Annette Bening has said she’ll never have “work” done, but she looked so different last night during her Golden Globes appearance that my first thought was “hmmm, did she capitulate?” She looked radiant. Blonde, swept-back hair. A bit more slender than before. Just-right eye makeup. Definitely an upgrade of some kind or another. Getting a touch-up these days is nothing — it’s like coloring your hair or getting a facial. All to say that if Bening did go undergo a procedure, it’s fine.

Bob Dylan‘s changeover from acoustic folk to electric rock existential poetry (aka “electric Dylan controversy“) wasn’t just a major creative growth move on his part — it also wound up galvanizing rock music across the industry, inspiring the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Byrds and many other to chime in with complex, socially relevant lyrics and musical attitudes. The shift began at the Newport Folk Festival in July ’65 (when Dylan was 24) and peaked with the infamous English booing tours (“Judas!”) of ’65 and ’66.

This chapter was totally covered in Martin Scorsese‘s Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, of course, but now James Mangold (Ford Ferrari, Walk The Line) is planning to direct the loosely-titled Going Electric, a Fox Searchlight film about this transitional period with none other than Timothee Chalamet as Dylan. Jay Cocks has written the screenplay; Dylan is actually exec producing.

I’d feel pretty good about this if I was Dylan, who believe it or not is around 14 months from hitting the big eight-oh. Chalamet is better looking than Dylan ever was, can act circles, can sing and probably plays guitar, and he’ll look the part when he grows out his Bringing It All Back Home Jewfro.

Better Chalamet, certainly, than Hayden Christensen, who played the Dylanesque “Billy Quinn” in George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl.

The Going Electric story was broken by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming.

Robert Altman-wise, I could watch California Split and The Long Goodbye once a year for the rest of my life. Ditto M.A.S.H., The Player, Thieves Like Us, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and A Wedding. But I’ll probably never watch Popeye ever again. It’s been almost four decades since I saw it (once) but that’s enough.

I have this recollection of Giuseppe Rotunno‘s cinematography being lazy as fuck — just watching the action from a distance, way too reliant on zoomed-in wide and medium shots. Harry Nilsson‘s musical score was kind of a flatliner, no? Ditto Jules Pfeiffer‘s screenplay. I always heard that Popeye was a big cocaine movie, and that this was part of the problem. Legend has it that Robin Williams didn’t get along with Altman. It wasn’t a financial bust — having cost $22 or so million, it made $60 million worldwide. But an impression lingers that it was basically a misconceived failure because of an ill-suited director.

Last night Team Elsewhere (Tatyana and myself) attended another great pre-Golden Globes party, a Lionsgate bash with Knives Out and Bombshell luminaries (Charlize Theron, HE’s own Rian Johnson, Toni Collette (particularly great in Netflix’s Unbelievable), Chris Evans, a less-than-fully-recognizable Ana de Armas) in attendance, and once again orchestrated by the great and garrulous and huggy-touchy Colleen Camp.

Plus Stellan Skarsgard, Billy Zane and some choice hotshot journos (Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, N.Y. Times “Caroetbagger” Kyle Buchanan, Daily Mail‘s Baz Bamigboye, Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman, Variety‘s Jazz Tangcay, Awards Daily TV and movie guy Clarence Moye).

It was cacophonous and a bit crowded but curiously relaxing…just a perfect, honeyed, shelter-from-the-storm vibe up and down…all tony amber and candles and low-light shadow and hors d’oeuvres every which way. Okay, the music was a bit loud.

Prior to the event we chilled with Phillip Noyce and Vuyo Dasi at the San Vicente Bungalows bar — smallish, quiet, darkly lighted, intimate, low-ceilinged. We were greeted by maitre’d Dimitri Dimitrov (formerly of the Sunset Tower bar-restaurant).

BTW: This being January 2020 and all, Tatyana and I have long since forgotten about that bizarre July 2017 episode when a Chateau gatekeeper wouldn’t allow us to visit on our own steam, possibly because they didn’t like the cut of my white pants.

If you could easily move into any home or apartment in which a movie character resides, what would you select? A recent Facebook thread asked this question, and believe it or not the author said he’d like to live in Scotty Ferguson‘s Vertigo apartment in San Francisco.

The guy has his pick of any residence in the movie world, including Robert Downey, Jr.‘s houseboat in Zodiac, the gaudy Tony Montana mansion in Scarface, Robert De Niro‘s seaside home in Heat, Joe Starrett‘s cabin in Shane and Xanadu in Citizen Kane, and he chooses an unexceptional and rather pokey one-bedroom apartment at 900 Lombard (at Jones)?

Jesus, why not choose Popeye Doyle’s Brooklyn one-bedroom rathole in The French Connection? Or Jeff Lebowski‘s Venice apartment?

