Sunday, 2.9.20 feels like a century ago. Nine weeks have actually passed. Imagine yourself at the Neon/Parasite Oscar-viewing party at Soho House. You’ve been there six and a half hours, Bong Joon-ho has won four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Int’l Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay) and the whole party is whoo-whooing and sipping the champagne. You’re thinking BJH probably won’t show until after midnight or even 1 or 2 am, and that hanging around for another three or four hours isn’t worth the exhaustion.

So you say goodnight to some friends and walk down the staircase and step into the elevator. You arrive at the ground-level parking lot floor and suddenly a younger, tuxedo-wearing guy you kind of “know” but whose name escapes smiles and shakes your hand and says “got a minute?” He pulls you over to an empty corner in the parking area. You’re half intrigued. His right hand is resting protectively on your left shoulder as he leans forward and begins to half-whisper the following:

Tuxedo Guy: “This is going to sound weird and maybe even mind-numbing but what I’m about to tell you is God’s honest truth. I can’t tell you how I know but I do. I’m not bullshitting and I wish I was…”
HE: “Okay.”
Tuxedo Guy: (Exhales) “There’s no easy way to say this but in a few weeks’ time your life will all but totally stop. All of us, everyone, the whole thing. Europe, Asia, everywhere. You’ll continue with the column but everything else will stop. No more incomes, no more travelling, no more restaurants, no more socializing, no more screenings or film festivals, no more wandering around Amoeba Records, no more Aero theatre, no more hiking or beach-walking…it’s all going to screech to a halt.”
HE: “That’s the punchline?”
Tuxedo Guy: “It’s real, man.”
HE: “You heard this today?”
Tuxedo Guy: “I know. Believe me. I’m telling you the truth.”
HE: “Caused by what? A nuclear attack?”
Tuxedo Guy: “No bombs, no terror, not a sound. When it happens you’ll be able to hear a pin drop.”
HE: “When what happens?”

Books, stories and documentaries about Howard Hughes are fascinating, but the two big films about him — Martin Scorsese‘s The Aviator (’04) and Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply (’16) — left me (and, I’m presuming, millions of others) disengaged and dispirited. Especially in the case of The Aviator, which may be Scorsese’s least enjoyable film, Cate Blanchett‘s Katharine Hepburn performance aside.

I just re-watched the Beverly Hills plane crash sequence, and I don’t believe a frame of it — every shot is pushed and amplified and CG’ed to a fare-thee-well — visual intensity for its own sake. And for me, Leonardo DiCaprio‘s performance was a whiff — emotionally on-target but otherwise about “acting.” I know Hughes spoke with a flat Midwestern accent and was never mistaken by anyone for an urban sophisticate, but DiCaprio over-channelled the Clem Kadiddlehopper. (His Hughes and Once Upon A Time in Hollywood‘s Rick Dalton are peas in a pod.)

Jason Robards‘ cameo-level performance in Melvin and Howard was the only Hughes I ever liked, and that was 40 years ago.

The bottom line is that The Aviator and Rules Don’t Apply have killed the Hughes legend, certainly among 21st Century movie audiences.

Incidentally: Hughes was born in December 1905. He was 41 when he testified before Congress in 1947 [after the jump]. He looked 51 if a day. By today’s standards he could be 55 or even 60.

Posted five weeks ago — just caught it this morning. Reptile face twitch, mouth flare, cocaine comedown, etc. I honestly haven’t seen this kind of “that’s what you are but what am I?” since I was nine or ten. One of Trump’s best guys. Soldier, mafioso…”fuck you,” “little bitch,” etc. I’d like to know the specifics, but otherwise what an eye-opener.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is currently polling 200-plus critics and directors for their choices for Best of the 1990s and Best of the Aughts. He’s asked if I’m sticking to my previously posted favorites. I said I need to think things over.

On 4.10.19 I posted my top 40 of the ’90s, and decided on the following as my top five: 1. Fargo (d: Coen brothers); 2. GoodFellas (d: Martin Scorsese); 3. Pulp Fiction (d: Quentin Tarantino); 4. Unforgiven (d: Clint Eastwood); 5. L.A. Confidential (d: Curtis Hanson).

On 10.6.09 I posed my Best of the Aughts So Far. The top five at the time were (1) Zodiac; (2) Memento; (3) Traffic; (4) Amores perros and (5) United 93.

