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How about a list of bad or dreary movies with brilliant titles? This is a thing, no? Titles that are so zestily inviting and perfectly catchy that you want to see them right away, but then the movie turns out to be an amateurish slog.

And I’m not thinking of, say, Surf Nazis Must Die — a Troma title that told you right off the bat that it was almost certainly cheap garbage. But Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S., a title from the mind of director-writer Don Edmonds or screenwriter Jonah Royston, turned a certain lock in the mind, unleashing all kinds of dopey B&D leather-pervo fantasies plus hints of wicked humor.

For years I loved this stupid title without having seen the film. Then I finally saw it on DVD in the late ’90s, and my whole Ilsa realm was shattered. The reviewers weren’t wrong when they called it dreary torture porn. But you still have to admire the title. And it did well enough to inspire four sequels — Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Ilsa, The Mad Butcher, Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia and Ilsa, the Wicked Warden.

I was going also going to ask for the reverse — a list of unusually good or even excellent films that were saddled with a curious, interest-killing title. But there aren’t very many of these — Edge of Tomorrow, Quantum of Solace, Under Capricorn, Chartreuse Caboose, etc.

WHE’s 4K Ultra HD Bluray of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been a long time coming, and has gone through some delays and odd changes along the way.

Last spring it was being prepared in the usual way, allegedly based on elements that would have rendered a visual look similar to the 2007 Bluray version. The original release date was 5.8.18.

Then Chris Nolan‘s non-restored version, infamously tinted teal and piss yellow, debuted in Cannes and opened in select U.S. theatres. It was soon after announced that the 4K disc would be based upon the Nolan version, and widespread depression was felt across the land. It was also announced that the release date of the Nolan-ized disc would be 10.30.18.

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14 out of 26 Gold Derby “experts” have put Green Book‘s Mahershala Ali at the top of their Best Supporting Actor spitball lists. That’s roughly a 60% consensus, and you can bet that some didn’t pick Mahershala because he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar less than two years ago for his Moonlight performance.

Ali had…what, four or five scenes in Barry Jenkins‘ Best Picture winner, if that? But his Don Shirley performance in Green Book lasts all through the film and abounds with pleasure — it’s almost a lead. In fact you could argue it is a lead performance, but that argues with Mahershala’s (or his p.r. team’s) strategy.

Mahershala is listed second on six Gold Derby lists. Face it — he’s almost a lock.

Ali’s strongest Best Supporting Actor competitor, Beautiful Boy‘s Timothy Chalamet, appears at the top of seven lists.

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Exactly two months before I had that 12.8.15 chat with Kurt Russell during a Hateful Eight junket, I experienced a “yes!” moment with a 10.5 Salon piece about guns by Amanda Marcotte. It contained one of the cleanest and most concise explanations of why the right is so adamant about the holiness of guns (i.e., refusing to regulate their use like the government regulates cars and drivers):

“Conservatives aren’t lying when they say they need guns to feel protected. But it’s increasingly clear that they aren’t seeking protection from crime or even from the mythical jackbooted government goons come to kick in your door. No, the real threat is existential. Guns are a totemic shield against the fear that they are losing dominance as the country becomes more liberal and diverse and, well, modern.” (“Diverse’, of course, being a code word for fewer whites calling the shots.)

“For liberals, the discussion about guns is about public health and crime prevention. For conservatives, hanging onto guns is a way to symbolically hang onto the cultural dominance they feel slipping from their hands.”

In the comment thread I explained that “50 years ago this country was more or less run by WASP whitebreads + Irish and Italian Catholics, etc. Blacks were seen as a minority, most gays were closeted and women worked the kitchen and tended to the kids. Those days are over and old-fart rural conservatives know it. That’s what the guns are about. To give them a sense of power in times of increasing powerlessness.”

First, any article, editor or journalist who mentions the word “pressure” in the context of a celebrity profile is a hack. If I’ve listened to one unctuous junket whore ask an actor “how much pressure did you have to cope with?” and blah blah, I’ve listened to it 700 or 800 times. Second, until I glanced at this THR cover I wasn’t even thinking about The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Sony, 11.9)…not even a blip on the screen. Third, now that I’m mulling it over I’m asking myself if I even want to sit through it. Fourth, the last time I checked Foy’s performance as Neil Armstrong‘s hand-wringing wife (Janet Shearon) stood a reasonable chance of being nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but no mention of First Man in the cover copy? Fifth, I respect the fact that Foy’s freckly alabaster skin is a signature that she embraces, but if I were her I would steer clear of black nail polish.

For their Hud script, Irving Ravetch and wife Harriet Frank, Jr. were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and won both the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Writers Guild of America Award for same. Their other screenplays included The Long, Hot Summer (based on William Faulkner‘s “Spotted Horses”, “Barn Burning” and “The Hamlet”), Home from the Hill, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The Reivers, The Spikes Gang, The Cowboys, The Sound and the Fury, Norma Rae, Murphy’s Romance and Stanley & Iris. Ravetch passed in 2010; Frank is still with us.