Hollywood Elsewhere is torn between (a) Kristen Stewart‘s small Paris apartment in Personal Shopper, (b) the mountainside John Robie home in To Catch A Thief (which Sasha Stone and I actually visited in 2011), (c) the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired VanDamm home in North by Northwest, and (d) Lionel Barrymore‘s ramshackle hotel in Key Largo.

No, I wouldn’t like to live in that 19th Century Knives Out mansion. I love that cozy third-floor area where Chris Plummer wrote and slept, but otherwise it’s too big, too cavernous, too costly to heat.

One of the most deeply rooted images of my entire filmgoing life. If I could find a nice impressionist rendering on canvas I’d hang it on my living-room wall.

Name some noteworthy films that started out as one thing, and ended up as another.

All serious-minded films are designed and executed with a certain moralistic or thematic or sensationalist intention. They’re made to stir emotions. Or merely excite or amuse. Or cast light upon certain aspects of the culture. Or make some kind of political point…whatever. But every so often the intended doesn’t happen when the film plays before paying audiences and it becomes something that the filmmakers never expected.

This is what happened to Martin Ritt‘s Hud (’63). The below excerpt from a 2003 conversation with Hud screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. and Michigan Quarterly Review‘s William Baer explains the basics.

The most obvious kind of “wait, what happened?” is when a film is made as a straightforward drama or melodrama, only to “land’ as an unintentional comedy because of ineptitude or an overload of attitude or something. Another is when a film is ostensibly made as some kind of half-crude exploitation but is nonetheless received as a sophisticated genre commentary in “quotes” (Mark Lester‘s Truck Stop Women), or something along these lines.

BAER: “Well, Hud was certainly a unique picture in many ways, but, most significantly, it dared to portray a central character who was a pure bastard, and who remained totally unredeemed and unrepentant at the end of the picture.”

RAVETCH: “Yes, we sensed a change in American society back then. We felt that the country was gradually moving into a kind of self-absorption, and indulgence, and greed. Which, of course, fully blossomed in the ’80s and ’90s. So we made Hud a greedy, self-absorbed man, who ruthlessly strives for things, and gains a lot materially, but really loses everything that’s important. But he doesn’t care. He’s still unrepentant.

FRANK: “In our society, there’s always been a fascination with the ‘charming’ villain, and we wanted to say that if something’s corrupt, it’s still corrupt, no matter how charming it might seem. Even if it’s Paul Newman with his beautiful blue eyes. But things didn’t work out like we planned.

BAER: “It actually backfired.”

RAVETCH: “Yes, it did, and it was a terrible shock to all of us. Here’s a man who tries to rape his housekeeper, who wants to sell poisoned cattle to his neighbors, and who stops at nothing to take control of his father’s property. And all the time, he’s completely unrepentant. Then, at the first screenings, the preview cards asked the audiences, ‘Which character did you most admire?’ and many of them answered ‘Hud.’ We were completely astonished. Obviously, audiences loved Hud, and it sent us into a tailspin. The whole point of all our work on that picture was apparently undone because Paul was so charismatic.

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Give Shia LaBeouf‘s Honey Boy an A for honesty, and an extra A for soul-baring. It warrants respect and admiration — for LaBeouf’s screenplay and lead performance (playing his own abusive dad), for the performances of Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges who play LeBeouf (called Otis Lort) at ages 12 and 22, respectively, and for the efforts of Israeli director Alma Har’el.

Since opening on 11.8, Honey Boy has been critically praised (Rotten Tomatoes 94%) and polled well with Joe and Jane Popcorn (91% on RT, an IMDB rating of 7.5.)

Honey Boy is a straight-up,  take-it-or-leave-it thing — half  cinematic therapy (LaBeouf wrote it in rehab) and half sordid family saga. It tells the truth about what Shia endured as a kid and what he’s grappling with now as a 33 year-old. And it’s no stroll in the park. But it doesn’t sidestep or shilly shally. It’s trustworthy.

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We’ve all come to know the LaBeouf saga over the last 13 or so years, and how reactive and turbulent and issue-laden it’s been all along. He became a successful child actor at age 9 or thereabouts (around ’95) and then a 21 year-old marquee name with his lead performance in Disturbia and then, starting in ’08 or thereabouts, an obviously troubled hotshot with standout performances in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (’10), Lawless and The Company You Keep (’12), Nymphomaniac (’13), Fury (’14), American Honey (’16), Borg vs McEnroe (’17) and The Peanut Butter Falcon (’19).

Not to mention the arrests, altercations, conflicts, provocations. Over the last decade LaBeouf has become far better known for his issues than his talent or achievements.  By the term “issues” I’m alluding to what some have perceived as obnoxious, self-regarding behavior.  But that’s a fair call, LaBeouf has said.