With the release date of every film on the calendar delayed until whenever, a discussion arose today about when a certain ready-to-open film might see the light of day. Which would depend, of course, on when the pandemic begins to lift.

Hollywood Elsewhere: “As far as I can discern the smart assessment is that the plague starts to lift in June, certainly by July. And then (per Dr. Fauci) a possibility of a resurgence in the fall.”

Knowledgable filmmaker: “The plague starts to lift in August, but then we need to be certain it doesn’t come back. No filmmaking until the new year. Except in New Zealand, Australia and Taiwan, which are islands that have acted intelligently to contain and eliminate the virus.”

Hollywood Elsewhere: “Okay, but who’s saying August exactly? June (or roughly seven or eight weeks hence) doesn’t seem at all crazy from this end, and certainly not July. China has lifted its lockdown; ditto South Korea. You’re telling me this country has to endure three and a half more months of cabin fever?”

Knowledgable filmmaker: “China and South Korea were methodical in dealing with the virus. America has been, and will continue to be, a mess.”

With major entertainment and media-related companies furloughing staffers and cutting salaries across the board due to the coronavirus lockdown (the Los Angeles Times being the most recent example), it is presumed that certain employees of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard will suffer draconian measures before too long.

Three days ago the headline of an unpublished story by TheWrap‘s J. Clara Chan seemed to confirm the worst. Chan’s story apparently reported that THR and Billboard cutbacks were imminent. The story never surfaced but the headline leaked. The two publications along with SpinMedia are owned by the Greenwich, Connecticut-based Valence Media.

Industry colleague: “That place” — THR — “and its parent company have been financially [struggling] for a long time. Good opportunity for the mean owners to start job eliminating — no surprise here. Why not hit ‘em when they’re down?”

All along I’ve been thinking that The Eddy, an eight-episode, Paris-based Netflix series bowing on 5.8.20, was a Damien Chazelle enterprise that would star Moonlight‘s Andre Holland along with Cold War‘s Joanna Kulig in a significant leading role.

The opening line of the series’ Wikipedia page says “directed by Damien Chazelle”, and Kulig is paired with Holland in the recently released one-sheet.

Except I’m now reminded that the actual creator-writer is Jack Thorne, and that Chazelle was more or less a hired gun who directed the first two episodes (#1 and #2). Plus the trailer indicates the series is largely about Holland’s character, Elliot Udo, being harassed by goons (one of them played by Les Miserables costar Alexis Manenti).

And Amandla Sternberg, 21, seems to be playing a larger role than Kulig, whose character has some kind of relationship with Holland but is largely shown going through the motions of a petulant diva.

Two clips indicate that the series was largely shot in the Belleville neighborhood.

The poster says the series was co-directed by Chazelle and Alan Poul, although Poul directed only the last two episodes (#7 and #8). Two episodes were also directed by Houda Benyamina (#3 and #4) and Laila Mrrakchi (#5 and #6).

Earlier today Richard Brody posted an admiring essay about The Battered Bastards of Baseball, a 2014 doc (co-directed by Chapman Way and Maclain Way) about Bing Russell‘s mid ’70s management of the Portland Mavericks.

Kurt Russell, Bing’s son and in his early 20s at the time, served as co-manager and an occasional designated hitter. Russell is an impassioned and entertaining talking head in the doc.

Why write about a doc that Netflix acquired and premiered six years ago? Coronavirus ennui and aimlessness, I’m guessing.

I flipped over Battered Bastards when I saw it during Sundance ’14. Easily one of the most heartwarming baseball docs I’ve ever seen, in this or the previous century. Variety‘s Scott Foundas (now a hotshot, BMW-driving Amazon exec) described it as “so rife with underdog victors and hairpin twists of fortune that, if it weren’t all true, no one would believe it.” The Hollywood Reporter‘s Duane Byrge called the doc is “a charming anti-establishment yarn that transcends the game.”

The Battered Bastards of Baseball co-directors Chapman and Maclain Way on either side of Kurt Russell during last Monday night’s after-party at 501 Main Street in Park City.

Immediately after the Sundance showing there was talk about making Battered Bastards into a narrative feature. The film “is ripe for a big-screen redo given the feel-good nature of the story that summons memories of classic baseball sagas like A League of Their Own,” I wrote.

