painter and the Thief, an engrossing Norwegian documentary born of the unlikely but resilient bond between a young female artist (Barbora Kysilkova) and a career criminal (Karl-Bertil Nordland) who stole two of her large canvases. Benjamin Ree’s second feature doc, after Carlsen, a widely seen 2015 portrait of Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, thrives on its odd couple pairing of two societal misfits in turmoil brought together by real circumstances — a situation that most fiction writers would reject as too contrived. Substantially in English, the film has an unusual and positive nature that will help find it homes in docu-friendly markets.” — from Todd McCarthy’s 1.123.20 THR review.

Yesterday the combined forces of Steven Gaydos and “Norton Ghomestead‘ tried to discredit a popular notion that Pauline Kael’s epic-sized New Yorker rave of Bonnie and Clyde was a key factor in that 1967 film’s revival, following a dispiriting late-summer release.

Ghomestead maintained that “Warner Bros. promotion guys, realizing that savvy showmen in the south were doing well with [Bonnie and Clyde] as a Thunder Road-like tale of high spirited lawbreaking, smartly capitalized on that [and thereby gradually] made it a hit”.

Gaydos reposted his 2003 Variety piece (“Truth takes bullet with Clyde tale”) which basically said that the legend about Kael’s review is not supported by research and that the film gradually became a hit through old-fashioned blood, sweat and tears — i.e., the promotional kind.

HE reply: I see. Thanks, guys, for straightening me out. So to sum up (and please correct me if I’ve got this wrong), Pauline Kael’s landmark reassessment in The New Yorker had little if anything to do with saving Bonnie and Clyde. Instead it was the Warner promo guys re-selling it as a “Thunder Road-like tale of high-spirited lawbreaking” to redneck audiences.

A film inspired by the French New Wave, a film that was clearly ahead of its time, a film that Francois Truffaut was initially interested in but passed on, a film with an art-filmy impressionistic sequence when Bonnie and Clyde visit her frail old mom, and another when they’re found wounded and bloodied by Okies,,..this alternately edgy and poignant film was reborn when WB sales guys pitched it to Nehi Cream Soda-drinking yokels. So Pauline Kael was incidental at best. Got it. Check.

I’ll accept the Gaydos assessment — “Bonnie and Clyde [was] carefully nurtured from Montreal to Manhattan with both studio and private promotion, solid reviews and solid business and given time to build into a breakout hit just as dozens of other films of the era had” — blended with the impact of the Kael piece, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Without tossing out the redneck promotion side-story, the likeliest scenario is that Beatty saved the film (and his own financial ass) by refusing to back off in his dispute with the antagonistic Jack L. Warner, to the point of threatening legal action.

Wiki excerpt: ” At first, Warner Bros. did not promote Bonnie and Clyde for general release, but mounted only limited regional releases that seemed to confirm its misgivings about the film’s lack of commercial appeal.

“Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde‘s producer and star, complained to Warner Bros. that if the company was willing to go to so much trouble for Reflections in a Golden Eye (they had changed the coloration scheme at considerable expense), their neglect of his film, which was getting excellent press, suggested a conflict of interest; he threatened to sue the company.

“Warner Bros. gave Beatty’s film a general release. Much to the surprise of Warner Bros.’ management, the film eventually became a major box office success.”

HE hereby apologizes to Spike Jonze for having posted the badly-scored version of his landmark 2005 Gap commercial, “Pardon Our Dust,” instead of the correct one. The correct version [directly below but shitty looking] uses Edvard Grieg‘s “In The Hall of The Mountain King,” which lends an arch, mock-bombastic air to the raucous destruction of the Gap store. The incorrectly scored version, posted yesterday, uses a sickening Up With People recording of “Don’t Stand Still.” Between the two videos is a 2005 paragraph (written, I think, by an Ad Age reviewer) about the differences.

During a chat with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn about Spike Jonze‘s Beastie Boys Story doc (AppleTV+), Beastie Boy Mike “Mike D” Diamond notes that during the watching of Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder, “Every three minutes something happens where you’re like, ‘That could never be in a movie in 2020.'”

Kohn: “It often seems like Stiller doesn’t get enough credit as a filmmaker.”

MD: “He really doesn’t. Cable Guy is incredible.”

Spike Jonze: “Escape From Dannemora is incredible.”

Jonah Hill: “I’ve heard ‘Stiller doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker’ enough to think that there’s something behind it. He’s made so many bangers. I think there’s something interesting in that statement in itself. He’s made like five of my favorite movies. Then I heard this from film people, that he doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker, but maybe it’s a backhanded compliment, because who says he doesn’t get enough props as a filmmaker? Do you think it’s because, if he just had that roster of five films we all love — if his IMDb was just, Reality Bites, Tropic Thunder, Zoolander, Cable Guy and Escape From Dannemora, you’d be like, ‘This guy is one of the best guys around.’ You think it’s because he’s also so famous as an actor that it strips back some of his props as a filmmaker?”

Kohn: “Jonah, this all feels very meta since, like Stiller, you’re a comedy guy now making your way into directing movies.”

JH: “I couldn’t know yet because I haven’t made enough films. But of course, I’m interested in that question. It’s so fascinating. There’s a selfish interest in that, but I’m also thinking about it as a fan of him as a director.”

MD: “Here’s an interesting footnote: Adam and I first met Ben Stiller after Paul’s Boutique came out, and after Cable Guy came out. We had this shared misery of putting all this time into a project that we respectively completely believed in. We didn’t even question it. To make stuff for this company and they’re like, ‘This thing is great’. And then it completely tanks commercially. But then some people say they love it. It’s a weird conflict.”