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Before today I hadn’t mentally revisited Jack Nicholson‘s brief bit in Ken Russell‘s Tommy (’75) for decades. I hadn’t even thought of it, much less sat down and re-watched.

In a 1974 interview with Sight and Sound‘s John Russell, Nicholson said he agreed to play Dr A. Quackson** because “Russell’s films intrigue me…some I like very much, some I don’t like at all, and I want to find out what makes them tick.”

** N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby described the character as “a vacuous Harley Street medical specialist.”

Each and every day AI slop is relentless…a 24/7 feature on everyone’s phone, passive brain mush. But here’s an exception — a parody trailer for a droll, light-hearted Jeffrey Epstein satire, written in the voice of Woody Allen and shot by Vittorio Storaro with nice ’90s lighting.

But I can’t find an embed code to save my life, and it’s driving me nuts. Can anyone figure it?

If this was a trailer for an actual movie, I’d pay to see it.

Three months ago I posted an “uh-oh” riff about Criterion’s 4K UHD Network Bluray. The thought was “dear god, what if the same Criterion vandals who teal-tinted Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut…what if they inject a similar greenish-teal flavoring into Network?” Pure speculation, of course, as the release date was three months off.

But now, with the new Network streeting six days hence (Tuesday, 2.24), a 2.13.26 review from Slant‘s Derek Smith rings an alarm bell.

Smith: “The color balancing leans toward teal, though that’s primarily limited to exteriors seen through the office building windows.” HE: So the amber-ish office interiors are okay, but don’t look too hard through the UBS windows with midtown Manhattan looking a bit…uhm, greenish.

On the same day (2.13) Criterionforum.org’s Chris Galloway notes the folowing: “The studio set sequences lean more neutral, daylight exteriors feel similar but warmer, and nighttime scenes carry a faint greenish tint consistent with other films of the era. Overall, the colors look superb…the best I’ve ever seen this film appear.”

I’ve asked four knowledgable and trustworthy veterans of the Bluray trenches (including DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze and Digital Bits’ Bill Hunt) if they’ve seen the Criterion Network…nope. So let’s hold our horses for now. Nonetheless Smith and Galloway have me sitting up straight.

A total waste of time and money…willfully submitting to spiritual pollution.

Is it fair to call Melania Trump a “trafficked zombie whore of a First Lady”? I’m only mentioning this because I half-chuckled when I read this description…sorry.

Reid Rosefelt on Facebook: “Even though I don’t know her, it pains me to see Blake Lively being attacked with snarky comments online by people who have never had any direct encounter with her. If there is somebody who had an issue with her on a movie, well, okay, let them have their honest say. But a lot of what I read is anonymous people on the internet. Just piling on, being mean. Because they can.”

HE to Rosefelt: Blake Lively is deeply loathed for trying to use a good portion of her (i.e., principally Ryan’s?) considerable wealth and power to try and murder the career of the far less famous, much less powerful Justin Baldoni.

Was her cut of It Ends With Us more commercial than his? Apparently so, but she certainly steamrolled and dragon-ed and butch-bossed her way into basically snatching away Baldoni’s film. They rubbed each other the wrong way? Apparently so, but this happens from time to time. Sensible people usually say “okay, THAT happened” and move on with their lives. But not Blake.

All I know is that Lively has almost certainly earned whatever grief she may be coping with now. She’s been using pumped-up #MeToo hyperbole as her knife or cudgel, and has scarred herself as a troublemaker. And now she’s basically “unemployable”, as a recent trade headline stated.

Who would be so clueless or reckless as to want to work with Blake now? If she had any practical sense she would have let this battle go last year and just moved on. Her point had certainly been made, but she’s STILL hammering away as we speak. (Team Baldoni also.) The Manhattan court date is four months away, and then the appeals will kick in. God help us all.

Posted on 10.8.12: If you want to know how radiantly aware and plugged-in Blake Lively is, read this excerpt from Ben Affleck‘s Details interview with Mark Harris:

“When I was doing The Town, I’d tour the actors around Boston,” Affleck tells Harris. “I was with Blake [Lively], and I saw Matt’s childhood home. And I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where Matt grew up.’ And she said, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘Matt Damon.’ And she said, ‘Oh my God! You know Jason Bourne?!’ She really didn’t know. And I thought, ‘There it is. The first age of people who are adults who missed the whole Matt-and-Ben propaganda campaign!’ Mostly, it just made me feel old.”