It was soon speculated and reported that In The Bedroom‘s Todd Field, who served as the Mavericks’ bat boy and is one of the doc’s talking heads, might direct the feature version. That was after Satan in the form of Justin Lin intervened, which I found horrific. I only know that when no one was looking the project had curdled and stalled. Why I don’t know. I’ve asked a couple of parties to share what happened on a non-attrib basis.

On 1.24.14 The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tatiana Siegel wrote that “after multiple buyers circled The Battered Bastards of Baseball, Justin Lin has acquired narrative remake rights of the film and will self-finance via his Perfect Storm banner. Lin, who will produce, beat out several pursuers for remake rights, including Columbia Pictures, Fox Searchlight and DreamWorks.

Here’s how I put in the same day as Siegel’s story: “During the post-screening dinner party I mentioned to Russell that BBoB is obviously excellent material for a feature, and his response was ‘hmm, yeah, maybe…who knows?’ I couldn’t believe Russell hadn’t at least thought about it, this being not just his dad’s story but his own. (Maybe he was pretending to be reluctant or noncommittal — maybe he just didn’t want to be candid with a journalist.) Somebody said at the party that if a movie version comes together an ideal director would be Todd Field (In The Bedroom).

“That was four nights ago. Today it was reported that a film version might indeed happen, but that the remake rights had been purchased by Fast and the Furious franchise helmer Justin Lin, who has always impressed me as one of the most brazenly shallow, corporate-kowtowing filmmakers working today. (Lin’s production company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, is the rights holder.)

Some faces need moustaches. Some movie-star faces (Clark Gable, Burt Reynolds, Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck) are almost unimaginable without them. For some movie characters (Robert Redford‘s Sundance Kid, Daniel Day Lewis‘s Bill the Butcher) moustaches were essential components.

But it just occured to me this morning that while two-week stubble and beards are par for the course these days (at least among customers of West Hollywood Pavilions), it’s become a relatively rare thing to run into a moustache upon an otherwise clean shaven mug. Not unheard of but rare, and to be honest a little curious looking.

That’s because there have only been three distinct phases over the last 90-odd years in which moustaches were “happening.”

Phase one began with Clark Gable‘s carefully trimmed ‘stache in It Happened One Night (’34) — an urban machismo profile that launched a thousand ships. The pencil-thin ‘stache lasted until death for Gable and Brian Donlevy and a few others but only into the late ’40s or early ’50s for everyone else.

Phase two began with Redford’s rakishly bushy, much-imitated Sundance Kid ‘stache in George Roy Hill and William Goldman’s 1969 classic western.

Four or five years after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the “Castro clone” ‘stache exploded within urban gay communities, and it refused to retreat until…what, the mid ’80s? I know that for those paying attention, the gay clone look was suddenly hugely unfashionable soon after the failure of Alan Carr‘s Can’t Stop The Music (’80), so there was that.

Moustaches will never go away, of course, but they haven’t re-ignited over the last 40-plus years. Unless I’ve been missing something. I live in a gay neighborhood so don’t tell me.

Apparently Barack Obama‘s game plan was to wait for Bernie Sanders to officially endorse Uncle Joe before making his own declaration. So now he has. If he’d waited any longer, it would’ve become a thing.

All that aside, Obama’s remarks are that of a human being, a leader, a man of kindness and conscience, a good egg, a practical thinker, a visionary.

A 4.11 N.Y. Times story, reported by Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes, said that between late January and mid-March, President Trump lied, denied, side-stepped and fiddled while the pandemic spread and spread. Today he was asked about this — pure comedy.

THERE ARE NO WORDS. pic.twitter.com/6KzWNmaemb

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) April 13, 2020

From Andy Kroll‘s 4.15 Rolling Stone article, “‘Absolute Clusterfuck’: Inside the Denial and Dysfunction of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force & how the White House fumbled its response to the worst pandemic in a century”:

“If you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020.

“The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies.”

Who in a besieged pandemic realm is in a mood to contemplate Denis Villeneuve and Timothee Chalamet‘s forthcoming Dune (Warner Bros., 12.18)? My first reaction was to instantly dismiss whatever the flying devices may be or represent or what-have-you. My second was “another seaside-cliff image in the wake of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and the forthcoming Ammonite?” My third was “why is Chalamet wearing a dark blue Barney’s winter overcoat circa 2005?”