Hud: “How much you take the boys for tonight?”
Alma: “Twenty dollars and some change.”
Hud: “You’re a dangerous woman.”
Alma: “I’m a good poker player.”
Hud: “You’re a good housekeeper. You’re a good cook. You’re a good laundress. (beat) What else are you good at?”
Alma: “At taking care of myself.”
Hud: “You shouldn’t have to, a woman looks like you.”
Alma: “That’s what my ex-husband used to tell me. Before he took my wallet, my gasoline credit card, and left me stranded in a motel in Alberquerque.”
Hud: “What did you do to make him take to the hills? Wear your curlers to bed or something?
Alma: “Ed’s a gambler. He’s probably up at Vegas or Reno, dealing at night, losing it all back in the daytime.”
Hud: “Man like that sounds no better than a heel.”
Alma: “Only thing he was ever good for was scratching my back.”
Hud: “Still got that itch?”

Originally posted on 9.19.15.

The Tribeca Film Festival reviews for Sam Boyd‘s In A Relationship (Vertical, 11.9) were pretty good, but the only thing the trailer tells you is that Michael Angarano is the charisma guy. Not by any kind of slick, uptown GQ standard. He’s short and unassuming in a kind of Lou Costello-meets-Peter Falk-meets-Jonah Hill way — part Millennial slacker, part ragdoll. But he has that stand-out thing, that quality that you want to watch. Character, eccentricity. A 21st century blending of Jim Belushi in the late ’80s and Jack Nicholson in the early ’70s. He’s 30 years old and looks at least 37, due to a prematurely weathered, lived-in face. By the time Angarano is 40 he’ll look 55. By the time he’s 55 he’ll look like Gabby Hayes.

I missed Lukas Dhont‘s Girl in Cannes last May, but I caught it last night at a special Peggy Siegal screening at the Quad.

Stop the presses — this Belgian submission for Best Foreign Language Film felt like the most assured, immersive and delicately effective drama about a transgender person that I’ve ever seen in my life, or am likely to see in the future. It’s the kind of film that could have conceivably been awful if it had been written or directed by the wrong kind of button-pushing American director (Dan Fogelman, say), but it feels deft, assured and totally right with Dhont at the helm.

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Author, critic, film professor and Orson Welles scholar Joseph McBride knows who Orson Welles was as well as anyone, and probably better than most. He recently wrote a Sight & Sound piece about Welles and his final film, The Other Side of the Wind. McBride was personally friendly with Welles, has written three books about him, and played a film critic in Wind.

Last night on Facebook a guy named Michael Karoly asked McBride if Welles liked the films of Jean-Luc Godard. McBride’s posted reply: “I’m not aware of anything he said about Godard. He didn’t see a lot of contemporary movies.”

HE reply to McBride: Wait…WHAT? What serious filmmaker ducked Godard back in the ’60s and ’70s, or for that matter missed “contemporary movies”? Welles was a big fan of the Shaft TV series (according to Todd McCarthy) but as of the late 60s or early 70s, or when you began your friendship with him, he didn’t see many films that were being made back then? During Hollywood’s experimental golden age? To me this indicates that Welles was partly living in a state of vague spiritual nostalgia and withdrawal and in some sense coasting on the fumes of the past.

To paraphrase a Cameron Crowe observation, Orson really was Brian Wilson — on fire and cooking with genius gas from his early to late 20s (mid 1930s to mid 1940s, Wells having been born in 1915) and then…well, then he lived the rest of his life. And there was nothing wrong with that.

From the mid 40s to his death in ‘85, Orson lived large. Ups, downs and all-arounds. Tirelessly creative, always industrious, always writing & pushing, a great gabber. But the creative incandescence happened early in his life (NY theatre, “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons), and everything he did from the mid 40s on was noteworthy, commendable, European, aspirational, admirable, Shakespearean, etc. But it was basically an aftermath to his brilliant “touched by God, years of lightning” streak.

Just as Brian Wilson’s monumental hot streak lasted four years, or from ‘64 to late ‘67 — from age 22 to 25 or 26. Obviously Orson’s streak lasted longer but the analogy holds.

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Beto O’Rourke is going to lose to Ted Cruz in Texas next month, but that might work out because it’ll leave him in a position to run for president in 2020. I really think he should do it. The hour is getting late and the Democrats need somebody strong and flinty to run against President Trump, and the more I kick it around the more I realize it has to be Beto. The Texas Senate race has nationalized him in a positive light. He’s been a U.S. Congressman for five years. He has the moxie and the aura, and there’s no time like right now.

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