“I don’t think you were wrong for thinking I was a dick,” he told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg a while back. Feinberg had confessed to feeling guilty for making dismissive assumptions about him in recent years as he repeatedly wound up in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons. “I think context is really important,” LaBeouf explained. “And I think what Honey Boy does is contextualize who I was publicly, and kind of plays on it. And I’m grateful it’s effective.”

Lost in the general holiday zone-out, obscured by the bombing of Cats and out-shone by the respectable box-office hauls of Little Women ($33.5M domestic) and Uncut Gems ($22.7M) is the curious foundering of Jay Roach‘s Bombshell.

It isn’t tanking exactly, but it doesn’t seem to be connecting either.

After two and a half weekends in wide release (1,480 situations) the R-rated #MeToo dramedy is currently looking at a $17M domestic total. That’s bad news for a film that cost $33 million to make, not counting marketing. The Rotten Tomatoes rating was 67%, but the audience score is a not bad 83. The IMDB rating is 6.6.

I don’t know if this lack of b.o. energy will penetrate the industry membrane by way of diminished support for Charlize Theron‘s Best Actress chances, but I’m sensing that it might.

A few weeks back one or two HE commenters predicted that Bombshell would fizzle. I thought it would do a lot better than it has. It’s a crafty, well-made film with an urgent theme, but for whatever reason (creeping #MeToo fatigue?) Joe and Jane Popcorn seem to be only half-attentive. I’m sorry about this. At the very least I thought Bombshell would develop legs.

Riding the flying Triumph over the barbed wire is the Steve McQueen moment everyone remembers**, but his stardom was officially sanctified with his return to Stalag Luft III. The whole camp came to a standstill. With everyone — German commanders, guards, inmates — staring at Cpt. Virgil Hilts and hanging on his every utterance, director John Sturges was telling the audience that McQueen was the King of Cool and that further attention would be paid. There but for the awful grace of God went Rick Dalton.

Race is the principal reason that your Fox News bumblefucks are so blindly loyal to The Beast.

The U.S. was generally a European-descendant white country during the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th Century, and it technically still is with 60.7% of the U.S population composed of non-Hispanic whites. But by 2050 whites will only represent 47% of the population. The country is basically tipping in a pluralistic, multicultural direction. For a half-century the Republican party, which adopted a kind of Anglo Saxon Maginot Line mentality (the “Southern strategy”) and which today is represented by guys like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan, has been the party of white resistance.

And so lunatic righties see themselves as defending the Alamo, and they see Trump, for all his appalling ignorance, arrogance and self-destructive behavior, as a fat Jim Bowie or an orange-faced Davy Crockett mixed with a New York City crime boss.

This is their last stand and they know it, and he’s all they’ve got. They know that sooner or later General Santa Anna‘s troops (multiculturals, LGBTQs) are going to scale the walls and bayonet them to death and ravage their daughters and mitigate the bloodline all to hell.

On top of which they know that urban liberals not only despise them for their Trump allegiance but because they embody what has become a full-on racial epithet — “crusty older white person.” (Just ask Rosanna Arquette.)

So they don’t care. They’re the Wild Bunch shooting it out with General Mapache‘s troops. They’re dead men, but at least they’ll know the dark satisfaction of causing as much chaos and destruction as possible before they fall to the floor, bleeding and cut to pieces.

What’s the current U.S. population? Roughly 330,149,796 as of 12.16.19. In 1620 the non-Native (i.e., immigrant) American population was around 2300 persons. That number had grown to 2.5 million by 1776, and then 31 million by 1860, 76 million by 1900, 180 million by 1960 and 282 million by 2000.

White guys “settled” this country (i.e., stole, slaughtered, railroaded, plantationed, bulldozed, capitalized) fair and square. And now the non-elite, non-urban, under-educated sector of whitebread culture has been marginalized and discredited, and is on the verge of being finished.

This is why Michael Moore is saying that Trump, God help us, has a fighting chance of being reelected in 2020. Because they’ve latched onto an idea that they’re fighting for their very existence.

Bumblefuck despair and depression is the main reason that average life expectancy in the United States has been on a decline since 2014. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention cites three main reasons: a 72% increase in overdoses in the last decade (including a 30% increase in opioid overdoses from July 2016 to September 2017), a ten-year increase in alcoholic liver disease (men 25 to 34 increased by 8%; women by 11%), and a 33% increase in suicide rates since 1999.

On one hand I’m in league with Joe Popcorn as far as WTF reactions to Uncut Gems are concerned. On the other I’m stunned by negative or “later” reactions to Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, which is easily among 2019’s ten best if not the top four or five.

The sad truth is that 97% of ticket buyers can’t get beyond subject matter. “So what happens? Two lighthouse keepers go crazy on a rocky island in the 1890s”…no, much more than that. You can’t tell them “it’s the singer, not the song.” You can mention the visual atmospheric highs…black and white, 1.19 aspect ratio, King Triton, the demonic seagull, magnificent production design…and 19 out of 20 popcorn inhalers will reply “so?”