Lively, born in August 1987, was ten when Good Will Hunting came out and also when Affleck and Damon won their Best Screenplay Oscar, so she wasn’t paying attention. But she never once heard or read about their collaboration and friendship in the years that followed? And when she got hired to be in The Town (which came out in ’10), she never went online to learn about Affleck’s past? Even if she’s not engaged or curious enough to do online searches, her agent or manager never gave her the rundown? Breathtaking.

A New Beverly tribute to the Eros, a stroke-house that operated out of the same auditorium between ‘70 and ‘77, will launch on Monday, February 2nd. A grim place but mere tumescence has always been a tonic in itself. The films are mostly hard-R grindhouse fare, all released in the ’70s.

The Eros became the Beverly Cinema in ‘78 or so. Quentin Tarantino took ownership in 2007, rechristening it as the NewBev.

Of the 23 films showing throughout February, HE approves of relatively few.

Marco Vicario‘s Wifemistress (’78) with Laura Antonelli (a sublime object of desire for relatively well-educated thinking men of the ‘70s) and Marcello Mastroianni.

Nagisa Oshima‘s In The Realm of the Senses (’76), of course.

Roger Vadim‘s cynical and depraved Pretty Maids All In A Row (’71)…Angie Dickinson has a couple of fetching nude scenes, or is it just one? And she was just turning 40 to boot. (Dickinson reached inside and truly touched the heart of Junior Soprano, aka “Johnny Ola”.)

Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Arabian Nights (’74) isn’t all that good, but it’s not bad.

Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione‘s Caligula (’79) is trash.

Deep Throat (’72) is absolute garbage…I felt so sorry for poor Linda Lovelace being “coerced” into blowing all those low-rent, homely-ass guys.

Last night and for the third or fourth time I re-watched Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema, and I swear to God it’s an even bigger wallop now. Expanded, deepened…a flotation experience.

HE hereby pledges to visit the white Teorema mansion (Via Palatino, 16, 20148 Milano) when I return to Italy seven months hence.

Pasolini and the entire cast (Terence Stamp, Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Anne Wiazemsky, Laura Betti) have passed. Only the red-haired son, played by Andrés José Cruz Soublette, is still with us.

In my Venice Film Festival review of Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee, I noted that Shaker founder Ann Lee, who lived until age 48, “was flat-faced and rather ugly, and that Seyfried (who turned 40 in December) is, of course, beautiful, so the film’s realism is lacking in this regard.

“And as long as hotness is on the table, 35-year-old Stacy Martin, who plays Jane Wardley, a British born co-founder of the Shakers, is way too attractive to play a woman who’s into a no-sex, God-and-only-God lifestyle…one look at Martin and you’re thinking “what is she doing with this bunch?”

Kristi Coulter has tried to ridicule me for sharing this observation, but hot women rarely renounce the perks that are naturally and plentifully given to them. Guys too. The truth is that abundantly dishy persons never join secular oddball religious cults because…like, why? The world is at their feet so why turn inward?

John Huston got away with casting the prim and prudish Deborah Kerr as a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr, Allison (’57), but would any sensible director have cast Marilyn Monroe in a similar role? Attractiveness is as attractiveness does.

I’ve always had trouble believing the central premise of Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess, which was that a young guy who looks like Montgomery Clift would become a humble, soft-spoken priest in Quebec. He’s simply too pretty for that.

The fetching Jean Simmons played a version of 1920s evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in Elmer Gantry (’60), but at the end of Act Two she began fucking Burt Lancaster. (Gantry was directed by Simmons’ husband, Richard Brooks.)

I’ve always respected Jeffrey Hunter‘s performance as the Nazarene in King of Kings (’61), but nobody accepted his being cast in the role. He was way too beautiful..those radiant blue eyes, that golden-brown hair, those perfectly pedicured toes.

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